Good spam filtering software can accomplish the same thing.
We work with lots of customers who absolutely rely on e-mail for business correspondence: occasionally they are unwittingly listed in some RBL and removing them is a pain in the ass. Who made Joe of JOESCRAPPYDNSBL God, telling our customers' customers not to receive e-mail from them?
Unfortunately there are alot of very bad examples of DNSBLs, and there are a lot of very bad examples of e-mail admins out there - putting the two together just causes headaches for us. Software-based filters seem to be a better option.
There is no such thing as a good DNSBL
on
Choosing a Good DNSBL
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They all have issues; all of them create headaches for administrators of legitimate e-mail servers at one time or another.
Someone actually modded this comment "Flamebait," though I was being serious.
I have read Dvorak's columns for about 15 years; he was very pro-OS/2 back in the day (as was I) and generally has a lot of intelligent stuff to say about some things. And he knows how to work it to increase the distribution of his articles. It's his job; who can blame him?
The fact that people get so worked up over his stuff is their own issue for not seeing that he's just trying to get his numbers up.
There's a reason I use E-mail, and not IM, or voice chat, or video chat, or message boards, or Skype, or whatever to communicate with customers & vendors. It works. It's reliable. It's battle tested.
Spam is a nuisance, but it is manageable with the right tools.
E-mail lets me be about five times as productive as I would be if I just relied on phone calls & voicemail.
It will probably evolve to be more secure, yes, but it'll never get the rip&replace treatment. It's like the power grid.
It's easy. (The whole experience is easy.) It just works.
(You'd think there'd be some real competition - but there really won't be until someone else can control the entire end-to-end experience. Microsoft is the only company with enough pull to do this--but they won't be able to get the experience as smoothed out as Apple. So the iPod will continue to dominate.)
I've been a longtime fan of Novell engineering (but NOT of their marketing efforts) and think I'd probably have to agree with this - I can see this coming, as well.
I _hope_ the really valuable stuff like eDirectory & GroupWise stick around in some form or another, whether or not these things are produced by Novell or another company.
FURTHERMORE, I'd recommend Corporate IT Managers adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards this sort of incompetence. There are too many other good products out there; when a software company you are supposedly entrusting your data to goes off and deletes valid information unexpectedly (whether it was accidental or not) you FIRE them. Very simple.
Software, generally speaking, sucks, and is too expensive. Companies should be made more responsible for their errors.
This is incredibly irresponsible on McAfee's part and if I were an IT manager I'd look at alternatives immediately. I haven't liked McAfee for years. I'm starting to hate Symantec, as well. eTrust is probably OK, as is Trend Micro. But some of the most innovative stuff I've seen lately comes from products like NOD32, Norman, F-Prot, AntiVir and Grisoft - companies that don't get to rely on the inertia of gigantic corporate service contracts to stay afloat. They actually have to produce a good product that people want to buy!
I am preaching to the choir, I know. I generally like Dvorak and agree with him on some things - but he is no Robert X. Cringely. He's basically saying "maybe Apple would switch to Windows so that they don't have to support all of those devices directly." Like this has been an issue--a large chunk of all currently manufactured perhiperals do in fact run well under OS X. The development tools for making OS X drivers are there - and are free. It's not brain surgery or rocket science--and with one way to deliver them (unlike the myriad complex ways to deliver Linux drivers) vendors are more likely to produce these drivers.
But there is no real other reason given for Apple wanting to switch to Windows. Most likely, Apple will make some sort of emulation layer (Rosetta?) that runs Windows applications side-by-side OS X apps. OS X is cool and shiny, yes, but its development model allows people to create software that is difficult or impossible to do in Windows. Apple already doesn't have to do "much" on the underpinnings of OS X (Darwin) because it is mostly built from open-sourced products. WHy would they switch out the base for an OS that isn't even 15 years old (WinNT) but is already showing serious signs of aging?
It doesn't make any sense at all, and Dvorak is a master at riling people up over nothing.
The website is hokey and loaded with marketing platitudes - and that's it. I think something is really fishy here. I don't believe this is even a real product - and I'm questioning whether or not it was used at the superbowl _at all_ and whether someone just fabricated all of this for the press.
