In addition to MozCalander, and MozOffice, the Mozilla organization has annouced MozSink, an Open Source replacement for the Kitchen Sink(tm). It is believed that this could revolutionize Open Source development.
I wondered when Emacs would get embedded in Mozilla;-)
Now, if you could use a Wacom tablet, it'd be more like Palm Graffitti. Pen to the left for forward, back for backward, tap the link...I oughta try it out.
I just did. It's a little fiddly - I might have to play with the pressure settings to make it a little easier. But still, it works (although my current nightly is a little flakey).
Konqueror [konqueror.org] does exactly that. Disable just window.open(), or disable is for specific sites. You can also enable-disable Java/JavaScript in general on a site-by-site if you like. It also supports accepting cookies only from specified sites. Makes me happy.
When Mozilla does this, I'll be a true GNOME convert. Until such time, it's apt-get install konqueror task-ximian-desktop enlightenment for me.
Welcome convert! Stick this in your.mozilla/*/prefs.js file and say good bye to popup ads on page load/close.
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);
Now that Mozilla also has tabbed browsing, what are you waiting for (Ctrl-T for those who don't know about this yet in the latest nightly builds). In fact the only criticism is that features get added to Mozilla followed by the UI some weeks later so unless you keep your nose in Bugzilla you miss tricks.
If someone wishes to pass information on to somebody else without anyone else knowing what is going on, putting backdoors in crypto packages and outlawing the rest isn't going to stop them.
The sheer volume of information sloshing around between machines means that you have to ignore something - processing all of it is verging on the impossible even if you don't have to decrypt. Say I wanted to tell Fred something important - "Free beer at John's house, 9pm" - and I was banned from using crypto. I could play with any number of obfuscations - I could encode the ASCII bits into the least significant bit of the red channel of an image. I could speak it and send it as an Windows executable with a MP3 component welded onto the end which could be extracted by knowing how long the original executable was. I could hide the message hidden spread through an MPEG file in some redundant byte in an MPEG frame header. Given a known random number generator and a given seed, you could XOR your message with the obfuscating signal. The number of ways to play this game is at least as complex as the number of data formats available.
So even if you had a complete and effective ban on encryption (which is impossible) you still couldn't process or intercept all the info flying through your checking portal. And even if the encryption ban stopped terrorists from passing information through the Internet, you haven't stopped them communicating - you have just made them use something else. Like encrypted packet radio or laser interferometry.
Two things are holding such people back from making more substantial contributions to OpenAL. First of all it is not entirely clear to me that the API is all that well designed. Modelling it after OpenGL was probably a mistake.
Gotta love this statement. Assert - never qualify.
One of the key points of environmental 3D audio is that it is intended to go hand-in-hand with a 3D visualization of a world. Choosing to use a similar set up to OpenGL struck me as being both an intuitive and sensible way to proceed. Creative certainly thought so when they looked at OpenAL hardware support. This does not mean that you have to use OpenAL for 3D worlds only - OpenGL works well for 2D as well - just look at Chromium BSU.
In addition, there are certain fundamental assumptions put into the API that assume preemptive multitasking for some things to work well, most notably spooling file play.
Well if your system doesn't support pre-emptive multitasking, you are going to have to live with interrupt control. Tricky but not impossible, and something that 99% of the developers aren't going to have to worry about.
There was no thought put into using it for anything other than 3D sound effects for games. So, for example if you attempt to write a MOD player using OpenAL to hopefully be able to take advantage of their SoundFont technology and EAX in your MOD player's core and reverb functionalities, you are pretty much out of luck.
Assertion! No facts!
OpenAL's source queues lack the functionality required for doing proper timing of various effects that you would need in order to pull it off.
Timing is critical in any sound API - OpenAL works fine. Maybe the key difference is that OpenAL does not give a mechanism to stream data into a buffer object, choosing instead to allow the programmer to queue buffers for sources. Essentially this means that the applications is free to do funky stuff up front before submitting the buffers or even (re)processing the buffers on the fly during playback. If you need to do funky things like real-time DSP processing then you are going to have to be able to make guarantees that you can process the data fast enough to keep the sound buffers populated. Beyond that, there is nothing stopping you from writing a MOD player using OpenAL.
BTW, any news on Nautilus? Although it's very bloated, I like that thing. Don't let it fade...
Seeing that God^H^H^HAlan Cox made some performance observations on one of the nautilus mailing lists (based on a almost complete lack of any caching for often-used fonts and file contents), I think you'll see the performance take a big leap when 1.0.5 comes out - there is still a fair amount of activity on the Nautilus code base.
Are Gnome and KDE completely compatible? If I write an application with Gnome specifically in mind, will KDE run the application as I wrote it? If not, that's why having two will make it less likely to succeed. If so, I stand corrected?
If you mean 'Can I run both Gnome and KDE applications side by side?' then the answer is a definite Yes. If you mean 'Can I cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop between the Gnome and KDE applications?' then the answer is 'Mostly'. Is it a good idea to do this if you have a small hard drive and 32Mb of memory then the answer is NO.
Gnome has its own underlying architecture for communicating between Gnome apps - based on CORBA. KDE chose to build a Corba-like system called KParts. Most interoperability issues revolve around getting these two infrastructures to work together. In order to have both KDE and Gnome apps up and running, you need to have both infrastructures active (this is not a problem, it just requires more resources).
There is also no requirement to run KDE apps under KWM either - Sawmill works fine. I suspect Enlightenment does too, along with IceWM, but I don't have any personal experience of those setups.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:But they'd probably want more control
on
IBM Wants Linux
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The problem I see with this is that if a company as big as IBM wants to use something like Linux, they're going to want some kind of control of the direction it goes. Companies have been trying to get Linus to loosen his 'control' of the kernel for a while now. No company with smart leadership will drop support for a product that they have complete power over, in favor of an OS where they have little-to-no control over the direction that it takes.
First a caveat: These are my own views and not those of IBM Canada.
Why do you think that IBM needs control of the Linux kernel? It's not necessary. Because the kernel is open source any features that IBM feels are necessary for running Linux on, for example, a 4-way H50 RS/6000 machine can be provided as a patch to the main kernel tree and pre-compiled binaries can be distributed by IBM from one of the web sites. Yes - someone has to keep the patches sane against the latest kernel but it is unlikely in the long run that useful and proven patches would remain out of the kernel tree forever unless they seriously clash with some design decision.
