You're right. I had forgotten about that aspect of the article. Natural gas is getting screwed and coal, the dirtiest technology of the three is chugging right along. Do you remember why that is? Something about coal being cheaper than gas but not as cheap as wind?
Even before government regulation there were boom and bust cycles. I remember reading something about the Dutch and tulips hundreds of years ago. Tulips were rather rare and in high demand. More and more people produced tulips. Eventually there were too many tulips and not enough buyers. The market crashed and investors were stuck with a lot of inventory that they couldn't sell for more than they paid for it.
That happened in 1637. In case your understanding of the history of the US government and the Federal Reserve is a bit shaky, neither of them were around and regulating the markets when that boom and bust cycle occurred.
Fiat currencies and interest rate manipulations certainly serve to sometimes increase the severity of the cycles. In my opinion (and I don't know jack shit about economics), I think the government should of let the banks fail after they wrote and securitized way too many home loans. In my very simple mind, because of fiat currency the banks were allowed to say, "We guess there are $xxx trillion worth of human labor hours to offset xxx million or homes." The reality is that they guessed wrong. Your average American family can't afford a $500,000+ home.
So what should have happened is the government should have said, "Sorry bank fraudster bastards, the home prices were artificially inflated and not really worth all of that money. The "money" that people "purchased" those homes with was really fake money in the first place, so now you have to press Delete and remove a few zeros from your computers." Instead the government said, "Yup, Americans really can afford what they can't afford. Yup, those homes really are worth significantly more than people can afford to pay for them. Here, let us take your liabilities and make ALL of the American people pay for them. Go ahead and keep giving a few thousand people MILLIONS of extra dollars each year while MILLIONS of Americans who don't work on Wall Street are now collecting unemployment and not contributing any productivity into the economy."
The rub with government intervention is that good intervention sets things right. The unfortunate reality of human nature seems to be that good guys bad guys. Also, humans left to their own devices and free from regulation will manage to screw things up royally.
The WSJ ran an article about this within the last week or two. The only gripe that traditional power companies had that seemed valid in my opinion is that wind producers get an exemption if they don't meet their production quotas. In a nutshell, this is how it works in Texas (and presumably other states): At the beginning of the day the department responsible for buying power for the state purchases power from utilities. The utilities bid based on how much power they are going to provide, and what the cost will be. Wind power comes in cheaper than gas or goal and gets purchased first. Gas and coal get penalized for not producing as much power as they promise to produce. So if they say they will deliver XXX megawatts, but due to facilities problems or whatever only deliver xxx-y megawatts, they have to pay a fine. If wind fails to deliver their promised megawatts, they are exempted from the fine.
On one hand wind is variable and not easy to predict (although wind based power companies claim that their models are become more accurate and reliable). On the other, wind is easy to come in inexpensively in part because there are incentives in place to make it cost competitive and they also don't have to pay fines for failing to deliver.
I'm of the opinion that the system is fine. Everyone agrees that wind can't provide baseline power. I think the government should reach some sort of compromise between the two. Wind can continue to be cheap and by all means we should be using it when it's available. When it isn't, wind based utilities should have to offset the cost of falling back to gas or coal. It takes hours to bring a plant online and doing so incurs operating costs. If the plant sits idle because the wind stays constant then that's great. The plant operator still needs to be compensated for spooling up the turbines, even if they aren't selling the output. The trick is pricing things in such a way that there is still an incentive to use wind when it's available. Maybe they can trend it, and say over the last five years, wind under-delivered by xx%. Therefore wind needs to adjust their rates upward by xx-y% to offset the irregularity. Y would be an agreed upon value to acknowledge the fact that man can't control the weather, but that when conditions are good, it is in everyone's best interests to tap the wind as a resource.
The realization that I eventually came to is that health and happiness are easier to find away from the computer. Although computers do help make some tasks easier, and do improve communication, the reality is that the physical act of sitting in front of the computer (or the television, or the desk at work) are inherently unhealthy activities.
Most computer "technologies" do not directly provide a common benefit. The most benefits are derived from good food, clean water, physical activities and stress free environments. If anything people will reap the most benefit by getting back to the basics, not creating new technologies.