Why don't people get more skeptical about this stuff? Doesn't it seem weird to people that people have tried to make 3D displays that don't require glasses for ages, and the best people have come up with is lenticular lenses over a flat LCD screen? How could some company come out of nowhere with little fanfare and make a 3D CRT? Why would this type of company even deserve any press on slashdot, let alone the newswires of the world, without some PROOF of this concept?
I searched around and came up with nothing useful. Can someone explain what a "Depth Tube" is and how it works? Call me skeptical, but a CRT capable of displaying 3D images without glasses sounds very novel to me.
This company (LifeVision) does not seem to have an obvious web presence, either.
GroupWise has _by far_ the lowest cost of ownership of the three major collaboration packages. Additionally, it is immune to virus/worm attacks that plague Exchange. It is far easier to deploy than Notes yet gives you 90% of the same out-of-box functionality. It's really, really stable & mature- and far more efficient than either Exchange or Notes. It is _incredibly_ reliable.
It also is built around the concept (used to be big, but they haven't pushed it in a while) of the "universal inbox" - like some of the other better PIMs of way back when; a GroupWise item can be any type you want it to be, and can be morphed into other items. Item types are extensible - you can create new types without much work. It has supported dynamic search folders for years, and supports tagging and linking to multiple folders. Full-text indexed search has been integral to the entire system since version 5.0 came out in 1997. It has also supported "Caching mode" for several revisions - which is new to outlook 2003. It ALSO runs on Windows, Linux, or Netware - you can run an entire GroupWise system completely on a LInux network. End-to-end communications have _always_ been secure, and now all end-to-end communications can run over SSL as well. It is a very, very powerful product.
Exchange, still, basically, sucks. Most of our customers use it; it's an OK e-mail client with a built-in calendar & some collaboration features. But it is not innovative. I have yet to see another collaboration platform match GroupWise feature-for-feature.
Hi. No, you're slightly incorrect about OES - I have always been a huge fan of Novell's software; it tends to be stellar stuff. But they have never been able to market their way out of a paper bag since Microsoft decimated Netware back in the NT 4.0 days. Still, products like GroupWise and eDirectory (NDS) have no _real_ technical equivalents in the market.
OES is not "Netware on top of Linux" - it's actually a collection of java-tomcat (web-based) services that previously ran on Netware that now also run on Linux. Things like iPrint, eDirectory, iFolder, iManage, NSS, etc. You can run these enterprise-value-added services on Netware 6.5 or on SuSE Enterprise Server 9. The management tools are the same for both platforms. It all works quite well--and they've had rave reviews, actually. Once again, their software is stunning - but their marketing sucks.
I have been playing with OES here - and really, really like what I see. Imagine being able to deploy SuSE 9 across a large enterprise and having _real_ tools to manage them all! That's the promise of what Novell can deliver - but again, the message has somehow been completely lost on the appropriate people.
I doubt they will declare bankruptcy - Novell has come back from the dead many, many times in the last decade (just like Apple!) But they definitely have some serious challenges to deal with in the coming months, as their traditional Netware revenue base has all but dried up.
Office for Linux may have been useful and even handy a few years ago, but the alternatives nowadays are just as good. There's no reason to need Office on Linux anymore.
I don't think Apple has anything to lose here. Steve Jobs _shouldn't_ back down because he has the upper hand at the moment. He _won't_ back down because of his ego. So what if Apple's shares are down for a quarter or two while this gets resolved? Apple is not _all_ about the stock price (unlike other companies) and he seems to have a strong sense of what is right for technology & what is right for the industry, regardless of how it may temporarily impact sales.
Besides, I'm sure they've had contingency plans for this worked out ages ago--the current music industry execs are clearly strictly reactive--they didn't exactly see this coming years ago and now they can only resort to threats and force to try to stop this from changing the status quo. Apple is very different from this--they think, plan, and anticipate things well ahead of the curve.
is that they open source Workplace Shell. Yes, OS/2 may still have some better guts--it certainly was extremely efficient on very limited hardware even compared to Linux today--but that stuff is basically all commodity now. WPS was really progressive & unique, and made the system a joy to use. Mac OS X is good now, but still doesn't quite match WPS for usability. I want it back.