Patch maintenance is a minor headache against a stable kernel series. It only becomes a major problem if you try and keep patches sync'd against a development kernel and IBM is very very unlikely to request customers use such a kernel in a production environment.
And secondly, why do you think that IBM needs total control over everything they use? That's nonsense. Working in the RDMBS world, we all work to published standards. There is no 'total control' exercised by IBM when submitting proposals for new SQL functionality or DRDA protocols. Total control is not the only option for making money out there - being the best at something still makes better business sense. Making sure that the customer support services are actually helping customers makes good financial sense. We have all got really warped by MS's monopoly position and healthy financial situation that it is too easy to forget that it is possible to make a good income by being good in a competitive marketplace.
I've been dissapointed by Loki once recently. I was thinking of moving from windows to linux on my home gaming system, figured i'd be able to play tribes 2 in linux, since i had heard it was done. I didn't realize the windows cd isn't patchable (like q3a is). To make things worse, Loki only sells complete CDs, not patches. And after spending 70$ on the win version, i figured i may as well say in win than move to linux and pay it again. If he had, for example, been selling a 15 dollar patch, i may have migrated.
You obviously don't hang out on the Loki newsgroups do you? This must be the most asked, most discussed question on those newsgroups.
Simply put, it doesn't make any financial sense for Loki to do this. Selling games on the Linux platform will, at least for the immediate future, be selling to a much smaller market than the Windows platform. Therefore the economies of scale which allow the cost-cutting seen with Windows games are just not an option for Loki - if every Loki game could be run on Linux by buying the Windows version (often more cheaply) and patching it to run on linux, Loki would not have released as many games as it has and it would be filing for Chapter 7. Bust. Finito. Gone.
Even allowing people to pay purely for the patch rather than new physical media would cut any margins they currently enjoy to nothing. Out of the $15 you propose, you can forget about $10 dollars as tax and payment to the original vendor (id software, Dynamix, etc.) and only leave tiny crumbs for Loki. $35 would probably make about the right margin - you can buy most Loki games for that and get a Linux-specific manual as well.
Have I been disappointed with Loki? No - everything I have bought has run straight out of the box. Most problems are fixed promptly and the installation and patching is an easy, trouble free process. And quite frankly, Urban Terror rocks my world:-)
You DOS a server, they move it to a different address. You format a hard disk, they restore from last nights backup but if you modify a couple of files here or there and If you reset the modification date then they won't even notice until all the backups are corrupt as well.
They now have to check *every* document, spreadsheet and database by hand to see if it's been modified and then try to find an unmodified version in the backup. It could get very nasty if the documents/spreadsheets/databases have *also* been updated legitimately in the meantime, mixing legitimate information with junk.
That's why you should be running an integrity checking system, such as Tripwire, to keep tabs on files which change on your system. Run in conjunction with something like LIDS where you can stop a file being editted while allowing log records to be appended, or where all your logs are sent to another machine as a backup (or even to a line-printer), you know precisely what has changed and when, regardless of the change dates.
Quite frankly, if the MD5sums on my files change without the dates changing, that's a pretty big hint that you have been compromised. Time to reach for the backups.
But, like you pointed out, it's hard for non-aware users to know about choice when everyone's forcing Hailstorm and Passport down their necks.
But that is the crux of the problem with the MS monopoly - most people are unaware. If we wish to have a hope of an open and standards-based web, we can't rely on people making decisions based on the best technology - we have already seen plenty of examples of superior technologies (i.e. V2000 video) going to the wall or being excluded from certain markets due to heavy duty marketing by a competitor.
And if people don't know or understand a problem, they can't be expected to care about the result, even if they are 'harmed' by that ignorance.
So, I think we agree, except you still fail to address my point about the way MS will leverage wide acceptance of.NET/etc to give them a stranglehold on the identity market!!
MS knows that - MS Passport is a master strategy by Microsoft - it gives them control of web services and a huge slice of the web commerce pie. However, MS will only see this happen if MS Passport is the only accredited Identity server. Hopefully dotGNU will make that nightmare fade away - given the widespread need for authentication services, I don't see Unix web development servers wanting to authenticate exclusively against a MS-solution. Mono's existence will not make any difference to the MS Passport strategy. Mono does not have to use MS Passport for it's authentication - in fact Mono does not require authentication for general use either. Mono is a much more general project than just web services - it is, in essence, a development layer.
.NET technologies including C#
Actually it is just the CLR and C# parts, plus libraries to support these bits
Passport and Hailstorm
You really haven't understood this bit have you? There is NOTHING in Mono that deals with Passport and Hailstorm. Sheesh!
Mono is saying.NET/C# technologies are great for us hackers to copy. We can even get MS to agree and help us!
I don't see any signs of MS helping the Mono project. Far from it - MS will be quite happy to watch it develop at arms length. All the communication between MS and Ximian reported has been clarification of the specs, rather than support discussions.
Mono is saying, we don't care about the second bit: Passport and Hailstorm. We can even do our own, super-groovy, hacker's version!
Actually, Ximian probably does care about the Passport and Hailstorm stuff. But they don't need to - the GNU project had dotGNU to counter that part of the MS strategy.
The problem that I and many others have been trying to point out to people is that MS' strategy is indeed to 'open up' the technologies and platforms - because, like in the case of Windows, it buys leverage and dominance on the layer above.
Yes - if you have an Open standard that relies entirely on some closed, unobtainable server layer, then you are totally at the mercy of that server layer. If you'd actually bothered to read the information floating around, you would have realised that the Mono project does not require Passport or Hailstorm to be of use to developers. On it's own, Mono is still a useful project and allows developers to move C# projects off the MS Windows platform onto other OS's, plus you get all the integrated Common Language runtime with the advantages of integrated garbage collection, exception handling and cross-language class re-use. You have a class you like in C++, and you want to wrap it in some other language, say CLOS, then if the CLR supports CLOS, you can use it there.
But with the dotGNU project as well, that unobtainable server layer suddenly has an open source rival. So you can write.NET-style web applications and authenticate against a distributed dotGNU server set without having to round trip anywhere near a MS-authentication server.
