Have you not heard about the UK, where a judge has upheld the notion that a Muslim family dispute ought to be covered by Sharia, in addition to the normal UK legal system? Whether they do it by force or by subterfuge, "invading" is their goal, and they're already doing it. See also the publicly funded Muslim-based elementary schools in Detroit. Or how about the special exceptions made at an American university for school-funded foot baths for the Muslim facility? I ought to go all Wikipedia and cite my references, but if you've not heard about these things, then you're not paying attention.
You seem to be in that middle ground where there's a big move afoot, and the company isn't saying that there's going to be X and Y happen, and this is how many people we'll be cutting. Without -knowing- that something drastic is going to happen up-front, everyone's going to be telling anyone who will listen that everything will be great for everyone involved. That just can't be true. (I'm sorry, but it can't.) I think the problem is that these sorts of deals are VERY difficult to evaluate, and the results of them can only be discovered when the rubber meets the road. What you may find is that it's good for -you-, or maybe not so much. During this time that it takes for the "higher ups" to figure out how this is going to work long-term, you need to watch them closely. I've been through a downsizing, a merger, and a divestiture. How the move affects the company is telegraphed by upper management. If, after the outsourcing, many of the key people from one company start "taking other opportunities," then you can bet hard-earned money that the culture of the company is shifting the other way. In my merger experience, this was a Very Bad Thing (and a VBT that continues to reverberate in the divested company). Ultimately, I watched and waited to see what was happening in the divested company, and, as soon as it became clear that I wasn't going to like what that was, a door was opened for me to leave, and I took it. (I, personally, believe that it was a move of God in my life, but YMMV.) But my point here is that it took a little over a YEAR for everything to get sorted enough for me to figure out HOW it would affect me. So, be patient. Again, these monster companies can't turn on a dime. (I now work for a startup.)
I've had a Palm device of some sort since the Palm Pilot Pro. My Treo 755 is, hmm, let me count... my 7th one. From DAY 1 on Windows, I was syncing with Outlook. Not exactly flawlessly. That much I'll grant. I had a lot of problems with duplication of entries, but I suppose because I was synchronizing between both work and home computers. However, it always fired up and worked.
I switched to using Linux as my main desktop about 12 years ago now. (My user agent will tell on me that I'm typing this from Windows, but I've been playing video games, and just checked/. before going to bed.) Linux support for Palm has always been there, but it's always been BUGGY. Just two days ago, I finally figured out that I can now sync ONCE, and then I have to reboot in order to sync again. What happened? I have no idea. I run Gentoo, so I guess something changed out from under me, but I have no idea what it might have been. I haven't updated any of the usual suspects in the chain of tools that it takes to sync. At least, I didn't THINK so...
I've hassled with this for OVER A DECADE now. At times, early on, it was enough to keep me in Windows for stretches of time. I spent a lot of effort -- and put up with a lot of incomplete support for things like priorities and categories -- to setup sync'ing with Evolution, but it was so buggy, I finally just gave up after a couple years. I've been just using jPilot for some time now, and now the whole thing has gone pear shaped on me. Not even using pilot-xfer at the command line can get around the one-sync-per-boot problem.
I guess that just leaves the kernel and udev as the problem, but messages in the log look the same on subsequent tries, so I don't know what to think. I tell you, the whole thing has become so frustrating, I just want to throw the Treo against the wall. I know I should jump in there and work on it myself, but if I'm going to spend time on something like that, this problem doesn't make the top of the list. I guess I'm willing to live without sync'ing in Linux rather than fix it.
I don't really have a point here. Peripherals not playing well in Linux. Film at 11. I just needed to vent, and this thread came along at the wrong time.
I just started a new job where I get to do development for Linux. I would concur that the.NET Visual Studio environment rates a 9/10, and Java in Eclipse rates a 7/10. The interesting thing that I've just discovered is that doing Qt/C++ development in Eclipse is also a 7/10, maybe even 7.5. As an added bonus (once you get Qt compiled with the MySQL database driver wrapper -- grr), you can deploy the same app on Windows, Linux (and Mac). I'm looking forward to doing a lot more of this sort of work.
Mod parent up. That's the most insightful comment I've seen on Slashdot lately. With things like Wine and Crossover and Cedega getting better all the time, Microsoft has to change the game.
