Los Angeles Goes Google Apps With Microsoft Cash 266
Dan Jones writes "The Los Angeles City Council has approved a US$7.25 million, five-year deal with Google in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps. Interestingly, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft (Microsoft paid $70 million three years ago to settle the suit by six California counties and cities who alleged that Microsoft used its monopoly position to overcharge for software). The city will migrate from Novell GroupWise e-mail servers. For security, Google will provide a new separate data environment called 'GovCloud' to store both applications and data in a completely segregated environment that will only be used by public agencies. This GovCloud would be encrypted and 'physically and logically segregated' from Google's standard applications. Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?"
Cannot parse title (Score:5, Funny)
I thought "Microsoft Cash" was a new marvellous Redmond product I hadn't heard of.
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... marvellous Redmond product...
When has that ever happened?
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When has that ever happened?
Windows 95.
Re: Marvelous Redmond Products (Score:2)
They "promised" it. Ya know, Microsoft produces world class vaporware.
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I thought they'd brought back Microsoft Money. :P
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Hmm, those Nigerians sure are getting crafty, but I fail to see where they are going to make money on this.
That's easy, watch:
1. Nigerian scam.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Why segregate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are the government servers more reliable, or more secure than the regular servers? If that's the case, what does that say about the peons who don't have access to it?
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I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with the Federal Information Security Management Act, from TFA:
Google has pushed Google Apps as an option for government agencies, promising to ship a product called Government Cloud, which will be certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), sometime next year.
I would guess that some provision in it [wikipedia.org] requires segregated data servers, just in case the public consumer computer gets 'owned' by a cracker, that the government network is not instantly vulnerable.
That's just guessing, it could be for any other number of reasons. IANAL, I am not a network engineer or security expert, and I only scanned the article to get some free, pointless, anonymous informat
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Without knowing the current Infrastructure that LA uses I can't say with certainty that Google will be less secure. However typical it is always more secure to keep your data in house than outsourcing that storage.
While the LA spokesman says it will be more secure that our current solution. I'm sure he is a PR weenie and if you talk to technicians in LA they would disagree.
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It's a mystery to me what "satisfactorily stable" consists of for people who point out availability as a problem with cloud solutions. As a rule, enterprises don't publish their internal downtime statistics, but I can tell you that for a large chunk of them, it's far worse than the occasional Gmail outages. And no one who makes that argument ever seems to look at the necessary companion to stability, which is cost. What does it cost you to be satisfactorily stable running internally? For most businesses
Re:Why segregate? (Score:4, Informative)
You can always pop/imap your email from google and can use offline access with google email/calendar/docs.
We changed over to google apps here at work and the offline access has been good for us here.
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Re:Why segregate? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Simple.
Almost all higher ups in government for some reason have Law degrees and is currently or use to be lawyers. If there is a problem they will point their fingers down a chain of rube-goldberg like causes and effects until it hits someone Who has no one else to point too. Then this person who is usually just a public servant or a vender will take all the heat for a full chain of mistakes that caused some problem. So say gmail went down for 5 hours. Sure it is a mistake on googles part. However it is
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If the underling didn't think to pick up the phone when email went down, his boss should have made him do it when he checked up on him (assuming at that point the email had then been down long enough to make it look like more than a 5 minute outage).
Re:Why segregate? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's probably a mix of FIMSA and public accountability/recordkeeping laws. Consider that one of the points made when Palin's Yahoo! email was "cracked" was that it was illegal for her to use that account for any kind of government business due to an accountability law in that state. Likely similar considerations are at the root of having a separate government cloud.
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HOLD UP (Score:3, Insightful)
Does this mean I will be losing some of the 7385 MB available for my inbox space? I'm already using a whole 1% of that!
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Still shows 0% for me :). I think I'm using like 44MB total.
Google has to be using some compression or something though. My Lotus Notes mail file at work with a similar message volume is 600+ MB.
I find it ironic though when they determined at work that we all needed to clean up our mailboxes in anticipation for a 250MB quota. Google manages to give me 7GB and with our own dedicated server our admin wants me to stay within 250MB. Something just seems wrong about that.
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That's not the reasoning for our case (I used to co-admin the email system where we're at but have mostly given up my influence there after just taking on too many other systems so that I didn't have time to work with it anymore). For a long time we monitored anything with an image coming in to make sure that it wasn't the type of stuff you mention. Eventually though the man-time required for that just became too much. I still admin the filtering gateway but not the actual server anymore.
