Just last week, I went into an Apple store to buy my wife a 15" Macbook Pro. The salesperson told me they had none in stock, didn't know when they would have any in stock, and that it was a national shortage at all of the Apple stores. He suggested ordering it online. Not entirely believing him, I checked stores like Best Buy and they all indicated long back orders on 15" Pro's. So, we ended up ordering one online, with a 2-3 week lead time.
Don't get me started on the free iPod offer. Buy a Macbook directly from Apple, pay upfront for an iPod (including tax), clip UPC's, send them in, and then wait for a check.
Good for Alfresco. They've gotten loads of publicity over a non-scientific survey, a poorly written eWeek article and now, the Slashdot front page. And way to go Slashdot, maybe an editor will dupe the false story about FreeType and the MS/Novell patent agreement as well. Apparently, neither eWeek or Slashdot employ editors.
Oracle announced this in a "newsletter" it sent to customers of their OCS product almost a year ago. It was just a short blurb, talking about Mozilla support for Oracle Calendar. OCS currently requires Outlook on the desktop or a mix of an IMAP client and their proprietary calendar application they inherited from their Stelor CorporateTime purchase (remeber Netscape calendar, same thing). I can imagine that it's hard to sell new customers on your Exchange alternative as you are telling them they still need to buy/keep Outlook. Helping Mozilla will help Oracle in two ways, they can ditch their proprietary calendar client and they have a good story for clients looking to ditch Outlook.
Here's a guess, when Oracle introduces OCS 10g, they'll formally annouce the Mozilla lightning client.
Don't expect much "cross-polination" and other polyanna ideas. If it wasn't stricly in Oracle's interest, they wouldn't be doing anything.
Novell spoke/presented about this topic last year. I'm sure they have a whitepaper or story on their website.
From what I remember from the presentation, they began by forcing everyone onto Openoffice. At the same time, their internal IT department began running Linux and evaluating what software would need to ported, purchased, or replaced with FOSS. For those applications like Siebel, they ended up site licensing Codeweavers crossover and worked with Codeweavers to fix bugs that arose. They also began going to their own development teams and got them to add Linux support (Groupwise, for example).
This year, they have not provided a detailed update but that may have been in a Brainshare session I missed.
Typically, these type of reviews are conducted exactly the same as if they reviewing the distro of the week. "Gee, it installed really easy" or "Gee, it couldn't identify my SoundBlaster PCI that I bought for $10.00 at a garage sale". Rather than discussing the ease of installation, how about focusing on the setup of services? For instance, how much effort and how well documented is it to install, configure, and create a simple functioning website? Or, how was the setup process for NAT or DHCP or DNS? What does it take to configure the file system/network shares for end users? What's required on the client side?
Reviews also tend to exist in a vacuum. They ignore existing software and servers and expect a green field environment. That's just not realistic. How about testing interoperability with other major platforms? No review could ever be complete, but they could certainly try to cover more ground.
A good example of a bad Enterprise software review is the recent TechExtreme/eWeek review of Novell Linux Desktop. They ignore the context and entire purpose of the product. It's not sold at retail, but the reviewer insists on treating as though it were the new Fedora Core release. Wrong, wrong, wrong. How easy is to manage? To patch? To image? How well does the Zenworks integration work? How well does the product address its target market?
A review should also include vendor practices. When reviewing a MS product, for instance, it might be helpful to point out that Microsoft has the tendency to stop offering support packs after major upgrades are released (ala the recent decision to not release sp5 for Win2000). What about service and support included in the product? Is it advisable to buy a support contract? How long will this product be supported? Is support overpriced (ala Cisco)?
The last thing that really gets me is when reviewers will endorse a product based on vendor promises of forthcoming functionality or the reviewers own expectations. "The product kind of sucks now, but wait 'til version 3 because we always know it takes 'em three tries to get it right." Review the product as delivered. If it lacks major functionality, they say it. How can you review something that's incomplete.
Frankly, it's no wonder that some vendors no longer participate in "fake" RFP's or vendor roundup. What passes for journalism on some of those IT websites is just embarassing.
The problem is that I think it even failed as ageneral overview. It failed to discuss many salient points and failed to interview many of the luminaries of the industry. It also failed to give a real assessment of the state of the industry. If video games make so much money, why are publishers folding left and right? Why did Mattel dump the Intellivision? Why did Hasbro ditch it's game division? Why is the market shrinking in Japan? (the documentary touted the size of the market, so I thought they should explain a bit more).