A hundred years ago, when I thought NT was the bees knees, I tried to use a Creative sound card. The problem was that I had a dual Pentium 200, and Creative just could be bothered to get their drivers to work with a dual-CPU motherboard. Note that I -know- this wasn't impossible at the time, because I got hold of an Ensoniq PCI, and it never bluescreened once. When Creative bought Ensoniq, I thought, great, now they'll get the software to do it right. WRONG! They destroyed Ensoniq's working drivers, and ruined the whole thing. As I built newer computers (always with a dual CPU), I kept using Ensoniq's because I knew they worked. Since I worked with a PC tech at work, I could always find a cast-off when I needed one.
The next Creative card I bought was the original Live, with the emu10k1 chip. I didn't realize how good I had it till I tried buying the Live 24-bit, which, of course (like wireless cards) had a -completely- different chipset. I could never make it work with Linux. What I didn't realize is that the emu10k1 has a hardware mixer on board. This obviated the need to get dmix working (which was the trick I gave up trying to learn). When mine died, I bought one from my PC-tech friend. Just the other week, I was working on an old computer for a friend, and I noticed he had one of these, and I told him that, if he ever wanted to get rid of the computer, I wanted the sound card.
I saw another post on here about how MAudio might be a suitable alternative these days. When those of you who use Linux are building computers these days, what sort of sound cards are you using, and how are you setting up the configuration so that everything (mplayer, Amarok, system sounds, etc.) are all going through a single mixer (e.g. the gnome panel applet)? Being a gamer, I want something that will work under Windows, but I want it to work -right- under Linux. I'm about to build a new computer, so this is an interesting time for this discussion to come up for me personally.
I just pulled the documents from my old Commodore 64 floppies. I bought an XA1541 cable, and used "opencbm" to transfer the disk images to my hard drive. Then I used "vice" to run the programs I used to use to create them (GEOS and WordWriter, for the curious). Then I could either print the output to a virtual printer or save the file to a virtual floppy, and then run `petcat' on the results to clean them up a bit. Then I concatenated the various little files into a single file, and used vim to sanitize the mess. Finally, I brought the text files into OpenOffice and formatted them. I saved all the interesting programs I wrote, a 37-page treatise on a new, sci-fi role playing game I invented (just the skeleton), and a 53-page high-level AD&D module I wrote (mostly done).
These things will obviously mean nothing to anyone but me, but the exercise was fun, mentally-stimulating, and ultimately rewarding to see what I had been doing with "my computer" 15-20 years ago. I could have lived without any of it, but I'm really glad I did it, even though getting all of this done took several days of work.
I think everyone can understand the situation I'm in here, because, hey, the old Commodore company went out of business, and the world standardized on PC's. I can accept that. What I can't accept is that one of the world's most profitable companies unilaterally decides that they'll stop supporting old document formats with no warning and no friendly workaround. I suspect the only people that this will affect will find themselves in the same situation I was in, and their only recourse will be to find an old PC, load it up with old versions of Windows and Office, and make the transition.
You would be tempted to think that there wouldn't be too many people in this situation, and you're probably right, but I think my father-in-law, who is an attorney, still has his secretaries creating their documents in Word Perfect, simply because they have a lot of templates created with it. If, down the road, they decide to "upgrade" to Office, I wonder if they'll suddenly find themselves in a pinch...
Ah, but that's the beauty of the system. As was intended, LET THE STATES HANDLE IT. The Constitution only provided for matters dealing BETWEEN states. From welfare to education, et. al., the STATES should be deciding on what to do where the Constitution is silent.* The states would then compete in a free-market sort of way for residents and business. Then the best ways of doing things would be evident. Also, where necessary, some states may cater to certain things.
Step 1) Create legislation to get rid of low-def TV to get funding from the tech industry Step 2) Face political backlash from the masses when the TV "stops working" Step 3) Fund yet another huge government handout to make the TV "start working" again Step 4) Run your next campaign on how you "saved TV" Step 5) Profit
There are just so many, wonderful things wrong with this situation, I find it hard to begin.
The Constitution of the United States granted precious few responsibilities for the federal government. Can someone name me one non-trivial aspect of our lives that isn't now covered at the federal level? Because I can't think of an example.