No, in our case
The times are changing (Score:2)
With the advancement of Google and open-source software, can we say that Microsoft has a monopoly on anything except its operating system?
I'm not saying that the court decisions were wrong, but this article goes to show how a few years can change the landscape and just how far Google and open-source software has come.
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Here we go again (Score:2)
"If I understood this right, Microsoft was found guilty of using their monopoly in the OS sector to gain monopolies in other sectors"
MS wasn't "found guilty" of anything because it was a civil -- ah forget it.
So, what are these "other sectors" that MS now enjoys a monopoly in?
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"If I understood this right, Microsoft was found guilty of using their monopoly in the OS sector to gain monopolies in other sectors"
MS wasn't "found guilty" of anything because it was a civil -- ah forget it.
Sorry if I didn't use the proper legal expression. I'm sure everyone understood.
So, what are these "other sectors" that MS now enjoys a monopoly in?
At the time they were found "guilty" of leveraging their monopoly in the operating system market to gain market shares in the browser market. Microsoft had essentially managed to gain a monopoly in the browser market. They could not have gained that monopoly without illegally leveraging off their monopoly in the OS market.
The fact that they no longer have a monopoly in the browser market is an indication that the ruling had the
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"At the time they were found "guilty" of leveraging their monopoly in the operating system market to gain market shares in the browser market."
Well, the US courts' position on IE is a bit muddled. In an earlier case Judge Jackson's ruling about MS bundling IE with Windows was overturned on appeal.
The penalty was overruled but not the finding of facts. There's no question that Microsoft was found "guilty" of using their monopoly in the OS sector to gain a monopoly in the browser market.
"The fact that they no longer have a monopoly in the browser market is an indication that the ruling had the intended effect."
I don't see how. Has MS eliminated IE from Windows? Has it been including firefox?
Maybe you don't remember about Microsoft preventing retailers from supplying Netscape with Windows and making changes to the OS that would break other applications? Do you not remember the Microsoft-only OS calls that IE would use which would make it perform faster?
The fact that they no longer use these practices is an
Re:The times are changing - Yes, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
You neglect the effect of the close call that MS experienced that tempered, somewhat its proclivity for using the Mafia business model. Remember even under the W, supposedly MS was under judicial restraint. Those factors had to play a role in allowing competition to reappear*.
* However, if you look at the netbook experience where Linux suddenly vanished (supposedly completely) from its initial dominance one can see hints that MS is probably back to its old game, but the environment has altered in the interim.
Re:The times are changing (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this is a step towards relieving MS of their monopoly, even on OSs.
How long until LA city employees don't need Windows for anything. If everything they do is in the browser, they can use Linux (maybe in the guise of ChromeOS)
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With the advancement of Google and open-source software,
Oh yes, Google and Open Source Software... the kind of Open Source Software that's so secret they won't release the source code to.
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He said "Google *and* OSS". Two different things (although there's a slight overlap).
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I don't think it wanted to associate Google with OSS, except to say that both represent competition for Microsoft.
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With the advancement of Google and open-source software,
Oh yes, Google and Open Source Software... the kind of Open Source Software that's so secret they won't release the source code to.
I'm not saying Google is open source. I am saying that the successes of Ubuntu and Open Office, combined with the resources provided from Google, has created some competition for Microsoft.
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Cloud? (Score:5, Informative)
Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?
No. Someone's just getting a dedicated data center hosting scalable web apps. Nothing new.
Of all the places on the interwebs, I would hope /. could refrain from the marketing babble.
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No. Someone's just getting a dedicated data center hosting scalable web apps. Nothing new.
Truly. Can we stick this "cloud" shit in the heap with "information superhighway", "cyber", and "web 2.0"?
Re:Cloud? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cloud? (Score:5, Funny)
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So it is a new term for something old. The only difference is that it is actually having an effect.
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"Cloud Computing" differs from "information superhighway," "cyber" and "web 2.0" in that it's not just a buzzword but an actual strategy shift in software development which is not only creating "marketing babble" but also directing an increasingly large share of global IT expenditures. This is a real fundamental shift away from traditional notions of the "Platform" away from operating system APIs and proprietary client/server applications to ubiquitous web/standards based applications and commoditized scalable third party provided infrastructure. Capital expenses are shifting to operating expenses, and whenever this much money changes focus you have to keep your head on straight and your eyes open.
