As someone who has designed SAAS services based both on commercial custom applications and off the shelf applications, I would say that the way to do it "ethically" would be to use known quantities.
E.g. Want a SAAS mail solution? Don't use Gmail because you don't know where it came from, instead sign up with a provider running Exchange Hosted Services, you can then be sure that what you are working with firstly is used by millions of other people around the world (security through obscurity, we love it), but more importantly if something goes really badly wrong, you have the good old fashion business favourite option to SUE someone!
What better steps or clever ideas can you take to ensure that "someone else" is creating this software as a service with your security first and foremost in mind?
Yep I know it's an unpopular idea, but when taking about businesses the best way to make a manager comfortable with something is a clear and undeniable chain of blame.:)
I would have to agree with him. Preferring software as a service vs. software running on your machine is a bad idea. It might be convinient in many cases, but you shouldn't trust a third party with your data and your work, especially when you can avoid it. It might not look that bad, but as you already have the tools on your computer, it's not worth it even if the issues don't look like a big deal to you.
If we are talking about home users trying to hide their private data from the big bad world then your point may be right. Certainly if your a terrorist, you'd probably be best not using LiveMesh to store your TakeOverTheWorld.MPP files!
BUT, if we are being serious here and talking about small to medium sized business (one to a couple of hundred users) then this whole software as a service thing just "Makes Sense(TM)".
Your point that you cannot trust anyone else with your data is moot as all typical businesses do it all the time, they have to. How else can you contract in 3rd parties to install those servers holding the data? How else can they engage a mob based out of Seattle / London / Bangalore to do remote desktop support?
Ask a typical manager or director of a company who they would trust more; a 3rd party company with a tight SLA, or a typical employee on a 1 month notice period? Hopefully the answer is neither, as both hopefully will perform within the letter of their contract and nothing more.
So can you really argue that there is a difference in trust between having your own managed servers located in your basement (managed by a nice cosy SLA), or having those same servers 'virtualised' and hosted offsite with a different 3rd party with their own SLA?
What about the backup? Come on you do have a diversely routed backup connection using an alternate connection technology don't you?
Anyway in the case when all Internet connections to a company go down you can pretty much guarantee that work will at least slow down, depending on the company, heck for a typical technology company no Google access means NO WORK full stop. Take a typical office worker and take away his/her email and I bet regardless of the fact that most other systems are working fine he/she will assume 'the networks down' and proceed to go for one of those rather long coffee breaks until it sorts itself out.
Read a little further along the article for your answer;
Price? it can be built for less than $250, including packaging. Add in fixed costs and other stuff you have to deal with (like returns), and you can sell it for $300 and probably not go out of business.
Ignoring for a moment that we are on/.:), when you consider the total cost of any such deployment over the long term, free is not possible. Your time costs money, one day you will leave and will require significant time to handover whatever solution you have implemented.
Free is not an option in any such decision, stop undervaluing yourself by perpetrating the myth to your managers that your experience and hard work is at zero cost to them!
Granted shared cable is not as good as fibre, even at 444mbits, but the option of having either is all we Aussies want!
Since the early days of the net we poor Australians have been at the tail-end of the uptake curve for high speed bandwidth, most point to the size and dispersal of the Australian population over the country but that is not entirely true, at least least not for 90% of us! Telstra in fact was one of the worlds FIRST companies to trial ADSL technologies, back in the late 90's! Think about that, back when you were getting your first 56k modem connection to this new 'Internet' thing Telstra was already years ahead. What happened? It's a monopoly of course, so why would they compete with there massive ISDN / E1 infrastructure currently in place? In particular when you realize that apart from city centre's there was no competition in such technologies, so they would be only competing with themselves!
So what happened, Telstra did it's bit testing and proving that ADSL works, then sat on the technology for years before trickling it out to market! Originally at prices comparable with existing leased line costs to boot!
So what does this have to do with DOCSIS and the new Fibre network? COMPETITION! Finally with another last mile player (excluding ADSL for a moment which was eventually pried away from the monopoly), this opens another avenue of competition. In the future at least 90% Australians will have three options; 100Mb Fibre, up to 444Mbit shared Cable, or ADSL2/3! (Not to mention the laughable WiMax, etc services also already available in areas)
Perfect! And by the time it happens it would only have taken 20 years since the first ADSL deployment in the country! Ho-hum.
On the note of Telstra, the seemingly overlooked fact of this/. discussion is that the fact that Telstra was completely excluded from this process will now break the Telstra monopoly completely when it comes to high speed data connections.
