But. . . but. . . in Die Hard and other movies they went blinky blinky, had countdown timers, and beeped every second! Don't ALL bombs have those features?
If it blinks, ticks or beeps, it's a bomb! Think of the children!
Here's a hint to local politicians: If someone wants to blow up a bridge, planting explosive days or weeks in advance, they're going to work hard to conceal the explosives within the infrastructure, or make it appear to be an integral part of the infrastructure. This means cutting holes in poles and inserting the explosives inside, then re-sealing and painting them, or adding additional tubing to contain the explosives and paint to match, or embed in an indentation/seam/crevice/gap and then plaster or putty and paint over it to escape detection. Also, any antennae are going to be very low visibility; very likely foil tape hidden beneath paint or tape which closely matches the rest of the structure - or if space and the structure allows, a larger, higher-gain antenna mounted under cover. It won't be mounted out in the open, it will not showcase popular cartoon characters, blink, beep, or otherwise draw attention to the device, and will not "look like a bomb" to movie fanatics.
Stop basing political decisions on your fondness for action movies.
Oh, and in case you're wondering: your "getting tough" and "showing zero tolerance" toward the folks who put up those signs did NOT win my vote. I think you've stupid, media-whoring knee-jerk reactionists seeking only to make a name for yourself and advanced up the political ladder. It doesn't work, so KNOCK IT OFF.
No other cities where this campaign was run had ANY problems; no shutting down highways, subways, buses, airports, trains, or anything else. No world news stories with blustering windbag politicians making speeches about any "bomb hoax" (hint: the worst they did was post bills without permits and POSSIBLY tresspassed, NOTHING else; not even vandalism, as they were designed for easy removal) or any other bullshit fear-inducing buzzwords which politicians so love to toss around to garner attention. You're all assholes, and the whole world thinks so. Boston is a fucking joke now thanks to you. Well, MORE of a joke (who thought that was possible?) Thanks, guys.
Well, think of the poor proprietary manufacturers! If they promote and adhere to standards, and document the external interface to their devices, they are somehow giving away competitive advantages to their competitors. No, instead, they will provide you only with proprietary, Windows-only drivers, and you will thank them for the privilege of having a half-working device to begin with.
(this also applies to video, cards, and WiFi cards)
Thankfully, not all companies are suckered into brand liquidation/diffusion/whateveyouwanttocallit. Some actually think about a) their customers and b) the long-term impact of making such deals with Wal*Mart.
Wal*Mart is very good that Wal*Mart does well in a venture. If a product does not sell, well, at least they didn't pay much for it and can offload overstock goods to job lot/dollar type stores. If it does sell, the brand in question may be perceived as a crappy brand thanks to Wal*Mart-specific models which in some cases are built to be cheap and barely functional enough to meet warranty for merchantability guidelines, with no regard to offering quality product for the customer and even less regard to making sure that brand will still be able to afford to offer you product three or five years from now.
Sadly, too many companies are lured by immediate, short-term profits and are not interested in larger, but long-term growth.:(
Is this true, Billy? If so, then please explain to us:
- Your calculation of migration costs (don't forget intermediate steps of Windows plus hardware upgrades which clients have already incurred to upgrade to Win2K, WinXP, and Vista for a fair comparison)
- Downtime comparisons (Don't forget to specify your redefinition of downtime, and also specify what you mean by "maintenance windows"
- How Unix, which has been around since the early '70s, has never seen a major virus breakout like Windows has - especially since in theory the NT family of Windows is a more secure model
The BSD allows mega-corps to borrow code, embrace and extend that standard, and contribute NOTHING back to the community who spent thousands of man-hours developing the product to begin with. Windows' TCP/IP stack, anyone?
If it were GPL then mega-corps can borrow code, embrace and extend it, and be required contribute the derived work back to the community. Apple's Safari and KHTML, for example (Thanks, Apple!).
The monies in question is related to Intel's advertising budget; if you are a system vendor and prominently display the Intel logo in your advertising, Intel will fund a certain percentage of the advertising, based on the prominence of the logo in your advertising. (Microsoft has a similar program).
Am I right? If so, then the ones suing Dell are complaining about NOTHING. There is absolutely nothing stopping AMD from implementing such policies if they have not already done so.
What frustrates is that from the outside it seems lots of folk are trying to be the next Exchange with their own formats and techniques, rather than us seeing an open deployable standard with interoperating clients and servers.
