I thought true open source developers are happy just to have the opportunity to write code for free?
This isn't about open source devs working for free. This is about a company that has stolen open sourced code in the past now trying to exploit developers in the Phillipines by offering only $10,000 for work that, if my interpretation of their requirements is even marginally correct, would cost the company a hell of a lot more to do it properly themselves.
Its simple exploitation crudely disguised in a competition with the hope that they can beat a deadline for a product that does not exist. Simply put, they want someone to write a Crossover Office installer for them but don't want to pay fair market rates for it.
Not only is that more than 15 days work, its definitely worth more than $10,000 to the developer that writes it. Someone actually pulling it off legitimately and taking the $10,000 would be like selling CP/M to Bill Gates and Paul Allen... Oh... Wait a sec.
Developers have been working on Linux for 15 years and some haven't received a dime.
If they wanted to receive money for their code that goes in Linux they could simply write it as a kernel module and charge for it, or sell the.patch files to people that are willing to pay for the added functionality in Linux. No one is forcing anyone to contribute to Linux for free. For most of them, its a labour of love they perform in their spare time. They're not sitting at their computers for 8 hours a day doing nothing but work on Linux. Those that do get paid for it are usually working at companies like Novell/SuSE or Redhat or IBM or any of the many others that contribute to Linux. They're getting a wage, not a direct income from Linux itself.
May I ask why the company continues to use Windows 2000 and Exchange then?:-)
I'm not trying to be negative or a downer, but I wouldn't accept that kind of performance or response from any product or company. Especially not for something as core critical to most businesses as email.
A lot of people claim there are no feature comparable alternatives, but thats not true. There are plenty. Its just a case of taking the time to research it.
So ultimately, if you have AD and Exchange and they're down for at least 16 hours and even Microsoft is struggling to help restore the service, why does the company continue to rely on the products? More importantly, why pay Microsoft support fees to fix a problem that should not be anywhere near as difficult as it appears to have become?
Personally, I would consider that amount of down time and difficulty of resolution to be 2 serious reasons to start looking for an alternative. They're two costs over and above your normal admistrative/maintenance costs. I'd consider 16 hours to be as much as I'd be willing to pay for in any half year. I know that with the solution I use I can build a new mail server, restore the mail and have everything back up and running from scratch in far less time than its taken to resolve that problem. If it came down to it I can use simple shell scripts to go through and clean out any viruses from the mail store.
Fortunately, the mail server (or any other for that matter) isn't running on Windows or Exchange and so virus issues are almost non-existant. The desktops/laptops all running Linux or OSX might help that too though.;) There are still virus scanners in place, but my concern of something going rampant on my network is mitigated significantly by design and deployment. But at least I know that if something does happen, I won't be spending 16+ hours trying to fix a single issue.
And if in the future I do end up in that situation, then I'll be back on the market looking for a replacement again. As I think you should be right now.
Confidentiality can be used to cloak all sorts of things. I believe individuals should have some privacy, but proceedings in public companies should not be private.
The confidentiality of some internal process is not as important to me as how each individual person is treated. If people are abused even a little bit, then to me that trumps enourmous amounts of confidentiality expectations.
Thats just wrong. Proceedings in public companies should be forced public. Thats like saying that someone living in a trailer isn't entitled to privacy because they don't own the land under it. The owner of the land is entitled to see everything that happens inside the trailer. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not watch trailer trash shower in public. That is kind of whats happening with Microsoft now.
Personally, I don't care how people are treated inside a company. Everyone has the choice to work there or not. If they don't like the way they're being treated, they can just leave. Or they can do like the mini-microsoft blogger has done and speak out about it and try to draw attention to it.
Pay attention -- if you treat people well, things naturally remain quiet. But treat people poorly, and then even a contract won't help to keep shit confidential. The moral of the story is -- just do not be an ass to people, it's not really profitable. I'm not saying "be good". Just saying "do not be an ass".
Wrong. A contract is an agreement with legal bindings. It may not stop some people from spilling their guts, but it allows a company a way to retaliate if it needs to. Contracts signed by an individual with another individual or company trump many (not all) personal rights or liberties. You are effectively agreeing to a particular course of behaviour for the duration of the contract in return for something. In this case, employment. Freedom of speech doesn't mean a thing once you sign an NDA. That NDA trumps your freedom to discuss the covered topic with people outside the agreement.
Microsoft is an obnoxious company who has utter disregard for the wider community. These internal troubles simply reflect what's outside, as far as I can see. If the company treats clients like shit, why would it treat their own employees like gold?
As just as I agree that Microsoft is an obnoxious company with no regard for anyone outside its own buildings, I think you need to step back and reassess your comments in the context of any small company. Say a 100 employee ma'n'pa shop down the street. Why should they be afforded any more rights than a much bigger company?
Microsoft is in a bad spot now. Everyone knows that. Balmer seems to be in denial, or just plain ignorant, but for the most plart everyone has seen it coming from a long way off. You're right. They have treated many of their customers pretty poorly. But it didn't take much to see that the company was top heavy.
The mini-microsoft blog is the opinion of a few people that happen to work inside Microsoft. It doesn't represent the 60,000 or so world wide, but it does represent a fair number of the developers or those 'on the shop floor'. What I don't agree with is how public it has become. Using blogger may have been a good way to stop Microsoft management from closing it, or tracing the authors, but wouldn't something like this have been better inside the organisation as a way of generating internal discussion?
Not to mention the irony of using Google to host the blog in the first place.;-) I mean, sure text.net (a.net asp blog tool, not an address) would have been enough?:-)
May I introduce you to an opensource Directory solution that quite nicely replaces Windows Active Directory. Many moons ago it started life as just OpenLDAP but it is now become so much more.
Darwin, *BSD, Linux, various Unixes. Builds with GCC and source is available under Apple's OpenSource license.
