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Nat Friedman on the Future of Collaboration
sp3298622 writes "Nat Friedman, co-founder of Ximian, expresses his excitement about the Hula collaboration Server, talks about the plugins in development for Evolution 2.2, the potential of XGL and the revolution of the Linux Desktop.
The
interview is a 30MB MP3 file."
Really, I love you guys, but "The interview is a 30MB MP3 file." is telling me you're fscking nuts. For how many days is he talking here? Is this 5.1 surround or something? How high a sampling rate is necessary for this kind of thing?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I want a calendar that I can maintain on my own, yet, allow for a dynamic overlay of a subset of this calendar to be viewed and/or maintained in other user calendars.
For example:
I have a work calendar and a personal calendar. It would be nice if I could see both my work calendar and personal calendar at both home and work (yes, I know it is possible to fudge this...). Also, I'd like to add my wife's calendar info to my view as well. And verse vica.
So we can all maintain our calendars anywhere and have realtime info from anywhere. A simple sort-by would allow me to see only work or only personal, etc. Friends could publish overlays for other friends to see (allowing for public and private data, of course).
This would be huge. Is it possible?
As I see it, we'd need a local copy of the calendar data as well as a server copy that is publically accessible (insert security concerns here). Standardize an "overlay" file and it would be pretty simple to send someone the link to a subset of your calendar.
I would imagine that, for tomorrow, my public-to-friends overlay would look like:
Darren, 2/25/2005, 5PM EST to ?, Beer and movies at my place.
More
I can't use it, since I do have a Geforce 6600, and afaik I can't use XGL with the X.org server. However, if I'm wrong, please post how it is possible to integrate XGL into an existing X.org server, so that I can use the nvidia glx module.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
I'm really tired but also very excited so I have to type a few words about something.
David Reveman, who became a Novell employee a couple of weeks ago, has been writing a new X server on OpenGL/Glitz called Xgl. Because Xgl is built on GL primitives it naturally gets the benefit of hardware acceleration. For example, window contents get rendered directly into textures (actually they get copied once in video memory for now), and so you get the benefit of the 3d hardware doing the compositing when you move semi-opaque windows or regions around.
But there are other benefits too. Simple GL operations on the windowing system can suddenly produce incredible results. Want live, running thumbnailed versions of iconified windows? Done. Want your six virtual desktops to be the six faces of a cube that spins, with lighting? Done.
David has a lot of ideas like these, and you probably do too. Apple's cute hacks, like Expose, are inspirational but now that space can be ours to explore. Xgl opens up a whole world of hardware acceleration, fancy animations, separating hardware resolution from software resolution, and more.
I'm personally pretty excited about this. I think running the X server on hardware-accelerated GL directly seems like a very elegant way to go. David was educating me tonight on how X's last lingering limitations are being cast off. With Gtk moving to Cairo, the X server running on Glitz/OpenGL, and hardware vendors providing 3d-accelerated OpenGL drivers for their cards, we will have a UI/graphics platform as powerful as OS X or Windows.
David is going to be demoing his server at XDevConf in Boston this weekend. The source code for Xgl is here.
Update: Thanks to David's help, I am now running Xgl on my laptop (ATI FireGL T2). Some observations: dragging windows doesn't generate any expose events, and is incredibly smooth and solid; antialiased text rendering is hardware-accelerated and so vte now screams (though it still uses all my CPU, so is not useful for compiling); it is a bit unstable, but far better than I expected.
Nat is a great guy to watch if you want ideas. His blog always has nice little insights into the technologies he's working on, or on things he thinks should exist. He has some great projects up his sleeve, particularly Dashboard which gives Tiger's Spotlight a real run for its money.. and it's all on the Linux desktop!
What we really want is for Novell to license Microsoft's ActiveSync for Exchange protocol, and include a module for it in the GPL source for one of these Novell servers. So we can "embrace and extend" Microsoft's only hope of keeping their "desktop" monopoly as it moves away from Windows desktops, and onto the "Webtop", distributed across all manner of Internet devices. PalmOne has licensed it, among others, and Novell could really get the Internet Age going again with that kind of interop.
--
make install -not war
If you look into it you will discover that the main points in the above article are actually where Nat has got a lot of his inspiration for the direction of the Hula project. I have seen a few people using this article as a device against Hula, however, those attempts are really misguided.