That's some fine trollin' Lou. The product described in TFA sounds more like a competitor to VMWare VDI in which case the proper "b-b-but UNIX was doing it 20 years ago!" response is to bring up the magnificence that is X11.
IT departments all over the world do what you describe with Windows boxen every day. You can store data centrally and have users work off of standard images, you can use several tools to migrate profiles and settings between PCs, you can use roaming profiles (OK, I admit the last one is a joke)
On the other hand, there's still no definitive system for managing Linux desktops comparable to AD/Group Policy. And interoperability in heterogeneous environments is fun too (e.g. winbind randomly dying or being broken by updates, Gnome's had a bug for almost a year that prevents listing of shares on SMB/CIFS servers that require authentication)
Actually, it's a myth in the sense that the price for an IP address is still ridiculously low (at least in contrast to other finite resources like domain names.)
A place I used to work had two class Bs that they really didn't need. I'm sure when IP blocks are going for $1000 per/30 per year, they'll reconsider whether they want to hold onto them or sell them.
Now who will be responsible for the first "Blood IPs?" I'm going to go with some gamer in Korea.
I would love a way to filter out all the nextag, ebay, etc. results when searching for information on a product. An Adblock like list so it can't be easily poisoned by spammers.
I'm half expecting people to declare IMAP to be obsolete in a new age of webmail, and then turn around in 5 years and build a complete e-mail client extension into the browser using XML to pass e-mail around, but no HTML for the interface.
This exists (sort of.) Using Outlook with RPC over HTTPS you're connecting via Outlook Web Access (the Exchange webmail server) It's a pretty nice feature since it allows traveling mail users to get their mail without requiring a separate VPN connection. HTTPS traffic is allowed through most outbound connections (e.g. crazy locked-down customer sites, free WiFi, home ISPs that block outbound TCP/25) which is why I think you're seeing a move to re-implementing existing protocols in HTTP (a kludge no doubt, though one real advantage is a single secured connection vs. multiple different services that all have to be secured independently.)
I would love to be able to do something similar with Thunderbird. If you want to be able to sync mail, (IMAP/S) send mail (SMTP/S) and sync contacts (LDAP/S) you have 3 separate connections to configure and troubleshoot, and good luck with all of them working via some random public Internet connection.
Tunneling the ports through an SSL VPN would probably be the easiest way to accomplish it right now, though I've been happy with the Zindus plugin which lets you sync contacts against the contacts in Zimbra webmail.
Even worse than that, their libel laws are ridiculous: "Rich people and bad laws mean tough times for free speech"
"The growing use of English courts by foreign litigants is arousing increasing concern among free-speech campaigners such as Chris Walker of Freedom House, an American lobby group. He terms it "manna from heaven for deeply illiberal and fantastically wealthy ex-Soviet oligarchs and Middle-Eastern oil tycoons. Everyone knows the potency of the English laws and everyone takes it into account, at an incalculable cost to free speech.""
Outlook - YES, FINALLY! Outlook is one of those things where I'm all for the death penalty. Outlook is the worst disaster for corporate productivity this side of the galactic core. It's also the worst e-mail client I've ever used, and that's a fairly long list. Outlook is enterprise messaging gone horribly wrong, in more ways than you thought possible. I'm SOO glad they put it on the list. What magic awesome enterprise messaging systems have you been using? I love Notes but the mail client UI (and the UI in general) sucks. What are your other options of awesomeness? cc:Mail? Groupwise?
Oh wait, of course, I forgot OfficeVision!
It's amazing how bad the "consumer" versions of Norton, McAfee, etc have become. Apparently they don't realize that's the impression people go with when they need to purchase business AV as well.
The corporate versions are still pretty usable (When people ask for AV suggestions for their home PC, I usually recommend getting a single Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition license - cheap and runs well)
The costs associated with the amount of time/tweaking required to admin Zimbra vs. Notes/Exchange dwarfs the licensing costs for the latter. I consider Zimbra in many ways to be more proprietary - sure the code is Open Source, but access to the data is way more of a pain in the ass. I can buy off the shelf migration tools and move from Notes to Exchange or vice versa, with Zimbra you have to find/build tools to migrate each discrete component mail, contacts, etc. In Notes I can save an nsf locally and as long as someone has the client they can access all their old data, same thing with Outlook and a pst, saving out Zimbra data isn't quite that easy yet -I'm sure that will get better as it matures, but at the moment it's hard to beat SBS for under 75 users so it's nice to see IBM trying to muscle in on that space (and that's without even considering that in supporting SBS companies have many more options to chose from vs. the Zimbra server some guy they found on Craigslist set up for them. "oh yeah, the server crashed because your/opt partition filled after zmstat.out went nutty and has grown to 40GB") I'll also be curious to see an AAR for a major Zimbra disaster recovery.
