Actually, it's getting to the point where Internet usage is impossible to measure/meter, because the Internet is increasingly woven directly into the fabric of our lives. The idea of sitting around and "using the Internet" is about as obsolete as the idea of turning on your modem and dialing into your ISP -- in other words, not obsolete yet, but definitely on its way there at a high speed (no pun intended).
We have AIM on our cell phones. Some of us have computers turned on 24/7 with the speakers turned up loud enough that we'll hear it anywhere in the house when we get new mail or someone in real time wants our attention. We have our telephones and even televisions integrated into the 'net now. Internet usage is everywhere, it's always on, and it's going to be impossible to say "I got online at 7:00 and I stayed online until 9:00."
Open source software such as Linux, particularly outside the US, is really coming into its own. I had a bit of an epiphany recently that I'd like to share with you. For the longest time we've been obsessing about Linux on the desktop, and watching things like Google Zeitgeist to try to figure out what our market share is and when it's going to finally take that sharp upturn that signals the beginning of the end of the Microsoft monopoly.
But what has happened in the meantime? As Linux users, we find ourselves missing things from the ball-and-chains world less and less. I, for one, haven't needed to use proprietary software for anything in a few years now. What does this mean? It means that the Linux and open source world is now completely self-sustaining. Whether or not we have numbers that compare to Apple's and Microsoft's, we still have numbers big enough that we're here to stay, and there will probably always be enough new, good software to keep us going now. That's a comforting thing to know. (But I still think it'll get bigger.)
No one ever managed to topple IBM's mainframe monopoly. It was rendered irrelevant by the arrival of smaller computers. It may very well be that Microsoft's monopoly on the PC Desktop never ends, but eventually nobody will care because the PC Desktop becomes irrelevant.
What all this tells us is that Network Computing was a good idea after all. One might even consider it inevitable. What was a bad idea was the Ellison/McNealy idea of Network Computing, where you had to throw away all your existing apps and go to 100% Pure Java applications across the board. This time it's being done right -- gradually, one app at a time, and with an easy to follow migration path. I hope it continues.
There's one HUGE important point to all this, and it has nothing to do with fashion, nothing to do with conspiracy, nothing to do with elitism.
It completely prevents the merging of kernel patches that malfunction on non-x86 platforms.
Sure, these would get ironed out eventually, but if someone were to inadvertently do something x86-specific, it would immediately break on Linus's computer. That's a pretty darn good guarantee that the kernel is going to remain architecture-independent all the time, rather than only after cross-platform QA has been recently performed.
Right now, Bill Gates is in his office having a temper tantrum.
Wait, don't mod this as 'funny' because I'm completely serious.
From what we know about Sir Bill, he easily loses his temper, especially when someone other than Microsoft is succeeding in the technology marketplace. Google is succeeding at doing many of the things Microsoft wants to be doing right now. Google is taking the 'net to the next level -- they're turning it into a "platform" the way Netscape wanted to. Netscape failed to do this mainly because their engineers got a little too full of themselves a little too quickly, but Google appears to not be making this mistake. They're careful about who they hire and they're careful not to make too much of their own noise -- they just create new technology and let the buzz appear on its own.
Right now, Bill Gates is in his office screaming at his top-level henchmen. He's ordering them to do whatever it takes to kill Google, just as he ordered them to do whatever it takes to kill Netscape back in 1997.
It's going to be an ugly show.
Just because you CAN...
on
Effective XML
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Sometimes, the most effective use of XML is to simply not use XML at all. XML is a wonderfully useful tool when applied correctly. It's architecture-independent and is a great way to communicate unstructured and/or hierarchial data.
Sometimes, though, your data can be simple enough that XML is overkill. Software developers need to make themselves aware of situations when they might be better served by a simple "flat file" of delimited data. In situations like this, using XML can amount to what I like to call "gratuitous complexity."
The problem is, other than Jabber, nobody (AFAIK) has implemented it.
That's because it's a very complicated protocol -- at least when you compare it to protocols like SMTP, POP3, and HTTP.
Protocols that are overly complex tend not to have as many implementations -- and the implementations that do get done (aside from whoever did the reference implementation) tend to be buggy.
Here's a hint: if a bunch of vendors have to get together for an interoperability testing festival, your protocol is too complex.
