I'm just amazed. Reading Slashdot is like speaking with your "know it all" good friend or relative. You like to discuss important topics with them, but at the end of the day, they're really only an expert at one or two things!
Okay - so I'll comment as a ten year Navy veteran (with Sub time) and as an MS Virtual Earth employee.
On the actual propeller, some of the comments above are accurate with respect to design, power, speed and cavitation issues. If it's covered by Wikipedia, then it must be true! There has always been a policy to cover the propeller whenever the boat was pulled out of the water - it's part of the secret sauce behind our submarine stealth. Not showing it in public only makes sense, but this picture from the air could have been taken by anyone flying a private plane. Shame on the Navy for not covering it, but then again, there's more to the engineering behind it than a picture could ever show.
Talk of satellite imagery and Government intervention is an interesting topic of the day, however. For one thing, the image was not taken by satellite, but rather by airplane using a unique capability for oblique imagery. In Virtual Earth, you can view the same area at 2 zoom levels and 4 compass points. The imagery comes from Pictometry, and MS uses the term "Bird's Eye" to depict areas in which it is available. It's pretty incredible imagery, truly raising the quality bar over systems using only satellite imagery.
Note that Microsoft does not manage satellite or aerial providers - we only take the imagery in, enhance it, tile it and then provide it to our customers in the form of an API. The organizations that provide the imagery have been in business for years capturing images of the earth and selling them to commercial and government organizations. If anyone should be on point to discuss the appropriate image capture time and location, these would be the organizations to do so. Since I do not work for one of these organizations, I will abstain from commenting on their data capture policies. Perhaps they have a Slashdot reader who would like to comment!
"Our mapping products fully comply with U.S. laws governing the acquisition and publishing of aerial imagery," according to the statement. "The clarity of the images is impressive, but beyond a certain zoom level the images become 'pixilated' and blur. In addition some Virtual Earth imagery can only be viewed from certain distances.
"Additionally, there are other instances where images have been intentionally blurred for security purposes. We review requests to do so on a case-by-case basis. In addition, we do not provide real-time data or live satellite images. All the imagery has been collected at a fixed point in time over a period of the last few years."
At the end of the day, several commenters here and elsewhere have used the term "get used to it", referring to the fact that we're losing our privacy and anonymity every day via cameras in the sky and search engines on earth... Perhaps this is true, but then again, maybe it's exactly what we need at this point in our civilization.
Funny- I can't post a home video with copyrighted background music on MSN Soapbox - they refused to publish it. But it works great in GooTube. A previous writer hit the nail on the head - when Google pulls down all of the illegal content, GooTube will turn into a GooGhostTown...
Microsoft actually has been supporting GeoRSS for over a year now in both the developer's kit and via user collections. Last week's Virtual Earth announcement was specifically around the "publishing" of GeoRSS feeds BETWEEN users. This means that users who create their own collections (MyMaps in Google-speak) can make them available for subscription just like any other RSS feed - whenever the owner adds anything to the map, the users will be notified via RSS and will see the updated map instead of having to send a URL or KML file...
Very nice Franco - I tested it with an old Groove user who is already familiar with the concepts. It looks like a very nice alternative, and it runs on Linux and Mac! I do have a couple of questions or feedback - whichever you prefer.
1. Information on disk was not encrypted - is this planned?
2. I could not tell if the information was encrypted over the wire. Again, planned?
3. Where is the data stored? Clients only, or is it ever on a server unencrypted?
4. Are users authenticated in any way so I can prove who they are?
5. Is there collision detection? (we edited files and consistently lost information when we overwrote each other's last changes)
I really like what you created - it actually feels a little like Groove. We did have some odd behavior when uninviting and reinviting to a space (i.e. the space never came back down and we had to create new one instead). It was also odd not seeing a persistent user pane that you can use to communicate with your team-members - once we shutdown the space, all references to the user were also eliminated and I could not even send an IM without setting up a whole new space and inviting him into it.
Love the tasks - great job! Overall - I think anyone looking for an alternative should check this out. Make sure you fix the minor issues though.
How much is it?
Re:I'm groovy and haven't found an alternative yet
on
Alternative to Groove?
·
· Score: 1
Very good list of technologies, though not entirely complete (e.g. LDAP is not a self-managed distributed directory system).
