Now, if someone would slurp up Netscape Calendaring Server and release *that* under the GPL.. If the Netscape SuiteSpot Server suite still existed and was under the GPL, there's your Exchange-killer right there.
Perhaps you might consider combining the now-open Netscape Directory and combining it with something like Citadel which can do mail, calendars, and a bunch of other things, and is designed to plug into an external LDAP directory.
That would give Exchange a run for its money, except for the same problem that plagues all non-Microsoft servers: people still want to use Outlook. Hopefully the next generation of upcoming open source client products will change that, though.
I was one of the people interviewed in this documentary. One of the things Jason always found interesting was that I was the one who at every phase of production was constantly reminding him that BBS's are not in any way a thing of the past. Dialup is dead, but BBS's live on. I haven't seen the final product yet, but I hope he's managed to convey this message successfully.
For those of you who aren't currently part of a BBS community, I'd strongly urge you to go out there, find one that you like, and make some friends. Log in every day. Keep the discussions going. The "modern" Internet has been trying (unsuccessfully) to re-create for a decade what the BBS has always provided. It's the people that matter most, and nothing connects people to each other better than a BBS.
Time Warner is the worst thing that ever happened to AOL. Yes, you heard me right. The moment Parsons stepped in, AOL lost its soul. Parsons was more than happy to sell out to Microsoft, putting the final nail in Netscape's coffin and killing off the possibility of a future in which tens of millions of AOL subscribers would have a Gecko-based browser embedded in their client software. If it weren't for TW and Parsons, IE's market share might be somewhere around 50-60% today.
I'd love to see AOL spun off, and Steve Case put back at the helm. I'd love to see Bill Gates dartboards put back in place at AOL. I'd love to see a plucky independent AOL taking stabs at Microsoft on a daily basis again. Let's see it happen. If this breakup happens, as far as I'm concerned it'll be good riddance to Time Warner.
This is a perfect example of why the "line item veto" should have been enacted in our legislation process. I think it was Reagan who wanted that amendment.
If we had a line item veto, the President could say "go for the military spending, but axe the RealID clause."
(Of course, our current president wouldn't line item veto in this case, because both he and his corporate masters are known to have fascist tendencies.)
This sounds like the perfect type of computer to use as a thin client, such as LTSP or perhaps ThinStation. No local maintenance, not even any local power requirements. Just plug into any PoE jack and go.
Secure Startup will eventually stop people running non-Microsoft OSs on computers.
As I understand it, that's not how a "secure boot" works. When a TPM is present, the operating system can talk to it, and the OS and TPM can assure each other that the boot happened cleanly, with nobody shimming stuff in between (say, a VMware type virtualization layer that happened to have a stream ripper in it). If you boot the OS on a computer with no TPM, the OS simply knows that it has booted insecurely, and applications requiring that mode will not run. If you boot a non-DRM OS on a computer with a TPM, it just boots the way it normally does, ignoring the presence of the TPM.
Sure, they could eventually write a BIOS that says "Don't allow an OS to boot unless the OS secures a channel with the TPM" but that doesn't appear to be part of the current implementation.
if microsoft makes a metro document editor included in ms word, which almost all businesses have, then most businesses will have no need to ever use adobe again.
If Joe PHB is already suffering from the "everybody uses Microsoft" form of myopia, then he's not going to convert his document to Metro format -- he's just going to save his Word document and email the.doc file to everyone anyway.
People save PDF's because of the P in PDF -- Portable. The morons who don't care about portability are the exact people who distribute.doc files without regard for whether the recipients can read them. Anyone who takes the time to think "well, this person might not have the same hardware/software as me..." is going to send out PDF's.
Back in 1999, Microsoft and Intel were using the "It Just Works" slogan to promote something they called the "Easy PC" initiative. And of course, it was more appropriate then, as it is now, to simply say "It just broke. Again."
I seem to recall that Ballmer had used that exact line ("It Just Works") to describe Windows ME. I can't find the exact reference, but this one might be close.
I remember this because at the time, one of my colleagues kept mocking Ballmer by deliberately misquoting it as "It just broke." To which I usually responded, "...again."
it should be possible to create a decentralised, cooperative P2P web search network that could do what Google does, but without any centralised reliance on a service, but rather a decentralised reliance on other people.
In that case, check out The Internet Portal. They're trying to build exactly what you're describing -- something similar to the Google 'grid' platform that they run all these distributed net-wide services upon, except it's distributed among all of its owners instead of centrally controlled.
