System i Addict

In the end I may end up being the smartest dude in technology. I have been calling for this move for years and while I know if I yelled and said it long enough over time it would eventually happen. With new leaked screen shots of Windows 7 out and looking more confusing than ever, and an even better release that Linux hackers are starting to move to MacOSX. Is this the shift Apple has been looking for? Is the failure of Vista and the silent, growing success of MacOSX finally put us at the tipping point.

While I would break my heart to see Linux fall short, it’s time for something other than Windows. Windows is garbage and it’s failed and disappointed us for years and I think the consumer is know waking up and seeing it for what it’s worth.

I sure do hope this is going the direction I think it is and time will only tell.

You don’t have to talk me into not liking Mimcrosoft. From the IT road I have traveled they are not as smart as some people make them out to be. Microsoft makes a decent all around OS for the desktop and the same piece of crap OS for the Server. I know there are smart people out there everywhere who think Microsoft is better than say an IBM or an Apple, but these are the same people who want State Run Health Care and Love Obama, some day you will up and understand Microsoft, The VA Hospitals or State Run Hospitals and Obama were all bad for you. They are all really good looking turds!

For the moment the American people are starting to figure out at least one of them, that Microsoft ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. LINK 

So one down and the rest to go. To cap this all off. You don’t want Free Health Care because we can’t afford it, and it will end up being much like the VA is now. Slow and Angry! Lastly Obama is an empty suit, I told you this a year ago. He has nothing to stand on becasue he has done nothing. He wrote a novel about a guy with his same name that has people wonder about his mental position and he promises everything only as the end of his speech to tell you he will promise you nothing but he will try hard. Plus is he more communist than you all think. I am going to go ahead and call him that because you really need to look at his issues and realize he and Stalin all over again.

<David climbs down off his soap box now>

I know I have made it a point to call Al Gore a moron and that I don’t think Global Warming is man made, but if it is then it’s not the US that is casueing it. It’s places like China and other countries right now who have little to no emission laws in place. Where 2 stroke motors are not regulated and the film of smog is all over everything. I think before we try to clean up the US and the supposed problems here we need to lean on China, Indonesia and other countries in that part of the world to help out as well.

LINK to Blog Entry

Link to Angry Person whom I agree with.

Link to Thieves

We all know the BSD Daemon is copy written and is not to be used unless you get permission from Marshall Kirk McKusick. I am sure he is OK with people working with BSD or wanting to use it to support BSD but for a company to use it is just bad, the fact that they are sex based has nothing to do with it. They stole someone else’s material for their gain. I say we sue the crap out of them and put that money back into the project!

Here is a link to the man who owns the rights to the Daemon.

So I spent the entire weekend thinking about Java. It’s not everyone favorite language but lets face it the damn thing is pretty popular. Also while I am no fan of where Sun is going or not going with it’s Solaris 10 which it loves for everyone to run but them and the inability to decide on a CHIP for their platform. I wonder who at Sun thinks that offering SPARC, AMD 32 Bit, AMD 64 Bit, Intel P4, Intel Core Duo, Intel 64, and Intel 4 Way is that way to make it in IT. Nothing like confusing the customer from day one. Hey how many different types of CPUs come in that iSeries or pSeries? Oh that would be ONE. One ass kicking Power5+ Chip and with Power6 on the way running at about 5GHz Sun had better be ready to drop those prices.

I do think they got Java out right when the market was looking for something like that.

The idea of write once and run on many is a compelling reason. So with that said I ran to my trusty book shelf and started to read WROX Press Beginning Java2 by Ivor Horton. First Ivor is way to smart for his own good. There are over 1200 pages in this book and not a one is wasted with fluff. If you have enough data in your head to pump out a 1200 page book just for beginners you are way to smart. Hats of to Ivor!

I got to work on Tuesday and talked to some of the Java guys and they pointed me to this page. While Ivor may be the king of Java from WROX, Bruce Eckel is the king of FREE Java learning. You can download his books for free from here and while I learn best with a book in hand I like the idea of FREE! Thanks Bruce!

