Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI.
Uh, no.
"Most UNIX-people" use Apple because the Apple desktop users outnumbered other unix desktop users, so when Apple switched to unix, they instantly became the #1 desktop unix brand. You're swapping cause and effect.
True, there are some people who moved from other unices to Apple, and if so, great; they went with what they liked, but don't make it sound like the entire unix world moved en masse to Apple when OS X came out.
Also, one other thing: by some counts, Linux users now outnumber Apple users. I will only make a passing mention of this because it's debatable.
Funny how things like volcanic activity have more effect on things like global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, etc. than anything mankind is doing. When we see nature affect itself like this, it really puts things into perspective.
(Oof. I await the inevitable hammering by left-wing moderators.)
So anyway, is it too much to ask for, to wish that Mt. St. Helens will suddenly erupt explosively and massively, burying the entire state of Washington in lava and ash, and thereby taking out Microsoft, Starbucks, and RealNetworks in the process?
AJAX based drag-and-drop email is becoming commonplace now. At this point it's a "must have" feature, and any web based email program that doesn't have it is going to look as if it hasn't been updated since 2004:)
Yahoo and MSN both have it now. Even the software that drives private email systems has it now. You've probably seen the screenshots for Roundcube, and you've probably seen the screenshots and swf-demos of systems like Citadel and Zimbra.
The point is, Google was the big trailblazer here, but at this point, everyone is now on that trail. The bar has been raised and rich AJAX webmail has quickly gone past "innovative" and is now "an expectation." Meanwhile, Google is probably busy cooking up the Next Big Thing. We hope.:)
Microsoft "opening" their XML format has an unintended side effect. Sure, they may end up winning the purchasing agreement for office software for the Massachussetts state government... but by opening the format, they've also opened the door to allowing the OpenOffice.org software to read/write Microsoft's format -- legally. This will allow the free world to continue using OpenOffice.org in a Microsoft-centric world.
The local joke around here...
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
Ah, our old friends at Alexa... the ones who brought us the wonderfully flawed page ranking system that is based on data fed back from their IE plugin that records what pages you visit and builds rankings out of them. A quick review of their "top ranked sites" includes advertising providers like Doubleclick, and spyware providers like Claria. Depending upon the functionality of someone's IE browser is fatally flawed.
SPARC already has multiple manufacturers building independent but compatible chips. SPARC was designed to be an open, multi-sourced processor design. Scalable PRocessor ARChitecture.
Windows 2000 didn't require reboots either. Microsoft claimed that they had made everything much better, and lots of people believed them.
As it turned out, the only reason people were observing that Windows 2000 rebooted less frequently, was because as the latest version of Windows, all of the latest DLL's were already online. Naturally, this meant that installing various applications did not require updating any system DLL's.
As time went on, of course, new software came out that bundled newer versions of those same DLL's, and slowly but surely the requisite reboots began to appear more and more frequently.
There is every reason to believe that Vista will be exactly the same.
Sounds like Microsoft is trying to re-invent GroupDAV, which is an open standard developed for precisely this purpose. Microsoft just has to be a childish brat and do things its own way.
Why does everyone want to "beat GMail" ???
on
Yahoo's Geek Statue
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· Score: 1
Seriously, this is ridiculous. Google raised the bar. They showed the world that you can do amazing things inside the browser. Nobody can take that away from them. What Yahoo et al are doing right now is called catching up. It's true: within a year or so, all webmail systems are going to have that level of functionality. Yahoo has it. MSN has it. AOL is building it. Several open source projects (such as Roundcube, Citadel, and Zimbra) either have it or are in the process of adding it. So what's Google doing right now?
While everyone else is catching up, Google is toiling away at the next big thing.
Whenever I hear the words "beat GMail" I think of a snotty junior high school kid who seriously needs to have the crap beaten out of him.
In one of his typical prima-donna rants earlier this year, Jamie Zawinski (one of the "popular kids" here at Slashdot High) spoke of Netscape's acquisition of Collabra, and how the Collabra people ended up forcing their culture onto Netscape from the bottom up -- eventually destabilizing and destroying the company by sending them in all the wrong directions.