What can possibly be more open than opening up the source (ref: Scalix, Zimbra)? Sure, the calendar implementation may be unique in each case, but there really IS NO SET STANDARD for group scheduling.
You have M$ Schedule Plus (defunct), Microsoft Exchange, and then Meeting Maker. Each implementation is unique and highly proprietary.
Then there is vcal for exchanging meeting requests between individuals (be they using calendar extensions to Thunderbird, kmail, outlook, or evolution), and hacks implementing vcal over WebDAV (ugly hacks at that) but even those implementations do not really promote a consistent method providing for interoperability, conflict and availability checking and publishing, defining resources vs. locations vs. attendees, tallying of accept/reject requests, required vs. optional attendees, contact/potential attendee lists, and so forth. Unless/until someone proposes an international cross-platform standard and it is accepted (and no way will Microsoft propose their own, it provides a migration path away from Exchange) each and every implementation is going to be highly proprietary.
And, since it comes down to picking a proprietary solution, at least if you want one which works, why not at least pick an open source, if unique solution that actually WORKS, rather than one that is based on several loosely-defined poorly-integrated methodologies which were not designed to be an ideal solution to the specific problem to begin with?
Or, you could just suck it up and pay Microsoft for their closed-source, proprietary, high-maintenance, high-cost solution and suffer from vendor lock, and down the road, forced upgrades when Microsoft decides to quit selling CALs to force you to repurchase the product all over again.
Check out Scalix, and the scalix connector for Exchange. I know, it may be too late now that you've started the Zimbra limitation, but it won't hurt to check out Scalix as a potential alternative.
Speaking of PocketPCs, every version of ActiveSync since 1.5 has grown progressively worse. With 4.1 and 4.2 beta whenver I try to sync my new iPAQ I get error 85010017, and I've followed every kb article and tried several versions of Outlook in effort to resolve it. ALL I am trying to sync is tasks and contacts, not a huge mailbox. Setting up Linux to sync (via synce) will likely work better than ActiveStink.
As an aside, IMHO, the ONLY product Microsoft is getting right now is the PocketPC/Windows Mobile platform. I've bought two PocketPCs, and unless Apple opens up the iPhone to third-party development, my next PDA is also going to be another PocketPC, even though a good chunk of the purchase price goes to Microsoft.
No; for some of their printers released shortly prior to the release of Windows XP, you have to purchase the drivers; they do not make them available on the web, and if you call them they do not provide any URL but inform you that yes, like the web site says, you have to purchase them.
I do not remember what the model number is. If you are so eager to know the model #, drop me an email as a reminder then I can find out from my client next week, which is the next time I am going there.
What really astonishes me is that open source has made such great leaps in other areas yet there's no apparent replacement for Outlook & Exchange.
Oh really?
What about Zimbra and Scalix? The only think you really miss out on, now that Microsoft is removing/has removed custom form support from Exchange, is task list, but on the other hand, shared tasks are more suitable for CRM or project management packages anyhow. Both of these server platforms support both rich client-side and web-based client support.
And then, there are solutions from RedHat, Novell, and Sun. Granted they're more expensive than Scalix or Zimbra, but they're
What about Outlook interoperability, you ask? It's free with Scalix, and an affordable option for Zimbra.
If you are willing to go with an all-web-based solution then there are even more solutions, and if all you need is email, but stored on the server side, any email back end which supports IMAP (read: practically all of them) will provide what you need.
Want to know what else you get with the Linux-based groupware solutions that you do not get with Windows? Zero down time. Maintenance, backups, repairs, and so forth can all be done live. No need to shut down service to defrag an info store. No hard-coded 16GB or 75GB info store limitation if all you need is an SBS equivalent. Backups can be done multiple ways; back up the filesystem live, an LVM snapshot, or simply use the backup facilities within the applications. While backing up the live filesystem is not ideal and can lead to inconsistencies, they will not completely break and refuse to mount like Microsoft's databases often do in such cases.
There ARE alternatives to Exchange. I'm sorry that you didn't find them earlier and that you gave up, but with all of the press surrounding both Zimbra and Scalix in the last couple of years, I'd have to guess you weren't really looking hard enough.
Thanks, but no thanks. If I decide to run Vista (I tried the public beta and removed it) I'll just pirate it (the first time I'll be pirating Windows BTW) and set up a spoofed Activation server.
