But people ASK for it because it's what they've been offered all over the place, it's what they've used at other hosts, and it's what everyone else is using. It's a circular issue. If people *WANTED* postgres support in all their hosting accounts, ISPs would deliver it. They just might find it a bit harder to set up. But then more people would know about it, and then ask for those pg apps by name in the future.
I tried to use postgresql years ago and it had a (ridiculous) 8k per row limit. There were many things I couldn't do with that, mostly involving community/forum type sites. Look at where PHP/MySQL exploded - hosted community/forum sites (phpbb, etc.) Not saying the code is good or bad, but it met a need, people used it, and it grew from there. Theoretical standards don't stand a chance in the way of people getting their needs met. And I now fear it'll be years before anyone can mount a serious challenge to MySQL on the lower end now. It's not just about introducing a new system, it's about branding and mindshare now, something which was up for grabs 7-8 years ago. It's MySQL's game to lose now.
*Most* people I know with OSX machines also have to use MS Word, Excel or Entourage on a daily basis. Not *all*, but most (more than 50% of the Mac users I know) fit into this category. They remind me of Mrs. Avery on the PJs, talkin about she "don't need nothing from nobody, as long as she got her welfare, her medicare, her disability, her social security and her food stamps!"
Maybe it's not an apt comparison, but I still think of that scene (and wonder where the heck the PJs went! That was a great show!):)
Due to odd circumstances, I've had 3 vonage accounts in the last year, 2 of which I've had to cancel. It's never taken me more than 15 minutes to cancel, and there's no song and dance or credit card charges.
The differences may be that I'd bought my own equipment from bestbuy and sam's club already, so there was no issue of returning anything. They just shut off my number - nothing more to it. They did ask why I was cancelling, I told them, and that was it.
I do agree that in some cases, it's not worth it for some people - paying for the 500 minutes whether you use it or not. But, let me put some of my numbers to you.
I have a cable modem - roughly $40/month. I'm using that no matter what for internet access. Adding an extra $15/month in vonage on top of that means phone/internet is $55/month. Yes, I'm paying for '500 minutes even if I don't use them' (a vonage 'rollover minutes' plan like cingular would be great).
However, compare that to my local verizon POTS. It's close to $50/month *before any other charges*. Start adding on all the per minute fees for calls, then extra taxes on top of that, and it's crazy.
Our phone usage pattern is probably different from most - we've got family both in UK and Australia. Verizon's *best* deal was 10 cents/minute to Australia - Vonage is 4 cents, which includes taxes (verizon adds on taxes later). And to get that wonderful 10 cents per minute rate I have to sign up for 'international caller' plan at an extra $4.99/month.
Yes, the quality of the Vonage line isn't as solid as the POTS. Occasionally there is static or a really bad connection. I'd say that's less than 1 in 10 calls. But for a 60+% savings, it's definitely worth it in our case.
The Zend Optimizer (ZO) is not a bytecode/opcode cache. The ZO injects itself into the processing of scripts and will allow the Zend Engine to decode Zend encoded files. It will also try to optimize the compiled bytecode. It's this second step where the performance gains can be seen, in some cases.
However, without a code cache of some sort, the optimization steps will be run on every request. The ZO will cache the results of the optimizations, which is the optimal way to go about it.
Example:
You have a script which takes 50ms to execute. ZO can take 15ms to 'optimize' it down to 40ms of execution time. If the optimized code was cached, then every further execution of the script would take 40ms - a 20% speed up. But you're only getting that 20% speedup at a rather extensive processor hit. It's not worth it, so the ZO can actually slow down some code (especially if you're already gone through an optimized your code by hand). The ZO also doesn't even attempt certain types of internal optimizations unless the Zend Cache is present because it knows some of these analyze/optimize cost/benefit ratios just make *no sense* ever.
The ZO is a mixed bag, and I've rarely seen it do anything noticeable in the past few years. It consider it more just a way for them to seed the market to make it more attractive to use the Zend Encoder. Not that that's a bad thing - I'm not criticizing them for it. It's just that the real performance boosts come from opcode caches. Any code that gets a significant boost from ZO alone was probably written very poorly to start with and could be mostly fixed by hand in the PHP source directly without requiring an external helper app like ZO.