In regards to it's use of time, I've seen other and much better documentaries on video games that were just as long. I think the makers of this documentary wasted it's time speaking with the wrong people.
After seeing the first Slashdot post about this a week or two ago, I dutifully set the Tivo to record it. Unfortunately, after watching it, I wish I hadn't recorded it. The show was deriative and disappointing. The segments were short and it painfully tried to present "both sides". There was the anti-video game "mother" and the former game nerd turned MIT professor. The segments with game designers, some of the famous and a few not really, were short and unfulfilling. What makes Wil Wright tick? How has Sid Meier designed so many of the most significant computer games of the last decade or so? You won't get those answers here. Instead you'll get the usual, "video games are bigger than Hollywood!" and "MS wants to invade your living room". Blah! They didn't interview any of the creators of Everquest, Ultima Online, or, come to think of it, any MMORPG. They talked about them, sure, but that seems a glaring omission. There have been some other, much better video game documentaries made. Avoid this one.
Wrong. Language studies have shown that computer langauges are not equivalent to conventional lanugages . One study, in part, was undertaken to identify whether teaching and using computers at an early age is beneficial. Unsurprisingly, it showed absolutely no benefit. Unlike spoken languages, where the earlier you start, the better you are, computer languages showed no such advantage. That's good news for adults.
Sorry, I do not have the source available. The study was discussed in the NYT within the last year or so.
Shortly after all of Black Isle's employees were let go, there were some postings on the Interplay forums about BG3 and Fallout3. BG3 was being designed by J.E. Sawyer with an original story written by him. It was to be only peripherialy related to the Child of Bhaal storyline. Unfortunately, worked stopped by BG3 when Atari yanked the license from Interplay for PC D&D games. Interplay retained a license for console games (i.e. Dark Alliance II). Interplay then sued Atari over the PC rights. Supposedly, in the last couple of months, the lawsuit was settled and Interplay got the rights back to produce PC D&D games again. After BG3 was put on hold, the team switched to Fallout3. If you've followed news about Fallout3, Interplay's management felt the game would take too long to produce and since Interplay was barely making payroll, they let everyone go. In case you're wondering, Interplay retained the rights to produce D&D games based on their existing franchises (Icewind Dale, BG, BGDA) when they sold the publishing rights to NWN to Atari. Interplay submitted the agreement to SEC when they were still a publicly traded company. Their stocks so low now, they were kicked off NASDAQ a couple of years ago.
I was in a session at Brainshare on the "Novell Linux Desktop", lead by Nat Friedman. Someone asked him about Gnome vs. KDE and his reply was that the only people who bring up this topic seem to be Slashdot posters.
Seriously, he called attention to the fact that Novell is committed to both KDE and GNOME. According to his slide, Novell is now the #1 contributer to both KDE and GNOME. From what I've seen, though, Novell will certainly leverage its purchase of Ximian in every way it can. All of the desktops and kiosks run SUSE with Ximian. All of the demos and new applications have been written on SUSE and Ximian. Finally, projects like iFolder are being built with Mono. Nat also talked a little about freedesktop.org and the worry that KDE and GNOME will become incompatible, something Novell does not want to see occur.
Not long after the Ximian acquisition, I attended a presentation by Chris Stone, Novell's vice chairmain (and the real CEO, if not in title), and he made it very clear that Novell was planning a significant push onto the desktop with Linux. He also indicated that Novell was likely to make other Linux purchases. Well, I guess they just did. Novell wants to be an end to end solution, from desktop to server to management. He sees Novell's earlier failure stemming from two problems: no developer support and no desktop offering (DR-DOS did not compete with Windows). He sought to rectify the first problem by buying SilverStream, but that wasn't enough. Give him credit for understanding that the real movement is in Open Source and not J2EE. Thus it also made sense to buy Ximian and instantly acquire an open source development base. Next, Novell needed a Linux distro. Again, to his credit, they bought one instead of developing their own. Now, Novell has to tie all of those pieces together. What does Novell bring to open source/Linux/etc? A large support, developmnent, and sales organization. Despite the declining marketshare of Netware, there are still many, many enterprises running on Netware and/or using Novell products. Novell's products are not as visible, simply because they're mostly infrastructure. How many people run eDirectory on their desktops? But, how many companies use it for authentication? Novell's taking a different course than IBM and, thus, stands a chance.