I may explain later why I am looking into Java but for now lets leave it at that. While I have never been known for my programming skills it frustrates me not to be able to write code. I try to code as much as possible when I have the time and something I need to write, but it’s a struggle for me at times as it is for many people. I would love nothing more than to create via code.

Why do smoke detectors run out of batteries @ 2 or 3 AM vs. say 5 PM? I don’t know who the engineer is that made the smoke detector systems, but in my last 3 places I’ve lived have to loose the backup 9V battery @ 3 AM?

Last night at 3 AM the smoke alarm start going off. Of course Kelly wakes up and says…”I smell smoke”, there was no smoke, maybe she can smell 9V batteries going bad?

Maybe I had just crapped the bed because the stupid smoke alarm was feeling lonely and wanted to wake us up? What ever she was smelling it was not smoke?

The smoke detector in our bedroom in the highest part of the ceiling was going bad. The other problem is that the little RED light that is supposed to tell us the battery is going bad only flashes, and when your tired @ 3 AM you blink allot and you have to really wake up to be able to see it. Bastards!

So off the garage to get the ladder and find a replacement battery.  Now the ladder is on the other side of the garage on the wall on the other side of Kelly’s car. Then you have to try not to drop it on the car and manage it back to the house without taking out anything you might value, like a wall or a light?

We actually had a 9V battery in the house(going to get more today). Really the 9V battery was in Kelly’s car for her Mr. Microphone of something, I know I laughed about it but can’t remember what she said she had a battery in her car for?

I changed it and then could not get back to sleep. All of these smoke detectors are wired into the house electrical and all go off when one goes off so they are loud.

Does anyone else have this problem? Do your smoke detectors only decide not to work at odds hours of the night? Am I psyhco or is this a real problem and what is it about the middle of the might and things that are electric. They all seem to want to act up when you are sleeping?

So with Vista sales not where they should be and for good reason, it sucks, and nothing to do since they have another 7 years before they have to deliver the next version of Windows.

Microsoft can’t beat Linux at thier own game so they corner Novell and now they are coming after the rest of the OpenSourced Community.

Microsoft is dying and we are watching them fall, and it sure is sweet. Problem is they have tons of money and can try to beat up the Open Sourced community all they want cause you can’t beat the price of FREE and Microsoft knows it.

Link to ZDNET Article

Microsoft claims that free and open-source software violates more than 230 of its patents, according to a magazine report published on Sunday.

In an interview with Fortune, Microsoft top lawyer Brad Smith alleged that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents, while its user interface and other design elements infringe on a further 65. OpenOffice.org is accused of infringing 45, along with 83 more in other free and open-source programs, according to the Fortune article.

I know Biff hates Patents and now so do I. Microsoft can go to hell. They are theives and are up to no good!

Fourtune Article

InfoWeek Article

Torvalds writes: ‘It’s certainly a lot more likely that Microsoft violates patents than Linux does.’ He added: ‘Basic operating system theory was pretty much done by the end of the 1960s. IBM probably owned thousand of really “fundamental” patents… The fundamental stuff… has long, long since lost any patent protection.’”

Here is a new list of complaints form users

IBM in all it’s wisdom has put the cap of 40 users on the 515. I have mentioned this before. Why? We may never know. It just seems like another stupid move by IBM. They seem to make these from time to time and it is dumbfounding. Like the move to keep what will go down as the ugliest mail client, Lotus Notes, around for so long before working on a decent replacement. Why they would announce to the world they were going to move all global desktops and laptops to Linux in the next five years and then do nothing with their Windows Software to foster that move.

Why would you make the fastest, and most reliable system, the i5 in a nice small affordable package and then put a limit on it? Why? Please someone with brains take over the i5 business unit at IBM and do something right for a change? In the last 20 years IBM has bumbled the i5 product line like a bunch of keystone cops. They get something right like the price and the size and then do something stupid like put a cap on the number of users.