But the best thing is the upside to this, Telstra won't back down without a fight, and that is GREAT for Australian consumers! Think about it, over the next 8 years while the govt is spending $44B on this fiber network, Telstra is quickly and relatively cheaply upgrading it's cable infrastructure to DOCSIS3 (up to 444mb)!
Finally Australia might see some real competition in the last mile of fixed wires!
The truth of the matter is that this is entirely on-topic, most problems with any operating system be it Windows or Linux can be put down to hardware. Sometimes memory (if you buy it cheap in particular) often drivers, very commonly with Vista (or any Windows) would be graphics drivers. Personally I only use Linux servers (often headless) so I can not comment on those drivers, but my guess would be that the experience is similar or even worse when there is limited manufacture support.
Having spent my teenage years pc building it is remarkably clear just how easy it is to put together bad hardware combination that results in crashes. The best example would be cheap memory, or worse a cheap motherboard, add to that a poorly ventilated case and you have guaranteed random BSOD's just due to heat, not to mention the shoddy system device driver set or memory error related crashes!
I've consulted for many companies and one of the easiest ways to stabilize a 'flaky' network (ie frequent complaints of software / system crashes) is to implement a standard operating environment (SOE). It may take the whole 3 year refresh cycle to do it properly but if your working in a company where that is not standard IT policy get out while you can (that is if you have the unfortunate role of supporting the mess)!
As for specific Vista experience examples; I did some consulting work in Microsoft UK and was (unsurprisingly) amazed at the job MS IT had done with the Vista deployment. Personally I had no experience of Vista related issues (including discussions with other teams), everything using a corporate build ran solidly (enough to make you suspect that they had a 'special' build) and that's even taking into account the old shoddy hardware that they gave us contractors!
What was particularly surprising (contradicting my above statement) is that they didn't have an SOE, there was a miss-match of Dell's, HP's and old Compaq's everywhere! I guess that anything non-vista 'capable' was weened off the corp net during the beta phase..
I agree with you completely, in particular your point on maturity. As a former tech-manager in a mid size IT outsourcer (80 odd tech staff), we had terrible trouble hiring for internal "Sys Admin" roles, partly because all of the good young candidates would prefer field support / consulting type roles (which we also were always in desperate need of), but also in this case when hiring a sys admin or net admin to manage a network of IT support personal you need a slightly higher caliber techie for some rather obvious reasons. (think security, etc)
After a good 6 months of searching the person we hired was in his late 40's, had at least 20 years "real engineering" experience (Radio engineer of some sort), but as he had always stayed up to date and the fact that he had moved into IT fulltime and re-certified in Cisco and MS and had a few years real world IT experience made him the perfect candidate (Also the fact that he referred to himself as the BOFH sold me!). Nobody else had the maturity to put up with the user base (80 IT support staff who would insist that they know better and about 20 sales/admin who constantly demand better!), but also very significantly in the London IT market one of the biggest problems is staff retention as it's particularly hard to hold onto good IT staff with only regular standard pay increases, in particular most younger staff know how easily they can increase their paychecks by moving companies (the advantage of being mobile).
In that case age is a significant advantage, any employer will know that the older you are the more stable you will be as an employee. When hiring for roles that need solid long term commitments as well as solid experience, this experience of mine has shown me that age *is* a significant factor, "the older the better"!
Thank you for the good response, it really gave me some things to think about. This topic perked my interest as I have just reached my 30's and despite working the past 11 years in IT after flunking out of CS my first time, I'm now looking to go back! In my case I'm not thinking of returning to complete my CS degree, but probably Comp Eng instead as I'm not really doing this for future job prospects but instead out of pure geek interest. (Note: Teaching myself C++ and 386 ASM at 12 years old kind of left me bored in university when I was 19, partly to blame for me flunking, but now the idea to go back and really get my hands dirty in engineering fascinates me!)
You mean they were responsible up till this moment? Ok.
Lets not over-generalize here, looking at this whole issue unemotionally (yes that's hard I know, we're talking about accounting here, a very contentions topic) if you borrow money from someone you will use every method at your disposal to pay it back, including by offsetting previously unsettled amounts.
If you lent me $10 last week and now you borrow $20 from me am I wrong if I only pay you back $10?
Come on let's try for a moment to remove the emotion from this topic (yes that means you also moderator), and remember that the people working over at AIG are actually PEOPLE. Lets exclude that top few percent of (failed) execs who got the company into this position sure, but it could be my neighbor, your school mate, whoever who is left with the actual work of getting it out of this mess!
