Well, from a personal perspective, trade shows are a great place to meet people. If you go to niche trade shows year after year, you get to know the other people who go. I've made some good friends in the trade press who have really helped me out in the past.
You can. XServe is essentially a vanity purchase, and no company in their right mind would buy them. They're about twice as expensive as the same box from Dell.
Apple needs some way to differentiate themselves then. If Grand Central is ridiculously better (just for example) than anything the competition have, then it might be work it. If you just want to run JBoss or something tho', buy a stack of beige boxes and just throw them away when they break,
Apple's enterprise "goal": be able to sell a compelling "smart enterprise" toolkit that "just works", and is a near-
complete top-to-bottom solution.
What this would wind up looking like: all employees have company-issued iphones (or iphone-like devices, if more form factors become available), company-issued apple laptops, and there's a couple xserves in a closet somewhere.
The xserves give the company integrated calendaring-and-task-management that just works, along with a platform for running whatever internal webapps, file serving, and related tasks.
The iphones are smoothly synced up to the company calendar, and possibly are running some in-house applications (eg: for a logistics company, the data-entry software the delivery guys use to note when and where stuff got delivered). Because these iphones are company-issued the company has some backdoors to the iphone's drm layer; this adds a layer of security to the devices in the event that an employee loses the phone and/or attempts to go rogue.
The laptops play nice with everything else.
Currently you can cobble together an equivalently-functional system with a combination of exchange, blackberries or windows mobile devices, and a lot of custom development and system integration; this is very doable once you're large enough to have a dedicated IT staff, but is often out of reach for small-or-midsize businesses.
Apple would like to be able to make this a turnkey system: you pays your money, and get an integrated phone/email/calendaring/collaboration environment; plug it in, set it up, and you're done, and no more sourcing your combined it-and-telecom services from many different vendors.
Target customers would include schools, medical and professional offices, and anyplace else where there's a huge gain from more-efficient scheduling and communications but not necessarily a lot of ability to develop in-house grade-A technical staff; fortune-500 types might also benefit, but wouldn't be the direct target.
Apple's biggest holdup here is email: they've licensed a lot of what you need to work with exchange, but they don't currently offer any way to run exchange yourself, and they don't have a competing product...ical is nice, but it's not exchange.
Until the email-server issue is sorted out, I can't see apple officially trying to enter this market.
It's worth noting: even in the event this succeeds, the xserve is never going to make sense as a beige-box replacement; it'd just be a major component of an integrated vertical solution.
What sort of price are you looking to pay? I've written a lot of secure software in the past, and I may well be able to recommend a couple of firms who have done a similar job for me but I'm afraid they don't come terribly cheap.
Oh, OK. The number I was looking for something close to had a couple more zeros on the end of it, I'm afraid. A decent code audit will take about a quarter of the time it took to write the code and its accompanying tests, and is an extremely specialised job. I'm not sure I can recommend anything in that sort of price range.
What is it you're actually wanting audited, and what is at stake if it turns out to be broken?
I was imagining presenting our security model to someone (or a team), having them ask questions, and then do some analysis of our systems to make sure we've implemented the model correctly (and don't have other gaping holes). Although a full audit of the code would be much more complete and secure, I was looking for a slightly different risk/cost tradeoff.
Generally, this sort of thing isn't worthwhile unless the liabilities you're exposed to by being broken are in excess of about $10M. Anything less than that, and it's a job for a butch insurance policy.
If you're reasonably confident that you've got a decent security model, and you've coded it defensively you're probably OK. I wouldn't stress about it too much at this point.
We're certainly under $10M in liability, we're confident in our model, and we're seeking less formal (but free) feedback from friends and peers on it, so I think you're right - we just won't stress about it too much right now.
Thanks a lot for the advice. I really appreciate it.
Ha! A wonderful example of why we have laws regarding unfair contract terms. I can't believe they found a lawyer either ignorant or optimistic enough to put this in. The remedy is out of all proportion with the injury (which, as far as I can tell is non-existent) so the contract is unenforceable.
I can't believe they found a lawyer either ignorant or optimistic enough to put this in.
I sure can. My only question is: Did he bite his pinky while adding the clause and pronounce it "meeeelion"?
Its strange to think that, as a lawyer, you can write a 'program' in legalese to run on 'the legal system' and collect your pay without ever having to run it. Your client finds out later (much) if it will run or not! Wish my code worked that way.
The $2MM liquidated damages clause may indeed be a penalty, but clause would then just disappear. Either way it wouldn't affect the validity of the rest of the contract.
Being involved somewhat in DTN, I'm here to tell you that the RFC 5050 bundle protocol is a steaming pile of crap. It desperately needs updating to stop trading off minuscule numbers of bytes saved in transmission for ridiculous pain in actually parsing and storing bundles. Oh, and the security drafts. Don't get me started on the security drafts. DTN is nowhere near a mature and well formed technology yet.
So, if you're not sure how you feel about unions what have you done as an individual to improve your pay and how has it worked out? If they're saying no to the union, I'm guessing either you've done nothing or if you did ask for more money yourself, they simply laughed at you.
Given that, if you choose to cross the picket line, what you're saying to your employer is that you're happy with your pay which you say is not the case. You're also making the statement that you either think your co-workers who will be striking are either malcontents or greedy, unless you know they're getting significantly less money that you for the same job.
Your decision is simply whether or not you believe your and co-worker's current compensation is fair, or if the deal the union is proposing better represents your market value.
I actually feel like the pay is pretty fair. Its a pretty easy way to make enough money to live on. Obviously, we teach math, so we are pretty uniquely qualified, but we don't exactly generate a lot of "revenue" for the university, so I understand being paid a small amount.
However paying tuition brings up a whole new set of problems. As masters students, we take 2-3 upper level graduate classes, which are very challenging and demanding. We also take up a lot of the faculty's time with these courses. I am receiving something of value, that I probably should pay for. However, as graduate students, we are practically researchers for the faculty, so at some point we transition from pure consumers to net zero or net producers as we become more experienced. Perhaps by teaching one of the universities courses, I should receive the education and a small stipend in return? Its all about expectations.
You should try other teas, like green, white or even red. I always hated the normal black tea and had to use sugar or milk with it, but now I drink several cups of green tea a day.
Does it annoy anyone else when people say operating system, when they mean user interface or window manager? You'd think after a year or so covering the industry, they'd get their terminology straight.
By having a landing page that isn't just a giant map. You need to explain what your site does. As it is, I suspect most of your visitors will arrive and depart almost immediately.
We do have a bounce rate of about 40%, which is something we're trying to manage. I think part of that is not knowing what to do on the site, and part of it is because the site is really slow (until tomorrow when we launch the new version).
We're thinking about switching from a giant map home page to having the "Geo News" (in the main menu) as our home page, once the news page is polished.
We'll do that eventually... it's just another feature filed in our bug tracker. It's not clear how valuable that is though, particularly on a US level.
The first goal for personal geo-location will be to show foreign visitors a world map.
Not precisely a web app per se, but a product I'd really like to see someone produce. It seems to me that the BBC's iPlayer sets the standard for TV stations broadcasting their content over the internet. They have flash streaming at reasonable quality, plus various species of download for different platforms including portable devices, and they don't discriminate a huge amount by operating system.
What I think would be wonderful would be if someone would produce a similar system packaged up and ready to be installed at any TV station. Just add a few racks of machines for encoding. Hell, if you were going for real shiny-shiny, you might even do the encoding "in the cloud" on EC2 or somesuch.
I'm not entirely sure how much money you could make doing this, but its certainly an idea.