Like you, I'm pretty starry-eyed too. Given the choice between the comfortable allure of a virtual world and the warm glow of a monitor, or physical exertion and the learning curve (and associated aches and pains) of developing competencies with new activities, I understand why some choose the former and fore-go the latter.
This just goes to show that Google is as "incompetent" as anyone else. There was a discussion on here the other day and a poster asked why Microsoft, with all of their resources, hasn't come up with a secure OS yet. It was suggested that the know how to create such an OS is out there, and it would just take money and will on Microsoft's part. This seems like the Google equivalent.
Google is trying to push Apps as a replacement for Exchange and Office. They are trying to push it as a replacement for hosting in house. I steered my organization away from Apps for the time being because I wasn't impressed with their support and there are a whole slew of other people who feel like they are being jerked around by Google for what should be simple support issues. It is not reassuring that Google hasn't gotten high availability down yet for one of their flagship products. I'm glad that they are being transparent about where they screwed up, but come on now, really? They haven't figured out fail-over yet? This is Google, the multi-hundred billion dollar organization. They can't fail-over one of their core offerings?
I agree that HTML5 provides a benefit for everyone. The question is who is going to develop it? It seems like Google is making a big push for HTML5 so that they can open up YouTube. Others have pointed out that Adobe has the tools to get the job done right now, where as HTML5 is in the slightly advanced vaporware stage.
Not wanting to buy / pirate is a symptom of a larger issue with professional computer users in general. There are those who are willing to pay for tools that will get the job done, and there are those who won't. Those are willing to do so, do so. Those who aren't will constantly seek alternatives and seemingly never learn the adage that, "You get what you pay for."
Some people don't seem to understand that the largest incentive to introduce new technologies is to make money. There is money to be made in making people's lives easier, or allowing people to accomplish tasks. Adobe has Flash. Microsoft has Windows. Neither of them are necessarily the "best" way of doing things. None the less they get the job done to a certain extent.
In the context of HTML5, people are going to have to recreate Flash like functionality. The first few attempts will probably suck or be "feature incomplete". What is the financial incentive to reproduce Flash like functionality in HTML5? In the long term people can save money by not having to use Adobe Flash. In the near to short term, what is the benefit? Who is going to come up with the Flash killer out of the goodness and kindness of their heart?
I've grown all too accustomed to "working" on two monitors. There are two tasks that I do that really benefit from two screens. One is researching things on the web and transferring that research into whatever document I'm working on. The other is writing code and being able to browse forums and other sources of examples. If I wanted to do one thing at a time or just watch a movie, an iPad would probably work. If I wanted to do anything productive, I'd appreciate the other screen.
As it is, I don't want either. I do my work at work where I have a desktop and servers and all the tools that I need. When I leave work, I might answer the occasional email on my Blackberry but that's it. In a really worst case scenario I might fire up the VPN client on my desktop.
So in that sense, it's not looking too good for Microsoft's future right now, and it's not even clear if Microsoft's new strategy will help that much either. By going for the cloud, Microsoft may continue to undercut in price its very own products (not just its rivals), so it may be able to conserve some of its marketshare, but at a much more rapid and significant loss financially.
I think you're right on target with your analysis of the situation. We always hear tales of Ballmer's rant about "Developers, developers, developers." Microsoft is facing a double pronged threat on the developer front. They not only need to continue to encourage developers to stay with their stack of SQL/.Net/IIS/etc, but they need to do that while also competing on cost. They have to come up with a way to counter the LAMP stack. That is their huge challenge, and they might not be able to do it. Even if they continue to offer compelling functionality at competitive prices, they are going to hemorrhage double digit percentages of market share while they figure out what the right balance between cost and functionality is.
I think SalesForce.com is a decent example of where the cloud is going. It's a generic, extensible CRM platform. I haven't heard any rave reviews about it, but at the same time they are gaining market share based on price and the ability for people to customize it. Not surprisingly, Microsoft has moved Dynamics into the SaaS space. I don't use either product, but I have looked at both of them while researching alternatives to the platform that we are currently using.
