Without the facts of the case neither of us can really comment any further. Given that the guy is "doing his work" with Gmail while the rest of the staff is using hosted Exchange it's pretty fair to bet that the guy isn't in a company of any reasonable size. If that is the case, it shouldn't be very hard to setup a stable Exchange environment.
I'm impressed with the way you dodged the question about whether or not your Linux boxes would do calendaring, mobile/PDA integration, webmail and everything else that Exchange does.
The Proliant that I quoted for "$10,000" would also include an LTO backup drive, RAID array, redundant power supplies, and 24x7x4 onsite support for 5 years. Things like that a pretty standard when you want to do it right. The Proliant will also run Linux with full driver support from the manufacturer. When I tossed the $10,000 number out there I wasn't trying to start a debate about costs of brand name, enterprise class hardware versus some white box you can build in your basement. In the grand scheme of running a business, $10,000 for a stable messaging/collaboration platform is nothing compared to the cost of the downtime when your employees can't communicate with each other and the outside world.
Al Gore is pushing an agenda that he and his supporters/friends are vested in profitting from. Of course he wants the United States to be 100% on renewable resources. If the CEO of Exxon/Mobil came out and said, "I think America should be 100% dependent on petroleum." would it be a real surprise? If Bill Gates said that every IT department in the world should run Windows and Exchange would it be a surprise?
People are going to champion whatever they see to be in their best interest. Welcome to Reality 101. As a large portion of the/. crowd has mentioned, we are one heck of a long way of getting all of our power from renewable resources. There is a big doubt about whether such things could ever be feasible.
With full calendar, tasks, mobile/PDA support and everything else that Exchange does? Or are you talking about simple POP3/IMAP? Whether or not you can do whatever you can do with Linux has nothing to do with the competence or lack there of on behalf of the OP's IT staff.
I was going to moderate but I have to post. Just because your IT staff can't keep their Exchange server working doesn't mean that Exchange is worthless. I used to consult for the SMB market and we had dozens of Exchange boxes hosting thousands of users. Downtime wasn't an issue. Backups weren't an issue. Security wasn't an issue. Email archival for the clients that required it (SEC regulated broker/dealers for example) wasn't an issue. Exchange works if you have admins who know what they are doing and a company that will devote the resources to properly specced hardware. (Free hint. You can get a decently specced HP Proliant ML370 that will easily host a couple hundred Exchange mailboxes for well under $10,000)
If you used Google's financial resources to build your Exchange infrastructure, you wouldn't be having the problems you were having with your particular Exchange infrastructure.
Why does this drivel keep getting posted and moderated up? I'd give a -1 myself but I think it's better to post and try to make a point. I haven't seen anyone saying that we are going to completely get rid of fossil fuels. I haven't seen anyone saying that we are going to go to 100% renewable resources. Those seem to be the strawmen that are always trotted out in these discussions.
The point in renewable technologies is that any additional power that we can get outside of the fossil/nuclear fuel box is a good thing. The power demands of society will continue to increase. I'm not completely convinced that petroleum (note I don't use the term "fossil fuels") is a limited resource. However it is quite possible that we will continue to consume it more quickly than it is replenished by whatever process pumps the stuff into the earth's crust. Nuclear (uranium and plutonium) energy sources are scarce and hard to get to. One of the big reasons we're in Afghanistan is because they have huge uranium deposits there. I'm getting off on a tangent so I will try to draw a couple of analogies here.
Just because you might never win the Boston marathon doesn't mean that you shouldn't do cardio training to keep yourself healthy. Just because you will never be a body builder doesn't mean you shouldn't exercise and have a good diet. Just because you can't afford a Ferrari doesn't mean you shouldn't drive. Just because wind and solar power might not ever produce base load power doesn't mean that we shouldn't harness them to the best of our ability. Just because one particular technology might be "better" than another does not make the other technology worthless. To use a computer analogy... "Why do you even bother with a stupid desktop computer? Obviously a supercomputer is much more powerful."
