It'd be even better if all the players got on board, so we could connect to friend@hotmail.com, and 12345678@icq.com . I'd really love to start using my icq number again, but only those with trillian or gaim tend to bother with icq nowadays.
Considering that AOL, Yahoo, and MSN previously tried to lock out 3rd party clients, and failed to do it for more than a day or two, I don't think there is too much to worry about.
Plus the other major players wouldn't try to break Jabber's interoperability unless Google was offering them MSN/ICQ/AIM/Yahoo transports as part of their service (which would actually be a good idea for initially migrating people away from the other clients). If it was just vanilla Jabber through jabber.google.com, it might as well be proprietary as far as the competition is concerned. The only difference is that it'd be easier for MS, Yahoo, and AOL to interoperate with Google since they'd be using a standard protocol.
By the way, I don't think I'd recommend either for a very large international network of machines. Tools that try to give a graphical representation of everything might not be what you're looking for at that level.
Searching around for SNMP tools that are still maintained is probably a good idea. If you can't find any good open source tools, try looking at proprietary SNMP tools like IBM Director. Most IT vendors have such packages, and in the case of IBM, it works on non-IBM hardware (of course it can do more on IBM hardware, and is less costly that way).
Another similar tool is ksysguard. Predictably, the client is written for KDE, but the ksysguardd daemon has no such dependencies.
It seems ksysguard does display a bit more information, and is better for displaying information from multiple hosts in one window.
But personally I prefer gkrellm. Since I do not have an overly large number of machines to monitor, I can have a number of gkrellm windows open and have a quick glance at what is going on. I find gkrellm much better for this sort of thing.
When the Canadians are revolting, we tell them to take a bath. They are disarmed, by their own government, so wouldn't present a threat to an invader. I begin to suspect that this message didn't really come from the future.
Actually Canadians, especially in rural areas, still have a lot of guns. Probably many more hunting rifles than handguns, but there are lots of guns nonetheless.
The government has somehow blown $2billion on a database to register these said guns, and passed a law saying all guns have to be registered. I guess this does lead to the possibility that the government could take them away, since they know where they all are. But since there are plenty of them still not registered, and our government doesn't plan on taking away the registered ones, the Canadians still remain a well armed population. If you believe Michael Moore, we're still as well armed as the American population. This is likely the truth.
Actually it would be really nice to have a windowsupdate.com type site for mozilla. In fact, it'd be nice to have such a site or program for all 3rd party software on Windows, so that each program doesn't have to have its own update tool.
At least having Cygwin, Gaim, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, etc. all updating from the same utility would be nice.
Apple should be embracing music stores that have the iPod as the "recommended" players. This would've been the ideal way to keep Dell out of this market, and would've hurt Microsoft's efforts as well.
Apple had it good when Dell was selling iPods, and did even better by getting HP to do the same. But then things went worse...
- Dell started selling their own player. No doubt that MS and Dell together are a huge threat to iTMS and iPod.
- Linspire/Lindows recommends the Dell player for LSongs. Apple missed a huge opportunity on the Linux side of things. They should've worked with Linspire to make LSongs the iTunes for Linux. (Although one could argue that Linspire has a lot more motivation to work with Dell than with Apple, for reasons outside the realm of the music industry.)
- Real wanted to partner with Apple. Right now Real isn't selling hardware, only songs. They do not want to go the.wmv route because of their competition with Microsoft, and Real's use of mpeg4 throughout their products makes them a logical licensee for Quicktime and FairPlay. I suppose it also makes them a big competitor in this sector, but a less dangerous one than MS.
Apple makes most of their money in this business off of iPod sales, so having manufacturers sell iPods, and having music stores recommending them can only be good. If every music store is recommending iPods, and most manufacturers are selling them with their PCs, then Dell and MS would have a hard time penetrating the market. The "all my friends have iPods" and "all the stores recommend iPods" barrier would be tough to break.
By trying to keep the iTMS pie for themselves, they've created a group of stores that'll gravitate towards the Dell and MS solution. This hurts the Quicktime and Macintosh brands as much as iPod and iTunes.