The one downside of cloud apps at this point seems to be their infancy. One vendor I was talking to was touting his "Team of programmers in India who can develop whatever functionality you might need." as a selling point. To me, that's not a selling point. That tells me that his app isn't done yet, and he expects me to underwrite his development costs. I don't really care if hosted licensing costs are half of what in house costs are if the savings are going to be gobbled up by costs for "enhancement requests". What a new SaaS provider calls an enhancement request, their competition calls a standard feature.
I wish Windows 7 ran fine on 5 year old hardware. Maybe the OS runs, but once you start running anything on top of the OS it is TERRIBLE. Luckily I don't really have to be concerned with licensing costs. I work for a 501c3 non-profit and Microsoft practically gives us software. It is the application licensing costs that kill us. Our CRM system cost us over $20,000 last year in licensing and maintenance/support.
Why did you go with Terminal Services over Citrix? Citrix seems to make it much easier to publish individual apps.
It sounds to me like you haven't even really used it before. What are you talking about ambiguous dates? It doesn't support dates. Once you activate it, it is on. The FIRST time someone sends you a message, they get the out of office message. Every subsequent message from the same person does not trigger it (including cc actions). What are you talking about double responses? I've never seen double responses, and again it leads me to believe that you've never even used the functionality you're complaining about. Even if you respond to a sender but leave your OoO message on, when they reply back to you, they won't receive the OoO message. Lastly, once you come back to the office after being away, Outlook asks you if you want to turn it off.
The server hardware costs are easy enough to figure out. We're using similar boxes here (Proliant ML370s). The boxes I was looking at came out to about $8000. They were similar to yours, but had one processor instead of two and 8GB of RAM instead of 64. I could see them hitting $10000.
Where is the break even point? I still have G2 / G3 Proliant boxes running in production. Those are seven plus years old at this point. Even with warranty costs, and assuming you spend $10000 up front on the hardware, those boxes are still way less than $6000 a year for a similar Amazon solution. Of course that doesn't include the cost of a SAN, but it does include over a terabyte of DAS.
How do you quantify offsite application performance, and how do you determine how much extra bandwidth you are going to need?
I'm in the situation where my users are running ancient hardware (Celeron 2.4ghz with 512MB of RAM is the standard config). There are some key applications that can be hosted on terminal services or Citrix. The question is whether or not to buy a new servers or two to continue hosting the apps in house, or to push the apps onto a server farm and deal with monthly costs for hosting and more bandwidth.
I honestly need to do more research on my end but I have a hard time getting honest answers about how many users can be supported on XX amount of bandwidth. It seems like my organization is right on the border line (cost wise) between hosting in-house versus moving it offsite. The real cost savings seems to come with disk space. A decent sized SAN for our environment is about a $20,000 idea.
I'm dealing with a lot of the same issues that you mentioned. Specifically the SMB market and the move toward online hosting of services. What I've been finding is that although you can realize a savings in hardware cost, you end up losing some of those savings by having to bring in faster and redundant internet feeds.
Where have you seen the dividing line materialize for the decision to keep it in house versus move it offsite?
Microsoft sees the future and it is about to run them over. A lot of organizations don't want to eat the hardware costs associated with Office upgrades every three to five years. Microsoft is offering to host the applications online. From what I've heard about Office 2010, they aren't doing a very good job yet.
At this point it looks like they're in a race with Google. Google is trying to add functionality to bring Docs on par with Office. Microsoft is trying to get Office online before Google replicates enough of the functionality to destroy Microsoft's licensing stream.
Given the perpetual beta mindset on Google's part, coupled with their absolutely abhorrent attitude toward end user support, I give Microsoft a better than 50/50 chance of getting a reasonable offering put together in time.
But there are no public hooks for it. I hope that will change in the future.
I agree. I hope it will change too. Drive updates were available through Windows Update for years before I actually trusted them. I preferred to go straight to the source. I wasn't going to trust Microsoft to update a third-party program on a production system.
It would be great if Microsoft published an API. On the client, apps could register themselves with Windows Update. Microsoft could provide an API to app developers and allow them to publish signed updates. A system like that really is the only logical way forward. Microsoft should do it simply to generate good will for the platform, both among users and among developers.
