Having been online in one form or another for 27 years, I think it's safe to disregard allegations of ignorance. I've watched online communities come and go for decades. In that time I've learned that small, focused communities tend to have better longevity than those which attempt to be all things to all people. Facebook will be supplanted by someone or something that doesn't try to take over the world.
Seriously... I'm sick and tired of hearing Facebook this, Facebook that, oh why don't you log on to Facebook, it's great and I'm meeting up with all these people... sheesh. I've been to high school once already. I didn't like it, and I don't want to do it a second time, ok?
Thankfully, the hype cycle is just about done and everyone will move on to something else soon. Don't believe me? It's just part of a cycle that's been going on for a long time. People moved from AOL, to Yahoo, to MySpace, to Facebook... it'll continue to happen, right on schedule.
And if that's not enough to convince you, consider the millions of teenagers who get online every year. The *last* thing they want to do is join the same online community that their parents are on! That's SO NOT COOL!!
From a practical point of view, Facebook's "walled garden" approach has failed before. Just ask AOL. A site that requires that you totally immerse yourself in it just to get a feel for what it's about is not sustainable. A while ago I wanted to poke around just to see what all the fuss is about, only to find out that you had to create an account in order to do so. WTF? So I created a throw-away account with a fake name. Then I went to browse the profiles of people I knew were on Facebook, only to find out that you have to "friend" them in order to read their profiles, which would of course subject you to an incoming torrent of high school bullshit from everyone on their friends lists.
No thanks. After seeing the way some people go into withdrawal if they don't check Facebook every 15 minutes, I'm happier than ever to NOT be a part of this particular clusterfuck. I want online tools that SAVE time, not CONSUME more and more of it.
The kind of restrictions you are asking for, will by definition make the software non-free (in the GNU sense of the word; in other words, non-Libre, non open source).
The goals you have in mind can be accomplished quite simply; it was being done *long* before open source became popular. Simply provide them the source code under NDA.
Or if you want to throw a few irony logs on the fire, you could provide them the software under one of Microsoft's "shared source" licenses that we all love to mock so much, because that's essentially what you're asking to accomplish.
Zarafa appears to be yet another "tiered" offering, with a cut-down version available as open source, and the full version available as $$$ware... same as Zimbra and Scalix. In order to be fair I only included pure-play open source offerings in my original post.
Zimbra is a pretty good Exchange knockoff, but if you want to use Outlook with it then you need to be aware that their Outlook connector runs in sync mode. It doesn't implement a full store and transport. Anyone who has used a sync connector knows that it's a pain in the neck to use compared to a connector which assumes that all of the data is on the server.
I had a conversation with one of the openchange developers a few months ago to talk about some of the architecture being built here, and was pleased to find out that they're aiming to do something useful. They do want OpenChange to be useful as a standalone server. That gets you something Outlook can talk to. But they're also going to expose all of the right API's and stuff so that OpenChange can be integrated with an existing store or server. That means that with the right amount of glue code, we'll be able to integrate it with existing open source groupware servers like Citadel or Kolab or OpenGroupware. All of these servers currently have Outlook compatibility, but you need to add a plugin to Outlook in order to make it work. With any luck, OpenChange will allow Outlook to talk to all of these excellent FOSS groupware platforms as if they were Exchange servers.
(Not that I'm knocking the plugins, mind you... some of them are excellent. I'm particularly fond of Bynari's connector which is totally seamless, works with open source groupware servers, and costs far less than Exchange licenses. But a connector-free option will be nice too.)
Leveling off == very bad for Microsoft
on
Less Is Moore
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This is dangerous territory for Microsoft to be in. Levelling off of computer power means that buyers are getting off the upgrade treadmill -- they're not buying new computers every couple of years. Preloads on new computers are where Microsoft makes the bulk of their Windows sales.
To make matters worse, without constant upgrades, Microsoft and ISV's can't count on new API's becoming widespread anytime soon, so they have to write applications for the lowest common denominator. This prevents Microsoft from forcing its latest agenda onto everyone -- and even worse, it could potentially provide the WINE team enough time to reach feature parity with Windows XP. (Spare me the lecture, have you tried WINE lately? It's surprisingly good these days.)
All in all, Microsoft is being forced to stand still in a place where they can't afford to. Commoditization sucks when you're a monopolist, doesn't it?