You want to sell more i5 units than you ever have before? Put someone like me in charge of the i5 unit and give me 5 years, I would put sales through the roof and it would all be because I would take the likes of DELL and Microsoft on head to head. I would give them night mares and make them scramble to keep up with me. The issue is that IBM has followed the market instead of leading it. The i5 is a super system and they still hid it in a corner and put Lenovo laptops on the homepage. Those laptops are not going to save IBM from floundering. You have to innovate and lead the charge and the i5 can do that but you don’t lead with a 40 user cap…..you get beat up and batted down for being stupid and short sighted.

You don’t have to be brilliant to sell the i5 you have to out smart the competition and you have to sell it’s strong points. I know how I would do it and I am not fancy college grad with a Phd or a Masters but I do know CIOs and CEOs and I know what the Microsoft morons are doing and I know you just shot yourself in the foot again?

The i5 team at IBM seems inept again. They don’t seem to understand that IT shops are getting less and less money not more. They are wondering if IBM is still the right choice and SUN who just open sourced Solaris and will do anything to get a sale is going to eat this 40 user cap up for lunch. Did no one in the room when you were working out this 40 user plan call any of you stupid? Did no one complain out loud, there had to be one person in the room who said I don’t think that’s such a good idea…give that person a promotion and the rest of you get to go home for being stupid! They should be in charge not the moron at IBM who thought the cap was a good idea?

I am sure they will find someway at COMMON to avoid this topic as I am going to bring it up as much as I can? IBM has made a move that I think will go down as one of the death nails of the i5 instead of one of those moments when it made a positive impact unless they fix it in the next 15 days or so to save face and make things right.

Oh did I also mention I would get rid of the interactive cap as well? Just to make up for all those years or taxing us for interactive users.

I have a few opinions on this article. They may not be popular, but I will give you what I know and have seen in the last 17 years.

CIO Insight has an article that points out that the number of women in IT is dropping. They may have the numbers right but I think the reasons are wrong.

Over all if you were to stand on my chair in my IT dept right now, and I do stand in my chair alot around here to see what is going on, I can tell you that IT has less women in it, but if you look at the numbers over the past 30 years and I don’t have those numbers but it would be more of a guess based on conversations and common sense I would also be able to conclude that the numbers for women in IT up way up compared to 1980.

Read the rest of this entry »

Link to Article

I am going to establish some items here. I live in Colorado. I have been to a hand full of FRUIG meetings. I have made contact with many of the IBM staff in Denver and I know Lonnie and others connected to FRIUG. I was not in the day to day operations of FRIUG. I did attempt to help them with a number of things over a two year time span.

So with that established. Let me take what Lonnie says bit by bit and explain it from my stand point, keeping in mind I am not anti-Lonnie, rather I don’t think the FRIUG in Denver was very good at knowing who their target market was and they catered the meetings to those eight people who always attended.

“I think user apathy was responsible for discontinuing the Front Range IBM User Group,” says Lonnie Kendall, the president of the Denver-area group when the decision was made to pull the plug in December. “We were having the same eight people show up for each meeting. Nobody was interested in joining. We went from monthly meetings to quarterly meetings to closing the doors.”

It is sad that Denver lost the Front Range IBM User Group. I am truly very sad, but at the same time my head is thinking of all the reasons from my perspective as to why it may have failed. The same eight people showed up I think is inaccurate. This is an exaggeration on Lonnie’s part. The fact that eight poeple kept shoing up should also key you off to the problems that were there.

At times it was 3 and at other I had seen over 20. So this doom and gloom is created by the group, and the constant that IBM does not care about them was a point I tried to bring up with a few people but only got ignored. If you think IBM is ignoring you then you will eventually spread that like a cancer and everyone starts to believe it. I know many people in the Denver area that have attended at least one FRIUG meeting and never went back for one reason or another.

Mainly because the eight who were always there were very self involved and didn’t want any outside or new help. The other reason was relevance. The topics had to be relevant to the community. The eight people who showed up catered the topics to their needs and for the rest of us in the area there was no reason to go find out how to do free flow RPG, put CL in your RPG, or how to compile Pascal on the iSeries. Pascal is a learning language and is not meant for production level applications and especially Enterprise solutions.

