I don't see how it can be considered P2P. You download the media off of the BBC's servers, not from your friends and neighbors.
In addition, the media files themselves are DRM-encumbered, so it wouldn't even make sense to have them on a P2P network when the files would 1) stop working after 7 days and 2) may not work on other machines.
Is this really P2P? If they are opening up the archives, why would they want to put DRM on the files?
When to start looking for a new job 1) You notice that the best engineers are systematically leaving the company - They are leaving for a reason. Maybe it's bad management, maybe it's bad pay. Whatever it is, you don't want it either.
2) You are forced to take a pay cut - If you take a pay cut, take it when switching jobs. Your salary at a company should always be increasing, and never decreasing.
3) The coffee delivery man stops refilling your coffee machines - Amenities getting cut in a budget crisis are one of the signs that further budget cuts are on the way.
4) The network gets locked down - Some companies will lock down the network in an effort to eliminate wasted time. It leads to bitterness among the employees and rarely works out the way the management wants it to.
5) The company get-togethers become more frequent, but less extravagant - HR is one of the first departments to know when things are going down the tubes. They respond by trying to raise morale with fun company get-togethers, but with a limited budget these get-togethers are less banquet celebrations and more confused standing around a punch bowl in the lunch room.
6) The CEO position has changed hands twice in one year - It is not uncommon that a CEO will quit after a certain amount of time at the top. It is a bad sign, though, when a CEO can't last a year. Something is wrong with the business and he is getting out while the getting is good. You should follow his lead.
7) The CFO position has changed hands twice in one year - CFOs are relatively harmless glorified accountants. Except when it comes to budgetary issues. If a CEO can't keep CFOs around, it is because they don't want to work for your CEO. Maybe you shouldn't either.
8) Your company announces a Brand New Direction - Companies can't just change their direction. Every move should be calculated and based on the strengths of the company. If your company designs software to run banking systems, be wary when the CEO declares that the company will begin work on medical systems.
9) The atmosphere is acrid - In a company where things are going well, there is usually a very strong atmosphere of comraderie. When things are going bad, or people are overstressed, that atmosphere turns sour. This cascades from the upper levels of management on down, so be aware when your coworkers stop being friendly.
10) The company opens a "research center" or "development center" in an impoverished country - Companies have found that they can increase headcount by hiring low-cost engineers in impoverished countries like India. They will typically declare the foreign site as a development center to handle development overflow from the main office, and that no current employee will be let go (so relax, because you're safe). This seems to be okay until you notice that headcount in the local office is decreasing because the employees that are leaving aren't being replaced. Brain drain at any company is a serious issue, and one that is directly caused by this type of off shoring.
They discuss the GPL at length in some of their whitepapers, but they don't seem to mention GNU or the FSF once.
I think it is quite a BAD sign when governments decide that the creators and maintainers of the GPL are not significant enough to mention in their documents. On top of that, they use the term "Linux" to describe the OS, and though they mention in pdf_datei.pdf that "Linux is only the core of the operating system", they go on "the non-core programs are parts of a so-called distribution". This is absolutely FALSE.
GNU is the operating system. It is the environment in which the Linux user lives. GNU tools are (if not the heart) the brain, lungs, arms, legs, and bladder of the GNU/Linux operating system. Without them, Linux is useless.
So, sure. Hooray that GNU/Linux is being promoted for use in Germany. However, this is a net loss for the Free Software community if the FSF and GNU are lost amid all the hoopla.
I alluded to this in my earlier post. Some mathematical operations are simply loops over a seed input. A summation is one example. You can reduce the calculation of a summation from a long series (infinite, perhaps) of functions executed in a loop to a single function which is valid for all inputs (voila, Calculus).
So they say they can take loops in 128 blocks at a time and calculate the result in less than 128 loop steps. They are requiring the compiler to come up with a valid function for those 128 steps that will work for any initial parameters. If it works, it means that you are no longer executing 128 time, but only once. That is a speed-up of just over 2 orders of magnitude. Really, really amazing.
But does it work? Can they really ask the compiler to do that much work? Is the compiler capable of being that smart? The main thing I wonder is how well this works, and how optimized it can get when the main purpose of looping is not to calculate functions but to access memory which is itself not fast.