Anyone who has every worked in a big company knows exactly how hard it is to continue justifying those 50+ hour weeks you're pulling for your stupid manager when the company gets some bad press that reflects on your hard work! What needs to be advocated is more management change in AIG, not blaming Joe Plumber's neighbor because he's a good tax accountant working for AIG!
I gave up my mod points already assigned in this topic because it was clear nobody was willing to discuss the other side of this, hopefully some of the moderators left out there want to see some balance.
Err hello, yes AIG is largely owned by the Govt, but does that mean it now must STOP being a responsible company?
If you worked for the IRS and your accountants told you that you the IRS owed you $10k on your tax refund would you stop and say, "oh no I couldn't claim that?" of course not, and you shouldn't! That is why we have tax refunds. I'm not saying that this AIG case is a similar refund case but the principle applies.
Yes I know everyone is pissed off about the bonuses (In particular imagine all those mom and pops who lost tens of thousands from their retirement funds for example!), but a bail-out like this does not *yet* equal socialism! Hopefully one day everyone will calm down a bit and remember that.
When it comes to international copyright it is no surprise to me that across borders people are far less inclined to respect copyright laws of another country.
It reminds me of something that I read once that stated that back in the 19th century before the US had established it's own home-grown authors and publishing industry, it was common place for Americans to simply copy and republish without consent the work of European authors and publishers. That was of course despite the constant complaints of European publishers and governments.
Of course eventually the US publishers had grown to a position where they themselves realized that they needed copyright in order to continue growing with the now booming local literature scene, hence the "true" birth of enforced US copyright.
(History repeating itself. Hmm, now how often does *that* ever happen - sarcasm)
Unfortunately I have no original sources to this 'tale', I would appreciate if anyone can either confirm or deny this with some evidence, as it is such a compelling story I would like to believe that it is true!
Interestingly both of those products also utilize facial expression recognition to supplement the basic "mind reading" done by the probes attached to your head!
I'd like to see where this technology goes outside of the gaming industry, far better to be able to use it to control a full computer UI.
A company (Ambient) also seems to be productising the technology and they even have some video demos online, although even from those you can see there is some way to go still. See: http://theaudeo.com/tech.html
I wonder because I have not seen any myself, but are there any (somewhat) independent comparisons between mainframe virtualization and VMWare or similar in terms of TCO, etc?
As someone who has never worked in the mainframe segment but has seen the massive growth of PC based virtualization in the enterprise I honestly wonder are mainframes still relevant? That is specifically when comparing hypervisors at least.
I guess sometimes when people deploy to a 10k+ user base Zimbra and Citadel are in the list of options. But I don't know, personally I only accept Exchange contract jobs and in the "Enterprise's" I've seen those options are frankly unheard of..
Don't get me wrong they are probable brilliant, but I'm sure when compared head to head in reliability, scalability, features and redundancy there would be a big difference, if only in TCO.
I don't know how well Blackberries do in Japan, but having just moved to Canada from England I am astounded by the number of Blackberries I see here!
In Europe the only people who have one of those are the poor people who's boss has suckered them into accepting one so that they can be "at work 24/7".:) Well more seriously, the Blackberry market in Europe is driven entirely by BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) which was up until only 2 or so years ago the only reliable way to get corporate email on mobile devices in a controlled fashion (Excluding Nokia's similar software which was far more expensive). Fortunately now Exchange does all that out of the box so the field has opened right up and anyone can download a £10 application to enable Push sync with Exchange on just about any phone.
It surprises me how many consumers in North America have Blackberries, but of course constant marketing and the whole first to market thing does have considerable weight..
Personally the day I again accept a mobile device with my corporate email on it again is the day I give up on my happy life.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Have a look at something like this:
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/mice/devices/5484&cl=au,en
The USB dongle extends from the USB port approximately 3mm, so in my experience it is not noticeable.
Oh and no special drivers are required for it either.
(Hmm, warning unpopular idea coming up!)
As someone who has designed SAAS services based both on commercial custom applications and off the shelf applications, I would say that the way to do it "ethically" would be to use known quantities.
E.g. Want a SAAS mail solution? Don't use Gmail because you don't know where it came from, instead sign up with a provider running Exchange Hosted Services, you can then be sure that what you are working with firstly is used by millions of other people around the world (security through obscurity, we love it), but more importantly if something goes really badly wrong, you have the good old fashion business favourite option to SUE someone!
