That's why if the BSA walks into my IT department, they get "Here's the door, leave now, you don't have an appointment, we won't give you an appointment, you're now trespassing. Get lawyers involved if you think we are not complying".

Since we use mostly open source software on our servers and all our Windows licenses are legit, if they want to waste the money taking us to court, let them.. We'll be sure to ask for reimbursement of all lawyer fees and time lost when we are found to be in compliance.

Some admins think the BSA is like the FBI where they can just walk into your office and demand to start seeing licenses and what-not. Guess what, they can't do that. I laugh like crazy everytime I hear of an admin caving to them when they just show up unannounced instead of the proper response of "Here's the door, GTFO."

Google is great until you realize your companies possible sensitive IP could be stored in just about any country in the world.

I think Google offers a more secure 'government' service or something. Last time I checked into that, they could only guarantee that data would not be stored in countries that your country is currently on un-friendly terms with (so they won't even offer you a 'your country and your countries allies only' option for where they store your data).

I think it is pretty damn stupid using Google Apps if the business deals with any type of sensitive data what-so-ever.

My company, for instance, deals with citizens private health care records, so Google Apps was instantly out of the question.

We switched to Zimbra and couldn't be happier. For those saying 'Google Prices are great', you can't beat FREE if you have an admin or two at the company with a clue that can administer the Zimbra setup. With 2 MTAs on different ISPs, we've had maybe a total of 10 minutes downtime in the past 2 years, and even then the messages still queued up and were delivered when everything came back up (a zimbra mailstore takes quite a while to reboot, but the MTAs still cache all incoming messages which are then instantly delivered to the mailstore when it is back available).

Your company must not have been utilizing Zimbra correctly then. The only thing I find a bit lacking with it compared to Exchange is shared contact management. Other than that, it's great. My company switched to it 2 years ago and have never been happier (IT is happy and the owners are happy for keeping costs down with a 99.999% uptime running 2 MTAs through different ISPs). Of course Postfix is the MTA Zimbra uses, and Postfix rocks.

My company switched to Zimbra about 2 years ago, all managed in-house on company owned servers. We have 2 MTAs, 2 LDAP servers, and 2 Mailstores (although only currently using 1 mailstore with RAID and backups since it is in a different physical location than the primary mailstore and I believe it requires licensing to make that work properly). It does everything we want it to and is all open source. The webmail interface is great. We still have alot of users on Outlook 2003 and they are about to get that ripped off their systems and be told to use the zimbra webmail or desktop client instead of paying the MS tax. All in all, it has worked out great for us. The company went from hosted email that would go down once a week to now maybe 10 minutes of downtime in the 2 years we have been using Zimbra.

The SIM cards in Verizon or Sprint phones (CDMA based networks) are only 4G LTE SIM cards, so you can't just take your phone to any other carrier because your phone "has a sim card", which is what I think your comment is implying.

Verizon still uses CDMA for all voice traffic, 4G is only used for data traffic currently (the SIM card is only a 4G LTE SIM card, still no cards for their 3G/2G CDMA which is what all voice traffic still uses)...

And how do you know an AC really is the business that gave you the bid?

If I was you, I'd go with with a proprietary solution (especially since you made sure to put 'free' after you mentioned 'open source solution' in the OP).

Since you don't appear to know enough about this on your own (thus Ask Slashdot), I *highly* doubt that even if you found an open source solution that it would be completely "free" to you/your business/your employer. Think of the outrageous support costs you will get when the "free" system takes a dump and you have no clue how to fix it. Debugging and fixing a 'free' system that you cobbled together isn't going to be exactly cheap.

Ubuntu Server is "free", but that doesn't stop my company from paying Canonical for a support contract just incase some outrageously strange kernel bug or something comes up that brings a critical production server screeching to a halt (of course we deal with patient medical data so the definition of critical production server is probably alot different than if the music stops at the theme park). The same goes for our "free" linux (software) based firewall distro we use at branch offices. We liked it so much we bought the hardware from the makers of the FW linux distro (Endian). The hardware from them comes with a support contract as well incase something screws up on the firewall.

Open Source and completely free doesn't always go together in a business environment, doubly so if you needed to use Ask Slashdot.

Another very low /. UID person agreeing with what you said.

As one of the first 3000 registered users of the site (first pointed to your site by you or Hemos iirc in the Enlightenment WM IRC channel).. I must say wthe obligatory so long and thanks for all the fish. Go on to do better things. Slashdot will continue on but never will be the same without you (as well as Hemos)! Who would have thought a little site to share stories with your friends would have exploded so rapidly.

I did not RTFA, but this sounds like a *great* laptop accessory. I hate laptop trackpads and nipples, and am frequently too lazy to plug a regular mouse in, or get it out of my bag in the first place.. even if it is wireless. I don't see why this shouldn't be the next great thing in portable computing. Especially due to the price.

....for 1.3.3.7... :)

Wow that's the GUI upgrade tool for you.. not good.. I've found shutting down X and upgrading from the console to generally be your safest bet when upgrading.

AT&T's "branded" 3G is HSDPA. However, EDGE is also actually considered a 3G technology, but AT&T labels it as 2.75G or 2.5G or something so as to not confuse customers by having 2 different 3G techs. The actual specs for 3G include EDGE as a 3G protocol.

Basically, verizons 3G service cdma2000, was a bolt on replacement upgrade to go from their 2G tech (cdmaOne). EDGE for AT&T was also a bolt on upgrade from their 2G tech (GPRS - a TDMA signal, not CDMA). Verizon just stopped after doing this bolt on upgrade so their entire network is considered 3G pretty much.

AT&T then decided to go with an entirely different 3G technology because it was way faster than EDGE (even though EDGE is considered a 3G tech). This new tech was HSDPA which is based on a CDMA network, not TDMA. Therefore, AT&T has to deploy entirely new towers to roll out this new 3G service so their 3G map is much smaller than Verizons. Technically EDGE is still a 3G tech though.

If AT&T still marketed EDGE as 3G and then maybe HSDPA as 3.25G or something, Verizon could not be making this claim. And technically speaking, AT&T would be on solid ground for doing so.

See the "Overview of 3G/IMT-2000 standards" chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G to clarify.

I can also confirm that I have experienced the mouse jumping around erratically sometimes with Karmic. I also feel the boot time was slower until I disabled usplash, although I never actually timed it.