It's clear now that the exact same thing is happening to Novell. The acquisition of Ximian was a BIG mistake. It added absolutely no value to Novell (I think it happened because "someone knew someone" in Massachussetts and they did it to keep Ximian's investors from losing all their money) and what happened next? Slowly but surely, the Ximian people are taking control of Novell. This latest move proves it -- SuSE was well known as a KDE powerhouse. They did more for KDE than any other single company out there (except maybe Troll Tech). Now, the Ximian people have dismantled SuSE's KDE leadership, and are probably well on their way to dismantling any other strategic advantage any other part of Novell may have had.
So long Novell, it was a grand run, but you're letting the wrong people take charge and even though you may not realize it yet, you're in a downward spiral.
And since I know Miguel and Nat are reading this -- listen up, guys, stop being a couple of pushy blowhards and do the right thing for your company. Let the grownups run the show please.
Since there are a lot of youngsters on Slashdot, it's not surprising that the memory of the web's genesis is fuzzy to nonexistent for many of you. Let's put things into perspective, shall we?
Flash back to the early 1990's. What was the term being bandied about by everyone, in the media, in IT, just about everywhere? Everyone was talking about the upcoming "Information Superhighway." And everyone assumed it was going to mean we'd have 500 cable channels. Digital shopping. "Video phones." Even a few scary elements of Big Brother. It was going to be a corporate panacea, and the media had the drooling masses convinced that they were going to love it.
What ended up happening was that while all the BigCo's fought over whose technology, whose network, whose pay-per-everything service was going to become "The" Information Superhighway, barefoot pilgrims like Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesen figured that the beginnings of that dream already existed in the then-current Internet, and all they needed was a killer app to bring it to the masses. And we all know what happened then.
Can you come up with any good reason why this couldn't just as easily have happened in 2005? Remember, if the web explosion hadn't yet happened, the big media pigopolists would not yet be on the defensive because people wouldn't be doing large-scale digital copying yet.
I'm guessing that the Ximian acquisition happened because "somebody knew somebody" up in the Boston area. Ximian's investors were losing money on the company and were able to make the right connections to get Novell to acquire the company. That's how these things tend to happen in the business world -- often it has nothing to do with technology. Ximian didn't really have anything Novell needed, and the former Ximian people certainly aren't doing anything now that Novell needs. Basically all they got was a pair of grandstanding blowhards and a GNOME-based desktop that didn't add a whole lot of value to the SuSE they acquired later.
SuSE, on the other hand, was a nice acquisition, because the company clearly had some value, and the brand *still* has value.
Novell blew it by not getting on the open source bandwagon in 1998 or so. If they had open sourced a basic version of NDS then, it would be the open directory standard today, and they'd have made a ton of money selling value-add products like Groupwise and BorderManager that run on top of it. Instead, they thought they could "win" -- even against Microsoft! How ridiculous was this, when they'd already played that game from the other side of the table? Novell had run roughshod over Banyan (the previous directory services leader) so they should have known full well that Microsoft would do the same to them.
Personally, I would like to see SuSE spun off again, and put in the hands of someone who could manage it better.
"We are stronger than ever because we have a research lab in Cambridge, we have one now in China, one in India and that is where the top problems in computer science are going to be solved."
I don't know why they spend so much on these research labs. All of Microsoft's best ideas come from the unofficial Microsoft Research lab in Cupertino, which they don't pay for.
Ideally, I would like to see this fancy new combined software package contain support for either SyncML or GroupDAV. It would be nice to connect to open source calendar servers, using a sync server like Sync4J or even natively on standards-compliant calendar servers.
There are some people out there who might have been led to believe that the fancy AJAX applications currently being built using Ruby on Rails actually require RoR for that degree of rich functionality. Fortunately, this is not true. The AJAX library is called script.aculo.us and it is available as a standalone JavaScript library.