On the other hand, I'm ok with Google, specifically because they're NOT Microsoft. Anything that helps to loosen Microsoft's grip on computing is good, in my opinion.
Microsoft Research, Cupertino CA
on
New Mac System Specs
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Beating Windows on the desktop is a pretty tall order, mainly because it's so deeply entrenched (and perhaps the same reason why Microsoft hasn't been able to take the Internet away from unix and Linux). Linux will defeat Microsoft the same way Microsoft defeated IBM: by altering the technology marketplace so substantially that their monopoly market is no longer relevant (or at least no longer the dominant paradigm).
If you buy a mainframe today, who do you buy it from? Chances are, it's IBM. IBM's grip on the mainframe market has never loosened. But most computing these days isn't done on mainframes. The same thing will happen to Microsoft. The conventional Pee Cee will become less and less relevant, as applications move back behind the glass so we can access them from any device anywhere in the world, be it a cell phone, a set-top box, a kiosk at the mall, or a conventional desktop (which may be nothing more than a thin terminal, if you're not a developer or power user).
As the PC fades, Microsoft will fade with it. Linux has already established itself as the ideal infrastructure OS, and infrastructure is what it's all about in the coming generation.
Thank you for your interest in the well-being of our customers. Or perhaps in the well-being of non-customers; specifically, you. Remind us again who pays us? Oh yes... our subscribers. Thank you for your consideration. Now please go away.
So basically what they're saying here, is that they're doing an infomercial. Microsoft has sunk low enough to advertise its products through infomercials, and MTV has sunk low enough to run infomercials.
Sorry people, I don't watch infomercials unless they contain the genius of Ron Popeil. And let me tell you, Bill Gates is no Ron Popeil.
I think this could potentially be a subtle attempt by Microsoft to get people to associate the phrases "open source" and "child porn."
No, I mean it; don't hit that "+1 Funny" button yet. This is basic psychology, people. It's a variant of the Big Lie. All they have to do is present those two phrases together, over and over again, and people will eventually associate them to the point where if someone says "open source" the first thing that comes to mind is "child porn."
One of the most important things people forget about the GPL is that Section 5 reads thusly:
You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.
Nobody is forcing Mr. Schwartz to make use of GPL software. We in the open source community like the GPL because it's fair. You want to use all that code out there, for free? Share and enjoy. But you have to play by our rules. You don't get to enjoy the benefits of the GPL without also taking on its responsibilities.
That's why Sun (and Microsoft) love the BSD license so much... you can take, take, take and not have to give back anything. Sun, unfortunately, is not currently in a position where they can begin dictating the rules. If they want "Open" Solaris to be a successful open source OS then they're going to have to start playing by conventional open source rules. Sun is in no position to change the rules.
Yes, it's really that simple. We need a few big, strong, non-Microsoft companies out there keeping Microsoft from becoming even more all-encompassing. It is good to back non-Microsoft technologies whenever we can. It's best to back totally open technologies, but non-evil corporations like Google are a good second choice.
Remember this -- never forget this -- once Microsoft takes monopo-ownership of something, it's nearly impossible for anyone to take it away from them. Google's strong lead in search (and increasingly in other Internet services as well) helps to keep things at least a little balanced. Imagine a future in which Microsoft owns search and webmail as well? Sooner or later everything would be IE-only, and eventually Windows-only, and Microsoft will have completed its goal of effectively taking ownership of the Internet.
A good policy to go with is to simply always go with the strongest non-Microsoft choice available when choosing any product or service.
Our other top story today: President Bush's approval rating is higher than ever, mainly because consumers are very happy about rising oil and gas prices... reports FOX News.
Agreed. When settling in with my desktop speakers a few months ago, I did a bit of a shootout of my own.
MP3 at 64k simply sounds low-fidelity. As someone with an ear for audio, I can actually live with this, because even though it's not ideal, it's consistent. WMA at 64k sounds downright obnoxious -- they seem to trade fidelity for lossiness, and it shows: there are very obvious encoding artifacts all over the stream. You end up hearing a 'flanging' sort of effect; it's very distracting. I wasn't able to listen to it for long.
The pleasant surprise for me was Ogg at a variable bit rate that hovered around 64k most of the time. It was what I'd call "radio quality" -- perhaps not quite as consistently hi-fi as FM radio, but close enough for casual music listening. Better fidelity than MP3, and without all the obnoxious encoding artifacts of WMA. It's a shame there aren't more Internet radio stations that broadcast in this format.