Redhat's RHDS available on subscription for RHEL3 and RHEL4 is another. Based on Netscape Directory Services. Thats mostly available under the GPL now, called Fedora Directory Server.
Personally my favourite has been eDirectory. It may not be opensource or even free, but the little you do pay for it is definitely worth the product. Anyone skipping over it is either deliberately obtuse or just plain ignorant. Especially if they're willing to pay for Active Directory and all the costs that go with it (including licensing, security and maintence/administration) while receiving a far inferior product.
Ultimately, Ask Slashdot is the worst place for the original poster to ask this kind of question. They need to sit down with people from various companies and vendors to get an idea of all available products. Many will happily discuss the requirements and work together with you to find the best solution, not just sell you a solution from a preferred supplier.
Ask various engineering places in the district to submitt RFP's based on requirements you set. It doesn't have to be a multi-million dollar contract to get many interested. Companies are starting to really take notice of the SME market now days. Ultimately the have to.;-)
Start with http://www.opensourcecms.com/ and have a look at all the various packages listed there. They don't list all available programs, but what they do list are demonstrated there as well.
All packages are required to be coded in PHP, however if you want to start looking at other languages (like perl or ASP) then I suggest looking at HotScripts.com and checking out whats listed in the lists there.
Failing those, how about a google search for multi-lingual CMS packages?
Maybe so, but in this case its still wrong. eDirectory is still being sold and is available on a massive scale. Its the foundation of SuSE Linux Server products as well a Novell's Netware products. It is available for all platforms in popular use today, including Windows. And the cost can't be beat.
For example, get a copy of Whitebox Enerprise Linux 4 (http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/ -- RHEL4 for free) and stick eDirectory on it makes for one exceptionally cheap, stable, supported directory server platform. At a price not even Microsoft can compete with.
Also, don't forget that now the Netscape Directory is back on the market and about to get a new injection of life as well. Then theres the SunONE suite.
I don't think Microsoft in this case is going to be able to own the directory services market in the same way the own the desktop market or the office suite market. I also think that if Novell were ever smart enough to license eDirectory at a $0 cost, they'd rapid gain massive market share. They don't have to open source it, just remove the price for adoption. Doing so would effectively provide an instant viable, user friendly, alternative to OpenLDAP for most $0 IT budget businesses and allow them to compete directly with Redhat's FedoraDS when that is finally fully GPL.
I've played with the FedoraDS and compared with eDirectory, I'd much prefer eDirectory. However, the price of FedoraDS is right and both are far more userfriendly than OpenLDAP.
Active Directory has never given me anything but headaches and while OpenDirectory has some excellent tools, its not the same without the Aqua gui;-) SunONE is just... well... Bloated.:-)
Sorry, way off the original tangent... But you get that.
BTW, I do not work for, nor have any association with, Novell or any of their partners.
I do, however, extoll the virtues of good products regardless of which vendor releases it. I may not like Microsoft as an entity, but I do acknowledge when they release a good product.
I disagree. eDirectory and DirXML (Now called the Novell Identity Manager) are both very excellent products that fit in to places that many other products don't go. Especially DirXML.
On job I did a few years ago required synchronising a Mac OpenDirectory network with an Active Directory network. Getting the two to talk together natively was a mission and never gave us results that were worth the effort. Putting DirXML in between solved that problem. Adding eDirectory in to the equation allowed us to then add in products like their SAP based ERP services and several other applications. This provided for a very smooth, extremely easily managed service that went far beyond just synchronising their OpenDirectory and Active Directory networks.
I have not yet seen another platform like DirXML that is as slick and as easy to implement while at the same time supporting such a large number of products out fo the box. And its modular design makes it even easier for developers and solution providers to add support for their own products.
AD didn't kill Novell. Anyone that takes the time to seriously use eDirectory will understand that AD doesn't even begin to offer the same flexibility. Not to mention that AD is not cross platform where as eDirectory (and pretty much all their products) will run on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Netware, AIX... Oh, and that nasty Microsoft Windows product too.
Against my own better judgement, I'm going to respond to this. I know its just begging for trouble but sometimes...
Firstly, sit back, relax and take a deep breath. The language and tone of your post suggests you're getting yourself worked up over an issue that makes absolutely no difference at all to whether you use Linux or not.
Secondly, given you don't care WHY Linux doesn't have the kind of apps you've talked of suggests that not only have you not really spent any useful time looking, you're not really interested in finding them anyway. Which suggests to me that even if there is an A/V app that meets your criteria (and after my comments yesterday I went looking and found several) you wouldn't be interested in them anyway because they're not familiar brands that you're used to on Windows or where ever.
As such, I suggest you stick with what you know and use those brands on Windows or MacOSX that you are familiar with already. Obviously, a GNU/Linux distro is not going to be in your list of wants for a good long while, with or without the AV software. I see no point in continuing a discussion with a mind thats already closed itself off and has become unreasonable as a result.
Thanks for pointing out my fat finger syndrome. If you read my previous comments in this thread you would have seen I am aware Codec was the word I was looking for. Codex was a typo, not a misunderstanding of meanings on my part.
For an absolutely massive rant, have you considered that maybe its just not been a priority yet? Linux is only just getting around to starting to become a common Desktop, and even then some would argue its still miles behind MacOSX as far as usablility goes. Not to mention that until recently its really only been a server or office workstation platform.
There are commercial products available for Linux, and they're there because commercial organisations (like Weta Digital, or Pixar) decided they wanted something that met their needs and made it happen or (in some cases) paid someone to make it happen.
As there are more and more people that move to Linux and that want simple video editors, people will start to get involved and create projects for it. People are going to move to Linux for reasons other than video editing first though. Whether it be cost, security, reliability or whatever. As that happens, companies like Adobe/Macromedia and so on will start taking it seriously and will be more likely to port their products.