As more and more CTOs and dull technical managers buy into the rapidly-spreading.NET platform (whether MS or open source), and more and more CEOs and dull government departments buy into the easy-easy Hailstorm community, it will be as impossible to do anything in your daily personal life without Passport/Hailstorm as it is now impossible to do anything in daily business life without Office.
And if we didn't have dotGNU and Mono, where would we be? Look at it this way - lets assume that we drop dotGNU and Mono now. Corporations that rely on Windows will be implementing Windows NET OS's as part of their normal upgrade cycle. Most people-in-the-street customers will buy it without knowing anything about the debate raging in technical circles. Microsoft will have at about half of its users using.NET services within two years of launch, regardless of whether there is an open source alternative which is not controlled by MS. At this point, MS has effectively balkanized the web - you either have MS Windows.NET and can use the newest web applications and services, or you have a platform such as Linux which is locked out of this. If you thought that the Internet Explorer monopoly was bad for the HTML standard and lead to IE-only web sites, wait until.NET rolls out. Then you will understand just how exclusionary the.NET plan is.
Or we can support the Mono and dotGNU projects. We can make use of the code built in C# and port it to other platforms. We can take advantage of the cross-language abilities of the CLR in our own programs without having to pay even lip-service to MS. We can authenticate against dotGNU servers and move MS.NET projects out into the open.
200MHz is a lot. 1GHz is utterly ridiculous. The biggest concern with having faster chips is reducing battery life. Most, if not all, WinCE devices have a max battery life in the hours. Granted, most such devices have colour screens, but it would be foolish to say the faster chips doesn't play a part in it.
The Motorola MC68328 DragonBall microprocessor uses about 55mW. The power consumption for a modern colour LCD screen is about 25mW. So CPU power usage is an important factor in battery life. There is a paper on power consumption which is worth a read which shows that power consumption for the Palm Pro 16MHz uses between 26mW (sleeping) and 160mW for intensive tasks.
Now the ARM family has been designed for high MIPS/Watt ratios. Looking at the ARM10 tech specs the ARM chip uses 275mW when running, and can drop down to less than 5mW when idling, and in sleep mode uses 0mW with the option for fast wake up.
So what does this mean for the average Palm user? If the CPU goes to sleep in between uses, and idle mode is invoked during any period of inactivity, the new Palms should maintain good battery life while being a lot snappier to use. To me, it looks like you should get the same sort of battery life if you use it for the same sort of tasks. If you want to play MP3's all day long, then your Palm will be chewing around 350mW out of the batteries. Given that a single AAA battery gives roughly 1000mAH (milliAmp Hours) so that would imply a pair of AAAs would give you about 8 hours of continuous 100% CPU usage.
Why ? because the strength of the KDE look-and-feel is that it's a close copy of Microsoft Windows
But the funny thing is that I also feel that KDE's greatest weakness is that it is a close copy of MS Windows. As a battle-hardened Unix user who started with austerity of TWM, has been scarred by OpenWindows, scratched by CDE and finally found salvation in FVWM before the time of Sawfish's appearance on the scene, KDE's default window manager feels too constraining. It's not configurable enough - I can't push into working in the way I want it to work. I can't program it in Lisp. The list goes on:-)
That's not to say I don't like the KDE stuff - I just run it from my Gnome desktop. The apps are fab, but you can keep the window manager.
OK, so it was very noble of this person to point out the faults in the protection scheme so that others would know that their documents were not so safe after all...
However, if "these are people after all" in Adobe, then why would it be such a bad idea to present this to them first rather than just shoving the information out to the general public.
If a company claims certain features in it's advertising and packaging, then a public examination of those claims are completely valid. Consumer groups have been doing this for ages for everything from baby toys to trucks, bringing the company to task for incorrect and misleading information or just plain bad products. I see no difference in this case. Indeed, if you are selling software which claims to be 'secure' you had better get your claims right. Hiding behind the DMCA should not excuse the company from the trading standards laws or allow the company to wriggle out of the 'merchantable quality' requirements.
This is rather different from products such as web servers having security holes in them - there are reasonable grounds in these cases to inform the vendor of the problem first and only go public if nothing happens.
It's nice to say 'Linux this' and 'Linux that' but the fact is that inside IBM, there's virtually NO Linux at all. Sounds like a giant PR move to me.
What a great way to see how many IBMers running Linux there are..:-) Okay - I'll bite.
Sitting in the DB2 development section, I run Linux as my *gasp* desktop OS. I'm not the only one around here either - I can quickly walk down the corridor and put my hands on 4 more Linux machines being used as development desktop OSs without going more than 20 yards. Then there are people who have laptops running Linux. There are Linux servers, Linux regressions machines and Linux test machines. We have people as primary Linux contacts, a Linux User Group.
And funnily enough, the number of machines running Linux seems to be increasing. Lotus Notes runs fine on my Linux desktop (major kudos to the WINE team for that one) so that solves the most critical need which is not available on Linux native. For some reason once released from the Windows-only world, those Windows partitions get cobwebs pretty quickly.
Pretty much since I started work at some company you might be able to guess from my signature, almost every major piece of work added into the source tree gets code reviewed in some form or other, from simple process flows through to line by line analysis depending on the likely critical impact if there is a failure.
Does this procedure help? I'd say it does - especially with a product as large and complicated as DB2 UDB, there may be side effects that are not obvious to just one programmer. There may be logic problems that you have missed which are clear to another person. Bad coding style leading to problematic maintenance problems in the future can be caught.
Just as nobody would dream of submitting a major article for publication in academia without having it proof read by at least one peer, it doesn't help a large product to have large volumes of code stuffed into it without somebody other than the original author looking over it. So while I used to find the process of code reviews cumbersome and time consuming, I now feel that code reviews save more time and energy in the long run.
Had this researcher bothered to read the Unicode technical introduction, the following would have been obvious.
In all, the Unicode Standard, Version 3.0 provides codes for 49,194 characters from the world's alphabets, ideograph sets, and symbol collections. These all fit into the first 64K characters, an area of the codespace that is called basic multilingual plane, or BMP for short.
There are about 8,000 unused code points for future expansion in the BMP, plus provision for another 917,476 supplementary code points. Approximately 46,000 characters are slated to be added to the Unicode Standard in upcoming versions.
The Unicode Standard also reserves code points for private use. Vendors or end users can assign these internally for their own characters and symbols, or use them with specialized fonts. There are 6,400 private use code points on the BMP and another 131,068 supplementary private use code points, should 6,400 be insufficient for particular applications.
