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I heard how easy to use ActiveDirectory with this version of SUSE. So, nobody needs to use industry standard LDAP etc. with their Linux desktops and they can keep their Windows Servers running non standard protocols.

What a big FUD monger I am, really... Perhaps not just being a big FUD troll, I am so old fashioned still remembering Halloween documents and how frightened Microsoft was by Java (.NET!), Linux having industry standard and open protocols (ActiveDirectory!) and the weak points of Linux which they abuse via Novell.

http://www.opensource.ac.uk/mirrors/www.opensource.org/halloween/faq.html

Well, if you start with the assumption that the set of Free Software is identical to the set of Open Source Software (which is approximately true), you can derive as a logical conclusion that it is a subset, yes. However, making that statement is very misleading, as it gives the impression of Free Software somehow being a special case of Open Source Software.

Initially and for seveal years (I don't know exactly when they changed that), the Open Source Initiative described itself as "a marketing program for free software" and as a "pitch for 'free software' on solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological tub-thumping". These quotes are from their "Frequently Asked Questions about Open Source" document which used to be available quite prominently on their website. You can still find a copy here.

MSN web search just plain sucks. I was using a windows box the other day, typed "java api" into the msn search bar because it was there. I figured "that one's easy, msn should be able to handle it."

MSN returns University of Bristol ILRT - Redland RDF Application Framework

The correct answer, which is of course Java 2 Platform SE v1.4.1 and is #1 in google's results[1]. It is #8 in MSN. That was the last time I will ever bother with msn search.

Erik

[1] Well, google gives you 1.3.1, which is pretty much the same thing. That is probably google's biggest fault. When new content comes out, google is only as fast to adapt as the rest of the web is when it comes to updating their links.

The other very important problem of LDAP is that it's for hierarchies/ However, the real world information in the best case of scenaria is DAG.

Besides, LDAP is way too slow and its query language is way too primitive.

I believe that another database paradigm should be used to roam user's personal information. And I am more convienced that RDF is a solution when non-tree info doesn't go to "raw" XML, neither to LDAP.

I agree that Jabber is a good idea to start. What's good in Jabber? SOAP. That's it. Well, today XML is a key. As I mentioned, PIM requires not a "raw" XML - but rather its RDF dialect. Perhaps some RDF database with RDF-oriented query language and web/SOAP interfaces will serve well if user profile info is defined well in RDF ontologies.

Here are some links I found about RDF:

• rdfDB : An RDF Database
• Redland RDF Database Demo
• Redfoot is an extensible RDF server written in Python for building a Semantic Web of P2P nodes.
• RDF SQL HOWTO, a part of installing a W3C-Perllib Annotation server
• RDF Query Languages: A state-of-the-art
• RDF Query and Inference, a part of 4Suite Server
• RDF Query Specification (old)
• DAML: The DARPA Agent Markup Language (very related to RDF and Ontologies)
• you can also find lots of links to RDF wrapping of calendars, bookmarks and addressbooks.

Show me use cases, styles, patterns and examples of developing web applications with AxKit. Same about Redland, which suffers from the lack of documentation.

This book just repeats about XML what was already said in other books.

Unfortunately, there is still no coherent architecture for mirroring and for mirror sites to register their collections with the sites which they mirror. In fact, we lack even a common (de facto) standard for recording this replication information in a machine readable for-mat. Some progress was made on this a few years ago by the Internet Engineering Task Force s [1] working group on Internet Anonymous FTP Archives, with the creation of the so-called IAFA Templates [2]. These provided a simple machine readable format for recording per-resource or collection metadata, which could easily be created by hand or programatically. Although support for IAFA templates was integrated into some software packages, e.g. the ALIWEB search engine [3] and the ROADS resource discovery sys-tem [4] , this approach never became successful on a large scale. The World Wide Web Consortium s Resource Description Format (RDF) [5] and the Dublin Core metadata effort [6] may eventually provide a viable machine readable interchange format.

Currently, the database underlying the freshmeat.net weblog [7] is perhaps the closest thing we have to a genuine mirror registry - though it focuses almost exclusively on soft-ware packages and operating system distributions, and only offers limited mirror informa-tion. RDF is also being used in this capacity as part of rpmfind.net [8], although mirror information is very limited in this case too. The Internet Engineering Task Force s Uni-form Resource Names effort [9] is also relevant here, since it would be very useful if there were persistent and location independent names for these collections of replicated resources.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/ Internet Engineering Task Force website
[2] http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/iafa/ IAFA Working Group & IAFA Templates homepage
[3] http://aliweb.emnet.co.uk/ ALIWEB website
[4] http://roads.opensource.ac.uk/ ROADS website
[5] http://www.w3.org/RDF/ World Wide Web Consortium Resource Description Format (RDF) homepage
[6] http://purl.org/dc/ Dublin Core website
[7] http://freshmeat.net/ freshmeat.net website P. Lenz & Andover Advanced Technologies, Inc.
[8] http://rpmfind.net/ rpmfind.net website
[9] RFC 1737, Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names K. Sollins & L. Masinter December 1994

And at the end somewhat less relevant to the topic.

This kind of metadata should be extremely valuable for implementation of the URIs and particularly for the I2C(s) (URI tp URC). Quote from the RFC 2483:

"Uniform Resource Characteristics are descriptions of resources. This request allows the client to obtain a description of the resource identified by a URI, as opposed to the resource itself or simply the resource's URLs. The description might be a bibliographic citation, a digital signature, or a revision history. This memo does not specify the content of any response to a URC request. That content is expected to vary from one server to another."

If, despite your best efforts (see http://www.openso urce.ac.uk/mirrors/www.opensource.org/halloween/), open standards prevail as the mechanism for intra-software communication and data storage how will Microsoft compete?

Question 2

Do you have any plans to use a subscription system or time-limited licenses for retail Microsoft software (not web based, I want to know about Windows and Office retail, etc...)?

Question 3 (in 2 parts)

When will the OS lineage built upon 'Quick & Dirty Operating System (QDOS)' (the name of the OS BG bought, before he renamed it to MSDOS) finally end?

Why should we believe a word you say? (he had promised Win98 was the last, then Win98 2nd edition, and now Win Millennium; they are all GUI's which run on top of MSDOS).

The deep cover agent we have inside the NSA says they're planning to get agents to insert malicious code in year 2000 fixes Las Vegas just as everybodys sitting down for Christmas dinner.