Have you ever actually used OpenGroupware? Please don't recommend it.
I happen to be a Citadel developer. I only mention a few others in order to focus on the idea rather than a specific product. Of course I think you should be running Citadel.:)
Exchange and SharePoint are huge money-suckers. There are plenty of open source alternatives, such as Citadel and Kolab and OpenGroupware. Give them a try and get that migration started.
If you want regulation, how's this: If you sold me 10Mbps download and can't provide it regardless of protocol, you have committed fraud and I'm allowed to sue. I don't want to hear about your problems, just provide what you sold me.
Better read that contract again. In all likelihood it very clearly said "Up to 10 Mbps." If you dig down into the fine print it probably also has some boilerplate about it being sold as an entertainment service, not an information service. Cable and phone companies have never been real ISP's.
This whole "DRM" thing is Newspeak. They call it that because "copy protection" has become a dirty word. Therefore we should *always* call it copy protection. We should call it the ugly, technology-breaking thing that it is.
Google has to do this. They can't stay in Microsoft's crosshairs forever -- eventually Steve will get a good shot in. Microsoft is pouring immense resources into driving people away from Google and onto Microsoft Live (including its search engine). People may be eschewing the IE search box (or switching it to Google) today, but that's not sustainable. If the current situation is allowed to continue, Microsoft will eventually use its desktop monopoly to relegate Google to an also-ran. (And don't think Firefox will be your comfortable fallback position either -- Mozilla's revenue comes directly from Google. Without Google there is no Firefox.)
Google is smart to start throwing some of their heft around while they still have it. Hopefully they're big and determined enough to win over some big OEM deals.
In the open source community it really does seem that either one is fine. This isn't like the old days of D00DZ and WAREZ and C0DEZ where you used your handle to keep the feds from figuring out who you really were. Nowadays it's more of a tradition. Most people are going to be able to match your real name and your screen name, and that's fine. I do a lot of development using both, and people are generally cool with it.
That's strictly in the online sphere, though. If you're sitting in someone's office working out a consulting contract to build some open source software then yeah, your business card had better have your birth name on it if you want to be taken seriously.
I don't know what portion of the OpenOffice developers work for Sun, but I'll bet it's a lot. And that's got to change. This is a worthwhile project -- without it, the Linux desktop basically ceases to exist (sorry KOffice fans, it's a great project, but it isn't even close to OpenOffice in terms of being usable as a true MS Office replacement).
Red Hat? Novell? CANONICAL?? You've got to saturate this project with developers. Without it, desktop Linux is dead in the water. And yes, desktop Linux is real, today, despite what detractors say. Take that away and Linux slowly sinks in other areas too.
And I agree with whoever suggested that they need to get the product out in front of more Joe Sixpak types. Press a bunch of CD's and hand them out like candy. It worked for AOL back in the day. We've got to get to a point where everyone's got "one of those OpenOffice CD's" lying around, so when they need to get a document together in the middle of the night and they don't have the time, inclination, or source media to get an MS Office install together, the little light bulb comes on over their head, they toss in the OpenOffice CD, and we have one more user.
And of course the preload market needs to be saturated with OpenOffice. Every new PC needs to have a copy of OpenOffice preloaded. As the price of computers continues to come down, this could be the key to keeping that price point down. I'm sure Microsoft is really going to turn the screws on this one, but if a few PC manufacturers are bold enough to do it, this could be the pivotal moment for that.
For 90% of the users out there, OpenOffice is MS Office's equal. It's time to really push push push to get it out in front of them.
How long can it be before Microsoft responds with a Windows 7 port?
There's no point in doing this. The reason people install Windows on their x86-based netbooks is so they can make use of the existing selection of Windows software titles. In the non-x86 world, there is no such thing, so the advantage goes to Linux.
As a geek in his late thirties, I can't hear the words "Doomsday Device" without thinking of "Doomsday is Tomorrow" and the ultimately fictional doomsday device created by Dr. Elijah Cooper, and managed by our favorite old supercomputer, ALEX 7000. And I know that I'm not alone.
The reason Windows 7 is getting good reviews is because Microsoft is bribing reviewers with free high-end laptops. If a software company handed you a $2,000 computer, wouldn't you have a few nice things to say about the operating system preloaded on it?
The content must contain sufficient information for the content to be decoded.
People do not buy "content." They buy movies, music, software, etc. "Content" is a weasel word that transforms someone's potentially beautiful creative work into a mere commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and generate revenue. For more on this, read the FSF's "Words to Avoid" document.
