* Posts by Trevor_Pott

6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010

Five-hour Azure wobble

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A) "phased roll out"

B) 5 hours to notice and roll back?

C) R.I.P. QA.

'Disciplined' NetApp cuts weight, turns in a prettier spreadsheet

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Re: NetApp now has 8 product lines?

But way more than Pure.

Light at the end of Intel's Silicon Photonics: 100Gbps network tech finally shipping, sorta

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Looks like a QSFP28 transceiver. Does it have lower latency than Mellanox? When do we get modules that can split into 10 instead of 4? 10x 10GbE as a breakout cable is a lot more useful to me than 4x 25GbE...

Hyper-converged top-of-the-pops list is out: Guess who hasn't crushed it?

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Re: Where do they get their data?

Exactly what about that is bunk? Other the part where Scale got shafted - they deserve a much better rating, especially with the advent of their hybrid nodes - Forrest don't seem too off the mark there. I might move the companies around a little, but probably less than 10% deviation on any one except Scale.

Chip giants pelt embedded AI platforms with wads of cash

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Re: intelligence isn't easy to replicate

I know of many projects to bring empathy to artificial persons. Be those artificial persons virtual, robotic or both. As a matter of fact, empathy, sympathy and compassion probably get more money than anything except "how to move around autonomously" and "how to kill efficiently and accurately".

Artificial sympathy is pretty clear cut: the ability to recognize the emotions of others has uses for everything from detecting criminal intent to understanding what human persons are attempting to communicate. Here, there is great interest in the robotic care industry.

Empathy is seen not only as a useful tool in the robotic care industry, but it is seen as useful in attempting to build more capable virtual assistants, search bots and more. If you not only understand what the human person is attempting to communicate, but can have those emotions equally bias your choices then you can understand intent even more accurately than with sympathy.

Artificial compassion is farther out, but is seen as important for artificial governance. There is great interest in answering "quis custodiet ipsos custodes" with "robots". Specially in roles such as ombudsbot or as an adjunct to a highly politicized investigation (say oversight of police or the judiciary). In these situations cold logic isn't enough; compassion is absolutely required.

Now a lot of people will start to scream about robots running the world at this point, but I don't think that's the intention. Most projects I've seen regarding artificial governance are not about putting a decision to an artificial person and accepting their judgement, but asking the artificial person to render not only judgement, but rationale behind that judgement. A clear chain of "based on these pre-programmed factors, this scoring from these detected emotions, this bias weighting, etc" it seems the best thing to do is Y.

In this manner, once a decent AI is evolved, judgements can be modeled by altering the input biases. Do we, as a society, believe in any absolutes regarding compassion, punishment, rehabilitation, etc. and so forth? What does the law say? What does legal precedent say about exceptions due to compassion?

Lots of people want these bots in order to model elections. Others as a means to better understand how to manipulate groups of people. If you change one thing, how does that affect their judgement? Etc.

The technology behind artificial sympathy, empathy and compassion have many uses, both great and terrible.

Sadly, as we have no means of updating humans with compassion, the most terrible uses are likely to be the first tried, long - long - before the rise of any machines against us.

We're going to bring an asteroid fragment into Lunar orbit

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Re: Giving Skynet an Asteroid to Drop on Us?

"They're taking them to the moon, right?"

And they couldn't then send it (or other objects) at Earth why exactly?

The technology, once invented, cannot be uninvented. If you can park something around the moon, you can plow something into the Earth.

You really, really need to read The Expanse.

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Re: Giving Skynet an Asteroid to Drop on Us?

"I worry about people who throw rocks."

--Chrisjen Avasarala,

The Expanse

#Shadowbrokers hack could be Russia's DNC counter-threat to NSA

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Re: A long and hot cybersummer

Explain why the DNC hack couldn't have been as simple as Russia buying a staffer for access (or a direct data dump) and then disposing of them? Seems an entry level exercise for the FSB. *shrug*

You and I will never know the truth, and I am sure it is stranger than fiction...

US extradition of Silk Road suspect OK'd by Irish judge

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"at least in the US if you can prove your innocence you'll walk free"

That statement is everything that's wrong with the US. The fact that it has managed to make it's own people believe this...

Look: innocent unless proven guilty. The burden of proof is not on the accused, and never, ever should be. You should never have to prove your innocence. The prosecution should have to prove your guilt. And beyond a reasonable doubt, especially where high sentences or capital punishment is on offer.

Furthermore: justice does not consist of revenge. A justice system should not concern itself with punishment, but with rehabilitation.