WHOAH. I take it you don't use MS SQL Server (or possibly even the MSDE)?
I'm qualifying this by saying that I've been primarily a LAMP developer for going on 9 years. MySQL is great for many things, and no, I'm not even going to be condescending and say just "small" projects. I've seen it used on very large projects, and it does fine.
However, it will not be 'on par' with MS SQL. I dare say MySQL5 won't even be 'on par' with MS SQL Server 2000, which is, what, 5 or 6 years old now?. The difference is, imo, mostly in the support tools around the product.
Something as simply as the index tuning wizard in MSSQL - there are no equivalent tools in the MySQL world (yet?). 'EXPLAIN' doesn't come close, and i f you haven't used MS SQL, you won't know what I mean. If you *have* used it, and still claim that MySQL5 will be 'on par' with MS SQL, you're not living in the real world.
Statements like these are what cause non MySQL users to dismiss MySQL supporters claims.
Clarifying it by saying "for some (or many) uses MySQL5 may be a good alternative to MS SQL" might be acceptable. Claiming equal status is just wrong.
... and probably version 6 at that. I saw someone else's post that "MSIE runs on OSX." Sure it does, but generally when people are doing browser detection or just putting in IE-only stuff, it's WINDOWS IE they're doing that for. OSX MSIE hasn't been updated in a long time, AFAICT, and even when it was 'current' it wasn't compatible with many "IE only" sites.
When people go the trouble of specifying "IE only" they almost alwasy mean "Windows IE only".
Well, you're right. I work in one of those organizations as well, and yes - I lose the convenience of the integration because I have to download, edit, save, and upload where an MS user won't have to.
And when you add that small 'convenience' factor (that you're OK with giving up) across thousands or tens of thousands of users, you get a huge savings, in training, increased efficiencies, etc. It's little wonder people stick with MS with innovations such as that - and I'm being completely serious here. It wasn't until I saw the day to day goings on in a 2200+ person company that I realized the efficiencies that MS integration can bring.
That's not to say that OSS packages don't offer some advantages in some arenas - they do. And here is where MS still has the name brand/familiarity advantage. It's their game to lose, and they still might if they don't continually keep on top of things.
Frankly, without some major hardware changes in the next few years, I don't see that much more integration that can be done to keep ahead of where OSS will eventually catch up to. BUT, seeing to the future is a difficult job, and no one knows exactly where the future will bring us.
Back to your point - *you* can successfully work in an MS office without MS software. But at what price to the employer and the rest of the workplace? It's not just your measured productivity that goes down when it takes you an extra couple of minutes to download/open/edit/save/reupload a document - the others you are communicating back to lose out as well. I'm speaking mostly to internal corporate workgroups here - perhaps there are other situations where this isn't as big of an impact.
Anyway, thanks for the response. I do wish some of the larger companies - Novell, IBM, etc. - would throw resources at this issue of office suite integration with external tools (browsers, LDAP, calendaring, etc.). There's no technical reason why someone couldn't come up with a good solution to this in, say, 1 year's time. My only fear is that Sun would try, and screw it up, by insisting Java be thrown in, then just writing a bunch of design specs on how a Java(tm) solution for the problem *should* look, and people then saying how awesome Sun is for providing leadership. We need some leadership, but we need practical work done as well. Don't get me wrong - Sun's done great work by giving us the base of OpenOffice, but what sort of external application integration work has happened in OpenOffice in the past 5 years (or ever?) Little or none. That's not Sun's fault, but another company could take up the cause and hasn't.
I really don't understand if most people don't see the integration possibilities which MS has already demonstrated or what. I do know I had discussions with people years ago (2000?) about replicating the IE-only WYSIWYG embedded HTML editor. Most OSS zealots I talked to about it either didn't understand what it was, or said that was pointless/useless/stupid/whatever. Being in the web application development space, I saw a HUGE need for this. Eventually Mozilla/Firefox caught up, mostly, but it took *years*, and was yet another reason for people to build IE only apps, which we're only now seeing a push away from (in some circles anyway).
