The supplied operating system may be a weird version of Windows, but you can install Linux on it as well. Go to http://www.larwe.com/technical/geode_linux.html where they have detailed instructions.
On the other hand, I'm sure a lot of people (myself included) categorically refuse to pay the Windows Tax. AMD ought to be offering a version of this device with no operating system preinstalled.
It's good that we have a standard protocol that all mail clients can use to access all mail servers. It's good that the protocol is open and unencumbered. It's a shame, though, that the protocol we standardized on was IMAP.
IMAP is an ugly, convoluted mess. And as I tend to rant about often, overly complex protocols encourage buggy implementations. "Keep it simple, stupid." If something like POP4 had become the standard, there would be a better selection of quality, non-troublesome email clients out there.
Although, with an increasing number of richlyfunctionalwebmail systems out there now, perhaps the email fat client will become less relevant anyway. Of course, email clients will never go away entirely: you still need text-based access (pine and elm), and non-interactive clients such as Fetchmail...
Oh hell, I'll just come out and say it... anything is better than Outlook.:)
Hula is way too much hype and way too much hubris. Look at how polite the Zimbra people were: "Here's our new product, we hope you like it." Compare with the Hula project, which made the ridiculous (and clearly false) claim that "no other projects exist in this space" and then speak of "taking over the world." It's a project which basically consists of abandonware (NetMail failed in the marketplace) plus vaporware (Nat Friedman's hype machine) and they're already claiming it to be "the Apache of collaboration."
I, for one, have no interest in going anywhere near Hula. With that kind of obnoxious hubris, I'd rather go with any of the other quality products in the open source collaboration space.
If you like the idea of an open source collaboration suite, you might also want to check out Citadel, which has been around for quite some time and offers many of the same features. It's very easy to install (doesn't require any manual mucking about with database servers etc.) and has mail, calendaring, address books, bulletin boards, real-time chat, instant messaging, IMAP/POP/SMTP, GroupDAV, and an attractive web front end with an increasing amount of AJAX functionality.
As I said yesterday in another comment, there won't be just one open source replacement for Exchange. Everyone will end up selecting the one whose features fit their organization best, rather than Microsoft's "one size fits all, and you have to use Exchange if you want to use Outlook" approach.
Until PDA/phone manufacturers support something other than Outlook, or Mozilla "speaks" Outlook, this is a showstopper for many.
While I agree that mobile devices need to sync. I'd rather see them syncing with the server. That could be accomplished with something like Sync4J, which speaks in a standards-compliant way (wherever possible) to the server. That way you don't have to have your desktop running (or connected) in order to sync your mobile device.
...but it will be worth it. The goal, of course, is standards-based functionality for PIM (Personal Information Management) software. Yes, people really do want a replacement for Outlook, and the open source community would do well to offer complete, end-to-end solutions. Combine the Lightning client with standards-based servers and you've got a good shot at finally getting people to dump Outlook and Exchange.
Here's the thing, though: everyone seems to assume that we need an "Outlook Killer" and an "Exchange Killer." This is, in fact, not true. "One size fits all" only works for Microsoft because Microsoft forces that model. In an ideal world, everyone will select the products that fit them best, and those products will all work together. That means some folks might choose Lightning, some might choose Aethera instead, and they'd still be able to interact with each other's calendars. On the server side, the dozen or so open source groupware servers such as Kolab, OGo, Citadel, and PHPgroupware would all be able to speak common protocols with Lightning and other clients. Users would choose based on other features; for example, one organization might want strong support for forms-based workflow, another might want rich real-time communications, another might want a large selection of third-party plugins. The idea is to allow people to choose their software based on the feature set, rather than by being locked into one choice because, for example, only Exchange supports all the features of Outlook.
It's going to take a lot of cooperation but we'll get there.
I hope the HDDVD vs. Blu-Ray format war wages on for a decade, and as a result, next generation DVD technology in general fizzles out.
This will allow us to continue enjoying the current DVD technology, whose weak DRM has already been cracked. At the very least, it will allow DVD Jon a few extra years to break the next generation of DRM.
If one of these two new technologies "wins" in the marketplace, then the industry could move to it en masse, effectively locking the free world out of its use. Do you want that to happen? I don't.