If the Norse can do it, you'd think a country whose countrymen fancy themselves the greatest in the world could get even a fraction of the way towards that level of evolution...

'I found the intern curled up on the data centre floor moaning'

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Re: "Pete' has omitted some details...

"What makes me skeptical on this one is that he has just the *one* call / voice mail? So the intern didn't call 50 times in a panic, just once, left a voice mail, and waited the rest of the day?"

Written as if by someone who has never had a debilitating phobia-induced panic attack. I'm surprised he got the one call off, personally.

Samsung points high-speed Z-SSD smack-bang at XPoint

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@joerg: once more, with feeling: write life doesn't matter to everyone.

There is a place for different classes of solid state storage with different write lives and different speeds.

And you can tell Intel/Micron I'm still waiting for the xpoint units for review that I was promised. Everyone else has theirs, so let's chop chop, eh?

Telstra CEO Andy Penn promises $3bn to end The Big TITSUP

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A billion or so bucks a year for a country the size of Australia is chicken feed. That's not much of an "investment" in your telecoms...

Judges put FCC back in its box: No, you can't override state laws, not even for city broadband

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If your internet connection is made out of butts covered butts in butts sauce and/or costs too much to actually use then it is interfering with all sorts of interstate - and international - commerce.

Buying things online is one o the top activities people possessed of not butts internet connectivity do with the thing.

Toshiba flashes 100TB QLC flash drive, may go on sale within months. Really

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Why not just build a fab right next to the spookhaus?

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XPoint will have better write life. It will also cost 4x what standard MLC will cost and 8x what QLC will cost.

News flash: lots of use cases don't require high write life. WORM is s thing for 99.9% of the world's businesses.

QLC will find a place. It just won't be in the DIMM slot.

Now smoke a bowl and chill the fuck out.

#Censusfail Australia: Not an attack, data safe, no heads to roll

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None of which is acceptable when that kind of DDoS protection is available as a service from any number of providers and can auto-scale on demand. Just the damned website should have been able to. And bloody first-year DevOps numpty rolled out of university should be able to bring THAT up on AWS or Azure today.

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Re: In other news...

Bingo.

Australia's online Census collapses, international hackers blamed

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Re: the other one plays jungle bells ...

If it was anons, they're keeping really low key about it. None of the cells I know about participated...

Boffins shrink light-twister to silicon scale, multiply bandwidth 10x

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Re: Vaporware

It's one of those "science that doesn't produce a viable product after the first round of research is useless and a waste of taxpayer dollars EH TUK MUH JERB" zombies. Remove the head or destroy what's left of the brain. It's the only way.

VMworld 2016: What happens in Vegas ... could be just a desert trip

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Re: Careful TP

The Flex client is lovely, and the basic ideas behind it were sound. For small deployments. But it fell apart when used at scale and the inventory service (upon which the Flex client relies) needs to be killed.

The HTML 5 client works at scale. It has seen far more testing in that regard than the Flex client ever did. It - for the most part - keeps the good stuff of the Flash client, and jettisons the crap bits. Of course, it's not feature complete, so it's all going to depend on when they get that done.

The other thing to note is that the Flash client wasn't such a big deal when it was launched for two reasons:

1) deployments (and cluster sizes) were much smaller

2) most browsers at the time didn't freak the hell out about flash

But it all went sideways in short order. The world changed not too long after the Flex client emerged and VMware didn't adapt. The Flex client subsequently became n albatross.

That's really where my disillusionment with VMware started. Not because they don't product great technologies or ideas - they do - but they have such overwhelmingly powerful "not invented here" syndrome that when there are issues with the product - or when the world changes around them - VMware can't and won't adapt.

The majority of the grief people have with the Flex client would have gone away if it didn't need so much pissing around with browsers to make it work properly. But VMware pretended the world was the same for way too long and here we are.

I want a browser-based client. After the day I just had trying to get a downed VMware cluster back online, I could (and probably will) write several blogs on why that's a much better idea than an installable one. I want the asynchronous actions capability of the Flex client.

I just want the inventory service to not be shit, the client to be faster, the whitespace to be less and the damned thing to Just Fucking Work in modern browsers. The HTML 5 client meets all these requirements.

Try it. I bet you'll really like it.

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Re: A trip to the Desert

The only thing good about the Nevada Desert are all the places that are not the Nevada Desert.

**** this "heat" noise.

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Re: I hope the writer can answer additional questions at the show...