What better steps or clever ideas can you take to ensure that "someone else" is creating this software as a service with your security first and foremost in mind?
Yep I know it's an unpopular idea, but when taking about businesses the best way to make a manager comfortable with something is a clear and undeniable chain of blame. :)
I would have to agree with him. Preferring software as a service vs. software running on your machine is a bad idea. It might be convinient in many cases, but you shouldn't trust a third party with your data and your work, especially when you can avoid it. It might not look that bad, but as you already have the tools on your computer, it's not worth it even if the issues don't look like a big deal to you.
If we are talking about home users trying to hide their private data from the big bad world then your point may be right. Certainly if your a terrorist, you'd probably be best not using LiveMesh to store your TakeOverTheWorld.MPP files!
BUT, if we are being serious here and talking about small to medium sized business (one to a couple of hundred users) then this whole software as a service thing just "Makes Sense(TM)".
Your point that you cannot trust anyone else with your data is moot as all typical businesses do it all the time, they have to. How else can you contract in 3rd parties to install those servers holding the data? How else can they engage a mob based out of Seattle / London / Bangalore to do remote desktop support?
Ask a typical manager or director of a company who they would trust more; a 3rd party company with a tight SLA, or a typical employee on a 1 month notice period? Hopefully the answer is neither, as both hopefully will perform within the letter of their contract and nothing more.
So can you really argue that there is a difference in trust between having your own managed servers located in your basement (managed by a nice cosy SLA), or having those same servers 'virtualised' and hosted offsite with a different 3rd party with their own SLA?
Gmail is sold with an SLA, so when "almighty Google" decides to do that they will have to face the mother of all class-action lawsuits!
What about the backup? Come on you do have a diversely routed backup connection using an alternate connection technology don't you?
Anyway in the case when all Internet connections to a company go down you can pretty much guarantee that work will at least slow down, depending on the company, heck for a typical technology company no Google access means NO WORK full stop. Take a typical office worker and take away his/her email and I bet regardless of the fact that most other systems are working fine he/she will assume 'the networks down' and proceed to go for one of those rather long coffee breaks until it sorts itself out.
Movies cost nothing anyway even on DVDs it's all about the service.
This is too dumb for words.
Err, I believe the original poster was referring to the cost of purchasing a movie on DVD vs. cost from any other service.
He's right, paying £15 for a DVD or £10 on iTunes means nothing if you can't do either until 6 months after it is available on a Torrent.
Read the article..
It is actually extremely interesting as it details exactly why iTunes has such a limited selection. Something that I often wondered..
Try this one:
Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
I've played with one that a friend bought, not bad, if web browsing in a small-medium size is what you want.
Ever heard of a NetBook?
Circles I tell ya, it all goes around in circles.
Read a little further along the article for your answer;
Price? it can be built for less than $250, including packaging. Add in fixed costs and other stuff you have to deal with (like returns), and you can sell it for $300 and probably not go out of business.
Ignoring for a moment that we are on /. :), when you consider the total cost of any such deployment over the long term, free is not possible. Your time costs money, one day you will leave and will require significant time to handover whatever solution you have implemented.
Free is not an option in any such decision, stop undervaluing yourself by perpetrating the myth to your managers that your experience and hard work is at zero cost to them!
Granted shared cable is not as good as fibre, even at 444mbits, but the option of having either is all we Aussies want!
Since the early days of the net we poor Australians have been at the tail-end of the uptake curve for high speed bandwidth, most point to the size and dispersal of the Australian population over the country but that is not entirely true, at least least not for 90% of us! Telstra in fact was one of the worlds FIRST companies to trial ADSL technologies, back in the late 90's! Think about that, back when you were getting your first 56k modem connection to this new 'Internet' thing Telstra was already years ahead. What happened? It's a monopoly of course, so why would they compete with there massive ISDN / E1 infrastructure currently in place? In particular when you realize that apart from city centre's there was no competition in such technologies, so they would be only competing with themselves!
So what happened, Telstra did it's bit testing and proving that ADSL works, then sat on the technology for years before trickling it out to market! Originally at prices comparable with existing leased line costs to boot!
So what does this have to do with DOCSIS and the new Fibre network? COMPETITION! Finally with another last mile player (excluding ADSL for a moment which was eventually pried away from the monopoly), this opens another avenue of competition. In the future at least 90% Australians will have three options; 100Mb Fibre, up to 444Mbit shared Cable, or ADSL2/3! (Not to mention the laughable WiMax, etc services also already available in areas)
Perfect! And by the time it happens it would only have taken 20 years since the first ADSL deployment in the country! Ho-hum.