Of course Apple might have another route planned. They saturate the market with as many iPods as possible. Eventually everyone who wants a portable player will have one of some sort, so sales will stagnate. They make sure that the only major store selling AAC for all those iPods is iTMS (and maybe some licensed hardware partners who help sell ACC enabled players like HP). Therefore they can keep a huge portion of the market share for online music buyers, long after the players stop selling like crazy. If iTMS doesn't profit now, they can always bump up the price a little bit due to their near lock-in. They also keep a lock-in on the iPod, as all these iTMS files with FairPlay that everyone has bought will not play on competing portables.
Unfortunately the second route won't work for Apple for two reasons. One is that Dell and MS are already building many allies in this market, whereas Apple is being very selective in who they will partner with. The Windows monopoly will help MS a great deal here. The other is that the iTMS and iPod lock-in is too easy to break. FairPlay can be cracked, the iPod can be hacked to play other formats, and stores can always sell mp3s which will play on everything. Apple's fights against these developments will only serve to make them less popular, and give their competitors more allies.
The minute Apple uses the DMCA, they lose a lot of respect in some tech circles. Right now they are the only people in the music industry seem to "get it", and we love them for this. But bringing in Apple legal against Real may show how much at least one part of the company does not "get it". Unfortunately it seems Jobs has a big enough ego and enough hatred of Real to back the lawyers on this one, to whatever ends are necessary. Maybe Read deserves it too, but that doesn't stop this from hurting Apple.
Steve wouldn't have been with the company had Apple bought BeOS. Apple wanted to buy BeOS, but the owners held out for more money than Apple was willing to pay. So Apple bought NextSTEP from Steve Jobs, and brought him back on board.
Well since Rutan's vehicle cost Paul Allen between 20-25million to build, maybe the money will go to Paul. But I doubt he cares much either way.
Haven't heard what either teams plans to do with the cash if they win. Given that one is a volunteer effort, and the other spend more than 2x the prize money already, it is likely neither team cares much about the money.
The fact is that the Canadian entry would actually profit by winning the X-Prize, whereas Rutan's team would only be cutting their losses.
I bet with Paul's billions, Rutan could put a hotel and casino on the moon, but I'm pretty sure that it would be a money losing venture. just like SpaceShipOne.
Not to say that Rutan's work isn't interesting. He certainly is favored to win this thing, and whoever wins it will be accomplishing a first.
I've only had two drives bought in the last 3 years fail. One was a Seagate and the other an infamous IBM DeathStar.
Not that I trust any brand of hard drives that much right now. The fact they all went to 1 year warranties for a while there says loads about how confident they were in their own products. And from the amount of dead drives I've seen people accumulate in the last couple years, I can't blame them.
I always thought this was a stupid tactic too. I swore I'd never buy from the companies with the most annoying advertisements. But the sad thing about this ads is that they are memorable. So next time you're looking for a new mattress, the annoying mattress store is the first one that comes to mind. I didn't realize how much advertising actually worked until I came across this sort of thing a few times. I have a good memory, and unfortunately the ads stay in there with everything else.
I still haven't bought from the annoying ads people, but I can see how they could work for a company. Especially if they're an obscure company (only sell mattresses, only a brand of water softener salts), or they want you to remember a stupid phone number (AT&T). If you know of an alternative, tricks like yours (think 1-800-COLLECT every time you see Carrot Top) can work. If you don't know of alternatives, the minute you're looking for the product, the annoying people are the first ones that will come to mind. If the advertisers are lucky, you might even forget why.
Personally, I now try to mute the advertisements while I'm watching TV so that they don't annoy me and don't stick in my mind. Unfortunately I find I could sing along without the sound for most of the one's I've seen before. But without the sound, it is also a lot easier to break my mindless stare into the box, and look away from the TV for a couple minutes.
Now I try cutting out TV as much as possible. Watching series from downloaded copies instead of whenever they air also helps cut down on TV and ad time as well. That way you watch only what you want to, and don't get your butt glued to the couch for shows you didn't plan to watch. It is just a much better viewing experience than getting shouted at to buy stuff every few minutes.
I imagine it'll soon be possible to build native KDE applications using GTK. Things like QtGtk theme engine and the library that merges the event loops, when stable, will allow a very nearly native KDE application written in GTK. See here for more details.