Now - link them all together, and provide a simple front-end interface that allows an average computer user to download, install, create a space and start sharing information securely, online/offline, cross-firewall, completely authenticated and encrypted everywhere - go!:)
Folks - Groove does nothing really new or that you can't get elsewhere. It's just that it encompasses the features of all these technologies (and more) in an integrated and user-friendly environment. No more. No less. I'm not setting a competitive gauntlet. Use it if you want or need to. Or don't. Doesn't much matter to me!
Re:I'm groovy and haven't found an alternative yet
on
Alternative to Groove?
·
· Score: 1
uradu - i agree with you. but there may be an alternative route than that typified by microsoft. what if the core tenents of groove (i.e. authentication, communications, synchronization, security, etc.) become core services in the stack, but are loosely coupled with other infrastructure services...a very different MS could emerge indeed! by the way, Ray is now "chief software architect", which means he can help all development teams to march in a coordinated direction. he's a bright guy - let's give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he opens some new "vistas" within MS...for everyone's benefit (yes, this means Linux and Mac communities as well!)
Re:I'm groovy and haven't found an alternative yet
on
Alternative to Groove?
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't say it "improves" on AFS at all, but then again, it didn't have AFS in mind during development.
Groove is definitely NOT a distributed filesystem, even if some might consider it as having those capabilities. For that purpose, I personally use http://www.foldershare.com/ just to keep large volumes of files in sync between my personal and family systems, including across firewalls.
Let me try to boil it down a bit further to illustrate. Groove is client software, much like an email client, that allows groups of people to share tools (not just files, but also calendars, discussion threads, meeting organizers, etc.) and keep them all synchronized. It works asynchronously, and automatically syncs and resolves conflicts when users return online. It works across firewalls, effectively setting up a peer-based relationship between users, utilizing only port 80 for all of its communications (although it has an IANA registered port 2492 that, if open, will vastly improve performance because it can use a highly optimized protocol - SSTP Simply Symmetric Transport Protocol - between users.)
Yes, it's Windows only. Sorry.:(
One nice feature is the ability to share a any folder on your computer with 1 or more people outside of your firewall and keep everything synchronized in the folder. Keep in mind that the focus is on team work, so it's not really tuned for sharing 100GB of video or tunes!
But for keeping a project on track, sharing documents and spreadsheets, discussion threads, etc. "in context" with the project has been a key selling point. The comparison is either doing an entire project in a team portal, which you can do - but you can also drive a car with your feet.:) Or send around countless emails with attachments, always generating the aforementioned questions "did you send it, where is it, which version are you on?" The nice thing is that my Dad can use it, because the only requirement to setting it up is to put in an email address and user name. All key generation, credentials, authentication, etc. is set up internally so users don't have to mess with it. It just "works" out of the box.
Folks - I'm not looking for an alternative. It works and it works damn well for what it does. The only thing I'm saying is that I haven't found anything that performs the core functionality. For that, you'd have to get a group of talented programmers together and invest multiple years, $150Million, and 5 million lines of code. Or you could take the simpler route and use a client/server architecture, or do specific pieces of it, like file-sharing.
Here's what you'd have to build:
1. Distributed directory system that allows people to authenticate each other out of band or via corporate server
2. WAN P2P protocols
3. LAN P2P protocols
4. Local encrypted database
5. Communications encryption
6. Robust synchronization algorithms, including offline support
7. Presence/awareness (no only does it tell you someone is online, but it will show what workspace and tool they are working in)
8. Messaging (IM)
9. RBAC (Role Based Access Control)
10. Integrated forms development for custom applications
11. About 20 tools that sit on the preceeding architecture and assume all of the capabilities therein
12. Another 30 items I'm sure you don't want to read!
Groove just does so many things, so seamlessly and completely integrated, that it effectively replaces some OS functions as well as applications. And IT need only bless it - they don't have to do anything to manage it - it's self-managing!
Well, now I'm getting into other aspects and this thread is getting way too long. I only wanted to get some more information out there in case there are some enterprising OSS developers out there who want to bring the same capabilities to Linux. By the way - Groove did show a Linux version back in 2002, but there was not enough business incentive to continue development.
Hope this information helps.
