The answer you want is a Land Line coupled with Plantronics SHR2083-01 Industrial Noise Canceling Headsets. I've put these into the last 12 cage buildouts I've done. The mouth piece isn't great, but at least it's audible when you're standing right in-between two 20-ton CRAC units. Don't do a cell phone, life is too short. Avoid VOIP because you can't call up and talk to a vendor if your network is down.
For 8 years, I ran Linux on the desktop, because I was a geek and that's what we did. Then one day I was doing work at a customer site, and my laptop died. I grabbed a spare imac to finish up my work, and was very impressed by the experience. The next day I went online and bought a powerbook, that was 4 years ago, and I haven't looked back. Linux runs on the 350 servers in my datacenter, but not a single machine in my home anymore. I'd never consider OSX for a server, and I'd never consider Linux for a desktop. Computers exist to help me run my company, I don't exist to run my laptop.
Three years ago my company did a comprehensive evaluation of 12 different exchange alternatives, both open source and proprietary. This included OpenXchange, Novell Open Exchange (same thing as OpenXchange but packaged by novell), Bynari, mirapoint, Stalker Communigate Pro, Scalix, KerioMaiLServer6, and another handful of bad pieces of software I've long since forgot.
The only one we didn't evaluate was Zimbra.
Long story short, they all sucked. It was a two month waste of time. Worse, however, was we ended up purchasing the Mirapoint, which to this date is the worst purchase I've ever made. My parents owned both a Pacer and a Pinto when I was a child. The Mirapoint was worse. That's $30k I want back. It's a brick now, we use it to prop open our cage door.
Go with exchange. It's the right tool for the job when the job is "Something that outlook syncs it's free and busy data with properly".
There are no surprises here. San Francisco's Mission St. Substation feeds half a dozen significant datacenters (365main, Level3, Coloserve, 400 Mission, and 650 Townend) and has suffered 3 serious outages in the past 7 years. California itself had 2 straight summers of rolling blackouts, which only subsided thanks to the dot-com crash. California is running out of duct-tape.
365main, usually runs a good operation, and is one of the best datacenters in California.. However, it's also the most expensive datacenter in California, and should have a better track record than it's lower-cost competitors like 200 Paul and Coloserv.
In May, 2007 we moved our infrastructure out of 365, off of California's cancerous power grid, and into a more reliable, greener, and cheaper grid.. Yeah, we moved to Seattle. This was the best decision we ever made.
Most of our experience with 365 was extremely positive, however pricing, and power density problems forced us to move. I can't list all of the good things 365main did, but here's a list of 365's power problems as we experienced them:
In April, 2005 365main had an outage that affected all customers for 50 minutes due to a failed EPO valve. 365 handled that outage spectacularly, claling all of their customers within 15 minutes of the outage.
In February, 2006 365main experienced a partial outage for 3 seconds that only affected some customers, but caused problems in their Telco spine, affecting connectivity.
In October, 2006 365main had a backup generator fail, but supposedly no customers were directly affected, but customers were not allowed to enter the building between 3:29 PM and 4:40 PM.
At least for the server side. Having been someone who has deployed about 2,000 servers from Dell, and about 1,000 from HP, I can't stress how much better HP's support model is. Once I started running my own small company (6 employees, 150 servers) I realized almost from day one how impossible it would be for me to profit if I used Dell's hardware. The quality level was fairly low, combined with a cumbersome support organization designed to make it hard to actually get support. Component replacements with Dell are a nightmare, because by default they treat you like an idiot, forcing you to go through a 10 minute script filled with inane tests like "is it plugged in". With HP, I call up HP server support, enter the turbo phrase "Proliant Support For Microsoft" (even though we're a 100% SuSE Linux shop) and tell the tech "I need a new motherboard for this model server, here's the serial # and here's the address to send it to". 4 hours later, i've got a replacement motherboard. The whole call usually takes about 5 minutes including hold time.