Its when the bigger companies start taking it seriously that the community will start coding serious alternatives. I'd love an equivelent of iMovie for my Gnome desktop. But I'm realistic enough to know that it won't come until there are enough people that want it first. Or till a coder with the time, patience or need decides to scratch an itch themselves.
As frightening as I think it might be, I wouldn't be surprised if Linspire or one of the more consumer targetted distro's were the first to start coding in that direction.
If you want consumer desktop with video editing, without sacrificing security and reliability, use MacOSX. Your only Linux options are to buy or wait till someone with the ability gets fed up enough to do something about it themselves.
Yeah, I'm aware it can read streams, but can it output to a stream instead of say XVideo or SDL or FrameBuffer or whichever method people want to use?
I don't know if a plugin for that exists yet. If mplayer could output to a file or a socket, that would make it an almost complete utility in much the same way VLC is becoming. I use VLC for pretty much everything at home because of its streaming and cross platform abilities. The web interface makes it easy to manage the streams and playlists and the fact you can choose the codec of the stream is a huge bonus. DVDs using XviD, Music in MP3.
If IceCast added support for video streaming, that might start to move up my list too. Unfortunately, I like to watch movies on my TV as well as listen to music on my stereo.
Not true. The videolan client meets that criteria exactly. It runs headless on Linux and pretty much anything else. Streaming that in various formats (including MP4, DivX and so on) is as simple as getting the codex.
If it doesn't exist already, it wouldn't be hard to write a streaming module for mplayer. Whether that be streamed to pipe, file or socket. It can already read most codecs and if you have a license for the WMP Win32 DLLs, it'll handle that too.
Except that I can acheive the same thing with existing tools that don't stay resident. Whats so difficult about writing a tcl/tk (or even a PHP-GTK) wrapper to find/locate/grep/awk? Adding in smarts for the various formats is simple.
Sure it might be marginally slower because it doesn't have a resident daemon in the back end constantly crawling the $home directory, but over all it could provide exactly the same functionality without the 20meg hit for each user, plus the cost of the 'best' front end itself. It'd also only be resident when the user actually wants to use it, it wouldn't be slowing things down by crawling the directory tree in the background when that user is inactive (but other users might not be inactive at the same time) and the search results could be displayed in a way that was just as pretty.;-)
I'm not saying that Beagle is bad. I use it at home for myself. But I'm the only one on the computer at the time I'm using it and I'm personally happy to take that performance hit.
My point is simple though. Mono/Beagle ARE expensive. Especially here in NZ where the cost of hardware is no where near as cheap as it is in say Australia (closest neighbour) or even the US.
I don't deny that Beagle is still a 0.12 release. In fact, thats part of my argument. I do not consider it ready at all for prime time use in a production/server environment. It is large, clunky and not optimised at all yet. The original poster wanted to know why Beagle isn't used as the search tech in Gnome 2.12... Quite simply, its still far to much of an alpha quality project in my opinion. Unless more people help out with it or more time is spent on the project by those already working on it, its going to be a while before I change my view on that. It doesn't stop me using it personally, but it does stop me even considering it in my office.
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to take a nearly 20meg hit on ram for each user that wants to run beagle so they can have flash/fancy search capabilities. Even on a machine with 1 or 2gig, that adds up quickly.
Now add in multiple instances OpenOffice.org writer and calc, multiple instances of the desktop environment (in my case, Gnome 2.10), a browser, Evolution, quite often Rhythmbox, plus whatever other tools the users are using at the time...
I'd rather not waste 20meg a user on something that should not in anyway use near that much. My issue stands. I will not use beagle (or Mono) in a production server environment until it is a lot cheaper to run. Why should I throw more ram and cpu's at it when the same (or similar) can be achieved for a much smaller cost?
For a small business like myself, with less than 20 employees, Mono and mono-based applications are simply too expensive right now. No matter how great or flash or whizbang or cool the application might be.
/etc/skel is one option if you intend to normalise it as the default search method on your platform across all users. But given how much of a hog beagled is when it comes to resources, on a busy server thats going to hurt.
In my office I run an Ubuntu termsrv set up. No one has anything on their own machines except for a basic OS with an X server on it. Cuts back on hardware costs. I'm sure I'm not the only one that has set things up this way. Now add in a whole heap of mono processes going and you're gonna hit trouble. Its hard enough having just a few people loading OpenOffice.org apps at the same time, adding in multiple Mono processes running for each user (beagled constantly in the background, best in the fore) and suddenly you need a much more powerful server to cope with that kind of load.
Sure,/etc/skel would work for desktop/workstation/laptop machines which are likely to have only one person using them at a time, but I'm not that rich. I run a small business and manage the IT side of things myself. I simply cannot afford the overhead required by multiple mono/beagled threads at once.
This is partly why I'm glad Gnome didn't let Ximian bully them in to coding core parts of the platform in C#/Mono. I've been a Gnome user since 1.2 and I would truly have had to change desktop if they went down that path. It just wouldn't be practical or useful for anything other than desktop/workstation/laptop installations.
One thing a lot of people seem to forget. Just because its Free doesn't mean it costs nothing.:-) In the case of Mono and C# apps on *nix, it costs a lot in memory/cpu. Sometimes beyond what I would consider reasonable.
Doesn't stop me trying them on my own machines at home, but at this point in time, I wouldn't consider it on any of my business related machines.
Re:What about MIME types/file associations?
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I have no freaking idea where this thing is actually stored. In GNOME 1.x, they used some kind of really broken text file format. In early 2.x, they seemed to just keep using it. Nowadays, I have absolutely no idea how it stores the associations. Is it somewhere in gconf database, finally? I also have no idea how to really manage these file associations in 2.10: Nautilus isn't particularly helpful and I couldn't find the knob in the control center.
You can change the file type associations by going to the properties of a file in Nautilus, then go to the "Open With" tab and make your changes there.:-)
This has been the case since at least 2.8 (I'm typing this on an Ubuntu 4 machine) and is definitely the case in current 2.10 machines (Ubuntu 5, FC4 tried and tested.)