People don’t realize the value of networking, Kendall says. “They don’t want to take four hours out of their evening or afternoon to go to a meeting. If they need education they go out and do a Webcast or a search on Google or they go to IT Jungle.”

It would have been the same eight people who showed up and of them none of them seemed to interested in networking outside of their group. Not to say they were not capable of working outside the group but they didn’t seem interested at all about new blood or help of anykind.

I can give an example of this. I wanted to be apart of the group and contribute and make it stronger so I attend a few meetings. There was a “personality” named Robert Tipton who seemed to only want to talk to the people of the users group when he needed them to do something for him or you were a “C” level contact. Other than that Bob had little to no use for you. Unfortunately Bob also used the group to help him and manipulated the group for their contacts and such to gain a better footing in Colorado and the surround areas. When you have people who don’t give back to the group and try to do everything they can to suck the life out of it you are eventually going to run dry.

I had many times when I ran into Bob and he made a point to either leave while talking or avoid the conversation. Grated I had nothing to offer him but conversation so that may have been why he often left without much to say. We can talk more about Robert later. He is a very successful person who claims to have written a pamphlet book which he sold at the meetings for a ridiculous sum. I think Bob is funny, bit I deagree with many of his ideas and lectures about IT. I am allowed to do that as I have an opinion and a blog.

Other than Robert the people who did attend were a mixed bag. You always had Lonnie there and Mark from ISS, there were always others from other places but these were the two main road blocks people getting things done.

Kendall’s frustration with the indifference shown by System i, iSeries, and AS/400 professionals boils over into anger due to the lack of interest by IBM in its OS/400 community.

This is just out and out funny. IBM was more than happy to talk more about what to with the users group in Denver. I had many conversations about the user group with many people at IBM. I was also told by IBM about all the calls that were made to FRIUG to help out and were either ignored or rejected.

When I was attending the meetings there was talk of a new contact at IBM and none for the users group. I would have to wonder if it didn’t have to do with the leaders of the group and their inability to branch out and really get the new people in the community, like me, to help out and become apart of the group. I just had lunch with IBM and I did start up the Lotus Users Group in Denver last year and they were talking to me about what we could do? Funny they seem to have ideas I think the group just needed some fresh blood, but the “8″ and I am going to call it from now on ran most of them off or never made them feel welcome. Not to say that the 8 were not nice or polite, they were, but they didn’t seem open to new ideas and they didn’t seem like they wanted any help.

The absence of IBM support for the Front Range LUG is more than a bit embarrassing. Kendall points out that IBM has a sizable presence in Denver, with a disaster recovery center, a large tech center, and an office in Boulder.

I may be wrong but the IBM presents at Boulder is not a heavy iSeries or AS/400 presence. It’s more infrastructure, but I could be wrong as I have never been over there and ask everyone what they do at IBM.

IBM as I remember it was presenting at the meetings on a regular basis and the group seemed to attract the most obscure IBM people on the face of Rochester. Rochester has some very odd and very smart people who can come present and FRIUG seems to attract them. I attended two meeting in two months that really smart IBM people who started the conversation with words I had never heard of and ended it by explaining how to do things on the iSeries at the assembly code level. Please someone tell me how that helps me Admin and iSeries better. Granted interesting but not topical or relevant. I think this is the theme I am driving at, the user group is not and was not relevant to the community and needed to die in order for it to be started again, reborn if you will. I do hope that someone will pick up the ball and try a go at it again.

There’s a two-edged sword aspect to IBM’s involvement with local user groups. It’s needed to some degree, but it is also pushed away when it begins to feel like influence pedaling. The LUGs strive to maintain a level of autonomy and are sensitive to being served the Big Blue Kool-Aid without a break.

Sure this is a known quantity with a users group. You have to have everyone present ideas and have to limit the “selling” time to the end of the meetings. Members are to present their ideas, their wins and they failures. The group is supposed to learn from each other, not try to talk about technology that is 15 years old and that the iSeries is moving away from.