Don't buy either one. Encourage the format wars. And of course, keep supporting the Electronic Freedom Foundation. In fact, take the money you might have spent on an HDDVD or Blu-Ray player, and donate it to the EFF instead. It will be money well spent.
"I'm probably going to get modded down for this" as they say, but this could be one of those "ha ha only serious" type of things...
Perhaps you ought to go with a nice, simple, inexpensive setup... and sock the rest of it away to live on for a while when your developer job gets sent to India?
Seriously folks, let's hope the world's web developers steer clear of this. Flash is cross-platform and it's one of the key tools that make the non-Microsoft desktop useful. I know, I know, as a techie you probably hate all those "punch the monkey!" ads, but think of that Linux box you may have set up for your Mom or something. Would she be happy with it if she couldn't play all of those silly cartoons that your aunt emailed to her? These things seem trite to us, but normal users demand them.
XAML is a Windows-only technology, designed to make the Web one step more proprietary to Microsoft. Don't let them do it. Keep the web based on cross-platform tools. Steer cleer of XAML.
I own a small hosting company,and wanted to see what web-based mail clients were out there that I could use for my customers. Squirelmail and TWIG looked pretty ugly in comparison.
There are lots of good ones out there now. If the customer doesn't already have an email infrastructure, you might also want to have a look at Citadel, which has all of its data stores and protocols built in (even its own HTTP engine so you don't have to integrate it into your Apache server). It has an attractive web UI with a small but growing number of Ajax-style features, as well as an address book, calendar server, a simple instant messaging server, and a real-time chat server.
(Disclaimer: I am a developer on this project so I'm admittedly a bit biased towards it. But, the hosting company I work for has committed to offering it as its standard mail server package in the near future, so I think it's worth something.)
Microsoft isn't the sweetheart of the developer universe anymore. Anything they offer now is too little, too late. Nobody trusts Microsoft anymore. And besides, would you want your "Web 2.0" apps to depend on Microsoft products and services? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you use Microsoft tools and API's, you're not going to end up with "web applications" -- you're going to end up with "Windows applications that are delivered via the web."
Around the turn of the century, the phrase everyone was spewing was "whoever controls the browser, controls the Web." Microsoft proved that this isn't true. They had a near-monopoly on browsers for years, and they blew it. They just let the browser stagnate while they went back to focusing Bill Gates' pet projects, like tablet computing and putting a database in the filesystem. Now Google is finally realizing the Netscape dream of turning the web into a pervasive computing platform, and suddenly Microsoft has to go into react mode again. Microsoft does not innovate. Microsoft reacts. And Microsoft gets pissy whenever someone other than them starts succeeding in the technology world. They're a bunch of spoiled brats. Is it any surprise that those of us who are building the next generation of applications are hesitant to go anywhere near Microsoft?
If you can split the users up, perhaps by suborganization or by geographic area, you might (and I say might because no one answer is right for everyone) be well served by having lots of different servers handling email for each group, and then aggregating it all together with a head end that handles email routing and directory services.
If you're putting more than a few hundred users into an Exchange environment, that's how Microsoft would have wanted you to do it. Although notoriously unreliable, the concept is sound. In the non-Microsoft world, you could build each area as a subdomain, deploy the usual tools (such as the SMTP and IMAP daemons of your choice), and then use OpenLDAP to tie it all together, and add some sort of Postfix or Sendmail routing system to make the subdomains invisible to the outside world.
Some organizations might even consider an open source email/groupware system like Citadel that can handle a distributed network like this; it can tie together lots of servers using its own peer-to-peer protocol and share a global address book without the need to use subdomains (and any individual server is capable of being an MX for the whole network, so you might not even need a hub server at the head end -- although you might want to use one anyway in order to centralize your border services like spam/virus filtering, archival for Sarbanes-Oxley auditing, etc.).
In summary, if you distribute and/or federate the email services, you gain the benefit of removing the single points of failure, and you can potentially put the servers closer to where the users are, reducing your bandwidth expenses.
Definitely agreed there, but I'd also add that the free NIS implementation is a big help as well. The NFS/NIS implementation contained in SFU is a great alternative to installing Samba on your servers. If you can dispense with CIFS altogether, it's a big win.