The 'cluedness' of the average USENET poster has gone down the tubes. Sure, it's always been a great place for newbies to get some help from the veterans, but lately things have gotten out of control. Cross-posting is rampant, trolls are everywhere, and spammers think folks care about their offerings.
Then get a better newsreader. I see hardly any spam, annoying posters never hit my radar, and posts from people whose expertise I value reading are moved up the lists so I read the threads they have posted to first. You need a scoring newsreader rather than a kill-filing one for really good post sorting - Gnus is my preference.
Technical discussion has given away to politics.
Blind assertion does not equal fact. Various newsgroups see their readership change over time. In almost any group, you can start to answer all the newbie questions after six months, simply by being exposed to all the responses. Politics does occur on the newsgroups, but so does technical discussion. If a group no longer serves your needs, find a better/different one.
Less than 18 months ago comp.sys.sgi.* was full of interesting chatter, these days half of the posts are by folks asking how to install a (completely unaccelerated and very unfinished) Linux port on an SGI MIPS machine they bought off eBay for $50.
So? You obviously don't value these posts, which is probably fair enough. For a new (or nearly new...) SGI owner, asking about difficulties with a Linux port is a reasonable question. If the answer is "Read the FAQ", then educate the new users. Thats a part of the UseNet community.
The true engineers, developers, and scientific users have pulled completely out and rely on private mailing lists.
Hmm. Staring at the poster lists, I'd say your claim was pretty far from reality. There seems to be a reasonable clue-to-noise ratio rattling around the sgi groups.
Some people will give up on Usenet, often because local resources to them give more select information. I've knocked around on Usenet for about the last 8 years or so, and I don't really see any great signs of changes in clue-level on the newsgroup levels. (except on alt.fan.pratchett, which went from a fun place to hang out to a disaster area simply because of a massive increase in posting levels making it difficult to keep up with or maintain any solid contact with. The price of success..) There are more people now who are playing with Linux and making their first steps with an unfamiliar OS than I remember being the case four years ago, but that is hardly surprising. Don't get frustrated at new users for asking questions you already know the answers to - either help them or offer new sections to be added to the newsgroup FAQ. New users have always been a part of the UseNet postings - getting them clued up is part of the UseNet tradition.
... imagine installing a fresh copy of Debian on a Pentium, and giving it to your grandmother? Unless you've done a really good job of making sure everything is working, and you show her how to use things, where is she going to start?
Obviously she can't call the guys at GNOME for customer support, or the guys at KDE to ask why Konqueror isn't rending a webpage properly. It these things that are preventing it from being a true workstation for the masses.
That's why small additions like the Ximian MonkeyTalk button in all Ximian GNOME apps are such a good idea. You're stuck, you've tried the help manual (or at least as much as is currently complete) and no go. Click on the Help->Talk button and get simple type and respond interface to talk to other Gnome users (including the Ximian people) and try to solve your problem.
Beyond the somewhat random talk room, there is always commercial support. That's where companies like RedHat will really find their niche - supporting the distributions they have put together. You already pay for MS Windows help desk support, so it is not such a long chalk to pay for Linux desktop support if you need it.
Not only that, Linux tries to mix Server and Workstation too much.. Once again, the average geek will like this, but most people don't care if they have a telnet server running, in fact its a huge security risk for the average home user.. Considering he'll probably be storing webpage passwords on his machine..
This is nitpicking, but Linux doesn't try to mix Server and workstation - the distros package it that way. Don't blame the famous Linux flexibility from embedded to mainframe for the packages that distros choose to installed with it.
That said, recent releases seem to be far more clued up on how much/little to have automatically starting on a workstation install and security levels are starting to look less like swiss cheese. Ditto 3D hardware support working straight away from install is also coming along - it's not completely there yet but it's better than it was 6 months ago.
Then the common answer for people that are struggling with Linux and always asking questions is "RTFM", well guess what, there are people out there that don't want to learn about a computer, but just use it. And futher more, I doubt this person has a book on GNOME, and people trying to learn GNOME aren't going to know GNOME has built in documentation, or what the f*ck is a manpage.
'Users' aren't going to need man pages - developers and system administrators are. And while I think that having GUI administration tools (such as Ximian Setup Tools, which look like they will provide the backends for both GNOME and KDE) for setting up and keep the system running is a major advance for normal users of the Linux desktop, anyone who uses a computer should be expected to put some effort into reading some of the various documentation provided - hopefully this documentation is part of the Help system of the package. In no other sphere of endeavour would you find this 'I have a tool and I'm just going to use it' mentality. Even using a hammer to bang a nail into wood works better if you have actually had some instruction in how to do it. A computer and software is analogous a complete set of carpentry tools, from bradle to lathe, some simple, some complex. Nobody expects to turn out Chippendale furniture without some training. Computers are the same - you should be able to the most basic tasks with 30 seconds of tips, but to carry out the more complete and complex tasks, you are going to have to learn some things.
Thats the only thing I give Windows, I can install it for my parents, show them the icon for IE, put a few games on for my Dad, show him the icons, show my mom the "Word" icon, and how to print, and they're set, happy and have little problems.. I only need to teach them when blue screens pop up, or things lock up, press the reset button and start over...
A successful install of the latest distros put you pretty much at this point - a pretty windowing GUI with a completely point and click interface. with little or no need to ever see the command line. If the install doesn't go smoothly, contact your vendor and let them know what died, hung, crashed or was simply ambiguous or unclear. You'd be amazed at what an impact constructive reports and criticism can acheive.
Looking at the PDF on developing games for the Nokia Media terminal reveals that this isn't an NVIDIA card. How can you tell? Simple - the specs list Mesa 3D graphics library and Direct Rendering Infrastructure as parts of the 3D features. If this was an NVIDIA card running on Linux, it wouldn't use either of these parts - NVIDIA has its own OpenGL implementation and doesn't use the DRI interface on XFree86.
And where is the Exchange clone for linux? Yup, there is none. I wonder if m$ would kill any company who even tried...
The Exchange clone is Here. (that's http://www.ximian.com/apps/evolution.php3 for the worried-about-bad-links folk). Evolution is already a pretty comprehensive package - if they manage to get it to interact successfully with centralized Groupware servers, such as Lotus Notes Domino, they stand an extremely good chance of taking Gnome deep into the corporate desktop, not just scratching the surface.