Oddly, I'm currently at BrainShare and he did not make those sort of comments during his keynote this past Monday. In fact, he even made fun of Scott McNealy's penguin suit and set a positive tone about Novell's interaction with Open Source. He also made a point about Novell being slow to listen to market changes and how that was being changed (he used IPX as the example).
The actual product roadmap came from Chris Stone, the vice chairman. Unlike the arrogant comments by Messman in the linked article, Stone seemed much more humble. He talked about the various Open Source technologies shipping with the next version of NetWare (6.5), including MySQL, Tomcat 4, Apache 2, and PHP 4. Finally, he announced that Netware 7 would run either the Netware kernel or the Linux kernel. He made it clear, however, that Linux was the ultimate destination. There wasn't any dismissal of Linux, especially since they expect to base all of their products on top of it.
Does Novell have anything to contribute?
Well, they claim that they've contributed back many improvements to PHP, Apache, and MySQL. Some, they said, were still forthcoming but that they would be available to the larger community.
As far as their products go, they still make a surprisingly large number of good ones. Many of the services that do run on Netware, including iPrint, iFolder, NetStorage, etc. would be a welcome addition to any operating system. eDirectory's already available cross platform, so nothing is new is gained there. Provisioning and user account management with Netware/eDirectory is still superior to many alternatives and makes administering a large number of users very easy (especially for support folks).
So, I think Jack Messman's comments are regrettable, but I don't really care what he thinks. I'm here at BrainShare to speak with the developers of the products we use and they, almost universially, get it. In nearly every session I've attended, they've highlighted solutions available from Freshmeat, SourceForge, CPAN, and others. I think it's especially helpful since most of the attendees here are not Slashdot readers. They're old school Novell admins working in a range of industries, from very large corporations to small business consultants. Despite the bravado from some CEO, Novell's participation should be welcomed and encouraged. After all, if they're contributing something useful, why not?
Slashdot Mirror
Just last week, I went into an Apple store to buy my wife a 15" Macbook Pro. The salesperson told me they had none in stock, didn't know when they would have any in stock, and that it was a national shortage at all of the Apple stores. He suggested ordering it online. Not entirely believing him, I checked stores like Best Buy and they all indicated long back orders on 15" Pro's. So, we ended up ordering one online, with a 2-3 week lead time.
Don't get me started on the free iPod offer. Buy a Macbook directly from Apple, pay upfront for an iPod (including tax), clip UPC's, send them in, and then wait for a check.
Good for Alfresco. They've gotten loads of publicity over a non-scientific survey, a poorly written eWeek article and now, the Slashdot front page. And way to go Slashdot, maybe an editor will dupe the false story about FreeType and the MS/Novell patent agreement as well. Apparently, neither eWeek or Slashdot employ editors.
c k-week-an-experiment-in-innovation.ars ?
So, why would trash like this get published on Slashdot instead of something actually interesting, like http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/novell-ha
Oracle announced this in a "newsletter" it sent to customers of their OCS product almost a year ago. It was just a short blurb, talking about Mozilla support for Oracle Calendar. OCS currently requires Outlook on the desktop or a mix of an IMAP client and their proprietary calendar application they inherited from their Stelor CorporateTime purchase (remeber Netscape calendar, same thing). I can imagine that it's hard to sell new customers on your Exchange alternative as you are telling them they still need to buy/keep Outlook. Helping Mozilla will help Oracle in two ways, they can ditch their proprietary calendar client and they have a good story for clients looking to ditch Outlook.
Here's a guess, when Oracle introduces OCS 10g, they'll formally annouce the Mozilla lightning client.
Don't expect much "cross-polination" and other polyanna ideas. If it wasn't stricly in Oracle's interest, they wouldn't be doing anything.
Novell spoke/presented about this topic last year. I'm sure they have a whitepaper or story on their website.
From what I remember from the presentation, they began by forcing everyone onto Openoffice. At the same time, their internal IT department began running Linux and evaluating what software would need to ported, purchased, or replaced with FOSS. For those applications like Siebel, they ended up site licensing Codeweavers crossover and worked with Codeweavers to fix bugs that arose. They also began going to their own development teams and got them to add Linux support (Groupwise, for example).
