So the only reason we're not seeing more IM spam right now is that AOL is not using the right protocol? Spammers are waiting for jabber instead of using the reverse-engineered proprietary protocols?
They're adding XMPP to both AIM and ICQ. ICQ is huge for spim. And now you'll get it even if you don't use ICQ.
It's great that AOL is finally going to speak the industry-standard XMPP. Now instant messaging will be as universal as email is today. And you know what that means...
If you have a Jabber account anywhere, be prepared to start receiving lots of spim all day, every day. And don't simply think that you'll get away with not allowing buddies on your list without accepting an invitation. Spimmers don't do business that way. They simply put their advertisement in the invitation so you've already read it by the time you decline the invite.
Viagra ads, mortgage scams, pump and dump stocks... all day, every day, but now it pops up right into the middle of your screen. Happy Happy!!
Microsoft is pushing so hard to get "Open" XML adopted by the ISO that they're really dropping their pants here. Regardless of what ISO does, both "Open" XML and the legacy formats are now wide open for interoperability work to be done by the free world.
Pointy haired morons demanding the use of a $500 office suite cannot prevail forever. Commoditization is a very strong force but sometimes it takes a while to do its thing.
During the dot-com bust, the slogan for Microsoft's server product advertising was "Do More With Less." They knew that everyone was doing business on a shoestring -- something that open source running on old hardware did exceedingly well. And they were desperate to try to fool people into thinking that running expensive Windows Server on expensive new hardware was just as cheap. They weren't really successful in fooling anyone. Open source excelled during the bust because of its economy, and there is no reason to believe that it won't do just as well if there were to be a recession.
Will there be a recession? With a big election coming up this year, there are a lot of people who would like you to believe that the economy is already sliding. Don't believe it.
The easiest way to reduce our consumption of helium is to cancel the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Who really needs to see a 100 foot tall balloon of Underdog for the hundredth time anyway?
I mean "aggregate" as a noun, not a verb. A couple of years ago I was building a two foot high concrete border wall around my patio. After pouring about half of the concrete, I threw in a bunch of old hard disks and other computer parts, and then topped it off with the remaining concrete. Flagstone went on top, and the finished border looks quite stylish. No one ever suspects that there are computer parts buried inside.:)
People, this is just clever spin. The entire industry is moving towards putting applications back behind the glass (where they usually belong). Sun's got some kickass virtualization tools, and the network is now ubiquitous. All this announcement means is that they're going to cut costs by outsourcing their data centers. Big deal. There will still be data centers, servers, system administrators... but they won't be at Sun. Lots of companies outsource their data center operation. I oversee network operations for a hosting company in New York state, and I can tell you with certainty that demand for data centers is not slowing down. The applications have to live somewhere. Can you save money by having someone else run it for you? In many cases it makes economic sense, and Sun is going to try it.
Clever spin. See how they made everyone turn their heads and take a curious interest? How much better was that than announcing "by 2015 we're going to fire all our IT staff and farm out the data center ops to some third party" ??
Please, Mozilla people... document and publish the protocol! We would like to be able to save our bookmarks/passwords/sessions on our own servers, not yours (or Google's). We would like to have our browsers talking to back end systems that can do something useful with that data. Please make this useful!
Not only that, but if commercial sales result in higher volume, then the production cost will go down, and it's a win for everyone: OLPC users, consumers who buy the commercial version, and of course the open source software world in which this machine lives.
It's going to take more to "beat" Ubuntu than just having someone say "this is going to beat Ubuntu." There's more to Ubuntu than just what's on the disc. Since Fedora 8 is really just the beta version of Red Hat "Global" Desktop, all I'm really hearing here is "me too." Ok, so they prettied up the screens and added some more configuration options? Great. What happens when Fedora 9 comes out? Will I just be able to push a button and seamlessly upgrade the whole thing in place? I doubt it. And what happens if I decide I want paid support? Will Red Hat support my free Fedora download the way Canonical will support Ubuntu? No, they'll insist that I run "Red Hat Enterprise" for that. And where are the free Fedora discs being mailed to anyone who wants, just for the asking?
Ubuntu nailed the winning formula for desktop Linux, just like Red Hat seems to have nailed the winning formula for enterprise Linux. I wouldn't use either one in the other's place.
