That's because Samba went GPL3, so Apple is having to roll their own CIFS implementation. I imagine it'll take a version or two before Apple gets within sniffing distance of feature parity.

Well, only in a base-26 alphabet. If we expand our horizons to include non-European alphabets, we'll be fine for a while yet.

I think they ditched the "license per IP address" model two or three years ago. I do agree that, until that happened, it was a royal pain once you hit that limit, though.

For smaller networks, I like Fortigates, though they can be a little... finicky to configure. Unlike the "overgrown Linksys" nature of the Sonicwall, you have to really pay attention when configuring Fortigates to do much of anything useful (do I need an "IP Address" or a "Virtual IP" to get this port forward going?). I've also been less than thrilled with their IPS products. For just basic firewall/routers, though, they get the job done.

Well of course not! How are you supposed to shift paradigms without synergy?

One of these days, someone is going to develop a continuously variable transmission that provides the proper amount of paradigm at all times under all load conditions - once that happens, man, watch out! Until then, I guess we're just going to have to settle for manual paradigm shifting or torque converter-driven automatic paradigm shifting, with all the trouble that entails.

To be fair, "permit udp any host 4.2.2.2 eq 53" will ensure a quick escort to the exit in most DNS-integrated directory service environments because it can nerf communication between workstations and internal assets (file servers, DCs, etc.). Outbound DNS really should only come from your internal DNS servers, not random PCs in the network. Similarly, nothing keeps you off spam blacklists better than denying outbound 25 from all machines in your network that aren't explicitly an e-mail server.

Come to think of it, prohibiting all outbound traffic that isn't "expected" and "normal" is just a good idea anyway.

Ha. Ha ha. HAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAH... *gaaassssp* HAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Seriously, most SAs (at least where I live) are lucky if they can break $50-60k unless they're working for a larger firm, and, even then, you have to work your way up to it. As I understand it, there are a few greybeard SAs making six figure salaries, but the vast majority of them are lucky if they make half that. Then again, that sort of thing happens when you can whack a tree a couple of times and have a dozen MCSE/MCITPs fall out. It's also what happens when 90%+ of the enterprise world, attracted by the promise of cheap labor and fixed operating system costs, decides to embrace Microsoft and its products with extreme prejudice.

Why? Well, because it's so much easier (and cheaper!) to find MS-specialized help...

That's because we're doing more interesting things in other fields, like genetics, computers, mobile devices, and so on. Some of us are so fixated on the failure to achieve the dream to roam the stars that we completely miss the fantastic science that surrounds and inexorably advances around us. Heck, we're all commenting on this board using computers that individually exceed the combined computational power of every computer in existence in 1975 (or so).

The trouble, as this guy learned, is that middlemen do add value. Why is his eBook only sold at Amazon US? Because he didn't have a middleman that he could go through to negotiate contracts with Barnes & Noble, Powell's, Borders/Waldenbooks, or overseas bookstores. To his credit, he did a decent job of doing his own marketing, hitting his target audience quite nicely, but, since it didn't have a cute animal on the front and a brand that sounds like "Oh really?", a lot of people might have taken a pass on his book because they didn't think it came from a trusted source of quality technical publications. This sort of dynamic holds true in the music and film industry, too.

Making stuff is easy. Getting stuff into people's hands is hard.

Now, are some middlemen overpaid? Could they use some real competition, instead of the cozy oligopoly they've been able to maintain thus far? Almost certainly. I'd love to see media distribution become commoditized because, when things become commodities, they become cheap and fungible, which is good for consumers of that product. Since artists are the consumers of media distribution networks (we're the product), I definitely can understand why this is an exciting moment for them.

What kills me is that you somehow got a +5 Insightful mod out of that.

Oh, so...

While 1
MsgBox "Developers!", vbExclamation, "Developers!"
Wend

That a little more Microsofty?

Several good reasons for this, actually. First, Germany's economic and political history through the Great Depression was very different than the US and Great Britain. While the US and the UK initially tried to deflate and liquidate their way out of the Depression, causing business and union leaders to run head-first and fist-first into the stickiness of wages (workers really don't like wage cuts, even/especially if their wages increase in value over time), Germany unwittingly inflated their way out of it, avoiding the worst of the business-labor conflicts of the Great Depression. This prevented German business leaders and unions from developing the adversarial relationship between business and labor that developed in the US and the UK, which allowed German businesses to grow and boom long after World War 2 and even during the '70s when Japan started getting its house in order. This also made it possible for German factory owners to employ the latest labor-saving technologies to preserve productivity and quality while many heavy industry unions in the US and the UK viewed those technologies with suspicion and blocked them at every turn.