The places where you're seeing Zimbra deployed are with ISPs/Edus where usage of the non-email portions of groupware are fairly limited.
That having been said, I think it's a great project and I'd love to see a real competitor to Notes/Exchange emerge, even though deep inside I'll always love/hate Notes like a beaten wife.
How easy/difficult is it to change/spoof a Bluetooth hardware address? I've been playing around with using hcitool -scan to lock and unlock gnome-screensaver when I walk away from the computer and am curious if this is merely a somewhat bad idea, or a truly epic bad idea.
I've been talking to Equallogic guys at various VMWare events and I think they've got a great product. The biggest pain with implementing ESX has been the cost around shared SAN storage (yes you can use NAS now but come on.)
I love VMWare, but can't stand their parent corp (EMC) and can't wait for the Compaqification of the SAN market with the part of IBM played by EMC. Any company that forces their customers to buy $100 SATA drives for $900 deserves to die at the hands of commoditization.
I've been using the 6 Beta with Office 2003 for a little while - it works OK except for the one thing I really need - Outook 2003 RPC over HTTPS support. I switched back to Outlook after finally getting sick of Evolution taking 20 minutes to sync and let me start working with messages and it's the last significant app that I have to boot up a Windows VM for. I will have to grab the full release to see if that made it in.
I'd rather see some development towards somehow preventing a client from finishing a download until his Down/Up ratio is at least 0.75. This would be difficult to do since you can't trust the client.
The IPs on any relay servers before the connection to your mail server can't be trusted. However, the IP of the server that sent the message to your server should be correct since it's your server that's adding that IP to the header.
Hey, we'd all love to apps and OS's written correctly, but to paraphrase Rumsfeld, "you go to work with the environment you have, not the environment you want." Good luck running Blackberry Enterprise Server under OpenVMS.
Also, most people would love to have Vaxen or big-ass iSeries or pSeries boxes, but VMWare lets you do similar things with x86, at a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately for big iron types, the pool of tasks that have to be put on that sort of hardware is rapidly getting smaller and smaller. We had the option of going with any architecture we wanted with the environment described in my original post, the one we chose cost less to build out than the yearly maintinance on the SP2s they replaced. (Support was easier too since we could avoid all the drinking on the job required when dealing with people who still refer to disk space as DASD)
Yeah sorry I should have explained.. I considered GSX expensive because it still cost a lot and gave you none of the stability/performance benefits of ESX - if the host OS took a dive, all your VMs did too. The new server is basically a free, stripped down version of GSX.
I recently left a position where we were using ESX server to host mail (Lotus Notes under Linux) for around 10k users along with Notes application servers, and other Linux and Windows utility servers.
ESX was great because it allows for much more efficient use of Server hardware. In a lot of cases we had applications running on seperate servers because the apps were unstable. Without VMWare that means seperate hardware (usually racks filled with shelves and desktop PCs if the company is cheap, or 1U servers if they're not) and all the administrative overhead of dealing with those servers. We had 30-40 VMs running inside 12 physical servers including heavily used primary and failover mail servers.
Running inside a VM gives you advantages if you're running a lights out data center, or if your servers are at a remote location. Many has been the time where a server hung and I needed someone on-site to power cycle it - with VMWare you can power cycle the VMs from anywhere, and I've never seen ESX take a dive (supposedly there's a purple screen of death, but I've never seen it)
Another advantage is backup/disaster recover planning. With a VM, your whole server is just a couple files. You can copy those files to a remote location via a variety of means, and boom, you have an off-site clone of your server. More importantly the VMs are hardware independent - you can have a datacenter filled with Dell 6850s burn to the ground and when you power up your VMs in a colo facility running HPs, the VMs don't care about there being different RAID cards, or NICs with the wrong MAC addresses.
This post was made on a Dell D620 running ubuntu with VMWare workstation on top hosting a windows VM for when I need to do windows stuff:)
I love VMWare and am stoked about this as it will allow for use of virtualization where ESX would have been too expensive (GSX was always too expensive:) )
I've thought a great idea along with this would be a super light linux distro to run as the host OS (an almost ESX server - obviously ESX has performance advantages since the kernel is running directly without an intervening OS layer)
I agree. Also, there HAVE been studies showing that investment in cell infrastructure produces positive ROI (The Economist runs an article about this every month is seems like) Having access to a cell phone give someone the opportunity to run a business (rent out time to other folks without phones) for farmers to get accurate market pricing and access to remote markets without travelling so they can get the best possible price for their crops, allows for dissemination of weather and public safety information and plenty of other things.
In time it may be shown that these laptops provide similar value, but we have tech that's been shown to help, it's a shame it's not as sexy to try to develop a $20 cell phone.
