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Rendezvous, Microsoft And Apple
serendigital writes "MacCentral reports that a BusinessWeek article entitled: 'A Rendezvous with Redmond?' has -- with Rendezvous -- created an actual threat to Microsoft. As reported by MacCentral, it's interesting to note that BusinesWeek's 'Byte of the Apple' columnist Charles Haddad is on temporary leave and this article was written by a substitute columnist."
The author suggests that Apple should release a Rendezvous enabled VOIP app. It seems to me that he's almost hit the nail on the head. Imagine if all new Macs came with not only that app, but also a phone jack that you could plug your telephone into. Maybe partner with a long distance company to provide a .Mac internet-to-phone calling plan! The possibilities are wide open for a company who owns the hardware, the software, and has little bit of capital.
the real question is if this will dissapear into obscurity as JINI has (a similar technology using Java).
A lot of the technology behind this seems very cool in nature, but just like AppleTalk (which had many similar zeroconf features) i can't imagine it will scale very well. Although this article would love you to think otherwise, I would imagine this whole thing would have more of an effect on the home market then on the buisiness market. I can see not wanting configure applications on small network, but with all of these broadcast packets i would imagine it would saturate a low speed (read:wireless) network.
...
Oh yeah, and
"Here's another idea that crossed my mind. How about using Rendezvous to power local-phone traffic inside a midsize office? Get rid of the wires. Use cheap voice-over-IP phones plugged into Macs equipped with Wi-Fi cards. No more need for inside plant specialists to check wiring or string cables to the desks."
Oh yeah, I -REALLY- want my phone to drop out whenever someone tries to microwave their lunch.
All of this is fun for small networks, but there is a reason no one has done a lot of this before, because it doesn't scale well.
I work for a high-tech company, that must remain nameless, and in my work I talk to IT people on a regular basses across the U.S. I am astounded that most of these people even have jobs. I must however convey that every now and then I come across a person of the highest integrity and the ability to get the job done right. The sad part is, that this only happens in about one in twenty contacts, way too low of a number to have these people running our country. When they've been bad, I have no idea how the company is even running, but when they've been good, it's been crystal clear why they hold that position and are an asset to the computing world.
Food for thought, when ever I converse with the people who do a great job and run they're IT department efficiently, and Apple/Macintosh is part of the conversation, they have no problem with it. I quote in a conversation just last Friday, "in our company we do what ever it takes to get the job done in the most efficient and effective way, at this time Mac's are not part of our makeup, but if that's the direction we need to go in the future, then we will. I am loyal to my company, not Microsoft and certainly not Dell.
I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed that "Pop-pop" is rendezvous-enabled. No need to "host" a game -- you just see each other, double-click to request a game.
What is interesting is that even though "normal host a game over IP" stuff still works, and is dead-easy to config, rendezvous seems to be relatively easy to drop into an app.
I was skeptical at first, but now I'm curious to see what neato things people will start to implement using rendezvous.
-- clvrmnky
What's the state of ZeroConf on Linux? How long before the major distributions have out-of-the-box support for Rendezvous? What would be required to make that happen?
Also, what exactly are the security implications? Obviously there are certain things you don't want to broadcast to just anybody! Rendezvous could make wardriving even easier...
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
It seems to me that zero configuration automatic sharing of resources is exactly what I don't want.
I'm seeing a lot of features but where is the security? This looks a lot like how older versions of windows used to share the contents of your drive over ethernet but not dialup without asking and theres a good reason they stopped doing that.
Or have I missed something?
This article is perfectible...
The first thing Apple shipped using rendez-vous was iChat. The iTunes demo refered to has yet to ship. (you can get the same fuctionnality using iCommune though).
Then, it's not that magical. It only works on one subnet, no way to manually add hosts to the resolver (at least not without serious hacking).
What's the deal with Safari helping you change your printer config? IF your printer advertises itself as a web serveur via Rendez-vous, AND you ask safari to display Rendez-vous-discovered bookmarks, then yes, you can directly access the printer's config pages. But the article does not make this clear at all. And this is different from auto-discovering printers, which I have yet to test since the old HPs we use are still go for a couple hundred thousand pages.
The wild guesses about distributed computing are still a pipe dream, Rendez-vous or not.
And at work, somehow, aliases of Rendez-vous-mountedd servers won't resolve after unmounting the server. Aliases made of servers mounted via AFP or Appletalk will resolve and mount the server.
Rendez-vous is cool, but it still has a long way to go before it is as polished (from a user POV) as the old Appletalk system.
a) Ignore
b) FUD
c) Embrace/extend/destroy
One important question: Does the Apple Public Source License (under which Rendezvous has been released) give Apple the ability to stop Microsoft from embracing/extending/destroying?
The big criticism of of AppleTalk was that it was too chatty (really, I think the issue was overblown, but that was the reputation it picked up). And yet, Rendezvous seems to be doing a lot of the same things that AppleTalk was doing.