Is this *only* a case of "it doesn't affect me, so I won't write software for it?" Don't throw back the "write it yourself" mantra. Plenty of OSS is written by individuals who don't have a direct need for the software - this is done by corps like Sun, IBM, Novell, etc. So why aren't they devoting more to this space? Do they fear a backlash from MS?
You know, I used to be the standard-bearer for that argument, but as of OO 1.9x, interoperability with MS is getting pretty damned good. Particularly the word processor.
I'm late to the thread here, but it seems that most people with the 'OpenOffice is nearly there' argument haven't really seen MS Office being used in medium to large organizations.
The MS Office integration with the network system (AD/Exchange) and now Sharepoint make the technical menu imitations of OpenOffice nearly irrelevant.
From a website, I can click a button, open a spreadsheet *in the browser* (not a full browser takeover, just embedded in part of the web page), make changes/updates, then save the document, and it'll save back on the network drive (or wherever it came from) seamlessly. If live realtime document collaboration of any Office doc was able to be embedded in IE already, I wouldn't be surprised.
MS has moved beyond the reach of OpenOffice for the next few years because they've taken multi-domain integration to the next stage, way ahead of the fragmentation that exists (almost by definition) in the open source world.
I'm writing this as someone who has pretty much used LAMP for about 9 years, and uses Linux on my desktop daily for the past 3.
Now, if someone was to take the novell openexchange system and define new protocols such that Firefox/Mozilla could do realtime openoffice document embedding and communication with the openexchange server, throwing in an embedded gaim client using a jabber protocol for good measure, and made this cross platform, that would be a serious contender. I'm afraid that won't happen for a few years, until a bunch of OSS developers get a glimpse of what's going on in the corporate world. Unfortunately, that may *never* happen, as many of them wouldn't get hired in the first place.
In short, Microsoft is staying ahead of the competition now by offering extremely tight integration among their core products, and it's only going to continue to go down that path. Not saying it's a bad thing - it's really the only way they *can* go, and I think it'll serve them well easily for another 3-5 years. That's about as far as I'll make predictions.:)
The iTunes interface for searching and subscribing to podcasts isn't even all that great yet. Search for something, 'subscribe', then try to go 'back' to see the rest of your search results? Nope. At least, not as far as I've been able to work it out yet (and generally, if you don't see a way to do something in the first 30 seconds or so in an Apple interface, you just can't do it).
The ipodder program, for as basic an interface as it is, is just as good. iTunes obviously has more recognition, but I'm waiting for Apple to do a second revision of this to have the podcast functionality a lot more useful. Automatically creating playlists from subscriptions as an option would be nice too. I thought I read some reason why they didn't do that, but frankly, giving people an option to get more advanced is usually a good thing - podcasting community is still mostly early adopters who like flexibility. I know they (Apple) can do much better than this.
We're using Ant with PHP. It's working out just fine. I'm preparing an article on an interesting technique we're using to manage multiple projects with a bit of sanity, and Ant is the cornerstone. If you're interested in a draft, email me at mgkimsal@gmail.com or check http://webdevradio.com/ in the next few weeks.
I didn't get it at first. I tried the.jar file and made something happen, but couldn't replicate it - then I saw the video. *VERY* neat idea. It would be fantastic if this could be something integrated into KDE4. (Wishful thinking, I know, but wouldn't be impossible. Having something like this integrated into a mainstream (well, sort of!) desktop years ahead of MS/Apple would be great. Of course, what will happen is that Apple will put this in the next OS release next year, then KDE and Gnome will both have half-baked imitations 6 months later (if that). I'm a KDE user, and would love to see this - I just think it won't happen.:/
Well, it looks like I was sort of wrong. Apparently you can't just take any Disney photo and use it on your own product. That seemed to good to be true. Perhaps you can do it with other contributions from other users, but the corporate contributors just allow you to customize the shirt a bit (color, size, etc).
My original understanding of this seemed much better.:/
The primary difference I can see between other sites (cafepress, etc) and zazzle is that zazzle will simply allow you to contribute creative without requiring you to actually sell the end product (mugs, shirts, etc). This could become a clearinghouse for artists who want to make their stuff available to others for 'mixing' (or mashup, or whatever the term is today).