Having implemented OpenID 1.1 Relying Party support myself, I think I can definitely see what Google is up to, and it isn't evil, people. OpenID 1.1 was elegant simplicity. Our team built OpenID Relying Party support in just a couple of days without even using any external libraries. OpenID 2.0, on the other hand, is a disaster. Its architecture reeks of design-by-committee. There were four different groups vying to define the standard for single-sign-on for the web, so what did they do? They basically just glommed all of the different technologies together and called it OpenID 2.0. There are all sorts of things you have to support, like I-Names (which no one is going to use). In the end our team decided to just implement OpenID 1.1 and rely on the recommendation for backward compatibility which is built into OpenID 2.0 (a recommendation which Yahoo ignored, btw).
So it's very possible that some engineers at Google said "hold on a minute. This sucks. OpenID 1.1 made a lot more sense, let's build out from there and see if it's something that the Internet community accepts."
It may even come to pass that both OpenID 2.0 and Goopen-ID both end up specifying backwards compatibility to OpenID 1.1, which would be great because it would effectively halt the progress of the over-engineered OpenID 2.0 and put us back on a saner path.
Let's not call Google's plans evil until we see where this goes. It could end up being something that finally puts this useful technology into some widespread use.
As many here have already mentioned, OpenID is only useful when there are lots of web sites that are willing to be an OpenID Relying Party. Microsoft is not. They only want to be a provider -- which is no surprise. Microsoft doesn't want to be open and useful and let you log in with an ID from some other place -- they want to be your identity provider, because they want to be the ones in control of your online identity.
Nice to see that the "kinder, gentler" post-Gates Microsoft is just as ruthless and selfish as ever.
Ask yourself this question: if you have a single sign-on for the web, who would you want managing it for you? For us geeks out there, the answer is simple: run your own identity server. No one controls it but you. For non-geeks... please, anyone but Microsoft.
Amen, brother. It's a huge success story in terms of politics masquerading as science. What I'm really surprised about, though, is that somehow you managed to get modded to +5 Insightful instead of 0 Flamebait. Perhaps there is hope for the world after all.
While the sentiment of what you said is true, do keep in mind that Evolution doesn't use MAPI to talk to Exchange. It uses a WebDAV API exposed by Outlook Web Access. Entourage (Microsoft's client for the Mac) uses the same API.
Actions like this speak volumes about the future of the United States in the global economy. As a whole we are locked into the Microsoft monopoly more tightly than any other nation. As the rest of the world embraces free and open source software at a faster pace than we do, they are essentially leapfrogging us in technological advancement. If more USA users don't wise up to this soon, we risk becoming a technological backwater. It could take years to catch up, if ever.
If you think this isn't possible, consider how much farther ahead cell phones are in Europe, or broadband to the home in Asia.
I never understood the "pay to receive" idea in the first place.
Simple, it goes like this.
In most of the world, cell phones are placed in a different area code (or whatever the equivalent of an area code is in a particular country), and if you want to dial a cell phone from a landline, the wireless carrier bills a settlement fee back to the landline carrier, and that fee is included in the price of a call to that area code.
In the United States and some other places, they didn't bother to do that. Instead, the wireless networks are overlaid on top of the landline networks, so there's no way for the originating CO in another area code to know that it's placing a call to a wireless phone -- or, even if it does, it can't bill the caller differently because it's in the same NPA/NXX as landline phones. So they came up with the crazy idea of billing the wireless subscriber for all airtime regardless of whether the wireless phone is placing or receiving a call.
I'd like to see the wireless carriers offer both pricing models.
Remember the dark days of the dot-com collapse? Microsoft's advertising slogan for Windows 2003 was "Do More With Less." It's ironic because their server software is one of the most expensive in the industry. The "Do More With Less" slogan is far more appropriate for open source software, which you can support in-house if you have the skill set on board.
And that is how it shall be if the economy takes another downturn. Open source software will thrive -- it's already bigger than it was in 2003 -- as more and more "enterprises" (gosh I hate that word) discover its incredible value prop.
jQuery is really just Microsoft's ripoff of Prototype and Scriptaculous, a pair of open source libraries that do the exact same thing. I might even add that they do it better, because one is built on top of the other, so if you only want the lower-layer stuff you only need the one library.
This is just one more in a long line of examples of Microsoft's "Not Invented Here" attitude problem. They could have joined the existing communities and worked with them. Open sourcing jQuery will not fix the problem -- the open source community still hates Microsoft's guts for exactly this type of behavior.
State government is a *prime* candidate for thin client computing. They need to spend some time in Largo, FL so they can see this kind of technology in action. Desktop computing is a waste of money in any environment, but in a taxpayer-funded environment it's just obscene. It wasn't all that long ago that most states had a mainframe or two running the state government, and there were just terminals all over the state. Support was easy and the technology was reliable. Most of those terminals never had a single site visit from the time they were first deployed until the time they were replaced with the first PC in a long line of treadmill upgrades.
State governments need to return to those days, and the technology is available, and it works. *That* would be a true benefit to taxpayers.