I haven't had a date for a while because I've been with the same woman for close to six years at this point. One of the great things about growing up and maturing and having a good stable job is that you can attract a good, stable partner. You don't have to worry about whether or not you're using a Mac or a PC, or a Blackberry or an iPhone. You don't have to care about what people around you think about what your toys "say" about your status or eligibility.
With your smug attitude and condescending tone, I can understand why you're still caught up in the head space you're in.
From TFA code from other Java programs will run on your Android phone -- although it won't look pretty or run as fast as it does on multicore servers
I'm not a developer but once of the criticisms I see constantly leveled against Java is how slow it is. Are there any mobile devices out there that can really handle even moderately complex / processor intensive Java code?
Thanks for the laugh. re: the gay remark, I was just pulling stereotypes out. Only about half of the OSX guys I know are gay which tracks about evenly with half of the PC/Linux guys I know.
I'm only forced to reboot my Win7 machine due to patches... Hmm, I think once in the time I've had it.
To be fair, other than during the initial install when you are pulling patches from Windows Update, Win7 patches on shutdown. It doesn't have the annoying XP-esque system tray icon that annoys you every fifteen minutes.
It does seem like the large majority of OSX patches do require a reboot. They should just adopt the Microsoft strategy and roll it into the shutdown process. I have found myself skipping OSX updates simply because they are intrusive. They pop up and want a reboot. I want to use the computer. When it comes time to shutdown, I do the Ctrl+Eject and hit Enter. There isn't an equivalent of the windows "Install updates AND Shutdown".
Whatever. Why don't you go back to making some k-gay Web 2.0 animated graphics for your boyfriend's garage sale? Oh yeah, be sure to blog about it and update your Twitter feed so that all of your Facebook friends know where to go after they leave the coffee shop.;)~
See my previous post. Not only are many third-party applications not in the repositories, some applications that are in the repositories are out of date. In my case I was installing Samba on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. The version in the repository was 3.0x (about). I wanted to install a newer version of 3.x Samba. It was a completely manual process on my part. Now that I have it installed, apt won't maintain it from the Ubuntu repositories (or from any other repository that I've been able to find).
Out of curiosity I just did a quick Google search on the subject to make sure that things haven't changed. It doesn't look like they have. Here is another poster who had pretty much the exact same issue I did. He made his post within the last week.
the point is that Ubuntu uses one mechanism to provide updates for *all* the software you have installed, as long as you stick to the Ubuntu repos, as is heavily advised and encouraged on all Linux distributions.
I like the idea. My brief experience with Ubuntu so far has been a different reality. I wanted to run Samba. The Ubuntu approved version of Samba in the rep was OLD and STALE. I couldn't use apt to update to the recent version. I had to figure it out myself. The good thing was that I learned first hand how much work goes into getting any particular app to work with any particular distro. I developed an appreciation for package maintainers who handle all of that nonsense.
So although, "Just use the repo" seems like a good idea, and it might work some of the time, it isn't by any means the be all and end all of application management.
microsoft already extends the Microsoft Update system to their own apps, as well as 3rd party drivers, why can't they further extend it to 3rd party APPS!
It's not confusing, it's infuriating...
I would suppose that it comes down to time. Microsoft already has a terrible reputation for responding to security issues 'in a timely manner'. Can you imagine the can of worms they'd be opening if they offered a centralized mechanism to patch non-MS applications? Beyond the time required to receive the patch from the vendor and package it up and distribute it, can you imagine the legal liability if they didn't QA the patch first? Do you remember the uproar when their patch caused malware infected XP boxes to blue screen because they changed a core system DLL?
This is the reason I want an iPad so bad: one less fucking system to patch.....
I see you've bought into the hype. Last I checked, OSX and iPhones still require "software updates". I can bet that whatever app you download from the app store will eventually have a "newer, shinier" version available and you'll have to decide whether or not you want to download it.
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You're right. I had forgotten about that aspect of the article. Natural gas is getting screwed and coal, the dirtiest technology of the three is chugging right along. Do you remember why that is? Something about coal being cheaper than gas but not as cheap as wind?