(Not as big a win as ditching desktop Windows altogether, but sometimes we have to compromise.)
You have to jump through hoops to be able to legally call something "Unix," so why not Linux? This may sound silly at first, until you realize that certain disreputable organizations may eventually try to deliberately muddy the waters by creating "Linux" products that are not actually Linux. Kudos to the Linux folks for taking the initiative now, instead of waiting for trouble.
There's currently no "gold standard" for data centers. This is actually a bad thing, because self-important corporate audity types want some sort of "this is ok" label they can slap on a facility (or worse -- one to look for when selecting a facility). Right now they're all using SAS 70 as the standard certification to look for, which is ridiculous because SAS 70 is really more about bean counters and accounting practices than it is about data center facilities. Something actually designed for our industry would be more appropriate.
2000 was a huge leap over 98 and NT as far as plug and play and sheer useability goes, that was the best version of windows.
No, that honor goes to Windows NT 3.51. Seriously. They got their relatively stable kernel in place (courtesy of Dave Cutler and a bunch of others who came over from the VMS team) and the Win32 goons had not yet gotten around to so badly "Microsofting" it.
In subsequent releases they started adding stupid things, and it's been downhill ever since.
Now, if you hadn't said "Windows" but instead wanted to talk about the best and most stable operating system of all time... well, there's no question that it was Xenix.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned XAML yet. Doesn't anyone remember hearing Miguel de Icaza ranting and raving about how XAML was going to spell the end of cross-browser, cross-platform web applications as we knew them, because everyone would be writing stuff that requires a browser that has the entire.NET API embedded inside it?
It's becoming very clear that AJAX is going to stop XAML dead in its tracks. Microsoft was pushing this whole "rich vs. reach" thing, but with AJAX you really can have it all. No need to restrict your user base to Windows XP or Vista in order to get rich controls in your web apps.
I think that's the more interesting story here. The monopolistic Windows desktop isn't going to disappear overnight, but the continued existence, improvement, and increasing pervasiveness of web applications will continue to make the non-Windows desktop more viable and widespread. (Click on the link in the previous paragraph to read a longer piece on why this is the more interesting story.)
The speed of any MTA is going to be determined largely by how much work is being performed when each message is submitted. The fastest MTA, therefore, is going to be the one that does the least amount of processing.
How about that spiffy big Postfix or Sendmail box you've got sitting out there, whose sole purpose in life is to act as a relay? Sure, it'll process millions of messages per day. It doesn't have to do much.
What if you're running a virus checker like ClamAV or a spam checker like SpamAssassin? Those take up CPU cycles. Sure, delivery is slower, but value was added.
What if your back end mail system is something like the Citadel groupware platform, where MIME content drives an event handler system? Again, delivery is impacted, but the functionality of the system depends on it.
What if your org has a global directory and your mail hub is responsible for making complex routing decisions for each message? Again, delivery is impacted; it'll be slower than the mega-fast-box, but mail won't be delivered correctly otherwise!
So you see, it's not always just about raw speed. And besides, next year's hardware will be faster anyway:)
So it *is* usable, even if not recommended for production yet.
Quite true. It does, however, seem quite inappropriate to give so much airtime to a project whose status is somewhat in flux, when there are half a dozen credible alternatives shipping today that solve many of the same problems.
These articles always seem to leave out credible open source groupware systems such as Citadel. It's a wonderfully complete system that does all of the usual tasks (mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, etc.). It also has a knack for connecting people together in real time, and includes a mini instant messenger and a chat system. One of the nice things about Citadel is that all of the data stores are built-in; you don't have to configure an external IMAP server and an external database server. It's very easy to install.
Why bother with Hula when it isn't even close to being finished yet? If a standalone open source groupware server is what you want, try Citadel, which does today much of what Hula is only promising to do at some arbitrary point in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
The supplied operating system may be a weird version of Windows, but you can install Linux on it as well. Go to http://www.larwe.com/technical/geode_linux.html where they have detailed instructions.