I hope not. I've been playing with Beagle 0.12 and its definitely not ready for prime time. Its a great service and the 'best' front end is very nice (although I personally prefer the web frontend as I usually already have a browser open) but its not anywhere near solid enough.
Its a mission to get going from source at the moment and even if you run a distro that already includes it, it doesn't take much to break it. Upgrading Firefox/Mozilla is enough in some cases (thanks to best's reliance on the Gecko libs).
Don't get me wrong. Personally I love the technology, but I really don't think its anywhere near ready for mainstream use. Great if you want to try out bleeding edge tech or help improve the software, but not if you just want a search tech that works.
The other downside is that beagled has to be run by the individual users when they log in. It refuses to run at boot as part of the init scripts. So its got to be included as either part of the xinit or shell rc scripts. Thus automation is going to be needed on the admins part at the moment. Sure, this can be done as a default part of a distro, but given its not ready yet...;-)
Also, although they may look pretty, I'm not sure that the new graphics are running at 50 frames per second... they look more like they're at 25 fps, which is really rather poor.
Not that it matters that much on anything but HDTV given that the average TV is running at 24-30fps and the normal human eye struggles to tell the difference between most things faster than 30fps.
Just duplicating the nice printer setup UI they have for CUPS would be a good start, but I don't think I've seen that yet...
Ummm... Gnome 2.10 provides a very slick, clean and easy interface to administer CUPS based settings. Wizard driven if you want it, or manually done if you prefer. In fact, Gnome has provided most of the functionality from at least 2.6 upwards.
much less point-and-click software update with push and server administration UIs.
Hmmm... Yast and RHN spring to mind. Then things like Synaptic for package management and security updates. Ubuntu even includes a client tool that will poll for updates and put a notice icon in your panel to let you know there are updates.
Don't get me wrong. I love my Macs as well. They are brilliant machines, but I still prefer to spend my time in Gnome 2.10. I use Gnome on all my PCs and on my Macs.
I can't speak for KDE or any other Desktop environment, but Gnome is definitely quite capable of holding its own against the OSX platform as far as usability goes. I switched my fathers entire business to Linux + Crossover Office (for their accounting package) and they have not had a single issue as far as usability goes. In fact, the only issue I did have was that some websites (actually, only the bank they use) don't work in Firefox too well, but do work in Netscape 7.x instead.
Get the latest Ubuntu LiveCD and check out Gnome 2.10. I think you will be surprised.
----8<---- Im giving up Wow Due to lag and their crapy servers, what do you all think of GW, worth trying as next step after WoW ?
(but i should be programming not playing games)
----8<----
I'm playing both GW and WoW. Both are excellent games and I enjoy both very much. Next step after WoW? Its too different to call it a next step. The graphics are different, the game mechanics are different, the whole way you play is extremely different. ArenaNet don't even call their game an MMORPG. They call it a role playing game that you play online.
Giving up WoW is your choice, but Guild Wars isn't a drop in replacement for it. Crafting and a pretty decent trade system are just two examples of things that I've gotten used to in WoW but are really missing from Guild Wars. Also, the commands are entirely different which can get confusing at first.
Having said all that, I really like Guild Wars. I play the Beta weekend and then when its over, go back to WoW. Not sure how I'm going to split my time between the two after the 28th, but I'll figure it out.;-)
Would I leave WoW for Guild Wars? Not initially. Maybe when I build up a community of friends there, but I have far too much time invested in WoW to drop it completely and permanantly. Lag and crappy servers in WoW? I'm on a medium pop PvP server and rarely have I had lag so bad I couldnt play the game as it is intended. The server downtime is easily addressed. You get free/credited days out of it. Not many other games do similar.
Okay... When did people stop using this great Emacs? I mean... Graphical interfaces? Wow! Who'da thunk it. Thats just a totally innovative and novel idea.
What? I can change the way my interface looks so it suits my own personal tastes and preferences? OMG! Someone get on the phone and tell Microsoft, they're gonna want to embrace that idea. They already do? Damn, they're on the ball. What? They got the idea from KDE and Gnome? OMG! Isn't that like stealing? Xerox? Apple Computer? Who are they again?
</>
It amazes me to see how so quickly the whole fight between KDE and Gnome sprang up over something as simple as the new DEFAULT THEME for Gnome being announced. Its not like people can't change the theme for either KDE or Gnome if they don't like the defaults. I thought the whole Keramilk issue was put to rest a long time ago. Guess not. Must've missed that memo. Sorry, didn't mean to stay out of the fight for so long.
Come one people. Get real. Personally, I think it looks good. Its clean, open, totally uncluttered (like some KDE shots I've seen recently) and its functional. Its pretty easy to navigate and it keeps with the K.I.S.S principle I have always liked in Gnome (KDE was always too cluttered with too many bells and whistles presented to the average end user. Might be fine for advanced users, but generally the newer users prefer not to get a whole heap of stuff thrown at them when all they want to do is configure their desktop).
But who cares? If you use Gnome and you don't like this theme, install a different one. There are so many available out there. Hell, I even went as far as making my own (*GASP*) so that my desktop looked and felt the way I wanted it to so I was more productive and it was useful to me.
Damn... Lets badmouth a clean and easy on the eyes interface simply because it bears some resemblance to Windows XP. Damn... Last time I looked, every Window Manager had 3 buttons at the top of their windows for minimize,maximize/restore,close. Even OS X.
If it really is that much of an issue, don't you dear look at FVWM. Maybe you should go check out Enlightenment again. Its not dead you know. In fact, some of use still use it every day. Then you can really make your desktop look any and every way you could possibly want it to. Amazing that.