We all have to drink the cool-aid to an extent, we are all apart of the community and sometimes it’s apart of the trade off to keep the LUG running. I welcome the IBMers to come and present, but I see Lonnie calling IBM “THE MAN” than he does calling them partners. IBM would rather support users groups than run them but you have to have them import Rochester SME’s to get that job done or contact VAR’s to bring in SME’s either way you have to take the pitch, with IBM is more limited as they know you are customer and are now looking for solutions.

For now that is all I can talk to on this topic, I have no exposure with the Pheonix group and will save my comments on COMMON at this point.

I would like to point out a few things. I tried right after I moved to Colorado to become involved and for about 7 or 12 months I struggled with Mark of ISS to give me a shot at remaking the web site for them and getting it a better look that might attract a bigger base and create some on-line activity in order to create a need to come meet. I wanted to make the on-line community strong so the local community would want to meet and talk more.

No one at FRIUG saw it my way and I came to the realization that they wanted to keep heading down the same road they had been going down. In the end Mark would never give me the go ahead to update the site and create a new look for the LUG. At one point I called Lonnie and asked him to help me, help Mark, help the LUG get a new site up and running and was told to leave it alone.

They were not accepting of new members and also were not open to new ideas coming from these people, even though month after month I would get asked about topics and would submit them and never see them come about.

I grew tired of fighting the group and figured I could get the same community experience on-line from places like COMMON, iSeries News, and others to get my fix and create my community. I heave created a blog, the one you are reading and I think it draws a good many readers from around the community.

You can see by the web site that is still up what was going on when they went down. The board of elections is going on in 2004. There is a listing of the last known memebers of the group. Note that the bulk of this info has not changed since 2003 when I started a move from Atlanta to Denver and was looking for a user group to grow some iSeries roots in Denver. It really saddens me that Lonnie is blaming everyone but the seven who were the ones in charge.

With that said I am going to open up the floor for comments and again this is my opinion and my experience. Others may have seen it another way and that is fine I just wanted to get my side of the story out so that IBM does not look like the bastard in this story, I think the blame could go both ways.

Andrew Says “Windows Vista has modest minimum system requirements that everyone with a system from within the last 5 years should have no problem meeting. Simply adding more system memory (RAM) is the most anyone with a less than 5 year old system should have to do to meet them.”

David’s Take - Windows Vista is a huge Pig. It’s eat resources and Andrew is doing nothing more than sugar coating the truth. I have been playing with Vista for a long while and I have not been about to put together a system that could handle it like it should to date.

My latest Vista system was as Follows:

It’s less than 2 years old

Pentium 4 3.0Ghz
1.5 GB of Ram
ATi X700 256Mb Video Card
100GB Hard Drive

You know what Vista was slow and took a while to open things. Those may be the requirements but they are junk and are to make you buy the software and then you will relize you need a bigger box. According to the requirements from Microsoft I should be able to run Vistajust fine but I can’t and it won’t.

Link to the entire post

Also while we are helping Andrew get more clicks to his site, how many different versions of Windows do we need? Could that be any more confusing?

Windows Vista Home Basic Edition - $199
Windows Vista Home Premium Edition - $239
Windows Vista Business Edition - $299
Windows Vista Enterprise Edition - You don’t want to know
Windows Vista Ultimate Edition - $399 (let’s just say $400)
Windows Vista Starter Edition
Windows ‘N’ Editions
Windows ‘K’ Editions

Come on. Let me list all of the Editions and prices there are for Apple:

MacOSX 10.4 - $129

Let me List all of the Editions and prices there are for my favorite version of Linux, Ubuntu:

Ubuntu 6.06 - FREE

Now you can choose Kubuntu and Xubuntu but it’s all the same thing you just have to choose what kind of desktop interface you like, not what applications you will need or how you are going to use it.

We all know Microsoft is made of money and this is just another way for them to stick it to you. It’s sad that at the end of the day many people will buy the wrong version of Windows only to find out that they need to go buy another to do what they need.

It makes me sad to think that any of you reading this are going to spend any aount on Vista. Please consider your alternatives. You do have a choice and we need to start making the right one starting today.

