You really want to check out Citadel. It has a very comprehensive feature set -- not just calendars but also email, address books, message boards, instant messaging, access via all standard protocols plus a gorgeous ajax-style web user interface.
The best part about Citadel is that it is very easy to install. There's an automatic installer script right on the web site. No fuss, no muss, just enter the install command and watch it go. No tedious mucking about with integrating all of the pieces yourself, as the entire Citadel system is self-contained.
And the whole thing is GPL, unlike solutions such as Zimbra and Scalix which claim to be open source, but when you actually go there you find out that to get the full feature set you have to buy a commercial version. The Citadel project makes its very best work available to everyone on the same terms.
They "may" cut funding? Let me know when they *DO* cut funding. Until then, this should be dismissed as PR theater. Perhaps EMI wants to manipulate the RIAA in some way... maybe reduce their share of the funding, or gain more power within the organization, or something.
Small org or large, why do they continue to labor under the mistaken assumption that they are well served by dealing with vendors who treat their customers like criminals? All the more reason to switch to friendlier vendors and/or open source software.
If you tell average Joe that he shouldn't do something that he wants to because it's a bad idea and then Joe's "expert" mate says "nah man you've got firewall and AV installed you'll be right" he'll ignore you.
Because even if the computer gets 0wned, you can fix anything by running DEFRAG and then MEMMAKER, right?:)
GENE SIMMONS NEVER HAD A PERSONAL COMPUTER WHEN HE WAS A KID.
How do we know? We know because our own well-documented research has shown conclusively that a child who lacks his own personal computer during those earliest school years will very probably grow up to be a bass player in a heavy metal rock band who wears women's fishnet pantyhose and sticks his tongue down to his kneecaps. Just like Gene Simmons.
Your child's future doesn't have to look like this.
The Banana Junior 6000 Self-portable Personal Computer System, complete with its optional software - Bananawrite, Bananadraw, Bananafile, and Bananamanager - is just what your four-year-old needs to compete in today's cut-throat world of high tech and high expectations.
The Banana Junior 6000...Buy one before it's too late. Gene's mother wishes she had.
Then explain why Microsoft adapted XmlHttpRequest() to be a native function call, rather than an ActiveX object in IE7.
Simple. Even Microsoft knows that the AJAX genie cannot be put back in the bottle at this point, so they might as well improve performance as much as they can before even more people abandon IE. If Microsoft suddenly discontinued XmlHttpRequest() in IE7, they'd lose pretty much everyone to Firefox and Opera, because everyone depends on that functionality now.
Here are a couple of points, in no particular order:
Symbian and Microsoft talking smack about Android seems quite reminiscent of Sony and Microsoft talking smack about the Wii. Oooh, our consoles are better, they said. The Wii is a toy, they said. But people wanted the Wii because it actually innovated in gaming instead of trying to take over the universe.
The mobile market is not "Microsoft's world." Microsoft is #3 in handsets, behind Symbian and the collective versions of Linux.
The fact that so much negative noise is being made tells us that Microsoft knows Google is going to kick its ass.
We really don't want to hear what Ballmer has to say unless there is an accompanying flight of chairs.
That's exactly it. Some people are fond of saying "You know, it was actually Microsoft who invented AJAX because they had XmlHttpRequest() first" but if Microsoft had known that they'd be enabling a general-purpose platform for application delivery -- one that doesn't require Win32, or even a full desktop computer at all -- they'd have found another way or not done it at all.
This is exactly what social networking needs -- a way to make it open and interoperable like Jabber, rather than you-have-to-be-on-the-same-system-as-your-friends like AIM. I hope they succeed. Hopefully they'll get MySpace on board - that'll make a few chairs fly in Redmond.
As unix sysadmins like to say: "Please go away or I shall be forced to replace you with a simple shell script." It's funny but it's only true some of the time. If the replacement of people with Web 2.0 Mashups is truly in the same threat category as outsourcing, then we really have nothing to worry about. Just ask anyone who had a really bad experience with outsourcing and was forced to bring their workforce back on-shore. Like the software house who outsourced a credit card processing app and found all sorts of minor bugs that wouldn't have appeared if it were written by someone who understands credit cards instead of a third world programmer who has never even had a credit card. Now you're telling me that you're going to replace your technical staff with a web app written by a 17 year old in a coffee shop? Good luck with that.