On the other hand, I'm sure a lot of people (myself included) categorically refuse to pay the Windows Tax. AMD ought to be offering a version of this device with no operating system preinstalled.
When someone says "POS" the first thing I think of is Windows.
Ooooohhh, you must mean Point Of Sale. Never mind, then...
It's good that we have a standard protocol that all mail clients can use to access all mail servers. It's good that the protocol is open and unencumbered. It's a shame, though, that the protocol we standardized on was IMAP.
:)
IMAP is an ugly, convoluted mess. And as I tend to rant about often, overly complex protocols encourage buggy implementations. "Keep it simple, stupid." If something like POP4 had become the standard, there would be a better selection of quality, non-troublesome email clients out there.
Although, with an increasing number of richly functional webmail systems out there now, perhaps the email fat client will become less relevant anyway. Of course, email clients will never go away entirely: you still need text-based access (pine and elm), and non-interactive clients such as Fetchmail...
Oh hell, I'll just come out and say it... anything is better than Outlook.
Hula is way too much hype and way too much hubris. Look at how polite the Zimbra people were: "Here's our new product, we hope you like it." Compare with the Hula project, which made the ridiculous (and clearly false) claim that "no other projects exist in this space" and then speak of "taking over the world." It's a project which basically consists of abandonware (NetMail failed in the marketplace) plus vaporware (Nat Friedman's hype machine) and they're already claiming it to be "the Apache of collaboration."
I, for one, have no interest in going anywhere near Hula. With that kind of obnoxious hubris, I'd rather go with any of the other quality products in the open source collaboration space.
If you like the idea of an open source collaboration suite, you might also want to check out Citadel, which has been around for quite some time and offers many of the same features. It's very easy to install (doesn't require any manual mucking about with database servers etc.) and has mail, calendaring, address books, bulletin boards, real-time chat, instant messaging, IMAP/POP/SMTP, GroupDAV, and an attractive web front end with an increasing amount of AJAX functionality.
As I said yesterday in another comment, there won't be just one open source replacement for Exchange. Everyone will end up selecting the one whose features fit their organization best, rather than Microsoft's "one size fits all, and you have to use Exchange if you want to use Outlook" approach.
Until PDA/phone manufacturers support something other than Outlook, or Mozilla "speaks" Outlook, this is a showstopper for many.
While I agree that mobile devices need to sync. I'd rather see them syncing with the server. That could be accomplished with something like Sync4J, which speaks in a standards-compliant way (wherever possible) to the server. That way you don't have to have your desktop running (or connected) in order to sync your mobile device.
...but it will be worth it. The goal, of course, is standards-based functionality for PIM (Personal Information Management) software. Yes, people really do want a replacement for Outlook, and the open source community would do well to offer complete, end-to-end solutions. Combine the Lightning client with standards-based servers and you've got a good shot at finally getting people to dump Outlook and Exchange.
Here's the thing, though: everyone seems to assume that we need an "Outlook Killer" and an "Exchange Killer." This is, in fact, not true. "One size fits all" only works for Microsoft because Microsoft forces that model. In an ideal world, everyone will select the products that fit them best, and those products will all work together. That means some folks might choose Lightning, some might choose Aethera instead, and they'd still be able to interact with each other's calendars. On the server side, the dozen or so open source groupware servers such as Kolab, OGo, Citadel, and PHPgroupware would all be able to speak common protocols with Lightning and other clients. Users would choose based on other features; for example, one organization might want strong support for forms-based workflow, another might want rich real-time communications, another might want a large selection of third-party plugins. The idea is to allow people to choose their software based on the feature set, rather than by being locked into one choice because, for example, only Exchange supports all the features of Outlook.
It's going to take a lot of cooperation but we'll get there.
I hope the HDDVD vs. Blu-Ray format war wages on for a decade, and as a result, next generation DVD technology in general fizzles out.
This will allow us to continue enjoying the current DVD technology, whose weak DRM has already been cracked. At the very least, it will allow DVD Jon a few extra years to break the next generation of DRM.
If one of these two new technologies "wins" in the marketplace, then the industry could move to it en masse, effectively locking the free world out of its use. Do you want that to happen? I don't.