We can understand easily how a loop could be calculated as a function, if the contents of the loop block is composed solely of calculations. When this occurs, the output of the loop is simply a function of its input (f(x), if you will). However, computer scientists who think that programs can always be reduced to a simple function with given inputs have their heads too far in their books to see how the real world forces programs to be far removed from that ivory tower gobbledygook.
In the real world, you aren't typically performing calculations in loops. Rather, you are usually reading and writing to memory, which may or may not be cached. So it isn't just a matter of saying f(x), it is much more complicated and possibly dependent on memory which you have no way to determine until the loop iteration reaches that point. And then you'll still get the bottlenecks which plague us today. Memory isn't fast enough, devices aren't fast enough, too much time is spent waiting for I/O to complete.
Pushing as much brute-force computation off onto compilers is fine. Let them unroll loops and optimize functions. But what are the limits to this? Can we really optimize our way to 1-step loops? I don't think so, but the DOD seems to think it is possible.
Scientist at the Cave of Ogg have discovered that wood may be able to be used a source of fire. Following hot on the heels of their previous breakthroughs with the ignition of fire, Ogg and Gor have discovered that fire is held in a solid state in certain types of wood. By transferring an existing fire to a piece of wood is said to "unlock" the fire within the wood and set it ablaze. Ogg's spokesman said that study will continue to find the exact amount of fire held within the various types of wood available near the Cave.
There is a very strong "gimme gimme" theme that runs deep within the GPL community. It says, give me the source code you have because I want it. The GPL, in fact, guarantees that if GPL'd software is used in another product, both products then become infected by the GPL and the resulting work is then covered by the GPL. In a very logical sense, this makes a lot of sense. We want people who use our work (GPL'd) to also be compelled to give back their work. The payment we demand is not monetary, it is to be paid in sourcecode.
So the loophole exists that someone may be able to make available a software package through an interface like the web which does not export the actual software to the client. The application, though, is absolutely in use by the client, he just can't see the source code. The user can't even request the source code (which the GPL forces the distributor to release to the asker). This is way outside the theme of the GPL, and it is not what the GPL writers had in mind when they originally (and revisedly) wrote it. The user should have the freedom to read, learn from, and change the code to the products he uses, that is the spirit of the GPL. By hiding the code and program behind the safety of a webserver, the companies exporting the application via the web interface are restricting the users' ability to do those things.
I don't support Stallman in this. I think it is absolutely the right of these companies to do this sort of thing. And I think that changing the GPL to include such egregious usurpation of rights is a blow to Free Software, both spiritually and tangibly as we will see more people decide to either stick with GPL2.0 or go with a more lenient license.
Here's what happens now. RIAA makes the request to Congress that ISPs open up, on request, records indicating upload (the main problem) transfers citing the obvious rampant criminal sharing going on on the network. Congress, in response, seeing both an opportunity to pad the coffers of its reelection campaigns as well as a chance to strengthen the rights of IP holders, decides to strike a blow to the 4th Amendment and force upload data to be opened upon subpoena.
Both sides in this equation (file uploaders and the RIAA) are in the wrong. You simply can't decide that you don't have to follow the law because you 1) don't like the law and 2) that technology allows you to violate the law easily. Moreover, the RIAA is continuing to alienate its customer base by using heavy-handed tactics on fairly low-level criminals. In addition, by continuing to violate the law and thumbing their noses at the industry, the file sharers themselves are forcing the lawmakers into strengthening IP laws.
I do not blame this guy for fighting the lawsuit. It takes a lot more guts to stare down the RIAA than to give in and pay them their due. But by forcing the RIAA to be more thorough in the future means that future lawsuits won't get away so easily.
And since this is just a motion for dismissal and not an actual dismissal (who knows what judges will do?), the judge may decide that the RIAA has enough evidence to prove that this guy was a file sharer and toss out the dismissal.
I think it depends on your perspective. If you are looking for platform independence, then Microsoft's solutions are obviously not going to fall into the realm of what you consider "web services". But web applications, as I mentioned way back in my original post, can be anything from simple client-side Javascript utilities (primitive calculators come to mind) and simple CGI programs (like the example in the CGI chapter of Learning Perl) all the way up to full blown applications which rely on a slew of technologies. Microsoft provides a set of technologies as well, but these may or may not work properly on non-Windows/non-IE systems. But the technologies are out there and provide web-borne services that are more full-featured than barebones Javascript.