Beyond better support, and comparable pricing (if you haggle with an HP reseller like CDW, you'll get comparable pricing on equivalent product lines), HP's products are super to Dell's from a management point of view. Dell being just a whitebox reseller that puts a minimal amount of engineering into their servers (enough to claim they're not a whitebox reseller), they just don't have the r&d capabilities that HP has. HP's server management features are second only to Sun's. Their ILO and RILO lines (Integrated Lights Out) featres are awesome. They give you remote serial console access, remote power access, remote sensor reading.. That's their minimal version, it comes for free in all of their Proliant servers.. It also doesn't require an IPMI client (though it supports IPMI) or some broken Java client to give you remote console. You just telnet or ssh into it.
Would it be so hard for craigslist to maintain a consistent user interface from one region to the next (which they don't currently have. SF and NYC are the only places with useable neighborhood subcategories!), while adding a few more fields for each category to make the data useable?
It would be a big help if craigslist would just create the ability to exclude keywords, because there is a ridiculous amount of spam on craigslist that community flagging just does not take care of.
It's rather well known that Craigslists' revenue is between $20M & $40M per year. They don't need to work on monetizing traffic, and Craig has stated he doesn't because he's a paranoid delusional who thinks that if they turn into a $100m/year company that he will need body guards.
Beyond that, what's the big deal about craigslist? They won't write an API and let people search the data with tools that aren't as 1998 as craigslist is. Have you ever tried searching for an apartment, car, or house on craigslist? I end up dumping my search results into a craigslist parser I wrote because their search is so pathetic.
Stallman is no Linux zealot.RMS hates Linux. Linux stands for everything he has failed at in life, such as Hurd. He had no part of the Linux kernel, and is visibly intimidated by the success of Linux. Is he even relevant? I have no doubts of the future of the OS that I've made a career out of.. Especially none related to an old hippy who is pissed off that the world won't bow down to his heavy-handed approach.
What's a lot more interesting is the amount of new search startups. A great deal of these are really just search aggregators, but there are some really innovative new companies coming out of the woodworks.
A search engine I've been using recently is http://www.gofish.com/ This is the direction that the small search engines are going, I feel. More paid search results, mixed with digital media purchasing. GoFish.com actually just launched a useful new service which allows you to search for digital media (music and video) then buy an mp3 and download the content, or stream it from their webserver. I'm finding it to be a rather entertaining method to waste my day.
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The answer you want is a Land Line coupled with Plantronics SHR2083-01 Industrial Noise Canceling Headsets. I've put these into the last 12 cage buildouts I've done. The mouth piece isn't great, but at least it's audible when you're standing right in-between two 20-ton CRAC units. Don't do a cell phone, life is too short. Avoid VOIP because you can't call up and talk to a vendor if your network is down.
For 8 years, I ran Linux on the desktop, because I was a geek and that's what we did. Then one day I was doing work at a customer site, and my laptop died. I grabbed a spare imac to finish up my work, and was very impressed by the experience. The next day I went online and bought a powerbook, that was 4 years ago, and I haven't looked back. Linux runs on the 350 servers in my datacenter, but not a single machine in my home anymore. I'd never consider OSX for a server, and I'd never consider Linux for a desktop. Computers exist to help me run my company, I don't exist to run my laptop.
Three years ago my company did a comprehensive evaluation of 12 different exchange alternatives, both open source and proprietary. This included OpenXchange, Novell Open Exchange (same thing as OpenXchange but packaged by novell), Bynari, mirapoint, Stalker Communigate Pro, Scalix, KerioMaiLServer6, and another handful of bad pieces of software I've long since forgot. The only one we didn't evaluate was Zimbra. Long story short, they all sucked. It was a two month waste of time. Worse, however, was we ended up purchasing the Mirapoint, which to this date is the worst purchase I've ever made. My parents owned both a Pacer and a Pinto when I was a child. The Mirapoint was worse. That's $30k I want back. It's a brick now, we use it to prop open our cage door. Go with exchange. It's the right tool for the job when the job is "Something that outlook syncs it's free and busy data with properly".