The funny thing about this was that in the past and at last year's Brainshare, Novell had stated that they had no intention of competing directly against Windows. They even insinuated that attempting such competition was madness.
That was probably Messman talking sensibly before. Now, as you can see:
Currently, Linux on the desktop has been adopted primarily by technology groups and the public sector. "The next release of [Novell] Linux Desktop will be ready to compete with Windows," Friedman said.
...this time it's Nat Friedman, a person not exactly known for being tactful. Witness how he single-handedly alienated half a dozen well-established projects last month when he declared Hula to be a category-killer and that there was nothing else in that space. (The developers of Horde, eGroupware, Citadel, and a few other projects just kind of stared gapjawed at their screens, wondering whether the entire previous decade had been mere figments of their imaginations.) This is essentially the same thing: the Ximian people (Nat and Miguel) have a habit of alienating people. It may very well be that they are among the few who did not learn from the lesson of Mark Andreesen: don't moon the giant. The giant will become cross and will squash you like a bug.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Friedman found himself in Jack Messman's office getting verbally bitch-slapped for making that comment in public.
I'm hearing all sorts of things here about how great Mono is, and how it's going to let all those new Windows apps run unmodified on Linux, as if it's the new WINE. Great, but how many Windows ISV's care about Linux? The ones I've met do not. And that means they're going to make use of every Windows-only API (sorry... "assembly") that Microsoft throws at them.
Welcome back to the moving target that's plagued WINE for more than a decade. Once they get Windows.Forms up and running, Microsoft will come up with some "must have" new API that the ISV's will start using. Maybe it'll be Avalon, who knows.
Mono makes it possible to write cross-platform apps that don't need to be recompiled (linking to Qt# or GTK# for example) but don't count on Mono being the magic bullet that suddenly makes an entire generation of Windows software run on Linux. Microsoft isn't that stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if someone would slurp up Netscape Calendaring Server and release *that* under the GPL.. If the Netscape SuiteSpot Server suite still existed and was under the GPL, there's your Exchange-killer right there.
Perhaps you might consider combining the now-open Netscape Directory and combining it with something like Citadel which can do mail, calendars, and a bunch of other things, and is designed to plug into an external LDAP directory.
That would give Exchange a run for its money, except for the same problem that plagues all non-Microsoft servers: people still want to use Outlook. Hopefully the next generation of upcoming open source client products will change that, though.
It's still fairly extensive, you just have to know where to look.
You could of course start here.
I was one of the people interviewed in this documentary. One of the things Jason always found interesting was that I was the one who at every phase of production was constantly reminding him that BBS's are not in any way a thing of the past. Dialup is dead, but BBS's live on. I haven't seen the final product yet, but I hope he's managed to convey this message successfully.
Those of us who still frequent BBS's know that it's still the best way to stay in touch with groups of people. BBS's are still home to some of the best online communities on the Internet, and now the BBS tradition is even providing an unconventional but surprisingly effective solution for groupware applications.
For those of you who aren't currently part of a BBS community, I'd strongly urge you to go out there, find one that you like, and make some friends. Log in every day. Keep the discussions going. The "modern" Internet has been trying (unsuccessfully) to re-create for a decade what the BBS has always provided. It's the people that matter most, and nothing connects people to each other better than a BBS.
Time Warner is the worst thing that ever happened to AOL. Yes, you heard me right. The moment Parsons stepped in, AOL lost its soul. Parsons was more than happy to sell out to Microsoft, putting the final nail in Netscape's coffin and killing off the possibility of a future in which tens of millions of AOL subscribers would have a Gecko-based browser embedded in their client software. If it weren't for TW and Parsons, IE's market share might be somewhere around 50-60% today.
I'd love to see AOL spun off, and Steve Case put back at the helm. I'd love to see Bill Gates dartboards put back in place at AOL. I'd love to see a plucky independent AOL taking stabs at Microsoft on a daily basis again. Let's see it happen. If this breakup happens, as far as I'm concerned it'll be good riddance to Time Warner.
This is a perfect example of why the "line item veto" should have been enacted in our legislation process. I think it was Reagan who wanted that amendment.
If we had a line item veto, the President could say "go for the military spending, but axe the RealID clause."
(Of course, our current president wouldn't line item veto in this case, because both he and his corporate masters are known to have fascist tendencies.)
This sounds like the perfect type of computer to use as a thin client, such as LTSP or perhaps ThinStation. No local maintenance, not even any local power requirements. Just plug into any PoE jack and go.
