Does anyone know whether this is patented? This sounds like the kind of thing that Peercast or some other company probably attempted to slap a stupid software patent on. Obviously we in the geek community could name plenty of prior art based on non media data replication, but this sounds like something the proprietary software scumbags of the world would have rushed to grab a patent on.
The sad thing is that AMD seems to be heading down the Intel road now and in another decade or two AMD will just be where Intel is now... offering overpriced processors, and we'll be rooting for whoever is eyeing AMD's chops at that point.
Yeah, you know what? This is called competition, and it's the way a healthy market is supposed to work. Hopefully we will see Microsoft realize this too someday.
This isn't necessarily the right approach. All the folks at Apple have to do is build complete Macintosh systems onto ATX form factor motherboards. System builders all over the world would buy them up and build Apple-compatible computers.
What many people don't know is that Sun actually did this a while back. I have an ATX rack-mount server with a Sun AXi motherboard in it, and it acts exactly like a Sun machine -- because it is a Sun machine. I'd love to see Apple do this.
The fundamental difference between what I'll call the "RMS approach" and the "ESR approach"... is that with the ESR approach, software freedom is a means to an end. That end is, of course, "software that doesn't suck." It's inexpensive to acquire, maintained by a community (creating all the usual efficiencies), and doesn't create lock-in. With the RMS approach, software freedom is an end in itself. It's something that, on its own, has value.
Most of us geeks understand the value of software freedom. It's why many of us willingly choose free software even if we have the money to buy proprietary alternatives that might have a bigger feature set, or a fancier UI, or whatever. We understand it. But ESR is correct when he asserts that most software users are not wired the same way we are. They want value, and they want functionality. They usually don't have the sophistication to understand why software freedom is important. That's why the software needs to meet or exceed their needs.
What you're describing is Citadel, which can be installed in its entirety with one command. I think it's more complex than that, though. We don't need an Outlook replacement, and we don't need an Exchange replacement. We need an end-to-end, open-source, cross-platform groupware solution. Citadel is the server portion. Let's get Moz Calendar and other clients working with it.
Are the citadel protocols the same as any other open source groupware servers? And what protocols are you using?
Citadel implements the most open, simple, straightforward calendar store possible: each calendar item is stored in vCalendar format as a MIME-encoded message in the user's calendar folder. Address books work the same way, with each contact being stored as a MIME message containing a vCard. Free/busy is generated automatically from each user's calendar and can be fetched via HTTP (again, in industry-standard vCalendar format). Meeting invitations -- you guessed it, sent and received via ordinary email using vCalendar format.
In my opinion this represents the most simple, optimal standard for open source calendar clients to use, and it should be pursued aggressively by all such projects. There is a pipe-dream IETF protocol called CAP which attempts to do the same thing, but it is so mind-bogglingly complex (XML over BEEP over MIME over more XML with a pseudo-SQL layer for querying) that there are exactly zero implementations of it out there.
Go check out the Citadel system and give it a test run. It's insanely easy to install, doesn't require a bunch of manual integration the way most unix solutions do, and has a complete, integrated web interface as well as support for all of the usual mail protocols. This is the complete solution others have attempted to build, only to end up with half-built rollups. All we need now to achieve an end-to-end open source groupware solution is for the client programs to be integrated with it.
The sooner the open source community develops a calendar client that is fully integrated with an open source groupware server, the sooner we will be able to mount a credible challenge against Outlook.
Reduce people's dependency on Outlook and it'll become much, much easier to topple Exchange. Topple Exchange and you've got a good chance at completely removing Microsoft from the server room!
It wouldn't stop. Not until ICANN became less of an independant organization and more of an elected body.
You mean kind of like the United States government? Yeah, those folks did a great job at representing the interests of its constituents. And in "Internet Time" it would only take a few weeks before the Internet was owned, operated, and taxed by corporate lobbyists.
Some people hate those cheesy Flash animations on badly designed web sites, but Flash is soooooo much more than that. And it's a good thing that they've got so much inertia going for Flash, because Macromedia will be a lot more platform-agnostic than, say, Microsoft or Sun.
It's called what the market will bear. Red Hat sets their prices based on their best guess about the value of their product in relation to how many people are willing to buy it at any given price point. If they're charging too much... hey, this isn't Windows, people -- there's competition in the Linux marketplace, and someone else will step in to fill what Dell perceives to be an unfilled market for a "value" enterprise Linux.
Did it occur to anyone, that perhaps he just believes the Red Hat distro to be the only distro of any real threat to Windows, and Solaris (of course, doesn't mean he's correct). Why is that statement taken as him attributing the Linux kernel to Red Hat?
Because if that were the case, he would have adopted his usual tack (which I find somewhat insulting) of spelling "Linux" with a lowercase L.
Look at the rest of his blog, and you'll see what I mean.