Perhaps they'll pull a Google and distribute an official set of API's with which one can talk to the AIM servers. What would be great is if they distributed it as a set of libraries. These libraries could then be linked into Kopete, Trillian, GAIM, etc. to allow these programs to access AIM using a true AOL implementation rather than a reverse-engineered version of the protocol. That would be cool.
Re:Stick a fork in it, it's done
on
IBM to Drop Itanium
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· Score: 4, Interesting
IBM already uses it in their high-end server products, like the ones that used to be called RS/6000.
Actually, that hardly does it justice. pSeries (formerly RS/6000), yes, but also iSeries (formerly AS/400) is now POWER. The new OpenPower line of systems from IBM can run AIX, i5/OS (formerly OS/400), and Linux. In fact, it can run them simultaneously thanks to IBM's really good server partitioning technology (you can partition down to 1/10 of a CPU!).
I'm currently doing some development work on one of these boxes (running Linux on POWER) and let me tell you, it just smokes. Runs circles around Itanium, even before you start parallelizing (which is usually the case, since you're always going to have a dual-core chip, maybe even several of them).
IBM has absolutely no reason to continue supporting Itanium. It doesn't buy them anything. Itanic is an architecture nobody wants. If Intel hadn't sank so much R&D into it while still being able to live off the revenue from their 32-bit processors (and now, their AMD64 clones), Itanium would have been shelved a year ago.
It's true. Lately I've been noticing that living in the open source universe can be a lot like attending high school: everything is a popularity contest. If you're not one of the "cool kids" you don't get any attention, even if what you're working on is more mature, more sophisticated, and just plain better than what they're working on.
What I'm about to say is probably not going to be taken well, but here goes anyway: Slashdot is probably the "football team / cheerleading squad" of the open source high school -- the place where the coolest of the cool get the most concentrated doses of glory and attention. There are certain people (whose names I shall not defame in this post, lest I get moderated down to -99 or something) who could make a stupid remark about how they think it would be better if people didn't wear matching shoes, and Slashdot would run half a dozen stories about it.
The best example of unsung heroes might be Linas Vepstas. He wasn't one of the "cool kids" so the world pretty much ignored his project, which was to port Linux to IBM mainframes -- he actually got it working, for the most part. IBM ignored his work and went it alone, and nobody knows much about Linas Vepstas now.
Unsung heroes indeed. Let's all try to avoid making open source a fashion show. Most of our best technology was built by nerds, and nerds aren't known for their social skills.
These aren't mainstrean groupware systems. In fact all of them combined don't have enough users to establish yet another "standard".
Well, here's how we're viewing it from inside the GroupDAV alliance. We feel that all of the efforts that have been made up to this point have failed because of one or more of the following reasons:
Too complicated to implement (as was the case with CAP, which nobody has even tried to implement, and CalDAV, which exists only in a few vaporware implementation). GroupDAV is designed to be easy to implement yet cover the most common use cases: connecting address books, calendars, task lists, etc. to your server. We've proven that it's easy to implement -- every project that has implemented it so far was able to get an initial version up and running in just a couple of days.
Too specific to one product or project. GroupDAV solves this problem by sticking to the standards: iCalendar for calendar and task list data, vCard for address book data, HTTP for authentication and transport.
All talk, no proof of concept. GroupDAV has proven that's not the case here, because we have at least two clients and two servers up and running today, with more on the way.
A rising tide lifts all ships. If the concensus we've begun here continues to expand to become a de jure standard, it will spell the beginning of the end for proprietary groupware connectors.
Doesn't Mitch know that it's almost exactly that statement that caused Microsoft to launch its slaughterfest against Netscape when Marc Andreesen said it?
I'm happy to see stuff like this happening. Being able to do rich web applications without the use of non-web technologies is a good thing. It's open, it's cross-platform, and it allows us to continue using whatever browser and whatever operating system we want.
If this trend continues, it will help to stave off the possibility of a world full of XAML web sites after Longhorn comes out. That's Microsoft's big, final attempt to proprietize the Web, and it'd be bad news for the rest of us.
Seeing apps like Ajax, Google Maps, and A9 is encouraging. Now we need to have someone come out with a development kit that makes it drag-and-drop easy to create sites like these.