"Mr. Tucker, an Internet industry executive who holds a Ph.D. in computer science" is an idiot. How about throwing the software restore CD back in the drive and starting over?
You *can* prevent Spyware/Virus infestations if you do regular maintenance--it's not rocket science, but apparently it's difficult to grasp for Mr. Tucker.
This article really says nothing about the cost of transferring data or reinstalling or patching applications--$130 to remove your system from spyware is far less than a $400 new machine PLUS a minimum of 3-4 hours of labor required to get everything put back together on a new PC.
If you own Windows, you have to learn to take care of it. It is kind of annoying, yes, but there isn't an alternative and it doesn't really take a lot of time to keep it maintained.
also want to add- I think developers writing new general-purpose OSes from scratch may be slightly misguided. With hardware speeds reaching infinity as prices approach zero, coming up with an OS that handles thread scheduling & semaphores slightly faster than Linux, OS X or Windows isn't exactly going to change the world. Almost every component underlying the OS right now is commodity & freely available--network stacks, VPNs, IO, file systems, etc. Why keep reinventing this stuff?
The real room for improvement is in the user interface. Apple is leading at the moment--they get a lot of things right, but there are still a lot of shortcomings (anyone remember the OS/2 WorkPlace Shell? Still beats the pants off Aqua, in my opinion) I'd rather see hobbyists focus on usability & interface design - there are huge unexplored opportunities there for real innovation.
Until we have really good open-source emulators (or API translators like Wine) that work on any platform and run any program, it'll be very difficult to get anything else off the ground at this point with any kind of saturation.
There's no point in running any OS really if you have to constantly switch back to another OS to do any meaningful work. This is the biggest obstacle to adoption.
Slashdot Mirror
I think server-side and user-side spam filtering software would get a lot better more quickly if there were no DNSBLs. :)
Good spam filtering software can accomplish the same thing.
We work with lots of customers who absolutely rely on e-mail for business correspondence: occasionally they are unwittingly listed in some RBL and removing them is a pain in the ass. Who made Joe of JOESCRAPPYDNSBL God, telling our customers' customers not to receive e-mail from them?
Unfortunately there are alot of very bad examples of DNSBLs, and there are a lot of very bad examples of e-mail admins out there - putting the two together just causes headaches for us. Software-based filters seem to be a better option.
They all have issues; all of them create headaches for administrators of legitimate e-mail servers at one time or another.
Someone actually modded this comment "Flamebait," though I was being serious.
I have read Dvorak's columns for about 15 years; he was very pro-OS/2 back in the day (as was I) and generally has a lot of intelligent stuff to say about some things. And he knows how to work it to increase the distribution of his articles. It's his job; who can blame him?
The fact that people get so worked up over his stuff is their own issue for not seeing that he's just trying to get his numbers up.
I like Dvorak. He's a smart & funny guy.
HP makes great corporate-grade stuff.
Their consumer stuff is crap. But I guess Dell's is even worse.
There's a reason I use E-mail, and not IM, or voice chat, or video chat, or message boards, or Skype, or whatever to communicate with customers & vendors. It works. It's reliable. It's battle tested.
Spam is a nuisance, but it is manageable with the right tools.
E-mail lets me be about five times as productive as I would be if I just relied on phone calls & voicemail.
It will probably evolve to be more secure, yes, but it'll never get the rip&replace treatment. It's like the power grid.
It's easy. (The whole experience is easy.) It just works.
(You'd think there'd be some real competition - but there really won't be until someone else can control the entire end-to-end experience. Microsoft is the only company with enough pull to do this--but they won't be able to get the experience as smoothed out as Apple. So the iPod will continue to dominate.)
Not only is it extremely capable, it's also beautiful.
I've been a longtime fan of Novell engineering (but NOT of their marketing efforts) and think I'd probably have to agree with this - I can see this coming, as well.
I _hope_ the really valuable stuff like eDirectory & GroupWise stick around in some form or another, whether or not these things are produced by Novell or another company.
FURTHERMORE, I'd recommend Corporate IT Managers adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards this sort of incompetence. There are too many other good products out there; when a software company you are supposedly entrusting your data to goes off and deletes valid information unexpectedly (whether it was accidental or not) you FIRE them. Very simple.