Has Rendezvous really addressed the issue that got AppleTalk locked out of a lot of corporate networks? I wonder how it compares to AT.
Before you flame me, note I now have a Mac in my office and am loving it more each day I use it. Changing the culture in the organization, however, will be tough. I'm a manager, which means I get to decide how to implement policy, but I don't make it. And the current policy is, Macs are not supported nor approved for purchase. In fact, the Mac in my office is one we confiscated from Marketing when the decision was made (not mine) to convert them all to PCs. Their loss, my gain!
We'll see how things shake out for the future. I'm certainly being converted, so much so that I have a 12" G4 PB on order for my personal use.
(could make an interesting switcher story. I, the evil tech support manager, confiscated a Mac from those rebel marketing people, plugged it in, fell in love, kept it for myself, muhahahahha...)
Anyway, sounds like there must be a way in the jet direct cards to name the printer for rendevous purposes.... I'll take a look later, maybe, whenever I find I need to print something out! :)
Apple's desktops are the sleekest or sexiest, but unless you home build you own whacked case with neon and shit, x86 desktops look like crap too.
wait a minute... let me get this straight... the physical look of a desktop system is the most important feature to you?!? The thing I like about x86 systems is that they're easy to configure... I'm talking about hardware configuration... leaving software out of the picture completely. It's easy to get ram from any number of manufacturers. You have a million video card choices. Upgrading a processor is as easy as pulling a lever. Changing modems (if you like that sorta thing) is simple, as are NICs and sound cards. Adding or removing drives are as easy as plugging a few idiot-proof cables.
granted, I've never been inside of a mac, but from what I know it's all propriety apple stuff. Well, the video card may be an exception, but I'm not positive.
umm... the moral of the story, if there is one, is that it doesn't matter WHAT your system looks like. It's the ease of use, and the power that matter.
~Jon~
This space for rent, inquire within.
The article is wrong on this point. iTunes does not support Rendezvous or sharing. But what if it did? Would strangers be sharing music at Starbucks, airport terminals, college lecture halls or other places where Wi-Fi enabled laptops congregate?
The Register takes this scenario one step further with the Rendez-Pod, a Bluetooth and Rendezvous enabled iPod. "You could get promiscuous with strangers: you could pair and exchange a song on the same short bus ride."
I don't know about the most recent machines, but most ATA drives can be placed right into my PowerMac G4. I done it all be myself.
I can also pretty much put in any kind of memory I want, so long as it complies with the expected stats:
168 Pin PC100 SDRAM DIMM
Changing modems and NICs are easy on Macs too, assuming you're just putting them in the PCI slot. You just have to make sure you have a driver for them. It is true that sometimes Mac drivers do not exist for the cards, but as I understand this is also true in *nix. Sound cards aren't as easy to change but I have never in my 10+ years of using computers felt a need to change mine.
The reason I prefer Macs is...surprise, surprise! The ease of Hardware configuartion! I have used PCs for many things over the years, and consistently found that setting up new hardware can be difficult on PCs whereas it is generally a breeze on the Mac.
Honestly, it really is just familiarity that drives my preference. If I had been raised on Windows, no doubt I would use that instead.
However, I think that it's wrong to say that the appearance of a computer should have no say in your preference.
When I get my next car, my #1 priority is that it be a nice shade of blue. I really don't have any major preference beyond that, so long as it looks good, gets decent mileage and is fairly dependable. These days, a lot of cars fit that bill, but if it ain't blue, I ain't buying it. Is it a stupid criteria? Maybe. But it's a criteria nonetheless. A lot of people tie up their identity in their "look", and their computer might fall under that too.
If you were buying some piece of shit computer that looked pretty, then I'd agree that it was a stupid decision. But Apple computers aren't pieces of shit.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Since you can now run bash and other unix-y things on Macs, I've noticed there have been a lot more people at the 2002 LISA conference with Mac laptops than PC laptops. At the 2000 LISA conference, most people had Sony Vaios.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
There are solutions to this, of course. For instance if you are printing to printers on a PC network, I'd advise getting GimpPrint. It takes a lot of Linux printer drivers for GIMP, adds some nice UI, and makes them general OSX drivers. (The underlying CUPS printing system is very nice - its just that printer dirvers often are woefully underpowered in their native OSX forms)
GimpPrint
The other solution to accessing a Windows network with a Mac is the "write it down solution." Hardly ideal, although to be fair, something Linux users also typically end up doing. There are some freeware/shareware solutions that provide browsers. Not all of them work equally though. (i.e. they don't really solve the underlying issues) The following is one that many people like. (I personally only have a few shares and thus only need to set them up once, after which "who cares?"