I agree that Microsoft's web services are very limiting for those seeking to use non-Microsoft platforms. However, just because it comes from a vendor I may not like and restricts me from using non-vendor platforms, I don't agree that you can disqualify the technology on that basis.
I was using the wrong slogan, but I don't think it's true that Microsoft was wholeheartedly behind destroying web services. As I mentioned in another post, Microsoft has actually been one of the leaders in developing the protocols that allow web services. The difference between their vision and "your" (the general "you") vision is that instead of seeing web services as a means of freeing yourself from a single operating system or browser vendor, Microsoft sees web services as a way of freeing you from your desk and allowing you to do your work anywhere that you've got an internet connection, on Windows PCs (naturally).
That's why ActiveX was their big idea back in 1994. You'd just download the ActiveX control to let you host applications directly in your browser, and if you needed to move somewhere else, you could just get that ActiveX control easily off the web at another computer.
Their vision is Windows everywhere, but that doesn't preclude them from seeing distributed computing as the antithesis to this goal. They see platform independence as the antithesis, which is why they killed Java and why they took on Netscape head-on. Now they can see that they can hold on to their marketshare by simply supplying better tools and better libraries to developers. The developers will keep the users on Windows, Microsoft just needs to make the OS and tools attractive to the programmers and the lock in is automatic.
You are right. That was Sun. But with regards to trying to actually implement usable web-based services, it has been Microsoft who has been the most vocal and active member of the computing community. They are at the helm of all sorts of initatives like SOAP, UPnP, now ASP.Net and others no doubt coming. They were the ones who tried to put actual application controls directly into IE (ActiveX) so that web-borne applications would have full access to the client system.
Webservices were going to rule the computing world. You'd download apps as you needed them from vendors, then they would automatically bill you for the rental, but only for the time spent using the actual product.
That idea died a horrible death, despite Microsoft's best efforts to make the Network the Computer.
Now webservices are back, but instead of building miniature application control building blocks, the entire application interface is downloaded to your browser. Everything immediate runs client-side and anything that needs a backend is sent upstream to the server. No more trying to keep a network connection alive between the client PC and the network server. Everything can be kept very asynchronous.
It's no surprise that this is the way things are evolving. Even the first CGI programs foretold this type of usage pattern. You'd get an interface on the client side and the heavy processing would be done on the server. But now with faster connections and the ability to run more stuff on the client side, a lot of processing can be and has been pushed off the server and onto the client browser.
It's very interesting, and quite a pleasant break from the barrage of boring sysadmin-specific stories here.
There was a story about power supplies earlier
on
Silent 500W Power Supply
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I remember that the story was discussing how the advertised wattages of these power supplies were pretty much lies or gross exaggerations. So we're talking about 500W of power without cooling, but how much power can be drawn until the thing dies from heat exhaustion? And can the 500W output be sustained for extended lengths of time?
Also, does anyone find really strange that slashdot would put the CSS definition files in the images.slashdot.org domain? One computer I use shows Slashdot completely stripped down. This one shows it "normally". Any way to get rid of advertisements and images without losing the formatting as well?
Memory chips are not "just memory chips" anymore. They do in fact contain little CPUs which run little programs which can determine whether commands (not simply signals) are read or write or some other application. This is the basis of multi-function cards like SDIO which can be both normal storage memory as well as an actual device.
The industry seems bound and determined to put copy protection on everything, whether it be ringtones or MP3s. Flash memory makers are doing their best to help them, and OS makers are doing their best to take advantage of those features.
We speak of Freedom as if Linux could provide it, but the question is gradually becoming whether it is better to be the canary in a gilded cage or the crow eating garbage in the snow. Having an isolated "free" system that can't interact with other "non-free" systems is not really how we expected things to turn out, I bet.
Abortions for all. *crowd boos* Very well, no abortions for anyone. *crowd boos* Hmm... Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others. *crowd cheers*
In my opinion, a phone is a tool. I don't ask screwdriver makers to make blank drivers so I can whittle my own philips head. If I need a tool with more features I will buy it, I don't want to worry about installing or developing my own tools. Meet me. Joe Consumer.
What mail client were your users using before the switch? After? Aside from the autoresponder, were there other features that didn't work anymore? Aside from the administrative benefits, were there other features that piggybacked their way in and were found to be useful?
I see the benefit in having separate mail databases (to the point where you have separate plaintext files for each mail!) over having a huge central database that runs the risk of getting corrupted. What safeguards to do you have in place to ensure that those emails are protected from prying eyes?