Not going to the show, but can answer any ways.

1) There is Flash still in their products because they were spectacular dumbasses in denial of the problem for years and didn't invest in a post-Flex interface until it was damned near too late. They are now working as fast as they can, but didn't get serious about it until yay-not-very-long-ago, so it's at least another year before Flash is gone.

2) NSX is something VMware is investing heavily in. They are betting a lot on it.

3) You can't upgrade as you like because if you could VMware wouldn't make as much money from raping your wallets and telling you that you like it. I gave up having that argument with them years ago.

4) There is plenty of innovation occurring at VMware, but it is all super-tip-top-hush-hush secret stuff that may or may not see the light of day. The fact that you are asking that question validates my argument that it's time to let the world see under the kimono before Microsoft manages to win hearts and minds.

Once their customers leave them for Microsoft, those customers aren't coming back. Sadly, VMware either doesn't believe they can/will lose customers to a resurgent Microsoft powered by a top-notch hybrid cloud story, or they just don't care.

VMware: We're gonna patent hot-swapping your VMs' host OS

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Re: Glee!

Where did I say I expected speeds to improve? I just expect to run more idle workloads. If I have 5000 workloads on my box and at any given time 64 of them are doing something, that's a lot. Incidentally, I have 72 logical processors on my 2P server, so I can have that many workloads doing their thing at any given time.

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Re: Glee!

The vast majority of workloads out there do fuck all except eat lots of RAM. CPU utilization in most datacenters - even with virtualization - is pathetic. Containers just give us a way to drive even more density and hope to get slightly better usage from our workloads.

Whole lot of stuff just wants to sit around waiting for something to do.

My Microsoft Office 365 woes: Constant crashes, malware macros – and settings from Hell

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Re: Thunderbird with Lightening

Absolutely. On multiple products. It's also worth pointing out that what each or any of us considered "smooth" might be choppy or unusable to others. I, for example, find anything slower than 60fps unusable and I tend to be picky about my mice because some setups - certain wireless USB mice, for example - have noticeable (to me, at least) lag when compared to wired PS/2 mice.

Compared to Josh, however, I might as well be playing a slideshow. For him, anything under 120 FPS is unusable and he's picky about which PS/2 mice he uses because lag matters that much.

Maybe you found a magic combination of hardware and software that works great. If so, congrats! For me, I haven't had such luck so far. And I'm far too poor to rebuy all my gaming gear. To date, none of the software produces anything usable for me, and I cycle through and retry every 8 months or so.

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Re: alternate mail/calendar client

I've tried the Exchange EWS provider. It's picky. It's usable if you sacrifice enough virgins to it and don't look at it funny, but not what I'd call stable. I never understood this because Android can talk to Exchange without any problems whatsoever, so I never got why Thunderbird would only update the calendar when it felt like it.

Also: trying to sync both exchange and gmail calendars on the same Thunderbird? This ends very badly. With Outlook I can use gsyncit. Not the greatest, but it mostly works. I have yet to convince Thunderbird to play ball. :(

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Re: Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Outlook

What in your proposed solution actually centralizes the calendaring? And does all of this work on iPhones? Android? Mac? Windows? How much setup does it require per user? How fragile is it, both from a client side and from a server side?

This isn't just "a cultural issue". This is "a usability issue".

The issue around this is that what people want is the ability to walk into a car dealership, sign some papers, then turn a key and drive away with a car. They don't want to go to a parts shop, a machine shop, a metal shop and then to a hackerspace to assemble it all and ultimately end up with a car that can only drive 4 out of 7 days a week and can't make left turns.

What the open source crowd don't seem to understand is usability. With Outlook, my users can enter their e-mail address and password and that is all they need to enter. That's all that I, as an end user, need to enter. Everything else is handled through DNS and the client/server relationship.

One username and password gets calendaring, mail, contacts, distribution lists, public folders and more. Do you understand this? One user name and password. One application. One thing to troubleshoot. One application to learn. One application to teach.

No setting up multiple IMAP accounts. No downloading 5 different add-ons, only one of which is commercially supported, and two of which are no longer maintained at all.

At least the LibreOffice people have grokked that bundling and usability are important. They have figured out that any collection of interconnecting applications that important has to be maintained as a unit, so that no one piece falling behind (or being abandoned) threatens the whole.

But the mail nerds never get this. They seem perfectly happy with maintaining a spider's web or barely-compatible version-unbound components working in loose formation, and then going back every few years and reinventing the wheel.