There is a similar project underway for KDE 2 - I'm sure we'll get the goods on that from someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
I wondered when Emacs would get embedded in Mozilla ;-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Now, if you could use a Wacom tablet, it'd be more like Palm Graffitti. Pen to the left for forward, back for backward, tap the link...I oughta try it out.
I just did. It's a little fiddly - I might have to play with the pressure settings to make it a little easier. But still, it works (although my current nightly is a little flakey).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Konqueror [konqueror.org] does exactly that. Disable just window.open(), or disable is for specific sites. You can also enable-disable Java/JavaScript in general on a site-by-site if you like. It also supports accepting cookies only from specified sites. Makes me happy.
When Mozilla does this, I'll be a true GNOME convert. Until such time, it's apt-get install konqueror task-ximian-desktop enlightenment for me.
Welcome convert! Stick this in your .mozilla/*/prefs.js file and say good bye to popup ads on page load/close.
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);
Now that Mozilla also has tabbed browsing, what are you waiting for (Ctrl-T for those who don't know about this yet in the latest nightly builds). In fact the only criticism is that features get added to Mozilla followed by the UI some weeks later so unless you keep your nose in Bugzilla you miss tricks.
Still it all adds to the excitement.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Well there is this:
Coffee.el" for submitting a BREW request to a RFC-2324 compliant coffee maker.
There is kitchensink.el around here somewhere too ... :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Google cache for Ornithopter.net. For the link wary
n g_ en%7Clang_fr%7Clang_de&q=site%3Awww.ornithopter.ne t+ornithopter
http://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&lr=la
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
If someone wishes to pass information on to somebody else without anyone else knowing what is going on, putting backdoors in crypto packages and outlawing the rest isn't going to stop them.
The sheer volume of information sloshing around between machines means that you have to ignore something - processing all of it is verging on the impossible even if you don't have to decrypt. Say I wanted to tell Fred something important - "Free beer at John's house, 9pm" - and I was banned from using crypto. I could play with any number of obfuscations - I could encode the ASCII bits into the least significant bit of the red channel of an image. I could speak it and send it as an Windows executable with a MP3 component welded onto the end which could be extracted by knowing how long the original executable was. I could hide the message hidden spread through an MPEG file in some redundant byte in an MPEG frame header. Given a known random number generator and a given seed, you could XOR your message with the obfuscating signal. The number of ways to play this game is at least as complex as the number of data formats available.
So even if you had a complete and effective ban on encryption (which is impossible) you still couldn't process or intercept all the info flying through your checking portal. And even if the encryption ban stopped terrorists from passing information through the Internet, you haven't stopped them communicating - you have just made them use something else. Like encrypted packet radio or laser interferometry.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Two things are holding such people back from making more substantial contributions to OpenAL. First of all it is not entirely clear to me that the API is all that well designed. Modelling it after OpenGL was probably a mistake.
Gotta love this statement. Assert - never qualify.
One of the key points of environmental 3D audio is that it is intended to go hand-in-hand with a 3D visualization of a world. Choosing to use a similar set up to OpenGL struck me as being both an intuitive and sensible way to proceed. Creative certainly thought so when they looked at OpenAL hardware support. This does not mean that you have to use OpenAL for 3D worlds only - OpenGL works well for 2D as well - just look at Chromium BSU.
In addition, there are certain fundamental assumptions put into the API that assume preemptive multitasking for some things to work well, most notably spooling file play.
Well if your system doesn't support pre-emptive multitasking, you are going to have to live with interrupt control. Tricky but not impossible, and something that 99% of the developers aren't going to have to worry about.
There was no thought put into using it for anything other than 3D sound effects for games. So, for example if you attempt to write a MOD player using OpenAL to hopefully be able to take advantage of their SoundFont technology and EAX in your MOD player's core and reverb functionalities, you are pretty much out of luck.
Assertion! No facts!
OpenAL's source queues lack the functionality required for doing proper timing of various effects that you would need in order to pull it off.
Timing is critical in any sound API - OpenAL works fine. Maybe the key difference is that OpenAL does not give a mechanism to stream data into a buffer object, choosing instead to allow the programmer to queue buffers for sources. Essentially this means that the applications is free to do funky stuff up front before submitting the buffers or even (re)processing the buffers on the fly during playback. If you need to do funky things like real-time DSP processing then you are going to have to be able to make guarantees that you can process the data fast enough to keep the sound buffers populated. Beyond that, there is nothing stopping you from writing a MOD player using OpenAL.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
BTW, any news on Nautilus? Although it's very bloated, I like that thing. Don't let it fade...
Seeing that God^H^H^HAlan Cox made some performance observations on one of the nautilus mailing lists (based on a almost complete lack of any caching for often-used fonts and file contents), I think you'll see the performance take a big leap when 1.0.5 comes out - there is still a fair amount of activity on the Nautilus code base.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Are Gnome and KDE completely compatible? If I write an application with Gnome specifically in mind, will KDE run the application as I wrote it? If not, that's why having two will make it less likely to succeed. If so, I stand corrected?
If you mean 'Can I run both Gnome and KDE applications side by side?' then the answer is a definite Yes. If you mean 'Can I cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop between the Gnome and KDE applications?' then the answer is 'Mostly'. Is it a good idea to do this if you have a small hard drive and 32Mb of memory then the answer is NO.
Gnome has its own underlying architecture for communicating between Gnome apps - based on CORBA. KDE chose to build a Corba-like system called KParts. Most interoperability issues revolve around getting these two infrastructures to work together. In order to have both KDE and Gnome apps up and running, you need to have both infrastructures active (this is not a problem, it just requires more resources).
There is also no requirement to run KDE apps under KWM either - Sawmill works fine. I suspect Enlightenment does too, along with IceWM, but I don't have any personal experience of those setups.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The problem I see with this is that if a company as big as IBM wants to use something like Linux, they're going to want some kind of control of the direction it goes. Companies have been trying to get Linus to loosen his 'control' of the kernel for a while now. No company with smart leadership will drop support for a product that they have complete power over, in favor of an OS where they have little-to-no control over the direction that it takes.
First a caveat: These are my own views and not those of IBM Canada.