Thanks for the response, it was very englightening.
Thanks for the response. This is very much in tune with what I was trying to find out. I'm not a sysadmin, and I really don't care what is running beneath the covers, as long as it works. Cost is only one of the benefits of moving away from Microsoft products, and I don't feel it's the most important nor the best selling point of Open Source software. It irks me when people will blurt out zero cost as if that were the only thing that people base their decisions on. Microsoft makes a ton off of Exchange, so a lot of companies see it as the best/easiest/whatever solution for their mail servers. If cost were the issue, they'd all be running sendmail (or whatever OSS backend mail system is in vogue).
So you mention quite a bit of benefit when upgrading the system (lower HW requirements, fewer dependencies on 3rd party support, etc), but what sort of features do I lose when going away from Exchange? Can I still use Outlook to its fullest (calendaring, scheduling, etc) with a non-Microsoft solution? Can I upgrade the backend to Linux without major disruption on the user end? How much extra software installation and configuration is necessary to bring the featureset of the Linux backend up to parity with the Exchange backend?
That may be an issue for a small company with only a handful of employees. But for a medium to large-sized company with over a couple hundred employees, the cost of an email system is negligble compared to the cumulative productivity gains of a working email system.
Let's say I've got an Exchange server farm running my network's mail system. Everything seems to work okay, but it's about time to stick with what I've got, upgrade to the next Exchange version, or look to another vendor (like Zimbra).
What kind of benefits would I see moving to another product? I can see Microsoft's checklist features and see exactly what will be changed between this version of Exchange and the next, but I'm wondering what the benefits will be if I move away from Exchange.
I'm not a sysadmin, so I'm wondering what criteria you guys use when making the decision to jump ship.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how it can be considered P2P. You download the media off of the BBC's servers, not from your friends and neighbors.
In addition, the media files themselves are DRM-encumbered, so it wouldn't even make sense to have them on a P2P network when the files would 1) stop working after 7 days and 2) may not work on other machines.
Is this really P2P? If they are opening up the archives, why would they want to put DRM on the files?
It doesn't make sense.
Who buys an Adword for the word "for"?
Take them for what they are worth.
When to start looking for a new job
1) You notice that the best engineers are systematically leaving the company
- They are leaving for a reason. Maybe it's bad management, maybe it's bad pay. Whatever it is, you don't want it either.
2) You are forced to take a pay cut
- If you take a pay cut, take it when switching jobs. Your salary at a company should always be increasing, and never decreasing.
3) The coffee delivery man stops refilling your coffee machines
- Amenities getting cut in a budget crisis are one of the signs that further budget cuts are on the way.
4) The network gets locked down
- Some companies will lock down the network in an effort to eliminate wasted time. It leads to bitterness among the employees and rarely works out the way the management wants it to.
5) The company get-togethers become more frequent, but less extravagant
- HR is one of the first departments to know when things are going down the tubes. They respond by trying to raise morale with fun company get-togethers, but with a limited budget these get-togethers are less banquet celebrations and more confused standing around a punch bowl in the lunch room.
6) The CEO position has changed hands twice in one year
- It is not uncommon that a CEO will quit after a certain amount of time at the top. It is a bad sign, though, when a CEO can't last a year. Something is wrong with the business and he is getting out while the getting is good. You should follow his lead.
7) The CFO position has changed hands twice in one year
- CFOs are relatively harmless glorified accountants. Except when it comes to budgetary issues. If a CEO can't keep CFOs around, it is because they don't want to work for your CEO. Maybe you shouldn't either.
8) Your company announces a Brand New Direction
- Companies can't just change their direction. Every move should be calculated and based on the strengths of the company. If your company designs software to run banking systems, be wary when the CEO declares that the company will begin work on medical systems.
9) The atmosphere is acrid
- In a company where things are going well, there is usually a very strong atmosphere of comraderie. When things are going bad, or people are overstressed, that atmosphere turns sour. This cascades from the upper levels of management on down, so be aware when your coworkers stop being friendly.
10) The company opens a "research center" or "development center" in an impoverished country
- Companies have found that they can increase headcount by hiring low-cost engineers in impoverished countries like India. They will typically declare the foreign site as a development center to handle development overflow from the main office, and that no current employee will be let go (so relax, because you're safe). This seems to be okay until you notice that headcount in the local office is decreasing because the employees that are leaving aren't being replaced. Brain drain at any company is a serious issue, and one that is directly caused by this type of off shoring.