The problem from a licensing perspective is that even if the theme and event loop code are LGPL, they probably link back to other KDE libraries which then link back to QT. Even though the integration libraries and much of KDE itself are LGPL, you wouldn't be saved from the link back to QT by writing KDE applications in GTK. Though I do feel it is a real stretch to say a GTK application is a "derivative" of QT. The vaugeness of the GPL in defining derivative work make this a difficult issue.
At least that is how I understand the current situation. One possible way around this might be to have all the integration technology sitting outside KDE, like D-BUS will be doing. QtGtk could be rewritten to be a common component for both desktops to use.
Disclaimer: I haven't looked at the code or the licenses of the integration components. If you developers can offer any corrections or comments, please do so.
You can't really avoid the "geek needed to install" in a corporate environment. If you want to run even a half-assed environment, you need either some internal IT staff or some outside contractors. Businesses that try to be too cheap in this regard tend to have crappy IT infrastructures, and probably don't realize the money they're losing due to poor efficiency and lowered capabilities.
A coroprate Windows environment needs the geeks as much (actually more according to most studies) as a UNIX or open source environment. You just don't have your 15-year old nephew installing pirated Windows on to all your business machines.
You're line of thinking is more appropriate in the home desktop scenario, although even then most people aren't capable of installing or supporting Windows by themselves. When they have problems, they either happen to have family or friends that can help them out, or they take their PCs in to a computer store where they charge a good amount of money to do the magic the home user cannot. Often the store is just running adware and virus removal software, and maybe doing a re-install of Windows if necessary.
It'd be even better if they could go after those that funded SCO, instead of their puppet management.
Better targets for IBM are Canopy and Microsoft. Maybe Sun, but that'd open up a whole other can of worms. I doubt they'd even want to touch a MS case for that matter, although they might not mind digging up evidence for the anti-trust folks to use.
I agree 100% with the profiles. It seems Mozilla is packaged slightly different on different distros. On some, they force you to use profile dialogs on startup even if you only have 1 profile; on others, they never bother you about a profile unless you create a second one. Of course, I much prefer the second method.
As to the Mozilla SeaMonkey (Navigator/Messenger/Composer/IRC) suite, I do agree it is still a useful piece of software. I personally use Konqueror or FireFox as a browser on most of my machines, but when doing support for Windows users, I often install the Mozilla Suite instead of FireFox. That way you can kill the security nightmares of IE and Outlook with one stone, and have some integration between the two. Also the migration tools in Messenger and Navigator to move mailboxes and bookmarks are nicely done. The preloading is also nice - on newer 3GHz type desktops, a new Mozilla window "loads" faster than a FireFox window due to the preloading.
It does seems that the FireFox/ThunderBird developers would like to get the same integration and features found in the suite through extensions, which I think is a great approach. They can then ship their lightweight apps seperately for those who prefer them that way (many on/. fall in this category), but they can also still ship a full suite by having selected extensions installed by default. A FireFox browser with a ThunderBird and NVu integration extension and a preloading extension would come very close to the Mozilla Suite in functionality.
Judging by the amount of times "people" have posted "it isn't all-artificial until AI writes the screenplay", I'm wondering whether the slashdot comments system may consist of all artifical postings.
I swear the whole comments system here could be replaced by a small shell script. A cron job that posts "Microsoft sucks" and "BSD is dying" would take care of a good chunk of the system right there. What else am I missing?
Cygwin ditched XFree86.org a long time ago. They got fed up with the lack of CVS access and XFree's refusal to integrate patches. They were probably the first "vendor" to break off, although trouble between individual developers (such as Keith Packard) and XFree had already started at this point.
For a while Cygwin maintained their own fork of XFree with their own patches for lack of any better option, but thankfully now they don't have to do that.
Company profits vs. general good of the internet. I really wonder which one they'll choose.
(note that I left out writing better software)
Yeah, because writing better software would both cost money and serve the general good. So they have the same choice to make in that regards. We've all seen how they've made that decision in the past.
A better pick your poison scenario is this:
Spending money on bandwidth patching unpaid clients vs Spending money on bandwidth due to DDOS attacks from unpatched clients
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad ReiserFS doesn't have a dump utility.
It'd be even better if all the players got on board, so we could connect to friend@hotmail.com, and 12345678@icq.com . I'd really love to start using my icq number again, but only those with trillian or gaim tend to bother with icq nowadays.
Considering that AOL, Yahoo, and MSN previously tried to lock out 3rd party clients, and failed to do it for more than a day or two, I don't think there is too much to worry about.
Plus the other major players wouldn't try to break Jabber's interoperability unless Google was offering them MSN/ICQ/AIM/Yahoo transports as part of their service (which would actually be a good idea for initially migrating people away from the other clients). If it was just vanilla Jabber through jabber.google.com, it might as well be proprietary as far as the competition is concerned. The only difference is that it'd be easier for MS, Yahoo, and AOL to interoperate with Google since they'd be using a standard protocol.
And soon there will be 3 of them in every X-Box 2, if the rumours about it were true.
By the way, I don't think I'd recommend either for a very large international network of machines. Tools that try to give a graphical representation of everything might not be what you're looking for at that level.
Searching around for SNMP tools that are still maintained is probably a good idea. If you can't find any good open source tools, try looking at proprietary SNMP tools like IBM Director. Most IT vendors have such packages, and in the case of IBM, it works on non-IBM hardware (of course it can do more on IBM hardware, and is less costly that way).
Another similar tool is ksysguard. Predictably, the client is written for KDE, but the ksysguardd daemon has no such dependencies.
It seems ksysguard does display a bit more information, and is better for displaying information from multiple hosts in one window.
But personally I prefer gkrellm. Since I do not have an overly large number of machines to monitor, I can have a number of gkrellm windows open and have a quick glance at what is going on. I find gkrellm much better for this sort of thing.
Actually Canadians, especially in rural areas, still have a lot of guns. Probably many more hunting rifles than handguns, but there are lots of guns nonetheless.
The government has somehow blown $2billion on a database to register these said guns, and passed a law saying all guns have to be registered. I guess this does lead to the possibility that the government could take them away, since they know where they all are. But since there are plenty of them still not registered, and our government doesn't plan on taking away the registered ones, the Canadians still remain a well armed population. If you believe Michael Moore, we're still as well armed as the American population. This is likely the truth.
Actually it would be really nice to have a windowsupdate.com type site for mozilla. In fact, it'd be nice to have such a site or program for all 3rd party software on Windows, so that each program doesn't have to have its own update tool.
At least having Cygwin, Gaim, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, etc. all updating from the same utility would be nice.
Apple should be embracing music stores that have the iPod as the "recommended" players. This would've been the ideal way to keep Dell out of this market, and would've hurt Microsoft's efforts as well.
.wmv route because of their competition with Microsoft, and Real's use of mpeg4 throughout their products makes them a logical licensee for Quicktime and FairPlay. I suppose it also makes them a big competitor in this sector, but a less dangerous one than MS.
Apple had it good when Dell was selling iPods, and did even better by getting HP to do the same. But then things went worse...
- Dell started selling their own player. No doubt that MS and Dell together are a huge threat to iTMS and iPod.
- Linspire/Lindows recommends the Dell player for LSongs. Apple missed a huge opportunity on the Linux side of things. They should've worked with Linspire to make LSongs the iTunes for Linux. (Although one could argue that Linspire has a lot more motivation to work with Dell than with Apple, for reasons outside the realm of the music industry.)
- Real wanted to partner with Apple. Right now Real isn't selling hardware, only songs. They do not want to go the
Apple makes most of their money in this business off of iPod sales, so having manufacturers sell iPods, and having music stores recommending them can only be good. If every music store is recommending iPods, and most manufacturers are selling them with their PCs, then Dell and MS would have a hard time penetrating the market. The "all my friends have iPods" and "all the stores recommend iPods" barrier would be tough to break.
By trying to keep the iTMS pie for themselves, they've created a group of stores that'll gravitate towards the Dell and MS solution. This hurts the Quicktime and Macintosh brands as much as iPod and iTunes.
Of course Apple might have another route planned. They saturate the market with as many iPods as possible. Eventually everyone who wants a portable player will have one of some sort, so sales will stagnate. They make sure that the only major store selling AAC for all those iPods is iTMS (and maybe some licensed hardware partners who help sell ACC enabled players like HP). Therefore they can keep a huge portion of the market share for online music buyers, long after the players stop selling like crazy. If iTMS doesn't profit now, they can always bump up the price a little bit due to their near lock-in. They also keep a lock-in on the iPod, as all these iTMS files with FairPlay that everyone has bought will not play on competing portables.
Unfortunately the second route won't work for Apple for two reasons. One is that Dell and MS are already building many allies in this market, whereas Apple is being very selective in who they will partner with. The Windows monopoly will help MS a great deal here. The other is that the iTMS and iPod lock-in is too easy to break. FairPlay can be cracked, the iPod can be hacked to play other formats, and stores can always sell mp3s which will play on everything. Apple's fights against these developments will only serve to make them less popular, and give their competitors more allies.
The minute Apple uses the DMCA, they lose a lot of respect in some tech circles. Right now they are the only people in the music industry seem to "get it", and we love them for this. But bringing in Apple legal against Real may show how much at least one part of the company does not "get it". Unfortunately it seems Jobs has a big enough ego and enough hatred of Real to back the lawyers on this one, to whatever ends are necessary. Maybe Read deserves it too, but that doesn't stop this from hurting Apple.
Steve wouldn't have been with the company had Apple bought BeOS. Apple wanted to buy BeOS, but the owners held out for more money than Apple was willing to pay. So Apple bought NextSTEP from Steve Jobs, and brought him back on board.
Well since Rutan's vehicle cost Paul Allen between 20-25million to build, maybe the money will go to Paul. But I doubt he cares much either way.
Haven't heard what either teams plans to do with the cash if they win. Given that one is a volunteer effort, and the other spend more than 2x the prize money already, it is likely neither team cares much about the money.
Only if Paul Allen funds that too.
The fact is that the Canadian entry would actually profit by winning the X-Prize, whereas Rutan's team would only be cutting their losses.
I bet with Paul's billions, Rutan could put a hotel and casino on the moon, but I'm pretty sure that it would be a money losing venture. just like SpaceShipOne.
Not to say that Rutan's work isn't interesting. He certainly is favored to win this thing, and whoever wins it will be accomplishing a first.
How widespread is that law in Canada? In my province we can turn right at red pretty anywhere.
I've only had two drives bought in the last 3 years fail. One was a Seagate and the other an infamous IBM DeathStar.
Not that I trust any brand of hard drives that much right now. The fact they all went to 1 year warranties for a while there says loads about how confident they were in their own products. And from the amount of dead drives I've seen people accumulate in the last couple years, I can't blame them.
I always thought this was a stupid tactic too. I swore I'd never buy from the companies with the most annoying advertisements. But the sad thing about this ads is that they are memorable. So next time you're looking for a new mattress, the annoying mattress store is the first one that comes to mind. I didn't realize how much advertising actually worked until I came across this sort of thing a few times. I have a good memory, and unfortunately the ads stay in there with everything else.
I still haven't bought from the annoying ads people, but I can see how they could work for a company. Especially if they're an obscure company (only sell mattresses, only a brand of water softener salts), or they want you to remember a stupid phone number (AT&T). If you know of an alternative, tricks like yours (think 1-800-COLLECT every time you see Carrot Top) can work. If you don't know of alternatives, the minute you're looking for the product, the annoying people are the first ones that will come to mind. If the advertisers are lucky, you might even forget why.
Personally, I now try to mute the advertisements while I'm watching TV so that they don't annoy me and don't stick in my mind. Unfortunately I find I could sing along without the sound for most of the one's I've seen before. But without the sound, it is also a lot easier to break my mindless stare into the box, and look away from the TV for a couple minutes.
Now I try cutting out TV as much as possible. Watching series from downloaded copies instead of whenever they air also helps cut down on TV and ad time as well. That way you watch only what you want to, and don't get your butt glued to the couch for shows you didn't plan to watch. It is just a much better viewing experience than getting shouted at to buy stuff every few minutes.
I imagine it'll soon be possible to build native KDE applications using GTK. Things like QtGtk theme engine and the library that merges the event loops, when stable, will allow a very nearly native KDE application written in GTK. See here for more details.
The problem from a licensing perspective is that even if the theme and event loop code are LGPL, they probably link back to other KDE libraries which then link back to QT. Even though the integration libraries and much of KDE itself are LGPL, you wouldn't be saved from the link back to QT by writing KDE applications in GTK. Though I do feel it is a real stretch to say a GTK application is a "derivative" of QT. The vaugeness of the GPL in defining derivative work make this a difficult issue.
At least that is how I understand the current situation. One possible way around this might be to have all the integration technology sitting outside KDE, like D-BUS will be doing. QtGtk could be rewritten to be a common component for both desktops to use.
Disclaimer: I haven't looked at the code or the licenses of the integration components. If you developers can offer any corrections or comments, please do so.
You can't really avoid the "geek needed to install" in a corporate environment. If you want to run even a half-assed environment, you need either some internal IT staff or some outside contractors. Businesses that try to be too cheap in this regard tend to have crappy IT infrastructures, and probably don't realize the money they're losing due to poor efficiency and lowered capabilities.
A coroprate Windows environment needs the geeks as much (actually more according to most studies) as a UNIX or open source environment. You just don't have your 15-year old nephew installing pirated Windows on to all your business machines.
You're line of thinking is more appropriate in the home desktop scenario, although even then most people aren't capable of installing or supporting Windows by themselves. When they have problems, they either happen to have family or friends that can help them out, or they take their PCs in to a computer store where they charge a good amount of money to do the magic the home user cannot. Often the store is just running adware and virus removal software, and maybe doing a re-install of Windows if necessary.
Yes it would dumbass. Write it in Java and compile it with something like gcj. Voila, you have a JVM written in Java.
Not that this hasn't already been done. I believe IBM's Jikes virtual machine is written in Java.
I smell a possible extension here.
It'd be even better if they could go after those that funded SCO, instead of their puppet management.
Better targets for IBM are Canopy and Microsoft. Maybe Sun, but that'd open up a whole other can of worms. I doubt they'd even want to touch a MS case for that matter, although they might not mind digging up evidence for the anti-trust folks to use.
I agree 100% with the profiles. It seems Mozilla is packaged slightly different on different distros. On some, they force you to use profile dialogs on startup even if you only have 1 profile; on others, they never bother you about a profile unless you create a second one. Of course, I much prefer the second method.
/. fall in this category), but they can also still ship a full suite by having selected extensions installed by default. A FireFox browser with a ThunderBird and NVu integration extension and a preloading extension would come very close to the Mozilla Suite in functionality.
As to the Mozilla SeaMonkey (Navigator/Messenger/Composer/IRC) suite, I do agree it is still a useful piece of software. I personally use Konqueror or FireFox as a browser on most of my machines, but when doing support for Windows users, I often install the Mozilla Suite instead of FireFox. That way you can kill the security nightmares of IE and Outlook with one stone, and have some integration between the two. Also the migration tools in Messenger and Navigator to move mailboxes and bookmarks are nicely done. The preloading is also nice - on newer 3GHz type desktops, a new Mozilla window "loads" faster than a FireFox window due to the preloading.
It does seems that the FireFox/ThunderBird developers would like to get the same integration and features found in the suite through extensions, which I think is a great approach. They can then ship their lightweight apps seperately for those who prefer them that way (many on
Or you could use Mozilla Thunderbird, which did the same to Mozilla Messenger as FireFox did to Navigator.
I'm a KMail user myself though, so I can't vouch for Thunderbird.
Judging by the amount of times "people" have posted "it isn't all-artificial until AI writes the screenplay", I'm wondering whether the slashdot comments system may consist of all artifical postings.
I swear the whole comments system here could be replaced by a small shell script. A cron job that posts "Microsoft sucks" and "BSD is dying" would take care of a good chunk of the system right there. What else am I missing?
And why am I talking to a small shell script?
Cygwin ditched XFree86.org a long time ago. They got fed up with the lack of CVS access and XFree's refusal to integrate patches. They were probably the first "vendor" to break off, although trouble between individual developers (such as Keith Packard) and XFree had already started at this point.
For a while Cygwin maintained their own fork of XFree with their own patches for lack of any better option, but thankfully now they don't have to do that.
I'm too lazy to look any links for you though.
Company profits vs. general good of the internet. I really wonder which one they'll choose.
(note that I left out writing better software)
Yeah, because writing better software would both cost money and serve the general good. So they have the same choice to make in that regards. We've all seen how they've made that decision in the past.
A better pick your poison scenario is this:
Spending money on bandwidth patching unpaid clients
vs
Spending money on bandwidth due to DDOS attacks from unpatched clients