Having run Linux with Compiz and Beryl, the Vista beta, and XP with third party shell enhancements, I can tell you that if you need eye candy, Beryl is the best way to go, with XP + shell enhancements (such as Windowblinds from Stardock) being a distant second.
And then there is OS X, which is amazingly pretty, but I HATE how limiting the shell is. If I want to run a UI which is dumbed down for users, I'll choose Gnome over OS X. At least I can be just as annoyed by Gnome without overpaying for hardware.
As someone who lives near Boston, I feel ashamed to be a Masshole today. Why? Because our local government is comprised of a bunch of knee-jerk reactionists who have no sense of humor.
It's not running at 60hz, that makes all difference in the world. I have no idea what the inverter runs at.
Everything else I have with LCD (aside from my original iPAQ) uses LED backlighting.
The only time I've seen LCDs flicker is with now-defunct passive displays (the backlight did not visibly flicker, the LCD itself did), or LCD backlights with defective inverters.
(measured at 1M, I forgot to bring my multimeter home so I do not have precise voltage info. Same fixture, same measuring position, I stood in the exact same spot (to prevent clothing color from tainting measurements due to varied reflection))
(divide lux by.9 for foot-candles)
60W Phillips DuraMax lamp: 112lux (divide by.9 for foot-candles) (it was momentarily less, stabilized after about two seconds, after power was off for approximately 11 hours, ramped up so quickly it's difficult to pin down an initial brightness)
(For frame of reference, the full moon is about.09 to.1 lux in southern New England with a slightly hazy sky. Basically, light enough to clearly read by. As an aside, if buying a surveillance camera, keep in mind that if it's not light enough to read, your average.3 lux home depot or Radio Trash camera is not going to cut it.)
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But. . . but. . . in Die Hard and other movies they went blinky blinky, had countdown timers, and beeped every second! Don't ALL bombs have those features?
If it blinks, ticks or beeps, it's a bomb! Think of the children!
Here's a hint to local politicians: If someone wants to blow up a bridge, planting explosive days or weeks in advance, they're going to work hard to conceal the explosives within the infrastructure, or make it appear to be an integral part of the infrastructure. This means cutting holes in poles and inserting the explosives inside, then re-sealing and painting them, or adding additional tubing to contain the explosives and paint to match, or embed in an indentation/seam/crevice/gap and then plaster or putty and paint over it to escape detection. Also, any antennae are going to be very low visibility; very likely foil tape hidden beneath paint or tape which closely matches the rest of the structure - or if space and the structure allows, a larger, higher-gain antenna mounted under cover. It won't be mounted out in the open, it will not showcase popular cartoon characters, blink, beep, or otherwise draw attention to the device, and will not "look like a bomb" to movie fanatics.
Stop basing political decisions on your fondness for action movies.
Oh, and in case you're wondering: your "getting tough" and "showing zero tolerance" toward the folks who put up those signs did NOT win my vote. I think you've stupid, media-whoring knee-jerk reactionists seeking only to make a name for yourself and advanced up the political ladder. It doesn't work, so KNOCK IT OFF.
No other cities where this campaign was run had ANY problems; no shutting down highways, subways, buses, airports, trains, or anything else. No world news stories with blustering windbag politicians making speeches about any "bomb hoax" (hint: the worst they did was post bills without permits and POSSIBLY tresspassed, NOTHING else; not even vandalism, as they were designed for easy removal) or any other bullshit fear-inducing buzzwords which politicians so love to toss around to garner attention. You're all assholes, and the whole world thinks so. Boston is a fucking joke now thanks to you. Well, MORE of a joke (who thought that was possible?) Thanks, guys.
Well, think of the poor proprietary manufacturers! If they promote and adhere to standards, and document the external interface to their devices, they are somehow giving away competitive advantages to their competitors. No, instead, they will provide you only with proprietary, Windows-only drivers, and you will thank them for the privilege of having a half-working device to begin with.