It is highly doubtful that the "deprecated functionality" will be removed from Microsoft Office. Therefore if they get the revised OOXML passed as a standard, anyone who uses Microsoft Office based on its claim to be OOXML will have been the victim of a bait-and-switch tactic.
But I suspect that was the goal all along. Orgs that just wanted to use Microsoft Office in the first place would be able to say "see, this is open" and keep doing what they were doing.
Well, at least it's somewhat documented, making it somewhat easier than.doc/ppt/xls for the free world to reverse engineer.
About a year ago Toshiba reached an agreement with a city in Alaska to put one of these reactors in free of charge. It is a remote site that is only accessible during the summer, so they have to receive all their diesel shipments during the summer and store them for the generators. Toshiba was willing to do the entire project free of charge to make a demonstration. The NRC would not approve the project.
So far, I have immensely been enjoying the decline of desktop computing, and the irrelevance of Microsoft to which it will ultimately lead. Microsoft only knows how to play a zero sum game: for Microsoft to win, everyone else must lose. This business model is fundamentally incompatible with the Internet-based software ecosystem. Internet-hosted software is difficult -- maybe even impossible -- to monopolize. Even the mighty Google will have a difficult time taking over everything. Fortunately, Google doesn't appear to have a monopoly in its business plan -- they just seem to be making a big splash with applications that have good architecture and wide appeal.
Software is moving back where it belongs: behind the glass. Maintained in data centers by people who know what they're doing. Hosted on servers running malware-resistant Linux. Accessed from any location, with any device. This is where the future lives, and although Microsoft can maintain an existence in this future, it cannot maintain a monopoly.
* It is not a project of the self-proclaimed "free" or open-source software movement, and does not suffer from popular fads among it, such as Xft/fontconfig and autoconf.
Ok, maybe Ion can run on smaller hardware, but it isn't exactly a feature worth trumpeting that the fonts are going to look like crap. Xft/fontconfig was a brilliant piece of work that finally put to rest all of the moronic "X11 is obsolete and must be completely replaced" ranting. While the dorks were chanting for X11 to be replaced, the Xft/fontconfig people were fixing the exact problems that were supposedly insurmountable. And they did so in a way that preserves X11's legendary network transparency.
Omit this functionality if you wish but don't advertise it as a "feature."
Forget the help desk... I oversee network operations for a mid sized hosting center, and I get direct phone calls from people who think that they're too important for the help desk. They have no business making direct calls to anyone other than the help desk, but they do anyway. It's very difficult for me not to tell them to die in a car fire.
The problem with crowdsourcing is that the crowd might not trust you, especially after being burned. Consider the "CDDB" database, which allows computers to identify the music CD that's currently sitting in the drive by building a hash of its contents and searching for that in an online database on the Internet. If it wasn't there, you could enter the data yourself, and then the next person to put the same disc in their computer would enjoy a track list that you composed. It was great, it worked, and it was a great example of crowdsourcing... but why are there others now, such as FreeDB? Because the folks holding the database just up and decided one day to make it proprietary. They renamed it to GraceNote and declared that anyone who wants to make use of the CDDB now has to pay for a license.
Naturally, the free world moved on and started FreeDB in its place, but the message here is: if you're going to crowdsource, don't stab your crowd in the back after you get what you want from them.
"The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected..."
I beg to differ. ISP's benefit from piracy because they sell more bandwidth to carry those pirated movies. It's bad enough to try to drag the ISP's in, but it's even worse to claim that it's for their own benefit.
So you are simple and have nothing to hide... that makes you, yes, a simple average moron sharing everything with beloved Google.
Me personally? I have my own server at a hosting center, and another at home with a tape drive for backups, so I don't personally have any use for GDrive. As for the rest of the world... people can make decisions for themselves whether they want to trust Google with their data. They don't need self-proclaimed "privacy advocates" making decisions on their behalf.
I don't know who these supposed "privacy advocates" are, but as far as I'm concerned they can go f**k themselves. If they don't trust their data on Google's servers, then don't use the service. END OF DISCUSSION.
I'm still amazed that software of this quality, with a 20 year history of development, continues to fly under the radar with much of the Free software community.