Even before government regulation there were boom and bust cycles. I remember reading something about the Dutch and tulips hundreds of years ago. Tulips were rather rare and in high demand. More and more people produced tulips. Eventually there were too many tulips and not enough buyers. The market crashed and investors were stuck with a lot of inventory that they couldn't sell for more than they paid for it.
Oblig Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
That happened in 1637. In case your understanding of the history of the US government and the Federal Reserve is a bit shaky, neither of them were around and regulating the markets when that boom and bust cycle occurred.
Fiat currencies and interest rate manipulations certainly serve to sometimes increase the severity of the cycles. In my opinion (and I don't know jack shit about economics), I think the government should of let the banks fail after they wrote and securitized way too many home loans. In my very simple mind, because of fiat currency the banks were allowed to say, "We guess there are $xxx trillion worth of human labor hours to offset xxx million or homes." The reality is that they guessed wrong. Your average American family can't afford a $500,000+ home.
So what should have happened is the government should have said, "Sorry bank fraudster bastards, the home prices were artificially inflated and not really worth all of that money. The "money" that people "purchased" those homes with was really fake money in the first place, so now you have to press Delete and remove a few zeros from your computers." Instead the government said, "Yup, Americans really can afford what they can't afford. Yup, those homes really are worth significantly more than people can afford to pay for them. Here, let us take your liabilities and make ALL of the American people pay for them. Go ahead and keep giving a few thousand people MILLIONS of extra dollars each year while MILLIONS of Americans who don't work on Wall Street are now collecting unemployment and not contributing any productivity into the economy."
The rub with government intervention is that good intervention sets things right. The unfortunate reality of human nature seems to be that good guys bad guys. Also, humans left to their own devices and free from regulation will manage to screw things up royally.
The WSJ ran an article about this within the last week or two. The only gripe that traditional power companies had that seemed valid in my opinion is that wind producers get an exemption if they don't meet their production quotas. In a nutshell, this is how it works in Texas (and presumably other states): At the beginning of the day the department responsible for buying power for the state purchases power from utilities. The utilities bid based on how much power they are going to provide, and what the cost will be. Wind power comes in cheaper than gas or goal and gets purchased first. Gas and coal get penalized for not producing as much power as they promise to produce. So if they say they will deliver XXX megawatts, but due to facilities problems or whatever only deliver xxx-y megawatts, they have to pay a fine. If wind fails to deliver their promised megawatts, they are exempted from the fine.
On one hand wind is variable and not easy to predict (although wind based power companies claim that their models are become more accurate and reliable). On the other, wind is easy to come in inexpensively in part because there are incentives in place to make it cost competitive and they also don't have to pay fines for failing to deliver.
I'm of the opinion that the system is fine. Everyone agrees that wind can't provide baseline power. I think the government should reach some sort of compromise between the two. Wind can continue to be cheap and by all means we should be using it when it's available. When it isn't, wind based utilities should have to offset the cost of falling back to gas or coal. It takes hours to bring a plant online and doing so incurs operating costs. If the plant sits idle because the wind stays constant then that's great. The plant operator still needs to be compensated for spooling up the turbines, even if they aren't selling the output. The trick is pricing things in such a way that there is still an incentive to use wind when it's available. Maybe they can trend it, and say over the last five years, wind under-delivered by xx%. Therefore wind needs to adjust their rates upward by xx-y% to offset the irregularity. Y would be an agreed upon value to acknowledge the fact that man can't control the weather, but that when conditions are good, it is in everyone's best interests to tap the wind as a resource.
The realization that I eventually came to is that health and happiness are easier to find away from the computer. Although computers do help make some tasks easier, and do improve communication, the reality is that the physical act of sitting in front of the computer (or the television, or the desk at work) are inherently unhealthy activities.
Most computer "technologies" do not directly provide a common benefit. The most benefits are derived from good food, clean water, physical activities and stress free environments. If anything people will reap the most benefit by getting back to the basics, not creating new technologies.
