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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."
They come out with the coolest technologies and they just work great!
That's what she said.
I can't believe I actually posted this. Wait...Yeah, I can.
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.
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
"You walked into a room bearing a laptop running Jaguar (the latest version of the OS X operating system) with a wireless networking (Wi-Fi) card, and you could instantly see the iTunes music files of everyone else in the room with a similar setup."
AWESOME!!!
-H. Rosen
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;
Could the Belle of Cupertino and the Stud of Redmond be the hottest new couple on the Siliconwood stage? That's what this gossip reporter tried to find out this week, but alas there was little 411 to be found as intimate confidantes of both parties were tight lipped and mum!
Apple and Microsoft we heard to be discussing a "rendezvous" of some sort. Could it be merely a business deal, or a romantic entanglement? Une telle excitation!
Only time will tell, sassy tech fans! Maybe Microsoft can only tell us how Apple signs a contract. But if the stars favor romance as Valentine's Day (every geek's FAVORITE holiday!) approaches, perhaps Microsoft will learn if Apple cries out or sighs softly or squeals like a pig as she, well, consummates the deal, if you know what I mean.
And I know you know, you naughty voyeurs! ;-) Une fessée sur le fond pour vous!
--- Ban humanity.
why?
because its open source...
Ironicly this is in redmond favor.... since if they ever see it as a threat to themselves due to their lack of such a feature, they'll simply incorporate it... And with that the advantage apple had over MS is gone.
With the major printers on board amongst others begining to support it.... I highly doubt it will take Bill long to make sure MS also supports it AND adds their own special "windows enhanced" features to it.
This whole situation is anologous to when apple made the USB only imac.... in a time when USB was common, but USB products weren't.... Apple suddenly created a greatly under-supported market.... which suddenly rushed to fill the whole with plethras of USB devices.... that didn't even take a year to become predominatly PC.
--Enter The Sig --
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
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.
What the hell are you talking about?
Rendez-Vous is based on Zero-Config, an open-sourced standard.
Apple merely enhenced it a bit and wrote some high-level APIs for even speedier development. But it's just Zero-Config. Rendez-Vous sources are available as all Darwin source code at Darwin.org.
Sure this "instant networking" is all very cool, but for most geeks in the know, we *want* to be able to configure till we die.
Security restrictions? Can I restrict the range of IP addresses that access my music folders? Password access? Encryption? I wanna tweak dammit! The problem with that is that as soon as you make the system more powerful and have all these geek-satisfying options, you need to be able to get down to the nuts and bolts of configuring it. Otherwise you end up in the same mess as MS, with users blindly enabling potentially insecure servers.
"In mathematics, it's not enough to read the words -- you have to hear the music"
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?
Looks like there are sourceforge projects here and here (although the first project actually has code, and the 2nd looks just like a description.)
Not to mention you can get the "real" rendezvous source here from Apple.
It's not automatic sharing, it's automatic discovery. Rendezvous will tell you that there's a machine providing a particular service on your LAN, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be able to gain access to it.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Although wireless networks offer slower bandwidth than their wired counterparts, they do offer one advantage over hard-connected ethernet: they don't suffer from the same saturation problems. While 100 demanding users could quickly saturate a shared 100 MB/S wire, the same users on wireless will not interfere with eachother. Wireless scales much better than you seem to think.
Secondly, a couple hunderd extra broadcast packets aren't going to saturate a 100 base-t network. A packet is tiny. If I do a tcpdump right now, you wouldn't believe the number of broadcast packets flying around here at this moment. My network connnection isn't being adversely affected.
Also, I'd really differ with you that Rendezvous isn't useful in a business setting. Obviously it's not going to replace DNS for the majority of services, but it could seriously simplfy things like, printing, scanning, and maybe even some file sharing. I don't doubt that this technology will find a great place in the home, but it certainly doesn't mean it's useless to businesses. It's worth noting though that Rendezvous is limited to the current machine's local subnet.