Anyone want to post what is wrong with this cover? I saw this in a book and about came apart. So please post your findings here. If no one gets it after a few days I will turn into “Captian Obvious” and point it out.

Windows Vista made Easy by Que Publishing

Information Week’s John C. Welch writes and interesting article this week about how he pitted the ever so stable and easy to use (My Words) MacOSX up against the every so bloated and virus laden(Again my words) Windows Vista.

I think this sums it up:

“Hidden behind all of this hoopla, however, is the fact that as much of an improvement Vista is over XP, its main competitor, Mac OS X, still stacks up really well — and even tops Vista in several important areas.”

So with that said I can also add without question MacOSX has been around since 2001 for the current Mac Computers, and if you go back and do a little history with UNIX and Apple then you will find that the original MacOSX has been around now for about 15+ years in some form or another. UNIX as we all know is a “business class” OS. Windows on the other hand should be asked to leave like you would a common thief or convict if he were in your office stealing things and causing all kinds of havoc. Why Windows is allowed to roam the halls of any company is beyond me, it really boils down to lazy Admins and even lazier IT staff unwilling to go the extra mile to use and OS that would keep things nice and secure, rather they would use the Fisher Price equivalent of OSs to run their multi-million dollar companies with a sub standard product…..

Oh did I get off on a rant again? Sorry!

I am going to point out a few of may favorite points in the article and then you can just read it and run out to your local Apple Store and get your own and avoid the virus update called Vista……oooops I did it again?

” While Vista is indeed a major update …..quite frankly, just Microsoft making up for lost time. “

“This means that while Mac OS X has been steadily evolving through 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4, and is now working towards 10.5,……When it was obvious the original Longhorn OS wasn’t going to happen, they took the Windows Server 2003 code base and used that for the basis of Vista. “

“Microsoft had two serious issues. First, they had to make this update of Windows revolutionary enough that it came close to justifying the delay. Second, they had to come up with something that would stand up well with its main competitor in the desktop OS market, Mac OS X.”

Really is Vista really on the same level as MacOSX? I really don’t think so and in fact I have looked at both and have not been overly impressed with what Microsoft Vista has become. I am not going to take the low road and call Vista a copy cat OS, because it is not, but we all know that since Microsoft released XP everything they have shown as new and innovative in Vista has been something that has either been in MacOSX since the start or was added in one of it’s later dot releases and it just screams that Windows Vista is just a culmination of what Windows users envy in MacOSX.

More fun little quotes:

“Long-delayed upgrade that has to account for almost 6 years of progress by its competitors”

“The other thing I keep noticing about Vista’s UI is how many times things just seem to be changed seemingly for no reason beyond “new version, gotta change stuff.” ”

” I’ve also been struck by how, even with all the notifications I get in Vista, how annoying it is to find basic information.”

“Another UI annoyance, and one I had hoped that Microsoft would have improved, is the hoops you have to jump through to get basic information from the OS.”

Like a pimple coming to a head:

“I could keep bringing up examples, but I think you get the idea. At the UI level, the human level, Vista is different far more often than it is better.”

I think he starts to show his Geek Side here:

“However, is it significantly, or even slightly better than Mac OS X? Maybe in a couple of low-level ways, like the randomizing memory address usage function, or being able to use USB memory sticks as additional RAM, but at the human level? Not even close.”

From a user stand point this is of no use to any Mom or Dad using Vista at home. It’s really more about Web, Email and typing a doc here and there, and with that said a company has the same problems. How do we make the desktop easy to use and the applications seamless or at least simple to maintain?

I think in the end we will all know MacOSX does it best and Windows just won the war based on lazy administration and adoption by software vendors….you would think they would have moved everything to MacOSX/UNIX long ago? Then again most Windows Admins think that UNIX/Linux is hard to learn….go figure. If it ain’t got a Wizard I can’t admin the server, that is what a Windows MSCE test should include. Don’t get me started on Windows Admins now. I don’t have time. It’s always nice to see that there people who call themselves Admins and really they are Wizard jockeys and haven’t a clue about how to Admin a server, much less figure out why something does what it does in Windows.
I think the last paragraph in the article makes owning a Mac make you feel good…..