Like you, I'm pretty starry-eyed too. Given the choice between the comfortable allure of a virtual world and the warm glow of a monitor, or physical exertion and the learning curve (and associated aches and pains) of developing competencies with new activities, I understand why some choose the former and fore-go the latter.
This just goes to show that Google is as "incompetent" as anyone else. There was a discussion on here the other day and a poster asked why Microsoft, with all of their resources, hasn't come up with a secure OS yet. It was suggested that the know how to create such an OS is out there, and it would just take money and will on Microsoft's part. This seems like the Google equivalent.
Google is trying to push Apps as a replacement for Exchange and Office. They are trying to push it as a replacement for hosting in house. I steered my organization away from Apps for the time being because I wasn't impressed with their support and there are a whole slew of other people who feel like they are being jerked around by Google for what should be simple support issues. It is not reassuring that Google hasn't gotten high availability down yet for one of their flagship products. I'm glad that they are being transparent about where they screwed up, but come on now, really? They haven't figured out fail-over yet? This is Google, the multi-hundred billion dollar organization. They can't fail-over one of their core offerings?
I agree that HTML5 provides a benefit for everyone. The question is who is going to develop it? It seems like Google is making a big push for HTML5 so that they can open up YouTube. Others have pointed out that Adobe has the tools to get the job done right now, where as HTML5 is in the slightly advanced vaporware stage.
Not wanting to buy / pirate is a symptom of a larger issue with professional computer users in general. There are those who are willing to pay for tools that will get the job done, and there are those who won't. Those are willing to do so, do so. Those who aren't will constantly seek alternatives and seemingly never learn the adage that, "You get what you pay for."
Some people don't seem to understand that the largest incentive to introduce new technologies is to make money. There is money to be made in making people's lives easier, or allowing people to accomplish tasks. Adobe has Flash. Microsoft has Windows. Neither of them are necessarily the "best" way of doing things. None the less they get the job done to a certain extent.
In the context of HTML5, people are going to have to recreate Flash like functionality. The first few attempts will probably suck or be "feature incomplete". What is the financial incentive to reproduce Flash like functionality in HTML5? In the long term people can save money by not having to use Adobe Flash. In the near to short term, what is the benefit? Who is going to come up with the Flash killer out of the goodness and kindness of their heart?
And the 0.02% of the global video game playing market rejoiced!
A Wall Street Journal article quoted Apple as anticipating selling 6 million iPads in the first year. We will see whether or not the can manage that.
I've grown all too accustomed to "working" on two monitors. There are two tasks that I do that really benefit from two screens. One is researching things on the web and transferring that research into whatever document I'm working on. The other is writing code and being able to browse forums and other sources of examples. If I wanted to do one thing at a time or just watch a movie, an iPad would probably work. If I wanted to do anything productive, I'd appreciate the other screen.
As it is, I don't want either. I do my work at work where I have a desktop and servers and all the tools that I need. When I leave work, I might answer the occasional email on my Blackberry but that's it. In a really worst case scenario I might fire up the VPN client on my desktop.
So in that sense, it's not looking too good for Microsoft's future right now, and it's not even clear if Microsoft's new strategy will help that much either. By going for the cloud, Microsoft may continue to undercut in price its very own products (not just its rivals), so it may be able to conserve some of its marketshare, but at a much more rapid and significant loss financially.
I think you're right on target with your analysis of the situation. We always hear tales of Ballmer's rant about "Developers, developers, developers." Microsoft is facing a double pronged threat on the developer front. They not only need to continue to encourage developers to stay with their stack of SQL/.Net/IIS/etc, but they need to do that while also competing on cost. They have to come up with a way to counter the LAMP stack. That is their huge challenge, and they might not be able to do it. Even if they continue to offer compelling functionality at competitive prices, they are going to hemorrhage double digit percentages of market share while they figure out what the right balance between cost and functionality is.
I think SalesForce.com is a decent example of where the cloud is going. It's a generic, extensible CRM platform. I haven't heard any rave reviews about it, but at the same time they are gaining market share based on price and the ability for people to customize it. Not surprisingly, Microsoft has moved Dynamics into the SaaS space. I don't use either product, but I have looked at both of them while researching alternatives to the platform that we are currently using.