SMB Browse
My point isn't that this is a huge problem. (It isn't) But it is something that is vastly easier in XP than in OSX. Further many "less tech savvy" individuals will have problem hooking their Mac to their PC network. Hopefully Apple will resolve this in 10.3. (Certainly they need to seriously revamp the Finder due to its lack of multithreading and poor FTP support along with the SMB problems)
The best demo of Rendezvous currently is iChat. I used it to wow one of my clients back in December when I upgraded them to Jaguar. They were always having to e-mail files back and forth to one another, blah blah blah.
Now, they just launch iChat when they log in in the morning, and boom-- instant, zero-config buddy list of everyone in the department. Need to ask someone a question? No more hollering over cubes or using the phone, a quick IM does the trick. Need to send someone a file? No more e-mailing or putting it on the server for the person who needs it. Drag it and drop it onto their name in the buddy list, and they'll get a dialog, "Person wants to send you file filename, do you wish to accept?"
The only people who think something like this is a bad thing are the ignorant ones. OF COURSE the devices that use Rendezvous will OFFER security and configurability options-- but the point is, you don't NEED them if all you want to do is get on a network and print to a networked printer. And you don't need to have silly little wizards walk you through the process. Rendezvous is the logical extension of Apple's whole 'it just works' philosophy, and is a wonderful modern incarnation of AppleTalk.
~Philly
As a long time computer user (20+ years), and a Mac user (Since Day 1)... I find your suggestion that you can't do anything meaningful on a Mac to be silly at best. I've made a good living for over 10 years using Macs. I have yet to run into a task that I could not complete on my Mac. If I were a 14 year old looking to play the latest and "greatest" video games, I might be S.O.L., but does that really rise to the level of "meaningful"? I'll spare you the tirades about Winblows, and put it this way.... I love people like you. My "competition" is frequently some moron who dropped $800 on a whizbang kit from Wal Mart intent on making it as a multimedia designer. I love competing for jobs against "visionaries" with 2Ghz Pentiums and a copy of PrintShop Pro, or SuperGeneric Greeting Card Workshop... With all that wonderful software available for Windows, it must be hard to choose... Oh, what's that? Photoshop? Got it. Maya? Got it. Office? Got it? Premiere? I crush it regularly with Final Cut Pro. Granted, we don't get Minesweeper for free, but we have plenty of options for Solitaire. There are about 40 other computers on our network, none of which have the continuous uptime that my Mac has. After seeing the amount of service required to keep Windows machines networking properly, you might want to look into Macs... They network extremely well, even on an all Windows network. My Mac ends up doing plenty of tasks that the Windows machines either can't do, or can't seem to do right. As far as "meaningful" goes, what's more meaningful than earning a living AND picking up the slack for the rest of the machines in the building? Here's something meaningful from my Mac: Bite me.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
Appletalk scales better than you think. We've had a network carrying traffic for thousands of appletalk-speaking devices, and we only very rarely have a network-related appletalk problem. However, its worth noting we have a router routing Appletalk, and the network is structured, not flat.
One thing that would make scaling RV better would be to route link-local addresses. We discussed trying this, but haven't tried it yet. This would allow for multiple 'RV' networks. In all probability, RV may not be ready for this kind of thing, but I don't know all there is to know about RV yet.
As for security, that always has been and always will be between the application layer and the network layer. Think about it: if your host and/or application is insecure, then it won't matter if you run ZeroConf/RV or not.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
- Open up Print Center
- Click the "Add Printer" button
- Select "AppleTalk" as the protocol
- Select the printer that appeared
Dang! I didn't know that JetDirect cards supported AppleTalk! So the moral there is, somewhere in some obscure technical bulletin (probably, knowing HP) there are instructions for setting the name of the JetDirect card.The really sweet part came a few weeks later when I wanted to print a document from OpenOffice. I had never configured the printer settings within X11, and have never even touched
This contrasts very favorably to the time 8 months ago when I configured my Dell laptop with RedHat 7.3 to print to the LaserJet at home.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
Rendezvous is just Apples implementation of ZeroConf (an IETF standard). It is a beautiful implementation, but it's not like they pulled this out of thin air. This is also about Apple FINALLY switching to IP as their primary protocol.
It is really neat, though.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Eat Food - Well, you can't download a hot dog, but you can find things to make eating more pleasant or order food online.
Breathe Air - You could suck down the power supply exhaust, but that doesn't really count. You can however check to see if you can breathe when you go outside.
Sex - Technology has not advanced that far yet, but I've had good luck meeting new people online, then meeting up with them in person.
Ride a bicycle - Buy parts, plan routes, get maps, etc..
Walk through the woods - here you go - it's a QTVR I made a couple of years ago of a walk along a creek to the river it joins up with. All kidding aside, this one probably can have the most computer involvement. After all, you want to get topographic maps somewhere, and maybe check out an overhead view of the area you plan on walking through, not to mention sharing details of where you went with friends.