According to a recent survey by NPD, the following was found:
Ninety-four percent of U.S. consumers have never heard of Web-based productivity suite alternatives. A mere 0.5 percent have substituted Web-based productivity suites for desktop software such as Microsoft Office. Chris Swenson, NPD’s director of Software Industry Analysis, described the 0.5 percent figure as being a “bit high.” Swenson predicted worldwide usage to be even lower than the United States
Some have gone as far as to say that the Web office suite is on its way out?! Please. It’s hardly touched the threshold, why rush it out the back door?
I do agree, however, that these types of tools are better spread through necessity of actual problem solving. The average consumer probably hasn’t used or heard of it yet because they don’t have a problem with their local tools.
The fact of the matter is that these new Web applications aren’t ready for the prime-time yet (hence most are still listed as beta). But you can bet your money that as soon as local and Web data are synced smoothly and with more applications (look to Google Gears), the balance will most certainly be tipped for many.
[tags]google apps, google docs, web office[/tags]
This is purely a self-congratulatory post that signifies my very first ever database now has a single table surpassing the 10,000 record mark.
It’s a sales tracking table that has only increased at a rate of about 10 records per day, but after a few years that really adds up! Thanks to a nifty caching system that I wrote it’s also extremely fast even when pulling up records from several years ago. 20,000 page views per month doesn’t slow it down one bit.
So, ‘crownma_home’, I tip my glass to you.
So Norton has released a version of their flagship product for the Mac? Please tell me this isn’t so!
All that I can say here is that I hope Mac users have paid attention to Windows users with Symantec’s products — specifically Norton Antivirus. I’ll admit that on my personal Linux machines I don’t run anything at all and ** knock on wood ** I’ve never had an issue with a virus. I do however use router and OS firewalls as well as the usual I-don’t-trust-anything-you-send-or-link-to-me mentality.
If I felt so inclined though there is always ClamAV and it apparently runs on a Mac as well as Windows and Linux! Imagine that?
[tags]clamav, mac, norton[/tags]
While I’m personally a huge fan of UltraVNC and the RealVNC projects, some video issues with our software made them extremely unstable to the point that I had to find an alternative remote support solution. I looked at a few of them and settled on LogMeIn’s IT Reach.
It’s an impressive product and very affordable, even when my initial subscription set consisted of 60 computers for deployment. I was instantly blown away by the Dashboard that each system displays when I first logged in to them. I have been able to restart Services and kill frozen Processes without even needing to view their desktop.
The biggest flaw that I’ve found with it is connectivity. I’m definitely a person willing to accept the bad with the good, provided that the good is worth the effort. In this case, I feel it is. I was also willing to accept that since there was little information regarding remote systems losing their online status that it might be due to the setup that we use in our retail kiosk locations. As such, I devised a workaround via the Windows Task Scheduler. Every 10 minutes I run a script with the following line: net start logmein.
If the service is already running then it simply reports such and disappears within a second, and if the service is stopped for some reason it is started again.
Oh yeah, as you can see, the client is all browser-based and cross-platform.
[tags]logmein, it reach, remote support[/tags]
I know there are a hundred and fifty scripts that do this, but I set out to do this within a single Crontab entry. I thought it would be nice to post and save others from having to suffer with combining a bunch of ridiculous scripts for such a simple task.
mysqldump -uusername -ppassword –all-databases | gzip > /pathto/db.gz && mutt -s Backup -a /pathto/db.gz email@domain.com < /dev/null
Voila. All data to be changed has been italicized to protect the innocent (and help you).
[tags]mysql, crontab, backup[/tags]