There have been many lessons learned since the last bubble. This time around, investors want to see real business plans, and there's got to be a plausible way of actually making some money. Perhaps more importantly, they're putting actual business-savvy people in charge this time around.
This isn't 1999, where a twentysomething with a web site could land millions of dollars of funding for a web site whose biggest feature was that it was on the web, and then get put in charge of the company, spend the money on Aeron chairs and foozball tables, and run the company into the ground.
Your pedantry is predictable and irrelevant. Any way you slice it, the OOXML support in OpenOffice is going to be even better than the doc/xls/ppt support.
I think you're all overlooking something important here. Regardless of whether Microsoft wins the battle against ODF, they've already left the door open for OpenOffice and other products. Why? Because in order to plug OOXML as the supposedly "open" standard, they had to document it and not patent it. Compared to the ridiculous amount of energy that had to go into reverse-engineering doc/xls/ppt, this makes life much easier for the free world. Even if OOXML ends up becoming dominant (I refuse to ever call it a standard), we still win.
To truly make blacklists useful...
on
Choosing a Good DNSBL
·
· Score: 2, Informative
To truly make blacklists useful, you've got to filter not only mail coming from IP addresses listed within them, but also mail containing URL's that resolve to IP addresses listed within them. Once you implement this, you will see a *dramatic* drop in spam. Spammers can move their delivery systems from place to place, but at some point they've got to advertise a web site. Yes, the stock spam will still get through, as well as some others, but over the years I've spent administering (and developing) email systems, this was the single most effective thing I've ever seen.
Happily, these tests are already present in SpamAssassin; they're just not scored highly enough. Here's a nice easy way to fix that. Edit your/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf and add these lines:
# High score for URL's whose IP addresses are in rbl score URIBL_AB_SURBL 10 score URIBL_JP_SURBL 10 score URIBL_OB_SURBL 10 score URIBL_PH_SURBL 10 score URIBL_SBL 10 score URIBL_SC_SURBL 10 score URIBL_WS_SURBL 10
Restart spamd, and you will immediately see a large drop in spam.
Microsoft has a long way to go before they can earn our trust back. After decades of acting like homicidal maniacs, we simply don't trust them. So to answer your question: no, we're not going to just smile and welcome them. More likely than not, they're extending an olive branch with one hand while preparing to stab us with the other. Microsoft cannot be trusted. We know they want us exterminated. If they have had a change of heart (and I don't believe for a moment that they have), they're going to have to prove themselves in numerous baby steps, and it's going to take a long time.
And so it becomes obvious what has happened here. There were two schedulers competing for inclusion in the mainline Linus kernel. Linus evaluated both and selected one. Having lost this race, Con declared Linux a failure and stormed off in a huff.
In other words: nothing to see here, move along, the increase in desktop Linux adoption will continue its slow but steady pace.
If you watch the video, you'll see that he also mentions the Scientific Atlanta acquisition, and how it is part of the overall strategy of converged networking across the home, business, and mobile environments. Although he doesn't come out and say it, the implication is that the Scientific Atlanta brand will also disappear. When millions of consumers have a Cisco set-top box staring back at them as they rot their brains on commercial television every evening... the Cisco brand *will* become a household name if it isn't already.
You did exactly what I mentioned, offered up a 60% solution, to go up against the Exchange beast. Citadel may as well be a rock and a sling against Goliath. Why dont so many of you get this?
Well, aside from the fact that your analogy is flawed because David was successful in slaying Goliath with his rock and sling...
Going feature-for-feature against Exchange is a bad idea because Exchange has a lousy feature set for most organizations. "One size fits all" may work for Microsoft, but only for as long as Microsoft continues to enjoy its ability to force-feed its users. With the exception of a few large enterprises, most orgs don't want all those features. They want mail, calendars, address books, instant messaging, maybe some public folders and workflow tools. They want a messaging server. Currently, they're forced to use Exchange because it's the only thing that seamlessly supports all of the features of Outlook.
But those barriers are slowly being overcome. And whether you like the idea or not, Citadel is already scoring wins against Exchange in both new deployments and "switchers".