The longer I live, the more I become disillusioned with the two-party-is-actually-one-party system we have, so I've changed my position. I'm now voting for the libertarian, the independent, and the unknown, in that order. Call it "wasting my vote" if you'd like, but I'll be here when the rest of you come around.
There's a lot of comments for Zimbra, but I've tried it, and it's very difficult to install. So I went with Scalix. The bonus is that it's totally free for the size of my organization (a church). We've used OpenGroupware (with the Outlook plugin), but Scalix has been a lot better for us. I highly recommend it. Their forums are great too!
Everyone seems to be forgetting the other half of the dynamic duo: Nat Friedman. Miguel's been piping up about this "standard," but Nat has simply disappeared (from the usual visibility he used to maintain) since the Novell license deal with Microsoft. He too seems to have begun drinking the Kool Aid, but seems to have had the decency to keep it on the down low...
Well, given a free machine, a free OS, and a knowledgeable friend helping out for nothing, I think the user could spare $25 for a cheap, off-the-shelf NIC at the local Wal-Mart or Office Max. I (almost personally) guarantee that anything you'd buy at a place like that would be supported just fine.
My money says that, once Google gets it all put together, they'll release appliance servers of ALL their apps (not just search) for corporations to drop in place. Would Gmail, combined their calendaring, their chat server, and their online document and spreadsheet apps be enough to get people to switch? Every time I think about stuff like this, I think I ought to invest. Guess I should have done that a few years ago...
When I replaced OpenGroupware at my church about a year ago, I looked at both Zimbra and Scalix. Both seemed to do about the same thing, in about the same way. I installed both and tried them out. Functionally, on the web client, I couldn't tell the difference. From an installation point-of-view, Scalix won hands-down. (The Outlook plugin was a little testy, but once the replication stuff was properly setup, it's all been good.) The point that really "sold" the system to me was that I needed the system to do delegation, and, at the time, I could NOT get that working with Zimbra. On Scalix, I wouldn't say it "just worked," but I was able to stumble my way through the tickboxes to a working setup. (In the version I have, I seem to remember needing to frob some things on the web-interface side. I also seem to remember that this would go away in the next release.) Anyway, Scalix is out there, works very well, and is completely free, including the Outlook plugin.
I was just going to link their URL, and I find that they've been bought by Xandros, which might have been sort of worrying on its own (being as Xandros is such a small player in the field, I guess that implies something about the size of Scalix as well), but they recently did a "patent" deal with Microsoft. Oops. I may have a problem now.
Ever since the whole "mono" thing, I've been waiting to see signs how it would work out. From what I understood, it was always Miguel's wish that whatever "killer app" Microsoft came up with on Mono would be readily available on Linux. I guess this "Moonlight" product will be the fruition of that desire. However, with copyright and patent law being as obfuscated as it is, I just can't have any confidence that Microsoft isn't going to eventually pull the rug out from under Mono, leaving derivative applications on the desktop sort of high and dry. As I've personally seen from the SCO fiasco, it doesn't take solid legal case to cause a problem for Linux. Even that ball of outrageous lies ("millions of lines of code") caused resistance to Linux within my company, and I had to fight the FUD. I suppose Miguel will claim that it's all clear to him, and that may well be, but it's not to me, nor to a lot of other people. All it would take is for Microsoft to threaten Red Hat over distribution of Mono, and suddenly we've got a defacto "Microsoft-blessed" distribution in SuSE, which is my take on what's happening here. In a way, that'd be good for my company, since that's their chosen platform, and it might even expand use of the platform internally, but my very large, very expensive application (when it comes to Linux) is only supported on Red Hat. I just want to avoid the nonsense entirely. With some of the crazy stuff that Microsoft pulls in order to trap people on their platform, how does anyone believe that they don't have an end-game in mind with all of this business? Miguel might just be a useful, unwitting pawn in the game. But, hey, I'm still bitter that they managed to buy out Daniel Robbins.;-)
The thought that you are paying them for the privilege of having a rootkit installed on your computer and that you're okay with it quite disconcerting to me, but by all means, if the service of having your system compromised is worth $50 to you, go ahead. (There are lots of people who would willingly compromise your system for free, incidentally.) Personally, I find it disgusting that anyone can't see the bigger picture and would support a company that engages in these practices, but it's your computer and your money. As others have pointed out, this particular piece of software is NOT a rootkit. I changed my tax preparation software because of issues LIKE this before, but my option here is play the game, or don't. I appreciate that someone who is vehemently against these practices is at least allowing me that it's my decision. I've chosen to do it; doesn't mean everyone has to. If we found that the software did, or even COULD, wipe out other partitions, I would avoid it. Like anything else in computer security, it's a constant balancing act. I find it acceptable in this case, but only just so.
In this particular example, I actually think this is a GOOD thing. I have another computer in the house for my kids, and there is one game on it that requires administrative permissions to run. I trust that it's just poorly written, and is not doing anything "bad" to the computer, so I enter those credentials when the kids want to play it. With Windows' architecture the way it is (needing elevated privileges to do basic things), I welcome this SORT of software to alleviate this problem. BELIEVE ME: I understand the tradeoffs. Again, it's a balancing act, and up to individuals to weigh their exposure to the benefits.
My original thoughts on weighing in here was just for people to keep in mind that this TOTAL situation is all part of the "negotiation" of either buying the thing or NOT buying the thing. If you agree to it, great, enjoy yourself. If you don't, then shut up and move on. Stop acting like this is some sort of crime against humanity to offer a certain thing at a certain price. That's the offer; take it or leave it. Just like anything else.
This is my point exactly. You keep thinking that this purchase is LIKE buying a tangible good. It's not. It is what it is. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
It's also why "copyright infringement" does not equal "piracy," but that's another conversation.
Bioshock installs software that allows the administrative privilege system of your computer to be subverted. They claim that it's a benefit and they have only good intentions. Maybe, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with. That's their business proposition. The market has changed. You're not buying a THING, you're buying a SERVICE, with all the benefits and limitations you're pointing out. Was that worth $50 to me? Yes. But, then, I have a separate Windows partition used for ONLY GAMES, and I'm not worried about much that might be required to facilitate this. I've used Linux as my desktop for about 12 years now. The Windows world can slide into whatever mess it would like to. I treat it as a console, and put no data on it. Maybe I should be buying a PS3 or a Wii. After all, that's all it is to me.
So where are we now? Here I am, along with other paying customers, doing the right thing- and I get shafted as a result. I can get a better copy with less restrictions by going to the local warez-are-us. That copy won't stop working ten years later when the developer shuts down. It won't phone home and refuse to run. It won't refuse to run without a net connection sending God-knows-what to their activation server. Where we are now is that you know the deal, but you are still buying into it. When are people going to realize that you're NOT buying a game, you're buying a LICENSE. We all KNOW this, and have for years, but we keep ACTING like we're buying a PRODUCT. Many of these licenses come with crazy restrictions, stupid software and configurations, and the LACK of a guarantee... of ANYTHING! Caveat emptor has never been more appropriate. I bought BioShock, and LOVED IT. But I bought it knowing that it could be rendered UNPLAYABLE before I finished it even the first time. That was their proposition, and I bought into it. I'm glad I did. But people need to give up this idea that they're buying a GAME that they SHOULD be able to play 20 years from now. We're buying a SERVICE, not a product. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. It's just that the industry has changed out from under our feet in the past couple of years, and many of us gamers aren't accepting this yet. But by buying a game like this, you ARE accepting it. After this, it's kind of hard to complain about it. Vote with your dollars, or lack thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you not heard about the UK, where a judge has upheld the notion that a Muslim family dispute ought to be covered by Sharia, in addition to the normal UK legal system? Whether they do it by force or by subterfuge, "invading" is their goal, and they're already doing it. See also the publicly funded Muslim-based elementary schools in Detroit. Or how about the special exceptions made at an American university for school-funded foot baths for the Muslim facility? I ought to go all Wikipedia and cite my references, but if you've not heard about these things, then you're not paying attention.
You seem to be in that middle ground where there's a big move afoot, and the company isn't saying that there's going to be X and Y happen, and this is how many people we'll be cutting. Without -knowing- that something drastic is going to happen up-front, everyone's going to be telling anyone who will listen that everything will be great for everyone involved. That just can't be true. (I'm sorry, but it can't.) I think the problem is that these sorts of deals are VERY difficult to evaluate, and the results of them can only be discovered when the rubber meets the road. What you may find is that it's good for -you-, or maybe not so much. During this time that it takes for the "higher ups" to figure out how this is going to work long-term, you need to watch them closely. I've been through a downsizing, a merger, and a divestiture. How the move affects the company is telegraphed by upper management. If, after the outsourcing, many of the key people from one company start "taking other opportunities," then you can bet hard-earned money that the culture of the company is shifting the other way. In my merger experience, this was a Very Bad Thing (and a VBT that continues to reverberate in the divested company). Ultimately, I watched and waited to see what was happening in the divested company, and, as soon as it became clear that I wasn't going to like what that was, a door was opened for me to leave, and I took it. (I, personally, believe that it was a move of God in my life, but YMMV.) But my point here is that it took a little over a YEAR for everything to get sorted enough for me to figure out HOW it would affect me. So, be patient. Again, these monster companies can't turn on a dime. (I now work for a startup.)
I've used the same scheme. VM's get smaller ship names, or shuttle names. On top of this, my internal domain is starfleet.mil. ;-)
I've had a Palm device of some sort since the Palm Pilot Pro. My Treo 755 is, hmm, let me count... my 7th one. From DAY 1 on Windows, I was syncing with Outlook. Not exactly flawlessly. That much I'll grant. I had a lot of problems with duplication of entries, but I suppose because I was synchronizing between both work and home computers. However, it always fired up and worked.
I switched to using Linux as my main desktop about 12 years ago now. (My user agent will tell on me that I'm typing this from Windows, but I've been playing video games, and just checked /. before going to bed.) Linux support for Palm has always been there, but it's always been BUGGY. Just two days ago, I finally figured out that I can now sync ONCE, and then I have to reboot in order to sync again. What happened? I have no idea. I run Gentoo, so I guess something changed out from under me, but I have no idea what it might have been. I haven't updated any of the usual suspects in the chain of tools that it takes to sync. At least, I didn't THINK so...
I've hassled with this for OVER A DECADE now. At times, early on, it was enough to keep me in Windows for stretches of time. I spent a lot of effort -- and put up with a lot of incomplete support for things like priorities and categories -- to setup sync'ing with Evolution, but it was so buggy, I finally just gave up after a couple years. I've been just using jPilot for some time now, and now the whole thing has gone pear shaped on me. Not even using pilot-xfer at the command line can get around the one-sync-per-boot problem.
I guess that just leaves the kernel and udev as the problem, but messages in the log look the same on subsequent tries, so I don't know what to think. I tell you, the whole thing has become so frustrating, I just want to throw the Treo against the wall. I know I should jump in there and work on it myself, but if I'm going to spend time on something like that, this problem doesn't make the top of the list. I guess I'm willing to live without sync'ing in Linux rather than fix it.
I don't really have a point here. Peripherals not playing well in Linux. Film at 11. I just needed to vent, and this thread came along at the wrong time.
I just started a new job where I get to do development for Linux. I would concur that the .NET Visual Studio environment rates a 9/10, and Java in Eclipse rates a 7/10. The interesting thing that I've just discovered is that doing Qt/C++ development in Eclipse is also a 7/10, maybe even 7.5. As an added bonus (once you get Qt compiled with the MySQL database driver wrapper -- grr), you can deploy the same app on Windows, Linux (and Mac). I'm looking forward to doing a lot more of this sort of work.
Mod parent up. That's the most insightful comment I've seen on Slashdot lately. With things like Wine and Crossover and Cedega getting better all the time, Microsoft has to change the game.
A hundred years ago, when I thought NT was the bees knees, I tried to use a Creative sound card. The problem was that I had a dual Pentium 200, and Creative just could be bothered to get their drivers to work with a dual-CPU motherboard. Note that I -know- this wasn't impossible at the time, because I got hold of an Ensoniq PCI, and it never bluescreened once. When Creative bought Ensoniq, I thought, great, now they'll get the software to do it right. WRONG! They destroyed Ensoniq's working drivers, and ruined the whole thing. As I built newer computers (always with a dual CPU), I kept using Ensoniq's because I knew they worked. Since I worked with a PC tech at work, I could always find a cast-off when I needed one.
The next Creative card I bought was the original Live, with the emu10k1 chip. I didn't realize how good I had it till I tried buying the Live 24-bit, which, of course (like wireless cards) had a -completely- different chipset. I could never make it work with Linux. What I didn't realize is that the emu10k1 has a hardware mixer on board. This obviated the need to get dmix working (which was the trick I gave up trying to learn). When mine died, I bought one from my PC-tech friend. Just the other week, I was working on an old computer for a friend, and I noticed he had one of these, and I told him that, if he ever wanted to get rid of the computer, I wanted the sound card.
I saw another post on here about how MAudio might be a suitable alternative these days. When those of you who use Linux are building computers these days, what sort of sound cards are you using, and how are you setting up the configuration so that everything (mplayer, Amarok, system sounds, etc.) are all going through a single mixer (e.g. the gnome panel applet)? Being a gamer, I want something that will work under Windows, but I want it to work -right- under Linux. I'm about to build a new computer, so this is an interesting time for this discussion to come up for me personally.
I lol'ed the first time I need to check my security log, and typed `less secure'.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/13/0116212
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/02/007254
My all time fave was the Tandy "Trash 80," which was actually a pretty decent home computer back in the day.
I just pulled the documents from my old Commodore 64 floppies. I bought an XA1541 cable, and used "opencbm" to transfer the disk images to my hard drive. Then I used "vice" to run the programs I used to use to create them (GEOS and WordWriter, for the curious). Then I could either print the output to a virtual printer or save the file to a virtual floppy, and then run `petcat' on the results to clean them up a bit. Then I concatenated the various little files into a single file, and used vim to sanitize the mess. Finally, I brought the text files into OpenOffice and formatted them. I saved all the interesting programs I wrote, a 37-page treatise on a new, sci-fi role playing game I invented (just the skeleton), and a 53-page high-level AD&D module I wrote (mostly done).
These things will obviously mean nothing to anyone but me, but the exercise was fun, mentally-stimulating, and ultimately rewarding to see what I had been doing with "my computer" 15-20 years ago. I could have lived without any of it, but I'm really glad I did it, even though getting all of this done took several days of work.
I think everyone can understand the situation I'm in here, because, hey, the old Commodore company went out of business, and the world standardized on PC's. I can accept that. What I can't accept is that one of the world's most profitable companies unilaterally decides that they'll stop supporting old document formats with no warning and no friendly workaround. I suspect the only people that this will affect will find themselves in the same situation I was in, and their only recourse will be to find an old PC, load it up with old versions of Windows and Office, and make the transition.
You would be tempted to think that there wouldn't be too many people in this situation, and you're probably right, but I think my father-in-law, who is an attorney, still has his secretaries creating their documents in Word Perfect, simply because they have a lot of templates created with it. If, down the road, they decide to "upgrade" to Office, I wonder if they'll suddenly find themselves in a pinch...
Ah, but that's the beauty of the system. As was intended, LET THE STATES HANDLE IT. The Constitution only provided for matters dealing BETWEEN states. From welfare to education, et. al., the STATES should be deciding on what to do where the Constitution is silent.* The states would then compete in a free-market sort of way for residents and business. Then the best ways of doing things would be evident. Also, where necessary, some states may cater to certain things.
(* Or amend it.)
Step 1) Create legislation to get rid of low-def TV to get funding from the tech industry
Step 2) Face political backlash from the masses when the TV "stops working"
Step 3) Fund yet another huge government handout to make the TV "start working" again
Step 4) Run your next campaign on how you "saved TV"
Step 5) Profit
There are just so many, wonderful things wrong with this situation, I find it hard to begin.
The Constitution of the United States granted precious few responsibilities for the federal government. Can someone name me one non-trivial aspect of our lives that isn't now covered at the federal level? Because I can't think of an example.
The longer I live, the more I become disillusioned with the two-party-is-actually-one-party system we have, so I've changed my position. I'm now voting for the libertarian, the independent, and the unknown, in that order. Call it "wasting my vote" if you'd like, but I'll be here when the rest of you come around.
There's a lot of comments for Zimbra, but I've tried it, and it's very difficult to install. So I went with Scalix. The bonus is that it's totally free for the size of my organization (a church). We've used OpenGroupware (with the Outlook plugin), but Scalix has been a lot better for us. I highly recommend it. Their forums are great too!
Everyone seems to be forgetting the other half of the dynamic duo: Nat Friedman. Miguel's been piping up about this "standard," but Nat has simply disappeared (from the usual visibility he used to maintain) since the Novell license deal with Microsoft. He too seems to have begun drinking the Kool Aid, but seems to have had the decency to keep it on the down low...
Dang it. We really need a meta-meta-moderation system around here for POST OF THE DAY!
Well, given a free machine, a free OS, and a knowledgeable friend helping out for nothing, I think the user could spare $25 for a cheap, off-the-shelf NIC at the local Wal-Mart or Office Max. I (almost personally) guarantee that anything you'd buy at a place like that would be supported just fine.
My money says that, once Google gets it all put together, they'll release appliance servers of ALL their apps (not just search) for corporations to drop in place. Would Gmail, combined their calendaring, their chat server, and their online document and spreadsheet apps be enough to get people to switch? Every time I think about stuff like this, I think I ought to invest. Guess I should have done that a few years ago...
When I replaced OpenGroupware at my church about a year ago, I looked at both Zimbra and Scalix. Both seemed to do about the same thing, in about the same way. I installed both and tried them out. Functionally, on the web client, I couldn't tell the difference. From an installation point-of-view, Scalix won hands-down. (The Outlook plugin was a little testy, but once the replication stuff was properly setup, it's all been good.) The point that really "sold" the system to me was that I needed the system to do delegation, and, at the time, I could NOT get that working with Zimbra. On Scalix, I wouldn't say it "just worked," but I was able to stumble my way through the tickboxes to a working setup. (In the version I have, I seem to remember needing to frob some things on the web-interface side. I also seem to remember that this would go away in the next release.) Anyway, Scalix is out there, works very well, and is completely free, including the Outlook plugin.
I was just going to link their URL, and I find that they've been bought by Xandros, which might have been sort of worrying on its own (being as Xandros is such a small player in the field, I guess that implies something about the size of Scalix as well), but they recently did a "patent" deal with Microsoft. Oops. I may have a problem now.
Ever since the whole "mono" thing, I've been waiting to see signs how it would work out. From what I understood, it was always Miguel's wish that whatever "killer app" Microsoft came up with on Mono would be readily available on Linux. I guess this "Moonlight" product will be the fruition of that desire. However, with copyright and patent law being as obfuscated as it is, I just can't have any confidence that Microsoft isn't going to eventually pull the rug out from under Mono, leaving derivative applications on the desktop sort of high and dry. As I've personally seen from the SCO fiasco, it doesn't take solid legal case to cause a problem for Linux. Even that ball of outrageous lies ("millions of lines of code") caused resistance to Linux within my company, and I had to fight the FUD. I suppose Miguel will claim that it's all clear to him, and that may well be, but it's not to me, nor to a lot of other people. All it would take is for Microsoft to threaten Red Hat over distribution of Mono, and suddenly we've got a defacto "Microsoft-blessed" distribution in SuSE, which is my take on what's happening here. In a way, that'd be good for my company, since that's their chosen platform, and it might even expand use of the platform internally, but my very large, very expensive application (when it comes to Linux) is only supported on Red Hat. I just want to avoid the nonsense entirely. With some of the crazy stuff that Microsoft pulls in order to trap people on their platform, how does anyone believe that they don't have an end-game in mind with all of this business? Miguel might just be a useful, unwitting pawn in the game. But, hey, I'm still bitter that they managed to buy out Daniel Robbins. ;-)
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In this particular example, I actually think this is a GOOD thing. I have another computer in the house for my kids, and there is one game on it that requires administrative permissions to run. I trust that it's just poorly written, and is not doing anything "bad" to the computer, so I enter those credentials when the kids want to play it. With Windows' architecture the way it is (needing elevated privileges to do basic things), I welcome this SORT of software to alleviate this problem. BELIEVE ME: I understand the tradeoffs. Again, it's a balancing act, and up to individuals to weigh their exposure to the benefits.
My original thoughts on weighing in here was just for people to keep in mind that this TOTAL situation is all part of the "negotiation" of either buying the thing or NOT buying the thing. If you agree to it, great, enjoy yourself. If you don't, then shut up and move on. Stop acting like this is some sort of crime against humanity to offer a certain thing at a certain price. That's the offer; take it or leave it. Just like anything else.
This is my point exactly. You keep thinking that this purchase is LIKE buying a tangible good. It's not. It is what it is. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
It's also why "copyright infringement" does not equal "piracy," but that's another conversation.