If they want OGG to be as successful as PNG has been, they're going to need to build an IE plugin (perhaps an ActiveX object). Web site operators need to be able to embed OGG video and audio clips, knowing that it will "just work" on Mozilla, and that IE it's only a couple of clicks away. If it's successful enough, then Microsoft might replace the plugin with built-in functionality. But don't count on it. They really want Silverlight to take over.
Remember, mono/moonlight are *open source*.. not even just a binary blob provided by Microsoft.
Not so fast. If you want to watch video on Silverlight, you have to install binary codecs supplied by Microsoft/Novell.
Sorry, but this is clearly Microsoft's classic Embrace/Extend/Extinguish play. If they manage to kill off Flash, just watch how fast Moonlight gets sidetracked.
So this is how Microsoft plans to get Silverlight adopted. They paid a lot of money to get the Olympics streamed using Silverlight and they've probably paid a lot of money for the inauguration too. Meanwhile, anyone building a video site in the absence of Microsoft bribes is using Flash.
Dunno what your problem is. Pretty much everything you mentioned is working on my system, and it installed out-of-the-box without any difficult tweaking. Linux in 1995 may have been a pain in the ass to get working right, but the modern Ubuntu installs are an absolute dream.
I call bullshit. The person who submitted this article cites a single web site that has dropped OpenID support and then proclaims the conclusion that "OpenID Fan Club is Shrinking." Sorry, but I won't believe that OpenID is dying unless Netcraft confirms it:)
Seriously though, OpenID is doing fine. They could stand to have some better marketing, though. I think that nearly everyone would use OpenID if they only knew it existed.
TFA says Juniper is doomed. Not so fast.
on
Google Router Rumors
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· Score: 5, Informative
TFA says that Juniper is doomed because Google is getting ready to switch to their own in-house brand of routers. I find this difficult to believe for several reasons. One is that even if Google is Juniper's biggest customer, one customer does not a demise make -- Juniper has many other customers, including the entire UUnet (MCI, WorldCom, Verizon Business, whatever they're calling themselves this year) backbone. But there are far more practical reasons. Routers contain a lot of specialized hardware designed for rapid switching of packets. Google may have a lot of smart people working for them, but they certainly don't have the resources on board to design and build all of those ASIC's and other custom hardware, and it doesn't really make sense for them to get into that business during a recession just for an in-house project. (And no, don't give me that line about how a fast enough server with multiple Ethernet cards can substitute for even a mid-grade Cisco or Juniper. I manage a data center network and know the numbers. It can't even come close, no matter how good the software is, because a general purpose computer has to forward every packet using software, while a real router only makes a routing decision once and then all the rest of the packets for that destination are switched in hardware at wire speed.)
Suddenly big business is concerned about the environment? Doubtful. "Green" is only fashionable because it's a way of simultaneously having your PR people crow about saving the environment while your number crunchers are busy trying to save as much money as possible on energy consumption. If the price of energy were not rising, there would be no "green" initiatives.
It's difficult to imagine Technocrat as anything other than "Bruce Perens' blog." All this time he has claimed it was a more grown-up version of Slashdot, but then you go there and find that it's mainly his own political soapbox. I want to read about the latest chips and dips, not about how Obama's flatulence is the cure for global warming. Seriously, what does he expect? That's not the formula for success. Either call it what it is or take it down.
I've got my display (a very retro looking 1x20 14-segment VFD!) hooked up to our monitoring system. Every alert that goes to the pager goes to my desk as well. If one of our NOC operators fails to respond to an alert, they'd have an awful hard time telling me that they didn't get the page.
The long tail is alive and well. I think some people seem to have gotten the crazy idea that implementing it meant that you'd have an automatic win. In reality, most of the basic rules of business still apply. You still have to deliver a quality product at a fair price, you still have to provide good service and a friendly buying experience... in short, you can't be a piece of crap e-commerce company and still expect that the world will beat a path to your door simply because you offer a huge selection. Amazon got it right. iTunes got it right. The basic premise of Long Tail still holds water: if you can connect a near-infinite number of buyers with a near-infinite number of selections, then you don't have to be the market leader selling the big blockbuster hits in order to turn a profit. But you can't suck either; Long Tail doesn't change that.
Instead of statically allocated local addresses or DHCP servers, IPX use the 48-bit MAC address as the only local identifier.