I know what Cloud Computing is, but you managed to make my eyes glaze over with that babble.
Cloud computing is like traditional managed hosting, except the basic management and accounting timescale is much shorter (i.e., you buy by the hour instead of by the month) and setup time is much shorter. That makes it immensely more flexible, which is very interesting to lots of people in the business world. Yes, it could have happened before; there was no real technical reason why not. But it isn't a technical rev
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Could someone translate the above post to English please?
Cloud computing = batshit insane (Score:3, Insightful)
"Cloud Computing" is just web based thin client with the servers outsourced to a 3rd party who you then trust to run their services scalably. The reason it hasn't been done before is simply that it's batshit insane and before you added marketing hype you'd lose your job even suggesting something as asinine. You simply don't put your day to day operations at the mercy of yet another 3rd party (and unlike basic utilities these services aren't simple and service levels are a bear to negotiate).
My prediction. (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest thing is space. In my(admittedly modest; but definitely nonzero) experience, users really, really hate dealing with storage quotas and love doing things(like storing files in the form of email attachments) that bump them into quotas. Unless the LA IT guys were unusually generous, or their deal with Google unusually stingy, most user's quotas will probably go up substantially. Plus, with Google doc's sharing functions, there will hopefully be much less attachment clutter eating email quota space.
Aside from heavy users of particular Office functions, who will almost certainly end up retaining local copies of office one way or another(whether it be official IT department policy, or local departmental budgets, or some other means), most people will probably care more about not bumping into quotas than anything else.
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There will be a subset of users who will hate it, mostly serious Excel jockies and the extremely change averse, but on the whole it'll be pretty popular.
Google Documents are still on the utilitarian side, but Spreadsheets are quite useful. They lack indentation (needed in accounting) and pivots, but add Google search capability and distributed sharing. For ad hoc management of numbers, it's quite convenient.
This is not to take anything away from the OP's prediction, which sounds like a certainty.
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There will be a subset of users who will hate it, mostly serious Excel jockies and the extremely change averse, but on the whole it'll be pretty popular..
More people than you think will hate it. The average, desk-bound, minimum-wage Excel/Outlook jockey will bitch at any change. Note that these people bitch if you get them a new computer, or even if you move the coffee machine to a new room down the hall. They bitch at every change, every day, all the time. These people are, in a lot of organizations, far more pervasive than you might think.
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I think that's all true.
However, if *I* was starting a new business (which admittedly, I'm not planning to do) with no legacy documents, I'd buy a Google Apps contract, and make it the company standard.
Anyone demands to have MS Office, I explain why they don't need it, explain our reasons for using Google Apps, and tell them to suck it up. They might come back with a very good reason, in which case I'd make them an exception, but I wouldn't expect this to be common.
The most common reason would be that Offic
Passing the Buck (Score:4, Insightful)
Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?
No.
What it has done is given IT administrators the opportunity to pass the buck when there's a problem with a system. Now when the e-mail system goes down for hours and employees can't access crucial data, the IT admin simply points at Google and says "it's not my fault or my problem".
That's all cloud computing offers. Unless you're a bit paranoid, in which case it also provides a single-point of attack for the government to eavesdrop under the banner of "keeping America safe".
Re:Passing the Buck (Score:4, Insightful)
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Your cynicism is dead on, but maybe that is exactly why this is a good idea. At Slashdot, we get constant discussion about how IT departments are stupid. So maybe having a few really big data centers that are well run is better than this idea of every company having it's own data center and IT department. There just wasn't enough bandwidth to do this in the past.
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What it has done is given IT administrators the opportunity to pass the buck when there's a problem with a system. Now when the e-mail system goes down for hours and employees can't access crucial data, the IT admin simply points at Google and says "it's not my fault or my problem".
In the long term, I'd guess there is no (local) IT admin. If an employee has an IT problem, they call Google directly.
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the IT admin simply points at Google and says "it's not my fault or my problem".
I'm not sure who you mean by "the IT admin"? Is that like a buggy-whip maker?
One of the big advantages that makes remote hosting with a standard application infrastructure (which is all "cloud computing" is in this context) attractive is that you get to fire most of your admins because you no longer have much in the way of in-house servers.