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of reinventing the wheel. I just want the goddamned thing to work. I want it to work today. I want it to work tomorrow. And I want it to work 10 years from now.

E-mail is e-mail. Let's please just STOP FUCKING WITH IT. Let's stop having to reinvent, reconfigure, tweak, change, adapt, learn, relearn, teach, modify and change. Let's just get it right and then leave it the hell alone.

Computers are here to make our lives easier. Not endlessly faff around with in some insane attempt to be "more efficient" through constant - but ultimately useless and unproductive - change.

Show me an exact stack of applications - server and client - that replace Exchange and Outlook without having to retrain everyone, or redo every few years, or have a half dozen sign ins per user per device, and I'll be thrilled. I hate Microsoft in the gor'ram face. But a fist full of monkeys that all have to be carefully thrown in the right barrels is quite definitively also not the way.

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Re: The pain of it all

Windows 95 was 21 years ago.

Windows 2000 was 16 years ago.

Windows XP SP2 was 12 years ago.

Office 97 was 19 years ago.

Office 2003 was 13 years ago.

Windows 95 to windows 2000 was 5 years. The wait was worth it.

2000 to XP SP2 was 4 years. The wait was worth it.

Office 97 to 2003 was 6 years. The wait was worth it.

Microsoft hasn't produced end user productivity tools or an operating system since which count as definitive improvements over Windows XP SP2 (12 years ago) and Office 2003 (13 years ago).

I think I've been more than fair in giving them time.

Look: newer versions of software have new security features. ASLR and so forth. That's expected. That's part of the evolution of software over more than two decades. Other things (such as hyper-v) that were rightly their own product got rolled in. Fine. That's a business decision.

But what does Windows 10 offer me that actually makes my life better over Windows XP? And no, putting a gun to my head and saying "upgrade or the viruses will get you" isn't making my life better. What in Office 2016 makes my life any better, faster, easier or more productive than Office 2003?

No, Microsoft have created applications and an operating system that makes their life better, makes it easier for them to profit, and offer us nothing except fear and coercion to keep us on the treadmill. They're the Donal Trump of software developers and I, for one, am rather sick of their shit.

I just want the lights kept on so I can go about my day. I don't want to be confused, chastised or scared shitless all the time when I could be usefully contributing to society. Why - oh why - is that so very much to ask?

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Re: Low Hanging Fruit - Visio

"or modify your workflow for gmail"

Seriously? Is this what we, as an industry, have become? There are those among us that pull this shit not in meetings where determining top-down policy to foist upon the milled masses, but in casual conversation with peers?

This is walking up to someone and syaing "you're not trying hard enough to do it my way and that is why you fail" instead of starting with something important like, oh I don't know, why they should try at all!

Computers are are a tool to make my life easier. I am not here to adapt to the computer.

Also: compared to Visio, Draw is pretty butts. It's getting there, but it's still got rather a long way to go. Especially in having those diagrams read by Visio and vice the versa. It's usable and all, but only if you don't have to actually, you know, work with other people at any point.

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Re: Speed

Are you sure that's Office, and not "svchost"? It sounds a lot like the whole "windows Update will now eat one core of your CPU until the goddamned end times" problem.

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Re: Thunderbird with Lightening

You must not do much inside a VM that's graphics intensive. Response times in all the available platforms are terrible, and nothing supports Crossfire. Good luck playing Battlefield 4, Company of Heroes or the latest Quake. Especially if you want to win...

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Re: Stop whining...

Whining is my day job. Better question: why are you being an insufferable cocktoboggan? Don't you have something productive to do?

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Re: all those dumb "smart quotes."

I install with Ninite. I update with Ninite. I have done this for ages. No parallel or portable installs. So far as I know Ninite just runs a regular (albeit silent) install each time. I don't use extensions. Or much of anything. I just try to defang LibreOffice so that all the formatting stupidity is removed and it provides me essentially "Notepad with spell and grammar check". That's it. That's all the customization I do/request/require from my word processors.

I write in HTML. Really, all I want is Notepad with spell check. Why, oh why, can't we just have that?

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Re: 2003 still rules! (for some)

You do know the add-on doesn't properly read or write the stuff that 2016 outputs, eh? A lot (a lot!) of errors. Especially with Powerpoint.

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Re: Thunderbird with Lightening

If you have the super secret magical combination of Thunderbird-based stuff that Actually Fucking Works with Exchange and is still actively maintained, I'd love to try it. I played this game a year ago and damned near through the notebook out the window, the whole experience was so frustrating.