Now that broadband is ubiquitous, and Internet-attached telephones and wireless laptops are becoming ubiquitous, having faster and faster computers on the client side is becoming less relevant. The move to network computing is officially underway. How much processing power do you really need to run what is essentially going to be an information and media terminal? Let the mega processing power go where it belongs: behind the glass in a data center.
Exchange is on its way out... or at least the idea that Exchange can lock an organization into Windows is on its way out. Slowly but surely, open source is building Exchange alternatives. Citadel is one such alternative, and it's rapidly gaining in popularity.
From the Microsoft "me too" department... Ballmer's answer to Google Apps. Evidently they are hedging their bets against the possibility of Google Apps taking hold and eating away at MS Office market share.
Orgs that want to control their own destiny aren't going to go for either one. They're going to use software-plus-services technologies, but they'll run them from their own data centers.
We use Postini here and it's really really good. It reliably filters out nearly all the spam that arrives, and it's fairly inexpensive ($1 per mailbox per month). Scaling it to the size of Google will make it even better. I'm looking forward to it.
I can hear all of the pedants shouting "yuor c0de has to be readable!!!!!!!111"
Yes, I agree, it's a bad idea to nest your code so deeply that it can only fit on a 200-column screen. But that's not always the case. Sometimes a piece of code is more readable if you aren't constantly breaking things up into multiple lines. Sometimes you're using libraries whose functions are useful when you make them call each other. Sometimes you're just finding that your variable names are long enough to be descriptive. The point is, a wider terminal sometimes makes your code easier to read. In that case, why constrain yourself to 80 columns? Almost nobody has that restriction anymore.
Your mileage may vary, but I find that 109x34 is my standard terminal these days.
Thankfully, laser printers (even color laser printers) continue to drop in cost -- even to the point where most consumers can realistically afford one if they need it for any non-trivial amount of printing. And at least today, printers and toner cartridges aren't sold with Gillette-style pricing.
If you're looking for an open source calendar server that works nicely with Sunbird, may I humbly recommend Citadel. It syncs up nicely with Sunbird via the webcal (DAV) standard, and also hosts a wonderful array of groupware features such as email, address books, instant messaging, forums, etc. And everything is available via a slick AJAX-style web interface (including that same calendar you're maintaining in Sunbird). Give it a try.
Won't take long for the "creative programmer" community to turn Microsoft's new offering into a wonderful, free, shared, non-traceable BIG FILE SERVER for all the warez, pr0n, and MP3's they'd like to keep online.
Microsoft isn't competing with Google, they're competing with Pirate Bay. Why torrent or FTP when you can just mount a drive?
The result would be excellent PR: Within six months 56% of Americans will believe Microsoft was behind the 9-11 attacks.
Umm, dude, Microsoft was behind the 9-11 attacks. Ballmer and Gates were so angry over Wall Street's use of Linux in their data centers that they called their buddy Osama bin Laden to drop a couple of skyscrapers in the financial district.
Here's a better link: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/127
This one is a top-level entry in Shuttleworth's blog in which he states his position. The one TFA references is a comment attached to some other blog entry.
This is great. Hopefully the Linux community will now consolidate around Canonical and Red Hat -- already, two leaders who have done well by listening to what people want and simply delivering quality free software without any strings attached -- now, the two who are sane enough to avoid getting in bed with Microsoft.
As the also-rans sign their lives away to the Beast of Redmond, their users will disappear. They will become irrelevant, because nobody wants to run Microsoft Linux. And the fragmentation of Linux will gradually go away as everyone consolidates around Ubuntu and Red Hat (and Red Hat respins such as CentOS).
Seriously, who's going to sue who over this? Ignore the differences between v2 and v3 and mix it up at will. In the extremely unlikely event that someone complains, call it a "bundle" and let the licenses exist on their own.
I wonder if this could end up being a good thing for the Linux community, even though it's not what Microsoft intended.
What if Microsoft continues to do deals with various second-tier Linux vendors? And what if Linux users and customers, by and large, shun those vendors? (Ok, Novell wasn't a second-tier vendor but they're already being shunned.)