They discuss the GPL at length in some of their whitepapers, but they don't seem to mention GNU or the FSF once.
I think it is quite a BAD sign when governments decide that the creators and maintainers of the GPL are not significant enough to mention in their documents. On top of that, they use the term "Linux" to describe the OS, and though they mention in pdf_datei.pdf that "Linux is only the core of the operating system", they go on "the non-core programs are parts of a so-called distribution". This is absolutely FALSE.
GNU is the operating system. It is the environment in which the Linux user lives. GNU tools are (if not the heart) the brain, lungs, arms, legs, and bladder of the GNU/Linux operating system. Without them, Linux is useless.
So, sure. Hooray that GNU/Linux is being promoted for use in Germany. However, this is a net loss for the Free Software community if the FSF and GNU are lost amid all the hoopla.
I alluded to this in my earlier post. Some mathematical operations are simply loops over a seed input. A summation is one example. You can reduce the calculation of a summation from a long series (infinite, perhaps) of functions executed in a loop to a single function which is valid for all inputs (voila, Calculus).
So they say they can take loops in 128 blocks at a time and calculate the result in less than 128 loop steps. They are requiring the compiler to come up with a valid function for those 128 steps that will work for any initial parameters. If it works, it means that you are no longer executing 128 time, but only once. That is a speed-up of just over 2 orders of magnitude. Really, really amazing.
But does it work? Can they really ask the compiler to do that much work? Is the compiler capable of being that smart? The main thing I wonder is how well this works, and how optimized it can get when the main purpose of looping is not to calculate functions but to access memory which is itself not fast.
We can understand easily how a loop could be calculated as a function, if the contents of the loop block is composed solely of calculations. When this occurs, the output of the loop is simply a function of its input (f(x), if you will). However, computer scientists who think that programs can always be reduced to a simple function with given inputs have their heads too far in their books to see how the real world forces programs to be far removed from that ivory tower gobbledygook.
In the real world, you aren't typically performing calculations in loops. Rather, you are usually reading and writing to memory, which may or may not be cached. So it isn't just a matter of saying f(x), it is much more complicated and possibly dependent on memory which you have no way to determine until the loop iteration reaches that point. And then you'll still get the bottlenecks which plague us today. Memory isn't fast enough, devices aren't fast enough, too much time is spent waiting for I/O to complete.
Pushing as much brute-force computation off onto compilers is fine. Let them unroll loops and optimize functions. But what are the limits to this? Can we really optimize our way to 1-step loops? I don't think so, but the DOD seems to think it is possible.
I actually can't take any airlines anywhere, but if I could, I don't think I would enjoy having to put up with all this extra security.
Frank Sinatra died before that old standard could be updated.
Come fly with me. Come fly, let's fly away.
The whole idea of air travel was about living on a cloud in that rarified air.
These days, not so much.
Scientist at the Cave of Ogg have discovered that wood may be able to be used a source of fire. Following hot on the heels of their previous breakthroughs with the ignition of fire, Ogg and Gor have discovered that fire is held in a solid state in certain types of wood. By transferring an existing fire to a piece of wood is said to "unlock" the fire within the wood and set it ablaze. Ogg's spokesman said that study will continue to find the exact amount of fire held within the various types of wood available near the Cave.
Seriously? Magnets?
There is a very strong "gimme gimme" theme that runs deep within the GPL community. It says, give me the source code you have because I want it. The GPL, in fact, guarantees that if GPL'd software is used in another product, both products then become infected by the GPL and the resulting work is then covered by the GPL. In a very logical sense, this makes a lot of sense. We want people who use our work (GPL'd) to also be compelled to give back their work. The payment we demand is not monetary, it is to be paid in sourcecode.
So the loophole exists that someone may be able to make available a software package through an interface like the web which does not export the actual software to the client. The application, though, is absolutely in use by the client, he just can't see the source code. The user can't even request the source code (which the GPL forces the distributor to release to the asker). This is way outside the theme of the GPL, and it is not what the GPL writers had in mind when they originally (and revisedly) wrote it. The user should have the freedom to read, learn from, and change the code to the products he uses, that is the spirit of the GPL. By hiding the code and program behind the safety of a webserver, the companies exporting the application via the web interface are restricting the users' ability to do those things.