Gotta love the fact that you can choose what interface your desktop has. In fact, if you really wanted to, you could set your.xinitrc to pick a different one at random every time you started X. Now theres a really far out idea.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't about open source devs working for free. This is about a company that has stolen open sourced code in the past now trying to exploit developers in the Phillipines by offering only $10,000 for work that, if my interpretation of their requirements is even marginally correct, would cost the company a hell of a lot more to do it properly themselves.
Its simple exploitation crudely disguised in a competition with the hope that they can beat a deadline for a product that does not exist. Simply put, they want someone to write a Crossover Office installer for them but don't want to pay fair market rates for it.
Not only is that more than 15 days work, its definitely worth more than $10,000 to the developer that writes it. Someone actually pulling it off legitimately and taking the $10,000 would be like selling CP/M to Bill Gates and Paul Allen... Oh... Wait a sec.
If they wanted to receive money for their code that goes in Linux they could simply write it as a kernel module and charge for it, or sell the .patch files to people that are willing to pay for the added functionality in Linux. No one is forcing anyone to contribute to Linux for free. For most of them, its a labour of love they perform in their spare time. They're not sitting at their computers for 8 hours a day doing nothing but work on Linux. Those that do get paid for it are usually working at companies like Novell/SuSE or Redhat or IBM or any of the many others that contribute to Linux. They're getting a wage, not a direct income from Linux itself.
May I ask why the company continues to use Windows 2000 and Exchange then? :-)
;) There are still virus scanners in place, but my concern of something going rampant on my network is mitigated significantly by design and deployment. But at least I know that if something does happen, I won't be spending 16+ hours trying to fix a single issue.
I'm not trying to be negative or a downer, but I wouldn't accept that kind of performance or response from any product or company. Especially not for something as core critical to most businesses as email.
A lot of people claim there are no feature comparable alternatives, but thats not true. There are plenty. Its just a case of taking the time to research it.
So ultimately, if you have AD and Exchange and they're down for at least 16 hours and even Microsoft is struggling to help restore the service, why does the company continue to rely on the products? More importantly, why pay Microsoft support fees to fix a problem that should not be anywhere near as difficult as it appears to have become?
Personally, I would consider that amount of down time and difficulty of resolution to be 2 serious reasons to start looking for an alternative. They're two costs over and above your normal admistrative/maintenance costs. I'd consider 16 hours to be as much as I'd be willing to pay for in any half year. I know that with the solution I use I can build a new mail server, restore the mail and have everything back up and running from scratch in far less time than its taken to resolve that problem. If it came down to it I can use simple shell scripts to go through and clean out any viruses from the mail store.
Fortunately, the mail server (or any other for that matter) isn't running on Windows or Exchange and so virus issues are almost non-existant. The desktops/laptops all running Linux or OSX might help that too though.
And if in the future I do end up in that situation, then I'll be back on the market looking for a replacement again. As I think you should be right now.
Thats just wrong. Proceedings in public companies should be forced public. Thats like saying that someone living in a trailer isn't entitled to privacy because they don't own the land under it. The owner of the land is entitled to see everything that happens inside the trailer. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not watch trailer trash shower in public. That is kind of whats happening with Microsoft now.
Personally, I don't care how people are treated inside a company. Everyone has the choice to work there or not. If they don't like the way they're being treated, they can just leave. Or they can do like the mini-microsoft blogger has done and speak out about it and try to draw attention to it.
Wrong. A contract is an agreement with legal bindings. It may not stop some people from spilling their guts, but it allows a company a way to retaliate if it needs to. Contracts signed by an individual with another individual or company trump many (not all) personal rights or liberties. You are effectively agreeing to a particular course of behaviour for the duration of the contract in return for something. In this case, employment. Freedom of speech doesn't mean a thing once you sign an NDA. That NDA trumps your freedom to discuss the covered topic with people outside the agreement.
As just as I agree that Microsoft is an obnoxious company with no regard for anyone outside its own buildings, I think you need to step back and reassess your comments in the context of any small company. Say a 100 employee ma'n'pa shop down the street. Why should they be afforded any more rights than a much bigger company?
Microsoft is in a bad spot now. Everyone knows that. Balmer seems to be in denial, or just plain ignorant, but for the most plart everyone has seen it coming from a long way off. You're right. They have treated many of their customers pretty poorly. But it didn't take much to see that the company was top heavy.
The mini-microsoft blog is the opinion of a few people that happen to work inside Microsoft. It doesn't represent the 60,000 or so world wide, but it does represent a fair number of the developers or those 'on the shop floor'. What I don't agree with is how public it has become. Using blogger may have been a good way to stop Microsoft management from closing it, or tracing the authors, but wouldn't something like this have been better inside the organisation as a way of generating internal discussion?
Not to mention the irony of using Google to host the blog in the first place. ;-) I mean, sure text.net (a .net asp blog tool, not an address) would have been enough? :-)
May I introduce you to an opensource Directory solution that quite nicely replaces Windows Active Directory. Many moons ago it started life as just OpenLDAP but it is now become so much more.
i rectory.html
;-)
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/opend
Good ol' Apple.
Darwin, *BSD, Linux, various Unixes. Builds with GCC and source is available under Apple's OpenSource license.
Redhat's RHDS available on subscription for RHEL3 and RHEL4 is another. Based on Netscape Directory Services. Thats mostly available under the GPL now, called Fedora Directory Server.
http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/
Personally my favourite has been eDirectory. It may not be opensource or even free, but the little you do pay for it is definitely worth the product. Anyone skipping over it is either deliberately obtuse or just plain ignorant. Especially if they're willing to pay for Active Directory and all the costs that go with it (including licensing, security and maintence/administration) while receiving a far inferior product.
Ultimately, Ask Slashdot is the worst place for the original poster to ask this kind of question. They need to sit down with people from various companies and vendors to get an idea of all available products. Many will happily discuss the requirements and work together with you to find the best solution, not just sell you a solution from a preferred supplier.