Why do you think that IBM needs control of the Linux kernel? It's not necessary. Because the kernel is open source any features that IBM feels are necessary for running Linux on, for example, a 4-way H50 RS/6000 machine can be provided as a patch to the main kernel tree and pre-compiled binaries can be distributed by IBM from one of the web sites. Yes - someone has to keep the patches sane against the latest kernel but it is unlikely in the long run that useful and proven patches would remain out of the kernel tree forever unless they seriously clash with some design decision.
Patch maintenance is a minor headache against a stable kernel series. It only becomes a major problem if you try and keep patches sync'd against a development kernel and IBM is very very unlikely to request customers use such a kernel in a production environment.
And secondly, why do you think that IBM needs total control over everything they use? That's nonsense. Working in the RDMBS world, we all work to published standards. There is no 'total control' exercised by IBM when submitting proposals for new SQL functionality or DRDA protocols. Total control is not the only option for making money out there - being the best at something still makes better business sense. Making sure that the customer support services are actually helping customers makes good financial sense. We have all got really warped by MS's monopoly position and healthy financial situation that it is too easy to forget that it is possible to make a good income by being good in a competitive marketplace.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I've been dissapointed by Loki once recently. I was thinking of moving from windows to linux on my home gaming system, figured i'd be able to play tribes 2 in linux, since i had heard it was done. I didn't realize the windows cd isn't patchable (like q3a is). To make things worse, Loki only sells complete CDs, not patches. And after spending 70$ on the win version, i figured i may as well say in win than move to linux and pay it again. If he had, for example, been selling a 15 dollar patch, i may have migrated.
You obviously don't hang out on the Loki newsgroups do you? This must be the most asked, most discussed question on those newsgroups.
Simply put, it doesn't make any financial sense for Loki to do this. Selling games on the Linux platform will, at least for the immediate future, be selling to a much smaller market than the Windows platform. Therefore the economies of scale which allow the cost-cutting seen with Windows games are just not an option for Loki - if every Loki game could be run on Linux by buying the Windows version (often more cheaply) and patching it to run on linux, Loki would not have released as many games as it has and it would be filing for Chapter 7. Bust. Finito. Gone.
Even allowing people to pay purely for the patch rather than new physical media would cut any margins they currently enjoy to nothing. Out of the $15 you propose, you can forget about $10 dollars as tax and payment to the original vendor (id software, Dynamix, etc.) and only leave tiny crumbs for Loki. $35 would probably make about the right margin - you can buy most Loki games for that and get a Linux-specific manual as well.
Have I been disappointed with Loki? No - everything I have bought has run straight out of the box. Most problems are fixed promptly and the installation and patching is an easy, trouble free process. And quite frankly, Urban Terror rocks my world :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
You DOS a server, they move it to a different address. You format a hard disk, they restore from last nights backup but if you modify a couple of files here or there and If you reset the modification date then they won't even notice until all the backups are corrupt as well.
They now have to check *every* document, spreadsheet and database by hand to see if it's been modified and then try to find an unmodified version in the backup. It could get very nasty if the documents/spreadsheets/databases have *also* been updated legitimately in the meantime, mixing legitimate information with junk.
That's why you should be running an integrity checking system, such as Tripwire, to keep tabs on files which change on your system. Run in conjunction with something like LIDS where you can stop a file being editted while allowing log records to be appended, or where all your logs are sent to another machine as a backup (or even to a line-printer), you know precisely what has changed and when, regardless of the change dates.
Quite frankly, if the MD5sums on my files change without the dates changing, that's a pretty big hint that you have been compromised. Time to reach for the backups.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Choice is a good thing.
Oh, yup, yup, it is!
But, like you pointed out, it's hard for non-aware users to know about choice when everyone's forcing Hailstorm and Passport down their necks.
But that is the crux of the problem with the MS monopoly - most people are unaware. If we wish to have a hope of an open and standards-based web, we can't rely on people making decisions based on the best technology - we have already seen plenty of examples of superior technologies (i.e. V2000 video) going to the wall or being excluded from certain markets due to heavy duty marketing by a competitor.
And if people don't know or understand a problem, they can't be expected to care about the result, even if they are 'harmed' by that ignorance.
So, I think we agree, except you still fail to address my point about the way MS will leverage wide acceptance of .NET/etc to give them a stranglehold on the identity market!!
MS knows that - MS Passport is a master strategy by Microsoft - it gives them control of web services and a huge slice of the web commerce pie. However, MS will only see this happen if MS Passport is the only accredited Identity server. Hopefully dotGNU will make that nightmare fade away - given the widespread need for authentication services, I don't see Unix web development servers wanting to authenticate exclusively against a MS-solution. Mono's existence will not make any difference to the MS Passport strategy. Mono does not have to use MS Passport for it's authentication - in fact Mono does not require authentication for general use either. Mono is a much more general project than just web services - it is, in essence, a development layer.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
So this is about:
Actually it is just the CLR and C# parts, plus libraries to support these bits
You really haven't understood this bit have you? There is NOTHING in Mono that deals with Passport and Hailstorm. Sheesh!
Mono is saying .NET/C# technologies are great for us hackers to copy. We can even get MS to agree and help us!
I don't see any signs of MS helping the Mono project. Far from it - MS will be quite happy to watch it develop at arms length. All the communication between MS and Ximian reported has been clarification of the specs, rather than support discussions.
Mono is saying, we don't care about the second bit: Passport and Hailstorm. We can even do our own, super-groovy, hacker's version!
Actually, Ximian probably does care about the Passport and Hailstorm stuff. But they don't need to - the GNU project had dotGNU to counter that part of the MS strategy.
The problem that I and many others have been trying to point out to people is that MS' strategy is indeed to 'open up' the technologies and platforms - because, like in the case of Windows, it buys leverage and dominance on the layer above.
Yes - if you have an Open standard that relies entirely on some closed, unobtainable server layer, then you are totally at the mercy of that server layer. If you'd actually bothered to read the information floating around, you would have realised that the Mono project does not require Passport or Hailstorm to be of use to developers. On it's own, Mono is still a useful project and allows developers to move C# projects off the MS Windows platform onto other OS's, plus you get all the integrated Common Language runtime with the advantages of integrated garbage collection, exception handling and cross-language class re-use. You have a class you like in C++, and you want to wrap it in some other language, say CLOS, then if the CLR supports CLOS, you can use it there.