I'd like to remind everyone that the Citadel project has a complete, robust, flexible open source groupware server that, unlike Hula, is not abandonware. And, it works today, has developers actively working on it, contains a high-performance standalone messaging engine, does IMAP, calendaring (with support for upcoming versions of Kontact and Evolution built-in thanks to GroupDAV), a nice web-based front end, and all the other stuff you expect. Go check it out.
By the way, CalDAV is starting to become widely regarded as too cumbersome to implement properly. GroupDAV is the upcoming standard -- not only is it simpler to implement (resulting in fewer buggy implementations) but it also supports all the usual groupware object types -- not only calendars, but tasks, contacts (using vCard), etc. GroupDAV support is currently in beta for Kontact, Evolution, Citadel, and OpenGroupware.org. Go check that out too.
This is of course a Good Thing (tm). Qt is a first-class toolkit. Perhaps the new license will encourage more developers to build cross-platform software. And we all know that the more cross-platform software we have out there, the easier it will be for people to gradually make the move from Windows to Linux (or at least from Microsoft to non-Microsoft).
Look at the success of applications like GAIM and Ethereal, which use the Windows version of GTK. This, folks, is the obvious long-term path to loosen and eventually dislodge Microsoft's death grip on computing.
The problem we've been failing to solve for way too long is that there's no standard access protocol for open source groupware clients to talk to open source groupware servers. Fortunately, this is about to change.
GroupDAV is a subset of DAV designed to handle this task. The draft version of the spec is available already, and unlike most new protocols, its primary goal is to be simple enough for widespread implementation. GroupDAV uses the vCalendar/iCalendar and vCard standard data formats, and a simple HTTP-based transport with some DAV-like methods to allow searching and updating.
GroupDAV is being implemented by (at least) the following projects:
Kontact (and KOrganizer, et al) (the KDE groupware client)
Evolution (client)
There is a Sunbird implementation rumored to be in its beginning stages as well.
It's probably only a matter of time before some third party ties Outlook into GroupDAV as well.
I've been advocating the idea of open source groupware since 1998. Fortunately, some concensus is finally starting to form about how everything is going to interoperate. Exchange is one of the most heinous Microsoft products out there and it's about time we displaced it.
In order for Microsoft to use its monopoly leverage, they have to take the clean, uncluttered Google-ripoof search page, and make it the default home page in new versions of Internet Explorer.
They cannot and will not do this, because whatever profitability the MSN division may be eking out right now, is only because cluttered-with-ads.msn.com is the IE default.
Look who's involved: Google and Linux. This looks like a back-door plan to make network computing finally happen in big numbers. These devices really don't need to do much more than boot into Firefox, and the apps will all run on Google's massive server network.
Really now. Isn't it about time they started building low-end computers the way they did in the 1980's? It's possible, once again, to put the entire guts of the computer inside the keyboard. Just plug in your mouse, screen, power, and maybe a network cable... turn it on and get to work.
Full-height hard disks and insanely hot Intel CPU's made this form factor disappear in the 1990's, but it's time to bring it back. It makes sense for a lot of installations -- homes, schools, cubicles... let's ditch the "box" altogether. The iMac is great, but do you really want to have to throw away a perfectly good LCD monitor every time you want a faster computer?
The Zero Footprint PC is a good idea, now let's start seeing them in volume and in the mainstream.
As a geek-turned-manager, your first order of business is to force all of your subordinates to run Linux on their desktop and laptop computers. It's time to turn the tables!
I don't know about the rest of you, but the expense of ink cartridges has made me all but stop using my color printer altogether. I do most of my home printing on a low-end laser printer (an old Okidata 400e... you can get the current version of this printer for less than $200 now), and buy relatively inexpensive toner cartridges when I need to. When it's time to print digital photos, I bring either the camera's flash card or a CD to CVS (substitute your favorite photo center as appropriate) and get better prints than I could have made at home anyway, for a lower price.
Congratulations HP/Lexmark/Epson/Canon and the rest of the Ink Cartel. You've driven prices so high that I've stopped using your product altogether.
I would hypothesize based upon available data (i.e. GFS) that they're looking to light up fiber between their data centers, while running either TCP/IP or IPv6 (with modifications of existing IGP and routing protocols, more than likely BGP or OSPF) between them.
If the fiber is dark, why play with layer 3 at all?
A redundant network of dark fiber would allow them to turn everything into one big data center. All they'd have to do is just run 802.1q Ethernet trunking over the fiber. Suddenly, every VLAN is available from every location. Imagine the possibilities.