Ask various engineering places in the district to submitt RFP's based on requirements you set. It doesn't have to be a multi-million dollar contract to get many interested. Companies are starting to really take notice of the SME market now days. Ultimately the have to.
Start with http://www.opensourcecms.com/ and have a look at all the various packages listed there. They don't list all available programs, but what they do list are demonstrated there as well.
All packages are required to be coded in PHP, however if you want to start looking at other languages (like perl or ASP) then I suggest looking at HotScripts.com and checking out whats listed in the lists there.
Failing those, how about a google search for multi-lingual CMS packages?
Maybe so, but in this case its still wrong. eDirectory is still being sold and is available on a massive scale. Its the foundation of SuSE Linux Server products as well a Novell's Netware products. It is available for all platforms in popular use today, including Windows. And the cost can't be beat.
;-) SunONE is just... well... Bloated. :-)
For example, get a copy of Whitebox Enerprise Linux 4 (http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/ -- RHEL4 for free) and stick eDirectory on it makes for one exceptionally cheap, stable, supported directory server platform. At a price not even Microsoft can compete with.
Also, don't forget that now the Netscape Directory is back on the market and about to get a new injection of life as well. Then theres the SunONE suite.
I don't think Microsoft in this case is going to be able to own the directory services market in the same way the own the desktop market or the office suite market. I also think that if Novell were ever smart enough to license eDirectory at a $0 cost, they'd rapid gain massive market share. They don't have to open source it, just remove the price for adoption. Doing so would effectively provide an instant viable, user friendly, alternative to OpenLDAP for most $0 IT budget businesses and allow them to compete directly with Redhat's FedoraDS when that is finally fully GPL.
I've played with the FedoraDS and compared with eDirectory, I'd much prefer eDirectory. However, the price of FedoraDS is right and both are far more userfriendly than OpenLDAP.
Active Directory has never given me anything but headaches and while OpenDirectory has some excellent tools, its not the same without the Aqua gui
Sorry, way off the original tangent... But you get that.
BTW, I do not work for, nor have any association with, Novell or any of their partners.
I do, however, extoll the virtues of good products regardless of which vendor releases it. I may not like Microsoft as an entity, but I do acknowledge when they release a good product.
I disagree. eDirectory and DirXML (Now called the Novell Identity Manager) are both very excellent products that fit in to places that many other products don't go. Especially DirXML.
On job I did a few years ago required synchronising a Mac OpenDirectory network with an Active Directory network. Getting the two to talk together natively was a mission and never gave us results that were worth the effort. Putting DirXML in between solved that problem. Adding eDirectory in to the equation allowed us to then add in products like their SAP based ERP services and several other applications. This provided for a very smooth, extremely easily managed service that went far beyond just synchronising their OpenDirectory and Active Directory networks.
I have not yet seen another platform like DirXML that is as slick and as easy to implement while at the same time supporting such a large number of products out fo the box. And its modular design makes it even easier for developers and solution providers to add support for their own products.
AD didn't kill Novell. Anyone that takes the time to seriously use eDirectory will understand that AD doesn't even begin to offer the same flexibility. Not to mention that AD is not cross platform where as eDirectory (and pretty much all their products) will run on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Netware, AIX... Oh, and that nasty Microsoft Windows product too.
Against my own better judgement, I'm going to respond to this. I know its just begging for trouble but sometimes...
Firstly, sit back, relax and take a deep breath. The language and tone of your post suggests you're getting yourself worked up over an issue that makes absolutely no difference at all to whether you use Linux or not.
Secondly, given you don't care WHY Linux doesn't have the kind of apps you've talked of suggests that not only have you not really spent any useful time looking, you're not really interested in finding them anyway. Which suggests to me that even if there is an A/V app that meets your criteria (and after my comments yesterday I went looking and found several) you wouldn't be interested in them anyway because they're not familiar brands that you're used to on Windows or where ever.
As such, I suggest you stick with what you know and use those brands on Windows or MacOSX that you are familiar with already. Obviously, a GNU/Linux distro is not going to be in your list of wants for a good long while, with or without the AV software. I see no point in continuing a discussion with a mind thats already closed itself off and has become unreasonable as a result.
Have a nice day.
Thanks for pointing out my fat finger syndrome. If you read my previous comments in this thread you would have seen I am aware Codec was the word I was looking for. Codex was a typo, not a misunderstanding of meanings on my part.
For an absolutely massive rant, have you considered that maybe its just not been a priority yet? Linux is only just getting around to starting to become a common Desktop, and even then some would argue its still miles behind MacOSX as far as usablility goes. Not to mention that until recently its really only been a server or office workstation platform.
There are commercial products available for Linux, and they're there because commercial organisations (like Weta Digital, or Pixar) decided they wanted something that met their needs and made it happen or (in some cases) paid someone to make it happen.
As there are more and more people that move to Linux and that want simple video editors, people will start to get involved and create projects for it. People are going to move to Linux for reasons other than video editing first though. Whether it be cost, security, reliability or whatever. As that happens, companies like Adobe/Macromedia and so on will start taking it seriously and will be more likely to port their products.
Its when the bigger companies start taking it seriously that the community will start coding serious alternatives. I'd love an equivelent of iMovie for my Gnome desktop. But I'm realistic enough to know that it won't come until there are enough people that want it first. Or till a coder with the time, patience or need decides to scratch an itch themselves.
As frightening as I think it might be, I wouldn't be surprised if Linspire or one of the more consumer targetted distro's were the first to start coding in that direction.
If you want consumer desktop with video editing, without sacrificing security and reliability, use MacOSX. Your only Linux options are to buy or wait till someone with the ability gets fed up enough to do something about it themselves.
Yeah, I'm aware it can read streams, but can it output to a stream instead of say XVideo or SDL or FrameBuffer or whichever method people want to use?