One of the reasons why this is happening now is because after a decade of of living with
Monopoly position to overcharge for their software (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Monopoly position to overcharge for their softw (Score:4, Insightful)
No, actually it's nothing like that. Reading a book doesn't require anything proprietary and it doesn't have to work with other software, etc.
But I'm sure you have more knowledge about the case than the judge who made the decision.
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No, actually it's nothing like that. Reading a book doesn't require anything proprietary and it doesn't have to work with other software, etc.
Neither does your OS. It wouldn't be good for business, but there's no requirement that the OS must work with anything else. How is your statement relevant to my analogy, again? It's like arguing that I've made a false analogy because JK Rowling is a woman and Bill Gates is a man - it's true, but irrelevant.
But I'm sure you have more knowledge about the case than the judge who made the decision.
If a judge correctly interprets an immoral law, does that make the law alright? Stop begging the question. I'm arguing what's right, not what's legal.
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You're right. Similarly, if Microsoft doesn't want to agree to the terms of doing business in the United States, where we require businesses to not behave in anti-competitive behaviour, they are perfectly free to take their business elsewhere.
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You're right. Similarly, if Microsoft doesn't want to agree to the terms of doing business in the United States, where we require businesses to not behave in anti-competitive behaviour, they are perfectly free to take their business elsewhere.
Begging the question. We're arguing what's right, not what's legal. There are immoral laws, and they should be overturned. That's what we're arguing. Or did you confuse this with a legal discussion board?
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So it's right for those with power to abuse it? Because that's the point of Antitrust - we as a society have decided that we value a competitive market more than a free market, so we took steps towards that. We have economic evidence that competitive markets are better for both consumers, corporations, and innovation than free markets. You are assuming that free = better, and therefore free = right. I see no evidence you're giving that that is correct.
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So it's right for those with power to abuse it?
Power, how? Political power? Economic power? Power to do what? To force you to buy their product? How do they force you? Do you believe you have a right to their product? What gives you that right?
We have economic evidence that competitive markets are better for both consumers, corporations, and innovation than free markets.
Since when do the ends justify the means? How do you justify the violation of rights in this non-free market.
we as a society have decided that we value a competitive market more than a free market
Who is this "we as a society"? When was this decision made, and where? I must not have gotten the memo about signing my rights away.
Simply put, the fact that the current state exists does not make it mor
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When did we give them the 'right' to a free market?
Or, to put it another way, when did we give them the right to remove *our* right to a competitive market?
This 'we, as a society' are the people of the United States who decided in the early 1900s to enact anti-trust laws, after seeing what lack of competition did to OUR (not their) economy.
Similarly, you are free to exercise your right to live in a non-competitive market by moving. If you want to enjoy the benefits of living in a competitive market, you ha
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Given your political views, I can only suggest you emigrate to Somalia. In that paradise, there is no central government controlling the market, and people are make any associations they want, No society will take your rights away.
Re:Monopoly position to overcharge for their softw (Score:5, Insightful)
Your JK Rowling analogy is missing the part where JK Rowling buys up every other publishing company, shuts them down, turns the book industry into a harry Potter monoculture, and makes Harry Potter the only book series on the planet aside from a few hold outs that have the creativity to write their own books.
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Ohh -- you mean they made a superior product,
We're talking about Microsoft Windows here. That never happened.
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They did in fact use their position to destroy others before they could compete, which is fine, unless you have a monopoly.
How'd they destroy them? With dynamite? C4? What sort of explosives are we talking about here? Or did they hack into their computers and wipe their hard drives? What destruction occurred, and how did it occur?
Or do you simply mean that Microsoft made contractual obligations with its clients? How is that equivalent to destruction, or even force? It's a requirement for the delivery and sale of a product, and violates no rights.
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But, IIRC, most of these cases had to do with Microsoft strong-arming OEMS (Dell,HP, etc) by forcing them to only ship Windows and Office on their computers.
"Strong-arming" how? Did they have guns? Automatic or semi-auto?
Ohh, right, you mean Microsoft said that unless Dell agrees to the terms of their contract, they would not sign the contract. *gasp* How horrible of them to not let Dell have their business without agreeing to the terms of their contract!
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"You can't ship Linux on your computers unless you agree that 99% of your computers have Windows installed, regardless of what your customers ask for", and you say "No! I will not agree to that!"
If Dell refused Microsoft's terms, then Microsoft loses Dell's business, which would also be a huge loss for them. They both lose if they can't agree to a deal.
