Given that Microsoft's big, big hold on everyone in business at the moment is Office+Outlook, it seems that NOT supporting Thunderbird is just a completely bizarre course of action.
Every time a post comes up on Slashdot about Thunderbird, I see the EXACT same comments - "our business uses Outlook, we've tried Thunderbird but it doesn't compete. If it did, we'd switch in a second."
Our business is the same; we'd happily make the switch away from Outlook+Exchange if Thunderbird was a viable alternative. It's not - yet - so we can't.
Mozilla pumping funds into Thunderbird development (with an Exchange replacement) to me seems like the best and fastest way to capture even more desktop space - but I guess they're having such great success with Firefox that they want to keep that going as best they can.
I don't know if its hugely innovative (ie, I don't know if its just copied from someone else, I'm pretty sure they bought it at the very least:) but when I saw this video of the Microsoft photosynth stuff, I was happy to see that they're trying to at least lead the way in some areas, rather than just blindly copying Google.
Why don't they use a flash based video player like NBC, ABC, etc. Well, because then everyone is locked into using Flash.
It sounds like a great idea, but "just because everyone else is doing it" isn't really a good reason. I believe there were a lot of problems with Flash video on Linux (though I think these are largely resolved now?).
I think the crux of the issue here is they should be releasing their videos in a DRM free, open format that anyone can access on any platform in any player. If they use an open video system that anyone can make a player for, it'll work everywhere, every time (if they went one step further and released their video under a CC-esque license that allowed format shifting, the community would even make be able to make and distribute alternate versions of their videof for them to play on portable devices, etc, that they might not want to support).
The problem is there are very few open video codecs/standards that they can use. MPEG, WM, VP6 for flash, etc - are all heavily patented and heavily regulated.... So that's probably why the BBC went and created Dirac, an open source video codec.
I haven't seen any information as to why they chose not to use it for iPlayer, but one possible theory (plucked out of the air) is that they have patent concerns (as outlined on their license page) and don't want to get sued if someone from MPEG comes after them, for example.
It would be instant chaos. Three out of four people...or more, depending on what part of the world you're from. Suddenly, the foundation and moral code they've all built their life on - is provably false. And therefore...gone. They would go nuts. It's interesting, I read a lot of sci-fi and some of it deals with how humans end up dealing with aliens and religion. Some of them (only one I can remember specifically now is the Xenocide series of books (the trilogy after Ender's Game) - and what they end up trying to do is convert the aliens.
If they're serious about market share, surely they should be going after the #1 calendar application rather than smaller ones first?
I would love to ditch Exchange for Sunbird + some other open solution. As soon as SOMEONE makes a replacement for Exchange that even has SOME of the functionality that Exchange offers plus a nice decent front end application, I'm sure zillions of people will switch. At the moment though Outlook+Exchange just kicks the ass of pretty much everything else.
(I think this shouldn't just be Mozilla's #1 priority - it should be the open source #1 priority. Exchange is still the main reason businesses stick with Microsoft. Including ours. We'd switch in a second if there was something remotely equivalent to Exchange - that doesn't require 4000 man hours of dicking around to make it work.)
I assume nothing. People are still going to record stuff, encode it, and put it on piratebay. So just like with music and movies and everything else, its still easier to pirate it and you end up with a better version of it that will happily interoperate on all your devices.
RIAA. Why are you too greedy to see this? I don't think they're too greedy to see it. In fact, I'm sure they can see it - they just don't want it to happen, because if it does all of a sudden the money that pays the salary of the ridiculously highly paid record executives that really do nothing will suddenly dry up.
I thought this was interesting, at the end of the article:
When stars like Eta Carinae explode, they tend to shoot of beams of energy and matter that, at its distance of 7500 light years, could kill every living thing on Earth. But since it's pointed away from us, all we'll get is a spectacular light show. If you're keeping score at home, gamma-ray burst aimed at you = bad, pretty supernova with no accompanying high energy radiation = good. Little bit scary to think about!
Does anyone know why the BBC didn't end up using Dirac for this project? It's the first I've heard of the iPlayer, but I would have thought their Dirac work would have been perfect for this.
I can't tell if you actually, genuinely think this is a good system to have, and if so if it's just because you have been/are a lobbyist yourself.
As a non-American innocent bystander it just seems like a really weird way to operate. At the end of the day despite what you say, all I see is Google spending what I assume is a lot of money on what I assume will be their attempts to change laws to improve their chances in the market.