I completely agree with you that Adobe software works better on OSX than Windows any day. It would be nice if the two environments were more compatible. Even when running CS3 on both XP and OSX, there are issues when trying to move files between the two suites. I ran into problems with Linotype FontExplorer. Now granted the environment I've had to support is one with finicky graphic developers (are there any other kind?) who have hundreds of fonts that they are working with. The issue they ran into was with font corruption, and only wanting to enable a certain subset of fonts at any particular time. To be fair the issues that they are having probably aren't issues that 85% of the OSX using world will ever run into.%r%rI'm coming from the Windows world and I like Putty. I haven't seen a feature with Terminal that allows to me save all of my often used sites in one place like Putty does.
Macs do not "just work"; that's a marketing fiction created by Apple. They do work a little better than Windows, but that's a far cry from "just work".
I took the dive and purchased a MBP because my g/f wanted a laptop for school and I wanted to see what all the noise about OSX is all about. The "just work" meme is the biggest load of crap. They seem to "just work" until you want to use an application on them. CS3 sure as hell doesn't just work. Fonts get corrupted all the time and you need to buy a third party program to manage your fonts. The standard applications work alright, but as soon as you want to step outside of the box you have to download the Developer Tools (1GB+ download), and then install Darwin Ports or do some other behind the scenes wizardry to get access to standard programs (in my case I prefer PuTTY for my terminal/ssh program). If you want to do things the iWay, then everything just works. If you want to put down the Kool Aid and join the rest of the world, it takes a lot of tweaking and jumping through hoops.
...for passing through THE most obvious and poorly written advertisements I've ever read here. The summary reads like a template straight out of a Marketing 101 textbook.
How many kids have any clue whatsoever on how to do this? I'd wager most CIS and IS students don't even know how to do it. You'd have a few really savvy kids that would know how, but honestly, the vast majority of kazaa users don't even know what a MAC address is.
You might be surprised about the tech savvy of "kids" these days. When I was consulting one of the clients I worked at was a private high school. We had their network locked down with a Sonicwall 4060 that isolated the different segments from each other. The teacher workstations were on one port, the library on another, the computer labs on another, the office on another and finally the classrooms on another. The kids were never able to jump the ACL to access the protected segments but they did manage to setup software that utilized the IP6 stack to get around the content filters.
This is right on. It seems to be the cable companies that do this. In my area we were able to simply turn the device off for thirty minutes and then turn it back on with the router/firewall attached to the ethernet port. It wouldn't surprise me if some cable companies were able to lock in the MAC of the first device attached to it.
I'm some what in agreement with you. I've been playing since pre-BC (I was only 56 when BC came out). It seems like Blizzard is killing off huge portions of the game. I've never raided MC. I never did the Oxyania quest chains. I never did UBRS or LBRS. I never raided Scholomance. With each release of the game they seem to push the original content out of the way. At this point they might as well just start everyone at level 60 and drop them in Hellfire Pennisula. I know this probably sounds lame, but I really feel kind of sad over missing a huge portion of the game. I could have played beta but I didn't. There are huge portions of the story that I will never participate in. I actually read the quest descriptions. I kind of like the lore and the history and the plot lines that tie the quests together.
Thanks for the reply. I'm okay with not being the best of the best. I just want a game that I can get into and play for a while to kill some time. It seems like Eve might offer that. I'm going to grab the trial and check it out.
Given the budget that they have to work with I'd say that they are doing a damn good job. The state isn't a private corporation that can just pass on cost increases to their customers. They don't have the money to attract AND RETAIN top IT talent. They fire more people than they hire and they are closing facilities left and right. I'd say the state has a budget problem, period, end of story. The issue isn't bad management in IT. The issue is a lack of funding.
If you want a perfect example of what happens when a huge government organization tries to replace their payroll system, take a look at the mess that has surrounded the Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) payroll system upgrade. Compared to the state system, that should have been a walk in the park.
Thanks for the description of how things are. That has been my sense of things. I guess that I'm stuck with WoW. Not that I don't enjoy playing it, but it would be nice to have some alternatives and the Eve environment does seem pretty attractive.
My girlfriend works for the state. This is what she has to say about what is going on. "I saw that people are talking about not wanting to hire cobool workers or something...well the issue with the state is that we do not upgrade anything EVER!!! So its freakin hilarious that they cant cut our pay cause they are cheapskates"
I've been involved in projects to replace legacy applications -- it's sometimes not possible to actually give them all of the functionality because nobody has a detailed list until someone comes along and says "oh, what about feature X, how do I do that?" Then you see a room full of people looking stunned and asking "why is this the first we're seeing of this??". Often, it's a feature which is so fundamentally incompatible with everything else you've been told -- "X can never happen. Oh, except there."
