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."

Comments

No OGG?

[zygoon]

How the heck am I going to listen to this on Fedora?

Re:No OGG?

[Wordsmith]

It's modded as funny, but this is a valid point when it comes to collaboration. If we can't all use the same resources - media files being one example - we can't effectively collaborate.

MP3 is the defacto standard for compressed audio and WMA has major support, so virtually no one uses Vorbis. After all - most windows and mac users wouldn't know what to do with an ogg file. But mp3 is patent-constricted, so fedora users can't listen to an mp3 without going outside the distribution for semi-legal support.

There's a collaboration problem.

Re:No OGG?

[LnxAddct]

It doesn't matter... the company that is responsible for Fedora's development is in the US and is still held legally liable for holding US copyright law. Do you really think that if I'm based in the US and selling something to Europe, that I can violate US patent law? It works both ways as well iirc, if you sell something to us then you must respect our patents. Fedora is one of the few distros that includes only fully free software, and they stick to their guns on it. Its actually really nice running fedora and knowing that everything on there is patent free... its liberating, if you will. Of course some companies may claim otherwise with the occasional law suit ...*cough* SCO *cough*.

Anyway... I've got two questions for you. Why would you fork Fedora when you can just plop this into /etc/ then do "yum install xmms-mp3". There your problem is solved, its not really worth a new distro to do that. My second question for you is why would you want to support a format that is patented at all( doesn't matter where). The idea is to help people realize that software patents are not acceptable and won't be tolerated. Give OGG a shot, honestly it sounds much better bit for bit (well thats obvious considering it uses more modern algorithms) and takes up less space. I only buy OGG compatible music players and right now I'm really happy with everything. I'm not sure if you use Fedora but, for more info on it FedoraFAQ is a really good resource. Take care
Regards,
Steve

Re:No OGG?

[dvdeug]

After all - most windows and mac users wouldn't know what to do with an ogg file

Assuming WinAmp is installed, they'll get the nice music icon and in theory, it will automagically work without them ever knowing it was an OGG file.

Not for long.

[Tackhead]

"Nat Friedman, co-founder of Ximian, expresses his excitement about the Hula collaboration Server [ ... ]"

Thursday afternoon is here,
Boobies links and time for beer,
We've been good, but we can't last,
Hurry Slashdot, hurry fast,
Knock your server for a loop,
Collaborating hula hoop,
We are those shall not mate,
Please Slashdot, don't be late!

- CmdrTaco and the Chipmunks

> The interview is a 30MB MP3 file.

Not for long, it ain't. ALVIN! Put that server cable down!

Wanted: Dynamic Calendar Overlays

[dsginter]

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.

Re:Wanted: Dynamic Calendar Overlays

[nine-times]

I might be misunderstanding what your asking for, but something like this already exists in both iCal and Evolution. You can subscribe to a calendar that's hosted on a server. Then, when you're viewing calendars, you have a sidebar with the list of calendars you have access to. Each calendar is assigned its own color, and the appointments for each persons calendar appear in the same calendar. The appointments are shown in the color associated with the calendar it's from so you can tell which appointment is whose. You can view all of them at once, or just one, or whatever combination you like. Not only can you subscribe to someone else's calendar, but you can create multiple personal calendars (home/work/whatever), each with it's own color, and do the same thing.

Like I said, I don't know if that's what you're asking for, but if you are, it's already available on OSX with iCal and Linux with Evolution. Evolution is also being ported to Windows. Also, I wouldn't be surprised to Sunbird had similar capabilities, but I don't use Sunbird, so I'm not sure.

Re:Wanted: Dynamic Calendar Overlays

[moosesocks]

Apple's iCal does pretty much what you're asking. a breif introduction on how the program works:

events are placed on a 'calendar' which is basically a topic or category for the event. events from each calendar are overlaid on top of each other as long as you've got the little box checked next to the name of the calendar. evnts are color-coded by calendar.

you can choose to publish any of these calendars on .mac or a WebDAV server (someone wrote a small PHP script which emulates the function of a WebDAV server, so you can do this on just about any server. the script also includes a frontend for parsing and viewing the calendars through a web browser). Other users can then 'subscribe' to that calendar, and it appears just as another calendar on the list. updates are sent and retrieved automatically in the background.

best of all, iCalendar (formerly vCal) is an open standard, the same which was used by outlook until version 2000, and the same as is being used by the upcoming mozilla sunbird project, so in a year or so, we'll have the same functionality on all platforms

all in all, it's my favorite of the iApps and definitely the most underused and underrated

XGL blog entry, in case of slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Hula main site

[BlueEar]

To see what Hula is about go to Hula Server site. You can also view a few screen shots

A preemptive mirror

[whizkid042]

Just in case it gets slow, here is my new server (you can help me load test):

30 mb mp3 file

Does anybody else hate these audio interviews?

[nicpottier]

I mean they are horrible. I know this is the latest trend, podcasting and all, but it's freaking useless.

I don't care what Nate sounds like, I just want the content, and I want it in txt so I can index it, search against it, quote it easily etc..

Not only are these shows just incredibly badly done (wtf is the first 3 minutes of this thing?) but the format itself is just asinine. mp3's are great for music, they are not great for interviews.

For the love of god, at least give us a transcript!

-Nic

Re:Does anybody else hate these audio interviews?

[flacco]

I don't care what Nate sounds like, I just want the content, and I want it in txt so I can index it, search against it, quote it easily etc..

well, i'm about to listen to it while taking a shower and getting ready for work.

my apologies to anyone who just pictured me in the shower.

So...

[samael]

when is this "Evolution" program being released for Windows?