Software, generally speaking, sucks, and is too expensive. Companies should be made more responsible for their errors.
This is incredibly irresponsible on McAfee's part and if I were an IT manager I'd look at alternatives immediately. I haven't liked McAfee for years. I'm starting to hate Symantec, as well. eTrust is probably OK, as is Trend Micro. But some of the most innovative stuff I've seen lately comes from products like NOD32, Norman, F-Prot, AntiVir and Grisoft - companies that don't get to rely on the inertia of gigantic corporate service contracts to stay afloat. They actually have to produce a good product that people want to buy!
I am preaching to the choir, I know. I generally like Dvorak and agree with him on some things - but he is no Robert X. Cringely. He's basically saying "maybe Apple would switch to Windows so that they don't have to support all of those devices directly." Like this has been an issue--a large chunk of all currently manufactured perhiperals do in fact run well under OS X. The development tools for making OS X drivers are there - and are free. It's not brain surgery or rocket science--and with one way to deliver them (unlike the myriad complex ways to deliver Linux drivers) vendors are more likely to produce these drivers.
But there is no real other reason given for Apple wanting to switch to Windows. Most likely, Apple will make some sort of emulation layer (Rosetta?) that runs Windows applications side-by-side OS X apps. OS X is cool and shiny, yes, but its development model allows people to create software that is difficult or impossible to do in Windows. Apple already doesn't have to do "much" on the underpinnings of OS X (Darwin) because it is mostly built from open-sourced products. WHy would they switch out the base for an OS that isn't even 15 years old (WinNT) but is already showing serious signs of aging?
It doesn't make any sense at all, and Dvorak is a master at riling people up over nothing.
The website is hokey and loaded with marketing platitudes - and that's it. I think something is really fishy here. I don't believe this is even a real product - and I'm questioning whether or not it was used at the superbowl _at all_ and whether someone just fabricated all of this for the press.
Why don't people get more skeptical about this stuff? Doesn't it seem weird to people that people have tried to make 3D displays that don't require glasses for ages, and the best people have come up with is lenticular lenses over a flat LCD screen? How could some company come out of nowhere with little fanfare and make a 3D CRT? Why would this type of company even deserve any press on slashdot, let alone the newswires of the world, without some PROOF of this concept?
I searched around and came up with nothing useful. Can someone explain what a "Depth Tube" is and how it works? Call me skeptical, but a CRT capable of displaying 3D images without glasses sounds very novel to me.
This company (LifeVision) does not seem to have an obvious web presence, either.
Something seems pretty fishy here...
GroupWise has _by far_ the lowest cost of ownership of the three major collaboration packages. Additionally, it is immune to virus/worm attacks that plague Exchange. It is far easier to deploy than Notes yet gives you 90% of the same out-of-box functionality. It's really, really stable & mature- and far more efficient than either Exchange or Notes. It is _incredibly_ reliable.
It also is built around the concept (used to be big, but they haven't pushed it in a while) of the "universal inbox" - like some of the other better PIMs of way back when; a GroupWise item can be any type you want it to be, and can be morphed into other items. Item types are extensible - you can create new types without much work. It has supported dynamic search folders for years, and supports tagging and linking to multiple folders. Full-text indexed search has been integral to the entire system since version 5.0 came out in 1997. It has also supported "Caching mode" for several revisions - which is new to outlook 2003. It ALSO runs on Windows, Linux, or Netware - you can run an entire GroupWise system completely on a LInux network. End-to-end communications have _always_ been secure, and now all end-to-end communications can run over SSL as well. It is a very, very powerful product.
Exchange, still, basically, sucks. Most of our customers use it; it's an OK e-mail client with a built-in calendar & some collaboration features. But it is not innovative. I have yet to see another collaboration platform match GroupWise feature-for-feature.
Hi. No, you're slightly incorrect about OES -
I have always been a huge fan of Novell's software; it tends to be stellar stuff. But they have never been able to market their way out of a paper bag since Microsoft decimated Netware back in the NT 4.0 days. Still, products like GroupWise and eDirectory (NDS) have no _real_ technical equivalents in the market.