Here is a PDF file that explains the technology behind this a little better...but does not go into too much detail regarding security. It sounds like you can choose what you want to share.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke
the unfortunate truth that it is still hard to do anything meaningful with a Mac.
I'm not a big Mac apologist, but may I ask what meaningful things are harder to do on a Mac than on Windows? It can't be using Microsoft Office documents, because there is an official Microsoft Office for MacOS, even OSX. That is the thing most people seem to complain about with other non-Windows OSes. So what are you talking about "anything meaningful" is awfully open ended.
You'd be surprised how well this actually scales. That is one of the whole points. Rendezvous is a replacement to AppleTalk, and as such one of the major goals is not to saturate the network like other more chatty protocols.
For instance, each host implements an aggressive caching scheme so if one host asks for data, other hosts can learn from its request. There is also an exponentially rising delay between each request, the assumption being a host that has been around a long time will continue to be around a long time. Further, Rendezvous requests are not just like broadcast pings. They have a very well defined (and specific) domain standard in multicast DNS. You could ask only for http servers running over TCP, or only iPhoto sharing servers. This cuts down on the traffic.
Of course, the other problem is the dynamic IP address assignment. It chooses an IP out of a /16 subnet. In short, in order for there to be a high probability of collision there need to be more than 32768 hosts, and even then it'll converge quickly. The Zeroconf spec gives upper bounds on how many hosts should be in a zeroconf network.
The whole idea of this system is to allow small isolated subnets (like a wireless zone) to auto-configure. After the first 20,000 devices, sure you might see some degredation in performance. Of course, imagine an admintaking care of a 20,000 device subnet. They end up like a cross between Jerry Lewis and Christopher Lloyd. If you need more subnets then you link them via a configured host. A proxy-gateway with rendezvous, forwarding only things that matter for this subnet, would be a pretty cool app too.
Zeroconf, especially in the home or small office setting, is really, really useful.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
If you hurry, you might be able to get one in time to save Valentine's Day.
Since Rendezvous is based on Zeroconf, here is an paper explaining how to secure a zerconf network. Perhaps this will slow the FUD.
Rendezvous is not just an Apple product - it is on the way to being an Internet standard, with an IETF working group and two Internet drafts in progress - one on Auto configuration of hosts and the other on the Dynamic configuration of IP Addresses.
At the ZeroConf WG meetings I have been to, Microsoft was very much present, so I assume that they are well aware of this technology.
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.
As mentioned, since Rendezvous is based on zeroconf, here is a paper explaining how to secure a zerconf network. Facts vs. FUD. Let the better approach win.
Yeah, but it could be better.
...Bill's boxes to Steve's elegant machines.
from the article:
This is the kind of subjectivity that has no place in real journalism. Zealots are Apple's real threat. So many people hear "Apple" and think "using a Powerbook at a Starbucks, sipping a latte, dressed in black." Apple users are art-fags to them, and derogatory comments about "Windoze" aren't going to do anything but make it worse.
How about some fucking objectivity? Lemmie give you a tip, Sparky - people will take you more seriously when you say "Apple's new technology poses a real threat to MS" if you don't follow it with "I'm getting a sex change so I could maybe have Steve's baby"
c-hack.com |
That's the point. It's not written by the guy who is known to be a real zealot.
If Apple creates a Rendezvous implementation for Windows I fail to see how Apple's market share will grow. It will enable PC users to get the benefits of Rendezvous without owning a Mac. It will also allow existing Mac users connect with their PC using co-workers and friends. And since it is a completely open technology the PC users will not even need a Mac involved at all. So that begs the questions, how will this benefit Apple?
Apple does not make money by packaging software and making it available for everyone to use freely. Sure they get to innovate and make their customers happy, but it does not win them more customers. This article seems to imply that creating cool technology and implementing it on a PC will help Apple. There needs to be some proprietary software in place for this to be true.