If cafepress cut a deal to allow people to search through flickr, for example, use those pics on a mug, then cut the original flickr uploader a piece of the sale, I think you'd have something close to zazzle. This would also make flickr much more valuable (imo) as it would be a triple purpose site (share my fotos, share my portfolio and make money selling my work).
Anyway, not saying it will or won't work. With enough money behind them, it might. Obviously getting Disney and others to contribute stuff is a big boon. I think this MAY work out in the long run (whether zazzle themselves or someone else) because it encourages the 'mash up' idea people are all excited about these days. Long term it will just be seen as normal to take multiple images and do things with them that they weren't intended for. This is a stepping stone in that direction. Check out a recent wired magazine on the whole 'remix' generation stuff - I think it was July '05 issue (gorillaz on the cover?)
I don't see that the prototype javascript library has been released under any specific license - there's only a copyright to Sam Stephenson in there. Is it licensed differently based on if you use it in RoR apps or using standalone? While it seems that this library could provide a great cross-language platform to build javascript UI libraries with, without licensing info it's rather dead in the water, no?
Or everyone's talking past each other. We've got a mac at home here, and a mac-loving guy I worked with talked about how great macs were. Once we got it, and my wife complained about how slow it was, he (colleague) started saying things like 'well, you don't have enough memory. You shoulda got a faster CPU.", etc. This was late 2003 and we had an emac (1ghz with 128 meg of ram it came with).
The line I got from him and others was "everyone knows 128 meg isn't enough to do anything with!". So, I asked, why did Apple sell something which apparently everyone knows would give an extremely bad user experience? This from the company whcih is arguably all about user experience? If they can't make a low end machine decent enough to not suck, just don't make it. Hrmm... never any answer on that one.
So, upgraded RAM - 1ghz, 384 megs of RAM now. Still often very slow. Safari is the worst, but many other things slow things to a crawl. Pinwheel of death comes up quite often. To me, and to my wife, it's slow. I've noticed that many diehard Mac fans gloss over this stuff. I've even had a hardcore Mac guy use this machine and he didn't mind the slowness. That's just what he expects!
So, your statement of 'smooth as glass' doesn't address the issue of speed at all. What you're used to and what I'm expecting are probably totally different.
I work with a group of people who mostly use Macs - the machines are top of the line and yet generally things are very slow, compared to what I can do on a Dell D800 either under Windows or Linux. No one cares. Trying to point out to them that things are slow is met with "no" or "but it's so cool" type responses...
I think he meant an investment in Apple (well, that's what I assumed anyway).
I can't tell for certain, but it looks like AAPL was at around $4/share in 1984. Now it's close to 40, that would be $25000, but that doesn't seem right. There were 3 2:1 splits, so would that make it $200k instead?
The NeoOffice/J 1.1 release is now available for download. Warning: all NeoOffice/J development and testing is done by volunteers so there are always some missing features and bugs. So if you expect software to be absolutely perfect before you install it, we recommend that you purchase a commercially supported office suite like Microsoft Office. (emphasis mine)
Hrm - maybe Office on the Mac is much better than the Windows version. I've been hearing that for awhile, but it's still from Microsoft, and will still have some of the same issues that people have on the Windows version, or it'd have compatibility problems (key commands, etc).
Still, I thought that comment about something being 'absolutely perfect' then recommending Office was pretty funny.
From what I recall, debit card transactions don't give you the same protection as credit card transactions, even though they're both 'mastercard' or 'visa' branded and have identical looking numbers.
and realized that wasn't a good idea. I'm not going to pay $100 to run some hobbyist's code. If he wants to sell it to me direct, that might be another story, but to get a hobbyist's program that requires I shell out $100 to someone else is a non-started.
VB took off because the system would package all the necessary stuff into one installer. If the realbasic system would compile into 3 installers (mac/linux/windows) that'd be very handy. I'd certainly shell out $50 to be able to write and distribute cross-platform gui apps.
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But people ASK for it because it's what they've been offered all over the place, it's what they've used at other hosts, and it's what everyone else is using. It's a circular issue. If people *WANTED* postgres support in all their hosting accounts, ISPs would deliver it. They just might find it a bit harder to set up. But then more people would know about it, and then ask for those pg apps by name in the future.