Secure Startup will eventually stop people running non-Microsoft OSs on computers.
As I understand it, that's not how a "secure boot" works. When a TPM is present, the operating system can talk to it, and the OS and TPM can assure each other that the boot happened cleanly, with nobody shimming stuff in between (say, a VMware type virtualization layer that happened to have a stream ripper in it). If you boot the OS on a computer with no TPM, the OS simply knows that it has booted insecurely, and applications requiring that mode will not run. If you boot a non-DRM OS on a computer with a TPM, it just boots the way it normally does, ignoring the presence of the TPM.
Sure, they could eventually write a BIOS that says "Don't allow an OS to boot unless the OS secures a channel with the TPM" but that doesn't appear to be part of the current implementation.
if microsoft makes a metro document editor included in ms word, which almost all businesses have, then most businesses will have no need to ever use adobe again.
.doc file to everyone anyway.
.doc files without regard for whether the recipients can read them. Anyone who takes the time to think "well, this person might not have the same hardware/software as me..." is going to send out PDF's.
If Joe PHB is already suffering from the "everybody uses Microsoft" form of myopia, then he's not going to convert his document to Metro format -- he's just going to save his Word document and email the
People save PDF's because of the P in PDF -- Portable. The morons who don't care about portability are the exact people who distribute
Ok, here it is, I found it:
i dg/
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/14/winhec.
Back in 1999, Microsoft and Intel were using the "It Just Works" slogan to promote something they called the "Easy PC" initiative. And of course, it was more appropriate then, as it is now, to simply say "It just broke. Again."
I seem to recall that Ballmer had used that exact line ("It Just Works") to describe Windows ME. I can't find the exact reference, but this one might be close.
I remember this because at the time, one of my colleagues kept mocking Ballmer by deliberately misquoting it as "It just broke." To which I usually responded, "...again."
it should be possible to create a decentralised, cooperative P2P web search network that could do what Google does, but without any centralised reliance on a service, but rather a decentralised reliance on other people.
In that case, check out The Internet Portal. They're trying to build exactly what you're describing -- something similar to the Google 'grid' platform that they run all these distributed net-wide services upon, except it's distributed among all of its owners instead of centrally controlled.
On the other hand, I'm ok with Google, specifically because they're NOT Microsoft. Anything that helps to loosen Microsoft's grip on computing is good, in my opinion.
Wow, Windows 2009 is really going to kick ass!
Beating Windows on the desktop is a pretty tall order, mainly because it's so deeply entrenched (and perhaps the same reason why Microsoft hasn't been able to take the Internet away from unix and Linux). Linux will defeat Microsoft the same way Microsoft defeated IBM: by altering the technology marketplace so substantially that their monopoly market is no longer relevant (or at least no longer the dominant paradigm).
If you buy a mainframe today, who do you buy it from? Chances are, it's IBM. IBM's grip on the mainframe market has never loosened. But most computing these days isn't done on mainframes. The same thing will happen to Microsoft. The conventional Pee Cee will become less and less relevant, as applications move back behind the glass so we can access them from any device anywhere in the world, be it a cell phone, a set-top box, a kiosk at the mall, or a conventional desktop (which may be nothing more than a thin terminal, if you're not a developer or power user).
As the PC fades, Microsoft will fade with it. Linux has already established itself as the ideal infrastructure OS, and infrastructure is what it's all about in the coming generation.
Don't forget what the BBS days were like.
The BBS days? You mean from 1978 until 2005 with no end in sight?
BBS's are alive and well, thank you. Go pick on some other technology.
Thank you for your interest in the well-being of our customers. Or perhaps in the well-being of non-customers; specifically, you. Remind us again who pays us? Oh yes ... our subscribers. Thank you for your consideration. Now please go away.
Sincerely,
The ISP industry
So basically what they're saying here, is that they're doing an infomercial. Microsoft has sunk low enough to advertise its products through infomercials, and MTV has sunk low enough to run infomercials.
Sorry people, I don't watch infomercials unless they contain the genius of Ron Popeil. And let me tell you, Bill Gates is no Ron Popeil.
We want Linux desktops too. Can you take care of that for us pls? kthx.
I think this could potentially be a subtle attempt by Microsoft to get people to associate the phrases "open source" and "child porn."
No, I mean it; don't hit that "+1 Funny" button yet. This is basic psychology, people. It's a variant of the Big Lie. All they have to do is present those two phrases together, over and over again, and people will eventually associate them to the point where if someone says "open source" the first thing that comes to mind is "child porn."