Now if they created a Rendezvous implementation for corporate environments and a Software Development Kit to be used by companies like IBM. At work I use Lotus Notes which has a messenger client. I would like to automatically find co-workers without all of the initial setup that I had to do when I started using it. I would also like to be able to monitor the servers on the network and use the printers more easily. If Apple could sell software to do all of that, and perhaps sell XServe systems with it I bet that would benefit Apple.
I really hope Apple does break into the corporate workplace. It would really simplify much of extra work that I do so I can get back to my real work.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
I'm seeing a lot of knee-jerk reactions about Rendezvous and security. People are assuming that because the protocol is about making certain types of network configuration dynamic and simple, it is necessarily insecure. Well, I've got news for you: any type of connection from one computer to another is creating security issues. I mean...duh. Now, clearly using something like the zeroconf protocol is going to require stuff like...passwords and encryption and all the usual nonsense we need to make things secure. Oh, and a competent sysadmin administrating the system. So can we cool it with the frothing?
Now, if someone had some good comments on the security issues involved with the zeroconf protocol itself, I'd like to read about it.
Maybe he means scraping the registry for the shattered corpse of an unsucessfully uninstalled program? Or perhaps he means the constant rebooting even in XP. Or, maybe, just maybe, it is Bonzi Buddy that is meaningful to him.
I believe the point that the author was making was that this is one more tool to reduce platform-dependence. The more freely programs and peripherals are able to communicate with one another across various platforms, the more Microsoft and Windows shrink into the background.
That's why MS got all fired up about stomping Netscape into the ground, because the browser is supposed to enable platform-independent computing.
Yeah, it's kind of a stretch to think of Rendezvous as a "Windows killer," but it's just one technology of many to accomplish that task.
I thought that enabling PC users to get the benifts was almost the point of this kind of thing. Instead of Apple trying to adapt to a Windows standard, everyone uses a standard that Apple knows pretty well how to deal with. Apple can play well with others using an open standard. They aren't the misfit children anymore.
If these Apple press release are anything to go by, then Rendezvous has already made huge headway:
-
TiVo, Brother & Aspyr Announce Rendezvous Networked Products
- Developers Rapidly Adopt Apple's Rendezvous Networking Technology
- Epson, HP & Lexmark Support Apple's Rendezvous Technology
Although already posted in further down, here is Apple's page on Rendezvous. I want to see this technology work, because simplicity is what most people want. If its simple, then people just use the technology and don't notice its there - this is what future computing must strive to do.Jumpstart the tartan drive.
If you *Really* wanted to support your claim that you can't do anything meaniful with a Mac, you'd have noted that you posted your comment from one.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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
It's quite relevant. One of the points of the article was that I/T configuration is a significant cost for companies, and the poster took it further by pointing out that competent I/T help is a factor that exacerbates the problem. The poster also correctly points out that in some places, Apple faces a severe uphill climb, because they're not even considered by some I/T "professionals" who've never given their products more than a cursory examination. In other places, I/T professionals (actual ones) have a wide grasp of technologies, not tied to a single vendor or platform, and they'll use whichever one seems to be the best value for the investment.
Apple solutions aren't always going to be the best. I'm not claiming that. I'd even go so far as to say that sometimes, using MS stuff is the right thing for a company or project, despite the fact that I detest their business practices (and think they've earned every bit of antipathy they've received). But the bottom line is: there's a world of I/T and software workers out there who'll never even consider (let alone attempt to become proficient with) technologies outside their favorites, and that's simply not professional. No company or platform out there holds a monopoly on good ideas.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
All I have to do to browse a Windows network is click in the box in the Connect To Server Windows - everything comes right up, workgroups/domains first.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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.
Actually, ZeroConf contains many provisions for scalability:
Apple has said that they designed ZeroConf to generate significantly less traffic than AppleTalk.
While they didn't invent zero-conf I believe that the head of the steering committee is and has been a full time Apple employee.
Go out and get sailing!