Second, Germany's economy is subsidized by the Euro. There's a reason Germany's sort of willing to bail out the PIIGs - if they don't, people in the PIIGs won't be able to buy as much German-made stuff. Normally, Greece, Italy, and so on would watch their currencies devalue in times of fiscal crisis, making imports from Germany less attractive to their citizens and making locally manufactured goods more attractive. By staying in the Euro, though, that devaluation isn't happening - instead, German-made goods from high-tech factories compete on even currency footing with goods manufactured in limited quantities in their troubled home countries using less cutting-edge technology, less educated labor, and owned by business leaders who are uncertain about their country's future and invest accordingly. Guess whose goods win out? Coincidentally, this is a big part of the reason Germany's running trade surpluses right now.

Third, US manufacturing isn't in anywhere near as bad of a position as people think. No, it's not where it was in the late '50s and the early '60s when we were the only advanced country with an intact industrial base and transportation network on the planet. But, it's not like we don't make anything in the US anymore. There are probably at least as many cars made in the US now as there were in 1970 - difference is, they're being manufactured for Toyota, Honda, BMW, VW, and (soon) Kia instead of GM, Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors. There are some industries that have largely vanished here - we don't really do textiles anymore, except in certain niche applications, and though we still produce a fair amount of steel and other metalworks, we're not manufacturing them to anywhere near the volumes we used to. On the other hand, we do still manufacture several higher-end electronics parts (though we don't often assemble them); Intel, for example, has several manufacturing plants here, among other things. Long story short, no, American manufacturing isn't the golden ticket for high school dropouts that could move a screwdriver like it was when we were the only producer of goods on the planet, but that doesn't mean it's dead. It just isn't what it used to be compared to the rest of the American economy. That doesn't mean other countries (even China!) wouldn't kill to produce as much stuff as the US does.

Let's trot out a bad car analogy...

Saying "Apple's products are too expensive to gain significant market share" is like saying "BMWs are too expensive to outsell Camrys and Accords". It's true not because BMWs aren't better cars, in that they have more features and can achieve higher performance on a test track than a Camry or an Accord. It's not true because BMWs are "too expensive" compared to their competition (Lexus, Infiniti, Mercedes-Benz, etc.). It's true because BMWs are more expensive than Camrys or Accords and most people don't need a BMW or BMW-like vehicle - they just need a Camry or an Accord.

(NOTE: Analogy not valid outside of the United States. In other locations, please replace "BMW" with "mid-level luxury manufacturer" and "Camry and Accord" with whatever the most popular cars are in your country. This might even be as simple as replacing "BMW" with "new car" and "Camry and Accord" with "used car from developed country", but it might not be. Thank you.)

Yeah, same here. The few companies I've seen that have moved off of Exchange certainly didn't move to Notes, Groupwise, Zimbra, or anything of that sort - instead, it was to hosted solutions (Google Apps being fairly common), which, more often than not, meant hosted Exchange instead of local Exchange.

Look, it's not like it's impossible to replicate most (if not all) of the features of Exchange with other tools. Yes, you can set up an iCal server, toss in some HTTP, turn on the Lemonade Profile options for IMAP in your mail daemon of choice, give it a SQL back-end of some flavor or another to improve performance over straight-up text read/writes (it also will help your users with client searches), and integrate it with whatever directory service you're running. But, unless you really know what you're doing and already have a recipe for this lying around, how quickly are you going to get it done? How reliable will it be? Who else is going to be able to support it? The advantage of Exchange is that it's a known quantity, there are plenty of people that can support it, it installs quickly and without fuss, it plays nicely with your existing infrastructure (assuming it's already Windows, of course), every business-grade mobile client on the planet speaks its language, there are tons of third-party add-ons that know how to speak to it, and, especially in later versions (seriously, it's come a long way since 5.5), it's reasonably stable. Sure, it's a complex resource hog, but that's because it does a lot of stuff other than e-mail.

Most financial calculations are done, at a minimum, to the 10000ths place (i.e. basis points). For example, US gas prices are universally X+90bp, with X being whatever it is people think they're going to pay at the pump when they drive by and see a price at a gas station.

Plus it's far more expensive than DSL or cable broadband because it's a dedicated circuit to the phone company's CO. Where I live, a data T1 is somewhere in the $400/month range.