The one downside of cloud apps at this point seems to be their infancy. One vendor I was talking to was touting his "Team of programmers in India who can develop whatever functionality you might need." as a selling point. To me, that's not a selling point. That tells me that his app isn't done yet, and he expects me to underwrite his development costs. I don't really care if hosted licensing costs are half of what in house costs are if the savings are going to be gobbled up by costs for "enhancement requests". What a new SaaS provider calls an enhancement request, their competition calls a standard feature.
I wish Windows 7 ran fine on 5 year old hardware. Maybe the OS runs, but once you start running anything on top of the OS it is TERRIBLE. Luckily I don't really have to be concerned with licensing costs. I work for a 501c3 non-profit and Microsoft practically gives us software. It is the application licensing costs that kill us. Our CRM system cost us over $20,000 last year in licensing and maintenance/support.
Why did you go with Terminal Services over Citrix? Citrix seems to make it much easier to publish individual apps.
It sounds to me like you haven't even really used it before. What are you talking about ambiguous dates? It doesn't support dates. Once you activate it, it is on. The FIRST time someone sends you a message, they get the out of office message. Every subsequent message from the same person does not trigger it (including cc actions). What are you talking about double responses? I've never seen double responses, and again it leads me to believe that you've never even used the functionality you're complaining about. Even if you respond to a sender but leave your OoO message on, when they reply back to you, they won't receive the OoO message. Lastly, once you come back to the office after being away, Outlook asks you if you want to turn it off.
The function is brain dead simple to use.
The server hardware costs are easy enough to figure out. We're using similar boxes here (Proliant ML370s). The boxes I was looking at came out to about $8000. They were similar to yours, but had one processor instead of two and 8GB of RAM instead of 64. I could see them hitting $10000.
Where is the break even point? I still have G2 / G3 Proliant boxes running in production. Those are seven plus years old at this point. Even with warranty costs, and assuming you spend $10000 up front on the hardware, those boxes are still way less than $6000 a year for a similar Amazon solution. Of course that doesn't include the cost of a SAN, but it does include over a terabyte of DAS.
How do you quantify offsite application performance, and how do you determine how much extra bandwidth you are going to need?
I'm in the situation where my users are running ancient hardware (Celeron 2.4ghz with 512MB of RAM is the standard config). There are some key applications that can be hosted on terminal services or Citrix. The question is whether or not to buy a new servers or two to continue hosting the apps in house, or to push the apps onto a server farm and deal with monthly costs for hosting and more bandwidth.
I honestly need to do more research on my end but I have a hard time getting honest answers about how many users can be supported on XX amount of bandwidth. It seems like my organization is right on the border line (cost wise) between hosting in-house versus moving it offsite. The real cost savings seems to come with disk space. A decent sized SAN for our environment is about a $20,000 idea.
I'm dealing with a lot of the same issues that you mentioned. Specifically the SMB market and the move toward online hosting of services. What I've been finding is that although you can realize a savings in hardware cost, you end up losing some of those savings by having to bring in faster and redundant internet feeds.
Where have you seen the dividing line materialize for the decision to keep it in house versus move it offsite?
Microsoft sees the future and it is about to run them over. A lot of organizations don't want to eat the hardware costs associated with Office upgrades every three to five years. Microsoft is offering to host the applications online. From what I've heard about Office 2010, they aren't doing a very good job yet.
At this point it looks like they're in a race with Google. Google is trying to add functionality to bring Docs on par with Office. Microsoft is trying to get Office online before Google replicates enough of the functionality to destroy Microsoft's licensing stream.
Given the perpetual beta mindset on Google's part, coupled with their absolutely abhorrent attitude toward end user support, I give Microsoft a better than 50/50 chance of getting a reasonable offering put together in time.
But there are no public hooks for it. I hope that will change in the future.
I agree. I hope it will change too. Drive updates were available through Windows Update for years before I actually trusted them. I preferred to go straight to the source. I wasn't going to trust Microsoft to update a third-party program on a production system.