This year, they have not provided a detailed update but that may have been in a Brainshare session I missed.
Typically, these type of reviews are conducted exactly the same as if they reviewing the distro of the week. "Gee, it installed really easy" or "Gee, it couldn't identify my SoundBlaster PCI that I bought for $10.00 at a garage sale". Rather than discussing the ease of installation, how about focusing on the setup of services? For instance, how much effort and how well documented is it to install, configure, and create a simple functioning website? Or, how was the setup process for NAT or DHCP or DNS? What does it take to configure the file system/network shares for end users? What's required on the client side?
Reviews also tend to exist in a vacuum. They ignore existing software and servers and expect a green field environment. That's just not realistic. How about testing interoperability with other major platforms? No review could ever be complete, but they could certainly try to cover more ground.
A good example of a bad Enterprise software review is the recent TechExtreme/eWeek review of Novell Linux Desktop. They ignore the context and entire purpose of the product. It's not sold at retail, but the reviewer insists on treating as though it were the new Fedora Core release. Wrong, wrong, wrong. How easy is to manage? To patch? To image? How well does the Zenworks integration work? How well does the product address its target market?
A review should also include vendor practices. When reviewing a MS product, for instance, it might be helpful to point out that Microsoft has the tendency to stop offering support packs after major upgrades are released (ala the recent decision to not release sp5 for Win2000). What about service and support included in the product? Is it advisable to buy a support contract? How long will this product be supported? Is support overpriced (ala Cisco)?
The last thing that really gets me is when reviewers will endorse a product based on vendor promises of forthcoming functionality or the reviewers own expectations. "The product kind of sucks now, but wait 'til version 3 because we always know it takes 'em three tries to get it right." Review the product as delivered. If it lacks major functionality, they say it. How can you review something that's incomplete.
Frankly, it's no wonder that some vendors no longer participate in "fake" RFP's or vendor roundup. What passes for journalism on some of those IT websites is just embarassing.
The problem is that I think it even failed as ageneral overview. It failed to discuss many salient points and failed to interview many of the luminaries of the industry. It also failed to give a real assessment of the state of the industry. If video games make so much money, why are publishers folding left and right? Why did Mattel dump the Intellivision? Why did Hasbro ditch it's game division? Why is the market shrinking in Japan? (the documentary touted the size of the market, so I thought they should explain a bit more).
In regards to it's use of time, I've seen other and much better documentaries on video games that were just as long. I think the makers of this documentary wasted it's time speaking with the wrong people.
After seeing the first Slashdot post about this a week or two ago, I dutifully set the Tivo to record it. Unfortunately, after watching it, I wish I hadn't recorded it. The show was deriative and disappointing. The segments were short and it painfully tried to present "both sides". There was the anti-video game "mother" and the former game nerd turned MIT professor. The segments with game designers, some of the famous and a few not really, were short and unfulfilling. What makes Wil Wright tick? How has Sid Meier designed so many of the most significant computer games of the last decade or so? You won't get those answers here. Instead you'll get the usual, "video games are bigger than Hollywood!" and "MS wants to invade your living room". Blah! They didn't interview any of the creators of Everquest, Ultima Online, or, come to think of it, any MMORPG. They talked about them, sure, but that seems a glaring omission. There have been some other, much better video game documentaries made. Avoid this one.
Wrong. Language studies have shown that computer langauges are not equivalent to conventional lanugages . One study, in part, was undertaken to identify whether teaching and using computers at an early age is beneficial. Unsurprisingly, it showed absolutely no benefit. Unlike spoken languages, where the earlier you start, the better you are, computer languages showed no such advantage. That's good news for adults.
Sorry, I do not have the source available. The study was discussed in the NYT within the last year or so.
Shortly after all of Black Isle's employees were let go, there were some postings on the Interplay forums about BG3 and Fallout3. BG3 was being designed by J.E. Sawyer with an original story written by him. It was to be only peripherialy related to the Child of Bhaal storyline. Unfortunately, worked stopped by BG3 when Atari yanked the license from Interplay for PC D&D games. Interplay retained a license for console games (i.e. Dark Alliance II). Interplay then sued Atari over the PC rights. Supposedly, in the last couple of months, the lawsuit was settled and Interplay got the rights back to produce PC D&D games again. After BG3 was put on hold, the team switched to Fallout3. If you've followed news about Fallout3, Interplay's management felt the game would take too long to produce and since Interplay was barely making payroll, they let everyone go.