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I happen to be a Citadel developer. I only mention a few others in order to focus on the idea rather than a specific product. Of course I think you should be running Citadel. :)
"Free" (not free, taxpayer funded) wireless Internet for everyone -- but they should only support IPv6.
Then watch how fast the entire industry trips over itself to get IPv6 deployed. It'd happen really quickly.
Exchange and SharePoint are huge money-suckers. There are plenty of open source alternatives, such as Citadel and Kolab and OpenGroupware. Give them a try and get that migration started.
Better read that contract again. In all likelihood it very clearly said "Up to 10 Mbps." If you dig down into the fine print it probably also has some boilerplate about it being sold as an entertainment service, not an information service. Cable and phone companies have never been real ISP's.
This whole "DRM" thing is Newspeak. They call it that because "copy protection" has become a dirty word. Therefore we should *always* call it copy protection. We should call it the ugly, technology-breaking thing that it is.
Google has to do this. They can't stay in Microsoft's crosshairs forever -- eventually Steve will get a good shot in. Microsoft is pouring immense resources into driving people away from Google and onto Microsoft Live (including its search engine). People may be eschewing the IE search box (or switching it to Google) today, but that's not sustainable. If the current situation is allowed to continue, Microsoft will eventually use its desktop monopoly to relegate Google to an also-ran. (And don't think Firefox will be your comfortable fallback position either -- Mozilla's revenue comes directly from Google. Without Google there is no Firefox.)
Google is smart to start throwing some of their heft around while they still have it. Hopefully they're big and determined enough to win over some big OEM deals.
"We're sorry, this video is no longer available."
In the open source community it really does seem that either one is fine. This isn't like the old days of D00DZ and WAREZ and C0DEZ where you used your handle to keep the feds from figuring out who you really were. Nowadays it's more of a tradition. Most people are going to be able to match your real name and your screen name, and that's fine. I do a lot of development using both, and people are generally cool with it.
That's strictly in the online sphere, though. If you're sitting in someone's office working out a consulting contract to build some open source software then yeah, your business card had better have your birth name on it if you want to be taken seriously.
I don't know what portion of the OpenOffice developers work for Sun, but I'll bet it's a lot. And that's got to change. This is a worthwhile project -- without it, the Linux desktop basically ceases to exist (sorry KOffice fans, it's a great project, but it isn't even close to OpenOffice in terms of being usable as a true MS Office replacement).
Red Hat? Novell? CANONICAL?? You've got to saturate this project with developers. Without it, desktop Linux is dead in the water. And yes, desktop Linux is real, today, despite what detractors say. Take that away and Linux slowly sinks in other areas too.
And I agree with whoever suggested that they need to get the product out in front of more Joe Sixpak types. Press a bunch of CD's and hand them out like candy. It worked for AOL back in the day. We've got to get to a point where everyone's got "one of those OpenOffice CD's" lying around, so when they need to get a document together in the middle of the night and they don't have the time, inclination, or source media to get an MS Office install together, the little light bulb comes on over their head, they toss in the OpenOffice CD, and we have one more user.
And of course the preload market needs to be saturated with OpenOffice. Every new PC needs to have a copy of OpenOffice preloaded. As the price of computers continues to come down, this could be the key to keeping that price point down. I'm sure Microsoft is really going to turn the screws on this one, but if a few PC manufacturers are bold enough to do it, this could be the pivotal moment for that.
For 90% of the users out there, OpenOffice is MS Office's equal. It's time to really push push push to get it out in front of them.
There's no point in doing this. The reason people install Windows on their x86-based netbooks is so they can make use of the existing selection of Windows software titles. In the non-x86 world, there is no such thing, so the advantage goes to Linux.
As a geek in his late thirties, I can't hear the words "Doomsday Device" without thinking of "Doomsday is Tomorrow" and the ultimately fictional doomsday device created by Dr. Elijah Cooper, and managed by our favorite old supercomputer, ALEX 7000. And I know that I'm not alone.
(For you rugrats out there, read what I'm talking about here on imdb and then check out this amazing fan trailer created years later.)
...I'll bet its owners now wish they had accepted the extended warranty.
The reason Windows 7 is getting good reviews is because Microsoft is bribing reviewers with free high-end laptops. If a software company handed you a $2,000 computer, wouldn't you have a few nice things to say about the operating system preloaded on it?
People do not buy "content." They buy movies, music, software, etc. "Content" is a weasel word that transforms someone's potentially beautiful creative work into a mere commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and generate revenue. For more on this, read the FSF's "Words to Avoid" document.
