It isn't just email functionality though... it's managing contacts, notes, schedules, etc... any IMAP provider can do email... it's all the other stuff that Outlook provides that (hopefully) MS's service will do that no one else does.
I'd say it makes a lot of sense for MS to do this. One of the problems with web-based email services (99% of them anyway) is that you HAVE to be connected to use them. One of the problems with Outlook is that you have to have an Exchange server to get maximum functionality, and most non-businesses don't go that route.
This basically allows non-big-corp users to gain access to their email from anywhere, using a standard client, 100% of the functionality of that client, without having to fork over thousands of dollars for exchange. To someone that is strictly a consultant, this might be a very appealing offering, and something that no other service can provide right now (feel free to fix that problem though;)
There was a shareware package you could get that would do basically the same thing. They called the gestures "glicks" and it was targeted primarily at users of touchpad type input devices (eg. Cirque's SmartCat). I hope they're not trying to patent this or anything, because there is DEFINATELY prior art:P
I'm not sure if that's really a necessary concern. If you look at a lot of the vidcams out there, they have built in hardware compression. Assuming this thing isn't doing any actual WATCHING of the video directly (eg. watching for unchanged frames; combining multiple streams into a single image as specified in some other posts), it could just take the raw stream of pre-compressed video and dump it to the storage device...no recompression necessary, and hence, not very processor intensive. It's mostly a bandwidth/storage space issue at this point.
The video demonstrates an AthlonXP processor. Tom was testing the "pre-XP" version. This leads to a VERY unfair comparison...Tom directly mentions that the XP will use the same core that the dual-capable Athlons do...this core does have built in temperature management. The Pre-XP processors DID NOT and WOULD FRY if left unhelped. This doesn't demonstrate that Tom's test was wrong or his results invalid...this shows that AMD knows they screwed up but were at least smart enough to fix the problem in the next significant rev of the chip (though that doesn't fix the situation for those of us with Pre-XP chips)
I can totally appreciate the desire he has to explain the situation his company is purportedly contributing to, but realistically, all he acknowledges is the comparison of RedHat to Microsoft.
The real things he needs to be doing is explaining to us WHY they included gcc 2.96 rather than a stable, proven version?
WHY are they encouraging the concepts of propriety in the software that they're distributing?
WHY are they regularly taking software that the open-source community and environment have strived so hard for and creating situations where no one can work with them, and incompatabilities and instability arise?
One could argue that while they are definately users and evangelists of the open source movement, they are still a closed-shop. If they were truly open source, and constantly contributing back to the community, wouldn't someone have known BEFORE it was released that they were doing some wacky things in their software? I mean, consider it...yes, we get to see their sourcecode, but we only get REAL access to it when they release it, not during the actual development of it. So while we've all been hacking away at the RH6.2 source, making improvements and sharing these to the rest of the community, we couldn't plan for and anticipate the changes that were being made and improvments (AND BUGS) that would be introduced in the RH7 source because we only get access to it AFTER it's released.
The point is, it's these kinds of closed-office things that create and instigate the comparison to Microsoft. And in the same respect, it is these kinds of responses and letters (The ones that don't really address the issues, but dance around them) that are typical of Microsoft (and any other software/hardware behemoth) to put out, expecting to somehow use marketing-speak to appease us.
I may be going off too far on one side, being a bit extreme, but I'm simply trying to raise an issue here. I love RedHat... I love the concepts and togetherness of the opensource effort... I just don't want to see them screwed up by any one company just because they become the dominant player in the field (like Microsoft).
It's funny, but the VAST majority of responses aren't helpful or even insightful...merely a waste of bits.
Anyway, I offer this approach:
Tell Microsoft that you are more than willing to comply with their request. However, in order to fulfill their request they must send printed copy highlighting the EXACT words that constitute copyright infringement.
Upon receiving such written/printed notification, slashdot should remove only the words that Microsoft has stated they own. Legally they cannot claim that words of opinion are theirs (though they might be able to call into question concepts that might be discussed, but are not litteral)
In every instance that Microsoft correctly states that a piece of text is owned by them, edit the text to a link to the effect of
In compliance with legal request, this information has been censored, but may be found at the owner's website The point is to A) Put it in their lap to do to the work (after all, they know their patents best, right?), yet still provide for the opinions of Microsoft's implementation to be openly demonstrated, and for the code samples to still be available through linkage (and this has already proven to be legal, hasn't it?). Also, this puts the burden of protection in Microsoft's hands.
I remember getting one of these as my 8th grade graduation present because we couldn't afford anything else. I wrote a bunch of programs for it in BASIC and stored them to tape and let my little sisters play on it. A math tutor (that printed out results), address book, diary app, all kinds of kewl stuff for a 12 year old to do. All that for the wonderful price of $100.00US.
What sucks is that nothing I learned on it then is worth anything now (it was an antique when WE got it!).
Sometimes I miss that thing, just because I could do anything on it. It's more fun to solve problems for myself when my understanding of the environment isn't the primary limiting factor.
We came across this problem when we were forced to rebuild our infrastructure. What we wanted was something that didn't limit the number of servers we could have, was abstract enough to allow a server to do multiple things if required, but specific enough to give an impression of it.
We decided to use colors (red, orange, blue, etc)... The firewall became known as RED, our webserver was GREEN, etc. These were the primary names, but with some DNS aliasing, you could let the users think they were talking to whatever you want. And with the NUMBER of colors out there (if you need more, talk to Crayola), you weren't limited in the number of servers you could install on the network.
Coincidentally, the test Win2K box was known as BLACK...;o)
MTA stands for "Microsoft Transfer Agent", the portion of Microsoft Exchange Server that attempts to deliver the message to one of it's internal addresses.
It looks like this guy was using one of Microsoft's 120 day trial licenses...maybe the best response is to forward the emails to piracy@microsoft.com and let them deal with it from an illegal-software perspective...:o)
The README file in the 1.0 release says that DirectX is not supported in this release, and may work in the future.
On another note, it seems to be running slow on my machine too...PII400/384MB,
I'm planning on running Winbench and winstone on my emulated install and my desktop install (both Win98SE) and see what the REAL difference is....I'll post'em if anyone's interested...
these guys are, at minimum, wannabe hackers, right? so, then while getting a bazillion hits might be kewl, getting so many hits that your machines fail FROM ONE REFERENCE SITE might not be so great...
What if one of them tries to "make justice?" I'm not saying that their site says anywhere that they're gonna do that(it wouldn't anyway), or that there's any indication of it...but I think that the majority of people that consider themselves "hackers" would lack enough maturity to just let something like this go...(no offense to anyone...that's a general statement, and as such, as exceptions)
touché, but slashdot has this nifty ability to bring together all the things that I care about (Okay...so I don't care about ALL of them...but at least they can all somehow sit under the relevance-banner of "technology").
Why do we have movie reviews here? I'm not saying that the movie review is bad, and I'm not saying that the opinion is right or wrong...but why here? In a world where the internet provides access to 50 million other reviews and commentaries on a movie, why is it coming up in a place that I come to for valuable information that I can't find anywhere else? Comments and opinions on subjects that are fully justified and can change my opinion on the subject if well founded. not movie reviews! I can understand the idea of something like Episode 1 having some universal appeal, every geek or nerd or sentient being over the age of 15 is talking about it...but EDtv? ugh.
Maybe we should have another domain name...screendot.org or something...but please don't turn/. into another Siskel & Ebert knock off...:(
My apologies, but I was kinda going with the dictionary definition:
censorship n: 2: deleting parts of publications or correspondence or theatrical performances
okay...granted, this isn't a theatrical performance, and also granted, the information isn't technically being deleted but it's being hidden, which boils down to the same thing....it is censorship in the most litteral form...but as I said, that's not always a bad thing...esp when it's self-censorship, so to speak, from a community as a whole...
Fact is, the moderation system that Rob's coming up with is prob the best that could really be asked for.
It's basically peer-review, which in a world with people making comments varying from "first post" to the recipe of coca-cola, is probably the best possible form of censorship available (sorry Rob, but any limiting of comments is a form of censorship, though not necessarily in a bad way) If you want the mindless blabber, then set your preferences low, if you want meat and potatoes, have some higher standards...very simple. Granted, the anonymous coward postings are lower...WONDERFUL! We don't need fingerpointing, but some credability is a great idea, IMHO. And even though there is a lot of good stuff that comes from AC posts, they'll get adjusted as moderators read them and up their status...and *POOF* they appear on my comment list too! amazing, isn't it?
This way of doing things lets the people that actually might contribute something useful help decide what the comparatively useful comments might be. THIS IS A GOOD THING!
Rob: not to kiss ass or anything, but fact is, you've done a great job handling the sh*t we feed slashdot sometimes, and I'm glad you're doing your best to look at your 'baby' as the community that it has become...great job...and on the same note, letting or helping us rule ourselves, well...welcome to democracy...:o)
Good job rob...(and David...and anyone else that fails to be mentioned)...:o)
BTW...When do we get to write the new constitution?;o)
Isn't it a safe bet to just say "In my opinion" before a statement? I think that if you're portraying your statements as fact, it's considered slander, but if you're giving them off as just your "opinion" then you're pretty safe against this stuff...after all, it's opinions that the first amendment was designed to protect, right? I think this is the same thing that MS used in their antitrust defense tho, so it might not be that great of an idea after all...:oP
Actually, I've considered looking for a REALLY long time....this will just accelerate my search a bit. It's good to be with a company as they reach their peak...it's bad to stick around until the last shovel of dirt is in the grave...I can't imagine a resume ever recovering...
I was also talking with some of my coworkers, and they all agree, this is a last ditch effort to basically save the company. Anyone have any ideas of other companies that have attempted a similar route and succeeded/failed?
Well, considering there are about a ZILLION postings before you, I'd say that by the time you posted this you should have known you weren't first post. Besides, is first post a decent reason to take up clock cycles?
Wasn't there some previous article about people from Microsoft being told to post raves about MS products in message board systems? Sounds like we found another one...:oP
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't just email functionality though... it's managing contacts, notes, schedules, etc... any IMAP provider can do email... it's all the other stuff that Outlook provides that (hopefully) MS's service will do that no one else does.
I'd say it makes a lot of sense for MS to do this. One of the problems with web-based email services (99% of them anyway) is that you HAVE to be connected to use them. One of the problems with Outlook is that you have to have an Exchange server to get maximum functionality, and most non-businesses don't go that route.
;)
This basically allows non-big-corp users to gain access to their email from anywhere, using a standard client, 100% of the functionality of that client, without having to fork over thousands of dollars for exchange. To someone that is strictly a consultant, this might be a very appealing offering, and something that no other service can provide right now (feel free to fix that problem though
Actually, this is the exact one I was thinking of. They did this about four years ago... http://www.cirque.com/products/cruise.html
http://www.tcbnetworks.com/strokeit/shots.shtml
There was a shareware package you could get that would do basically the same thing. They called the gestures "glicks" and it was targeted primarily at users of touchpad type input devices (eg. Cirque's SmartCat). I hope they're not trying to patent this or anything, because there is DEFINATELY prior art :P
I'm not sure if that's really a necessary concern. If you look at a lot of the vidcams out there, they have built in hardware compression. Assuming this thing isn't doing any actual WATCHING of the video directly (eg. watching for unchanged frames; combining multiple streams into a single image as specified in some other posts), it could just take the raw stream of pre-compressed video and dump it to the storage device...no recompression necessary, and hence, not very processor intensive. It's mostly a bandwidth/storage space issue at this point.
The video demonstrates an AthlonXP processor. Tom was testing the "pre-XP" version. This leads to a VERY unfair comparison...Tom directly mentions that the XP will use the same core that the dual-capable Athlons do...this core does have built in temperature management. The Pre-XP processors DID NOT and WOULD FRY if left unhelped. This doesn't demonstrate that Tom's test was wrong or his results invalid...this shows that AMD knows they screwed up but were at least smart enough to fix the problem in the next significant rev of the chip (though that doesn't fix the situation for those of us with Pre-XP chips)
I can totally appreciate the desire he has to explain the situation his company is purportedly contributing to, but realistically, all he acknowledges is the comparison of RedHat to Microsoft.
The real things he needs to be doing is explaining to us WHY they included gcc 2.96 rather than a stable, proven version?
WHY are they encouraging the concepts of propriety in the software that they're distributing?
WHY are they regularly taking software that the open-source community and environment have strived so hard for and creating situations where no one can work with them, and incompatabilities and instability arise?
One could argue that while they are definately users and evangelists of the open source movement, they are still a closed-shop. If they were truly open source, and constantly contributing back to the community, wouldn't someone have known BEFORE it was released that they were doing some wacky things in their software? I mean, consider it...yes, we get to see their sourcecode, but we only get REAL access to it when they release it, not during the actual development of it. So while we've all been hacking away at the RH6.2 source, making improvements and sharing these to the rest of the community, we couldn't plan for and anticipate the changes that were being made and improvments (AND BUGS) that would be introduced in the RH7 source because we only get access to it AFTER it's released.
The point is, it's these kinds of closed-office things that create and instigate the comparison to Microsoft. And in the same respect, it is these kinds of responses and letters (The ones that don't really address the issues, but dance around them) that are typical of Microsoft (and any other software/hardware behemoth) to put out, expecting to somehow use marketing-speak to appease us.
I may be going off too far on one side, being a bit extreme, but I'm simply trying to raise an issue here. I love RedHat... I love the concepts and togetherness of the opensource effort... I just don't want to see them screwed up by any one company just because they become the dominant player in the field (like Microsoft).
I know I screwed up the HTML there...my bad, but you get the idea :oP
Anyway, I offer this approach:
In compliance with legal request, this information has been censored, but may be found at the owner's website The point is to A) Put it in their lap to do to the work (after all, they know their patents best, right?), yet still provide for the opinions of Microsoft's implementation to be openly demonstrated, and for the code samples to still be available through linkage (and this has already proven to be legal, hasn't it?). Also, this puts the burden of protection in Microsoft's hands.
And as usual, IANAL (like that was any surprise)
I remember getting one of these as my 8th grade graduation present because we couldn't afford anything else. I wrote a bunch of programs for it in BASIC and stored them to tape and let my little sisters play on it. A math tutor (that printed out results), address book, diary app, all kinds of kewl stuff for a 12 year old to do. All that for the wonderful price of $100.00US.
:o)
What sucks is that nothing I learned on it then is worth anything now (it was an antique when WE got it!).
Sometimes I miss that thing, just because I could do anything on it. It's more fun to solve problems for myself when my understanding of the environment isn't the primary limiting factor.
Life goes on...
We came across this problem when we were forced to rebuild our infrastructure. What we wanted was something that didn't limit the number of servers we could have, was abstract enough to allow a server to do multiple things if required, but specific enough to give an impression of it.
We decided to use colors (red, orange, blue, etc)... The firewall became known as RED, our webserver was GREEN, etc. These were the primary names, but with some DNS aliasing, you could let the users think they were talking to whatever you want. And with the NUMBER of colors out there (if you need more, talk to Crayola), you weren't limited in the number of servers you could install on the network.
Coincidentally, the test Win2K box was known as BLACK...;o)
MTA stands for "Microsoft Transfer Agent", the portion of Microsoft Exchange Server that attempts to deliver the message to one of it's internal addresses.
It looks like this guy was using one of Microsoft's 120 day trial licenses...maybe the best response is to forward the emails to piracy@microsoft.com and let them deal with it from an illegal-software perspective...:o)
The README file in the 1.0 release says that DirectX is not supported in this release, and may work in the future.
On another note, it seems to be running slow on my machine too...PII400/384MB,
I'm planning on running Winbench and winstone on my emulated install and my desktop install (both Win98SE) and see what the REAL difference is....I'll post'em if anyone's interested...
Just something to think about...
these guys are, at minimum, wannabe hackers, right? so, then while getting a bazillion hits might be kewl, getting so many hits that your machines fail FROM ONE REFERENCE SITE might not be so great...
What if one of them tries to "make justice?" I'm not saying that their site says anywhere that they're gonna do that(it wouldn't anyway), or that there's any indication of it...but I think that the majority of people that consider themselves "hackers" would lack enough maturity to just let something like this go...(no offense to anyone...that's a general statement, and as such, as exceptions)
Turn on that security, Rob...
touché, but slashdot has this nifty ability to bring together all the things that I care about (Okay...so I don't care about ALL of them...but at least they can all somehow sit under the relevance-banner of "technology").
Somehow, I just don't see EDtv doing that...
Why do we have movie reviews here? I'm not saying that the movie review is bad, and I'm not saying that the opinion is right or wrong...but why here?
/. into another Siskel & Ebert knock off...:(
In a world where the internet provides access to 50 million other reviews and commentaries on a movie, why is it coming up in a place that I come to for valuable information that I can't find anywhere else? Comments and opinions on subjects that are fully justified and can change my opinion on the subject if well founded. not movie reviews!
I can understand the idea of something like Episode 1 having some universal appeal, every geek or nerd or sentient being over the age of 15 is talking about it...but EDtv? ugh.
Maybe we should have another domain name...screendot.org or something...but please don't turn
My apologies, but I was kinda going with the dictionary definition:
censorship n: 2: deleting parts of publications or correspondence or theatrical performances
okay...granted, this isn't a theatrical performance, and also granted, the information isn't technically being deleted but it's being hidden, which boils down to the same thing....it is censorship in the most litteral form...but as I said, that's not always a bad thing...esp when it's self-censorship, so to speak, from a community as a whole...
Okay people...lets look at some reality here:
;o)
Fact is, the moderation system that Rob's coming up with is prob the best that could really be asked for.
It's basically peer-review, which in a world with people making comments varying from "first post" to the recipe of coca-cola, is probably the best possible form of censorship available (sorry Rob, but any limiting of comments is a form of censorship, though not necessarily in a bad way)
If you want the mindless blabber, then set your preferences low, if you want meat and potatoes, have some higher standards...very simple. Granted, the anonymous coward postings are lower...WONDERFUL! We don't need fingerpointing, but some credability is a great idea, IMHO. And even though there is a lot of good stuff that comes from AC posts, they'll get adjusted as moderators read them and up their status...and *POOF* they appear on my comment list too! amazing, isn't it?
This way of doing things lets the people that actually might contribute something useful help decide what the comparatively useful comments might be. THIS IS A GOOD THING!
Rob: not to kiss ass or anything, but fact is, you've done a great job handling the sh*t we feed slashdot sometimes, and I'm glad you're doing your best to look at your 'baby' as the community that it has become...great job...and on the same note, letting or helping us rule ourselves, well...welcome to democracy...:o)
Good job rob...(and David...and anyone else that fails to be mentioned)...:o)
BTW...When do we get to write the new constitution?
If somebody wants to send me a copy, I'll be happy to recompress it to mpeg...;oP
Isn't it a safe bet to just say "In my opinion" before a statement? I think that if you're portraying your statements as fact, it's considered slander, but if you're giving them off as just your "opinion" then you're pretty safe against this stuff...after all, it's opinions that the first amendment was designed to protect, right? I think this is the same thing that MS used in their antitrust defense tho, so it might not be that great of an idea after all...:oP
Actually, I've considered looking for a REALLY long time....this will just accelerate my search a bit. It's good to be with a company as they reach their peak...it's bad to stick around until the last shovel of dirt is in the grave...I can't imagine a resume ever recovering...
I was also talking with some of my coworkers, and they all agree, this is a last ditch effort to basically save the company. Anyone have any ideas of other companies that have attempted a similar route and succeeded/failed?
Well, considering there are about a ZILLION postings before you, I'd say that by the time you posted this you should have known you weren't first post. Besides, is first post a decent reason to take up clock cycles?
:oP
hrm...then again...is this posting either?
Wasn't there some previous article about people from Microsoft being told to post raves about MS products in message board systems? Sounds like we found another one...:oP