On the note of Telstra, the seemingly overlooked fact of this /. discussion is that the fact that Telstra was completely excluded from this process will now break the Telstra monopoly completely when it comes to high speed data connections.
But the best thing is the upside to this, Telstra won't back down without a fight, and that is GREAT for Australian consumers! Think about it, over the next 8 years while the govt is spending $44B on this fiber network, Telstra is quickly and relatively cheaply upgrading it's cable infrastructure to DOCSIS3 (up to 444mb)!
Finally Australia might see some real competition in the last mile of fixed wires!
The truth of the matter is that this is entirely on-topic, most problems with any operating system be it Windows or Linux can be put down to hardware. Sometimes memory (if you buy it cheap in particular) often drivers, very commonly with Vista (or any Windows) would be graphics drivers. Personally I only use Linux servers (often headless) so I can not comment on those drivers, but my guess would be that the experience is similar or even worse when there is limited manufacture support.
Having spent my teenage years pc building it is remarkably clear just how easy it is to put together bad hardware combination that results in crashes. The best example would be cheap memory, or worse a cheap motherboard, add to that a poorly ventilated case and you have guaranteed random BSOD's just due to heat, not to mention the shoddy system device driver set or memory error related crashes!
I've consulted for many companies and one of the easiest ways to stabilize a 'flaky' network (ie frequent complaints of software / system crashes) is to implement a standard operating environment (SOE). It may take the whole 3 year refresh cycle to do it properly but if your working in a company where that is not standard IT policy get out while you can (that is if you have the unfortunate role of supporting the mess)!
As for specific Vista experience examples; I did some consulting work in Microsoft UK and was (unsurprisingly) amazed at the job MS IT had done with the Vista deployment. Personally I had no experience of Vista related issues (including discussions with other teams), everything using a corporate build ran solidly (enough to make you suspect that they had a 'special' build) and that's even taking into account the old shoddy hardware that they gave us contractors!
What was particularly surprising (contradicting my above statement) is that they didn't have an SOE, there was a miss-match of Dell's, HP's and old Compaq's everywhere! I guess that anything non-vista 'capable' was weened off the corp net during the beta phase..
Everybody's experience is different.
Spot on..
I agree with you completely, in particular your point on maturity. As a former tech-manager in a mid size IT outsourcer (80 odd tech staff), we had terrible trouble hiring for internal "Sys Admin" roles, partly because all of the good young candidates would prefer field support / consulting type roles (which we also were always in desperate need of), but also in this case when hiring a sys admin or net admin to manage a network of IT support personal you need a slightly higher caliber techie for some rather obvious reasons. (think security, etc)
After a good 6 months of searching the person we hired was in his late 40's, had at least 20 years "real engineering" experience (Radio engineer of some sort), but as he had always stayed up to date and the fact that he had moved into IT fulltime and re-certified in Cisco and MS and had a few years real world IT experience made him the perfect candidate (Also the fact that he referred to himself as the BOFH sold me!). Nobody else had the maturity to put up with the user base (80 IT support staff who would insist that they know better and about 20 sales/admin who constantly demand better!), but also very significantly in the London IT market one of the biggest problems is staff retention as it's particularly hard to hold onto good IT staff with only regular standard pay increases, in particular most younger staff know how easily they can increase their paychecks by moving companies (the advantage of being mobile).
In that case age is a significant advantage, any employer will know that the older you are the more stable you will be as an employee. When hiring for roles that need solid long term commitments as well as solid experience, this experience of mine has shown me that age *is* a significant factor, "the older the better"!
Thank you for the good response, it really gave me some things to think about. This topic perked my interest as I have just reached my 30's and despite working the past 11 years in IT after flunking out of CS my first time, I'm now looking to go back!
In my case I'm not thinking of returning to complete my CS degree, but probably Comp Eng instead as I'm not really doing this for future job prospects but instead out of pure geek interest. (Note: Teaching myself C++ and 386 ASM at 12 years old kind of left me bored in university when I was 19, partly to blame for me flunking, but now the idea to go back and really get my hands dirty in engineering fascinates me!)
You mean they were responsible up till this moment? Ok.
Lets not over-generalize here, looking at this whole issue unemotionally (yes that's hard I know, we're talking about accounting here, a very contentions topic) if you borrow money from someone you will use every method at your disposal to pay it back, including by offsetting previously unsettled amounts.