One of the most important things people forget about the GPL is that Section 5 reads thusly:
... you can take, take, take and not have to give back anything. Sun, unfortunately, is not currently in a position where they can begin dictating the rules. If they want "Open" Solaris to be a successful open source OS then they're going to have to start playing by conventional open source rules. Sun is in no position to change the rules.
You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.
Nobody is forcing Mr. Schwartz to make use of GPL software. We in the open source community like the GPL because it's fair. You want to use all that code out there, for free? Share and enjoy. But you have to play by our rules. You don't get to enjoy the benefits of the GPL without also taking on its responsibilities.
That's why Sun (and Microsoft) love the BSD license so much
Yes, it's really that simple. We need a few big, strong, non-Microsoft companies out there keeping Microsoft from becoming even more all-encompassing. It is good to back non-Microsoft technologies whenever we can. It's best to back totally open technologies, but non-evil corporations like Google are a good second choice.
Remember this -- never forget this -- once Microsoft takes monopo-ownership of something, it's nearly impossible for anyone to take it away from them. Google's strong lead in search (and increasingly in other Internet services as well) helps to keep things at least a little balanced. Imagine a future in which Microsoft owns search and webmail as well? Sooner or later everything would be IE-only, and eventually Windows-only, and Microsoft will have completed its goal of effectively taking ownership of the Internet.
A good policy to go with is to simply always go with the strongest non-Microsoft choice available when choosing any product or service.
Our other top story today: President Bush's approval rating is higher than ever, mainly because consumers are very happy about rising oil and gas prices ... reports FOX News.
64kb/s? That isn't even FM radio quality.
Agreed. When settling in with my desktop speakers a few months ago, I did a bit of a shootout of my own.
MP3 at 64k simply sounds low-fidelity. As someone with an ear for audio, I can actually live with this, because even though it's not ideal, it's consistent. WMA at 64k sounds downright obnoxious -- they seem to trade fidelity for lossiness, and it shows: there are very obvious encoding artifacts all over the stream. You end up hearing a 'flanging' sort of effect; it's very distracting. I wasn't able to listen to it for long.
The pleasant surprise for me was Ogg at a variable bit rate that hovered around 64k most of the time. It was what I'd call "radio quality" -- perhaps not quite as consistently hi-fi as FM radio, but close enough for casual music listening. Better fidelity than MP3, and without all the obnoxious encoding artifacts of WMA. It's a shame there aren't more Internet radio stations that broadcast in this format.
The funny thing about this was that in the past and at last year's Brainshare, Novell had stated that they had no intention of competing directly against Windows. They even insinuated that attempting such competition was madness.
That was probably Messman talking sensibly before. Now, as you can see:
Currently, Linux on the desktop has been adopted primarily by technology groups and the public sector. "The next release of [Novell] Linux Desktop will be ready to compete with Windows," Friedman said.
...this time it's Nat Friedman, a person not exactly known for being tactful. Witness how he single-handedly alienated half a dozen well-established projects last month when he declared Hula to be a category-killer and that there was nothing else in that space. (The developers of Horde, eGroupware, Citadel, and a few other projects just kind of stared gapjawed at their screens, wondering whether the entire previous decade had been mere figments of their imaginations.) This is essentially the same thing: the Ximian people (Nat and Miguel) have a habit of alienating people. It may very well be that they are among the few who did not learn from the lesson of Mark Andreesen: don't moon the giant. The giant will become cross and will squash you like a bug.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Friedman found himself in Jack Messman's office getting verbally bitch-slapped for making that comment in public.
I'm hearing all sorts of things here about how great Mono is, and how it's going to let all those new Windows apps run unmodified on Linux, as if it's the new WINE. Great, but how many Windows ISV's care about Linux? The ones I've met do not. And that means they're going to make use of every Windows-only API (sorry ... "assembly") that Microsoft throws at them.
Welcome back to the moving target that's plagued WINE for more than a decade. Once they get Windows.Forms up and running, Microsoft will come up with some "must have" new API that the ISV's will start using. Maybe it'll be Avalon, who knows.
Mono makes it possible to write cross-platform apps that don't need to be recompiled (linking to Qt# or GTK# for example) but don't count on Mono being the magic bullet that suddenly makes an entire generation of Windows software run on Linux. Microsoft isn't that stupid.
I'm thinking we need some sort of ISO standard for clock speed
:)
How about the amount of time it takes a processor to do a full-text search on the entire Library of Congress?