Mod this guy up please. Everyone who is saying how easy it would be to make the change to the system obviously hasn't had the real world experience of dealing with legacy systems where there are all sorts of arcane, long since forgotten functions that nobody really understands that have been coded into them.
It isn't just an issue of changing some constants. The pay cut isn't permanent. It is a temporary solution and the employees will get back pay once the budget passes. There are a lot of calculations that take place when a state employee gets paid. There are union contracts to follow. There are Federal and State payroll deductions to calculate. There are pension funds that are regulated by law to take into consideration.
This is the State of California we are talking about here. Do you really think that they have "non-production / test" environment of their antiquated COBOL mainframe setup for the amateur's to play around with and test code on? Maybe they can go ahead and just bring it up in an x86 virtual machine?
My girlfriend works for the state. She handles part of the time/payroll process. Most of it is still manual and done in ledger books. For the facility she works at with about 500 employees there is a single person who handles all of the payroll data entry into the system. The entire system is so antiquated it would be a nightmare to sort out. It isn't as simple as updating a single value to $6.55 and being done with. Everything is tiered and based on seniority. Each position has a different pay rate and is influenced by how long the employee has been working for the state. There are so many layers of complexity in that system that it would boggle your mind. Hell... the state just LAID OFF 200,000 people. Those are only the part time folks. How many people are still employed? A million? Maybe more? Do you really want some amateur screwing with the production database that is responsible for paying a million people? And not just paying, but deducting social security, medicare, payroll taxes, pension payments, Cal-PERS and all of that?
Every time Eve comes up in discussion I think about checking it out. I get the sense that it is really geared toward people who have lots of time to play it and it isn't very friendly toward casual players. What do you guys think? Is there any point in playing it if I only have 5-10 hours a week to devote to it?
Grow a pair and do something for others that puts your skin on the line.
Like post on/. about how the efforts of others are worthless?
There's an old Chinese proverb that is mostly applicable to this situation. "The person who says it can't be done should get out of the way of the person doing it."
I'm pretty sure the point of the story is to get the reporters and other people who are visiting China for the olympics to download the software BEFORE they get to China.
'To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, our sales, revenue and operating margins may decline.'
In other words, "We see the train coming, but we aren't going to do anything to modify our business strategy and are instead just going to stay in the middle of the tracks and get clobbered." It is frustrating to read ignorance from people who are in charge of billions of dollars in operating revenue. Change is inevitable and either you recognize that and get with the program, or you attempt to fight and it get taken apart.
I always hate to try to predict the future, but it seems to me like most of the "killer apps" for the commerical world have already been developed. There are only so many ways to efficiently do business, a limited number of ways to effectively collaborate, a fairly limited number of communication channels, etc. The applications to get things done have already been developed. Those applications are the office suites, the email applications, the webservers with their wiki's and document respositories, the databases to glue everything together. For the most part, it is already all there. The foundation has been laid. Most of what is taking place right now is polish and fine tuning. Any lead that Microsoft has will continue to decline as competitors continue to improve upon the foundation that is already there.
I did refute the claim. I did it in an analogy. Perhaps it was buried too deeply for you to notice it, or maybe my immature outburst blinded your emotions and you weren't able to perceive it. Here it is again.
You work hard for a living to have a family and a nice place to live. A drug dealer barely works at all and makes as much money as you do while having more time to spend with his family and a nice place to live. Are you a sucker for working hard and playing within the system? Do you expect that the law will deal with the drug dealer because society has deemed his actions wrong? Because pragmatically speaking you both end up at the same place, making money and having a family.
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I'm impressed with the way you dodged the question about whether or not your Linux boxes would do calendaring, mobile/PDA integration, webmail and everything else that Exchange does.
The Proliant that I quoted for "$10,000" would also include an LTO backup drive, RAID array, redundant power supplies, and 24x7x4 onsite support for 5 years. Things like that a pretty standard when you want to do it right. The Proliant will also run Linux with full driver support from the manufacturer. When I tossed the $10,000 number out there I wasn't trying to start a debate about costs of brand name, enterprise class hardware versus some white box you can build in your basement. In the grand scheme of running a business, $10,000 for a stable messaging/collaboration platform is nothing compared to the cost of the downtime when your employees can't communicate with each other and the outside world.