As nice as Sun makes it sound, they really aren't fully committed to the GPL. They only seem to use the GPL when it suits them -- in other words, when they are pushing a piece of software that operates in a space that is already commoditized and has a true open source competitor running away with their market share. Witness what happened with Java -- they only moved to GPL when competitive JVM's were about to move on without them. Compare to ZFS, which contains some true value and innovation, and so they are avoiding the GPL with the specific goal of keeping it out of Linux.
If Sun was truly committed to free software, they would use the GPL on everything because in a true free software space it doesn't matter if your customers mix-and-match the pieces. Sun's current approach is two-faced -- much like Microsoft when it comes to vendor-neutral standards (they push for "open standards" in areas where they don't have a monopoly, but they push for the "customer's right to choose" a closed standard in areas where they do have a monopoly).
I'm not so sure about the Internet being a reasonable substitute for a significant other. Every time I open my email, the Internet tells me that my penis is too small.
All newer Microsoft clients are aiming to switch from this original RPC driven protocol to WebDAV through OWA.
This doesn't help. Most open source people are looking to replace Exchange, not Outlook. The truly enlightened will replace both sides, but realistically we need to fully support Outlook as a "legacy client" until then. Outlook does not use the WebDAV based protocol. It uses the crufty old RPC protocol. This means that any server project that wants to speak to Outlook in its native protocol has to figure out how to get the RPC stuff running.
Interoperability between Outlook and non-Exchange servers typically happens with client-side connectors that attach to MAPI (which is not a protocol; it's the API that Outlook uses to talk to stores and transports). Bynari has a pretty good one that uses their IMAP server, but it still saves calendar and address book data in Microsoft's proprietary TNEF format on the server. The good news is that an improved version is currently in late beta that will work with servers like Citadel storing calendars in iCalendar format and address books in vCard format.
I know we've been down this path before, but seeing Microsoft get behind open standards when it suits them, and then getting behind closed proprietary stuff when that suits them, still makes me sick. Such a complete absence of any virtue whatsovever.
This won't work out the way Dancing Monkey Boy hopes it will. It is patently (heh) obvious that any open source company acquired by Microsoft will immediately lose all credibility in the open source marketplace. Furthermore, since the software itself is open source, that loss of credibility will immediately cause the project to fork, and the community will move in lockstep over to the newly formed, true open source project. Basically it'll be a repeat of what happened with Mambo and Joomla every time Microsoft performs an acquisition.
Seriously, this is really the only option for Windows at this point. Anyone who has seen the Windows source code has said that it's an unmaintainable jumble of subsystems that they're having a lot of difficulty continuing to wrap their heads around.
Microsoft sees what the open source folks are doing -- building quality operating systems around loosely coupled modules with separate developer teams and clearly defined interfaces -- and has decided "oh yeah, Windows should do that too." Of course it's a good idea. Microsoft steals from the best. Ironically, they'll patent it too.
The policy we've established here is that every document should be saved in whatever format is the least common denominator that will support the data being conveyed. For plain text, it's got to be plain text. For rich text, HTML. For tabular data that is typically edited in a spreadsheet, we go with CSV if there are not any formulas. charts, graphs, etc.
Only when we are using the higher level functions of an office suite do we save files in an office suite format.
I can't believe all the Microsoft shills that are on Slashdot these days! All sorts of 'softies whining about how OOo is missing this or that feature when the rest of us know that the 90/10 rule applies -- 90 percent of the users only use 10 percent of the functionality. And it's clear that OOo has far more than 10 percent of the functionality of MS Office.
I for one am quite happy to see that an Outlook killer is going to find its way into OOo. Truth is, you could already put a solution together yourself using existing components. Start with the base thunderbird package, add Lightning for the calendar, and then add the plugins for attaching to server-side calendars and address books (using vCard and iCalendar data formats, and one of various DAV or IMAP based protocols for connectivity). The server would be something like Citadel which provides many of the same features as Exchange + SharePoint, plus web access for the folks who are away from their primary computers.
The problem is that it can be difficult to integrate and maintain it all, particularly on a fleet of computers. That's why I'd be very happy to see the OOo folks put it all together for us. Just install OOo, point it at your Citadel or Kolab or OGo server, and get right to work. Even more importantly, it'll be a ready-made solution that'll work on all supported operating systems.