I don't support Stallman in this. I think it is absolutely the right of these companies to do this sort of thing. And I think that changing the GPL to include such egregious usurpation of rights is a blow to Free Software, both spiritually and tangibly as we will see more people decide to either stick with GPL2.0 or go with a more lenient license.
This is okay, as long as they don't attack Open Source, right? We care about actions more than principles, don't we?
Here's what happens now. RIAA makes the request to Congress that ISPs open up, on request, records indicating upload (the main problem) transfers citing the obvious rampant criminal sharing going on on the network. Congress, in response, seeing both an opportunity to pad the coffers of its reelection campaigns as well as a chance to strengthen the rights of IP holders, decides to strike a blow to the 4th Amendment and force upload data to be opened upon subpoena.
Both sides in this equation (file uploaders and the RIAA) are in the wrong. You simply can't decide that you don't have to follow the law because you 1) don't like the law and 2) that technology allows you to violate the law easily. Moreover, the RIAA is continuing to alienate its customer base by using heavy-handed tactics on fairly low-level criminals. In addition, by continuing to violate the law and thumbing their noses at the industry, the file sharers themselves are forcing the lawmakers into strengthening IP laws.
I do not blame this guy for fighting the lawsuit. It takes a lot more guts to stare down the RIAA than to give in and pay them their due. But by forcing the RIAA to be more thorough in the future means that future lawsuits won't get away so easily.
And since this is just a motion for dismissal and not an actual dismissal (who knows what judges will do?), the judge may decide that the RIAA has enough evidence to prove that this guy was a file sharer and toss out the dismissal.
I think it depends on your perspective. If you are looking for platform independence, then Microsoft's solutions are obviously not going to fall into the realm of what you consider "web services". But web applications, as I mentioned way back in my original post, can be anything from simple client-side Javascript utilities (primitive calculators come to mind) and simple CGI programs (like the example in the CGI chapter of Learning Perl) all the way up to full blown applications which rely on a slew of technologies. Microsoft provides a set of technologies as well, but these may or may not work properly on non-Windows/non-IE systems. But the technologies are out there and provide web-borne services that are more full-featured than barebones Javascript.
I agree that Microsoft's web services are very limiting for those seeking to use non-Microsoft platforms. However, just because it comes from a vendor I may not like and restricts me from using non-vendor platforms, I don't agree that you can disqualify the technology on that basis.
I was referring to this in my reply:
"Microsoft doesn't want network applications to take off because it undermines the strength of their platform."
I was not referring to the slogan misattribution (which, frankly, is hardly the most important point in my original post).
I was using the wrong slogan, but I don't think it's true that Microsoft was wholeheartedly behind destroying web services. As I mentioned in another post, Microsoft has actually been one of the leaders in developing the protocols that allow web services. The difference between their vision and "your" (the general "you") vision is that instead of seeing web services as a means of freeing yourself from a single operating system or browser vendor, Microsoft sees web services as a way of freeing you from your desk and allowing you to do your work anywhere that you've got an internet connection, on Windows PCs (naturally).
That's why ActiveX was their big idea back in 1994. You'd just download the ActiveX control to let you host applications directly in your browser, and if you needed to move somewhere else, you could just get that ActiveX control easily off the web at another computer.
Their vision is Windows everywhere, but that doesn't preclude them from seeing distributed computing as the antithesis to this goal. They see platform independence as the antithesis, which is why they killed Java and why they took on Netscape head-on. Now they can see that they can hold on to their marketshare by simply supplying better tools and better libraries to developers. The developers will keep the users on Windows, Microsoft just needs to make the OS and tools attractive to the programmers and the lock in is automatic.
I'm going to just point you to this webpage and let you come to your own conclusions.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/
You are right. That was Sun. But with regards to trying to actually implement usable web-based services, it has been Microsoft who has been the most vocal and active member of the computing community. They are at the helm of all sorts of initatives like SOAP, UPnP, now ASP.Net and others no doubt coming. They were the ones who tried to put actual application controls directly into IE (ActiveX) so that web-borne applications would have full access to the client system.
Webservices were going to rule the computing world. You'd download apps as you needed them from vendors, then they would automatically bill you for the rental, but only for the time spent using the actual product.
That idea died a horrible death, despite Microsoft's best efforts to make the Network the Computer.