Also announced today were the plans to construct a new NASA engineering and research center in Bangalore, India. NASA is expected to be able to meet its budget constraints within the next three years.
Several side benefits are going to be realized as well. For example, the new space food will consist mostly of Hummus, which after processing by the astronauts will provide additional fuel for space travel, resulting in the ability to sustain longer orbits and/or travel longer distances.
I fail to see why this is so special. Aside from the "shoebox form factor" this isn't anything one could not accomplish simply by buying a bunch of 250GB SATA drives, and a nice 6 or 8 port SATA controller.
They may not be all that common anymore, but full-size tower cases still exist, and they exist for just this kind of reason.
Clearly, planting an Apple computer will produce an apple tree. Planting a Sun computer would probably produce sunflowers. Planting an SGI computer would probably produce Hollywood-quality cartoon plants.
Planting a Windows machine would probably end up getting your yard declared a Superfund site.
One would think that Intel, better than anyone else, should know one simple fact about the computer universe:
Try as you might, you just can't get rid of x86.
RISC vendors failed. Intel's own RISC efforts failed. Itanium is an overengineered design that nobody wants. What did they think was going to happen?
In the world of computers, especially PC type computers, backwards compatibility is king. That's what keeps incumbents like Intel and (especially) Microsoft on top. You'd think they'd know this better than anyone else. Has AMD beaten Intel at its own game? Time will tell.
Look on the bright side: the complete failure of Itanium in the marketplace (let's call it what it is, even though Intel hasn't officially thrown in the towel yet) means that we won't be stuck with an entire generation of computing where Intel calls the shots. Can you imagine what would have happened if Itanium prevailed and nobody else was allowed to produce a compatible processor?
Hold on, take this into consideration before you hit that "flamebait" button. I'm responsible for a large number of Linux systems at a hosting center, and this is our single biggest complaint:
There needs to be a consistent driver API across each major version of the kernel.
A driver compiled for 2.6.1 should work, in its binary form, on 2.6.2, 2.6.3, and 2.6.99. If Linus wants to change the API, he should wait until 2.7/2.8 to do so.
The current situation is completely ridiculous. Anything which requires talking to the kernel (mainly drivers, but there are other things) needs either driver source code (watch your Windows people laugh at you when you tell them that) or half a dozen different modules compiled for the most popular Linux distributions. These days, that usually means you're going to get a RHEL version, and possibly nothing else. What happens when you're competent enough to maintain Fedora or Debian, but you don't have driver binaries? (Yeah I know, White Box or Scientific, but that's not the point.)
In fact, I recently had to ditch Linux for a project which required four different third-party add-ons, because I couldn't find a Linux distribution common to those supported by all four. We had to buy a Sun machine and use Solaris, because Sun has the common sense to keep a consistent driver API across each major version.
Yes, I've heard all the noise. Linus and others say that a stable driver API encourages IHV's to release binary-only drivers. So what? They're going to release binary-only drivers anyway. Others will simply avoid supporting Linux at all. LSB is going to make distributing userland software for Linux a lot easier, but until Linus grows up and stabilizes the driver API, anything which requires talking to the kernel is still stuck in the bad old days of 1980's-1990's. Come on people, it's 2004 and it's not too much to expect to be able to buy a piece of hardware that says "Drivers supplied for Linux 2.6" and expect to be able to use those drivers.
This article assumes that Bill Gates is someone important in the email world. Is he? I don't think so. He didn't invent email. His company didn't invent email. In fact, Microsoft's level of innovation in the email space is exactly zero. So why do we care how much spam he gets? Yes, he's one of the world's most hated people, and his email address is widely known. So what?
This is really about Intel finally coming to terms with the fact that nobody wants to buy Itanium chips. That's where Intel was headed, and Intel assumed that everyone would follow along. Unfortunately, Itanium's future depended on technology advancements that never happened, and a rate of adoption that nobody was willing to pursue.
This is why Xeon became an architectural dead end: Intel wasn't willing to move the technology forward, because Xeon was supposed to be superseded by Itanium.
Did you know that "Pentium M" is actually based on the same technology they originally called Pentium Pro? It's true. It was a good design. It didn't do all that well initially because its 16-bit performance was abysmal, and people were still running a lot of 16-bit software at the time. Now that everything is 32-bit, Pentium Pro (now Pentium M) is just fine. The fact that it gets used in laptops is a testament to its ratio of performance to power consumption.
Intel would be wise to move forward with this. They ought to ditch Xeon entirely, and perhaps even graft the AMD64 instruction set onto this chip.
Why does AMD have to turn into an Intel killer in one swift move? These changes don't happen overnight, you know. There was a time when Intel itself was a feisty little upstart, sitting in the shadow of the then-giant Fairchild Semiconductor.