It would be great if Microsoft published an API. On the client, apps could register themselves with Windows Update. Microsoft could provide an API to app developers and allow them to publish signed updates. A system like that really is the only logical way forward. Microsoft should do it simply to generate good will for the platform, both among users and among developers.
I haven't had a date for a while because I've been with the same woman for close to six years at this point. One of the great things about growing up and maturing and having a good stable job is that you can attract a good, stable partner. You don't have to worry about whether or not you're using a Mac or a PC, or a Blackberry or an iPhone. You don't have to care about what people around you think about what your toys "say" about your status or eligibility.
With your smug attitude and condescending tone, I can understand why you're still caught up in the head space you're in.
From TFA
code from other Java programs will run on your Android phone -- although it won't look pretty or run as fast as it does on multicore servers
I'm not a developer but once of the criticisms I see constantly leveled against Java is how slow it is. Are there any mobile devices out there that can really handle even moderately complex / processor intensive Java code?
Thanks for the laugh. re: the gay remark, I was just pulling stereotypes out. Only about half of the OSX guys I know are gay which tracks about evenly with half of the PC/Linux guys I know.
I'm only forced to reboot my Win7 machine due to patches... Hmm, I think once in the time I've had it.
To be fair, other than during the initial install when you are pulling patches from Windows Update, Win7 patches on shutdown. It doesn't have the annoying XP-esque system tray icon that annoys you every fifteen minutes.
It does seem like the large majority of OSX patches do require a reboot. They should just adopt the Microsoft strategy and roll it into the shutdown process. I have found myself skipping OSX updates simply because they are intrusive. They pop up and want a reboot. I want to use the computer. When it comes time to shutdown, I do the Ctrl+Eject and hit Enter. There isn't an equivalent of the windows "Install updates AND Shutdown".
Whatever. Why don't you go back to making some k-gay Web 2.0 animated graphics for your boyfriend's garage sale? Oh yeah, be sure to blog about it and update your Twitter feed so that all of your Facebook friends know where to go after they leave the coffee shop. ;)~
See my previous post. Not only are many third-party applications not in the repositories, some applications that are in the repositories are out of date. In my case I was installing Samba on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. The version in the repository was 3.0x (about). I wanted to install a newer version of 3.x Samba. It was a completely manual process on my part. Now that I have it installed, apt won't maintain it from the Ubuntu repositories (or from any other repository that I've been able to find).
Out of curiosity I just did a quick Google search on the subject to make sure that things haven't changed. It doesn't look like they have. Here is another poster who had pretty much the exact same issue I did. He made his post within the last week.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1416233
the point is that Ubuntu uses one mechanism to provide updates for *all* the software you have installed, as long as you stick to the Ubuntu repos, as is heavily advised and encouraged on all Linux distributions.
I like the idea. My brief experience with Ubuntu so far has been a different reality. I wanted to run Samba. The Ubuntu approved version of Samba in the rep was OLD and STALE. I couldn't use apt to update to the recent version. I had to figure it out myself. The good thing was that I learned first hand how much work goes into getting any particular app to work with any particular distro. I developed an appreciation for package maintainers who handle all of that nonsense.
So although, "Just use the repo" seems like a good idea, and it might work some of the time, it isn't by any means the be all and end all of application management.
microsoft already extends the Microsoft Update system to their own apps, as well as 3rd party drivers, why can't they further extend it to 3rd party APPS!
It's not confusing, it's infuriating...
I would suppose that it comes down to time. Microsoft already has a terrible reputation for responding to security issues 'in a timely manner'. Can you imagine the can of worms they'd be opening if they offered a centralized mechanism to patch non-MS applications? Beyond the time required to receive the patch from the vendor and package it up and distribute it, can you imagine the legal liability if they didn't QA the patch first? Do you remember the uproar when their patch caused malware infected XP boxes to blue screen because they changed a core system DLL?
This is the reason I want an iPad so bad: one less fucking system to patch.....
I see you've bought into the hype. Last I checked, OSX and iPhones still require "software updates". I can bet that whatever app you download from the app store will eventually have a "newer, shinier" version available and you'll have to decide whether or not you want to download it.