Slashdot Mirror
That's some fine trollin' Lou. The product described in TFA sounds more like a competitor to VMWare VDI in which case the proper "b-b-but UNIX was doing it 20 years ago!" response is to bring up the magnificence that is X11.
IT departments all over the world do what you describe with Windows boxen every day. You can store data centrally and have users work off of standard images, you can use several tools to migrate profiles and settings between PCs, you can use roaming profiles (OK, I admit the last one is a joke)
On the other hand, there's still no definitive system for managing Linux desktops comparable to AD/Group Policy. And interoperability in heterogeneous environments is fun too (e.g. winbind randomly dying or being broken by updates, Gnome's had a bug for almost a year that prevents listing of shares on SMB/CIFS servers that require authentication)
"AIX-- doesn't much care for the OS, but loves the jackboots. "
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/know.your.sysadmin.html
Actually, it's a myth in the sense that the price for an IP address is still ridiculously low (at least in contrast to other finite resources like domain names.)
A place I used to work had two class Bs that they really didn't need. I'm sure when IP blocks are going for $1000 per /30 per year, they'll reconsider whether they want to hold onto them or sell them.
Now who will be responsible for the first "Blood IPs?" I'm going to go with some gamer in Korea.
I would love a way to filter out all the nextag, ebay, etc. results when searching for information on a product. An Adblock like list so it can't be easily poisoned by spammers.
I'm half expecting people to declare IMAP to be obsolete in a new age of webmail, and then turn around in 5 years and build a complete e-mail client extension into the browser using XML to pass e-mail around, but no HTML for the interface.
This exists (sort of.) Using Outlook with RPC over HTTPS you're connecting via Outlook Web Access (the Exchange webmail server) It's a pretty nice feature since it allows traveling mail users to get their mail without requiring a separate VPN connection. HTTPS traffic is allowed through most outbound connections (e.g. crazy locked-down customer sites, free WiFi, home ISPs that block outbound TCP/25) which is why I think you're seeing a move to re-implementing existing protocols in HTTP (a kludge no doubt, though one real advantage is a single secured connection vs. multiple different services that all have to be secured independently.)
I would love to be able to do something similar with Thunderbird. If you want to be able to sync mail, (IMAP/S) send mail (SMTP/S) and sync contacts (LDAP/S) you have 3 separate connections to configure and troubleshoot, and good luck with all of them working via some random public Internet connection.
Tunneling the ports through an SSL VPN would probably be the easiest way to accomplish it right now, though I've been happy with the Zindus plugin which lets you sync contacts against the contacts in Zimbra webmail.
You should look at getting eOpen volume licenses - only one key to have to track.
https://eopen.microsoft.com/EN/default.asp
It's amazing how bad the "consumer" versions of Norton, McAfee, etc have become. Apparently they don't realize that's the impression people go with when they need to purchase business AV as well.
The corporate versions are still pretty usable (When people ask for AV suggestions for their home PC, I usually recommend getting a single Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition license - cheap and runs well)
The costs associated with the amount of time/tweaking required to admin Zimbra vs. Notes/Exchange dwarfs the licensing costs for the latter. I consider Zimbra in many ways to be more proprietary - sure the code is Open Source, but access to the data is way more of a pain in the ass. I can buy off the shelf migration tools and move from Notes to Exchange or vice versa, with Zimbra you have to find/build tools to migrate each discrete component mail, contacts, etc. In Notes I can save an nsf locally and as long as someone has the client they can access all their old data, same thing with Outlook and a pst, saving out Zimbra data isn't quite that easy yet -I'm sure that will get better as it matures, but at the moment it's hard to beat SBS for under 75 users so it's nice to see IBM trying to muscle in on that space (and that's without even considering that in supporting SBS companies have many more options to chose from vs. the Zimbra server some guy they found on Craigslist set up for them. "oh yeah, the server crashed because your /opt partition filled after zmstat.out went nutty and has grown to 40GB") I'll also be curious to see an AAR for a major Zimbra disaster recovery.
The places where you're seeing Zimbra deployed are with ISPs/Edus where usage of the non-email portions of groupware are fairly limited.
That having been said, I think it's a great project and I'd love to see a real competitor to Notes/Exchange emerge, even though deep inside I'll always love/hate Notes like a beaten wife.
How easy/difficult is it to change/spoof a Bluetooth hardware address? I've been playing around with using hcitool -scan to lock and unlock gnome-screensaver when I walk away from the computer and am curious if this is merely a somewhat bad idea, or a truly epic bad idea.
I've been talking to Equallogic guys at various VMWare events and I think they've got a great product. The biggest pain with implementing ESX has been the cost around shared SAN storage (yes you can use NAS now but come on.)