I'm surprised at this too. Much of the blame goes to the Slashdot editors, who have over the last couple of years rejected more than a dozen stories about Citadel. I don't know why.
Regrettably the connector cannot be free, because it is being built by an outside vendor whose revenue model depends upon being able to sell copies of it. However, we're being very careful to ensure that the only time money is spent is if you want to connect Outlook to the system, unlike Zimbra and Scalix who have built that cost into the price of their high-end server products. We are very strict on making sure the Citadel server will always be both free and Free. In any case, the cost is peanuts compared to what an Exchange seat would have cost.
I've looked at Citadel myself. I think it looks good, but I also think that when you say "shared calendars" to most middle and upper management, it gets interpreted as "Outlook + Exchange".
Sadly, there is quite a bit of truth to that statement. Fortunately, there is an Outlook connector for Citadel currently in beta test. It's quite nice -- while most non-Microsoft Outlook connectors merely do synchronization, this one implements a full store (i.e. the equivalent of what you get when you connect to Exchange). Outlook and non-Outlook clients will *both* be first class citizens on a Citadel system. We'll have this out within the next couple of months, and it'll be very useful.
Slashdot Mirror
It's great that AOL is finally going to speak the industry-standard XMPP. Now instant messaging will be as universal as email is today. And you know what that means...
... all day, every day, but now it pops up right into the middle of your screen. Happy Happy!!
If you have a Jabber account anywhere, be prepared to start receiving lots of spim all day, every day. And don't simply think that you'll get away with not allowing buddies on your list without accepting an invitation. Spimmers don't do business that way. They simply put their advertisement in the invitation so you've already read it by the time you decline the invite.
Viagra ads, mortgage scams, pump and dump stocks
Microsoft is pushing so hard to get "Open" XML adopted by the ISO that they're really dropping their pants here. Regardless of what ISO does, both "Open" XML and the legacy formats are now wide open for interoperability work to be done by the free world.
Pointy haired morons demanding the use of a $500 office suite cannot prevail forever. Commoditization is a very strong force but sometimes it takes a while to do its thing.
During the dot-com bust, the slogan for Microsoft's server product advertising was "Do More With Less." They knew that everyone was doing business on a shoestring -- something that open source running on old hardware did exceedingly well. And they were desperate to try to fool people into thinking that running expensive Windows Server on expensive new hardware was just as cheap. They weren't really successful in fooling anyone. Open source excelled during the bust because of its economy, and there is no reason to believe that it won't do just as well if there were to be a recession.
Will there be a recession? With a big election coming up this year, there are a lot of people who would like you to believe that the economy is already sliding. Don't believe it.
The easiest way to reduce our consumption of helium is to cancel the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Who really needs to see a 100 foot tall balloon of Underdog for the hundredth time anyway?
I mean "aggregate" as a noun, not a verb. A couple of years ago I was building a two foot high concrete border wall around my patio. After pouring about half of the concrete, I threw in a bunch of old hard disks and other computer parts, and then topped it off with the remaining concrete. Flagstone went on top, and the finished border looks quite stylish. No one ever suspects that there are computer parts buried inside. :)
People, this is just clever spin. The entire industry is moving towards putting applications back behind the glass (where they usually belong). Sun's got some kickass virtualization tools, and the network is now ubiquitous. All this announcement means is that they're going to cut costs by outsourcing their data centers. Big deal. There will still be data centers, servers, system administrators ... but they won't be at Sun. Lots of companies outsource their data center operation. I oversee network operations for a hosting company in New York state, and I can tell you with certainty that demand for data centers is not slowing down. The applications have to live somewhere. Can you save money by having someone else run it for you? In many cases it makes economic sense, and Sun is going to try it.
Clever spin. See how they made everyone turn their heads and take a curious interest? How much better was that than announcing "by 2015 we're going to fire all our IT staff and farm out the data center ops to some third party" ??
160 megabits ... throttled down to 2 megabits. Your cable dollars at work.
Please, Mozilla people ... document and publish the protocol! We would like to be able to save our bookmarks/passwords/sessions on our own servers, not yours (or Google's). We would like to have our browsers talking to back end systems that can do something useful with that data. Please make this useful!
Not only that, but if commercial sales result in higher volume, then the production cost will go down, and it's a win for everyone: OLPC users, consumers who buy the commercial version, and of course the open source software world in which this machine lives.