I don't know if a plugin for that exists yet. If mplayer could output to a file or a socket, that would make it an almost complete utility in much the same way VLC is becoming. I use VLC for pretty much everything at home because of its streaming and cross platform abilities. The web interface makes it easy to manage the streams and playlists and the fact you can choose the codec of the stream is a huge bonus. DVDs using XviD, Music in MP3.
If IceCast added support for video streaming, that might start to move up my list too. Unfortunately, I like to watch movies on my TV as well as listen to music on my stereo.
Not true. The videolan client meets that criteria exactly. It runs headless on Linux and pretty much anything else. Streaming that in various formats (including MP4, DivX and so on) is as simple as getting the codex.
If it doesn't exist already, it wouldn't be hard to write a streaming module for mplayer. Whether that be streamed to pipe, file or socket. It can already read most codecs and if you have a license for the WMP Win32 DLLs, it'll handle that too.
There are a lot of options for Linux.
Pre-slashdotted? Is that the antithesis of pre-caching? :-)
Except that I can acheive the same thing with existing tools that don't stay resident. Whats so difficult about writing a tcl/tk (or even a PHP-GTK) wrapper to find/locate/grep/awk? Adding in smarts for the various formats is simple.
;-)
Sure it might be marginally slower because it doesn't have a resident daemon in the back end constantly crawling the $home directory, but over all it could provide exactly the same functionality without the 20meg hit for each user, plus the cost of the 'best' front end itself. It'd also only be resident when the user actually wants to use it, it wouldn't be slowing things down by crawling the directory tree in the background when that user is inactive (but other users might not be inactive at the same time) and the search results could be displayed in a way that was just as pretty.
I'm not saying that Beagle is bad. I use it at home for myself. But I'm the only one on the computer at the time I'm using it and I'm personally happy to take that performance hit.
My point is simple though. Mono/Beagle ARE expensive. Especially here in NZ where the cost of hardware is no where near as cheap as it is in say Australia (closest neighbour) or even the US.
I don't deny that Beagle is still a 0.12 release. In fact, thats part of my argument. I do not consider it ready at all for prime time use in a production/server environment. It is large, clunky and not optimised at all yet. The original poster wanted to know why Beagle isn't used as the search tech in Gnome 2.12... Quite simply, its still far to much of an alpha quality project in my opinion. Unless more people help out with it or more time is spent on the project by those already working on it, its going to be a while before I change my view on that. It doesn't stop me using it personally, but it does stop me even considering it in my office.
Someone mod this one up. :-) +1 Funny
This is from my personal machine at home. Bit gives you an indication.
----8----
[steve@pyros ~]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515340 449500 65840 0 27032 264536
-/+ buffers/cache: 157932 357408
Swap: 1048568 0 1048568
[steve@pyros ~]$ beagled
[steve@pyros ~]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515340 468728 46612 0 27048 264560
-/+ buffers/cache: 177120 338220
Swap: 1048568 0 1048568
[steve@pyros ~]$
----8----
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to take a nearly 20meg hit on ram for each user that wants to run beagle so they can have flash/fancy search capabilities. Even on a machine with 1 or 2gig, that adds up quickly.
Now add in multiple instances OpenOffice.org writer and calc, multiple instances of the desktop environment (in my case, Gnome 2.10), a browser, Evolution, quite often Rhythmbox, plus whatever other tools the users are using at the time...
I'd rather not waste 20meg a user on something that should not in anyway use near that much. My issue stands. I will not use beagle (or Mono) in a production server environment until it is a lot cheaper to run. Why should I throw more ram and cpu's at it when the same (or similar) can be achieved for a much smaller cost?
For a small business like myself, with less than 20 employees, Mono and mono-based applications are simply too expensive right now. No matter how great or flash or whizbang or cool the application might be.
I fully agree. See my reply to 'irc.goatse.cx troll' to see my concurring arguments :-)
/etc/skel is one option if you intend to normalise it as the default search method on your platform across all users. But given how much of a hog beagled is when it comes to resources, on a busy server thats going to hurt.
/etc/skel would work for desktop/workstation/laptop machines which are likely to have only one person using them at a time, but I'm not that rich. I run a small business and manage the IT side of things myself. I simply cannot afford the overhead required by multiple mono/beagled threads at once.
:-) In the case of Mono and C# apps on *nix, it costs a lot in memory/cpu. Sometimes beyond what I would consider reasonable.
In my office I run an Ubuntu termsrv set up. No one has anything on their own machines except for a basic OS with an X server on it. Cuts back on hardware costs. I'm sure I'm not the only one that has set things up this way. Now add in a whole heap of mono processes going and you're gonna hit trouble. Its hard enough having just a few people loading OpenOffice.org apps at the same time, adding in multiple Mono processes running for each user (beagled constantly in the background, best in the fore) and suddenly you need a much more powerful server to cope with that kind of load.
Sure,
This is partly why I'm glad Gnome didn't let Ximian bully them in to coding core parts of the platform in C#/Mono. I've been a Gnome user since 1.2 and I would truly have had to change desktop if they went down that path. It just wouldn't be practical or useful for anything other than desktop/workstation/laptop installations.
One thing a lot of people seem to forget. Just because its Free doesn't mean it costs nothing.
Doesn't stop me trying them on my own machines at home, but at this point in time, I wouldn't consider it on any of my business related machines.
I have no freaking idea where this thing is actually stored. In GNOME 1.x, they used some kind of really broken text file format. In early 2.x, they seemed to just keep using it. Nowadays, I have absolutely no idea how it stores the associations. Is it somewhere in gconf database, finally? I also have no idea how to really manage these file associations in 2.10: Nautilus isn't particularly helpful and I couldn't find the knob in the control center.
You can change the file type associations by going to the properties of a file in Nautilus, then go to the "Open With" tab and make your changes there. :-)
This has been the case since at least 2.8 (I'm typing this on an Ubuntu 4 machine) and is definitely the case in current 2.10 machines (Ubuntu 5, FC4 tried and tested.)