Don't buy either one. Encourage the format wars. And of course, keep supporting the Electronic Freedom Foundation. In fact, take the money you might have spent on an HDDVD or Blu-Ray player, and donate it to the EFF instead. It will be money well spent.
"I'm probably going to get modded down for this" as they say, but this could be one of those "ha ha only serious" type of things...
... and sock the rest of it away to live on for a while when your developer job gets sent to India?
Perhaps you ought to go with a nice, simple, inexpensive setup
Seriously folks, let's hope the world's web developers steer clear of this. Flash is cross-platform and it's one of the key tools that make the non-Microsoft desktop useful. I know, I know, as a techie you probably hate all those "punch the monkey!" ads, but think of that Linux box you may have set up for your Mom or something. Would she be happy with it if she couldn't play all of those silly cartoons that your aunt emailed to her? These things seem trite to us, but normal users demand them.
XAML is a Windows-only technology, designed to make the Web one step more proprietary to Microsoft. Don't let them do it. Keep the web based on cross-platform tools. Steer cleer of XAML.
I own a small hosting company,and wanted to see what web-based mail clients were out there that I could use for my customers. Squirelmail and TWIG looked pretty ugly in comparison.
There are lots of good ones out there now. If the customer doesn't already have an email infrastructure, you might also want to have a look at Citadel, which has all of its data stores and protocols built in (even its own HTTP engine so you don't have to integrate it into your Apache server). It has an attractive web UI with a small but growing number of Ajax-style features, as well as an address book, calendar server, a simple instant messaging server, and a real-time chat server.
(Disclaimer: I am a developer on this project so I'm admittedly a bit biased towards it. But, the hosting company I work for has committed to offering it as its standard mail server package in the near future, so I think it's worth something.)
Microsoft isn't the sweetheart of the developer universe anymore. Anything they offer now is too little, too late. Nobody trusts Microsoft anymore. And besides, would you want your "Web 2.0" apps to depend on Microsoft products and services? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you use Microsoft tools and API's, you're not going to end up with "web applications" -- you're going to end up with "Windows applications that are delivered via the web."
Around the turn of the century, the phrase everyone was spewing was "whoever controls the browser, controls the Web." Microsoft proved that this isn't true. They had a near-monopoly on browsers for years, and they blew it. They just let the browser stagnate while they went back to focusing Bill Gates' pet projects, like tablet computing and putting a database in the filesystem. Now Google is finally realizing the Netscape dream of turning the web into a pervasive computing platform, and suddenly Microsoft has to go into react mode again. Microsoft does not innovate. Microsoft reacts. And Microsoft gets pissy whenever someone other than them starts succeeding in the technology world. They're a bunch of spoiled brats. Is it any surprise that those of us who are building the next generation of applications are hesitant to go anywhere near Microsoft?
If you can split the users up, perhaps by suborganization or by geographic area, you might (and I say might because no one answer is right for everyone) be well served by having lots of different servers handling email for each group, and then aggregating it all together with a head end that handles email routing and directory services.
If you're putting more than a few hundred users into an Exchange environment, that's how Microsoft would have wanted you to do it. Although notoriously unreliable, the concept is sound. In the non-Microsoft world, you could build each area as a subdomain, deploy the usual tools (such as the SMTP and IMAP daemons of your choice), and then use OpenLDAP to tie it all together, and add some sort of Postfix or Sendmail routing system to make the subdomains invisible to the outside world.
Some organizations might even consider an open source email/groupware system like Citadel that can handle a distributed network like this; it can tie together lots of servers using its own peer-to-peer protocol and share a global address book without the need to use subdomains (and any individual server is capable of being an MX for the whole network, so you might not even need a hub server at the head end -- although you might want to use one anyway in order to centralize your border services like spam/virus filtering, archival for Sarbanes-Oxley auditing, etc.).
In summary, if you distribute and/or federate the email services, you gain the benefit of removing the single points of failure, and you can potentially put the servers closer to where the users are, reducing your bandwidth expenses.
...now let me me one of many to say, good move, now do the same for Java. Before Java's relevance is destroyed by Microsoft and Novell.
What a missed opportunity. All he needed to do was throw a few Google Ads onto his game page, and Fuddrucker's would basically be handing him cash!