And what if Red Hat and Canonical continue to refuse to sign, because, y'know, people are actually *using* their Linux distros in large numbers? Could the Linux-using world end up making a concerted effort to consolidate around the non-Microsoft-tainted distros? That would reduce Linux fragmentation and actually end up making Linux a more unified target platform for third-party ISV's.
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There have been many lessons learned since the last bubble. This time around, investors want to see real business plans, and there's got to be a plausible way of actually making some money. Perhaps more importantly, they're putting actual business-savvy people in charge this time around.
This isn't 1999, where a twentysomething with a web site could land millions of dollars of funding for a web site whose biggest feature was that it was on the web, and then get put in charge of the company, spend the money on Aeron chairs and foozball tables, and run the company into the ground.
Your pedantry is predictable and irrelevant. Any way you slice it, the OOXML support in OpenOffice is going to be even better than the doc/xls/ppt support.
I think you're all overlooking something important here. Regardless of whether Microsoft wins the battle against ODF, they've already left the door open for OpenOffice and other products. Why? Because in order to plug OOXML as the supposedly "open" standard, they had to document it and not patent it. Compared to the ridiculous amount of energy that had to go into reverse-engineering doc/xls/ppt, this makes life much easier for the free world. Even if OOXML ends up becoming dominant (I refuse to ever call it a standard), we still win.
To truly make blacklists useful, you've got to filter not only mail coming from IP addresses listed within them, but also mail containing URL's that resolve to IP addresses listed within them. Once you implement this, you will see a *dramatic* drop in spam. Spammers can move their delivery systems from place to place, but at some point they've got to advertise a web site. Yes, the stock spam will still get through, as well as some others, but over the years I've spent administering (and developing) email systems, this was the single most effective thing I've ever seen.
/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf and add these lines:
Happily, these tests are already present in SpamAssassin; they're just not scored highly enough. Here's a nice easy way to fix that. Edit your
# High score for URL's whose IP addresses are in rbl
score URIBL_AB_SURBL 10
score URIBL_JP_SURBL 10
score URIBL_OB_SURBL 10
score URIBL_PH_SURBL 10
score URIBL_SBL 10
score URIBL_SC_SURBL 10
score URIBL_WS_SURBL 10
Restart spamd, and you will immediately see a large drop in spam.
Microsoft has a long way to go before they can earn our trust back. After decades of acting like homicidal maniacs, we simply don't trust them. So to answer your question: no, we're not going to just smile and welcome them. More likely than not, they're extending an olive branch with one hand while preparing to stab us with the other. Microsoft cannot be trusted. We know they want us exterminated. If they have had a change of heart (and I don't believe for a moment that they have), they're going to have to prove themselves in numerous baby steps, and it's going to take a long time.
And so it becomes obvious what has happened here. There were two schedulers competing for inclusion in the mainline Linus kernel. Linus evaluated both and selected one. Having lost this race, Con declared Linux a failure and stormed off in a huff.
In other words: nothing to see here, move along, the increase in desktop Linux adoption will continue its slow but steady pace.
If you watch the video, you'll see that he also mentions the Scientific Atlanta acquisition, and how it is part of the overall strategy of converged networking across the home, business, and mobile environments. Although he doesn't come out and say it, the implication is that the Scientific Atlanta brand will also disappear. When millions of consumers have a Cisco set-top box staring back at them as they rot their brains on commercial television every evening ... the Cisco brand *will* become a household name if it isn't already.
Going feature-for-feature against Exchange is a bad idea because Exchange has a lousy feature set for most organizations. "One size fits all" may work for Microsoft, but only for as long as Microsoft continues to enjoy its ability to force-feed its users. With the exception of a few large enterprises, most orgs don't want all those features. They want mail, calendars, address books, instant messaging, maybe some public folders and workflow tools. They want a messaging server. Currently, they're forced to use Exchange because it's the only thing that seamlessly supports all of the features of Outlook.
But those barriers are slowly being overcome. And whether you like the idea or not, Citadel is already scoring wins against Exchange in both new deployments and "switchers".
Now that broadband is ubiquitous, and Internet-attached telephones and wireless laptops are becoming ubiquitous, having faster and faster computers on the client side is becoming less relevant. The move to network computing is officially underway. How much processing power do you really need to run what is essentially going to be an information and media terminal? Let the mega processing power go where it belongs: behind the glass in a data center.