Having implemented OpenID 1.1 Relying Party support myself, I think I can definitely see what Google is up to, and it isn't evil, people. OpenID 1.1 was elegant simplicity. Our team built OpenID Relying Party support in just a couple of days without even using any external libraries. OpenID 2.0, on the other hand, is a disaster. Its architecture reeks of design-by-committee. There were four different groups vying to define the standard for single-sign-on for the web, so what did they do? They basically just glommed all of the different technologies together and called it OpenID 2.0. There are all sorts of things you have to support, like I-Names (which no one is going to use). In the end our team decided to just implement OpenID 1.1 and rely on the recommendation for backward compatibility which is built into OpenID 2.0 (a recommendation which Yahoo ignored, btw).
So it's very possible that some engineers at Google said "hold on a minute. This sucks. OpenID 1.1 made a lot more sense, let's build out from there and see if it's something that the Internet community accepts."
It may even come to pass that both OpenID 2.0 and Goopen-ID both end up specifying backwards compatibility to OpenID 1.1, which would be great because it would effectively halt the progress of the over-engineered OpenID 2.0 and put us back on a saner path.
Let's not call Google's plans evil until we see where this goes. It could end up being something that finally puts this useful technology into some widespread use.
As many here have already mentioned, OpenID is only useful when there are lots of web sites that are willing to be an OpenID Relying Party. Microsoft is not. They only want to be a provider -- which is no surprise. Microsoft doesn't want to be open and useful and let you log in with an ID from some other place -- they want to be your identity provider, because they want to be the ones in control of your online identity.
... please, anyone but Microsoft.
Nice to see that the "kinder, gentler" post-Gates Microsoft is just as ruthless and selfish as ever.
Ask yourself this question: if you have a single sign-on for the web, who would you want managing it for you? For us geeks out there, the answer is simple: run your own identity server. No one controls it but you. For non-geeks
Amen, brother. It's a huge success story in terms of politics masquerading as science. What I'm really surprised about, though, is that somehow you managed to get modded to +5 Insightful instead of 0 Flamebait. Perhaps there is hope for the world after all.
While the sentiment of what you said is true, do keep in mind that Evolution doesn't use MAPI to talk to Exchange. It uses a WebDAV API exposed by Outlook Web Access. Entourage (Microsoft's client for the Mac) uses the same API.
Actions like this speak volumes about the future of the United States in the global economy. As a whole we are locked into the Microsoft monopoly more tightly than any other nation. As the rest of the world embraces free and open source software at a faster pace than we do, they are essentially leapfrogging us in technological advancement. If more USA users don't wise up to this soon, we risk becoming a technological backwater. It could take years to catch up, if ever.
If you think this isn't possible, consider how much farther ahead cell phones are in Europe, or broadband to the home in Asia.
Duuuuuude! Everyone knows that the most creative time of day is 4:20!
Simple, it goes like this.
In most of the world, cell phones are placed in a different area code (or whatever the equivalent of an area code is in a particular country), and if you want to dial a cell phone from a landline, the wireless carrier bills a settlement fee back to the landline carrier, and that fee is included in the price of a call to that area code.
In the United States and some other places, they didn't bother to do that. Instead, the wireless networks are overlaid on top of the landline networks, so there's no way for the originating CO in another area code to know that it's placing a call to a wireless phone -- or, even if it does, it can't bill the caller differently because it's in the same NPA/NXX as landline phones. So they came up with the crazy idea of billing the wireless subscriber for all airtime regardless of whether the wireless phone is placing or receiving a call.
I'd like to see the wireless carriers offer both pricing models.
Remember the dark days of the dot-com collapse? Microsoft's advertising slogan for Windows 2003 was "Do More With Less." It's ironic because their server software is one of the most expensive in the industry. The "Do More With Less" slogan is far more appropriate for open source software, which you can support in-house if you have the skill set on board.
And that is how it shall be if the economy takes another downturn. Open source software will thrive -- it's already bigger than it was in 2003 -- as more and more "enterprises" (gosh I hate that word) discover its incredible value prop.
jQuery is really just Microsoft's ripoff of Prototype and Scriptaculous, a pair of open source libraries that do the exact same thing. I might even add that they do it better, because one is built on top of the other, so if you only want the lower-layer stuff you only need the one library.
This is just one more in a long line of examples of Microsoft's "Not Invented Here" attitude problem. They could have joined the existing communities and worked with them. Open sourcing jQuery will not fix the problem -- the open source community still hates Microsoft's guts for exactly this type of behavior.
I browse the web by telnetting to port 80, you insensitive clod!
State government is a *prime* candidate for thin client computing. They need to spend some time in Largo, FL so they can see this kind of technology in action. Desktop computing is a waste of money in any environment, but in a taxpayer-funded environment it's just obscene. It wasn't all that long ago that most states had a mainframe or two running the state government, and there were just terminals all over the state. Support was easy and the technology was reliable. Most of those terminals never had a single site visit from the time they were first deployed until the time they were replaced with the first PC in a long line of treadmill upgrades.
State governments need to return to those days, and the technology is available, and it works. *That* would be a true benefit to taxpayers.