I tried to use postgresql years ago and it had a (ridiculous) 8k per row limit. There were many things I couldn't do with that, mostly involving community/forum type sites. Look at where PHP/MySQL exploded - hosted community/forum sites (phpbb, etc.) Not saying the code is good or bad, but it met a need, people used it, and it grew from there. Theoretical standards don't stand a chance in the way of people getting their needs met. And I now fear it'll be years before anyone can mount a serious challenge to MySQL on the lower end now. It's not just about introducing a new system, it's about branding and mindshare now, something which was up for grabs 7-8 years ago. It's MySQL's game to lose now.
*Most* people I know with OSX machines also have to use MS Word, Excel or Entourage on a daily basis. Not *all*, but most (more than 50% of the Mac users I know) fit into this category. They remind me of Mrs. Avery on the PJs, talkin about she "don't need nothing from nobody, as long as she got her welfare, her medicare, her disability, her social security and her food stamps!"
:)
Maybe it's not an apt comparison, but I still think of that scene (and wonder where the heck the PJs went! That was a great show!)
Due to odd circumstances, I've had 3 vonage accounts in the last year, 2 of which I've had to cancel. It's never taken me more than 15 minutes to cancel, and there's no song and dance or credit card charges.
The differences may be that I'd bought my own equipment from bestbuy and sam's club already, so there was no issue of returning anything. They just shut off my number - nothing more to it. They did ask why I was cancelling, I told them, and that was it.
I do agree that in some cases, it's not worth it for some people - paying for the 500 minutes whether you use it or not. But, let me put some of my numbers to you.
I have a cable modem - roughly $40/month. I'm using that no matter what for internet access. Adding an extra $15/month in vonage on top of that means phone/internet is $55/month. Yes, I'm paying for '500 minutes even if I don't use them' (a vonage 'rollover minutes' plan like cingular would be great).
However, compare that to my local verizon POTS. It's close to $50/month *before any other charges*. Start adding on all the per minute fees for calls, then extra taxes on top of that, and it's crazy.
Our phone usage pattern is probably different from most - we've got family both in UK and Australia. Verizon's *best* deal was 10 cents/minute to Australia - Vonage is 4 cents, which includes taxes (verizon adds on taxes later). And to get that wonderful 10 cents per minute rate I have to sign up for 'international caller' plan at an extra $4.99/month.
Yes, the quality of the Vonage line isn't as solid as the POTS. Occasionally there is static or a really bad connection. I'd say that's less than 1 in 10 calls. But for a 60+% savings, it's definitely worth it in our case.
The Zend Optimizer (ZO) is not a bytecode/opcode cache. The ZO injects itself into the processing of scripts and will allow the Zend Engine to decode Zend encoded files. It will also try to optimize the compiled bytecode. It's this second step where the performance gains can be seen, in some cases.
However, without a code cache of some sort, the optimization steps will be run on every request. The ZO will cache the results of the optimizations, which is the optimal way to go about it.
Example:
You have a script which takes 50ms to execute. ZO can take 15ms to 'optimize' it down to 40ms of execution time. If the optimized code was cached, then every further execution of the script would take 40ms - a 20% speed up. But you're only getting that 20% speedup at a rather extensive processor hit. It's not worth it, so the ZO can actually slow down some code (especially if you're already gone through an optimized your code by hand). The ZO also doesn't even attempt certain types of internal optimizations unless the Zend Cache is present because it knows some of these analyze/optimize cost/benefit ratios just make *no sense* ever.
The ZO is a mixed bag, and I've rarely seen it do anything noticeable in the past few years. It consider it more just a way for them to seed the market to make it more attractive to use the Zend Encoder. Not that that's a bad thing - I'm not criticizing them for it. It's just that the real performance boosts come from opcode caches. Any code that gets a significant boost from ZO alone was probably written very poorly to start with and could be mostly fixed by hand in the PHP source directly without requiring an external helper app like ZO.
It'll finally be up to par with MS.
WHOAH. I take it you don't use MS SQL Server (or possibly even the MSDE)?
I'm qualifying this by saying that I've been primarily a LAMP developer for going on 9 years. MySQL is great for many things, and no, I'm not even going to be condescending and say just "small" projects. I've seen it used on very large projects, and it does fine.