IPX and IP both use 32-bit external addresses, but the IPX 32-bit address is simply the address of the network, with no addressing mask to split it into net/host parts. This meant that clients could be plugged in anywhere and just worked, without any DHCP servers, and since each Netware server was allocated its own internal 32-bit network address, it was trivial to install multiple network cards for load balancing and/or redundancy
Yup. And now there's a push for IPv6. Automatic address assignment on IPv6 turns the 48-bit MAC address into a portion of the IPv6 address. It's startlingly similar to IPX. If the Internet had been based on IPX, and they figured out a way to make IPX run at a global scale (finding equivalents to things like BGP) we wouldn't be in the impending address exhaustion pickle we are today.
I stopped accepting the DSM-IV as a legitimate reference when they allowed Big Pharma to place the imaginary condition called ADHD in there just so they could push neurotoxins at children.
Sorry Google, but if you're looking to finish what Netscape started -- namely, making the Internet an application delivery platform that does an end-run around Microsoft's monopoly -- you had damn well better make Linux, Macintosh, and appliance-embeddable versions available before you remove the "beta" label.
Do remember how long it took/. to move from a tablefest of tagsoup to a CSS-based design? A good 10 years, give or take. IPv6?
True, but the difference here is that there's no need to wait for the Slash bunch to implement it. Their hosting provider can set it up for them, right down to the machines that it's running on. As long as the load balancers being used are IPv6-ready, it's probably just a couple of days of work. It isn't Slash that needs to be IPv6-aware, it's Apache and Linux. And it is certain that Apache and Linux can speak IPv6.
For every person who says "We cannot replace Exchange because it has so and so feature and Outlook blah blah blah" there is another person who is kicking Exchange to the curb. Over at the Citadel project we've actively made the decision that an Exchange replacement does not necessarily have to be an Exchange clone. If you want the exact feature set of Exchange, then you should probably be running Exchange. We're having a lot of success with organizations who are smart enough to realize that Exchange's feature set sucks if you're not serving a building full of PHB's.
Zimbra and Scalix are making the mistake of trying to face Exchange head-on in the "enterprise" market. They are doomed to fail. Citadel is focusing on creating a system that people love to use, and it's got a strong and growing following. (And if you've got a couple of the abovementioned PHB's who still insist on using Outlook, there's a plugin that connects Outlook to Citadel's mail, calendar, address book, etc. with very little effort.)
Anyway, don't make the mistake of assuming that just because you are chained to Exchange that everyone else is too. Every organization is different, and if you change your vantage point a bit you will see a startlingly different picture.
Slashdot Mirror
Having been online in one form or another for 27 years, I think it's safe to disregard allegations of ignorance. I've watched online communities come and go for decades. In that time I've learned that small, focused communities tend to have better longevity than those which attempt to be all things to all people. Facebook will be supplanted by someone or something that doesn't try to take over the world.
Seriously ... I'm sick and tired of hearing Facebook this, Facebook that, oh why don't you log on to Facebook, it's great and I'm meeting up with all these people ... sheesh. I've been to high school once already. I didn't like it, and I don't want to do it a second time, ok?
Thankfully, the hype cycle is just about done and everyone will move on to something else soon. Don't believe me? It's just part of a cycle that's been going on for a long time. People moved from AOL, to Yahoo, to MySpace, to Facebook ... it'll continue to happen, right on schedule.
And if that's not enough to convince you, consider the millions of teenagers who get online every year. The *last* thing they want to do is join the same online community that their parents are on! That's SO NOT COOL!!
From a practical point of view, Facebook's "walled garden" approach has failed before. Just ask AOL. A site that requires that you totally immerse yourself in it just to get a feel for what it's about is not sustainable. A while ago I wanted to poke around just to see what all the fuss is about, only to find out that you had to create an account in order to do so. WTF? So I created a throw-away account with a fake name. Then I went to browse the profiles of people I knew were on Facebook, only to find out that you have to "friend" them in order to read their profiles, which would of course subject you to an incoming torrent of high school bullshit from everyone on their friends lists.
No thanks. After seeing the way some people go into withdrawal if they don't check Facebook every 15 minutes, I'm happier than ever to NOT be a part of this particular clusterfuck. I want online tools that SAVE time, not CONSUME more and more of it.
The kind of restrictions you are asking for, will by definition make the software non-free (in the GNU sense of the word; in other words, non-Libre, non open source).