I suspect/hope Google will be working on changing draconian copyright laws. But is that really the best way for these laws to change?
I mean, I don't have any alternatives. But this way it just seems big business gets to have more influence over the rules than they should.
The opposition has promised to upgrade the entire country's infrastructure to fibre-to-the-node, unlike the govt which is only willing to encourage private investors to do this in the cities where it is profitable. The people of Australia voted away their rights to have the government do things with their telecommunications infrastructure. They voted in Howard, who had promised to sell Telstra and privatise it, with a goal of making it more profitable, better structured, increase competition in telecoms, etc.
Now all of a sudden the people of Australia are expecting the government to step up and drop billions of dollars wiring up the rest of the country? I think its ludicrous of Labour to propose spending $4 billion of my hard earned tax dollars wiring up people who probably voted for the government to wash their hands of the telecoms market.
This is what happens when you privatise industries. Everyone should have thought about this before they voted for someone who wanted to privatise it.
I saw "our brilliant Prime Minister" on TV last night, he was talking to a guy sitting at a PC and asking insightfull questions such as: "How long does it take to download a movie?". From the quotes around "brilliant", I assume you are being sarcastic - but that's pretty much the exact same question many people are going to be asking. Many of the small groups we have over here whining about our "insufficient broadband infrastructure" are doing so because they can't download their torrentz fast enough.
Further - I saw that clip. It was a single sound bite. You shouldn't make any judgment calls based on a tiny clip that the media chose to present to you.
It doesn't matter what we do, we'll always be ruled by an aristocracy comprised of corporations, special-interest groups and the wealthy. Surely there's a way to take money out of the equation.
I don't mean the equation of you giving your money to the tax man - I mean the money that appears to control the US government that comes from lobby groups controlled by the RIAA, big military business, etc.
I hesitate to call them "bribes", but I don't really see how these companies can have such a massive influence over what politicians end up doing to you guys.
"Leaked to BitTorrent" just gives the anti-piracy jerks more ammunition to use against BitTorrent. At the very least, change it to "Leaked via P2P" or even better, just "Leaked".
Everyone knows what you mean. I actually use BitTorrent exclusively for legitimate downloads (yes, I realise that sounds unlikely, but it's true) and I would be very disappointed if use of it was criminalised because of clueless lawmakers who are deriding their information from subjects like this.
They're using "genuine" to mean "licensed", because as everyone knows, the only difference between the copy of XP my roommate bought from the store and the copy of XP I burned from his legit CD is that his copy is legally licensed and mine's not. They're bit-for-bit identical and there is no way to tell the difference. How about when you go to try to update it online and WGA rejects you?
It is a true indictment of how wasteful car designs and usage are in the US that you think 40mpg is newsworthy. It's also sad that one of the tags for this article is 'toy' though. Even the Slashdot community appear to think that unless you're driving an SUV you're not a real man, or whatever it is that makes people buy SUVs in the first place.
Yes, stopping kids from getting their hands on violent video games will be the magic bullet that stops violence, aggressive behaviour, bullying, etc.
The practical effect of this seems to me to obviously be that people that want to play violent video games will now just get them through non-official channels - ie, they'll pirate them. Or download any number of violent video games that are made available for free on the Internet to anyone in the world.
Politicians - please stop wasting your time and our money and get back to doing something else. Leave the parenting to the parents and let people accept some responsibility for their actions, eh?
Unfortunately, this is a 'convergence' product almost a decade late. Furthermore, it doesn't do the ONE thing I want and need: allow me to take eink notes or annotate over pdfs. Well, that's why not having an SDK means this product sucks for you - because noone will be able to add those features for you (or maybe that's your point?).
I'm in the market for a 'convergence' product myself, and in a similar boat to you - I can't find one that does exactly what I want. I was holding out hope for the iPhone hoping it would have a rich development environment - the hardware/OS base looks nice and solid and with a nice SDK/dev tool set it would mean I'd be able to effectively cherry pick the functionality _I_ wanted and just drop it on the phone.
I can't find any phone that, by default, has the set of software features I have. There's too many mobile OSes so there's little common ground - if someone writes an awesome app for Palm, I can't get it on my PocketPC.
everything else - huh? you started this by boldly making claims about Firefox as if they were globally applicable - I was merely pointing out that they're not, just so at least there was a single counter-point which proved your claims wrong
Let's see now, how to gain cash over the weekend - I know! The hottest topic in the computing sphere right now has to be Apple - with the keynote at their conference tomorrow. Let's do a hack-job on them... I wonder who we should be pissed at here:
1) whoever wrote this article for being a clueless attention whore
2) Slashdot, for putting it on the front page
3) everyone that commented on it despite its complete idiocy and thus drew more attention to it:)
My experience with Windows is that it is sloppily coded, and lots of things cause Windows to need maintenance. For example, the CPU hogging bug in Firefox, which seems to be worse in Firefox version 2.0.0.4, sometimes causes Windows XP Professional SP2 to become unstable and require re-starting the computer. When Firefox hogs the CPU under Linux, it is only necessary to kill Firefox. Linux remains stable. I have used Firefox almost all day, every day since version 1.0 under Windows XP Pro SP2 and I have never ever seen the behaviour you have described, except on certain sites that (mis-)use Flash - in which case I can just kill the Firefox process and my OS remains as rock solid as ever.
Sorry, but this is just pure anti-Windows BS. If you're having problems running Firefox under XP, you either have hardware problems or other software problems.
So if you're a business operating in the US that has to deal with any of these ISPs onine, you just pass on your extra costs to the customers of these ISPs. The cool thing about doing business based on email address is its easy for you to find out who you should be charging more!
This move by the ISPs is just a lame, cheap, extortionist way of trying to produce some more revenue. If you're on one of these ISPs, vote with your feet.
if you want to know why things are the way they are in this country, follow the money. Yeh, it'd be awesome if you guys could get money taken out of politics. I'm in Australia and we have the problem too - I'm sure it's a problem in any typical Western democracy - but boy, if you guys could lead the way on this one it sure would be appreciated.
If you could at least make Haliburton a government agency that'd probably be a good start. I'm sure they'd still piss away a bit of money, but at least it would just be getting wasted on typical useless government bureaucracy instead of going into the pockets of corporate fiends.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that Microsoft's big, big hold on everyone in business at the moment is Office+Outlook, it seems that NOT supporting Thunderbird is just a completely bizarre course of action.
Every time a post comes up on Slashdot about Thunderbird, I see the EXACT same comments - "our business uses Outlook, we've tried Thunderbird but it doesn't compete. If it did, we'd switch in a second."
Our business is the same; we'd happily make the switch away from Outlook+Exchange if Thunderbird was a viable alternative. It's not - yet - so we can't.
Mozilla pumping funds into Thunderbird development (with an Exchange replacement) to me seems like the best and fastest way to capture even more desktop space - but I guess they're having such great success with Firefox that they want to keep that going as best they can.
I don't know if its hugely innovative (ie, I don't know if its just copied from someone else, I'm pretty sure they bought it at the very least :) but when I saw this video of the Microsoft photosynth stuff, I was happy to see that they're trying to at least lead the way in some areas, rather than just blindly copying Google.
It sounds like a great idea, but "just because everyone else is doing it" isn't really a good reason. I believe there were a lot of problems with Flash video on Linux (though I think these are largely resolved now?).
I think the crux of the issue here is they should be releasing their videos in a DRM free, open format that anyone can access on any platform in any player. If they use an open video system that anyone can make a player for, it'll work everywhere, every time (if they went one step further and released their video under a CC-esque license that allowed format shifting, the community would even make be able to make and distribute alternate versions of their videof for them to play on portable devices, etc, that they might not want to support).
The problem is there are very few open video codecs/standards that they can use. MPEG, WM, VP6 for flash, etc - are all heavily patented and heavily regulated.
I haven't seen any information as to why they chose not to use it for iPlayer, but one possible theory (plucked out of the air) is that they have patent concerns (as outlined on their license page) and don't want to get sued if someone from MPEG comes after them, for example.
If they're serious about market share, surely they should be going after the #1 calendar application rather than smaller ones first?
I would love to ditch Exchange for Sunbird + some other open solution. As soon as SOMEONE makes a replacement for Exchange that even has SOME of the functionality that Exchange offers plus a nice decent front end application, I'm sure zillions of people will switch. At the moment though Outlook+Exchange just kicks the ass of pretty much everything else.
(I think this shouldn't just be Mozilla's #1 priority - it should be the open source #1 priority. Exchange is still the main reason businesses stick with Microsoft. Including ours. We'd switch in a second if there was something remotely equivalent to Exchange - that doesn't require 4000 man hours of dicking around to make it work.)
I assume nothing. People are still going to record stuff, encode it, and put it on piratebay. So just like with music and movies and everything else, its still easier to pirate it and you end up with a better version of it that will happily interoperate on all your devices.
Here's a question - can Last.fm operate out of the UK, and put a mirror server on US soil?
I assume that a server in the US still needs to abide by US law, even if the parent company doesn't have to.
Does anyone know why the BBC didn't end up using Dirac for this project? It's the first I've heard of the iPlayer, but I would have thought their Dirac work would have been perfect for this.
I can't tell if you actually, genuinely think this is a good system to have, and if so if it's just because you have been/are a lobbyist yourself.
As a non-American innocent bystander it just seems like a really weird way to operate. At the end of the day despite what you say, all I see is Google spending what I assume is a lot of money on what I assume will be their attempts to change laws to improve their chances in the market.
I suspect/hope Google will be working on changing draconian copyright laws. But is that really the best way for these laws to change?
I mean, I don't have any alternatives. But this way it just seems big business gets to have more influence over the rules than they should.
Now all of a sudden the people of Australia are expecting the government to step up and drop billions of dollars wiring up the rest of the country? I think its ludicrous of Labour to propose spending $4 billion of my hard earned tax dollars wiring up people who probably voted for the government to wash their hands of the telecoms market.
This is what happens when you privatise industries. Everyone should have thought about this before they voted for someone who wanted to privatise it.
Further - I saw that clip. It was a single sound bite. You shouldn't make any judgment calls based on a tiny clip that the media chose to present to you.
I don't mean the equation of you giving your money to the tax man - I mean the money that appears to control the US government that comes from lobby groups controlled by the RIAA, big military business, etc.
I hesitate to call them "bribes", but I don't really see how these companies can have such a massive influence over what politicians end up doing to you guys.
"Leaked to BitTorrent" just gives the anti-piracy jerks more ammunition to use against BitTorrent. At the very least, change it to "Leaked via P2P" or even better, just "Leaked".
Everyone knows what you mean. I actually use BitTorrent exclusively for legitimate downloads (yes, I realise that sounds unlikely, but it's true) and I would be very disappointed if use of it was criminalised because of clueless lawmakers who are deriding their information from subjects like this.
Yes, stopping kids from getting their hands on violent video games will be the magic bullet that stops violence, aggressive behaviour, bullying, etc.
The practical effect of this seems to me to obviously be that people that want to play violent video games will now just get them through non-official channels - ie, they'll pirate them. Or download any number of violent video games that are made available for free on the Internet to anyone in the world.
Politicians - please stop wasting your time and our money and get back to doing something else. Leave the parenting to the parents and let people accept some responsibility for their actions, eh?
I'm in the market for a 'convergence' product myself, and in a similar boat to you - I can't find one that does exactly what I want. I was holding out hope for the iPhone hoping it would have a rich development environment - the hardware/OS base looks nice and solid and with a nice SDK/dev tool set it would mean I'd be able to effectively cherry pick the functionality _I_ wanted and just drop it on the phone.
I can't find any phone that, by default, has the set of software features I have. There's too many mobile OSes so there's little common ground - if someone writes an awesome app for Palm, I can't get it on my PocketPC.
a) you're right
everything else - huh? you started this by boldly making claims about Firefox as if they were globally applicable - I was merely pointing out that they're not, just so at least there was a single counter-point which proved your claims wrong
1) whoever wrote this article for being a clueless attention whore
2) Slashdot, for putting it on the front page
3) everyone that commented on it despite its complete idiocy and thus drew more attention to it
Sorry, but this is just pure anti-Windows BS. If you're having problems running Firefox under XP, you either have hardware problems or other software problems.
Welcome to the new world of RSS browsed-headlines
So if you're a business operating in the US that has to deal with any of these ISPs onine, you just pass on your extra costs to the customers of these ISPs. The cool thing about doing business based on email address is its easy for you to find out who you should be charging more!
This move by the ISPs is just a lame, cheap, extortionist way of trying to produce some more revenue. If you're on one of these ISPs, vote with your feet.
If you could at least make Haliburton a government agency that'd probably be a good start. I'm sure they'd still piss away a bit of money, but at least it would just be getting wasted on typical useless government bureaucracy instead of going into the pockets of corporate fiends.