OES is not "Netware on top of Linux" - it's actually a collection of java-tomcat (web-based) services that previously ran on Netware that now also run on Linux. Things like iPrint, eDirectory, iFolder, iManage, NSS, etc. You can run these enterprise-value-added services on Netware 6.5 or on SuSE Enterprise Server 9. The management tools are the same for both platforms. It all works quite well--and they've had rave reviews, actually. Once again, their software is stunning - but their marketing sucks.
I have been playing with OES here - and really, really like what I see. Imagine being able to deploy SuSE 9 across a large enterprise and having _real_ tools to manage them all! That's the promise of what Novell can deliver - but again, the message has somehow been completely lost on the appropriate people.
I doubt they will declare bankruptcy - Novell has come back from the dead many, many times in the last decade (just like Apple!) But they definitely have some serious challenges to deal with in the coming months, as their traditional Netware revenue base has all but dried up.
Office for Linux may have been useful and even handy a few years ago, but the alternatives nowadays are just as good. There's no reason to need Office on Linux anymore.
I don't think Apple has anything to lose here. Steve Jobs _shouldn't_ back down because he has the upper hand at the moment. He _won't_ back down because of his ego. So what if Apple's shares are down for a quarter or two while this gets resolved? Apple is not _all_ about the stock price (unlike other companies) and he seems to have a strong sense of what is right for technology & what is right for the industry, regardless of how it may temporarily impact sales.
Besides, I'm sure they've had contingency plans for this worked out ages ago--the current music industry execs are clearly strictly reactive--they didn't exactly see this coming years ago and now they can only resort to threats and force to try to stop this from changing the status quo. Apple is very different from this--they think, plan, and anticipate things well ahead of the curve.
Novell GroupWise on Linux.
All of the heavy lifting has been done for you; it's a scalable, secure, battle-tested solution running on an open-source platform.
is that they open source Workplace Shell. Yes, OS/2 may still have some better guts--it certainly was extremely efficient on very limited hardware even compared to Linux today--but that stuff is basically all commodity now. WPS was really progressive & unique, and made the system a joy to use. Mac OS X is good now, but still doesn't quite match WPS for usability. I want it back.
"Mr. Tucker, an Internet industry executive who holds a Ph.D. in computer science" is an idiot. How about throwing the software restore CD back in the drive and starting over?
You *can* prevent Spyware/Virus infestations if you do regular maintenance--it's not rocket science, but apparently it's difficult to grasp for Mr. Tucker.
This article really says nothing about the cost of transferring data or reinstalling or patching applications--$130 to remove your system from spyware is far less than a $400 new machine PLUS a minimum of 3-4 hours of labor required to get everything put back together on a new PC.
If you own Windows, you have to learn to take care of it. It is kind of annoying, yes, but there isn't an alternative and it doesn't really take a lot of time to keep it maintained.
also want to add- I think developers writing new general-purpose OSes from scratch may be slightly misguided. With hardware speeds reaching infinity as prices approach zero, coming up with an OS that handles thread scheduling & semaphores slightly faster than Linux, OS X or Windows isn't exactly going to change the world. Almost every component underlying the OS right now is commodity & freely available--network stacks, VPNs, IO, file systems, etc. Why keep reinventing this stuff?
The real room for improvement is in the user interface. Apple is leading at the moment--they get a lot of things right, but there are still a lot of shortcomings (anyone remember the OS/2 WorkPlace Shell? Still beats the pants off Aqua, in my opinion) I'd rather see hobbyists focus on usability & interface design - there are huge unexplored opportunities there for real innovation.
Until we have really good open-source emulators (or API translators like Wine) that work on any platform and run any program, it'll be very difficult to get anything else off the ground at this point with any kind of saturation.
There's no point in running any OS really if you have to constantly switch back to another OS to do any meaningful work. This is the biggest obstacle to adoption.
Make sure the software-based firewall is turned on at every Windows XP machine--make sure everything's at WinXP SP2; the firewall isn't half bad.
Use the built-in Win2k3 firewall.
Install Astaro on an older PC as a _real_ firewall "appliance" - it is VERY good.
http://www.astaro.com/