I hope not. I've been playing with Beagle 0.12 and its definitely not ready for prime time. Its a great service and the 'best' front end is very nice (although I personally prefer the web frontend as I usually already have a browser open) but its not anywhere near solid enough.
;-)
Its a mission to get going from source at the moment and even if you run a distro that already includes it, it doesn't take much to break it. Upgrading Firefox/Mozilla is enough in some cases (thanks to best's reliance on the Gecko libs).
Don't get me wrong. Personally I love the technology, but I really don't think its anywhere near ready for mainstream use. Great if you want to try out bleeding edge tech or help improve the software, but not if you just want a search tech that works.
The other downside is that beagled has to be run by the individual users when they log in. It refuses to run at boot as part of the init scripts. So its got to be included as either part of the xinit or shell rc scripts. Thus automation is going to be needed on the admins part at the moment. Sure, this can be done as a default part of a distro, but given its not ready yet...
Also, although they may look pretty, I'm not sure that the new graphics are running at 50 frames per second... they look more like they're at 25 fps, which is really rather poor.
Not that it matters that much on anything but HDTV given that the average TV is running at 24-30fps and the normal human eye struggles to tell the difference between most things faster than 30fps.
Just duplicating the nice printer setup UI they have for CUPS would be a good start, but I don't think I've seen that yet...
Ummm... Gnome 2.10 provides a very slick, clean and easy interface to administer CUPS based settings. Wizard driven if you want it, or manually done if you prefer. In fact, Gnome has provided most of the functionality from at least 2.6 upwards.
much less point-and-click software update with push and server administration UIs.
Hmmm... Yast and RHN spring to mind. Then things like Synaptic for package management and security updates. Ubuntu even includes a client tool that will poll for updates and put a notice icon in your panel to let you know there are updates.
Don't get me wrong. I love my Macs as well. They are brilliant machines, but I still prefer to spend my time in Gnome 2.10. I use Gnome on all my PCs and on my Macs.
I can't speak for KDE or any other Desktop environment, but Gnome is definitely quite capable of holding its own against the OSX platform as far as usability goes. I switched my fathers entire business to Linux + Crossover Office (for their accounting package) and they have not had a single issue as far as usability goes. In fact, the only issue I did have was that some websites (actually, only the bank they use) don't work in Firefox too well, but do work in Netscape 7.x instead.
Get the latest Ubuntu LiveCD and check out Gnome 2.10. I think you will be surprised.
----8<----
Im giving up Wow Due to lag and their crapy servers, what do you all think of GW, worth trying as next step after WoW ?
(but i should be programming not playing games)
----8<----
I'm playing both GW and WoW. Both are excellent games and I enjoy both very much. Next step after WoW? Its too different to call it a next step. The graphics are different, the game mechanics are different, the whole way you play is extremely different. ArenaNet don't even call their game an MMORPG. They call it a role playing game that you play online.
Giving up WoW is your choice, but Guild Wars isn't a drop in replacement for it. Crafting and a pretty decent trade system are just two examples of things that I've gotten used to in WoW but are really missing from Guild Wars. Also, the commands are entirely different which can get confusing at first.
Having said all that, I really like Guild Wars. I play the Beta weekend and then when its over, go back to WoW. Not sure how I'm going to split my time between the two after the 28th, but I'll figure it out. ;-)
Would I leave WoW for Guild Wars? Not initially. Maybe when I build up a community of friends there, but I have far too much time invested in WoW to drop it completely and permanantly. Lag and crappy servers in WoW? I'm on a medium pop PvP server and rarely have I had lag so bad I couldnt play the game as it is intended. The server downtime is easily addressed. You get free/credited days out of it. Not many other games do similar.
Okay... When did people stop using this great Emacs? I mean... Graphical interfaces? Wow! Who'da thunk it. Thats just a totally innovative and novel idea.
What? I can change the way my interface looks so it suits my own personal tastes and preferences? OMG! Someone get on the phone and tell Microsoft, they're gonna want to embrace that idea. They already do? Damn, they're on the ball. What? They got the idea from KDE and Gnome? OMG! Isn't that like stealing? Xerox? Apple Computer? Who are they again?
</>
It amazes me to see how so quickly the whole fight between KDE and Gnome sprang up over something as simple as the new DEFAULT THEME for Gnome being announced. Its not like people can't change the theme for either KDE or Gnome if they don't like the defaults. I thought the whole Keramilk issue was put to rest a long time ago. Guess not. Must've missed that memo. Sorry, didn't mean to stay out of the fight for so long.
Come one people. Get real. Personally, I think it looks good. Its clean, open, totally uncluttered (like some KDE shots I've seen recently) and its functional. Its pretty easy to navigate and it keeps with the K.I.S.S principle I have always liked in Gnome (KDE was always too cluttered with too many bells and whistles presented to the average end user. Might be fine for advanced users, but generally the newer users prefer not to get a whole heap of stuff thrown at them when all they want to do is configure their desktop).
But who cares? If you use Gnome and you don't like this theme, install a different one. There are so many available out there. Hell, I even went as far as making my own (*GASP*) so that my desktop looked and felt the way I wanted it to so I was more productive and it was useful to me.
Damn... Lets badmouth a clean and easy on the eyes interface simply because it bears some resemblance to Windows XP. Damn... Last time I looked, every Window Manager had 3 buttons at the top of their windows for minimize,maximize/restore,close. Even OS X.
If it really is that much of an issue, don't you dear look at FVWM. Maybe you should go check out Enlightenment again. Its not dead you know. In fact, some of use still use it every day. Then you can really make your desktop look any and every way you could possibly want it to. Amazing that.
Gotta love the fact that you can choose what interface your desktop has. In fact, if you really wanted to, you could set your .xinitrc to pick a different one at random every time you started X. Now theres a really far out idea.