Your scenarios are possible but not plausible. Remember that it's MONEY that the IP Trolls are after. It doesn't benefit them to shut down an open source project by demanding a royalty on free software. It does, however, benefit them to allow their bullshit patent to find its way into free software, because the moment someone sells an operating system that bundles it, they get a royalty payment.
Move on, nothing to see here. This "story" was most likely planted by Sony (or even Microsoft) to try to cool down the public's enthusiasm for the Wii. This is exactly the same thing we saw earlier this year when Microsoft and others were trying to convince anyone who would listen (including themselves) that nobody would want the iPhone.
Let us assume for a moment that Microsoft-- er, I mean IP Innovation LLC wins this case. And let us assume that Red Hat and other Linux distributors are then forced to pay a patent royalty for every copy of the operating system that they sell.
Read that again. Every copy that they sell.
Could this potentially be a really good precedent? It could end up setting the stage for an industry in which open source operating systems can freely include patented technologies, because the only parties who need be concerned about patents are the ones who are selling it. This could end up making the whole patent problem much less of a concern. Go ahead and put that MP3 decoder in, for example. Fedora distributes it for free. CentOS distributes it for free. Red Hat Enterprise charges for it, and pays the royalty to Frauhofer.
Yes, software patents are bullshit, including this one. But imagine how cool it would be if this precedent were established, and free operating systems like Ubuntu could bundle all those codecs by default, because the royalty requirement only applies when money changes hands for an operating system license.
Perhaps someone ought to tell these people that Gravatar has already done this.
Wikipedia's pagerank is its biggest problem
on
Has Wikipedia Peaked?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Do a Google search on innumerable topics and Wikipedia shows up as the first link. This is Wikipedia's biggest problem. Anyone with an interest in how their topic of interest (themselves, their company, product, or service, something they're involved with, etc. etc. etc.) is seen on the Internet is therefore going to have a vested interest in what Wikipedia says about that topic.
And then... oh look! The entry on Wikipedia is editable! No wonder Wikipedia is a magnet for PR and turf wars.
I lost my taste for Wikipedia when some people who have a personal axe to grind with me located a Wikipedia entry for a scene I was involved with years ago, and began spamming it with lies -- well written, but revisionist history nonetheless. Then when I reverted their edits they accused me of "vandalism" and it sparked an edit war. After the Wikipedia "management" got involved, we were forced to reach a "compromise" that still isn't 100% truth. How does a supposedly encyclopedic writing claim accuracy when you have to compromise with people who write complete falsehoods?
Slashdot Mirror
You really want to check out Citadel. It has a very comprehensive feature set -- not just calendars but also email, address books, message boards, instant messaging, access via all standard protocols plus a gorgeous ajax-style web user interface.
The best part about Citadel is that it is very easy to install. There's an automatic installer script right on the web site. No fuss, no muss, just enter the install command and watch it go. No tedious mucking about with integrating all of the pieces yourself, as the entire Citadel system is self-contained.
And the whole thing is GPL, unlike solutions such as Zimbra and Scalix which claim to be open source, but when you actually go there you find out that to get the full feature set you have to buy a commercial version. The Citadel project makes its very best work available to everyone on the same terms.
They "may" cut funding? Let me know when they *DO* cut funding. Until then, this should be dismissed as PR theater. Perhaps EMI wants to manipulate the RIAA in some way ... maybe reduce their share of the funding, or gain more power within the organization, or something.
So far it's just talk. And talk is cheap.
Small org or large, why do they continue to labor under the mistaken assumption that they are well served by dealing with vendors who treat their customers like criminals? All the more reason to switch to friendlier vendors and/or open source software.
Ah, here it is ... if you don't recognize the prose in the above post, here's the original Bloom County cartoon from which it is taken.
GENE SIMMONS NEVER HAD A PERSONAL COMPUTER WHEN HE WAS A KID.
How do we know? We know because our own well-documented research has shown conclusively that a child who lacks his own personal computer during those earliest school years will very probably grow up to be a bass player in a heavy metal rock band who wears women's fishnet pantyhose and sticks his tongue down to his kneecaps. Just like Gene Simmons.
