Having just upgraded from the first iPhone to the 3GS I have to say I am disappointed with the battery life on the new handset, it's certainly not the improvement I was expecting from reviews. With Wi-Fi and location services turned off and very light usage I can get just about 2 days out of it, normal use sees it being recharged every night which is inferior to the old model. I was contemplating returning it to O2 but before I did that I wanted to know if there are any standard tests to see if my battery is that much worse than normal, e.g. the phone plays a movie for 5.5 hours at 75% brightness or play music through headphones for 9 hours from full charge etc. Any thoughts? Reviews also seemed to suggest there was a better battery meter in this model but I haven't seen it, 20% charge remaining still seems to mean run for a recarger, not you have 20% of the usage time you would get from a full charge left.
Fink mirrors the Debian release cycle so you have stable packages whiich are generally a few versions behind current and unstable (which I have always fount to be stable) which are generally bleeding edge. The unstable release of Ruby is 1.8.4 which is current.
To configure Fink to use unstable, edit/sw/etc/fink.conf, add unstable/main and unstable/crypto to the Trees: line, and then run fink selfupdate; fink index; fink scanpackages.
You should now find you have more than 5000 packaes instead of 1800 to choose from and the latest version oof PERL, Ruby, KDE etc. are all there. You will have to update all your old packages to use them though, with Fink you can either choose stable or unstable, not a mixture. Having said that I have over 1000 unstable Fink packages installed on this mac aand they work fine.
I don't think KDE using the native window manager and QT on a mac is close to ready yet, a number of people do seem to be working on a port for KDE 4.0, there is a small amount of information at the KDE Wiki.
I agree and was puzzled the author had X11 down at no. 10 on his developers list. Once you have X11, try Fink or Darwin ports and installing KDE and gnome is as easy as with Debian.
Once you have spent around a day watching fink compile all the libraries and applications for you KDE runs superbly on a mac. You can either alloiw it to manage the desktop and run fulll screen or simply run a toolbar in the manner of the dock. I would then highly recommend Kate - the KDE advanced text editor which is excellent for Perl and Bluefish for XML and X/HTML, although some pprefer Quanta plus which also comes with tthe Fink KDE bundle.. The KConsole is a very good terminal application also.
While there are still a few cut and paste issues between X11 and native mac application overall the integration is excellent, you can use expose on X11 and native windows and most desktop manager applications allow you to separate them between desktops, plus you get access to all the excellent mac fonts.
As a Perl author I was disappointed in the mac at first. Now I have the combination of KDE, Gnome an native mac tools it has moved to be my preferred development platform. I would seriously recommend anyone with a mac and an interest in development to look at fink, to my mind it is more exciting than bootcamp will ever be.
I'm no expert, but I'm not sure this is true. The kernel for Macs and BSD is very different, the MACH Kernel is no BSD kernel. The parts Apple took from BSD relate to Networking and the user tools we often use from a shell, i.e. the shell and common unix commands most Mac users play with from time to time. The diaply code (Quartz, Aqua etc.) was their own and I think they have kept this closed.
For the BSD stuff they took, they wern't required to post anything back to the BSD communitity but my imprssion is that they have in every case. I don't think this would have been any different if they had taken a GPL equivelent, unless the GPL prevented them linking to a closed source kernel.
The code they have taken for Safari was GPL and I think they have contributed back to this. There have been numerous discussions around this as they did make huge changes optimed for Power PC which they contributed back but were of very little use to Linux on Intel and I would be interested to hear what people think now they have contributed back their Intel code.
I have to say that I am no expert in this, working mainly in the identity and directory field. However Apple's work with Directory Servers and Clients is on a par with the open source contributions of SUN, Novell and OpenDirectory and something I watch with great interest (and far beyond what I would expect from a company which mainly makes home based Macs and iPods.
I think this is a case of demand and supply. We certainly have the technology to darken windows when sunlight gets bright, or to warm faces in the cold, there just isn't the demand to put these into commercial production.
Now look at the market for glasses. 20 years ago there wasn't such a thing as designer glasses and opticians (at least here in the UK) were very limited practices. Now designer glasses are all the rage and there are a huge range of opticians on the high street.
How if people are prepared to pay £500 for a normal pair of glasses which say Armani or DKNY, surely there is a market for glasses which give you genuine 20/20 vision or better. I would easily go up to £1000 for that dream (having been ruled unsuitable for laser correction or contact lenses) and I would bet there are a million people like me worldwide. So there is your billion pound market, gets your attention better than dark glass or face warmers.
As a Brit myself I have to take issue with the fact that we live in a "proudly secular country" as the editor has added. Consider the following;
The Queen is the head of state, but is also the head of the Church of England.
The unelected second chamber is the House of Lords, which includes numerous people appointed from the Church (this has changed slightly in recent times, but not radically). The House of Lords is also the final court of the Land, before the European Court in recent times
There is a strong link between Church Schools and Education, often supported by the middle-classes because Church run state schools are seen as the acceptable alternative to going private (my children go to a Church of England School, for example)
Our current Prime Minister and Education Secretary are both very religious and send their children to denominational schools.
Our court system is also linked to the church, when doing Jury service recently I was asked to swear on the Bible to state I would try the defendant fairly, although alternatives were available to Bible was the default.
So please tell me where this proud secular country is. It disappoints me when editors add these comments which don't add to the core values of a story.
Thanks, I didn't know that. I don't remember ever having to do that through my previous Safari upgrades and I agree that enabling tabs by default would be the most logical behaviour, especially as even IE will have this feature and it makes a lot of sense on a widescreen, as favoured by Apple.
I bought the new 20" Core Duo iMac yesterday, after much searching of the streets of London. My initial thoughts are as follows;
The machine is beautifully constructed, it is very clear a lot of thought went into it. The screen is very, very nice, the latest Sony machines seem a little nicer but it is better than I am used to from flat screens. It took about 4 minutes to get from opening the box to up and running which is very impressive. However, one point to note, it is much heavier than you might expect. I had visions of moving it round to watch movies on, use in the living room etc and I am now having doubts about the practicallity of this.
Start up is fast, as notes in other reviews. Safari is blazingly fast. However, Safari seem to be an earlier build, my version doesn't seem to have any tabs. The build reports as 2.05, has anyone else noted this about the Intel build, I couldn't find anything on the Web.
A bought an Airport base station and it was up and running with my broadband router in about 10 minutes (would have been sooner apart from a basic mistake on my part). I was very impressed with the Airport integration, there are cheaper solutions but this was very impressive.
I downloaded and installed Firefox without any issues. I don't think this is a universal binary yet, start time was much slower than Safari but once up and running it seemed at least as fast at page rendering and it has tabs.
There seems to be a shortage of media players at present. No Windows Media Player for the mac and the flip4mac plugin for Quicktime explicitly states that it isn't ready for Intel Macs yet. I tried to get Real Player but was fustrated by their awful web site, again it wasn't clear if I ever found the free version if it would work on an Intel iMac.
Installing dashboard widgets was also a little hit and miss. Some worked perfectly, others didn't respond as you might expect (I think the main issue was those with embedded Flash).
I installed Google Earth and this was a revelation. Again, I don't think this is a universal binary but it is hard to tell if it is running under emulation. This proved superb, if you want a single application to demonstrate the quality of the screen combined with the data provided by a decent network connection this is it. I was completely hooked and spend the next few hours simply playing with this.
Overall the machine feels superb in terms of hardware construction, after 5 hours it was barely warmer than a standard flat screen monitor and the fan(s) are very quiet, hard to hear in normal usage. The OS feels fast and responsive and I like the new Mighty Mouse. However, the OS also feels like a work in progress, it feels sparse compared to my previous G4 Mac with Tiger and a number of tools and utilities simply aren't there yet.
However, I feel I made the right choice, after just 5 hours I am hooked in a way I didn't expect to be working with computers day in day out. The machine has a real "WOW" factor as you put it through its paces and I have yet to find an app (Office, Mail, Web etc.) which feels less snappy than its Windows equivelent.
I can't agree that Netware is completly at a dead end. To be sure it isn't a rapidly growing market but it isn't shrinking so fast either, the last time I met my Novell salesperson he said they still had over 400 Million Netware user licences under maintenance. Even if they lose 10% per year that still deserves heavy R&D.
Novell has a clear strategy here, with the latest Netware you can run either the Netware or SuSE kernel. My guess is that eventually Netware will ship with a Linux core by default but a number of people will continue to buy it for all the value add features. Within 5 years you will then see a single core O/S sold and you will then be able to buy services such as eDirectory, file and print management, Zenworks etc. as the value add profitable services.
Novell simply can't move out of Netware quickly, many infrastructure systems rely on it (I know of one airline booking systems and 2 cash machine networks in the Uk which still rely on it and I'm sure there are many, many more).
IBM made a huge mistake in abandoning OS/2 with nowhere for its customers (especially embedded system / POS customers) to move to. Novell has proved once again the value of their maintenance contracts by fully supporting all their existing OS customers until they have a smooth migration plan to SuSE.
I don't think video is the killer app for these things, but photos are with video as a useful secondary function.
I know they have a iPod photo already, but it is essentially a iPod which happens to be able to display photos in a small screen, there photos are clearly the secondary app to music. Yet digital photography is clearly dominating the photo market but most people still struggle to find the right way to carry and display these photos. Printing them out is time consuming and expensive, either at home or the photo lab.
The ideal solution is a device with a screen of a similar size to a standard print which you can pass around friends and family to show off your collection. The interface should be so simple grandparents can use it, and Apple have a clear lead in this area. Add in an interface to iPhoto which rivals the iTunes interface and I think you have a winner.
If you can then watch movies on it then I think this will be a useful secondary app, but not what the real selling point will be for most users.
Since the article didn't really say anything about managing LDAP or playing with OpenLDAP, I thought I would share a useful utility my team has recently started using for LDAP management and administration.
It's a really nice open source LDAP administration and management utility that not only lets you do the easy entry editing stuff but a lot of the more complex tree management operations. It also has some really nice search building interfaces. I'm in no way connected with this project but it has replaced a number of free and commercial utilities we used to use.
It also lets you play with populating an OpenLDAP installation so you can begin to understand some of its real power and tuning potential.
I agree, but rather than add this to Windows NT, which they don't support any more, perhaps they could make it a new feature in, like, Windows 2000 and improve it for Win 2003. If they could add a secure Kerberos authentication service to it and even allow it to be used standalone for applications (giving it a nice nickname like erm, EVE) they might have a real world beater on their hands.
"run on SPARC, which is a poorly designed processor"
I know this is Slashdot, but do you have anything to back this up. Everything I have read about SPARC seems to suggest that it is a very well designed processor although manufacturers seem to have failed to push uit to the MHz that Intel and AMD have achieved.
You also overlook the fact that SPARC is not owned by an individual manufacturer but by the SPARC Consortium. This means that the AMD / Intel issues described in this thread simply could not exist as everything is genuine SPARC. I recently bought some Fujitsu PrimePower SPARC boxes in preference to SUN boxes, they are certified by SUN to run all versions of Solaris and indeed they are currently running Solaris 9 like a dream. In addition they are outperforming some other manufacturers XEON boxes we also use to run JAVA software on an out and out price comparison basis and have had 100% relaibility of 16 months, not something I can say for every Linux / XEON box I have use (based on a very small sample size of 3 PrimePower to 5 XXX Vendor XEON, so take with a pinch of salt).
SUN's roadmap for SPARC continues to look very good and their low end boxes compete very favourable with even their own AMD based boxes. So I remain confused as to what's not to like, I will certainly be bying them again (especially with Solaris 10 shaping up very nicely).
An interesting phone in that it only has start and stop call buttons plus two "soft keys" and the wheel. To enter numbers you spin the wheel until you come to the right number and then press the soft key to move on. This means it has to sync with something else really to make it work and yet the styling is aimed at the opposite end of the market from people who spend their lives synching things together, perhaps the intended market would get their butler or PA to do this or only ever use them for incoming calls. Anyway, although I've seen them in shops I never saw one in the wild.
OK, fair point. There are some eyewitness accounts from The Guardian here and they seem to agree that a number of people did make it off the the bus, but it still looks fairly bad.
Apologies for any overreaction, no real work done here today as I'm still waiting for news from one friend 6 hours on.
Here is an image from the BBC's web site. As you can see the entire top deck has been completely destroyed and much of the back of the bus. I hope it isn't as bad as it looks but an explosion that would completely blow the top off a double decker has to do major damage to the people on board.
I'm in the UK (central London as I write this) and I have to say I'm not used to it. The IRA did try to blow stuff up but generally gave warnings, as they did when they tried to blow up Canary Whalf and the Natwest Tower (now Tower 42) (what is it with terrorists and tall buildings). They attacked military targets as they called them, although many of these were dubious in their military connections e.g. Hourseguards Parade. Northern Ireland was a different story but London never felt like it does today. This is not to excuse any of their actions, they killed 3,000 people, all of whom should be here today.
So I hope all the people of America today will stand with us as we did through 9/11. We have many differences as the discussions at the G8 will show but we must never get used to this feeling or democracy as we all practice it will have lost.
7 bombs and 2 deaths, the BBC web site has got this wrong. The bus in Russel Square was a double decker, packed with people leaving the tube and it was completely destroyed, these busses hold around 90 people when packed. The aAldgate explosion looked very bad an eyewitnesses were talking of 20 deaths. They are still cutting people from the tube at Russel square and there any many abulances at King Cross.
I am writing this from an office block over the road from Bishopsgate and there is almost nothing on the roads apart from police and emergency veicles.I got caught halfway to work this morning and had to walk the rest of the way, I wish I had walked home instead but for a long time the announcements were talking of power failure rather than bombs and everyone assumed they would get the power working again. I guess this was a way of preventing panic.
So I hope and pray the numbers are low but the thoughs of my colleages and I are with those who were caught in these awful events, as they were with the people in 9/11. I will also be going to give blood as soon as they announce where we can do this.
I remember Trumpet winsock, and PC/NFS and OnNet. Back in the Windows 3.11 days you had to use these and if you wanted to run a TCP/IP stack and Novell you had to very carefully fine tune autoexec.bat and use strange driver software. SUN used to give away PCNFS for 10 UKP per copy to universities but I remember paying almost 150 UKP for OnNet, which gave you the TCP stack, a browser (based on Mosaic), telnet client and ftp client.
Then Microsoft started giving away a TCP stack for Windows for Workgroups (or Playgroups as we very cleverly called it at the time) and the market almost died overnight. Interestingly enough the first betas of Windows 95 or Chicago didn't include this network stack, they appeared somewhat later. The curious thing is that no one sued Microsoft (as far as I know) for including a TCP stack, but their ham fisted efforts to bundle the browser were a very different story.
A great story, thanks for the link. I wondered what happened to Graphing Calculator in OS X, interesting to see it is still provided as a free download.
One thing I wondered was, is this influenced by commercial considerations? In the US big players include Sun Microsystems with the JAVA Card and RSA Security. Each of these systems are backed with US technologies and both have got closer to Microsoft recently (Bill Gates gave this year's keynote at the RSA Conference, SUN and Microsoft have recently made a number of announcement re. making their Directories and technology work closer together). I can't see the US picking a non US vendor for such a political project.
I'm not privy to the UK discussions, but they may well be considering using a Siemens solution backed with a Siemens X500 infrastructure (to name one European vendor).
I would have thought that multi format card readers could be developed relatively cheaply, but a US company winning this contract would gain 60 Million UK "users" and a real headstart on the 300+ Million European market (as France, Germany etc. would then be under pressure to be compatible with the UK).
Agreed, but this is still not true multi master in the sense of good X500 implementations or eDirectory.
What happens when you have an update to the same entry on 2 masters which are not in sync? In Novell's eDirectory (IMHO the best implementation yet of multi master) the conflict resolution is at attribute level and you can specify a range of rules to say which update application or server wins in the event of conflict. You can even look at audit logs of these events.
With SUN ONE it generally uses 2 phase committ. So you (as an application) update master 1. It then tries to update the other masters. Once this is complete it then return a success code to the LDAP client. I don't know how this works over the WAN (my impression of the WAN functionality was that it is for HUBS and Consumers, I have never tried it for masters).
Either way, you still have a pyramid structure of masters and consumers unless you have four or fewer servers in which case they can all be masters. With something like eDirectory or AD almost every server is a writable master rather than hub or consumer, which I what I would understand to be true multi-master. I prefer this as you can capture the data from a master at any one point and know this a true view of that data, with the eDirectory model you can have updates propagating through the system at all times and no one server can know the full state of the data because some updates may be hours away. This can be especially useful in environments like Finance where audit may want a guarenteed snapshot of your data at midnight on a particular day and this is very easy with the clasic SUN model.
Hmmm, don't know what I am talking about, 7 years running a team of 8 people implementing a global LDAP service for a Fortune 500 Company, beta tester for SUN ONE versions 5.1 and 5.2 (including being the only person to submit a P1 bug on the 5.2 version) speaker at the RSA Conference Europe on Identity Management in 2003 and accepted for 2005, sorry if I need to dig out my cluestick.
With eDirectory and AD, you can update any server and each server then replicated globally. Each have their own mechanism for reconciling conflicts as changes move across the cloud, each with their own drawbacks (although Novell's is more customisable IMHO). However, in theory, you can have 1000 servers all accepting updates.
When Innosoft launched their DS 5 as was, they took the lead with what they called either failover or standby master. This is the code that SUN bought to build DS 5, and also because they didn't have Smith and Howes who were their lead architects on the iPlanet Directory and gained Mark Wahl, who I think still works for them.
With DS 5.1 and 5.2 you still have failover or standby masters, with 5.2 you can have 4. SUN rebranded these as Multi Master in response to marketing critisism from MS and Novell. However, it is not true multi-master in the sense of eDirectory or AD, most installations use one master for writes and the 2nd/3rd/4th as failovers. There is a two phase commit between masters before updates are sent to hubs and consumers with NO conflict resolution, which you abolutly need if you are running multi master over slow WAN links or the link between masters breaks while both masters are up and you need to reconcile them when the network link returns.
Everything else you write is 100% correct, for all my production environments I use SUN ONE 5.2 SP3 and I think they are the fastest on the planet, serving over 1000 searches per second on very cheap Linux hardware (lots of indexes and allids at arount 20% of entry size).
Consoles do suck but people have to lean somewhere, we have written a Web based interface to SSH to command line that manages our global SUN ONE servers but people have to start somewhere and Novell's is much better than SUN ONE.
Slashdot Mirror
Having just upgraded from the first iPhone to the 3GS I have to say I am disappointed with the battery life on the new handset, it's certainly not the improvement I was expecting from reviews. With Wi-Fi and location services turned off and very light usage I can get just about 2 days out of it, normal use sees it being recharged every night which is inferior to the old model. I was contemplating returning it to O2 but before I did that I wanted to know if there are any standard tests to see if my battery is that much worse than normal, e.g. the phone plays a movie for 5.5 hours at 75% brightness or play music through headphones for 9 hours from full charge etc. Any thoughts? Reviews also seemed to suggest there was a better battery meter in this model but I haven't seen it, 20% charge remaining still seems to mean run for a recarger, not you have 20% of the usage time you would get from a full charge left.
You should now find you have more than 5000 packaes instead of 1800 to choose from and the latest version oof PERL, Ruby, KDE etc. are all there. You will have to update all your old packages to use them though, with Fink you can either choose stable or unstable, not a mixture. Having said that I have over 1000 unstable Fink packages installed on this mac aand they work fine.
Happy finking.
I don't think KDE using the native window manager and QT on a mac is close to ready yet, a number of people do seem to be working on a port for KDE 4.0, there is a small amount of information at the KDE Wiki.
I agree and was puzzled the author had X11 down at no. 10 on his developers list. Once you have X11, try Fink or Darwin ports and installing KDE and gnome is as easy as with Debian.
Once you have spent around a day watching fink compile all the libraries and applications for you KDE runs superbly on a mac. You can either alloiw it to manage the desktop and run fulll screen or simply run a toolbar in the manner of the dock. I would then highly recommend Kate - the KDE advanced text editor which is excellent for Perl and Bluefish for XML and X/HTML, although some pprefer Quanta plus which also comes with tthe Fink KDE bundle.. The KConsole is a very good terminal application also.
While there are still a few cut and paste issues between X11 and native mac application overall the integration is excellent, you can use expose on X11 and native windows and most desktop manager applications allow you to separate them between desktops, plus you get access to all the excellent mac fonts.
As a Perl author I was disappointed in the mac at first. Now I have the combination of KDE, Gnome an native mac tools it has moved to be my preferred development platform. I would seriously recommend anyone with a mac and an interest in development to look at fink, to my mind it is more exciting than bootcamp will ever be.
I'm no expert, but I'm not sure this is true. The kernel for Macs and BSD is very different, the MACH Kernel is no BSD kernel. The parts Apple took from BSD relate to Networking and the user tools we often use from a shell, i.e. the shell and common unix commands most Mac users play with from time to time. The diaply code (Quartz, Aqua etc.) was their own and I think they have kept this closed.
For the BSD stuff they took, they wern't required to post anything back to the BSD communitity but my imprssion is that they have in every case. I don't think this would have been any different if they had taken a GPL equivelent, unless the GPL prevented them linking to a closed source kernel.
The code they have taken for Safari was GPL and I think they have contributed back to this. There have been numerous discussions around this as they did make huge changes optimed for Power PC which they contributed back but were of very little use to Linux on Intel and I would be interested to hear what people think now they have contributed back their Intel code.
I have to say that I am no expert in this, working mainly in the identity and directory field. However Apple's work with Directory Servers and Clients is on a par with the open source contributions of SUN, Novell and OpenDirectory and something I watch with great interest (and far beyond what I would expect from a company which mainly makes home based Macs and iPods.
I think this is a case of demand and supply. We certainly have the technology to darken windows when sunlight gets bright, or to warm faces in the cold, there just isn't the demand to put these into commercial production.
Now look at the market for glasses. 20 years ago there wasn't such a thing as designer glasses and opticians (at least here in the UK) were very limited practices. Now designer glasses are all the rage and there are a huge range of opticians on the high street.
How if people are prepared to pay £500 for a normal pair of glasses which say Armani or DKNY, surely there is a market for glasses which give you genuine 20/20 vision or better. I would easily go up to £1000 for that dream (having been ruled unsuitable for laser correction or contact lenses) and I would bet there are a million people like me worldwide. So there is your billion pound market, gets your attention better than dark glass or face warmers.
So please tell me where this proud secular country is. It disappoints me when editors add these comments which don't add to the core values of a story.
Thanks, I didn't know that. I don't remember ever having to do that through my previous Safari upgrades and I agree that enabling tabs by default would be the most logical behaviour, especially as even IE will have this feature and it makes a lot of sense on a widescreen, as favoured by Apple.
I bought the new 20" Core Duo iMac yesterday, after much searching of the streets of London. My initial thoughts are as follows;
The machine is beautifully constructed, it is very clear a lot of thought went into it. The screen is very, very nice, the latest Sony machines seem a little nicer but it is better than I am used to from flat screens. It took about 4 minutes to get from opening the box to up and running which is very impressive. However, one point to note, it is much heavier than you might expect. I had visions of moving it round to watch movies on, use in the living room etc and I am now having doubts about the practicallity of this.
Start up is fast, as notes in other reviews. Safari is blazingly fast. However, Safari seem to be an earlier build, my version doesn't seem to have any tabs. The build reports as 2.05, has anyone else noted this about the Intel build, I couldn't find anything on the Web.
A bought an Airport base station and it was up and running with my broadband router in about 10 minutes (would have been sooner apart from a basic mistake on my part). I was very impressed with the Airport integration, there are cheaper solutions but this was very impressive.
I downloaded and installed Firefox without any issues. I don't think this is a universal binary yet, start time was much slower than Safari but once up and running it seemed at least as fast at page rendering and it has tabs.
There seems to be a shortage of media players at present. No Windows Media Player for the mac and the flip4mac plugin for Quicktime explicitly states that it isn't ready for Intel Macs yet. I tried to get Real Player but was fustrated by their awful web site, again it wasn't clear if I ever found the free version if it would work on an Intel iMac.
Installing dashboard widgets was also a little hit and miss. Some worked perfectly, others didn't respond as you might expect (I think the main issue was those with embedded Flash).
I installed Google Earth and this was a revelation. Again, I don't think this is a universal binary but it is hard to tell if it is running under emulation. This proved superb, if you want a single application to demonstrate the quality of the screen combined with the data provided by a decent network connection this is it. I was completely hooked and spend the next few hours simply playing with this.
Overall the machine feels superb in terms of hardware construction, after 5 hours it was barely warmer than a standard flat screen monitor and the fan(s) are very quiet, hard to hear in normal usage. The OS feels fast and responsive and I like the new Mighty Mouse. However, the OS also feels like a work in progress, it feels sparse compared to my previous G4 Mac with Tiger and a number of tools and utilities simply aren't there yet.
However, I feel I made the right choice, after just 5 hours I am hooked in a way I didn't expect to be working with computers day in day out. The machine has a real "WOW" factor as you put it through its paces and I have yet to find an app (Office, Mail, Web etc.) which feels less snappy than its Windows equivelent.
I can't agree that Netware is completly at a dead end. To be sure it isn't a rapidly growing market but it isn't shrinking so fast either, the last time I met my Novell salesperson he said they still had over 400 Million Netware user licences under maintenance. Even if they lose 10% per year that still deserves heavy R&D.
Novell has a clear strategy here, with the latest Netware you can run either the Netware or SuSE kernel. My guess is that eventually Netware will ship with a Linux core by default but a number of people will continue to buy it for all the value add features. Within 5 years you will then see a single core O/S sold and you will then be able to buy services such as eDirectory, file and print management, Zenworks etc. as the value add profitable services.
Novell simply can't move out of Netware quickly, many infrastructure systems rely on it (I know of one airline booking systems and 2 cash machine networks in the Uk which still rely on it and I'm sure there are many, many more).
IBM made a huge mistake in abandoning OS/2 with nowhere for its customers (especially embedded system / POS customers) to move to. Novell has proved once again the value of their maintenance contracts by fully supporting all their existing OS customers until they have a smooth migration plan to SuSE.
I don't think video is the killer app for these things, but photos are with video as a useful secondary function.
I know they have a iPod photo already, but it is essentially a iPod which happens to be able to display photos in a small screen, there photos are clearly the secondary app to music. Yet digital photography is clearly dominating the photo market but most people still struggle to find the right way to carry and display these photos. Printing them out is time consuming and expensive, either at home or the photo lab.
The ideal solution is a device with a screen of a similar size to a standard print which you can pass around friends and family to show off your collection. The interface should be so simple grandparents can use it, and Apple have a clear lead in this area. Add in an interface to iPhoto which rivals the iTunes interface and I think you have a winner.
If you can then watch movies on it then I think this will be a useful secondary app, but not what the real selling point will be for most users.
Since the article didn't really say anything about managing LDAP or playing with OpenLDAP, I thought I would share a useful utility my team has recently started using for LDAP management and administration.
Have a look at JXplorer (or alternate Sourceforge link).
It's a really nice open source LDAP administration and management utility that not only lets you do the easy entry editing stuff but a lot of the more complex tree management operations. It also has some really nice search building interfaces. I'm in no way connected with this project but it has replaced a number of free and commercial utilities we used to use.
It also lets you play with populating an OpenLDAP installation so you can begin to understand some of its real power and tuning potential.
I agree, but rather than add this to Windows NT, which they don't support any more, perhaps they could make it a new feature in, like, Windows 2000 and improve it for Win 2003. If they could add a secure Kerberos authentication service to it and even allow it to be used standalone for applications (giving it a nice nickname like erm, EVE) they might have a real world beater on their hands.
"run on SPARC, which is a poorly designed processor"
I know this is Slashdot, but do you have anything to back this up. Everything I have read about SPARC seems to suggest that it is a very well designed processor although manufacturers seem to have failed to push uit to the MHz that Intel and AMD have achieved.
You also overlook the fact that SPARC is not owned by an individual manufacturer but by the SPARC Consortium. This means that the AMD / Intel issues described in this thread simply could not exist as everything is genuine SPARC. I recently bought some Fujitsu PrimePower SPARC boxes in preference to SUN boxes, they are certified by SUN to run all versions of Solaris and indeed they are currently running Solaris 9 like a dream. In addition they are outperforming some other manufacturers XEON boxes we also use to run JAVA software on an out and out price comparison basis and have had 100% relaibility of 16 months, not something I can say for every Linux / XEON box I have use (based on a very small sample size of 3 PrimePower to 5 XXX Vendor XEON, so take with a pinch of salt).
SUN's roadmap for SPARC continues to look very good and their low end boxes compete very favourable with even their own AMD based boxes. So I remain confused as to what's not to like, I will certainly be bying them again (especially with Solaris 10 shaping up very nicely).
" Come to think of it, the iPod's Clickwheel would probably do okay for a cell phone. Just get it to emulate an old rotary phone or something."
Like this one from Nokia.
An interesting phone in that it only has start and stop call buttons plus two "soft keys" and the wheel. To enter numbers you spin the wheel until you come to the right number and then press the soft key to move on. This means it has to sync with something else really to make it work and yet the styling is aimed at the opposite end of the market from people who spend their lives synching things together, perhaps the intended market would get their butler or PA to do this or only ever use them for incoming calls. Anyway, although I've seen them in shops I never saw one in the wild.
OK, fair point. There are some eyewitness accounts from The Guardian here and they seem to agree that a number of people did make it off the the bus, but it still looks fairly bad.
Apologies for any overreaction, no real work done here today as I'm still waiting for news from one friend 6 hours on.
Here is an image from the BBC's web site. As you can see the entire top deck has been completely destroyed and much of the back of the bus. I hope it isn't as bad as it looks but an explosion that would completely blow the top off a double decker has to do major damage to the people on board.
I'm in the UK (central London as I write this) and I have to say I'm not used to it. The IRA did try to blow stuff up but generally gave warnings, as they did when they tried to blow up Canary Whalf and the Natwest Tower (now Tower 42) (what is it with terrorists and tall buildings). They attacked military targets as they called them, although many of these were dubious in their military connections e.g. Hourseguards Parade. Northern Ireland was a different story but London never felt like it does today. This is not to excuse any of their actions, they killed 3,000 people, all of whom should be here today.
So I hope all the people of America today will stand with us as we did through 9/11. We have many differences as the discussions at the G8 will show but we must never get used to this feeling or democracy as we all practice it will have lost.
7 bombs and 2 deaths, the BBC web site has got this wrong. The bus in Russel Square was a double decker, packed with people leaving the tube and it was completely destroyed, these busses hold around 90 people when packed. The aAldgate explosion looked very bad an eyewitnesses were talking of 20 deaths. They are still cutting people from the tube at Russel square and there any many abulances at King Cross.
I am writing this from an office block over the road from Bishopsgate and there is almost nothing on the roads apart from police and emergency veicles.I got caught halfway to work this morning and had to walk the rest of the way, I wish I had walked home instead but for a long time the announcements were talking of power failure rather than bombs and everyone assumed they would get the power working again. I guess this was a way of preventing panic.
So I hope and pray the numbers are low but the thoughs of my colleages and I are with those who were caught in these awful events, as they were with the people in 9/11. I will also be going to give blood as soon as they announce where we can do this.
I remember Trumpet winsock, and PC/NFS and OnNet. Back in the Windows 3.11 days you had to use these and if you wanted to run a TCP/IP stack and Novell you had to very carefully fine tune autoexec.bat and use strange driver software. SUN used to give away PCNFS for 10 UKP per copy to universities but I remember paying almost 150 UKP for OnNet, which gave you the TCP stack, a browser (based on Mosaic), telnet client and ftp client.
Then Microsoft started giving away a TCP stack for Windows for Workgroups (or Playgroups as we very cleverly called it at the time) and the market almost died overnight. Interestingly enough the first betas of Windows 95 or Chicago didn't include this network stack, they appeared somewhat later. The curious thing is that no one sued Microsoft (as far as I know) for including a TCP stack, but their ham fisted efforts to bundle the browser were a very different story.
A great story, thanks for the link. I wondered what happened to Graphing Calculator in OS X, interesting to see it is still provided as a free download.
One thing I wondered was, is this influenced by commercial considerations? In the US big players include Sun Microsystems with the JAVA Card and RSA Security. Each of these systems are backed with US technologies and both have got closer to Microsoft recently (Bill Gates gave this year's keynote at the RSA Conference, SUN and Microsoft have recently made a number of announcement re. making their Directories and technology work closer together). I can't see the US picking a non US vendor for such a political project.
I'm not privy to the UK discussions, but they may well be considering using a Siemens solution backed with a Siemens X500 infrastructure (to name one European vendor).
I would have thought that multi format card readers could be developed relatively cheaply, but a US company winning this contract would gain 60 Million UK "users" and a real headstart on the 300+ Million European market (as France, Germany etc. would then be under pressure to be compatible with the UK).
there is an interesting article about this on The Register here.
It seems the scheme isn't mandatory (yet) so you can request not to be subject to additional X-Rays but they keep this rather quiet.
Agreed, but this is still not true multi master in the sense of good X500 implementations or eDirectory.
What happens when you have an update to the same entry on 2 masters which are not in sync? In Novell's eDirectory (IMHO the best implementation yet of multi master) the conflict resolution is at attribute level and you can specify a range of rules to say which update application or server wins in the event of conflict. You can even look at audit logs of these events.
With SUN ONE it generally uses 2 phase committ. So you (as an application) update master 1. It then tries to update the other masters. Once this is complete it then return a success code to the LDAP client. I don't know how this works over the WAN (my impression of the WAN functionality was that it is for HUBS and Consumers, I have never tried it for masters).
Either way, you still have a pyramid structure of masters and consumers unless you have four or fewer servers in which case they can all be masters. With something like eDirectory or AD almost every server is a writable master rather than hub or consumer, which I what I would understand to be true multi-master. I prefer this as you can capture the data from a master at any one point and know this a true view of that data, with the eDirectory model you can have updates propagating through the system at all times and no one server can know the full state of the data because some updates may be hours away. This can be especially useful in environments like Finance where audit may want a guarenteed snapshot of your data at midnight on a particular day and this is very easy with the clasic SUN model.
Hmmm, don't know what I am talking about, 7 years running a team of 8 people implementing a global LDAP service for a Fortune 500 Company, beta tester for SUN ONE versions 5.1 and 5.2 (including being the only person to submit a P1 bug on the 5.2 version) speaker at the RSA Conference Europe on Identity Management in 2003 and accepted for 2005, sorry if I need to dig out my cluestick.
With eDirectory and AD, you can update any server and each server then replicated globally. Each have their own mechanism for reconciling conflicts as changes move across the cloud, each with their own drawbacks (although Novell's is more customisable IMHO). However, in theory, you can have 1000 servers all accepting updates.
When Innosoft launched their DS 5 as was, they took the lead with what they called either failover or standby master. This is the code that SUN bought to build DS 5, and also because they didn't have Smith and Howes who were their lead architects on the iPlanet Directory and gained Mark Wahl, who I think still works for them.
With DS 5.1 and 5.2 you still have failover or standby masters, with 5.2 you can have 4. SUN rebranded these as Multi Master in response to marketing critisism from MS and Novell. However, it is not true multi-master in the sense of eDirectory or AD, most installations use one master for writes and the 2nd/3rd/4th as failovers. There is a two phase commit between masters before updates are sent to hubs and consumers with NO conflict resolution, which you abolutly need if you are running multi master over slow WAN links or the link between masters breaks while both masters are up and you need to reconcile them when the network link returns.
Everything else you write is 100% correct, for all my production environments I use SUN ONE 5.2 SP3 and I think they are the fastest on the planet, serving over 1000 searches per second on very cheap Linux hardware (lots of indexes and allids at arount 20% of entry size).
Consoles do suck but people have to lean somewhere, we have written a Web based interface to SSH to command line that manages our global SUN ONE servers but people have to start somewhere and Novell's is much better than SUN ONE.