I'm groovy and haven't found an alternative yet
on
Alternative to Groove?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I've been using it since version 1, and have been actively monitoring the web, Mac and Linux markets to see if anything else could be compared. For a while, the competition seemed to be SharePoint on the surface, which provides a way to share "workspaces" with documents, calendars, discussions, etc. in a portal. But this was limited to working inside a firewall, unless you wanted to set up a special configuration with external connectors and adding outside people to your internal directory system (a no-no in most IT shops I visit).
Currently, the biggest competitor (if you can call it that) is simply email, because of its ubiquity. Try to convince anyone to give up their email for a month and see what happens. Fortunately, I tested this scenario in Groove a few years ago, and it was a dream come true! No spam. No irrelevant messages (because it is intentionally challenging to use it as a simple email alternative). Just work. And only with people I chose to work with. It was rather Feng Shui. Everything was simple. All files were in one place. Nobody ever asks "did you get that file I sent?" or "where's the latest forecast?" - it's all just there on your system. Everything was secure. Peace of mind. Never had to set it up - it just worked on installation. But now that I'm in a different job and have to work with non-Groovy people, I'm stuck working in the archaic email days once again...:( To compare, it would like people who use email today starting to handwrite letters to each other...it's that bad!
Groove provides several key components that put it ahead of any web-only technologies. The following can also be used for a business case:
1. It's a rich client in a Web 2.0 world - which means you will see people running it on an airplane (also, incidentally, where you don't see any Web apps running)
2. It runs a distributed directory, so people can collaborate across organizational boundaries without requiring IT to modify directory systems (a challenge that has been vexing the industry for at least 15 years now)
3. It navigates across firewalls to create a "live" peer-based connection between Groove users - features are presence, awareness, instant messaging, and a whole raft of collaborative tools like file sharing, calendars, discussion threads, and customizable forms.
4. Security is built-in from the ground up - every user is authenticated, which has proven to effectively limit spam, viruses and other malware, and all work is protected with FIPS-approved 192bit AES encryption on disk and over the network.
5. Trust. Only the people designated to read information you choose to share will have the keys to unlock it. That means that an errant sys admin cannot view Groove workspaces or intercept data intended for another recipient.
6. Synchronization. This actually should have been first, since at the core, Groove is a great big XML message switch. Here's where you'll find the patents. Groove has a very robust synchronization engine that ensures that all documents, files, messages, changes to a workspace, etc. are synchronized with all members, whether they are online or offline. This is a hugely complicated endeavor that the Groove team has been working on since the Lotus Notes days - and they KNOW how to do it right.
Also note that it was developed by Ray Ozzie and his team of about 125 developers over 5 years and with over 5 million lines of code. It's more like an operating system on top of Windows, with identity, authentication, storage, synchronization, security, and communications all rolled up into one app. The original intent was to make it a development platform on which people could create their own collaborative applications, like the Team Direction project and Information Patterns' geo-mapping applications.
After the MS acquisition and the decision to add it to the Office Enterprise suite as a premium business offering (since business is the real focus of the application - cross-organization,
Slashdot Mirror
Okay - so I'll comment as a ten year Navy veteran (with Sub time) and as an MS Virtual Earth employee.
On the actual propeller, some of the comments above are accurate with respect to design, power, speed and cavitation issues. If it's covered by Wikipedia, then it must be true! There has always been a policy to cover the propeller whenever the boat was pulled out of the water - it's part of the secret sauce behind our submarine stealth. Not showing it in public only makes sense, but this picture from the air could have been taken by anyone flying a private plane. Shame on the Navy for not covering it, but then again, there's more to the engineering behind it than a picture could ever show.
Talk of satellite imagery and Government intervention is an interesting topic of the day, however. For one thing, the image was not taken by satellite, but rather by airplane using a unique capability for oblique imagery. In Virtual Earth, you can view the same area at 2 zoom levels and 4 compass points. The imagery comes from Pictometry, and MS uses the term "Bird's Eye" to depict areas in which it is available. It's pretty incredible imagery, truly raising the quality bar over systems using only satellite imagery.
Note that Microsoft does not manage satellite or aerial providers - we only take the imagery in, enhance it, tile it and then provide it to our customers in the form of an API. The organizations that provide the imagery have been in business for years capturing images of the earth and selling them to commercial and government organizations. If anyone should be on point to discuss the appropriate image capture time and location, these would be the organizations to do so. Since I do not work for one of these organizations, I will abstain from commenting on their data capture policies. Perhaps they have a Slashdot reader who would like to comment!