Your child's future doesn't have to look like this.
The Banana Junior 6000 Self-portable Personal Computer System, complete with its optional software - Bananawrite, Bananadraw, Bananafile, and Bananamanager - is just what your four-year-old needs to compete in today's cut-throat world of high tech and high expectations.
The Banana Junior 6000...Buy one before it's too late. Gene's mother wishes she had.
- Symbian and Microsoft talking smack about Android seems quite reminiscent of Sony and Microsoft talking smack about the Wii. Oooh, our consoles are better, they said. The Wii is a toy, they said. But people wanted the Wii because it actually innovated in gaming instead of trying to take over the universe.
- The mobile market is not "Microsoft's world." Microsoft is #3 in handsets, behind Symbian and the collective versions of Linux.
- The fact that so much negative noise is being made tells us that Microsoft knows Google is going to kick its ass.
- We really don't want to hear what Ballmer has to say unless there is an accompanying flight of chairs.
That is all.That's exactly it. Some people are fond of saying "You know, it was actually Microsoft who invented AJAX because they had XmlHttpRequest() first" but if Microsoft had known that they'd be enabling a general-purpose platform for application delivery -- one that doesn't require Win32, or even a full desktop computer at all -- they'd have found another way or not done it at all.
This is exactly what social networking needs -- a way to make it open and interoperable like Jabber, rather than you-have-to-be-on-the-same-system-as-your-friends like AIM. I hope they succeed. Hopefully they'll get MySpace on board - that'll make a few chairs fly in Redmond.
As unix sysadmins like to say: "Please go away or I shall be forced to replace you with a simple shell script." It's funny but it's only true some of the time. If the replacement of people with Web 2.0 Mashups is truly in the same threat category as outsourcing, then we really have nothing to worry about. Just ask anyone who had a really bad experience with outsourcing and was forced to bring their workforce back on-shore. Like the software house who outsourced a credit card processing app and found all sorts of minor bugs that wouldn't have appeared if it were written by someone who understands credit cards instead of a third world programmer who has never even had a credit card. Now you're telling me that you're going to replace your technical staff with a web app written by a 17 year old in a coffee shop? Good luck with that.
As nice as Sun makes it sound, they really aren't fully committed to the GPL. They only seem to use the GPL when it suits them -- in other words, when they are pushing a piece of software that operates in a space that is already commoditized and has a true open source competitor running away with their market share. Witness what happened with Java -- they only moved to GPL when competitive JVM's were about to move on without them. Compare to ZFS, which contains some true value and innovation, and so they are avoiding the GPL with the specific goal of keeping it out of Linux.
If Sun was truly committed to free software, they would use the GPL on everything because in a true free software space it doesn't matter if your customers mix-and-match the pieces. Sun's current approach is two-faced -- much like Microsoft when it comes to vendor-neutral standards (they push for "open standards" in areas where they don't have a monopoly, but they push for the "customer's right to choose" a closed standard in areas where they do have a monopoly).
I'm not so sure about the Internet being a reasonable substitute for a significant other. Every time I open my email, the Internet tells me that my penis is too small.
Interoperability between Outlook and non-Exchange servers typically happens with client-side connectors that attach to MAPI (which is not a protocol; it's the API that Outlook uses to talk to stores and transports). Bynari has a pretty good one that uses their IMAP server, but it still saves calendar and address book data in Microsoft's proprietary TNEF format on the server. The good news is that an improved version is currently in late beta that will work with servers like Citadel storing calendars in iCalendar format and address books in vCard format.
I know we've been down this path before, but seeing Microsoft get behind open standards when it suits them, and then getting behind closed proprietary stuff when that suits them, still makes me sick. Such a complete absence of any virtue whatsovever.
This won't work out the way Dancing Monkey Boy hopes it will. It is patently (heh) obvious that any open source company acquired by Microsoft will immediately lose all credibility in the open source marketplace. Furthermore, since the software itself is open source, that loss of credibility will immediately cause the project to fork, and the community will move in lockstep over to the newly formed, true open source project. Basically it'll be a repeat of what happened with Mambo and Joomla every time Microsoft performs an acquisition.