I love VMWare, but can't stand their parent corp (EMC) and can't wait for the Compaqification of the SAN market with the part of IBM played by EMC. Any company that forces their customers to buy $100 SATA drives for $900 deserves to die at the hands of commoditization.
This is simply false. Egypt had begun blockading Israeli ports (a blockade is widely considered an act of war http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9015678/block ade ) as well as providing considerable material support to paramilitary forces regularly staging attacks into Israel across the Egyptian border, in violation of cease fire agreements. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Histor y/Suez_War.html/ mf5.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths
I've been using the 6 Beta with Office 2003 for a little while - it works OK except for the one thing I really need - Outook 2003 RPC over HTTPS support. I switched back to Outlook after finally getting sick of Evolution taking 20 minutes to sync and let me start working with messages and it's the last significant app that I have to boot up a Windows VM for. I will have to grab the full release to see if that made it in.
I'd rather see some development towards somehow preventing a client from finishing a download until his Down/Up ratio is at least 0.75. This would be difficult to do since you can't trust the client.
The IPs on any relay servers before the connection to your mail server can't be trusted. However, the IP of the server that sent the message to your server should be correct since it's your server that's adding that IP to the header.
http://www.truecombatelite.net/ - free team based realism mod for the free version of Wolfentein Enemy Territory.
Started playing it a year ago and haven't picked up CS since. It's awesome.
Hey, we'd all love to apps and OS's written correctly, but to paraphrase Rumsfeld, "you go to work with the environment you have, not the environment you want." Good luck running Blackberry Enterprise Server under OpenVMS.
Also, most people would love to have Vaxen or big-ass iSeries or pSeries boxes, but VMWare lets you do similar things with x86, at a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately for big iron types, the pool of tasks that have to be put on that sort of hardware is rapidly getting smaller and smaller. We had the option of going with any architecture we wanted with the environment described in my original post, the one we chose cost less to build out than the yearly maintinance on the SP2s they replaced. (Support was easier too since we could avoid all the drinking on the job required when dealing with people who still refer to disk space as DASD)
Yeah sorry I should have explained.. I considered GSX expensive because it still cost a lot and gave you none of the stability/performance benefits of ESX - if the host OS took a dive, all your VMs did too. The new server is basically a free, stripped down version of GSX.
I recently left a position where we were using ESX server to host mail (Lotus Notes under Linux) for around 10k users along with Notes application servers, and other Linux and Windows utility servers.
:)
ESX was great because it allows for much more efficient use of Server hardware. In a lot of cases we had applications running on seperate servers because the apps were unstable. Without VMWare that means seperate hardware (usually racks filled with shelves and desktop PCs if the company is cheap, or 1U servers if they're not) and all the administrative overhead of dealing with those servers. We had 30-40 VMs running inside 12 physical servers including heavily used primary and failover mail servers.
Running inside a VM gives you advantages if you're running a lights out data center, or if your servers are at a remote location. Many has been the time where a server hung and I needed someone on-site to power cycle it - with VMWare you can power cycle the VMs from anywhere, and I've never seen ESX take a dive (supposedly there's a purple screen of death, but I've never seen it)
Another advantage is backup/disaster recover planning. With a VM, your whole server is just a couple files. You can copy those files to a remote location via a variety of means, and boom, you have an off-site clone of your server. More importantly the VMs are hardware independent - you can have a datacenter filled with Dell 6850s burn to the ground and when you power up your VMs in a colo facility running HPs, the VMs don't care about there being different RAID cards, or NICs with the wrong MAC addresses.
This post was made on a Dell D620 running ubuntu with VMWare workstation on top hosting a windows VM for when I need to do windows stuff
I love VMWare and am stoked about this as it will allow for use of virtualization where ESX would have been too expensive (GSX was always too expensive :) )
I've thought a great idea along with this would be a super light linux distro to run as the host OS (an almost ESX server - obviously ESX has performance advantages since the kernel is running directly without an intervening OS layer)
before someone points out I misspelled his name, keep in mind he just doesn't matter enough to go to the trouble of spelling it correctly.
#11 - Cowboy Neil
I agree. Also, there HAVE been studies showing that investment in cell infrastructure produces positive ROI (The Economist runs an article about this every month is seems like) Having access to a cell phone give someone the opportunity to run a business (rent out time to other folks without phones) for farmers to get accurate market pricing and access to remote markets without travelling so they can get the best possible price for their crops, allows for dissemination of weather and public safety information and plenty of other things.
In time it may be shown that these laptops provide similar value, but we have tech that's been shown to help, it's a shame it's not as sexy to try to develop a $20 cell phone.
Ubuntu has WPA support - search in Synaptic for WPA_supplicant. (You may need to enable Universe/Multiverse)
This post brought to you on a Dell D600 running Ubuntu Breezy Badger using WPA.