In case you're wondering, Interplay retained the rights to produce D&D games based on their existing franchises (Icewind Dale, BG, BGDA) when they sold the publishing rights to NWN to Atari. Interplay submitted the agreement to SEC when they were still a publicly traded company. Their stocks so low now, they were kicked off NASDAQ a couple of years ago.
I was in a session at Brainshare on the "Novell Linux Desktop", lead by Nat Friedman. Someone asked him about Gnome vs. KDE and his reply was that the only people who bring up this topic seem to be Slashdot posters.
Seriously, he called attention to the fact that Novell is committed to both KDE and GNOME. According to his slide, Novell is now the #1 contributer to both KDE and GNOME. From what I've seen, though, Novell will certainly leverage its purchase of Ximian in every way it can. All of the desktops and kiosks run SUSE with Ximian. All of the demos and new applications have been written on SUSE and Ximian. Finally, projects like iFolder are being built with Mono. Nat also talked a little about freedesktop.org and the worry that KDE and GNOME will become incompatible, something Novell does not want to see occur.
Not long after the Ximian acquisition, I attended a presentation by Chris Stone, Novell's vice chairmain (and the real CEO, if not in title), and he made it very clear that Novell was planning a significant push onto the desktop with Linux. He also indicated that Novell was likely to make other Linux purchases. Well, I guess they just did.
Novell wants to be an end to end solution, from desktop to server to management. He sees Novell's earlier failure stemming from two problems: no developer support and no desktop offering (DR-DOS did not compete with Windows). He sought to rectify the first problem by buying SilverStream, but that wasn't enough. Give him credit for understanding that the real movement is in Open Source and not J2EE. Thus it also made sense to buy Ximian and instantly acquire an open source development base. Next, Novell needed a Linux distro. Again, to his credit, they bought one instead of developing their own. Now, Novell has to tie all of those pieces together.
What does Novell bring to open source/Linux/etc? A large support, developmnent, and sales organization. Despite the declining marketshare of Netware, there are still many, many enterprises running on Netware and/or using Novell products. Novell's products are not as visible, simply because they're mostly infrastructure. How many people run eDirectory on their desktops? But, how many companies use it for authentication? Novell's taking a different course than IBM and, thus, stands a chance.
Oddly, I'm currently at BrainShare and he did not make those sort of comments during his keynote this past Monday. In fact, he even made fun of Scott McNealy's penguin suit and set a positive tone about Novell's interaction with Open Source. He also made a point about Novell being slow to listen to market changes and how that was being changed (he used IPX as the example).
The actual product roadmap came from Chris Stone, the vice chairman. Unlike the arrogant comments by Messman in the linked article, Stone seemed much more humble. He talked about the various Open Source technologies shipping with the next version of NetWare (6.5), including MySQL, Tomcat 4, Apache 2, and PHP 4. Finally, he announced that Netware 7 would run either the Netware kernel or the Linux kernel. He made it clear, however, that Linux was the ultimate destination. There wasn't any dismissal of Linux, especially since they expect to base all of their products on top of it.
Does Novell have anything to contribute?
Well, they claim that they've contributed back many improvements to PHP, Apache, and MySQL. Some, they said, were still forthcoming but that they would be available to the larger community.
As far as their products go, they still make a surprisingly large number of good ones. Many of the services that do run on Netware, including iPrint, iFolder, NetStorage, etc. would be a welcome addition to any operating system. eDirectory's already available cross platform, so nothing is new is gained there. Provisioning and user account management with Netware/eDirectory is still superior to many alternatives and makes administering a large number of users very easy (especially for support folks).
So, I think Jack Messman's comments are regrettable, but I don't really care what he thinks. I'm here at BrainShare to speak with the developers of the products we use and they, almost universially, get it. In nearly every session I've attended, they've highlighted solutions available from Freshmeat, SourceForge, CPAN, and others. I think it's especially helpful since most of the attendees here are not Slashdot readers. They're old school Novell admins working in a range of industries, from very large corporations to small business consultants. Despite the bravado from some CEO, Novell's participation should be welcomed and encouraged. After all, if they're contributing something useful, why not?