If you lent me $10 last week and now you borrow $20 from me am I wrong if I only pay you back $10?
Come on let's try for a moment to remove the emotion from this topic (yes that means you also moderator), and remember that the people working over at AIG are actually PEOPLE. Lets exclude that top few percent of (failed) execs who got the company into this position sure, but it could be my neighbor, your school mate, whoever who is left with the actual work of getting it out of this mess!
Anyone who has every worked in a big company knows exactly how hard it is to continue justifying those 50+ hour weeks you're pulling for your stupid manager when the company gets some bad press that reflects on your hard work! What needs to be advocated is more management change in AIG, not blaming Joe Plumber's neighbor because he's a good tax accountant working for AIG!
I gave up my mod points already assigned in this topic because it was clear nobody was willing to discuss the other side of this, hopefully some of the moderators left out there want to see some balance.
Err hello, yes AIG is largely owned by the Govt, but does that mean it now must STOP being a responsible company?
If you worked for the IRS and your accountants told you that you the IRS owed you $10k on your tax refund would you stop and say, "oh no I couldn't claim that?" of course not, and you shouldn't! That is why we have tax refunds. I'm not saying that this AIG case is a similar refund case but the principle applies.
Yes I know everyone is pissed off about the bonuses (In particular imagine all those mom and pops who lost tens of thousands from their retirement funds for example!), but a bail-out like this does not *yet* equal socialism! Hopefully one day everyone will calm down a bit and remember that.
When it comes to international copyright it is no surprise to me that across borders people are far less inclined to respect copyright laws of another country.
It reminds me of something that I read once that stated that back in the 19th century before the US had established it's own home-grown authors and publishing industry, it was common place for Americans to simply copy and republish without consent the work of European authors and publishers. That was of course despite the constant complaints of European publishers and governments.
Of course eventually the US publishers had grown to a position where they themselves realized that they needed copyright in order to continue growing with the now booming local literature scene, hence the "true" birth of enforced US copyright.
(History repeating itself. Hmm, now how often does *that* ever happen - sarcasm)
Unfortunately I have no original sources to this 'tale', I would appreciate if anyone can either confirm or deny this with some evidence, as it is such a compelling story I would like to believe that it is true!
A couple of companies (http://www.emotiv.com and http://www.ocztechnology.com/) are already working on products utilizing direct "mind control" style interfaces (previously posted on ./ here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/22/138201 among others).
Interestingly both of those products also utilize facial expression recognition to supplement the basic "mind reading" done by the probes attached to your head!
I'd like to see where this technology goes outside of the gaming industry, far better to be able to use it to control a full computer UI.
If the voice recognition works without the voice...
Some people have been working on this for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition
A company (Ambient) also seems to be productising the technology and they even have some video demos online, although even from those you can see there is some way to go still. See: http://theaudeo.com/tech.html
I wonder because I have not seen any myself, but are there any (somewhat) independent comparisons between mainframe virtualization and VMWare or similar in terms of TCO, etc?
As someone who has never worked in the mainframe segment but has seen the massive growth of PC based virtualization in the enterprise I honestly wonder are mainframes still relevant? That is specifically when comparing hypervisors at least.
I love slashdot! :)
I guess sometimes when people deploy to a 10k+ user base Zimbra and Citadel are in the list of options. But I don't know, personally I only accept Exchange contract jobs and in the "Enterprise's" I've seen those options are frankly unheard of..
Don't get me wrong they are probable brilliant, but I'm sure when compared head to head in reliability, scalability, features and redundancy there would be a big difference, if only in TCO.
My 2c.
I don't know how well Blackberries do in Japan, but having just moved to Canada from England I am astounded by the number of Blackberries I see here!
In Europe the only people who have one of those are the poor people who's boss has suckered them into accepting one so that they can be "at work 24/7". :) Well more seriously, the Blackberry market in Europe is driven entirely by BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) which was up until only 2 or so years ago the only reliable way to get corporate email on mobile devices in a controlled fashion (Excluding Nokia's similar software which was far more expensive). Fortunately now Exchange does all that out of the box so the field has opened right up and anyone can download a £10 application to enable Push sync with Exchange on just about any phone.
It surprises me how many consumers in North America have Blackberries, but of course constant marketing and the whole first to market thing does have considerable weight..
Personally the day I again accept a mobile device with my corporate email on it again is the day I give up on my happy life. :)
Japanese are not concerned with "Bling", conclusively proven?
Are you kidding?
Have you been to Tokyo?