It's going to take more to "beat" Ubuntu than just having someone say "this is going to beat Ubuntu." There's more to Ubuntu than just what's on the disc. Since Fedora 8 is really just the beta version of Red Hat "Global" Desktop, all I'm really hearing here is "me too." Ok, so they prettied up the screens and added some more configuration options? Great. What happens when Fedora 9 comes out? Will I just be able to push a button and seamlessly upgrade the whole thing in place? I doubt it. And what happens if I decide I want paid support? Will Red Hat support my free Fedora download the way Canonical will support Ubuntu? No, they'll insist that I run "Red Hat Enterprise" for that. And where are the free Fedora discs being mailed to anyone who wants, just for the asking?
Ubuntu nailed the winning formula for desktop Linux, just like Red Hat seems to have nailed the winning formula for enterprise Linux. I wouldn't use either one in the other's place.
It is highly doubtful that the "deprecated functionality" will be removed from Microsoft Office. Therefore if they get the revised OOXML passed as a standard, anyone who uses Microsoft Office based on its claim to be OOXML will have been the victim of a bait-and-switch tactic.
.doc/ppt/xls for the free world to reverse engineer.
But I suspect that was the goal all along. Orgs that just wanted to use Microsoft Office in the first place would be able to say "see, this is open" and keep doing what they were doing.
Well, at least it's somewhat documented, making it somewhat easier than
About a year ago Toshiba reached an agreement with a city in Alaska to put one of these reactors in free of charge. It is a remote site that is only accessible during the summer, so they have to receive all their diesel shipments during the summer and store them for the generators. Toshiba was willing to do the entire project free of charge to make a demonstration. The NRC would not approve the project.
So far, I have immensely been enjoying the decline of desktop computing, and the irrelevance of Microsoft to which it will ultimately lead. Microsoft only knows how to play a zero sum game: for Microsoft to win, everyone else must lose. This business model is fundamentally incompatible with the Internet-based software ecosystem. Internet-hosted software is difficult -- maybe even impossible -- to monopolize. Even the mighty Google will have a difficult time taking over everything. Fortunately, Google doesn't appear to have a monopoly in its business plan -- they just seem to be making a big splash with applications that have good architecture and wide appeal.
Software is moving back where it belongs: behind the glass. Maintained in data centers by people who know what they're doing. Hosted on servers running malware-resistant Linux. Accessed from any location, with any device. This is where the future lives, and although Microsoft can maintain an existence in this future, it cannot maintain a monopoly.
Omit this functionality if you wish but don't advertise it as a "feature."
In other words, it's free of cost, for now ... but it isn't an open license.
Forget the help desk ... I oversee network operations for a mid sized hosting center, and I get direct phone calls from people who think that they're too important for the help desk. They have no business making direct calls to anyone other than the help desk, but they do anyway. It's very difficult for me not to tell them to die in a car fire.
The problem with crowdsourcing is that the crowd might not trust you, especially after being burned. Consider the "CDDB" database, which allows computers to identify the music CD that's currently sitting in the drive by building a hash of its contents and searching for that in an online database on the Internet. If it wasn't there, you could enter the data yourself, and then the next person to put the same disc in their computer would enjoy a track list that you composed. It was great, it worked, and it was a great example of crowdsourcing ... but why are there others now, such as FreeDB? Because the folks holding the database just up and decided one day to make it proprietary. They renamed it to GraceNote and declared that anyone who wants to make use of the CDDB now has to pay for a license.
Naturally, the free world moved on and started FreeDB in its place, but the message here is: if you're going to crowdsource, don't stab your crowd in the back after you get what you want from them.
I don't know who these supposed "privacy advocates" are, but as far as I'm concerned they can go f**k themselves. If they don't trust their data on Google's servers, then don't use the service. END OF DISCUSSION.
Regrettably the connector cannot be free, because it is being built by an outside vendor whose revenue model depends upon being able to sell copies of it. However, we're being very careful to ensure that the only time money is spent is if you want to connect Outlook to the system, unlike Zimbra and Scalix who have built that cost into the price of their high-end server products. We are very strict on making sure the Citadel server will always be both free and Free. In any case, the cost is peanuts compared to what an Exchange seat would have cost.