(this also applies to video, cards, and WiFi cards)
Thankfully, not all companies are suckered into brand liquidation/diffusion/whateveyouwanttocallit. Some actually think about a) their customers and b) the long-term impact of making such deals with Wal*Mart.
m l
:(
See http://slashdot.org/articles/06/03/28/2235246.sht
Wal*Mart is very good that Wal*Mart does well in a venture. If a product does not sell, well, at least they didn't pay much for it and can offload overstock goods to job lot/dollar type stores. If it does sell, the brand in question may be perceived as a crappy brand thanks to Wal*Mart-specific models which in some cases are built to be cheap and barely functional enough to meet warranty for merchantability guidelines, with no regard to offering quality product for the customer and even less regard to making sure that brand will still be able to afford to offer you product three or five years from now.
Sadly, too many companies are lured by immediate, short-term profits and are not interested in larger, but long-term growth.
" The other $1M goes to 'goodwill funds' that will be used for response training and public outreach."
Yay! Big corporation with deep pockets, time to fleece them! (I hate that attitude in this state/commonwealth)
- Your calculation of migration costs (don't forget intermediate steps of Windows plus hardware upgrades which clients have already incurred to upgrade to Win2K, WinXP, and Vista for a fair comparison)
- Downtime comparisons (Don't forget to specify your redefinition of downtime, and also specify what you mean by "maintenance windows"
- How Unix, which has been around since the early '70s, has never seen a major virus breakout like Windows has - especially since in theory the NT family of Windows is a more secure model
Until then, may I introduce you to Kettle?
That is not how windmills work!!!! Goodnight!
The resulting "Hello world" program won't make such a great platform then. That's pretty much what Linux would become.
The BSD allows mega-corps to borrow code, embrace and extend that standard, and contribute NOTHING back to the community who spent thousands of man-hours developing the product to begin with. Windows' TCP/IP stack, anyone?
If it were GPL then mega-corps can borrow code, embrace and extend it, and be required contribute the derived work back to the community. Apple's Safari and KHTML, for example (Thanks, Apple!).
FWIW, I did try the public beta of Vista and the Nvidia drivers worked perfectly fine, both 32-bit and 64-bit.
Also, to be fair to M$ (and I hate admitting this) the media center works amazingly well. I wish MythTV worked so well.
Huh?
Exchange 2003 allows single mailboxes to be restored, either tied to the original user account or to an alternate independent account.
With Exchange 2000 and prior what you outlined is absolutely true, but not so with 2003.
They are.
I'll make an educated guess:
The monies in question is related to Intel's advertising budget; if you are a system vendor and prominently display the Intel logo in your advertising, Intel will fund a certain percentage of the advertising, based on the prominence of the logo in your advertising. (Microsoft has a similar program).
Am I right? If so, then the ones suing Dell are complaining about NOTHING. There is absolutely nothing stopping AMD from implementing such policies if they have not already done so.
Sorry.
You have M$ Schedule Plus (defunct), Microsoft Exchange, and then Meeting Maker. Each implementation is unique and highly proprietary.
Then there is vcal for exchanging meeting requests between individuals (be they using calendar extensions to Thunderbird, kmail, outlook, or evolution), and hacks implementing vcal over WebDAV (ugly hacks at that) but even those implementations do not really promote a consistent method providing for interoperability, conflict and availability checking and publishing, defining resources vs. locations vs. attendees, tallying of accept/reject requests, required vs. optional attendees, contact/potential attendee lists, and so forth. Unless/until someone proposes an international cross-platform standard and it is accepted (and no way will Microsoft propose their own, it provides a migration path away from Exchange) each and every implementation is going to be highly proprietary.
And, since it comes down to picking a proprietary solution, at least if you want one which works, why not at least pick an open source, if unique solution that actually WORKS, rather than one that is based on several loosely-defined poorly-integrated methodologies which were not designed to be an ideal solution to the specific problem to begin with?
Or, you could just suck it up and pay Microsoft for their closed-source, proprietary, high-maintenance, high-cost solution and suffer from vendor lock, and down the road, forced upgrades when Microsoft decides to quit selling CALs to force you to repurchase the product all over again.
Check out Scalix, and the scalix connector for Exchange. I know, it may be too late now that you've started the Zimbra limitation, but it won't hurt to check out Scalix as a potential alternative.
Speaking of PocketPCs, every version of ActiveSync since 1.5 has grown progressively worse. With 4.1 and 4.2 beta whenver I try to sync my new iPAQ I get error 85010017, and I've followed every kb article and tried several versions of Outlook in effort to resolve it. ALL I am trying to sync is tasks and contacts, not a huge mailbox. Setting up Linux to sync (via synce) will likely work better than ActiveStink.