That's anti-competitive behavior
What does "anti-competitive" means? Care to define it in clearly concrete terms? If you believe force was applied - how? in what way? where are the guns?
No rights were violated. Nobody was forced to sign a contract at gun point, by a thug, or otherwise blackmailed. No fraud was committed. This is the free market. In the same way McDonald's demands
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Not the same at all. There are millions of other books to choose from because Rowling's does own all the printing presses.
It is the same. Re-read my post. I said a monopoly on Harry Potter, not a monopoly on books.
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Answering TFS's Question... (Score:2, Informative)
Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?
I hear "cloud computing" discussed and wonder what it really means. It seems like it's just a notion of a server connected to many clients serving data to client applications (which isn't a new concept). However, my impression was that "cloud computing" was many clients connected to each other serving each other content.
Let's see what Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has to say about it
Cloud computing services often provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.
Okay... cloud computing is "business application accessed from a web browser". Well, in the respect I think the deal might be a good step for
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my impression was that "cloud computing" was many clients connected to each other serving each other content.
You're either thinking of P2P or mesh computing.
Let's see what Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has to say about it
Cloud computing services often provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.
Okay... cloud computing is "business application accessed from a web browser". Well, in the respect I think the deal might be a good step for cloud computing.
The Wikipedia page quite nicely sums up why it's more than just that: "This definition states that clouds have five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service."
It's likely th
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Ugh. Sorry about the quoting cockup.
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Cloud computing is the client-server model that everyone is used to... but where the "server" is distributed.
There are significant advantages over a more traditional client-server model, even if the "server" is a cluster. Because the cloud is distributed geographically; 1. infrastructure outages are far less damaging to the application, 2. entire data centers can be taken off line and added at will, 3. power and cooling advantages can be used to keep costs lower, 4. Bandwidth utilization are distributed to
Gmail is not ready. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Gmail is not ready. (Score:5, Informative)
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Blasphemy! Obviously he's better than Google, and handles millions of users from his mom's basement using a server running on a classic Gameboy!
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I'm not pre-empting the answer, this is a genuine question and not an attempt to score points:
Were paid Google Apps customers as badly affected as users of the free GMail service?
Do big customers like LA City Council have more stringent SLAs?
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Citation needed. What theoretical "business-class" SLA are you holding Google to, and can you demonstrate that they haven't met it? Doing some hand waving about two or three outages this year, without quantifying how long they were, or what percentage of users were affected, is insufficient.
If unusually high availability of e-mail/documents is truly that import
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That is the first gmail outage that has affected me since 2004, and i was still able to use it because i use the web interface but also imap it to apples mail app and to my ipod touch
Time for another class action or other suit? (Score:2)
I actually don't know the details of the suit or settlement associated with the three California counties suit against Microsoft using its monopoly position to overcharge for software, but I observe that the suit did not result in lower prices. They are pretty much still too expensive.
Google called me yesterday (Score:2, Interesting)
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Call me traditional or old-fashioned, but I like having physical access to my data. I also like being responsible for ensuring our services stay up and running. If e-mail is down, I can fix it, instead of calling someone else to check it out for me. Several techs in our state from a recent meeting shared this sentiment as well.
I guess you like it because it's your job, and if your job was reduced to passing questions onto someone else, you'd be redundant.
Myself, I'd far prefer *not* to have physical access to my data. If I can have secure access to my data without having to worry about messy, space-consuming, power-consuming, attention hogging hardware, I'll take that thanks.
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Finally open goverment (Score:3, Funny)
Imagine how powerful Google will become (Score:2)
Do No Evil - ya right!
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Won't last more than a couple of years..... (Score:2)
.....and then they'll be back to Exchange or Domino or GeeWhizz!
California's letter to Microsoft (Score:3, Funny)
Dear Microsoft:
Forget the fact that you overcharge
us, we can overlook that. You were
counting on your monopoly to
keep us as customers and that's not right.
Your products, however, are shoddy and
outside the realm of
usability. We will switch to Google.
Love,
California
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At times A through B, LA purchased software from Microsoft. At time C, which is after times A and B, they sued, asserting that Microsoft used their market power in the interval between A and B to overcharge. They one. At time D, which is after A, B, and C, they purchased a product from a competitor which was not offered in the A to B interval.
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Uhh, if they had used it to buy a bunch of Microsoft products, that would have made more sense how?