The goals you have in mind can be accomplished quite simply; it was being done *long* before open source became popular. Simply provide them the source code under NDA.
Or if you want to throw a few irony logs on the fire, you could provide them the software under one of Microsoft's "shared source" licenses that we all love to mock so much, because that's essentially what you're asking to accomplish.
Zarafa appears to be yet another "tiered" offering, with a cut-down version available as open source, and the full version available as $$$ware ... same as Zimbra and Scalix. In order to be fair I only included pure-play open source offerings in my original post.
Zimbra is a pretty good Exchange knockoff, but if you want to use Outlook with it then you need to be aware that their Outlook connector runs in sync mode. It doesn't implement a full store and transport. Anyone who has used a sync connector knows that it's a pain in the neck to use compared to a connector which assumes that all of the data is on the server.
I had a conversation with one of the openchange developers a few months ago to talk about some of the architecture being built here, and was pleased to find out that they're aiming to do something useful. They do want OpenChange to be useful as a standalone server. That gets you something Outlook can talk to. But they're also going to expose all of the right API's and stuff so that OpenChange can be integrated with an existing store or server. That means that with the right amount of glue code, we'll be able to integrate it with existing open source groupware servers like Citadel or Kolab or OpenGroupware. All of these servers currently have Outlook compatibility, but you need to add a plugin to Outlook in order to make it work. With any luck, OpenChange will allow Outlook to talk to all of these excellent FOSS groupware platforms as if they were Exchange servers.
... some of them are excellent. I'm particularly fond of Bynari's connector which is totally seamless, works with open source groupware servers, and costs far less than Exchange licenses. But a connector-free option will be nice too.)
(Not that I'm knocking the plugins, mind you
This is dangerous territory for Microsoft to be in. Levelling off of computer power means that buyers are getting off the upgrade treadmill -- they're not buying new computers every couple of years. Preloads on new computers are where Microsoft makes the bulk of their Windows sales.
To make matters worse, without constant upgrades, Microsoft and ISV's can't count on new API's becoming widespread anytime soon, so they have to write applications for the lowest common denominator. This prevents Microsoft from forcing its latest agenda onto everyone -- and even worse, it could potentially provide the WINE team enough time to reach feature parity with Windows XP. (Spare me the lecture, have you tried WINE lately? It's surprisingly good these days.)
All in all, Microsoft is being forced to stand still in a place where they can't afford to. Commoditization sucks when you're a monopolist, doesn't it?
If they want OGG to be as successful as PNG has been, they're going to need to build an IE plugin (perhaps an ActiveX object). Web site operators need to be able to embed OGG video and audio clips, knowing that it will "just work" on Mozilla, and that IE it's only a couple of clicks away. If it's successful enough, then Microsoft might replace the plugin with built-in functionality. But don't count on it. They really want Silverlight to take over.
Not so fast. If you want to watch video on Silverlight, you have to install binary codecs supplied by Microsoft/Novell.
Sorry, but this is clearly Microsoft's classic Embrace/Extend/Extinguish play. If they manage to kill off Flash, just watch how fast Moonlight gets sidetracked.
So this is how Microsoft plans to get Silverlight adopted. They paid a lot of money to get the Olympics streamed using Silverlight and they've probably paid a lot of money for the inauguration too. Meanwhile, anyone building a video site in the absence of Microsoft bribes is using Flash.
Can't say it won't work, but I hope it doesn't.
Dunno what your problem is. Pretty much everything you mentioned is working on my system, and it installed out-of-the-box without any difficult tweaking. Linux in 1995 may have been a pain in the ass to get working right, but the modern Ubuntu installs are an absolute dream.
"Google"
I call bullshit. The person who submitted this article cites a single web site that has dropped OpenID support and then proclaims the conclusion that "OpenID Fan Club is Shrinking." Sorry, but I won't believe that OpenID is dying unless Netcraft confirms it :)
Seriously though, OpenID is doing fine. They could stand to have some better marketing, though. I think that nearly everyone would use OpenID if they only knew it existed.