People are going to champion whatever they see to be in their best interest. Welcome to Reality 101. As a large portion of the /. crowd has mentioned, we are one heck of a long way of getting all of our power from renewable resources. There is a big doubt about whether such things could ever be feasible.
With full calendar, tasks, mobile/PDA support and everything else that Exchange does? Or are you talking about simple POP3/IMAP? Whether or not you can do whatever you can do with Linux has nothing to do with the competence or lack there of on behalf of the OP's IT staff.
If you used Google's financial resources to build your Exchange infrastructure, you wouldn't be having the problems you were having with your particular Exchange infrastructure.
The point in renewable technologies is that any additional power that we can get outside of the fossil/nuclear fuel box is a good thing. The power demands of society will continue to increase. I'm not completely convinced that petroleum (note I don't use the term "fossil fuels") is a limited resource. However it is quite possible that we will continue to consume it more quickly than it is replenished by whatever process pumps the stuff into the earth's crust. Nuclear (uranium and plutonium) energy sources are scarce and hard to get to. One of the big reasons we're in Afghanistan is because they have huge uranium deposits there. I'm getting off on a tangent so I will try to draw a couple of analogies here.
Just because you might never win the Boston marathon doesn't mean that you shouldn't do cardio training to keep yourself healthy. Just because you will never be a body builder doesn't mean you shouldn't exercise and have a good diet. Just because you can't afford a Ferrari doesn't mean you shouldn't drive. Just because wind and solar power might not ever produce base load power doesn't mean that we shouldn't harness them to the best of our ability. Just because one particular technology might be "better" than another does not make the other technology worthless. To use a computer analogy... "Why do you even bother with a stupid desktop computer? Obviously a supercomputer is much more powerful."
I completely agree with you that Adobe software works better on OSX than Windows any day. It would be nice if the two environments were more compatible. Even when running CS3 on both XP and OSX, there are issues when trying to move files between the two suites. I ran into problems with Linotype FontExplorer. Now granted the environment I've had to support is one with finicky graphic developers (are there any other kind?) who have hundreds of fonts that they are working with. The issue they ran into was with font corruption, and only wanting to enable a certain subset of fonts at any particular time. To be fair the issues that they are having probably aren't issues that 85% of the OSX using world will ever run into.%r%rI'm coming from the Windows world and I like Putty. I haven't seen a feature with Terminal that allows to me save all of my often used sites in one place like Putty does.
I took the dive and purchased a MBP because my g/f wanted a laptop for school and I wanted to see what all the noise about OSX is all about. The "just work" meme is the biggest load of crap. They seem to "just work" until you want to use an application on them. CS3 sure as hell doesn't just work. Fonts get corrupted all the time and you need to buy a third party program to manage your fonts. The standard applications work alright, but as soon as you want to step outside of the box you have to download the Developer Tools (1GB+ download), and then install Darwin Ports or do some other behind the scenes wizardry to get access to standard programs (in my case I prefer PuTTY for my terminal/ssh program). If you want to do things the iWay, then everything just works. If you want to put down the Kool Aid and join the rest of the world, it takes a lot of tweaking and jumping through hoops.
...for passing through THE most obvious and poorly written advertisements I've ever read here. The summary reads like a template straight out of a Marketing 101 textbook.
Back when I was a kid, we used KoH and we liked it!
You might be surprised about the tech savvy of "kids" these days. When I was consulting one of the clients I worked at was a private high school. We had their network locked down with a Sonicwall 4060 that isolated the different segments from each other. The teacher workstations were on one port, the library on another, the computer labs on another, the office on another and finally the classrooms on another. The kids were never able to jump the ACL to access the protected segments but they did manage to setup software that utilized the IP6 stack to get around the content filters.
This is right on. It seems to be the cable companies that do this. In my area we were able to simply turn the device off for thirty minutes and then turn it back on with the router/firewall attached to the ethernet port. It wouldn't surprise me if some cable companies were able to lock in the MAC of the first device attached to it.
