News from PANUG/BizNix - June 11, 2003 http://panug.org - http://biznix.org Living on Earth is expensive, but it does include a free trip around the sun every year. BIZNIX MEETING This month's BizNix meeting is this Thursday evening, June 12, at 6:30pm. The main presentation will be Fun with USB Memory Drives - referring to those cute little USB-based memory devices often referred to as Thumb Drives. You'll learn what's required to support them with Linux and how to partition and format them. We'll look at useful applications and at least one application that may not be universally practical but is certainly way cool: using USB memory devices to build a RAID array. If you have a USB memory device and want to help us build a bigger array, bring it along. TECHED 2003 A BUST Many people attending Microsoft's TechEd conference were less than impressed. Here's one of the stories that was written by Paul Thurrott: The Letdown That was TechEd 2003 And speaking of TechEd 2003: What happens when Microsoft plans one of the biggest launch parties in its history but none of the products show up? Well, after wiping that "deer in the headlights" look out of their eyes, the company's PR people started talking "vision" instead. Boring? Oh yeah. This year's TechEd was originally going to be a coming-out party for the new Microsoft Office System and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. Instead, TechEd 2003 began as a giant apology and ended with a whimper: No new products are ready, Microsoft has no definitive release dates for those products, and the show had little real meat for its 10,000 attendees. Exchange and Office will ship at some indeterminate date later this summer, and even the promised Office 2003 Beta 2 Refresh won't ship until late June. Virtually every product touted at the show is destined for a late 2003 or 2004 launch. In one painful example, Paul Flessner, senior vice- president of Microsoft's Server Platform Division, presented one of the most exciting products--Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services--during his keynote address, leading many people to believe the product is ready. It isn't ready, and the public beta won't even ship until late this year. MISCELLANEOUS Open Source Software Bridging the Technology Gap http://panug.org/21 DISCLAIMER PANUG and BizNix welcome contributions from all members. Member contributions do not necessarily represent the official positions of PANUG or BizNix. If you don't contribute, the views of members that contribute frequently may appear to be the official position of the group(s).