It can be used in any language, or even from static web pages. Heck, I practice the unorthodox style of developing web apps in C and I'm using it too!
- Server-side sorting so that all messages don't need to be downloaded in order to view, say, the 15 newest. - Special folder support, such as Junk, Sent, Trash, etc. Currently send mail just goes off into the ether.
In that case you might want to check out Citadel, which is a complete self-contained mail system with a nice web interface. It has both of those features, plus a number of tightly integrated groupware features.
It's not for you if you have an existing imap backend that you want to keep, but if you want a complete system it's very easy to install and has a lot of functionality. The two-pane mail view is ajax-powered, for example.
Google remains the preferred search engine for AOL
OpenOffice.org begins to appear on CD's being mailed out to everyone
Google could use AOL's POP's to provide a Google-branded ISP
The synergy potential is actually quite significant -- very much moreso than an AOL+Microsoft combination, which was clearly intended to do nothing more than muscle Google out of the search market.
MySQL has pluggable back ends, and they make it easy to switch between them. If the Oracle folks make life with InnoDB too difficult, MySQL users can just convert their tables to be stored using Berkeley DB instead. No code changes, no loss of functionality, everything just keeps on going.
I can't believe nobody has yet bothered to explain the difference between transit and nontransit service.
When you buy Internet bandwidth from your ISP, you are getting transit service. This means that you can use the link to send traffic to that ISP and to other ISP's upstream from it.
Nontransit service means that the link is to be used exclusively for sending traffic to that one ISP.
All of the Tier 1 ISP's provide nontransit service to each other, because at tier 1 there is no such thing as "upstream." This is not people playing stupid, this is how it's done at the top. It's the reason why the major peering points exist.
Any ISP who wants to shut off a peering arrangement for stupid business-o-political purposes is creating a hole in its own connectivity, and therefore shooting itself in the foot, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI.
Uh, no.
"Most UNIX-people" use Apple because the Apple desktop users outnumbered other unix desktop users, so when Apple switched to unix, they instantly became the #1 desktop unix brand. You're swapping cause and effect.
True, there are some people who moved from other unices to Apple, and if so, great; they went with what they liked, but don't make it sound like the entire unix world moved en masse to Apple when OS X came out.
Also, one other thing: by some counts, Linux users now outnumber Apple users. I will only make a passing mention of this because it's debatable.
Funny how things like volcanic activity have more effect on things like global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, etc. than anything mankind is doing. When we see nature affect itself like this, it really puts things into perspective. (Oof. I await the inevitable hammering by left-wing moderators.) So anyway, is it too much to ask for, to wish that Mt. St. Helens will suddenly erupt explosively and massively, burying the entire state of Washington in lava and ash, and thereby taking out Microsoft, Starbucks, and RealNetworks in the process?
AJAX based drag-and-drop email is becoming commonplace now. At this point it's a "must have" feature, and any web based email program that doesn't have it is going to look as if it hasn't been updated since 2004 :)
:)
Yahoo and MSN both have it now. Even the software that drives private email systems has it now. You've probably seen the screenshots for Roundcube, and you've probably seen the screenshots and swf-demos of systems like Citadel and Zimbra.
The point is, Google was the big trailblazer here, but at this point, everyone is now on that trail. The bar has been raised and rich AJAX webmail has quickly gone past "innovative" and is now "an expectation." Meanwhile, Google is probably busy cooking up the Next Big Thing. We hope.
Microsoft "opening" their XML format has an unintended side effect. Sure, they may end up winning the purchasing agreement for office software for the Massachussetts state government ... but by opening the format, they've also opened the door to allowing the OpenOffice.org software to read/write Microsoft's format -- legally. This will allow the free world to continue using OpenOffice.org in a Microsoft-centric world.
The local joke around here is ...
Q: What does the "J" in Java stand for?
A: "Slow."