So what is Microsoft's position on this issue? A quick search (http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=justin+osme r+submarine+propeller) yields the following statement on Navy Times from Justin Osmer of the MS Virtual Earth product team:
At the end of the day, several commenters here and elsewhere have used the term "get used to it", referring to the fact that we're losing our privacy and anonymity every day via cameras in the sky and search engines on earth... Perhaps this is true, but then again, maybe it's exactly what we need at this point in our civilization.
Funny- I can't post a home video with copyrighted background music on MSN Soapbox - they refused to publish it. But it works great in GooTube. A previous writer hit the nail on the head - when Google pulls down all of the illegal content, GooTube will turn into a GooGhostTown...
Microsoft actually has been supporting GeoRSS for over a year now in both the developer's kit and via user collections. Last week's Virtual Earth announcement was specifically around the "publishing" of GeoRSS feeds BETWEEN users. This means that users who create their own collections (MyMaps in Google-speak) can make them available for subscription just like any other RSS feed - whenever the owner adds anything to the map, the users will be notified via RSS and will see the updated map instead of having to send a URL or KML file...
1. Information on disk was not encrypted - is this planned?
2. I could not tell if the information was encrypted over the wire. Again, planned?
3. Where is the data stored? Clients only, or is it ever on a server unencrypted?
4. Are users authenticated in any way so I can prove who they are?
5. Is there collision detection? (we edited files and consistently lost information when we overwrote each other's last changes)
I really like what you created - it actually feels a little like Groove. We did have some odd behavior when uninviting and reinviting to a space (i.e. the space never came back down and we had to create new one instead). It was also odd not seeing a persistent user pane that you can use to communicate with your team-members - once we shutdown the space, all references to the user were also eliminated and I could not even send an IM without setting up a whole new space and inviting him into it.
Love the tasks - great job! Overall - I think anyone looking for an alternative should check this out. Make sure you fix the minor issues though.
How much is it?
Now - link them all together, and provide a simple front-end interface that allows an average computer user to download, install, create a space and start sharing information securely, online/offline, cross-firewall, completely authenticated and encrypted everywhere - go!:)
Folks - Groove does nothing really new or that you can't get elsewhere. It's just that it encompasses the features of all these technologies (and more) in an integrated and user-friendly environment. No more. No less. I'm not setting a competitive gauntlet. Use it if you want or need to. Or don't. Doesn't much matter to me!
uradu - i agree with you. but there may be an alternative route than that typified by microsoft. what if the core tenents of groove (i.e. authentication, communications, synchronization, security, etc.) become core services in the stack, but are loosely coupled with other infrastructure services...a very different MS could emerge indeed! by the way, Ray is now "chief software architect", which means he can help all development teams to march in a coordinated direction. he's a bright guy - let's give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he opens some new "vistas" within MS...for everyone's benefit (yes, this means Linux and Mac communities as well!)
Groove is definitely NOT a distributed filesystem, even if some might consider it as having those capabilities. For that purpose, I personally use http://www.foldershare.com/ just to keep large volumes of files in sync between my personal and family systems, including across firewalls.
Let me try to boil it down a bit further to illustrate. Groove is client software, much like an email client, that allows groups of people to share tools (not just files, but also calendars, discussion threads, meeting organizers, etc.) and keep them all synchronized. It works asynchronously, and automatically syncs and resolves conflicts when users return online. It works across firewalls, effectively setting up a peer-based relationship between users, utilizing only port 80 for all of its communications (although it has an IANA registered port 2492 that, if open, will vastly improve performance because it can use a highly optimized protocol - SSTP Simply Symmetric Transport Protocol - between users.)
Yes, it's Windows only. Sorry. :(
One nice feature is the ability to share a any folder on your computer with 1 or more people outside of your firewall and keep everything synchronized in the folder. Keep in mind that the focus is on team work, so it's not really tuned for sharing 100GB of video or tunes!