However, it will not be 'on par' with MS SQL. I dare say MySQL5 won't even be 'on par' with MS SQL Server 2000, which is, what, 5 or 6 years old now?. The difference is, imo, mostly in the support tools around the product.
Something as simply as the index tuning wizard in MSSQL - there are no equivalent tools in the MySQL world (yet?). 'EXPLAIN' doesn't come close, and i f you haven't used MS SQL, you won't know what I mean. If you *have* used it, and still claim that MySQL5 will be 'on par' with MS SQL, you're not living in the real world.
Statements like these are what cause non MySQL users to dismiss MySQL supporters claims.
Clarifying it by saying "for some (or many) uses MySQL5 may be a good alternative to MS SQL" might be acceptable. Claiming equal status is just wrong.
... and probably version 6 at that. I saw someone else's post that "MSIE runs on OSX." Sure it does, but generally when people are doing browser detection or just putting in IE-only stuff, it's WINDOWS IE they're doing that for. OSX MSIE hasn't been updated in a long time, AFAICT, and even when it was 'current' it wasn't compatible with many "IE only" sites.
When people go the trouble of specifying "IE only" they almost alwasy mean "Windows IE only".
Well, you're right. I work in one of those organizations as well, and yes - I lose the convenience of the integration because I have to download, edit, save, and upload where an MS user won't have to.
:)
And when you add that small 'convenience' factor (that you're OK with giving up) across thousands or tens of thousands of users, you get a huge savings, in training, increased efficiencies, etc. It's little wonder people stick with MS with innovations such as that - and I'm being completely serious here. It wasn't until I saw the day to day goings on in a 2200+ person company that I realized the efficiencies that MS integration can bring.
That's not to say that OSS packages don't offer some advantages in some arenas - they do. And here is where MS still has the name brand/familiarity advantage. It's their game to lose, and they still might if they don't continually keep on top of things.
Frankly, without some major hardware changes in the next few years, I don't see that much more integration that can be done to keep ahead of where OSS will eventually catch up to. BUT, seeing to the future is a difficult job, and no one knows exactly where the future will bring us.
Back to your point - *you* can successfully work in an MS office without MS software. But at what price to the employer and the rest of the workplace? It's not just your measured productivity that goes down when it takes you an extra couple of minutes to download/open/edit/save/reupload a document - the others you are communicating back to lose out as well. I'm speaking mostly to internal corporate workgroups here - perhaps there are other situations where this isn't as big of an impact.
Anyway, thanks for the response. I do wish some of the larger companies - Novell, IBM, etc. - would throw resources at this issue of office suite integration with external tools (browsers, LDAP, calendaring, etc.). There's no technical reason why someone couldn't come up with a good solution to this in, say, 1 year's time. My only fear is that Sun would try, and screw it up, by insisting Java be thrown in, then just writing a bunch of design specs on how a Java(tm) solution for the problem *should* look, and people then saying how awesome Sun is for providing leadership. We need some leadership, but we need practical work done as well. Don't get me wrong - Sun's done great work by giving us the base of OpenOffice, but what sort of external application integration work has happened in OpenOffice in the past 5 years (or ever?) Little or none. That's not Sun's fault, but another company could take up the cause and hasn't.
I really don't understand if most people don't see the integration possibilities which MS has already demonstrated or what. I do know I had discussions with people years ago (2000?) about replicating the IE-only WYSIWYG embedded HTML editor. Most OSS zealots I talked to about it either didn't understand what it was, or said that was pointless/useless/stupid/whatever. Being in the web application development space, I saw a HUGE need for this. Eventually Mozilla/Firefox caught up, mostly, but it took *years*, and was yet another reason for people to build IE only apps, which we're only now seeing a push away from (in some circles anyway).
Is this *only* a case of "it doesn't affect me, so I won't write software for it?" Don't throw back the "write it yourself" mantra. Plenty of OSS is written by individuals who don't have a direct need for the software - this is done by corps like Sun, IBM, Novell, etc. So why aren't they devoting more to this space? Do they fear a backlash from MS?
Anyway, done ranting for now...
You know, I used to be the standard-bearer for that argument, but as of OO 1.9x, interoperability with MS is getting pretty damned good. Particularly the word processor.
:)
I'm late to the thread here, but it seems that most people with the 'OpenOffice is nearly there' argument haven't really seen MS Office being used in medium to large organizations.
The MS Office integration with the network system (AD/Exchange) and now Sharepoint make the technical menu imitations of OpenOffice nearly irrelevant.
From a website, I can click a button, open a spreadsheet *in the browser* (not a full browser takeover, just embedded in part of the web page), make changes/updates, then save the document, and it'll save back on the network drive (or wherever it came from) seamlessly. If live realtime document collaboration of any Office doc was able to be embedded in IE already, I wouldn't be surprised.
MS has moved beyond the reach of OpenOffice for the next few years because they've taken multi-domain integration to the next stage, way ahead of the fragmentation that exists (almost by definition) in the open source world.
I'm writing this as someone who has pretty much used LAMP for about 9 years, and uses Linux on my desktop daily for the past 3.
Now, if someone was to take the novell openexchange system and define new protocols such that Firefox/Mozilla could do realtime openoffice document embedding and communication with the openexchange server, throwing in an embedded gaim client using a jabber protocol for good measure, and made this cross platform, that would be a serious contender. I'm afraid that won't happen for a few years, until a bunch of OSS developers get a glimpse of what's going on in the corporate world. Unfortunately, that may *never* happen, as many of them wouldn't get hired in the first place.
In short, Microsoft is staying ahead of the competition now by offering extremely tight integration among their core products, and it's only going to continue to go down that path. Not saying it's a bad thing - it's really the only way they *can* go, and I think it'll serve them well easily for another 3-5 years. That's about as far as I'll make predictions.
The iTunes interface for searching and subscribing to podcasts isn't even all that great yet. Search for something, 'subscribe', then try to go 'back' to see the rest of your search results? Nope. At least, not as far as I've been able to work it out yet (and generally, if you don't see a way to do something in the first 30 seconds or so in an Apple interface, you just can't do it).
The ipodder program, for as basic an interface as it is, is just as good. iTunes obviously has more recognition, but I'm waiting for Apple to do a second revision of this to have the podcast functionality a lot more useful. Automatically creating playlists from subscriptions as an option would be nice too. I thought I read some reason why they didn't do that, but frankly, giving people an option to get more advanced is usually a good thing - podcasting community is still mostly early adopters who like flexibility. I know they (Apple) can do much better than this.
I couldn't see any place in the final picture where he could use the CD/DVD part of the mac. Did I miss something, or did he?
We're using Ant with PHP. It's working out just fine. I'm preparing an article on an interesting technique we're using to manage multiple projects with a bit of sanity, and Ant is the cornerstone. If you're interested in a draft, email me at mgkimsal@gmail.com or check http://webdevradio.com/ in the next few weeks.
Adjust the times *once* to be 30 minutes between the two times and be done with it forever... :)
I didn't get it at first. I tried the .jar file and made something happen, but couldn't replicate it - then I saw the video. *VERY* neat idea. It would be fantastic if this could be something integrated into KDE4. (Wishful thinking, I know, but wouldn't be impossible. Having something like this integrated into a mainstream (well, sort of!) desktop years ahead of MS/Apple would be great. Of course, what will happen is that Apple will put this in the next OS release next year, then KDE and Gnome will both have half-baked imitations 6 months later (if that). I'm a KDE user, and would love to see this - I just think it won't happen. :/
Well, it looks like I was sort of wrong. Apparently you can't just take any Disney photo and use it on your own product. That seemed to good to be true. Perhaps you can do it with other contributions from other users, but the corporate contributors just allow you to customize the shirt a bit (color, size, etc).
:/
My original understanding of this seemed much better.
The primary difference I can see between other sites (cafepress, etc) and zazzle is that zazzle will simply allow you to contribute creative without requiring you to actually sell the end product (mugs, shirts, etc). This could become a clearinghouse for artists who want to make their stuff available to others for 'mixing' (or mashup, or whatever the term is today).
If cafepress cut a deal to allow people to search through flickr, for example, use those pics on a mug, then cut the original flickr uploader a piece of the sale, I think you'd have something close to zazzle. This would also make flickr much more valuable (imo) as it would be a triple purpose site (share my fotos, share my portfolio and make money selling my work).
Anyway, not saying it will or won't work. With enough money behind them, it might. Obviously getting Disney and others to contribute stuff is a big boon. I think this MAY work out in the long run (whether zazzle themselves or someone else) because it encourages the 'mash up' idea people are all excited about these days. Long term it will just be seen as normal to take multiple images and do things with them that they weren't intended for. This is a stepping stone in that direction. Check out a recent wired magazine on the whole 'remix' generation stuff - I think it was July '05 issue (gorillaz on the cover?)
I like the variation that "imperfect" humans add to the music.
:)
I wish *you* had been my band teacher in 7th grade.
I don't see that the prototype javascript library has been released under any specific license - there's only a copyright to Sam Stephenson in there. Is it licensed differently based on if you use it in RoR apps or using standalone? While it seems that this library could provide a great cross-language platform to build javascript UI libraries with, without licensing info it's rather dead in the water, no?
Or everyone's talking past each other. We've got a mac at home here, and a mac-loving guy I worked with talked about how great macs were. Once we got it, and my wife complained about how slow it was, he (colleague) started saying things like 'well, you don't have enough memory. You shoulda got a faster CPU.", etc. This was late 2003 and we had an emac (1ghz with 128 meg of ram it came with).
The line I got from him and others was "everyone knows 128 meg isn't enough to do anything with!". So, I asked, why did Apple sell something which apparently everyone knows would give an extremely bad user experience? This from the company whcih is arguably all about user experience? If they can't make a low end machine decent enough to not suck, just don't make it. Hrmm... never any answer on that one.
So, upgraded RAM - 1ghz, 384 megs of RAM now. Still often very slow. Safari is the worst, but many other things slow things to a crawl. Pinwheel of death comes up quite often. To me, and to my wife, it's slow. I've noticed that many diehard Mac fans gloss over this stuff. I've even had a hardcore Mac guy use this machine and he didn't mind the slowness. That's just what he expects!
So, your statement of 'smooth as glass' doesn't address the issue of speed at all. What you're used to and what I'm expecting are probably totally different.
I work with a group of people who mostly use Macs - the machines are top of the line and yet generally things are very slow, compared to what I can do on a Dell D800 either under Windows or Linux. No one cares. Trying to point out to them that things are slow is met with "no" or "but it's so cool" type responses...
I think he meant an investment in Apple (well, that's what I assumed anyway).
I can't tell for certain, but it looks like AAPL was at around $4/share in 1984. Now it's close to 40, that would be $25000, but that doesn't seem right. There were 3 2:1 splits, so would that make it $200k instead?
The NeoOffice/J 1.1 release is now available for download. Warning: all NeoOffice/J development and testing is done by volunteers so there are always some missing features and bugs. So if you expect software to be absolutely perfect before you install it, we recommend that you purchase a commercially supported office suite like Microsoft Office. (emphasis mine)
Hrm - maybe Office on the Mac is much better than the Windows version. I've been hearing that for awhile, but it's still from Microsoft, and will still have some of the same issues that people have on the Windows version, or it'd have compatibility problems (key commands, etc).
Still, I thought that comment about something being 'absolutely perfect' then recommending Office was pretty funny.
From what I recall, debit card transactions don't give you the same protection as credit card transactions, even though they're both 'mastercard' or 'visa' branded and have identical looking numbers.
There's no easy way of installing software like apt-get install foo or yum install foo.
urpmi foo
Whoo, that was tough...
Mandrivis
Lydraktiva
Condraktivis
Mancortiva
I know you guys can come up with more!
and realized that wasn't a good idea. I'm not going to pay $100 to run some hobbyist's code. If he wants to sell it to me direct, that might be another story, but to get a hobbyist's program that requires I shell out $100 to someone else is a non-started.
VB took off because the system would package all the necessary stuff into one installer. If the realbasic system would compile into 3 installers (mac/linux/windows) that'd be very handy. I'd certainly shell out $50 to be able to write and distribute cross-platform gui apps.
Whoo hoo - got me there.
There's about 20 people here, and about 12 people had cake, some had just ice cream. Not a fortune 500, but still a real company using PHP.