Ah, our old friends at Alexa ... the ones who brought us the wonderfully flawed page ranking system that is based on data fed back from their IE plugin that records what pages you visit and builds rankings out of them. A quick review of their "top ranked sites" includes advertising providers like Doubleclick, and spyware providers like Claria. Depending upon the functionality of someone's IE browser is fatally flawed.
"Logic bomb."
How is this something new? SPARC has always been, more or less, an open processor design.
Go to http://sparc.org to see.
SPARC already has multiple manufacturers building independent but compatible chips. SPARC was designed to be an open, multi-sourced processor design. Scalable PRocessor ARChitecture.
Windows 2000 didn't require reboots either. Microsoft claimed that they had made everything much better, and lots of people believed them.
As it turned out, the only reason people were observing that Windows 2000 rebooted less frequently, was because as the latest version of Windows, all of the latest DLL's were already online. Naturally, this meant that installing various applications did not require updating any system DLL's.
As time went on, of course, new software came out that bundled newer versions of those same DLL's, and slowly but surely the requisite reboots began to appear more and more frequently.
There is every reason to believe that Vista will be exactly the same.
Now I'll have to buy the White album again.
Sounds like Microsoft is trying to re-invent GroupDAV, which is an open standard developed for precisely this purpose. Microsoft just has to be a childish brat and do things its own way.
...wouldn't it be a "Dot Org Bubble" ??
Seriously, this is ridiculous. Google raised the bar. They showed the world that you can do amazing things inside the browser. Nobody can take that away from them. What Yahoo et al are doing right now is called catching up. It's true: within a year or so, all webmail systems are going to have that level of functionality. Yahoo has it. MSN has it. AOL is building it. Several open source projects (such as Roundcube, Citadel, and Zimbra) either have it or are in the process of adding it. So what's Google doing right now?
While everyone else is catching up, Google is toiling away at the next big thing.
Whenever I hear the words "beat GMail" I think of a snotty junior high school kid who seriously needs to have the crap beaten out of him.
In one of his typical prima-donna rants earlier this year, Jamie Zawinski (one of the "popular kids" here at Slashdot High) spoke of Netscape's acquisition of Collabra, and how the Collabra people ended up forcing their culture onto Netscape from the bottom up -- eventually destabilizing and destroying the company by sending them in all the wrong directions.
It's clear now that the exact same thing is happening to Novell. The acquisition of Ximian was a BIG mistake. It added absolutely no value to Novell (I think it happened because "someone knew someone" in Massachussetts and they did it to keep Ximian's investors from losing all their money) and what happened next? Slowly but surely, the Ximian people are taking control of Novell. This latest move proves it -- SuSE was well known as a KDE powerhouse. They did more for KDE than any other single company out there (except maybe Troll Tech). Now, the Ximian people have dismantled SuSE's KDE leadership, and are probably well on their way to dismantling any other strategic advantage any other part of Novell may have had.
So long Novell, it was a grand run, but you're letting the wrong people take charge and even though you may not realize it yet, you're in a downward spiral.
And since I know Miguel and Nat are reading this -- listen up, guys, stop being a couple of pushy blowhards and do the right thing for your company. Let the grownups run the show please.
Since there are a lot of youngsters on Slashdot, it's not surprising that the memory of the web's genesis is fuzzy to nonexistent for many of you. Let's put things into perspective, shall we?
Flash back to the early 1990's. What was the term being bandied about by everyone, in the media, in IT, just about everywhere? Everyone was talking about the upcoming "Information Superhighway." And everyone assumed it was going to mean we'd have 500 cable channels. Digital shopping. "Video phones." Even a few scary elements of Big Brother. It was going to be a corporate panacea, and the media had the drooling masses convinced that they were going to love it.
What ended up happening was that while all the BigCo's fought over whose technology, whose network, whose pay-per-everything service was going to become "The" Information Superhighway, barefoot pilgrims like Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesen figured that the beginnings of that dream already existed in the then-current Internet, and all they needed was a killer app to bring it to the masses. And we all know what happened then.