But for keeping a project on track, sharing documents and spreadsheets, discussion threads, etc. "in context" with the project has been a key selling point. The comparison is either doing an entire project in a team portal, which you can do - but you can also drive a car with your feet. :) Or send around countless emails with attachments, always generating the aforementioned questions "did you send it, where is it, which version are you on?" The nice thing is that my Dad can use it, because the only requirement to setting it up is to put in an email address and user name. All key generation, credentials, authentication, etc. is set up internally so users don't have to mess with it. It just "works" out of the box.
Folks - I'm not looking for an alternative. It works and it works damn well for what it does. The only thing I'm saying is that I haven't found anything that performs the core functionality. For that, you'd have to get a group of talented programmers together and invest multiple years, $150Million, and 5 million lines of code. Or you could take the simpler route and use a client/server architecture, or do specific pieces of it, like file-sharing.
Here's what you'd have to build:
1. Distributed directory system that allows people to authenticate each other out of band or via corporate server
2. WAN P2P protocols
3. LAN P2P protocols
4. Local encrypted database
5. Communications encryption
6. Robust synchronization algorithms, including offline support
7. Presence/awareness (no only does it tell you someone is online, but it will show what workspace and tool they are working in)
8. Messaging (IM)
9. RBAC (Role Based Access Control)
10. Integrated forms development for custom applications
11. About 20 tools that sit on the preceeding architecture and assume all of the capabilities therein
12. Another 30 items I'm sure you don't want to read!
Groove just does so many things, so seamlessly and completely integrated, that it effectively replaces some OS functions as well as applications. And IT need only bless it - they don't have to do anything to manage it - it's self-managing!
Well, now I'm getting into other aspects and this thread is getting way too long. I only wanted to get some more information out there in case there are some enterprising OSS developers out there who want to bring the same capabilities to Linux. By the way - Groove did show a Linux version back in 2002, but there was not enough business incentive to continue development.
Hope this information helps.
Currently, the biggest competitor (if you can call it that) is simply email, because of its ubiquity. Try to convince anyone to give up their email for a month and see what happens. Fortunately, I tested this scenario in Groove a few years ago, and it was a dream come true! No spam. No irrelevant messages (because it is intentionally challenging to use it as a simple email alternative). Just work. And only with people I chose to work with. It was rather Feng Shui. Everything was simple. All files were in one place. Nobody ever asks "did you get that file I sent?" or "where's the latest forecast?" - it's all just there on your system. Everything was secure. Peace of mind. Never had to set it up - it just worked on installation. But now that I'm in a different job and have to work with non-Groovy people, I'm stuck working in the archaic email days once again...:( To compare, it would like people who use email today starting to handwrite letters to each other...it's that bad!
Groove provides several key components that put it ahead of any web-only technologies. The following can also be used for a business case:
1. It's a rich client in a Web 2.0 world - which means you will see people running it on an airplane (also, incidentally, where you don't see any Web apps running)
2. It runs a distributed directory, so people can collaborate across organizational boundaries without requiring IT to modify directory systems (a challenge that has been vexing the industry for at least 15 years now)
3. It navigates across firewalls to create a "live" peer-based connection between Groove users - features are presence, awareness, instant messaging, and a whole raft of collaborative tools like file sharing, calendars, discussion threads, and customizable forms.
4. Security is built-in from the ground up - every user is authenticated, which has proven to effectively limit spam, viruses and other malware, and all work is protected with FIPS-approved 192bit AES encryption on disk and over the network.
5. Trust. Only the people designated to read information you choose to share will have the keys to unlock it. That means that an errant sys admin cannot view Groove workspaces or intercept data intended for another recipient.
6. Synchronization. This actually should have been first, since at the core, Groove is a great big XML message switch. Here's where you'll find the patents. Groove has a very robust synchronization engine that ensures that all documents, files, messages, changes to a workspace, etc. are synchronized with all members, whether they are online or offline. This is a hugely complicated endeavor that the Groove team has been working on since the Lotus Notes days - and they KNOW how to do it right.
Also note that it was developed by Ray Ozzie and his team of about 125 developers over 5 years and with over 5 million lines of code. It's more like an operating system on top of Windows, with identity, authentication, storage, synchronization, security, and communications all rolled up into one app. The original intent was to make it a development platform on which people could create their own collaborative applications, like the Team Direction project and Information Patterns' geo-mapping applications.
After the MS acquisition and the decision to add it to the Office Enterprise suite as a premium business offering (since business is the real focus of the application - cross-organization,