TFA says that Juniper is doomed because Google is getting ready to switch to their own in-house brand of routers. I find this difficult to believe for several reasons. One is that even if Google is Juniper's biggest customer, one customer does not a demise make -- Juniper has many other customers, including the entire UUnet (MCI, WorldCom, Verizon Business, whatever they're calling themselves this year) backbone. But there are far more practical reasons. Routers contain a lot of specialized hardware designed for rapid switching of packets. Google may have a lot of smart people working for them, but they certainly don't have the resources on board to design and build all of those ASIC's and other custom hardware, and it doesn't really make sense for them to get into that business during a recession just for an in-house project. (And no, don't give me that line about how a fast enough server with multiple Ethernet cards can substitute for even a mid-grade Cisco or Juniper. I manage a data center network and know the numbers. It can't even come close, no matter how good the software is, because a general purpose computer has to forward every packet using software, while a real router only makes a routing decision once and then all the rest of the packets for that destination are switched in hardware at wire speed.)
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Suddenly big business is concerned about the environment? Doubtful. "Green" is only fashionable because it's a way of simultaneously having your PR people crow about saving the environment while your number crunchers are busy trying to save as much money as possible on energy consumption. If the price of energy were not rising, there would be no "green" initiatives.
It's difficult to imagine Technocrat as anything other than "Bruce Perens' blog." All this time he has claimed it was a more grown-up version of Slashdot, but then you go there and find that it's mainly his own political soapbox. I want to read about the latest chips and dips, not about how Obama's flatulence is the cure for global warming. Seriously, what does he expect? That's not the formula for success. Either call it what it is or take it down.
I've got my display (a very retro looking 1x20 14-segment VFD!) hooked up to our monitoring system. Every alert that goes to the pager goes to my desk as well. If one of our NOC operators fails to respond to an alert, they'd have an awful hard time telling me that they didn't get the page.
The long tail is alive and well. I think some people seem to have gotten the crazy idea that implementing it meant that you'd have an automatic win. In reality, most of the basic rules of business still apply. You still have to deliver a quality product at a fair price, you still have to provide good service and a friendly buying experience ... in short, you can't be a piece of crap e-commerce company and still expect that the world will beat a path to your door simply because you offer a huge selection. Amazon got it right. iTunes got it right. The basic premise of Long Tail still holds water: if you can connect a near-infinite number of buyers with a near-infinite number of selections, then you don't have to be the market leader selling the big blockbuster hits in order to turn a profit. But you can't suck either; Long Tail doesn't change that.
Yup. And now there's a push for IPv6. Automatic address assignment on IPv6 turns the 48-bit MAC address into a portion of the IPv6 address. It's startlingly similar to IPX. If the Internet had been based on IPX, and they figured out a way to make IPX run at a global scale (finding equivalents to things like BGP) we wouldn't be in the impending address exhaustion pickle we are today.
I stopped accepting the DSM-IV as a legitimate reference when they allowed Big Pharma to place the imaginary condition called ADHD in there just so they could push neurotoxins at children.
...or they might be autistic. Nice of them to jump to conclusions.
Sorry Google, but if you're looking to finish what Netscape started -- namely, making the Internet an application delivery platform that does an end-run around Microsoft's monopoly -- you had damn well better make Linux, Macintosh, and appliance-embeddable versions available before you remove the "beta" label.
Great ... Google just invented ActiveX.
True, but the difference here is that there's no need to wait for the Slash bunch to implement it. Their hosting provider can set it up for them, right down to the machines that it's running on. As long as the load balancers being used are IPv6-ready, it's probably just a couple of days of work. It isn't Slash that needs to be IPv6-aware, it's Apache and Linux. And it is certain that Apache and Linux can speak IPv6.
For every person who says "We cannot replace Exchange because it has so and so feature and Outlook blah blah blah" there is another person who is kicking Exchange to the curb. Over at the Citadel project we've actively made the decision that an Exchange replacement does not necessarily have to be an Exchange clone. If you want the exact feature set of Exchange, then you should probably be running Exchange. We're having a lot of success with organizations who are smart enough to realize that Exchange's feature set sucks if you're not serving a building full of PHB's.
Zimbra and Scalix are making the mistake of trying to face Exchange head-on in the "enterprise" market. They are doomed to fail. Citadel is focusing on creating a system that people love to use, and it's got a strong and growing following. (And if you've got a couple of the abovementioned PHB's who still insist on using Outlook, there's a plugin that connects Outlook to Citadel's mail, calendar, address book, etc. with very little effort.)
Anyway, don't make the mistake of assuming that just because you are chained to Exchange that everyone else is too. Every organization is different, and if you change your vantage point a bit you will see a startlingly different picture.