Can you come up with any good reason why this couldn't just as easily have happened in 2005? Remember, if the web explosion hadn't yet happened, the big media pigopolists would not yet be on the defensive because people wouldn't be doing large-scale digital copying yet.
I'm guessing that the Ximian acquisition happened because "somebody knew somebody" up in the Boston area. Ximian's investors were losing money on the company and were able to make the right connections to get Novell to acquire the company. That's how these things tend to happen in the business world -- often it has nothing to do with technology. Ximian didn't really have anything Novell needed, and the former Ximian people certainly aren't doing anything now that Novell needs. Basically all they got was a pair of grandstanding blowhards and a GNOME-based desktop that didn't add a whole lot of value to the SuSE they acquired later.
SuSE, on the other hand, was a nice acquisition, because the company clearly had some value, and the brand *still* has value.
Novell blew it by not getting on the open source bandwagon in 1998 or so. If they had open sourced a basic version of NDS then, it would be the open directory standard today, and they'd have made a ton of money selling value-add products like Groupwise and BorderManager that run on top of it. Instead, they thought they could "win" -- even against Microsoft! How ridiculous was this, when they'd already played that game from the other side of the table? Novell had run roughshod over Banyan (the previous directory services leader) so they should have known full well that Microsoft would do the same to them.
Personally, I would like to see SuSE spun off again, and put in the hands of someone who could manage it better.
"We are stronger than ever because we have a research lab in Cambridge, we have one now in China, one in India and that is where the top problems in computer science are going to be solved."
I don't know why they spend so much on these research labs. All of Microsoft's best ideas come from the unofficial Microsoft Research lab in Cupertino, which they don't pay for.
Ideally, I would like to see this fancy new combined software package contain support for either SyncML or GroupDAV. It would be nice to connect to open source calendar servers, using a sync server like Sync4J or even natively on standards-compliant calendar servers.
There are some people out there who might have been led to believe that the fancy AJAX applications currently being built using Ruby on Rails actually require RoR for that degree of rich functionality. Fortunately, this is not true. The AJAX library is called script.aculo.us and it is available as a standalone JavaScript library.
It can be used in any language, or even from static web pages. Heck, I practice the unorthodox style of developing web apps in C and I'm using it too!
- Server-side sorting so that all messages don't need to be downloaded in order to view, say, the 15 newest.
- Special folder support, such as Junk, Sent, Trash, etc. Currently send mail just goes off into the ether.
In that case you might want to check out Citadel, which is a complete self-contained mail system with a nice web interface. It has both of those features, plus a number of tightly integrated groupware features.
It's not for you if you have an existing imap backend that you want to keep, but if you want a complete system it's very easy to install and has a lot of functionality. The two-pane mail view is ajax-powered, for example.
- Google remains the preferred search engine for AOL
- OpenOffice.org begins to appear on CD's being mailed out to everyone
- Google could use AOL's POP's to provide a Google-branded ISP
The synergy potential is actually quite significant -- very much moreso than an AOL+Microsoft combination, which was clearly intended to do nothing more than muscle Google out of the search market.There is no such word as "messenging."
The noun describing the delivery mechanism is "messenger." The verb describing its activity is "messaging."
MySQL has pluggable back ends, and they make it easy to switch between them. If the Oracle folks make life with InnoDB too difficult, MySQL users can just convert their tables to be stored using Berkeley DB instead. No code changes, no loss of functionality, everything just keeps on going.
I can't believe nobody has yet bothered to explain the difference between transit and nontransit service.
When you buy Internet bandwidth from your ISP, you are getting transit service. This means that you can use the link to send traffic to that ISP and to other ISP's upstream from it.
Nontransit service means that the link is to be used exclusively for sending traffic to that one ISP.
All of the Tier 1 ISP's provide nontransit service to each other, because at tier 1 there is no such thing as "upstream." This is not people playing stupid, this is how it's done at the top. It's the reason why the major peering points exist.
Any ISP who wants to shut off a peering arrangement for stupid business-o-political purposes is creating a hole in its own connectivity, and therefore shooting itself in the foot, plain and simple.