In the Netherlands here you're just out of luck if a free day falls in the weekend. In many countries it's like that actually. Sometimes the employers get lucky. Sometimes the employees.

To be fair. Self driving taxis are something i would look forward to. Uber at its best. Especially if they could be so cheap that you could take them to work every day. Especially in Europe with its cozy city's with small streets this might significantly reduce car ownership in the city and clean up the streets. Its also better for the environment in other ways. As more people could use the same car during a day. Instead of standing by idle in front of the house or the office. Lower taxi prices during non-rush hours would also give organisations incentives to allow their workers to work at variable hours. ( lower travel cost ) on top of being a further optimization to car usage. We all know this is the future. Its just a matter of time for the technology to catch up.

We run a couple of customers on Azure that want be in our native country. ( and azure so happened to be here, and aws isn't )
So we use it for that. We currently have around $1000 / month in Azure workloads. But our AWS workloads for exceed this closer to $20000 / month.

But yeah, Azure is a turd compared to AWS.
Both in terms of performance, price and features.

As a system architect who works daily with both AWS and Azure for a living i am not surprised at all.
The quality and features of AWS is unmatched by any other cloud provider out there.
And anyone wishing to compete with AWS has a long journey ahead of them.

Nevertheless we set up our business to be cross-cloud so we can deploy the applications in any cloud we desire.
I think we currently spend around $20000 on AWS fees, $1000 on Azure and $3000 on an Openstack provider in our country itself.

Currently we are looking into Google cloud support as well. Our initial research showed that it has all the features we rely on like Virtual Private Networks between VMs, Floating IPs, Volumes, etc and a lower price point compared to AWS so we believe this might prove to be an interesting option for some of our customers who desire cheaper solutions while still wanting the flexibility of the cloud.

My prediction for this and next year is that we will continue to add many more customers to AWS. Azure will probably remain stable and Google Cloud will have a couple of pilot projects running.

In the Netherlands we mostly have a mix of semi free market and government regulation.
The government sets the ground rules and free competition is possible within that platform.

Taxi drivers have to obey by many strict laws. Uber "taxis" do not.
The current position of the government is that Uber poses unfair competition as Uber users do not comply with the regulation required for Taxi drivers while essentialy offering the same services.

Technically, if Uber can make their drivers comply to the Taxi driver rules the app would be no problem.
Much of the advantage would be lost in the process though..
And it's a bit of a killer for innovation and keeps prices high.
Personally i like the sharing culture Uber promotes.
But i don't think the attitude towards Uber taxis will change anytime soon.

I once gave phpvirtualbox a spin on the server.
http://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj...

It's actually quite an awesome way to operate single visualization servers.
Though i did find it not stable enough in the end and switch over to KVM.

There is definitely still some potential left for virtualbox here though.

Well, there is a difference between eventual target and current reality.

As a sysadmin it is a joy to use linux on the desktop when maintaining linux servers.
NVIDIA is way beyond any other party in their linux support. ( equal in performance and features to their windows drivers )
It's simply the best you can get right now. Now many of our coders use linux as well. But i don't think any of them would consider running the open source drivers.
As much as i would love my drivers to be open source i get much better results using the binary drivers.

That being said, i do applaud major vendors building their open source drivers themselves.
It is a major requirement to getting decent video card drivers for the future.

To be honest i see this more as a feature than as a problem.
This will very likely improve the quality of the linux build making it more complete and compatible with the windows build and features.

Just compare the linux and windows versions of firefox for example.
They look far from the same.
And for a big part this is caused by the difference in toolkits used beneath the skin.

Now i am a big fan of QT.
But even if they port their own: one toolkit everywhere can only make things better.

Which is actually the smart thing to do.

This will make it significantly easier for steam to support multiple linux versions in the future
And the (binary) games actually don't break as fast when upgrading your OS.

The Zimbra Open Source Edition is probably a very good choice.
- 99% of all companies don't need features then the open source edition.
- it supports large mailboxes very well. ( some of our employees have 21gb mailboxes, it still runs smooth )
- You can buy a plugin for encryption if you really need it.
- Mail (IMAP), Calender (iCal) and adressbook (LDAP) sync is possible to almost any device.
- You can always get the commercial version if you need the extras.

I don't think you can remotely wipe your mail using an open source product but nowadays you might simply get any android of iphone device and use a wiping app. Maybe not as convenient but it works.

Spamassasin can work very well ( it certainly does for us ) using external blocklists and distributed mail analysis services ( dcc, razor2 ) in addition to it's core filters. We added greylisting as well. Everything runs as part of the Amavis product. We don't use Bayesian filtering though. While good on paper we found it to be to unpredictable in real life. ( people reporting valid mailing lists as spam instead of unsubscribing, etc ) Instead we added around 15 additional custom spam filter lines over the years but that's it. Now all our spam is gone. We filter mail for over 1500 domains and our customers have never been happier.

As someone who actually went to Nepal i can tell you that you will need permits for almost everything you do as a tourist.
I guess i can't really blame them. They aren't the richest country and tourism is thier main source of income.

SIP en XMPP both work like mail.

Well, at work i am using the debian 6 version on my desktop.
For a long time it was the only distribution you could find that would actually provide you with a stable and well working kde version.

I'll be upgrading when the debian 7 version comes out. whenever that will be.
And you know, that suits me just fine.

The only packages i upgraded are firefox, chrome, flash and libreoffice.
Other than that i had no need to run any linux distribution more current than debian 6.

It is part of a deal to have a more diverse group of stakeholders.
So you are indeed right that this shows nothing about the performance of google.
And i guess the money will always come in handy as well. :P

Or we could have a better incremental tax system where dirt poor is not the bottom and fat rich is not the top.