Now webservices are back, but instead of building miniature application control building blocks, the entire application interface is downloaded to your browser. Everything immediate runs client-side and anything that needs a backend is sent upstream to the server. No more trying to keep a network connection alive between the client PC and the network server. Everything can be kept very asynchronous.
It's no surprise that this is the way things are evolving. Even the first CGI programs foretold this type of usage pattern. You'd get an interface on the client side and the heavy processing would be done on the server. But now with faster connections and the ability to run more stuff on the client side, a lot of processing can be and has been pushed off the server and onto the client browser.
It's very interesting, and quite a pleasant break from the barrage of boring sysadmin-specific stories here.
I remember that the story was discussing how the advertised wattages of these power supplies were pretty much lies or gross exaggerations. So we're talking about 500W of power without cooling, but how much power can be drawn until the thing dies from heat exhaustion? And can the 500W output be sustained for extended lengths of time?
Also, does anyone find really strange that slashdot would put the CSS definition files in the images.slashdot.org domain? One computer I use shows Slashdot completely stripped down. This one shows it "normally". Any way to get rid of advertisements and images without losing the formatting as well?
Memory chips are not "just memory chips" anymore. They do in fact contain little CPUs which run little programs which can determine whether commands (not simply signals) are read or write or some other application. This is the basis of multi-function cards like SDIO which can be both normal storage memory as well as an actual device.
The industry seems bound and determined to put copy protection on everything, whether it be ringtones or MP3s. Flash memory makers are doing their best to help them, and OS makers are doing their best to take advantage of those features.
We speak of Freedom as if Linux could provide it, but the question is gradually becoming whether it is better to be the canary in a gilded cage or the crow eating garbage in the snow. Having an isolated "free" system that can't interact with other "non-free" systems is not really how we expected things to turn out, I bet.
I want to be able to install my own applications.
etc.
Reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons:
Abortions for all.
*crowd boos*
Very well, no abortions for anyone.
*crowd boos*
Hmm... Abortions for some, miniature American flags for
others.
*crowd cheers*
In my opinion, a phone is a tool. I don't ask screwdriver makers to make blank drivers so I can whittle my own philips head. If I need a tool with more features I will buy it, I don't want to worry about installing or developing my own tools. Meet me. Joe Consumer.
What mail client were your users using before the switch? After? Aside from the autoresponder, were there other features that didn't work anymore? Aside from the administrative benefits, were there other features that piggybacked their way in and were found to be useful?
I see the benefit in having separate mail databases (to the point where you have separate plaintext files for each mail!) over having a huge central database that runs the risk of getting corrupted. What safeguards to do you have in place to ensure that those emails are protected from prying eyes?
Thanks for the response, it was very englightening.
Thanks for the response. This is very much in tune with what I was trying to find out. I'm not a sysadmin, and I really don't care what is running beneath the covers, as long as it works. Cost is only one of the benefits of moving away from Microsoft products, and I don't feel it's the most important nor the best selling point of Open Source software. It irks me when people will blurt out zero cost as if that were the only thing that people base their decisions on. Microsoft makes a ton off of Exchange, so a lot of companies see it as the best/easiest/whatever solution for their mail servers. If cost were the issue, they'd all be running sendmail (or whatever OSS backend mail system is in vogue).
So you mention quite a bit of benefit when upgrading the system (lower HW requirements, fewer dependencies on 3rd party support, etc), but what sort of features do I lose when going away from Exchange? Can I still use Outlook to its fullest (calendaring, scheduling, etc) with a non-Microsoft solution? Can I upgrade the backend to Linux without major disruption on the user end? How much extra software installation and configuration is necessary to bring the featureset of the Linux backend up to parity with the Exchange backend?
That may be an issue for a small company with only a handful of employees. But for a medium to large-sized company with over a couple hundred employees, the cost of an email system is negligble compared to the cumulative productivity gains of a working email system.
Or to say it another way, money is cheap.
Let's say I've got an Exchange server farm running my network's mail system. Everything seems to work okay, but it's about time to stick with what I've got, upgrade to the next Exchange version, or look to another vendor (like Zimbra).
What kind of benefits would I see moving to another product? I can see Microsoft's checklist features and see exactly what will be changed between this version of Exchange and the next, but I'm wondering what the benefits will be if I move away from Exchange.
I'm not a sysadmin, so I'm wondering what criteria you guys use when making the decision to jump ship.