But with the dotGNU project as well, that unobtainable server layer suddenly has an open source rival. So you can write .NET-style web applications and authenticate against a distributed dotGNU server set without having to round trip anywhere near a MS-authentication server.
As more and more CTOs and dull technical managers buy into the rapidly-spreading .NET platform (whether MS or open source), and more and more CEOs and dull government departments buy into the easy-easy Hailstorm community, it will be as impossible to do anything in your daily personal life without Passport/Hailstorm as it is now impossible to do anything in daily business life without Office.
And if we didn't have dotGNU and Mono, where would we be? Look at it this way - lets assume that we drop dotGNU and Mono now. Corporations that rely on Windows will be implementing Windows NET OS's as part of their normal upgrade cycle. Most people-in-the-street customers will buy it without knowing anything about the debate raging in technical circles. Microsoft will have at about half of its users using .NET services within two years of launch, regardless of whether there is an open source alternative which is not controlled by MS. At this point, MS has effectively balkanized the web - you either have MS Windows .NET and can use the newest web applications and services, or you have a platform such as Linux which is locked out of this. If you thought that the Internet Explorer monopoly was bad for the HTML standard and lead to IE-only web sites, wait until .NET rolls out. Then you will understand just how exclusionary the .NET plan is.
Or we can support the Mono and dotGNU projects. We can make use of the code built in C# and port it to other platforms. We can take advantage of the cross-language abilities of the CLR in our own programs without having to pay even lip-service to MS. We can authenticate against dotGNU servers and move MS .NET projects out into the open.
Choice is a good thing.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
200MHz is a lot. 1GHz is utterly ridiculous. The biggest concern with having faster chips is reducing battery life. Most, if not all, WinCE devices have a max battery life in the hours. Granted, most such devices have colour screens, but it would be foolish to say the faster chips doesn't play a part in it.
The Motorola MC68328 DragonBall microprocessor uses about 55mW. The power consumption for a modern colour LCD screen is about 25mW. So CPU power usage is an important factor in battery life. There is a paper on power consumption which is worth a read which shows that power consumption for the Palm Pro 16MHz uses between 26mW (sleeping) and 160mW for intensive tasks.
Now the ARM family has been designed for high MIPS/Watt ratios. Looking at the ARM10 tech specs the ARM chip uses 275mW when running, and can drop down to less than 5mW when idling, and in sleep mode uses 0mW with the option for fast wake up.
So what does this mean for the average Palm user? If the CPU goes to sleep in between uses, and idle mode is invoked during any period of inactivity, the new Palms should maintain good battery life while being a lot snappier to use. To me, it looks like you should get the same sort of battery life if you use it for the same sort of tasks. If you want to play MP3's all day long, then your Palm will be chewing around 350mW out of the batteries. Given that a single AAA battery gives roughly 1000mAH (milliAmp Hours) so that would imply a pair of AAAs would give you about 8 hours of continuous 100% CPU usage.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Why ? because the strength of the KDE look-and-feel is that it's a close copy of Microsoft Windows
But the funny thing is that I also feel that KDE's greatest weakness is that it is a close copy of MS Windows. As a battle-hardened Unix user who started with austerity of TWM, has been scarred by OpenWindows, scratched by CDE and finally found salvation in FVWM before the time of Sawfish's appearance on the scene, KDE's default window manager feels too constraining. It's not configurable enough - I can't push into working in the way I want it to work. I can't program it in Lisp. The list goes on :-)
That's not to say I don't like the KDE stuff - I just run it from my Gnome desktop. The apps are fab, but you can keep the window manager.
Thankfully we have a choice :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
OK, so it was very noble of this person to point out the faults in the protection scheme so that others would know that their documents were not so safe after all...
However, if "these are people after all" in Adobe, then why would it be such a bad idea to present this to them first rather than just shoving the information out to the general public.
If a company claims certain features in it's advertising and packaging, then a public examination of those claims are completely valid. Consumer groups have been doing this for ages for everything from baby toys to trucks, bringing the company to task for incorrect and misleading information or just plain bad products. I see no difference in this case. Indeed, if you are selling software which claims to be 'secure' you had better get your claims right. Hiding behind the DMCA should not excuse the company from the trading standards laws or allow the company to wriggle out of the 'merchantable quality' requirements.
This is rather different from products such as web servers having security holes in them - there are reasonable grounds in these cases to inform the vendor of the problem first and only go public if nothing happens.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It's nice to say 'Linux this' and 'Linux that' but the fact is that inside IBM, there's virtually NO Linux at all. Sounds like a giant PR move to me.
What a great way to see how many IBMers running Linux there are .. :-) Okay - I'll bite.
Sitting in the DB2 development section, I run Linux as my *gasp* desktop OS. I'm not the only one around here either - I can quickly walk down the corridor and put my hands on 4 more Linux machines being used as development desktop OSs without going more than 20 yards. Then there are people who have laptops running Linux. There are Linux servers, Linux regressions machines and Linux test machines. We have people as primary Linux contacts, a Linux User Group.
And funnily enough, the number of machines running Linux seems to be increasing. Lotus Notes runs fine on my Linux desktop (major kudos to the WINE team for that one) so that solves the most critical need which is not available on Linux native. For some reason once released from the Windows-only world, those Windows partitions get cobwebs pretty quickly.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Does this procedure help? I'd say it does - especially with a product as large and complicated as DB2 UDB, there may be side effects that are not obvious to just one programmer. There may be logic problems that you have missed which are clear to another person. Bad coding style leading to problematic maintenance problems in the future can be caught.
Just as nobody would dream of submitting a major article for publication in academia without having it proof read by at least one peer, it doesn't help a large product to have large volumes of code stuffed into it without somebody other than the original author looking over it. So while I used to find the process of code reviews cumbersome and time consuming, I now feel that code reviews save more time and energy in the long run.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Had this researcher bothered to read the Unicode technical introduction, the following would have been obvious.
In all, the Unicode Standard, Version 3.0 provides codes for 49,194 characters from the world's alphabets, ideograph sets, and symbol collections. These all fit into the first 64K characters, an area of the codespace that is called basic multilingual plane, or BMP for short.
There are about 8,000 unused code points for future expansion in the BMP, plus provision for another 917,476 supplementary code points. Approximately 46,000 characters are slated to be added to the Unicode Standard in upcoming versions.
