On 11/25/05, Nate Duehr wrote: > Chen Xiao Fan wrote: > > 3) Outlook and Outlook Express are the de-facto standard. The IT > > administrators are not all stupid by choosing them. > > That's debatable. Outlook in a corporate environment still does a few > things that are completely non-email related that keep it the standard, > but those benefits are slowly going away, and free or nearly-free > replacements are stepping up to being able to handle those tasks. Since > most of those benefits are integrated with Exchange Server and Active > Directory, it'll take a long time for companies that have already spent > money on those things (very expensive... very very expensive when you > factor in the performance level of the hardware needed to operate > Exchange) to leave them. However, their smaller faster more-competitive > rivals will start using free or close-to-free tools to do the same jobs, > and they'll gain ground on the larger, slower to change, companies. > My company was originally using Novell with Pegasus mail. It is rather troublesome to use. Upgrade to Exchange greatly reduce the problems. No Linux on sight for coporate world yet. We are still using Windows XP with Novel server and IBM AS400 ERP server and Oracle server. And a Dell Windows computer is cheaper than a Dell Linux computer if you want the support. Do not get me wrong. I like Linux and I like open source. However I do think that the free alternative is not that cheap after all in the coporate setup. > That's my opinion on it anyway... a server or server farm with > appropriate RAID, speed, and capabilities for 10,000 users on Exchange > is enormously expensive, compared to say a farm running postfix, > Courier-IMAP, and clients running Thunderbird or Evolution. > Nanyang Technology University of Singapore has a massive Exchange Server setup (20000 to 30000 users or more, including alumni account, maybe 60,000 or more). It is said to be much cheaper than SUN and Digital Unix based solution. > If the organization can culturally deal with using an off-board > calendering app (or better a web-based one on their Intranet), since > it's rare to see Outlook calendaring used extensively BETWEEN > organizations... they can save boatloads of money on software licenses > and hardware. But the cultural shift is sometimes harder than the > technological one. Outlook is very convenient with the same organization. Between organization, it is not much useful. Web-based is the buzz word now. In the real world, I hate the web service thingy. After they move the AS400 terminal based ERP application to web-service, I need to spend 10 minutes on a 1minutes task originally on the AS400 terminal. > > Many organizations "front-end" Outlook with regional or departmental > Exchange servers, and do the heavy mail transport lifting behind the > scenes with Unix or Linux. The bigger the organization, the more likely > they have a system like this in the "back room". Yes Outlook support other server as well. Outlook express news reader is much better than a lot of Unix email client when comes to news reading. > > 4) Anti-top-posting sentiment is more religious or historical than > > it should be justified. Some old timers make it a rule and try to > > impose it to other users. They are still doing it, however only > > on some unix-centric mailing list which by no means should be the > > norm now. > > It's grammatical, not religious. Unless you call English professors and > great Writers and Editors, "Father" or "Reverend". ;-) > Okay I do not do that . In my dictionary there are no words called "Reverend". ;-) I am a free thinker and do not believe there is another one high high above. ;-) > Of course, some of the debates that language people get into, and the > proliferation of more and more slang into English would tend to make me > agree -- perhaps English should be taught as a religion! You have to > believe grammar is important, or you will use words like, "Shizzle my > zizzle" in daily language. (No offense meant toward Snoop-Dog, > Flava-Flave, or any of the rap music crowd!) > Luckily English is not taught as religion. > I understand your point - I just think when we're trying to communicate, > adding complexity in any form is backwards. Top-posting adds > complexity, bottom-posting doesn't. Contextual posting adds less > complexity, but has the added benefit of helping the reader separate the > ideas into digestible pieces. > I do not agree that "bottom-posting doesn't add complexity". To scroll to the bottom adds a bit of complexity involved. To leave two empty lines waste bandwidth. Start from the empty line is the natural thing to do --> top posting adds less complexity. Context posting above your name may not be a good idea. ;-) > Nate > -- Regards, Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist