Almost overnight, Microsoft becomes the market leader in ODF-compliant office suites. So now, OracleOffice.org and KOffice will have to code up all sorts of ugly hacks and reverse engineering tricks to maintain compatibility with Microsoft Office ODF documents. Exactly as they had to do to get compatible with.doc and.xls documents.
Microsoft plays dirty. All the time. This was totally expected, of course.
It's ok though; we're still in better shape than we were just a few years ago. A Microsoft ODF document, or even a Microsoft OOXML document, is still at least roughly following a standard that has some documentation somewhere. The free world can develop Microsoft Office compatibility in this space a lot easier than in the.doc and.xls space.
Perhaps everyone is missing the important asset here: AOL Instant Messenger. It's still the leader in instant messaging. I'll bet Microsoft would love to force-march the AIM user base to "Windows Live Instant Messenger" (or whatever they call it).
For a monopolist with a war-chest full of cash like Microsoft, it's worth buying AOL and throwing the rest of the company away just to get AIM users.
This is what is holding Linux back on the desktop though.
No, it isn't.
Desktop Linux was good enough for non-geeks to use a decade ago. What's holding Linux back on the desktop is Microsoft's entrenchment. End of discussion. Most users have a perceived need to stay with Windows because they have some legacy application they feel they need to continue to run, or because they're afraid of change, or because Microsoft continues to strongarm the OEM channel. It has nothing to do with the quality of the operating system. Windows did just fine for years during which much time was still spent fiddling with config.sys, autoexec.bat, system.ini, etc.
Ubuntu is definitely the most user-friendly Linux available, and reports of v9.04 is that they've done an exceptionally good job this time, but desktop Linux has been viable for years now. It isn't about the technology; it's about an entrenched monopolist bullying the industry around.
In case anyone was wondering "40? Why 40 Gigabit?" here's the answer: 40 Gigabit Ethernet reuses existing OC-768 technology. So it's actually not exactly 40 Gbps, it's actually 39.813120 Gbps. The idea is that Ethernet encapsulation and framing are being applied to existing components that are electrically (and optically) OC-768. (For the nitpickers out there, yes, I know there's more to it than that, but let's not get bogged down in details.)
So that's why we're making a stop at 40 Gbps instead of going straight to 100 Gbps. Existing technology is being reused to get a useful product to market faster.
Incidentally, 10 Gigabit Ethernet is similarly based on OC-192 technology, so it's actually 9.953280 Gbps.
If the majority of the energy is being consumed by end users searching through spam quarantines for false positives, then it would make sense to reject spam instead of quarantining it. (Yes, that's what I do on my server.) In that case, you never pay to store the spam (energy savings), your end users never have to search for real mail within the spam (time and energy savings), and in the event of a false positive, the sender knows that the message didn't make it through because they get a bounce. In my opinion, that's better.
It would be quite ironic... MySQL has had to deal with Oracle acquiring InnoDB and then Sleepycat (Berkeley DB)... multiple times they had to rework MySQL's underpinnings because they didn't want Oracle to own key parts of the platform. If Oracle were to be in control of MySQL they'd be able to "un-deprecate" (reprecate?) those engines.
I'd like to see that, actually -- Berkeley DB is an amazingly robust data store. It worked well with MySQL.
Microsoft says that Windows 7 will be small enough to run on the current generation of underpowered laptops that are pretending to be netbooks. I think we can count on this being just one more feature that Microsoft ends up overpromising and underdelivering on. Frankly, I just don't believe that they can do it. They probably don't, either. When they say "Windows 7 will be small footprint enough to run on a netbook" they really mean "We're counting on our ability to strongarm the netbook vendors into fattening up their hardware so it'll run Windows 7 by the time it's released."
Meanwhile, Linux will keep showing up in places where Windows XP can fit but Windows 7 can't. And if it's a big enough market then Microsoft will be forced to keep Windows XP running even longer.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. There is a huge market for operating systems that just give you the brass tacks... get a bare desktop up and running and get out of the way. Something not larded up with stupid extras. But that's not a sustainable business model for a company that still thinks that software is something that has to be bought and sold.
You definitely want to try out the Citadel groupware server. Even if you don't need it for its mail system, address book, calendar, etc... it's got a built in XMPP (Jabber) service that integrates nicely across the entire environment. It also logs all of the instant messages sent through it. Each user can review their own logs too, which is nice. And you have the ability to journal everything that comes through the system, perhaps to an external archiving service (this feature was built with industries like yours in mind, where anything that gets read by anyone *must* be archived).
I maintain that a netbook running Windows, or even a standard Linux build, isn't really a netbook. It's really just a small, underpowered laptop.
The whole point of netbooks was supposed to be that they *weren't* PC's, they were consumer electronics devices. Quickie access to the Internet, a little photo sharing and music playing... all of the things that you didn't really want to drag out a PC to do, but didn't really want to cram onto a phone either... and with a snappy operating system that boots up quickly and gets the job done without calling attention to itself. If you have to run Windows Update on your netbook to protect it from the worm-of-the-week... you've totally missed the point.
I'm more interested in the next generation of netbooks -- the ones that will cost $150-200 and run for eight or nine hours on one battery charge -- running low-power ARM and a designed for small form factor OS like Android. That generation of hardware will prove that a netbook isn't supposed to act like a PC. (And even if Microsoft weasels its way into that market by building Windows for ARM, they'll still find themselves at a disadvantage because x86 Windows software won't run on it. In fact, they'll even be faced with an unprecedented rate of customers returning them for just that reason.)
Let PC's be PC's and let netbooks be netbooks. They're not the same thing.
Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems
Not HP! Anyone but HP!
Remember when Compaq acquired DEC? They quickly went out to all of DEC's unix customers and told them "Good news! We're migrating you to Windows!" A few made the switch, but most of them replied "Fuck you. If you're killing off your own unix business then we're moving to Sun." And most of them did.
Compaq and HP are now merged, and the once-great DEC unix business has all but been dissolved. Is that the fate which awaits Sun if they are acquired by HP? HP is firmly under the control of Microsoft. The day after the merger, they would receive their marching orders from Redmond: quietly suffocate Java and OpenOffice.
Java is currently the lingua franca of business logic, and whether you like it or not, it's a key enabler for Linux's success in the enterprise. Without Java, the data center would slowly be taken over by.NET running on Windows. And although Linux has finally started to gain some traction on the desktop, that too would come to a halt without OpenOffice.
Cisco is a slightly better bet, but I'm not sure they'd really know what to do with Sun. Cisco is fabulous at merging networking companies, but when they buy other types of companies (such as WebEx or the people who built Openchange) they really don't seem to know what to do with them. IBM would have been a good merger. Now I'm worried.
Maybe it has changed since when I looked, but the application handles its own metadata and must enforce its own relations if you need any referential integrity.
Ummm... yeah, that's pretty much exactly the point. If you want the database to enforce relations then you use a relational database. If you want that logic to be in the application's domain then you use something like Berkeley DB.
This isn't a set of tinkertoys to be used for a barista-turned-programmer to develop a shiny but useless Web 2.0 application. It's a library that implements a very simple but insanely reliable data store that embeds directly into the application that uses it. It does its job exceptionally well, and doesn't attempt to do any other tool's job.
I don't like the idea of taking away the computer labs and relying on students to bring their own laptops. It's only a very small step from that, to a regime where the university begins dictating very specific requirements about what hardware and software the student is required to have. For starters, the university is probably going to dictate what operating system is being used (no bonus points for guessing it's going to be an operating system sold by a monopolist from the Pacific Northwest who recently made a large "donation" to the uni for influencing that decision). Pretty soon they're also dictating that the uni's custom suite of security programs are loaded, and other things. At the end of the day it's no longer the student's own computer -- it's a locked-down university computer that the student (or his parents) paid for. No thanks.
That's about the sum of it. Big "enterprise" is steeped in the "no one ever got fired for buying [large lumbering vendor]" culture. One of the advantages of small businesses is that they're nimble and willing to experiment, especially if they can realize cost savings along the way. Bigcos only started using Linux servers after they percolated their way up from the bottom, and that's going to be the case for every new grassroots technology, whether it's open source content management, open source collaboration, etc.
Gunning straight for the enterprise is a losing proposition.
I can't believe there hasn't been any mention of Berkeley DB yet. Guess what, folks: sometimes you just don't need the features of a full relational database. Sometimes all you need is fast, robust, reliable storage of indexed key/value pairs.
I can attest that Berkeley DB does exactly that, and does it really, really well. We use Berkeley DB for all of the data storage in the Citadel system, including the mailboxes themselves. Some sites have tens of gigabytes or even hundreds of gigabytes of data, and Berkeley DB just keeps chugging along, happily and reliably doing its thing. Our biggest problem? People who point at it and say "storing email in a database is unreliable" because they know it constantly explodes when Exchange does it. Well guess what, folks: Berkeley DB ain't the Exchange database (actually, maybe Exchange wouldn't be so unreliable if they switched to Berkeley DB).
Eschewing the full set of RDBMS features isn't slacking. It's choosing the right tool for the job.
The most important thing is that crucial software such as Java and OpenOffice are maintained. Without a BigCo maintaining these, they will fall behind, which ultimately will make open source a weaker proposition. Nothing would please the Beast of Redmond more. IBM would be a good steward of these programs.
Say goodbye to the MS business plan. That's what we're really talking about, the slow death of Windows in the data center. Perhaps we should bring in the life support systems now?
You say that as if it's a bad thing. Microsoft's predatory behavior has set the entire industry back by a decade or more. Without them, there is plenty of room for new innovation (as opposed to Microsoft Innovation (tm) which isn't really innovation at all). Companies will spring up to fill market needs, robust competition will be restored or invigorated, people will be employed... it's a good thing for everyone.
Don't get me wrong they are probable brilliant, but I'm sure when compared head to head in reliability, scalability, features and redundancy there would be a big difference, if only in TCO.
That's because the deck is stacked to begin with. The person writing the RFP has either already decided on Exchange or uses the Exchange feature set verbatim as his list of requirements.
Zimbra is becoming quite popular in service provider environments, and Citadel is currently enjoying a lot of growth in small-to-medium companies and non-profits. The "enterprise" can keep their Exchange for all we care.
We recently did a re-evaluation of our virtualization tech, and VMware won out over Xen. The simple reason: VMware can run Windows on machines that don't have hardware VT. Sure, if we wanted to immediately replace every single server with a new one containing a new cpu, that'd be different, but in this economy you don't really want to throw away perfectly good hardware that still runs VMware at a very nice speed. Xen requires hardware VT, or you aren't running Windows guests, period. VMware doesn't care; it uses hardware VT if you have it, or it does software virtualization otherwise.
It's that simple. Get an internal Wiki up and running immediately, and encourage your team to dump every single little bit of knowledge into it. It won't become a complete repository overnight; it takes time, but as more information flows into it, it will become more and more useful.
Also be sure that your wiki has a full text index so it's easily searchable. This is actually more important than building pages that house tables of contents.
As more and more consumer ISP's block outbound connections on port 25, this will only accelerate the development of newer, smarter zombie bots that know how to read the configuration settings of popular email programs (perhaps even the passwords for popular webmail sites stored in your browser's saved password list) and use those settings to send mail.
This will be even more wonderful because all of that spam will now have your name and email address on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost overnight, Microsoft becomes the market leader in ODF-compliant office suites. So now, OracleOffice.org and KOffice will have to code up all sorts of ugly hacks and reverse engineering tricks to maintain compatibility with Microsoft Office ODF documents. Exactly as they had to do to get compatible with .doc and .xls documents.
.doc and .xls space.
Microsoft plays dirty. All the time. This was totally expected, of course.
It's ok though; we're still in better shape than we were just a few years ago. A Microsoft ODF document, or even a Microsoft OOXML document, is still at least roughly following a standard that has some documentation somewhere. The free world can develop Microsoft Office compatibility in this space a lot easier than in the
Perhaps everyone is missing the important asset here: AOL Instant Messenger. It's still the leader in instant messaging. I'll bet Microsoft would love to force-march the AIM user base to "Windows Live Instant Messenger" (or whatever they call it).
For a monopolist with a war-chest full of cash like Microsoft, it's worth buying AOL and throwing the rest of the company away just to get AIM users.
No, it isn't.
Desktop Linux was good enough for non-geeks to use a decade ago. What's holding Linux back on the desktop is Microsoft's entrenchment. End of discussion. Most users have a perceived need to stay with Windows because they have some legacy application they feel they need to continue to run, or because they're afraid of change, or because Microsoft continues to strongarm the OEM channel. It has nothing to do with the quality of the operating system. Windows did just fine for years during which much time was still spent fiddling with config.sys, autoexec.bat, system.ini, etc.
Ubuntu is definitely the most user-friendly Linux available, and reports of v9.04 is that they've done an exceptionally good job this time, but desktop Linux has been viable for years now. It isn't about the technology; it's about an entrenched monopolist bullying the industry around.
Warez, pr0n, and MP3's. That's all. Take those away and we might as well be using 300 bps modems.
In case anyone was wondering "40? Why 40 Gigabit?" here's the answer: 40 Gigabit Ethernet reuses existing OC-768 technology. So it's actually not exactly 40 Gbps, it's actually 39.813120 Gbps. The idea is that Ethernet encapsulation and framing are being applied to existing components that are electrically (and optically) OC-768. (For the nitpickers out there, yes, I know there's more to it than that, but let's not get bogged down in details.)
So that's why we're making a stop at 40 Gbps instead of going straight to 100 Gbps. Existing technology is being reused to get a useful product to market faster.
Incidentally, 10 Gigabit Ethernet is similarly based on OC-192 technology, so it's actually 9.953280 Gbps.
If the majority of the energy is being consumed by end users searching through spam quarantines for false positives, then it would make sense to reject spam instead of quarantining it. (Yes, that's what I do on my server.) In that case, you never pay to store the spam (energy savings), your end users never have to search for real mail within the spam (time and energy savings), and in the event of a false positive, the sender knows that the message didn't make it through because they get a bounce. In my opinion, that's better.
One of the most wonderful things about Exchange is how they artificially limit the size of the message store in order to get you to buy the "enterprise" version.
Why pay megabucks for that limitation when others give you 256 TB or more?
Are they going to make sure it can handle 5-digit years? In other words, is it Y10K compliant?
It would be quite ironic ... MySQL has had to deal with Oracle acquiring InnoDB and then Sleepycat (Berkeley DB) ... multiple times they had to rework MySQL's underpinnings because they didn't want Oracle to own key parts of the platform. If Oracle were to be in control of MySQL they'd be able to "un-deprecate" (reprecate?) those engines.
I'd like to see that, actually -- Berkeley DB is an amazingly robust data store. It worked well with MySQL.
Microsoft says that Windows 7 will be small enough to run on the current generation of underpowered laptops that are pretending to be netbooks. I think we can count on this being just one more feature that Microsoft ends up overpromising and underdelivering on. Frankly, I just don't believe that they can do it. They probably don't, either. When they say "Windows 7 will be small footprint enough to run on a netbook" they really mean "We're counting on our ability to strongarm the netbook vendors into fattening up their hardware so it'll run Windows 7 by the time it's released."
... get a bare desktop up and running and get out of the way. Something not larded up with stupid extras. But that's not a sustainable business model for a company that still thinks that software is something that has to be bought and sold.
Meanwhile, Linux will keep showing up in places where Windows XP can fit but Windows 7 can't. And if it's a big enough market then Microsoft will be forced to keep Windows XP running even longer.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. There is a huge market for operating systems that just give you the brass tacks
You definitely want to try out the Citadel groupware server. Even if you don't need it for its mail system, address book, calendar, etc... it's got a built in XMPP (Jabber) service that integrates nicely across the entire environment. It also logs all of the instant messages sent through it. Each user can review their own logs too, which is nice. And you have the ability to journal everything that comes through the system, perhaps to an external archiving service (this feature was built with industries like yours in mind, where anything that gets read by anyone *must* be archived).
... GPL 3, to be exact.
And it's free software
I maintain that a netbook running Windows, or even a standard Linux build, isn't really a netbook. It's really just a small, underpowered laptop.
... all of the things that you didn't really want to drag out a PC to do, but didn't really want to cram onto a phone either ... and with a snappy operating system that boots up quickly and gets the job done without calling attention to itself. If you have to run Windows Update on your netbook to protect it from the worm-of-the-week ... you've totally missed the point.
The whole point of netbooks was supposed to be that they *weren't* PC's, they were consumer electronics devices. Quickie access to the Internet, a little photo sharing and music playing
I'm more interested in the next generation of netbooks -- the ones that will cost $150-200 and run for eight or nine hours on one battery charge -- running low-power ARM and a designed for small form factor OS like Android. That generation of hardware will prove that a netbook isn't supposed to act like a PC. (And even if Microsoft weasels its way into that market by building Windows for ARM, they'll still find themselves at a disadvantage because x86 Windows software won't run on it. In fact, they'll even be faced with an unprecedented rate of customers returning them for just that reason.)
Let PC's be PC's and let netbooks be netbooks. They're not the same thing.
It would have to be someone who is as effective at Linus at managing DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!!!
Not HP! Anyone but HP!
.NET running on Windows. And although Linux has finally started to gain some traction on the desktop, that too would come to a halt without OpenOffice.
Remember when Compaq acquired DEC? They quickly went out to all of DEC's unix customers and told them "Good news! We're migrating you to Windows!" A few made the switch, but most of them replied "Fuck you. If you're killing off your own unix business then we're moving to Sun." And most of them did.
Compaq and HP are now merged, and the once-great DEC unix business has all but been dissolved. Is that the fate which awaits Sun if they are acquired by HP? HP is firmly under the control of Microsoft. The day after the merger, they would receive their marching orders from Redmond: quietly suffocate Java and OpenOffice.
Java is currently the lingua franca of business logic, and whether you like it or not, it's a key enabler for Linux's success in the enterprise. Without Java, the data center would slowly be taken over by
Cisco is a slightly better bet, but I'm not sure they'd really know what to do with Sun. Cisco is fabulous at merging networking companies, but when they buy other types of companies (such as WebEx or the people who built Openchange) they really don't seem to know what to do with them. IBM would have been a good merger. Now I'm worried.
Ummm ... yeah, that's pretty much exactly the point. If you want the database to enforce relations then you use a relational database. If you want that logic to be in the application's domain then you use something like Berkeley DB.
This isn't a set of tinkertoys to be used for a barista-turned-programmer to develop a shiny but useless Web 2.0 application. It's a library that implements a very simple but insanely reliable data store that embeds directly into the application that uses it. It does its job exceptionally well, and doesn't attempt to do any other tool's job.
I don't like the idea of taking away the computer labs and relying on students to bring their own laptops. It's only a very small step from that, to a regime where the university begins dictating very specific requirements about what hardware and software the student is required to have. For starters, the university is probably going to dictate what operating system is being used (no bonus points for guessing it's going to be an operating system sold by a monopolist from the Pacific Northwest who recently made a large "donation" to the uni for influencing that decision). Pretty soon they're also dictating that the uni's custom suite of security programs are loaded, and other things. At the end of the day it's no longer the student's own computer -- it's a locked-down university computer that the student (or his parents) paid for. No thanks.
That's about the sum of it. Big "enterprise" is steeped in the "no one ever got fired for buying [large lumbering vendor]" culture. One of the advantages of small businesses is that they're nimble and willing to experiment, especially if they can realize cost savings along the way. Bigcos only started using Linux servers after they percolated their way up from the bottom, and that's going to be the case for every new grassroots technology, whether it's open source content management, open source collaboration, etc.
Gunning straight for the enterprise is a losing proposition.
I can't believe there hasn't been any mention of Berkeley DB yet. Guess what, folks: sometimes you just don't need the features of a full relational database. Sometimes all you need is fast, robust, reliable storage of indexed key/value pairs.
I can attest that Berkeley DB does exactly that, and does it really, really well. We use Berkeley DB for all of the data storage in the Citadel system, including the mailboxes themselves. Some sites have tens of gigabytes or even hundreds of gigabytes of data, and Berkeley DB just keeps chugging along, happily and reliably doing its thing. Our biggest problem? People who point at it and say "storing email in a database is unreliable" because they know it constantly explodes when Exchange does it. Well guess what, folks: Berkeley DB ain't the Exchange database (actually, maybe Exchange wouldn't be so unreliable if they switched to Berkeley DB).
Eschewing the full set of RDBMS features isn't slacking. It's choosing the right tool for the job.
The most important thing is that crucial software such as Java and OpenOffice are maintained. Without a BigCo maintaining these, they will fall behind, which ultimately will make open source a weaker proposition. Nothing would please the Beast of Redmond more. IBM would be a good steward of these programs.
You say that as if it's a bad thing. Microsoft's predatory behavior has set the entire industry back by a decade or more. Without them, there is plenty of room for new innovation (as opposed to Microsoft Innovation (tm) which isn't really innovation at all). Companies will spring up to fill market needs, robust competition will be restored or invigorated, people will be employed ... it's a good thing for everyone.
That's because the deck is stacked to begin with. The person writing the RFP has either already decided on Exchange or uses the Exchange feature set verbatim as his list of requirements.
Zimbra is becoming quite popular in service provider environments, and Citadel is currently enjoying a lot of growth in small-to-medium companies and non-profits. The "enterprise" can keep their Exchange for all we care.
We recently did a re-evaluation of our virtualization tech, and VMware won out over Xen. The simple reason: VMware can run Windows on machines that don't have hardware VT. Sure, if we wanted to immediately replace every single server with a new one containing a new cpu, that'd be different, but in this economy you don't really want to throw away perfectly good hardware that still runs VMware at a very nice speed. Xen requires hardware VT, or you aren't running Windows guests, period. VMware doesn't care; it uses hardware VT if you have it, or it does software virtualization otherwise.
Cool, they must finally be releasing the ZunePhone(tm) !!
Check out the ZunePhone on YouTube!
It's that simple. Get an internal Wiki up and running immediately, and encourage your team to dump every single little bit of knowledge into it. It won't become a complete repository overnight; it takes time, but as more information flows into it, it will become more and more useful.
Also be sure that your wiki has a full text index so it's easily searchable. This is actually more important than building pages that house tables of contents.
As more and more consumer ISP's block outbound connections on port 25, this will only accelerate the development of newer, smarter zombie bots that know how to read the configuration settings of popular email programs (perhaps even the passwords for popular webmail sites stored in your browser's saved password list) and use those settings to send mail.
This will be even more wonderful because all of that spam will now have your name and email address on it.