Exchange is on its way out ... or at least the idea that Exchange can lock an organization into Windows is on its way out. Slowly but surely, open source is building Exchange alternatives. Citadel is one such alternative, and it's rapidly gaining in popularity.
Although it may not seem like it, a general shift from "What's Linux?" to "We don't support Linux" among tech support people *is* an improvement.
From the Microsoft "me too" department ... Ballmer's answer to Google Apps. Evidently they are hedging their bets against the possibility of Google Apps taking hold and eating away at MS Office market share.
Orgs that want to control their own destiny aren't going to go for either one. They're going to use software-plus-services technologies, but they'll run them from their own data centers.
We use Postini here and it's really really good. It reliably filters out nearly all the spam that arrives, and it's fairly inexpensive ($1 per mailbox per month). Scaling it to the size of Google will make it even better. I'm looking forward to it.
I can hear all of the pedants shouting "yuor c0de has to be readable!!!!!!!111"
Yes, I agree, it's a bad idea to nest your code so deeply that it can only fit on a 200-column screen. But that's not always the case. Sometimes a piece of code is more readable if you aren't constantly breaking things up into multiple lines. Sometimes you're using libraries whose functions are useful when you make them call each other. Sometimes you're just finding that your variable names are long enough to be descriptive. The point is, a wider terminal sometimes makes your code easier to read. In that case, why constrain yourself to 80 columns? Almost nobody has that restriction anymore.
Your mileage may vary, but I find that 109x34 is my standard terminal these days.
What is Telmex ??? I thought the Mexican telephone company was called Taco Bell.
Thankfully, laser printers (even color laser printers) continue to drop in cost -- even to the point where most consumers can realistically afford one if they need it for any non-trivial amount of printing. And at least today, printers and toner cartridges aren't sold with Gillette-style pricing.
If you're looking for an open source calendar server that works nicely with Sunbird, may I humbly recommend Citadel. It syncs up nicely with Sunbird via the webcal (DAV) standard, and also hosts a wonderful array of groupware features such as email, address books, instant messaging, forums, etc. And everything is available via a slick AJAX-style web interface (including that same calendar you're maintaining in Sunbird). Give it a try.
Won't take long for the "creative programmer" community to turn Microsoft's new offering into a wonderful, free, shared, non-traceable BIG FILE SERVER for all the warez, pr0n, and MP3's they'd like to keep online.
Microsoft isn't competing with Google, they're competing with Pirate Bay. Why torrent or FTP when you can just mount a drive?
Debian is to Ubuntu as Fedora is to Red Hat: the beta version.
Here's a better link: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/127 This one is a top-level entry in Shuttleworth's blog in which he states his position. The one TFA references is a comment attached to some other blog entry.
This is great. Hopefully the Linux community will now consolidate around Canonical and Red Hat -- already, two leaders who have done well by listening to what people want and simply delivering quality free software without any strings attached -- now, the two who are sane enough to avoid getting in bed with Microsoft.
As the also-rans sign their lives away to the Beast of Redmond, their users will disappear. They will become irrelevant, because nobody wants to run Microsoft Linux. And the fragmentation of Linux will gradually go away as everyone consolidates around Ubuntu and Red Hat (and Red Hat respins such as CentOS).
I'm looking forward to it.
Seriously, who's going to sue who over this? Ignore the differences between v2 and v3 and mix it up at will. In the extremely unlikely event that someone complains, call it a "bundle" and let the licenses exist on their own.
Pedantry has no place in this kind of thing.
I wonder if this could end up being a good thing for the Linux community, even though it's not what Microsoft intended.
What if Microsoft continues to do deals with various second-tier Linux vendors? And what if Linux users and customers, by and large, shun those vendors? (Ok, Novell wasn't a second-tier vendor but they're already being shunned.)
And what if Red Hat and Canonical continue to refuse to sign, because, y'know, people are actually *using* their Linux distros in large numbers? Could the Linux-using world end up making a concerted effort to consolidate around the non-Microsoft-tainted distros? That would reduce Linux fragmentation and actually end up making Linux a more unified target platform for third-party ISV's.