Free NFS. Other than that it was a pigs ear.
Definitely agreed there, but I'd also add that the free NIS implementation is a big help as well. The NFS/NIS implementation contained in SFU is a great alternative to installing Samba on your servers. If you can dispense with CIFS altogether, it's a big win.
(Not as big a win as ditching desktop Windows altogether, but sometimes we have to compromise.)
You have to jump through hoops to be able to legally call something "Unix," so why not Linux? This may sound silly at first, until you realize that certain disreputable organizations may eventually try to deliberately muddy the waters by creating "Linux" products that are not actually Linux. Kudos to the Linux folks for taking the initiative now, instead of waiting for trouble.
There's currently no "gold standard" for data centers. This is actually a bad thing, because self-important corporate audity types want some sort of "this is ok" label they can slap on a facility (or worse -- one to look for when selecting a facility). Right now they're all using SAS 70 as the standard certification to look for, which is ridiculous because SAS 70 is really more about bean counters and accounting practices than it is about data center facilities. Something actually designed for our industry would be more appropriate.
Whether this is it, is another story.
2000 was a huge leap over 98 and NT as far as plug and play and sheer useability goes, that was the best version of windows.
No, that honor goes to Windows NT 3.51. Seriously. They got their relatively stable kernel in place (courtesy of Dave Cutler and a bunch of others who came over from the VMS team) and the Win32 goons had not yet gotten around to so badly "Microsofting" it.
In subsequent releases they started adding stupid things, and it's been downhill ever since.
Now, if you hadn't said "Windows" but instead wanted to talk about the best and most stable operating system of all time... well, there's no question that it was Xenix.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned XAML yet. Doesn't anyone remember hearing Miguel de Icaza ranting and raving about how XAML was going to spell the end of cross-browser, cross-platform web applications as we knew them, because everyone would be writing stuff that requires a browser that has the entire .NET API embedded inside it?
It's becoming very clear that AJAX is going to stop XAML dead in its tracks. Microsoft was pushing this whole "rich vs. reach" thing, but with AJAX you really can have it all. No need to restrict your user base to Windows XP or Vista in order to get rich controls in your web apps.
I think that's the more interesting story here. The monopolistic Windows desktop isn't going to disappear overnight, but the continued existence, improvement, and increasing pervasiveness of web applications will continue to make the non-Windows desktop more viable and widespread. (Click on the link in the previous paragraph to read a longer piece on why this is the more interesting story.)
Who comes up with these names? ZOTOB sounds like some sort of new drug that treats heartburn, or allergies, or cholesterol or something.
"Ask your doctor if ZOTOB is right for you!"
- How about that spiffy big Postfix or Sendmail box you've got sitting out there, whose sole purpose in life is to act as a relay? Sure, it'll process millions of messages per day. It doesn't have to do much.
- What if you're running a virus checker like ClamAV or a spam checker like SpamAssassin? Those take up CPU cycles. Sure, delivery is slower, but value was added.
- What if your back end mail system is something like the Citadel groupware platform, where MIME content drives an event handler system? Again, delivery is impacted, but the functionality of the system depends on it.
- What if your org has a global directory and your mail hub is responsible for making complex routing decisions for each message? Again, delivery is impacted; it'll be slower than the mega-fast-box, but mail won't be delivered correctly otherwise!
So you see, it's not always just about raw speed. And besides, next year's hardware will be faster anywaySo it *is* usable, even if not recommended for production yet.
Quite true. It does, however, seem quite inappropriate to give so much airtime to a project whose status is somewhat in flux, when there are half a dozen credible alternatives shipping today that solve many of the same problems.
These articles always seem to leave out credible open source groupware systems such as Citadel. It's a wonderfully complete system that does all of the usual tasks (mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, etc.). It also has a knack for connecting people together in real time, and includes a mini instant messenger and a chat system. One of the nice things about Citadel is that all of the data stores are built-in; you don't have to configure an external IMAP server and an external database server. It's very easy to install.
Why bother with Hula when it isn't even close to being finished yet? If a standalone open source groupware server is what you want, try Citadel, which does today much of what Hula is only promising to do at some arbitrary point in the future.