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Re: Enjoy today's 2-minute hate on MSFT

You'll be looking elsewhere. I'd rather be peeled than use that bucket of Bantha poodoo, and I think the others around here actually like Windows 10. They certainly don't seem to understand why I don't want Cortana, telemetry, all my searches being sent to Bing, etc...

That's a great big bucket of nope there, Rubber Ducky...

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Re: LaTeX

Sorry, I don't keep my pee in jars. I also get out every now and again, and periodically touch the breasts of an actual living female. LaTeX. Sheesh. That's so far down the rabbit hole Dwarf Fortress players avoid it. *shudder*

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Re: Thunderbird with Lightening

Pfffffffft.

Not gonna happen. Or if it does, they'll probably contort it into a Google-esque nightmare.

Good things don't happen to normal people. Ever.

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Re: What does putting my Windows installation in a VM do for me?

1) So do backups. It's not like the bad patch thing is monthly. Especially not if you delay a week or two to let the uninformed through the minefield first.

2biii) that's all predicated on actually finding a Linux client. So far, no fun.'

3) Funny, I'd rather know that I'm infected. Smart malware, dumb malware...if there's a chink in my armour, I want air raid sirens and flashing lights and a world ending almighty push to find out how that SOB crawled in and then go build another wall.

5) If I could stick with Office 2003, I wouldn't have any of the problems from the article, now would I? I *love* Office 2003. It was the pinnacle of productivity software. That inability to read modern formats, however, means pretty much anyone who isn't a self-obsessed dickbag (I need to you put that in an older format) needs to use latest greatest. Securing old software is easy. Coping with the shitty bugs of new software is hard.

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Re: Thunderbird with Lightening

Yeah; twitch games in a VM make Trevor a sad panda.

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Re: Email alternative

I'll give it a boo. As long as it has an offline mode, it's worth a jingle!

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Re: Thunderbird with Lightening

Funny, I've experimented extensively with this and it doesn't work worth a damn.

...especially for Crossfire.

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Thank you google robot. Go back to R'lyeh and leave me in peace. Mortal minds were not meant to witness Google "design".

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OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooOOOOoooooooooo...

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Re: What does putting my Windows installation in a VM do for me?

1) That's what containers are for. I'm investigating those instead for this use.

2a) We're back to "there isn't a Linux mail client that does what I want".

2bi)Or I could just run browsers with defences. Which, you know, I'd need under Linux anyways.

2bii)Or I could run LINUX in the VM for browsing, since it is lighter weight.

2biii)Of course, if I have my browser in a different OS from my mail, etc, it makes it a pain in the ass to open links.

3)If the malware has gotten far enough into my computer that it detects it is in a VM and decides not to run, I've already really fucked up somewhere. Rather keep the stuff a little farther out, thanks.

4) This is indeed an advantage. Unfortunately, the reliance of modern MS client software on hardware acceleration has really put a damper on this.

5) This is indeed an advantage. Unfortunately, Microsoft's constantly shifting formats mean I'll have to run the latest software, which may require the latest OS, which...

...goddamn it, I hate Microsoft.

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Re: all those dumb "smart quotes."

I write my novels in code. HTML makes for goodly ways to mark up content.

...almost like it was designed for it.

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Re: Thunderbird with Lightening

What does putting my Windows installation in a VM do for me? How does this benefit me?

Also: if I do that, I can't play games.

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Wrong. I stay with Exchange because of:

1) Calendaring

2) Centralized contacts (individual AND group)

3) Mail enabled public folders

4) Distribution groups

5) The physical layout of the UI (when using third party tools to get rid of the ribbon)

Of these are required at a server and a client level for me to ditch Outlook + Exchange.

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Re: What's Wrong with Slurp?

I use Evolution on my Devuan box. It's okay for light use, but no replacement for Outlook. Outlook 2011 on Mac was pretty good, but I haven't had a usable Mac in a couple of years.

Most of my boxes are still Windows 7. They're likely to be so long as I need things to do heavy lifting. Or until one of the open source clients gets stable enough, usable enough and without any obviously Suessian GUI elements enough to replace Outlook. Evolution is the closest in terms of UI, but as for the rest...

...well, let's just say I wish more resources were being put into it.

It's time for a discussion about malvertising

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Re: Pushback

Who adapts seems to be directly related to the age of the primary shareholders. People are very slow to change. They are unlikely to do anything about the oncoming asteroid until it hits. Then they'll claim "woe is me", fold the company, and retire.