by ezs | Nov 8, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized
There has been a lot of discussion recently about Novell dropping KDE in favour of Gnome on its corporate desktop offering Novell Linux Desktop.
[Note – I really don’t think this matters on a server – clean up your servers; reduce the bloat; reduce the risk – remove X and a desktop from your servers 🙂 Believe me – ssh is your friend]
I’ve posted before on this – my personal opinion is that the real battle is not over KDE vs. Gnome. It’s about making a more productive, good looking, consistent desktop; one that you can “Just Use” (TM). It would be great to see components of KDE running nicely on Gnome, Gnome pieces running on KDE, common themes – can you see my paradise here?
This should not be a religious argument. There has been much work between the two communities – even as far back as the 1.0 versions (common menuing for example).
There have been some notable efforts in this space more recently. freedesktop.org tries to drive interoperability for all GUI/WM environments on X – with some success; even more recently last month the Tango Project was launched to try and deliver a common user experience.
These are all good efforts. I believe Novell has supported several of these initiatives; as well as promoting choice within (over 50% of Novell employees are using NLD as their primary production OS).
by ezs | Nov 4, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Novell recently announced an interesting change to its product licensing:
Device Licenses
Customers will now have the option to license qualifying products by device for their organization.
This optional counting method is available on select “User” licensed products. To implement this option, customers can simply begin counting User-licensed products according to the number of devices utilizing the software functionality, rather than the number of users.
No conversion forms or documentation are required. However, customers should track device licensing counts and products internally for usage and audit purposes. Customers must declare their counting method to Novell or their partner up front, and must adhere to this method for audit and payment purposes. If the customer does not declare device licensing, user is assumed to be the default on all user-licensed products.
This is a change that was included in ZENworks 7 – it makes licensing a lot simpler for some organisations.
by ezs | Nov 3, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized, ZENworks
Wow. There has been a flurry of activity with ZENworks Server Management in the last month or so.
Martin Irwin in WorldWide Support built a set of CPKs to deploy ZENworks 6.5 SP2 across your infrastructure; he is now working on delivering this with the standalone CPK engine (think of this as a small part of the ZENworks Server Management subscriber agent) to all customers. That is way cool.
Peter Lambrechtsen in New Zealand has almost finalised a CPK (hopefully soon with the standalone engine) that will let you deploy ZENworks 7 in your network.
All very cool – and showing real savings for customers deploying ZENworks in an enterprise.
Centralised deployment, across hundreds of servers – in hours. Now that’s value.
by ezs | Nov 3, 2005 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, travel, Uncategorized
McCarran Airport in Las Vegas has fast free wifi.
The JW Marriott Resort in Las Vegas has a voucher-based wifi implementation – but it only blocks ports 8 (http/https) – not anything else. So if you don’t mind not having web browsing you can – hypothetically – do email (GW, POP, IMAP, SMTP), other stuff (SSH, RDP) and also things like IM. Oh well.
by ezs | Nov 1, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I’ve been using Zappos for a while – it’s a great example of how a web-based service can and should work.
Here are my positive pieces:
- if you know what you want – it’s really easy to find and buy a pair of shoes. Look at real shoes in a real shop; buy online. (Oh how traditional stores must hate that)
- if you want to look for something new – it’s nice and clean navigation to find what you want to compare. The images of the shoes look clear and realistic. That’s good.
- great shipping policy. Free shipping – I’m often ‘upgraded’ to 2 day priority at no cost. That’s just splendid.
- excellent returns policy. Print out the return label online; put it on the box; arrange pickup. No cost, no hassle. Compare this to other online stores (urg – Swatch are awful for this) where they issue an RMA then make you ship the product back. Or they ship you a return document. It’s all time and hassle.
- feedback on purchases. Just like any other successful site you can comment on the goods purchased (shoes – how much can you say about a pair?) and on the service itself.
- purchase history. I liked those shoes so much I’ll buy some more. Or you can view what you did purchase and look for similar things.
Overall Zappos is pretty splendid.
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