Seriously, this is really the only option for Windows at this point. Anyone who has seen the Windows source code has said that it's an unmaintainable jumble of subsystems that they're having a lot of difficulty continuing to wrap their heads around.
Microsoft sees what the open source folks are doing -- building quality operating systems around loosely coupled modules with separate developer teams and clearly defined interfaces -- and has decided "oh yeah, Windows should do that too." Of course it's a good idea. Microsoft steals from the best. Ironically, they'll patent it too.
The policy we've established here is that every document should be saved in whatever format is the least common denominator that will support the data being conveyed. For plain text, it's got to be plain text. For rich text, HTML. For tabular data that is typically edited in a spreadsheet, we go with CSV if there are not any formulas. charts, graphs, etc.
Only when we are using the higher level functions of an office suite do we save files in an office suite format.
I can't believe all the Microsoft shills that are on Slashdot these days! All sorts of 'softies whining about how OOo is missing this or that feature when the rest of us know that the 90/10 rule applies -- 90 percent of the users only use 10 percent of the functionality. And it's clear that OOo has far more than 10 percent of the functionality of MS Office.
I for one am quite happy to see that an Outlook killer is going to find its way into OOo. Truth is, you could already put a solution together yourself using existing components. Start with the base thunderbird package, add Lightning for the calendar, and then add the plugins for attaching to server-side calendars and address books (using vCard and iCalendar data formats, and one of various DAV or IMAP based protocols for connectivity). The server would be something like Citadel which provides many of the same features as Exchange + SharePoint, plus web access for the folks who are away from their primary computers.
The problem is that it can be difficult to integrate and maintain it all, particularly on a fleet of computers. That's why I'd be very happy to see the OOo folks put it all together for us. Just install OOo, point it at your Citadel or Kolab or OGo server, and get right to work. Even more importantly, it'll be a ready-made solution that'll work on all supported operating systems.
Your scenarios are possible but not plausible. Remember that it's MONEY that the IP Trolls are after. It doesn't benefit them to shut down an open source project by demanding a royalty on free software. It does, however, benefit them to allow their bullshit patent to find its way into free software, because the moment someone sells an operating system that bundles it, they get a royalty payment.
Move on, nothing to see here. This "story" was most likely planted by Sony (or even Microsoft) to try to cool down the public's enthusiasm for the Wii. This is exactly the same thing we saw earlier this year when Microsoft and others were trying to convince anyone who would listen (including themselves) that nobody would want the iPhone.
IANAL ... and neither are you. We'll see what happens.
Let us assume for a moment that Microsoft-- er, I mean IP Innovation LLC wins this case. And let us assume that Red Hat and other Linux distributors are then forced to pay a patent royalty for every copy of the operating system that they sell.
Read that again. Every copy that they sell.
Could this potentially be a really good precedent? It could end up setting the stage for an industry in which open source operating systems can freely include patented technologies, because the only parties who need be concerned about patents are the ones who are selling it. This could end up making the whole patent problem much less of a concern. Go ahead and put that MP3 decoder in, for example. Fedora distributes it for free. CentOS distributes it for free. Red Hat Enterprise charges for it, and pays the royalty to Frauhofer.
Yes, software patents are bullshit, including this one. But imagine how cool it would be if this precedent were established, and free operating systems like Ubuntu could bundle all those codecs by default, because the royalty requirement only applies when money changes hands for an operating system license.
Perhaps someone ought to tell these people that Gravatar has already done this.
Do a Google search on innumerable topics and Wikipedia shows up as the first link. This is Wikipedia's biggest problem. Anyone with an interest in how their topic of interest (themselves, their company, product, or service, something they're involved with, etc. etc. etc.) is seen on the Internet is therefore going to have a vested interest in what Wikipedia says about that topic. And then ... oh look! The entry on Wikipedia is editable! No wonder Wikipedia is a magnet for PR and turf wars.
I lost my taste for Wikipedia when some people who have a personal axe to grind with me located a Wikipedia entry for a scene I was involved with years ago, and began spamming it with lies -- well written, but revisionist history nonetheless. Then when I reverted their edits they accused me of "vandalism" and it sparked an edit war. After the Wikipedia "management" got involved, we were forced to reach a "compromise" that still isn't 100% truth. How does a supposedly encyclopedic writing claim accuracy when you have to compromise with people who write complete falsehoods?