Amazing... all these posts and nobody is talking about file formats. What I'd like to see, is to have Apple's new office suite speak the OOo XML file formats. This would provide an even greater incentive for vendor-neutral formats to be used -- and then it won't matter if you're using OpenOffice or Apple iOffice (or iWhatever it's called now) because they'll all be interoperable.
...because it doesn't have an internal power supply. It uses a power brick. The power brick is the size of a washing machine and requires three-phase power.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's getting to the point where Internet usage is impossible to measure/meter, because the Internet is increasingly woven directly into the fabric of our lives. The idea of sitting around and "using the Internet" is about as obsolete as the idea of turning on your modem and dialing into your ISP -- in other words, not obsolete yet, but definitely on its way there at a high speed (no pun intended).
We have AIM on our cell phones. Some of us have computers turned on 24/7 with the speakers turned up loud enough that we'll hear it anywhere in the house when we get new mail or someone in real time wants our attention. We have our telephones and even televisions integrated into the 'net now. Internet usage is everywhere, it's always on, and it's going to be impossible to say "I got online at 7:00 and I stayed online until 9:00."
Open source software such as Linux, particularly outside the US, is really coming into its own. I had a bit of an epiphany recently that I'd like to share with you. For the longest time we've been obsessing about Linux on the desktop, and watching things like Google Zeitgeist to try to figure out what our market share is and when it's going to finally take that sharp upturn that signals the beginning of the end of the Microsoft monopoly.
But what has happened in the meantime? As Linux users, we find ourselves missing things from the ball-and-chains world less and less. I, for one, haven't needed to use proprietary software for anything in a few years now. What does this mean? It means that the Linux and open source world is now completely self-sustaining. Whether or not we have numbers that compare to Apple's and Microsoft's, we still have numbers big enough that we're here to stay, and there will probably always be enough new, good software to keep us going now. That's a comforting thing to know. (But I still think it'll get bigger.)
No one ever managed to topple IBM's mainframe monopoly. It was rendered irrelevant by the arrival of smaller computers. It may very well be that Microsoft's monopoly on the PC Desktop never ends, but eventually nobody will care because the PC Desktop becomes irrelevant.
What all this tells us is that Network Computing was a good idea after all. One might even consider it inevitable. What was a bad idea was the Ellison/McNealy idea of Network Computing, where you had to throw away all your existing apps and go to 100% Pure Java applications across the board. This time it's being done right -- gradually, one app at a time, and with an easy to follow migration path. I hope it continues.
There's one HUGE important point to all this, and it has nothing to do with fashion, nothing to do with conspiracy, nothing to do with elitism.
It completely prevents the merging of kernel patches that malfunction on non-x86 platforms.
Sure, these would get ironed out eventually, but if someone were to inadvertently do something x86-specific, it would immediately break on Linus's computer. That's a pretty darn good guarantee that the kernel is going to remain architecture-independent all the time, rather than only after cross-platform QA has been recently performed.
Right now, Bill Gates is in his office having a temper tantrum.
Wait, don't mod this as 'funny' because I'm completely serious.
From what we know about Sir Bill, he easily loses his temper, especially when someone other than Microsoft is succeeding in the technology marketplace. Google is succeeding at doing many of the things Microsoft wants to be doing right now. Google is taking the 'net to the next level -- they're turning it into a "platform" the way Netscape wanted to. Netscape failed to do this mainly because their engineers got a little too full of themselves a little too quickly, but Google appears to not be making this mistake. They're careful about who they hire and they're careful not to make too much of their own noise -- they just create new technology and let the buzz appear on its own.
Right now, Bill Gates is in his office screaming at his top-level henchmen. He's ordering them to do whatever it takes to kill Google, just as he ordered them to do whatever it takes to kill Netscape back in 1997.
It's going to be an ugly show.
Sometimes, the most effective use of XML is to simply not use XML at all. XML is a wonderfully useful tool when applied correctly. It's architecture-independent and is a great way to communicate unstructured and/or hierarchial data.
Sometimes, though, your data can be simple enough that XML is overkill. Software developers need to make themselves aware of situations when they might be better served by a simple "flat file" of delimited data. In situations like this, using XML can amount to what I like to call "gratuitous complexity."
Always use the right tool for the job.
The problem is, other than Jabber, nobody (AFAIK) has implemented it.
That's because it's a very complicated protocol -- at least when you compare it to protocols like SMTP, POP3, and HTTP.
Protocols that are overly complex tend not to have as many implementations -- and the implementations that do get done (aside from whoever did the reference implementation) tend to be buggy.
Here's a hint: if a bunch of vendors have to get together for an interoperability testing festival, your protocol is too complex.
Perhaps they'll pull a Google and distribute an official set of API's with which one can talk to the AIM servers. What would be great is if they distributed it as a set of libraries. These libraries could then be linked into Kopete, Trillian, GAIM, etc. to allow these programs to access AIM using a true AOL implementation rather than a reverse-engineered version of the protocol. That would be cool.
IBM already uses it in their high-end server products, like the ones that used to be called RS/6000.
Actually, that hardly does it justice. pSeries (formerly RS/6000), yes, but also iSeries (formerly AS/400) is now POWER. The new OpenPower line of systems from IBM can run AIX, i5/OS (formerly OS/400), and Linux. In fact, it can run them simultaneously thanks to IBM's really good server partitioning technology (you can partition down to 1/10 of a CPU!).
I'm currently doing some development work on one of these boxes (running Linux on POWER) and let me tell you, it just smokes. Runs circles around Itanium, even before you start parallelizing (which is usually the case, since you're always going to have a dual-core chip, maybe even several of them).
IBM has absolutely no reason to continue supporting Itanium. It doesn't buy them anything. Itanic is an architecture nobody wants. If Intel hadn't sank so much R&D into it while still being able to live off the revenue from their 32-bit processors (and now, their AMD64 clones), Itanium would have been shelved a year ago.
It's true. Lately I've been noticing that living in the open source universe can be a lot like attending high school: everything is a popularity contest. If you're not one of the "cool kids" you don't get any attention, even if what you're working on is more mature, more sophisticated, and just plain better than what they're working on.
What I'm about to say is probably not going to be taken well, but here goes anyway: Slashdot is probably the "football team / cheerleading squad" of the open source high school -- the place where the coolest of the cool get the most concentrated doses of glory and attention. There are certain people (whose names I shall not defame in this post, lest I get moderated down to -99 or something) who could make a stupid remark about how they think it would be better if people didn't wear matching shoes, and Slashdot would run half a dozen stories about it.
The best example of unsung heroes might be Linas Vepstas. He wasn't one of the "cool kids" so the world pretty much ignored his project, which was to port Linux to IBM mainframes -- he actually got it working, for the most part. IBM ignored his work and went it alone, and nobody knows much about Linas Vepstas now.
Unsung heroes indeed. Let's all try to avoid making open source a fashion show. Most of our best technology was built by nerds, and nerds aren't known for their social skills.
Well, here's how we're viewing it from inside the GroupDAV alliance.
We feel that all of the efforts that have been made up to this point have failed because of one or more of the following reasons:
A rising tide lifts all ships. If the concensus we've begun here continues to expand to become a de jure standard, it will spell the beginning of the end for proprietary groupware connectors.
Owwch.
"and Firefox as an operating system."
Doesn't Mitch know that it's almost exactly that statement that caused Microsoft to launch its slaughterfest against Netscape when Marc Andreesen said it?
I'm happy to see stuff like this happening. Being able to do rich web applications without the use of non-web technologies is a good thing. It's open, it's cross-platform, and it allows us to continue using whatever browser and whatever operating system we want.
If this trend continues, it will help to stave off the possibility of a world full of XAML web sites after Longhorn comes out. That's Microsoft's big, final attempt to proprietize the Web, and it'd be bad news for the rest of us.
Seeing apps like Ajax, Google Maps, and A9 is encouraging. Now we need to have someone come out with a development kit that makes it drag-and-drop easy to create sites like these.
I'd like to remind everyone that the Citadel project has a complete, robust, flexible open source groupware server that, unlike Hula, is not abandonware. And, it works today, has developers actively working on it, contains a high-performance standalone messaging engine, does IMAP, calendaring (with support for upcoming versions of Kontact and Evolution built-in thanks to GroupDAV), a nice web-based front end, and all the other stuff you expect. Go check it out.
By the way, CalDAV is starting to become widely regarded as too cumbersome to implement properly. GroupDAV is the upcoming standard -- not only is it simpler to implement (resulting in fewer buggy implementations) but it also supports all the usual groupware object types -- not only calendars, but tasks, contacts (using vCard), etc. GroupDAV support is currently in beta for Kontact, Evolution, Citadel, and OpenGroupware.org. Go check that out too.
For a moment there, I misread the title as ESR to Deploy Mars Express Radar and I thought, what the heck is Eric Raymond doing now?!!
This is of course a Good Thing (tm). Qt is a first-class toolkit. Perhaps the new license will encourage more developers to build cross-platform software. And we all know that the more cross-platform software we have out there, the easier it will be for people to gradually make the move from Windows to Linux (or at least from Microsoft to non-Microsoft).
Look at the success of applications like GAIM and Ethereal, which use the Windows version of GTK. This, folks, is the obvious long-term path to loosen and eventually dislodge Microsoft's death grip on computing.
GroupDAV is a subset of DAV designed to handle this task. The draft version of the spec is available already, and unlike most new protocols, its primary goal is to be simple enough for widespread implementation. GroupDAV uses the vCalendar/iCalendar and vCard standard data formats, and a simple HTTP-based transport with some DAV-like methods to allow searching and updating.
GroupDAV is being implemented by (at least) the following projects:
It's probably only a matter of time before some third party ties Outlook into GroupDAV as well.
I've been advocating the idea of open source groupware since 1998. Fortunately, some concensus is finally starting to form about how everything is going to interoperate. Exchange is one of the most heinous Microsoft products out there and it's about time we displaced it.
In order for Microsoft to use its monopoly leverage, they have to take the clean, uncluttered Google-ripoof search page, and make it the default home page in new versions of Internet Explorer.
They cannot and will not do this, because whatever profitability the MSN division may be eking out right now, is only because cluttered-with-ads.msn.com is the IE default.
It's really as simple as that.
Look who's involved: Google and Linux. This looks like a back-door plan to make network computing finally happen in big numbers. These devices really don't need to do much more than boot into Firefox, and the apps will all run on Google's massive server network.
Really now. Isn't it about time they started building low-end computers the way they did in the 1980's? It's possible, once again, to put the entire guts of the computer inside the keyboard. Just plug in your mouse, screen, power, and maybe a network cable ... turn it on and get to work.
... let's ditch the "box" altogether. The iMac is great, but do you really want to have to throw away a perfectly good LCD monitor every time you want a faster computer?
Full-height hard disks and insanely hot Intel CPU's made this form factor disappear in the 1990's, but it's time to bring it back. It makes sense for a lot of installations -- homes, schools, cubicles
The Zero Footprint PC is a good idea, now let's start seeing them in volume and in the mainstream.
As a geek-turned-manager, your first order of business is to force all of your subordinates to run Linux on their desktop and laptop computers. It's time to turn the tables!
I don't know about the rest of you, but the expense of ink cartridges has made me all but stop using my color printer altogether. I do most of my home printing on a low-end laser printer (an old Okidata 400e ... you can get the current version of this printer for less than $200 now), and buy relatively inexpensive toner cartridges when I need to. When it's time to print digital photos, I bring either the camera's flash card or a CD to CVS (substitute your favorite photo center as appropriate) and get better prints than I could have made at home anyway, for a lower price.
Congratulations HP/Lexmark/Epson/Canon and the rest of the Ink Cartel. You've driven prices so high that I've stopped using your product altogether.
I would hypothesize based upon available data (i.e. GFS) that they're looking to light up fiber between their data centers, while running either TCP/IP or IPv6 (with modifications of existing IGP and routing protocols, more than likely BGP or OSPF) between them.
If the fiber is dark, why play with layer 3 at all?
A redundant network of dark fiber would allow them to turn everything into one big data center. All they'd have to do is just run 802.1q Ethernet trunking over the fiber. Suddenly, every VLAN is available from every location. Imagine the possibilities.
Amazing ... all these posts and nobody is talking about file formats. What I'd like to see, is to have Apple's new office suite speak the OOo XML file formats. This would provide an even greater incentive for vendor-neutral formats to be used -- and then it won't matter if you're using OpenOffice or Apple iOffice (or iWhatever it's called now) because they'll all be interoperable.
...because it doesn't have an internal power supply. It uses a power brick. The power brick is the size of a washing machine and requires three-phase power.