Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Nat Friedman on the Future of Collaboration

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the listen-up dept.

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."

2 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Wanted: Dynamic Calendar Overlays by dsginter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  2. XGL blog entry, in case of slashdotting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting
    9 February 2005 #

    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.