The Unicode Standard also reserves code points for private use. Vendors or end users can assign these internally for their own characters and symbols, or use them with specialized fonts. There are 6,400 private use code points on the BMP and another 131,068 supplementary private use code points, should 6,400 be insufficient for particular applications.
Plenty of room.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I've been trying for a couple of days to get this file. I only have 300k so far. Has anyone managed to download the whole thing yet?
Tried getting it with 'wget' or any other download manager? That way you can resume part way through a broken download...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The 'cluedness' of the average USENET poster has gone down the tubes. Sure, it's always been a great place for newbies to get some help from the veterans, but lately things have gotten out of control. Cross-posting is rampant, trolls are everywhere, and spammers think folks care about their offerings.
Then get a better newsreader. I see hardly any spam, annoying posters never hit my radar, and posts from people whose expertise I value reading are moved up the lists so I read the threads they have posted to first. You need a scoring newsreader rather than a kill-filing one for really good post sorting - Gnus is my preference.
Technical discussion has given away to politics.
Blind assertion does not equal fact. Various newsgroups see their readership change over time. In almost any group, you can start to answer all the newbie questions after six months, simply by being exposed to all the responses. Politics does occur on the newsgroups, but so does technical discussion. If a group no longer serves your needs, find a better/different one.
Less than 18 months ago comp.sys.sgi.* was full of interesting chatter, these days half of the posts are by folks asking how to install a (completely unaccelerated and very unfinished) Linux port on an SGI MIPS machine they bought off eBay for $50.
So? You obviously don't value these posts, which is probably fair enough. For a new (or nearly new...) SGI owner, asking about difficulties with a Linux port is a reasonable question. If the answer is "Read the FAQ", then educate the new users. Thats a part of the UseNet community.
The true engineers, developers, and scientific users have pulled completely out and rely on private mailing lists.
Hmm. Staring at the poster lists, I'd say your claim was pretty far from reality. There seems to be a reasonable clue-to-noise ratio rattling around the sgi groups.
Some people will give up on Usenet, often because local resources to them give more select information. I've knocked around on Usenet for about the last 8 years or so, and I don't really see any great signs of changes in clue-level on the newsgroup levels. (except on alt.fan.pratchett, which went from a fun place to hang out to a disaster area simply because of a massive increase in posting levels making it difficult to keep up with or maintain any solid contact with. The price of success..) There are more people now who are playing with Linux and making their first steps with an unfamiliar OS than I remember being the case four years ago, but that is hardly surprising. Don't get frustrated at new users for asking questions you already know the answers to - either help them or offer new sections to be added to the newsgroup FAQ. New users have always been a part of the UseNet postings - getting them clued up is part of the UseNet tradition.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Obviously she can't call the guys at GNOME for customer support, or the guys at KDE to ask why Konqueror isn't rending a webpage properly. It these things that are preventing it from being a true workstation for the masses.
That's why small additions like the Ximian MonkeyTalk button in all Ximian GNOME apps are such a good idea. You're stuck, you've tried the help manual (or at least as much as is currently complete) and no go. Click on the Help->Talk button and get simple type and respond interface to talk to other Gnome users (including the Ximian people) and try to solve your problem.
Beyond the somewhat random talk room, there is always commercial support. That's where companies like RedHat will really find their niche - supporting the distributions they have put together. You already pay for MS Windows help desk support, so it is not such a long chalk to pay for Linux desktop support if you need it.
Not only that, Linux tries to mix Server and Workstation too much.. Once again, the average geek will like this, but most people don't care if they have a telnet server running, in fact its a huge security risk for the average home user.. Considering he'll probably be storing webpage passwords on his machine..
This is nitpicking, but Linux doesn't try to mix Server and workstation - the distros package it that way. Don't blame the famous Linux flexibility from embedded to mainframe for the packages that distros choose to installed with it.
That said, recent releases seem to be far more clued up on how much/little to have automatically starting on a workstation install and security levels are starting to look less like swiss cheese. Ditto 3D hardware support working straight away from install is also coming along - it's not completely there yet but it's better than it was 6 months ago.
Then the common answer for people that are struggling with Linux and always asking questions is "RTFM", well guess what, there are people out there that don't want to learn about a computer, but just use it. And futher more, I doubt this person has a book on GNOME, and people trying to learn GNOME aren't going to know GNOME has built in documentation, or what the f*ck is a manpage.
'Users' aren't going to need man pages - developers and system administrators are. And while I think that having GUI administration tools (such as Ximian Setup Tools, which look like they will provide the backends for both GNOME and KDE) for setting up and keep the system running is a major advance for normal users of the Linux desktop, anyone who uses a computer should be expected to put some effort into reading some of the various documentation provided - hopefully this documentation is part of the Help system of the package. In no other sphere of endeavour would you find this 'I have a tool and I'm just going to use it' mentality. Even using a hammer to bang a nail into wood works better if you have actually had some instruction in how to do it. A computer and software is analogous a complete set of carpentry tools, from bradle to lathe, some simple, some complex. Nobody expects to turn out Chippendale furniture without some training. Computers are the same - you should be able to the most basic tasks with 30 seconds of tips, but to carry out the more complete and complex tasks, you are going to have to learn some things.
Thats the only thing I give Windows, I can install it for my parents, show them the icon for IE, put a few games on for my Dad, show him the icons, show my mom the "Word" icon, and how to print, and they're set, happy and have little problems.. I only need to teach them when blue screens pop up, or things lock up, press the reset button and start over. ..
A successful install of the latest distros put you pretty much at this point - a pretty windowing GUI with a completely point and click interface. with little or no need to ever see the command line. If the install doesn't go smoothly, contact your vendor and let them know what died, hung, crashed or was simply ambiguous or unclear. You'd be amazed at what an impact constructive reports and criticism can acheive.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
And where is the Exchange clone for linux? Yup, there is none. I wonder if m$ would kill any company who even tried...
The Exchange clone is Here. (that's http://www.ximian.com/apps/evolution.php3 for the worried-about-bad-links folk). Evolution is already a pretty comprehensive package - if they manage to get it to interact successfully with centralized Groupware servers, such as Lotus Notes Domino, they stand an extremely good chance of taking Gnome deep into the corporate desktop, not just scratching the surface.
There is a similar project underway for KDE 2 - I'm sure we'll get the goods on that from someone else.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes