> So in the end OO is not usable except for extremely simple things
Have you tried using the Stylist and master documents? Because I maintain several complex multi-hundred-page documents with OOo and it is a breeze. Table of contents, indexes, etc... and generate automatically. It is great.
> OOBasic bites, and their component architecture is anything but simple.
Here I agree with you; 'programming' in OOo is a lost cause, but I chalk this up primarily to the fact that the documentation for advanced features is AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL!!!
> This probably explains why Lotus Notes has more success than Open Office, > Sendmail / Qmail / Postfix / Sunbird / OpenGroupware and Thunderbird;
I don't understand what this means: "Lotus Notes has more success". You can't possibly mean that there are more installations of Lotus Notes than there is of Sendmail / Postfix? That's crazy; many shops that use Notes also use Sendmail or Postfix, and there are certainly way more sites that use Sendmail/Postfix than use Notes.
> despite Notes being crappier, bulkier and bloatier than the MS equivalents.
Why this need for perjoratives? Maybe lots of places find Notes useful? What is one man's "bloat" is another man's critical feature. As someone who works on the [to you, unsuccessful] OpenGroupware project I can assure you that there are lots of people who don't understand the difference between "groupware" and "PIM" because they believe no one exists who needs the features of a true "groupware" solution - it is all just "bloat" to them. They're wrong.
> Calling Thunderbird an "Outlook Replacement" just shows they have no idea what people use > Outlook for. Outlook Express replacement, sure.
Man, you took the words right out of my mouth. The vast majority of people in Open Source in general SOOOO don't get groupware or what people who actually USE products like Outlook and Notes actually do [and need]. I was convinced of this after I saw the pathetic "Groupware Bad" [http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html] post relating to the launch of the now [effectively] defunct Hula project. Calling Thunderbird a replacement for Outlook/Notes, at least in anything like its current form, is ridiculous.
But the OOo people are being honest, they are calling it a PIM, and not a groupware client. But my reaction is.... so what? A basic install of GNOME or KDE already includes at least a half dozen decent PIMs. We just don't need another PIM.
I was subscribed to the OOo groupware project list for a long time before dropping off. I never saw a list of what people wanted or considered essential for integration between OOo and a groupware server. Just lots of "you have to be just like Exchange/Outlook" which isn't very specific/constructive/helpful. The bugger is that this requires a *SERVER*. There are several candidates (OpenGroupware, Citadel, etc...) and ample standards (CalDAV, WebDAV, GroupDAV, etc...) but no one coming forward and saying "it should work like this...".
> I'm sorry, but this entire article is written for 70 year old men who are slowly > being phased out because there products are completly ineffective in todays world.
Agree, the technological world is littered with these guys. Tech gurus really need to learn to fade out gracefully instead of crying Apocolypse when they start to feel irrelevant. Most of us will be irrelevant within our own lifetimes; it sucks, and is even a little scary, but thats just how it is.
> ne of them has a router that reads the type of data(email, video, etc) and > then sets aside bandwith for it....
But we have this - it is called QoS and works in a pure datagram network. There are many ways to do Qos if you really need it, but most of the time you don't. The stupid (and cheap) solution of a "bigger pipe" works in most cases.
> Worst idea ever. What if my email CONTAINS video?! What then internet man?
Then that would be an attachment, not a stream, so it doesn't really work as an example of the problem. Once you've received the attachment, which doesn't need to arrive 'smoothly', you watch it without involving anything but the local network.
> Including a minor tool for a trivial task which takes as much memory as the > rest of core Gnome together is something I can't really understand
Either your installation is completely hosed or you don't understand UNIX memory semantics. Because I've got Tomboy running all the time, and I've never seen Resident - Shared exceed 10Mb. For a modern X application that isn't much.
> But I also want to be able to sync my 'combined' calendar to my PDA or > cell phone's calendar too. Is there anything (on Linux, not Windows) > that can do this for me?
Funambol can't sync just about any device; and there is a GroupDAV connector. So you can sync a DAV share, or a real groupware server that supports GroupDAV: OpenGroupware, Citadel, or USA.
> I want my own private calendar for myself which only I add events to. > Then I want a "household" calendar which anybody in the house can add events > to, such as "we're going to a party on Saturday" and these events appear to me, > and sync to my PDA
"Real" groupware servers don't have 'shared calendars'. (Personally, shared calendars suck). Simply assigning participants and permissions to events is much much more elegant - then everyone sees what they want or is relevant to them, no need to aggregate or check various calendars.
> All I want is read and write access to one or more calendars, the ability to selectively > 1. Share with everyone (read - write) > 2. Share with everyone (read only) > 3. Selectively share read-write with a number of other users > 4. Share only availability information
> I do not see a point in a shared calendar if it does not tie up straight into > project management and work time >allocation. None of the packages on the market > at the moment does.
Yes, they do. http://www.opengroupware.org/ - has a very nice project and task application integrated with the traditional schedular and addressbook.
> Now, if your calendar ties up straight into your into the project manager view of > how much resource was spent on which part of the project as well as salary, overtime > and performance management the shared calendar becomes a completely different ball game
You can track time in tasks; projects report percentages of spent time in various tasks. But to go much beyond that you really need an ERP package.
Try OpenGroupware - http://www.opengroupware.org/ - it has a simple web interface that works in every browser, is fast, and extremely feature complete.
It supports GroupDAV [ http://www.groupdav.org/ ] which is an up-and-coming collaboration standard; there is already and Evolution plugin and a Thunderbird address book plugin. Mobile devices can be sync'd via the Fumanbol GroupDAV connector. And there is a commerical M$-Outlook connector (ZideLook), which is a real MAPI connector, not some weird sync-thing; ZideLook costs about $35 a seat. The OpenGroupware server is completely free.
>Ideally, the web side would be written in PHP to minimize time to integrate with the rest of the sites
OpenGroupware is not a PHP script; it is written in Objective-C [fast!]. But it supports an XML-RPC so integrating with customized applications is very easy. We have a sophisticated CRM application, written in PHP, built around OpenGroupware.
You can also access the contacts, project files, and project notes, via WebDAV. Mounting your groupware server via fuse/wdfs or NetDrive is pretty cool.
>Almost all Open Source exchange alternatives shoot themselves in the foot by either >pricing the Outlook connectors above or close to the cost of Exchange
Zidelook is about $35 a seat.
> Typical problems with open source exchange alternatives are: > 1. None or poor support for Nokia Phones / Windows Mobile PDAs.
Wrong, mobile devices are supported via the Funambol GroupDAV connector, all SyncML clients, including Nokia phones are supported, as well as Windows Mobile, Palm, and Blackberry
> 2. Use the abortion that is IMAP, absolutely slow, buggy and hopeless.
Hah, that is just downright silly.
> 3. Poor implementation of groupware functionality within Outlook.
Zidelook, the connector for Outlook, is real MAPI provider.
> 4. No optimisations for slow links / mobile.
All communication is via HTTP; mod_gzip
>5. No reliable or efficent offline capabilities.
Zidelook supports offline mode.
>6. Poor choice of backup / archiving add-ons.
Data is in the filesystem and PostgreSQL, backup works fine.
>Since when has Exchange+Outlook been the business standard? It isn't a standard of anything, >not even a de facto one. As much as it hurts to say, both Novell Groupwise and IBM Lotus >Notes are far superior groupware applications.
Not to mention there are real Open Source alternatives for groupware.
>> It does? I don't Darwinism says anything at all about this. > It's a basic biological urge to reproduce. > Those that don't, don't pass on their genes.
And one can jump from the urge to reproduce to SPACE TRAVEL! That is ridiculous.
>Basic probability also suggests that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence...
In an argument like this basic probability doesn't suggest ANYTHING beyond what people want to to suggest. To many variables, too many unknowns, *ZERO* reference points....
>You'd have to buy into Creationism to think that such as we could never have happened anywhere else.
And following the above logic creationist would say that it is basic statistics which proves it could not have all happened by chance.
> Just as I suspected: SOAP suffers from an artificial (read: gratuitous) > complexity; what more do you need besides XML-RPC, anyway?
This must come from someone who doesn't do any amount of real RPC related work.
"besides XML-RPC"? You've got to be kidding; who about (1) code page management (2) working introspection (3) ***TIME ZONES*** [my goodness how did XML-RPC make it out the door with its crappy time type?] (4) any standardization for authentication (5) complex data types [no, so apps can't live without them].
SOAP is not complicated; creating a SOAP client/server is *MUCH* simpler than creating an XML-RPC client/server if you are using the proper tools.
I mentioned this. Lots of companies already outsource their IT operations, including email.
You wouldn't want to put medical records into GMail, but I don't think you should be sending medical records by email at all.But I'll bet almost every on of them: (a) has their stuff in their own VM (at least) if not their own colocated physical box (b) they have access to that box if they want it (c) they have the backups (or at least access to them)
Gmail provides none of the above. (c) being absolutely critical - you are ***NUTS*** - if you use any system for business that you don't have at least rotating backups of. Otherwise just wait till the auditors, or worse - the cops -, come to you with some questions.... and you don't have the information. That makes for a really nice day.
>>We really need a full active directory replacement. LDAP + KRB5 integrated >>compatible with Windows, with a schema compatible with Windows 2003 Server >>or such, and a management console that doesn't involve writing up text >>files and then using some command line tool to parse them.
Agree; this is what Samba 4 will be. It is nothing resembling easy.
> Have you heard of Apple Computer? They make something along these lines.
No they don't. A Mac can participate in an AD domain, it can't master one. Anything (BSD, Mac, Linux, etc...) reasonably recent can participate in an AD domain. But even then only partially, they don't respect user policies, etc... or all the other niceities .
This is a good thing; there are at least several viable Open Source Exchange replacements. Hula offered nothing new, and the developers attitudes about groupware (and how it relates to college students getting laid) was just silly. Effort would have been better spent on existing already viable solutions (http://www.opengroupware.org and friends).
>that use hardware memory management to seperate otherwise unsafe (written in liberal mid-level languages like C) processes from one another,
All processes written in any language are unsafe.
>using a security model based largely upon user ownership.
This is not true, processes are protected from each other - period. My one bash proces is protected from my other bash process just as much as from you bash process.
> If a large number of jobs have to be done that require communications between > the different programs performing the different jobs, a single program - running > in its own memory space - is generally written that manages all the jobs, rather > than the jobs being split out one-per-program.
And you base this statement on what? It is higly suspect. Many many complex systems are truly distributed, using System V IPC if on the same host or via CORBA/IIOP, JMI, etc...
> There have been serious attempts since then to reform that model,
This is debatable.
> but generally they haven't gone anywhere.
Yep, and maybe for very good reasons.
> The 1980s was full of simplified systems where all processes ran in the same memory space - Windows, > Mac OS 6+, AmigaOS, Sinclair QDOS, etc. At the
And almost everything you list above was either 8 or 16 bit; and not really relevant. Most couldn't even really run multiple processes.
> other end of the spectrum, there were many abortive attempts to break up operating systems into more > simplified units protected from one another. None of these design changes are present in Windows, > Mac OS X, or GNU/Linux, either the simplified or the microkernel strategies (with good reasons for both.)
Yep. Although I think some of the concepts ARE present in modern operating systems, just via dynamically loadable kernel modules rather that 'microkernel' stuff.
> File systems have been reformed several times. DEC VMS supported native rich file types with record indexing. > This has yet to appear anywhere else. Mac OS introduced forks and added creator and type information to the file system. > While present for legacy reasons, Apple has deprecated support; Microsoft technically supports file forks in NT but > has made no effort to use them
Windows uses resource forks all over the place.
> or encourage their use;
They don't need to, mostly it is automatic.
> GNU/Linux has only recently started to support additional metadata, and the feature is barely used.
Yep, and it is frustrating.
> Systems like Smalltalk, NewtonOS and PalmOS blur the differences between files and other objects.
I don't think so; they simply don't have anything even like a filesystem; it is all just a collection of BLOBs.
Achieving minor success on PDAs, their approaches have yet to really have any serious impact.
> Essentially, Mac OS X, Windows, and GNU/Linux, are the latest, most optimal, versions of what you saw in the seventies.
I disagree, they are radically different from thier forrunners. They are also very much the same. People are biologically a lot like kittens, but to say people are just an optimized version of a Cat would border on absurd. It misses some obvious and many subtle to percieve physical/archictural differences - but difference with an enourmous effect on the outcome; hacking up hairballs vs. composing music or walking on the moon.
> That's not a terrible thing, but 64 bits gives us the opportunity to rethink why we're programming the same way we did thirty years ago.
No - 64 bits gives us a larger address space, and absolutely nothing else. 64 bits is in truth a completely irrelevant issue for 99.999% of computing; most systems will get replaced with 64 bit machines merely because the systems were due to be replaced.
> I don't think the immaturity discussion at hand has really anything to do with > becoming one of the Sheeple and conforming to expected norms. > I think it has everything to do with accepting responsibilities. That I think is a growing > problem that people seem to be less responsible than in the past...
I though the article was kind of vague as to what it meant by maturrity,
One quote from the article is "Charlton pointed out that past cultures often marked the advent of adulthood with initiation ceremonies." I think this is a pretty important bit. A real issue here is the definition of adulthood, when it begins, and what it means. Modern life is conspiculously free of specifically ritualistic activities (except perhaps ritual-lite such as graduations). I suppose there are upsides to this, but I think it also does leave people kind of wondering where they are or what they are supposed to do. All those societies can't have created all those rites-of-passage and initiations if in people there wasn't some need, or at least, desire for such things (having some of the basics of life defined FOR you can be comforting, and maybe if that doesn't happen - then it has happened: the basics of life are undefined/undefinable. A situation I don't think most people actually find much comfort in.
A little more depth concerning that the author(s) meant by "Neoteny" would have been helpful.
>Perhaps it is the erosion of serious relationships in society (and that could mean >anything from partners to very close friends) that is tainting other aspects of life >for some people.
Yep, I think it may only be truly possible to be adult, in conjunction with other adults. The decay of traditional institutions has made it harder, or at least less likely, for adults to come together outside of recreational or work related activities. The psuedo-recreational activities of religion, orders, or lodges (that often included hosting speakers and participating in charitable functions, etc..) have basically vanished. It is easy to forget how enormous (in membership) and influential organizations like lodges and orders were in the not too distant past.
Slashdot Mirror
>All we need is a groupware suite thats GPL/BSD, is stable,
http://www.opengroupware.org/
> offers the basics like calendar sharing, addressbooks, appointments and
Yep
> integrates with things like Funambol.
Yep
> Integrating with Outlook clients isn't such a big deal anymore,
There is a commercial MAPI plugin (a real plugin, not some sync thing)
Other than the Outlook plugin it is completely free and Open Source, no gimmicks.
> So in the end OO is not usable except for extremely simple things
Have you tried using the Stylist and master documents? Because I maintain several complex multi-hundred-page documents with OOo and it is a breeze. Table of contents, indexes, etc... and generate automatically. It is great.
> OOBasic bites, and their component architecture is anything but simple.
Here I agree with you; 'programming' in OOo is a lost cause, but I chalk this up primarily to the fact that the documentation for advanced features is AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL!!!
> This probably explains why Lotus Notes has more success than Open Office,
> Sendmail / Qmail / Postfix / Sunbird / OpenGroupware and Thunderbird;
I don't understand what this means: "Lotus Notes has more success". You can't possibly mean that there are more installations of Lotus Notes than there is of Sendmail / Postfix? That's crazy; many shops that use Notes also use Sendmail or Postfix, and there are certainly way more sites that use Sendmail/Postfix than use Notes.
> despite Notes being crappier, bulkier and bloatier than the MS equivalents.
Why this need for perjoratives? Maybe lots of places find Notes useful? What is one man's "bloat" is another man's critical feature. As someone who works on the [to you, unsuccessful] OpenGroupware project I can assure you that there are lots of people who don't understand the difference between "groupware" and "PIM" because they believe no one exists who needs the features of a true "groupware" solution - it is all just "bloat" to them. They're wrong.
> Calling Thunderbird an "Outlook Replacement" just shows they have no idea what people use
> Outlook for. Outlook Express replacement, sure.
Man, you took the words right out of my mouth. The vast majority of people in Open Source in general SOOOO don't get groupware or what people who actually USE products like Outlook and Notes actually do [and need]. I was convinced of this after I saw the pathetic "Groupware Bad" [http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html] post relating to the launch of the now [effectively] defunct Hula project. Calling Thunderbird a replacement for Outlook/Notes, at least in anything like its current form, is ridiculous.
But the OOo people are being honest, they are calling it a PIM, and not a groupware client. But my reaction is.... so what? A basic install of GNOME or KDE already includes at least a half dozen decent PIMs. We just don't need another PIM.
I was subscribed to the OOo groupware project list for a long time before dropping off. I never saw a list of what people wanted or considered essential for integration between OOo and a groupware server. Just lots of "you have to be just like Exchange/Outlook" which isn't very specific/constructive/helpful. The bugger is that this requires a *SERVER*. There are several candidates (OpenGroupware, Citadel, etc...) and ample standards (CalDAV, WebDAV, GroupDAV, etc...) but no one coming forward and saying "it should work like this...".
> I'm sorry, but this entire article is written for 70 year old men who are slowly
...
> being phased out because there products are completly ineffective in todays world.
Agree, the technological world is littered with these guys. Tech gurus really need to learn to fade out gracefully instead of crying Apocolypse when they start to feel irrelevant. Most of us will be irrelevant within our own lifetimes; it sucks, and is even a little scary, but thats just how it is.
> ne of them has a router that reads the type of data(email, video, etc) and
> then sets aside bandwith for it.
But we have this - it is called QoS and works in a pure datagram network. There are many ways to do Qos if you really need it, but most of the time you don't. The stupid (and cheap) solution of a "bigger pipe" works in most cases.
> Worst idea ever. What if my email CONTAINS video?! What then internet man?
Then that would be an attachment, not a stream, so it doesn't really work as an example of the problem. Once you've received the attachment, which doesn't need to arrive 'smoothly', you watch it without involving anything but the local network.
> Including a minor tool for a trivial task which takes as much memory as the
> rest of core Gnome together is something I can't really understand
Either your installation is completely hosed or you don't understand UNIX memory semantics. Because I've got Tomboy running all the time, and I've never seen Resident - Shared exceed 10Mb. For a modern X application that isn't much.
> Can someone point me at a single Open sourced project that offers the same,
> or at least equivalent, service as the closed source version?
OpenGroupware.Org - http://www.opengroupware.org/
PostgreSQL - http://www.postgresql.org/
> But I also want to be able to sync my 'combined' calendar to my PDA or
> cell phone's calendar too. Is there anything (on Linux, not Windows)
> that can do this for me?
Funambol can't sync just about any device; and there is a GroupDAV connector. So you can sync a DAV share, or a real groupware server that supports GroupDAV: OpenGroupware, Citadel, or USA.
> I want my own private calendar for myself which only I add events to.
> Then I want a "household" calendar which anybody in the house can add events
> to, such as "we're going to a party on Saturday" and these events appear to me,
> and sync to my PDA
"Real" groupware servers don't have 'shared calendars'. (Personally, shared calendars suck). Simply assigning participants and permissions to events is much much more elegant - then everyone sees what they want or is relevant to them, no need to aggregate or check various calendars.
> All I want is read and write access to one or more calendars, the ability to selectively
> 1. Share with everyone (read - write)
> 2. Share with everyone (read only)
> 3. Selectively share read-write with a number of other users
> 4. Share only availability information
http://www.opengroupware.org/ - Yes, all the above.
> I do not see a point in a shared calendar if it does not tie up straight into
> project management and work time >allocation. None of the packages on the market
> at the moment does.
Yes, they do. http://www.opengroupware.org/ - has a very nice project and task application integrated with the traditional schedular and addressbook.
> Now, if your calendar ties up straight into your into the project manager view of
> how much resource was spent on which part of the project as well as salary, overtime
> and performance management the shared calendar becomes a completely different ball game
You can track time in tasks; projects report percentages of spent time in various tasks. But to go much beyond that you really need an ERP package.
Try OpenGroupware - http://www.opengroupware.org/ - it has a simple web interface that works in every browser, is fast, and extremely feature complete.
Been using it since 2003; fast, stable, and feature complete.
http://www.opengroupware.org/
It supports GroupDAV [ http://www.groupdav.org/ ] which is an up-and-coming collaboration standard; there is already and Evolution plugin and a Thunderbird address book plugin. Mobile devices can be sync'd via the Fumanbol GroupDAV connector. And there is a commerical M$-Outlook connector (ZideLook), which is a real MAPI connector, not some weird sync-thing; ZideLook costs about $35 a seat. The OpenGroupware server is completely free.
>Ideally, the web side would be written in PHP to minimize time to integrate with the rest of the sites
OpenGroupware is not a PHP script; it is written in Objective-C [fast!]. But it supports an XML-RPC so integrating with customized applications is very easy. We have a sophisticated CRM application, written in PHP, built around OpenGroupware.
You can also access the contacts, project files, and project notes, via WebDAV. Mounting your groupware server via fuse/wdfs or NetDrive is pretty cool.
>This is really not worth debating,
Maybe not for you, since you've clearly already decided, but for the record....
>there can be no open source exchange alternative unless there is a credible
>Outlook alternative, which for the moment there isn't.
I give more credence to this part of your argument then the other parts.
Only some of us are actually working on that problem; http://code.google.com/p/consonance/
>Almost all Open Source exchange alternatives shoot themselves in the foot by either
>pricing the Outlook connectors above or close to the cost of Exchange
Zidelook is about $35 a seat.
> Typical problems with open source exchange alternatives are:
> 1. None or poor support for Nokia Phones / Windows Mobile PDAs.
Wrong, mobile devices are supported via the Funambol GroupDAV connector, all SyncML clients, including Nokia phones are supported, as well as Windows Mobile, Palm, and Blackberry
> 2. Use the abortion that is IMAP, absolutely slow, buggy and hopeless.
Hah, that is just downright silly.
> 3. Poor implementation of groupware functionality within Outlook.
Zidelook, the connector for Outlook, is real MAPI provider.
> 4. No optimisations for slow links / mobile.
All communication is via HTTP; mod_gzip
>5. No reliable or efficent offline capabilities.
Zidelook supports offline mode.
>6. Poor choice of backup / archiving add-ons.
Data is in the filesystem and PostgreSQL, backup works fine.
>7. Poor LDAP / Active Directory support.
>8. Crummy management tools.
What management tools do you want?
>Since when has Exchange+Outlook been the business standard? It isn't a standard of anything,
e rbird_groupdav_plugin.html
>not even a de facto one. As much as it hurts to say, both Novell Groupwise and IBM Lotus
>Notes are far superior groupware applications.
Not to mention there are real Open Source alternatives for groupware.
http://www.opengroupware.org/
And you can continue to use Thunderbird - http://www.inverse.ca/english/contributions/thund
>If only we could convince someone to write the Exchange competitor on an open database...
e rbird_groupdav_plugin.html7
Done.
http://www.inverse.ca/english/contributions/thund
http://www.groupdav.org/
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/24/17220
Pick from one of several groupware servers.
>> It does? I don't Darwinism says anything at all about this.
> It's a basic biological urge to reproduce.
> Those that don't, don't pass on their genes.
And one can jump from the urge to reproduce to SPACE TRAVEL! That is ridiculous.
> Or that the process of evolution tends to take a while to produce a space faring civilization.
Or it never produces one. We aren't one; we may very possibly never be one.
>Even if they subsequently went extinct here, it's hard to imagine a high-tech civilisation
>would not have left relics.
And the odds of your every finding them? Talk about a needle in a haystack
> Perhaps not every race feels the urge to do so, but Darwinism indicates that many will
It does? I don't Darwinism says anything at all about this.
>Basic probability also suggests that it is extremely unlikely that we are an isolated occurrence...
In an argument like this basic probability doesn't suggest ANYTHING beyond what people want to to suggest. To many variables, too many unknowns, *ZERO* reference points....
>You'd have to buy into Creationism to think that such as we could never have happened anywhere else.
And following the above logic creationist would say that it is basic statistics which proves it could not have all happened by chance.
Fermi's theory is simply psuedo-scientfic bilge.
> Just as I suspected: SOAP suffers from an artificial (read: gratuitous)
> complexity; what more do you need besides XML-RPC, anyway?
This must come from someone who doesn't do any amount of real RPC related work.
"besides XML-RPC"? You've got to be kidding; who about (1) code page management (2) working introspection (3) ***TIME ZONES*** [my goodness how did XML-RPC make it out the door with its crappy time type?] (4) any standardization for authentication (5) complex data types [no, so apps can't live without them].
SOAP is not complicated; creating a SOAP client/server is *MUCH* simpler than creating an XML-RPC client/server if you are using the proper tools.
I mentioned this. Lots of companies already outsource their IT operations, including email.
You wouldn't want to put medical records into GMail, but I don't think you should be sending medical records by email at all.But I'll bet almost every on of them:
(a) has their stuff in their own VM (at least) if not their own colocated physical box
(b) they have access to that box if they want it
(c) they have the backups (or at least access to them)
Gmail provides none of the above. (c) being absolutely critical - you are ***NUTS*** - if you use any system for business that you don't have at least rotating backups of. Otherwise just wait till the auditors, or worse - the cops -, come to you with some questions.... and you don't have the information. That makes for a really nice day.
>>We really need a full active directory replacement. LDAP + KRB5 integrated
>>compatible with Windows, with a schema compatible with Windows 2003 Server
>>or such, and a management console that doesn't involve writing up text
>>files and then using some command line tool to parse them.
Agree; this is what Samba 4 will be. It is nothing resembling easy.
> Have you heard of Apple Computer? They make something along these lines.
No they don't. A Mac can participate in an AD domain, it can't master one. Anything (BSD, Mac, Linux, etc...) reasonably recent can participate in an AD domain. But even then only partially, they don't respect user policies, etc... or all the other niceities .
This is a good thing; there are at least several viable Open Source Exchange replacements. Hula offered nothing new, and the developers attitudes about groupware (and how it relates to college students getting laid) was just silly. Effort would have been better spent on existing already viable solutions (http://www.opengroupware.org and friends).
>POSIX and Windows are both operating systems
POSIX is a standard not an OS.
>that use hardware memory management to seperate otherwise unsafe (written in liberal mid-level languages like C) processes from one another,
All processes written in any language are unsafe.
>using a security model based largely upon user ownership.
This is not true, processes are protected from each other - period. My one bash proces is protected from my other bash process just as much as from you bash process.
> If a large number of jobs have to be done that require communications between
> the different programs performing the different jobs, a single program - running
> in its own memory space - is generally written that manages all the jobs, rather
> than the jobs being split out one-per-program.
And you base this statement on what? It is higly suspect. Many many complex systems are truly distributed, using System V IPC if on the same host or via CORBA/IIOP, JMI, etc...
> There have been serious attempts since then to reform that model,
This is debatable.
> but generally they haven't gone anywhere.
Yep, and maybe for very good reasons.
> The 1980s was full of simplified systems where all processes ran in the same memory space - Windows,
> Mac OS 6+, AmigaOS, Sinclair QDOS, etc. At the
And almost everything you list above was either 8 or 16 bit; and not really relevant. Most couldn't even really run multiple processes.
> other end of the spectrum, there were many abortive attempts to break up operating systems into more
> simplified units protected from one another. None of these design changes are present in Windows,
> Mac OS X, or GNU/Linux, either the simplified or the microkernel strategies (with good reasons for both.)
Yep. Although I think some of the concepts ARE present in modern operating systems, just via dynamically loadable kernel modules rather that 'microkernel' stuff.
> File systems have been reformed several times. DEC VMS supported native rich file types with record indexing.
> This has yet to appear anywhere else. Mac OS introduced forks and added creator and type information to the file system.
> While present for legacy reasons, Apple has deprecated support; Microsoft technically supports file forks in NT but
> has made no effort to use them
Windows uses resource forks all over the place.
> or encourage their use;
They don't need to, mostly it is automatic.
> GNU/Linux has only recently started to support additional metadata, and the feature is barely used.
Yep, and it is frustrating.
> Systems like Smalltalk, NewtonOS and PalmOS blur the differences between files and other objects.
I don't think so; they simply don't have anything even like a filesystem; it is all just a collection of BLOBs.
Achieving minor success on PDAs, their approaches have yet to really have any serious impact.
> Essentially, Mac OS X, Windows, and GNU/Linux, are the latest, most optimal, versions of what you saw in the seventies.
I disagree, they are radically different from thier forrunners. They are also very much the same. People are biologically a lot like kittens, but to say people are just an optimized version of a Cat would border on absurd. It misses some obvious and many subtle to percieve physical/archictural differences - but difference with an enourmous effect on the outcome; hacking up hairballs vs. composing music or walking on the moon.
> That's not a terrible thing, but 64 bits gives us the opportunity to rethink why we're programming the same way we did thirty years ago.
No - 64 bits gives us a larger address space, and absolutely nothing else. 64 bits is in truth a completely irrelevant issue for 99.999% of computing; most systems will get replaced with 64 bit machines merely because the systems were due to be replaced.
> I don't think the immaturity discussion at hand has really anything to do with
> becoming one of the Sheeple and conforming to expected norms.
> I think it has everything to do with accepting responsibilities. That I think is a growing
> problem that people seem to be less responsible than in the past...
I though the article was kind of vague as to what it meant by maturrity,
One quote from the article is "Charlton pointed out that past cultures often marked the advent of adulthood with initiation ceremonies." I think this is a pretty important bit. A real issue here is the definition of adulthood, when it begins, and what it means. Modern life is conspiculously free of specifically ritualistic activities (except perhaps ritual-lite such as graduations). I suppose there are upsides to this, but I think it also does leave people kind of wondering where they are or what they are supposed to do. All those societies can't have created all those rites-of-passage and initiations if in people there wasn't some need, or at least, desire for such things (having some of the basics of life defined FOR you can be comforting, and maybe if that doesn't happen - then it has happened: the basics of life are undefined/undefinable. A situation I don't think most people actually find much comfort in.
A little more depth concerning that the author(s) meant by "Neoteny" would have been helpful.
>Perhaps it is the erosion of serious relationships in society (and that could mean
>anything from partners to very close friends) that is tainting other aspects of life
>for some people.
Yep, I think it may only be truly possible to be adult, in conjunction with other adults. The decay of traditional institutions has made it harder, or at least less likely, for adults to come together outside of recreational or work related activities. The psuedo-recreational activities of religion, orders, or lodges (that often included hosting speakers and participating in charitable functions, etc..) have basically vanished. It is easy to forget how enormous (in membership) and influential organizations like lodges and orders were in the not too distant past.