There are no surprises here. San Francisco's Mission St. Substation feeds half a dozen significant datacenters (365main, Level3, Coloserve, 400 Mission, and 650 Townend) and has suffered 3 serious outages in the past 7 years. California itself had 2 straight summers of rolling blackouts, which only subsided thanks to the dot-com crash. California is running out of duct-tape. 365main, usually runs a good operation, and is one of the best datacenters in California.. However, it's also the most expensive datacenter in California, and should have a better track record than it's lower-cost competitors like 200 Paul and Coloserv. In May, 2007 we moved our infrastructure out of 365, off of California's cancerous power grid, and into a more reliable, greener, and cheaper grid.. Yeah, we moved to Seattle. This was the best decision we ever made. Most of our experience with 365 was extremely positive, however pricing, and power density problems forced us to move. I can't list all of the good things 365main did, but here's a list of 365's power problems as we experienced them: In April, 2005 365main had an outage that affected all customers for 50 minutes due to a failed EPO valve. 365 handled that outage spectacularly, claling all of their customers within 15 minutes of the outage. In February, 2006 365main experienced a partial outage for 3 seconds that only affected some customers, but caused problems in their Telco spine, affecting connectivity. In October, 2006 365main had a backup generator fail, but supposedly no customers were directly affected, but customers were not allowed to enter the building between 3:29 PM and 4:40 PM.
At least for the server side. Having been someone who has deployed about 2,000 servers from Dell, and about 1,000 from HP, I can't stress how much better HP's support model is. Once I started running my own small company (6 employees, 150 servers) I realized almost from day one how impossible it would be for me to profit if I used Dell's hardware. The quality level was fairly low, combined with a cumbersome support organization designed to make it hard to actually get support. Component replacements with Dell are a nightmare, because by default they treat you like an idiot, forcing you to go through a 10 minute script filled with inane tests like "is it plugged in". With HP, I call up HP server support, enter the turbo phrase "Proliant Support For Microsoft" (even though we're a 100% SuSE Linux shop) and tell the tech "I need a new motherboard for this model server, here's the serial # and here's the address to send it to". 4 hours later, i've got a replacement motherboard. The whole call usually takes about 5 minutes including hold time. Beyond better support, and comparable pricing (if you haggle with an HP reseller like CDW, you'll get comparable pricing on equivalent product lines), HP's products are super to Dell's from a management point of view. Dell being just a whitebox reseller that puts a minimal amount of engineering into their servers (enough to claim they're not a whitebox reseller), they just don't have the r&d capabilities that HP has. HP's server management features are second only to Sun's. Their ILO and RILO lines (Integrated Lights Out) featres are awesome. They give you remote serial console access, remote power access, remote sensor reading.. That's their minimal version, it comes for free in all of their Proliant servers.. It also doesn't require an IPMI client (though it supports IPMI) or some broken Java client to give you remote console. You just telnet or ssh into it.
Would it be so hard for craigslist to maintain a consistent user interface from one region to the next (which they don't currently have. SF and NYC are the only places with useable neighborhood subcategories!), while adding a few more fields for each category to make the data useable? It would be a big help if craigslist would just create the ability to exclude keywords, because there is a ridiculous amount of spam on craigslist that community flagging just does not take care of.
It's rather well known that Craigslists' revenue is between $20M & $40M per year. They don't need to work on monetizing traffic, and Craig has stated he doesn't because he's a paranoid delusional who thinks that if they turn into a $100m/year company that he will need body guards. Beyond that, what's the big deal about craigslist? They won't write an API and let people search the data with tools that aren't as 1998 as craigslist is. Have you ever tried searching for an apartment, car, or house on craigslist? I end up dumping my search results into a craigslist parser I wrote because their search is so pathetic.
Stallman is no Linux zealot.RMS hates Linux. Linux stands for everything he has failed at in life, such as Hurd. He had no part of the Linux kernel, and is visibly intimidated by the success of Linux. Is he even relevant? I have no doubts of the future of the OS that I've made a career out of.. Especially none related to an old hippy who is pissed off that the world won't bow down to his heavy-handed approach.
What's a lot more interesting is the amount of new search startups. A great deal of these are really just search aggregators, but there are some really innovative new companies coming out of the woodworks. A search engine I've been using recently is http://www.gofish.com/ This is the direction that the small search engines are going, I feel. More paid search results, mixed with digital media purchasing. GoFish.com actually just launched a useful new service which allows you to search for digital media (music and video) then buy an mp3 and download the content, or stream it from their webserver. I'm finding it to be a rather entertaining method to waste my day.