As an aside, IMHO, the ONLY product Microsoft is getting right now is the PocketPC/Windows Mobile platform. I've bought two PocketPCs, and unless Apple opens up the iPhone to third-party development, my next PDA is also going to be another PocketPC, even though a good chunk of the purchase price goes to Microsoft.
No; for some of their printers released shortly prior to the release of Windows XP, you have to purchase the drivers; they do not make them available on the web, and if you call them they do not provide any URL but inform you that yes, like the web site says, you have to purchase them.
I do not remember what the model number is. If you are so eager to know the model #, drop me an email as a reminder then I can find out from my client next week, which is the next time I am going there.
What about Zimbra and Scalix? The only think you really miss out on, now that Microsoft is removing/has removed custom form support from Exchange, is task list, but on the other hand, shared tasks are more suitable for CRM or project management packages anyhow. Both of these server platforms support both rich client-side and web-based client support.
And then, there are solutions from RedHat, Novell, and Sun. Granted they're more expensive than Scalix or Zimbra, but they're
What about Outlook interoperability, you ask? It's free with Scalix, and an affordable option for Zimbra.
If you are willing to go with an all-web-based solution then there are even more solutions, and if all you need is email, but stored on the server side, any email back end which supports IMAP (read: practically all of them) will provide what you need.
Want to know what else you get with the Linux-based groupware solutions that you do not get with Windows? Zero down time. Maintenance, backups, repairs, and so forth can all be done live. No need to shut down service to defrag an info store. No hard-coded 16GB or 75GB info store limitation if all you need is an SBS equivalent. Backups can be done multiple ways; back up the filesystem live, an LVM snapshot, or simply use the backup facilities within the applications. While backing up the live filesystem is not ideal and can lead to inconsistencies, they will not completely break and refuse to mount like Microsoft's databases often do in such cases.
There ARE alternatives to Exchange. I'm sorry that you didn't find them earlier and that you gave up, but with all of the press surrounding both Zimbra and Scalix in the last couple of years, I'd have to guess you weren't really looking hard enough.
Thanks, but no thanks. If I decide to run Vista (I tried the public beta and removed it) I'll just pirate it (the first time I'll be pirating Windows BTW) and set up a spoofed Activation server.
Having run Linux with Compiz and Beryl, the Vista beta, and XP with third party shell enhancements, I can tell you that if you need eye candy, Beryl is the best way to go, with XP + shell enhancements (such as Windowblinds from Stardock) being a distant second.
And then there is OS X, which is amazingly pretty, but I HATE how limiting the shell is. If I want to run a UI which is dumbed down for users, I'll choose Gnome over OS X. At least I can be just as annoyed by Gnome without overpaying for hardware.
HP has been known to charge for XP drivers for certain all-in-one fax/printer/scanner devices.
As someone who lives near Boston, I feel ashamed to be a Masshole today. Why? Because our local government is comprised of a bunch of knee-jerk reactionists who have no sense of humor.
It's not running at 60hz, that makes all difference in the world. I have no idea what the inverter runs at.
Everything else I have with LCD (aside from my original iPAQ) uses LED backlighting.
The only time I've seen LCDs flicker is with now-defunct passive displays (the backlight did not visibly flicker, the LCD itself did), or LCD backlights with defective inverters.
I was wrong, I have 14W CFLs
.9 for foot-candles)
.9 for foot-candles) (it was momentarily less, stabilized after about two seconds, after power was off for approximately 11 hours, ramped up so quickly it's difficult to pin down an initial brightness)
.09 to .1 lux in southern New England with a slightly hazy sky. Basically, light enough to clearly read by. As an aside, if buying a surveillance camera, keep in mind that if it's not light enough to read, your average .3 lux home depot or Radio Trash camera is not going to cut it.)
OK here is one comparison:
(measured at 1M, I forgot to bring my multimeter home so I do not have precise voltage info. Same fixture, same measuring position, I stood in the exact same spot (to prevent clothing color from tainting measurements due to varied reflection))
(divide lux by
60W Phillips DuraMax lamp: 112lux (divide by
n:vision soft white 14W CFLs, rated output 900 lumens, lamp # 61Y6
0 sec: 23 lux
15 sec: 46 lux
60 sec: 127 lux
120 sec: 136 lux
180 sec: 136 lux
It stabilized right around 120 seconds.
(For frame of reference, the full moon is about