I'm some what in agreement with you. I've been playing since pre-BC (I was only 56 when BC came out). It seems like Blizzard is killing off huge portions of the game. I've never raided MC. I never did the Oxyania quest chains. I never did UBRS or LBRS. I never raided Scholomance. With each release of the game they seem to push the original content out of the way. At this point they might as well just start everyone at level 60 and drop them in Hellfire Pennisula. I know this probably sounds lame, but I really feel kind of sad over missing a huge portion of the game. I could have played beta but I didn't. There are huge portions of the story that I will never participate in. I actually read the quest descriptions. I kind of like the lore and the history and the plot lines that tie the quests together.
Thanks for the reply. I'm okay with not being the best of the best. I just want a game that I can get into and play for a while to kill some time. It seems like Eve might offer that. I'm going to grab the trial and check it out.
If you want a perfect example of what happens when a huge government organization tries to replace their payroll system, take a look at the mess that has surrounded the Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) payroll system upgrade. Compared to the state system, that should have been a walk in the park.
Thanks for the description of how things are. That has been my sense of things. I guess that I'm stuck with WoW. Not that I don't enjoy playing it, but it would be nice to have some alternatives and the Eve environment does seem pretty attractive.
My girlfriend works for the state. This is what she has to say about what is going on. "I saw that people are talking about not wanting to hire cobool workers or something...well the issue with the state is that we do not upgrade anything EVER!!! So its freakin hilarious that they cant cut our pay cause they are cheapskates"
Mod this guy up please. Everyone who is saying how easy it would be to make the change to the system obviously hasn't had the real world experience of dealing with legacy systems where there are all sorts of arcane, long since forgotten functions that nobody really understands that have been coded into them.
It isn't just an issue of changing some constants. The pay cut isn't permanent. It is a temporary solution and the employees will get back pay once the budget passes. There are a lot of calculations that take place when a state employee gets paid. There are union contracts to follow. There are Federal and State payroll deductions to calculate. There are pension funds that are regulated by law to take into consideration.
My girlfriend works for the state. She handles part of the time/payroll process. Most of it is still manual and done in ledger books. For the facility she works at with about 500 employees there is a single person who handles all of the payroll data entry into the system. The entire system is so antiquated it would be a nightmare to sort out. It isn't as simple as updating a single value to $6.55 and being done with. Everything is tiered and based on seniority. Each position has a different pay rate and is influenced by how long the employee has been working for the state. There are so many layers of complexity in that system that it would boggle your mind. Hell... the state just LAID OFF 200,000 people. Those are only the part time folks. How many people are still employed? A million? Maybe more? Do you really want some amateur screwing with the production database that is responsible for paying a million people? And not just paying, but deducting social security, medicare, payroll taxes, pension payments, Cal-PERS and all of that?
Amen brother.
Every time Eve comes up in discussion I think about checking it out. I get the sense that it is really geared toward people who have lots of time to play it and it isn't very friendly toward casual players. What do you guys think? Is there any point in playing it if I only have 5-10 hours a week to devote to it?
Like post on /. about how the efforts of others are worthless?
There's an old Chinese proverb that is mostly applicable to this situation. "The person who says it can't be done should get out of the way of the person doing it."
I'm pretty sure the point of the story is to get the reporters and other people who are visiting China for the olympics to download the software BEFORE they get to China.
In other words, "We see the train coming, but we aren't going to do anything to modify our business strategy and are instead just going to stay in the middle of the tracks and get clobbered." It is frustrating to read ignorance from people who are in charge of billions of dollars in operating revenue. Change is inevitable and either you recognize that and get with the program, or you attempt to fight and it get taken apart.
I always hate to try to predict the future, but it seems to me like most of the "killer apps" for the commerical world have already been developed. There are only so many ways to efficiently do business, a limited number of ways to effectively collaborate, a fairly limited number of communication channels, etc. The applications to get things done have already been developed. Those applications are the office suites, the email applications, the webservers with their wiki's and document respositories, the databases to glue everything together. For the most part, it is already all there. The foundation has been laid. Most of what is taking place right now is polish and fine tuning. Any lead that Microsoft has will continue to decline as competitors continue to improve upon the foundation that is already there.
You work hard for a living to have a family and a nice place to live. A drug dealer barely works at all and makes as much money as you do while having more time to spend with his family and a nice place to live. Are you a sucker for working hard and playing within the system? Do you expect that the law will deal with the drug dealer because society has deemed his actions wrong? Because pragmatically speaking you both end up at the same place, making money and having a family.