“I’ve yet to see anything in Vista that blows away the Mac OS, even a version of the Mac OS that’s over a year old. Microsoft still can’t manage to make something simple and easy to use. Vista reeks of committee and design by massive consensus, while OS X shines from an intense focus on doing things in a simple, clear fashion and design for the user, not the programmer.”

Long live Xcode!

Link to article

Can someone explain why the Wireless tools in KDE and GNOME suck so bad? I am not stupid and I guess I could configure the WiFi manually but isn’t that the reason we have KDE and GNOME in the first place?

I have OpenSUSE 10.2 installed on a DELL laptop with an internal WiFi card and Linux sees the card and that is about it. I can’t connect to my Apple Base Station at home or the WiFi network at the office.

Seems like every OS would take a hint from MacOSX and make it that easy!

Maybe it’s just me?

In the past (1999) you were either a fan of IBM or you were a fan of Microsoft. You either installed Lotus or you picked up Exchange. in the end you just needed mail and if the mail server did more than that then you, the admin, were pretty darned happy.

Lotus R5 did more than that. It did a lot. You could make applications on the fly and they were pretty easy to make. Exhcnage still only did email and the other crap that goes along with email. No one was to fussy back then.

Lotus also was able to run thier Domino server on just about any platform. My favorite was the AS/400, not the iSeries or the i5. Along with AiX, Windows, and Linux. You can still to this day only run Exchange on Windows Server. Sad really if you think about it.

As time went on, Lotus didn’t change to much in fact it has not changed that much since R5. The templates for mail and such have gotten better looking but over all it’s still Lotus Notes. Outlook on the other had has always looked better, even though it only does one thing, mail, it still just has a very polished feel to it. Lotus over the years has stepped up to the plate and really worked hard on the web intergration and the Domino Web Access, which is far better than OWA, but still the Notes Client has needed a face lift for some time.

About 14 - 20 months ago Hannover was release as a buzz word around the Lotus community. They showed a slick little GUI that looked IMHO better than Outlook. It was a whole new Notes client. They even have a nice little section on the Lotus.com web site about Hannover, now called Lotus Notes 8, to read and catch up with what is going to be coming. Lotusphere 07 is right around the corner and I would urge IBM to get 8 out the door ASAP.

IBM and Lotus need a huge win in order to stay in this fight. They truley have the better product but you can’t win new customers when you client is butt ugly and what most would consider “outdated” or “old”. I get that a lot from people who don’t undertand the versitility of Lotus Domino and Notes and truley don’t know the reliability of runnning it on a platform like the iSeries. It really is solid on the iSeries. If you run Lotus Domino on Windows, please consider the iSeries, first you will look like a Super Admin with all the uptime and next it will be tons faster. I am not kidding.

Back to the topic at hand. Please IBM release Lotus Notes 8 sooner rather than later and make sure you guys are testing it on Vista. Lord knows we don’t want to use Vista, but we all know it’s coming. If you really love me you will also put out Lotus Notes 8 for Fedora and OpenSUSE as well make me smile from ear to ear.

I want the next Hannover post to be that the code went GA and not another delay!

So if you don’t know now you know….I love AA. I am a huge America’s Army Fan and play with a bunch of dudes called [IHS] (International Hit Squad) and man they are good. I am called DeVASTAte and if you don’t know how I got my name just look at the letters in CAPS.
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I have a decent PC that will play AA pretty good and as you also know I am a Mac user. So haveing a Wnidows PC is just odd for me but I love AA. It’s a Pentium 2.9 GHZ with 1 GB or RAM and if I am lucky the nVidia 6600 256MB AGP will keep working, but the new AA out today (2.7) is a huge release and I am reading that Frame Rates or fps are going way down and if they are to far down the that makes that game no fun. You need at least 30-60 for it to seem real.

Here are the release Notes

System Req Press Release for 2.7