If you're now asking yourself "Fairchild who?" then you're probably too young to remember that Intel wasn't always "Chipzilla."
How ironic. In the 1960's, there was a big push for all-electric homes (electric heat, electric hot water heaters, electric stoves) because nuclear power promised to make electricity so inexpensive, it wouldn't be worth metering -- we'd all someday just pay a flat monthly rate to keep the grid and the plants maintained.
Well, we all know how that particular story ended up. But who would have imagined, back in the days of 40 cent per minute interstate calling, that someday telephone service would become so cheap that it wouldn't be worth metering? Unmetered telephone service? Now you're just crazy talking!
I suppose it's somewhat ironic (in an Alanis Morrisette fashion, not true irony) that it's really just people problems, not technology problems, that we have to solve in order to make these things come true.
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Who needs a girlfriend when you can have a $499 iMac? Come on people, let's start to see some proper geek priorities!!
(Disclaimer: comment is firmly tongue-in-cheek. Turn the damn computer off and go outside once in a while.)
Does anyone know whether this is patented? This sounds like the kind of thing that Peercast or some other company probably attempted to slap a stupid software patent on. Obviously we in the geek community could name plenty of prior art based on non media data replication, but this sounds like something the proprietary software scumbags of the world would have rushed to grab a patent on.
The sad thing is that AMD seems to be heading down the Intel road now and in another decade or two AMD will just be where Intel is now... offering overpriced processors, and we'll be rooting for whoever is eyeing AMD's chops at that point.
Yeah, you know what? This is called competition, and it's the way a healthy market is supposed to work. Hopefully we will see Microsoft realize this too someday.
It was so obvious. All they had to do was manufacture the transistors out of transparent aluminum!
This isn't necessarily the right approach. All the folks at Apple have to do is build complete Macintosh systems onto ATX form factor motherboards. System builders all over the world would buy them up and build Apple-compatible computers.
What many people don't know is that Sun actually did this a while back. I have an ATX rack-mount server with a Sun AXi motherboard in it, and it acts exactly like a Sun machine -- because it is a Sun machine. I'd love to see Apple do this.
The fundamental difference between what I'll call the "RMS approach" and the "ESR approach" ... is that with the ESR approach, software freedom is a means to an end. That end is, of course, "software that doesn't suck." It's inexpensive to acquire, maintained by a community (creating all the usual efficiencies), and doesn't create lock-in. With the RMS approach, software freedom is an end in itself. It's something that, on its own, has value.
Most of us geeks understand the value of software freedom. It's why many of us willingly choose free software even if we have the money to buy proprietary alternatives that might have a bigger feature set, or a fancier UI, or whatever. We understand it. But ESR is correct when he asserts that most software users are not wired the same way we are. They want value, and they want functionality. They usually don't have the sophistication to understand why software freedom is important. That's why the software needs to meet or exceed their needs.
What you're describing is Citadel, which can be installed in its entirety with one command. I think it's more complex than that, though. We don't need an Outlook replacement, and we don't need an Exchange replacement. We need an end-to-end, open-source, cross-platform groupware solution. Citadel is the server portion. Let's get Moz Calendar and other clients working with it.
Are the citadel protocols the same as any other open source groupware servers? And what protocols are you using?
Citadel implements the most open, simple, straightforward calendar store possible: each calendar item is stored in vCalendar format as a MIME-encoded message in the user's calendar folder. Address books work the same way, with each contact being stored as a MIME message containing a vCard. Free/busy is generated automatically from each user's calendar and can be fetched via HTTP (again, in industry-standard vCalendar format). Meeting invitations -- you guessed it, sent and received via ordinary email using vCalendar format.
In my opinion this represents the most simple, optimal standard for open source calendar clients to use, and it should be pursued aggressively by all such projects. There is a pipe-dream IETF protocol called CAP which attempts to do the same thing, but it is so mind-bogglingly complex (XML over BEEP over MIME over more XML with a pseudo-SQL layer for querying) that there are exactly zero implementations of it out there.
Go check out the Citadel system and give it a test run. It's insanely easy to install, doesn't require a bunch of manual integration the way most unix solutions do, and has a complete, integrated web interface as well as support for all of the usual mail protocols. This is the complete solution others have attempted to build, only to end up with half-built rollups. All we need now to achieve an end-to-end open source groupware solution is for the client programs to be integrated with it.
The sooner the open source community develops a calendar client that is fully integrated with an open source groupware server, the sooner we will be able to mount a credible challenge against Outlook.
Reduce people's dependency on Outlook and it'll become much, much easier to topple Exchange. Topple Exchange and you've got a good chance at completely removing Microsoft from the server room!
It wouldn't stop. Not until ICANN became less of an independant organization and more of an elected body.
You mean kind of like the United States government? Yeah, those folks did a great job at representing the interests of its constituents. And in "Internet Time" it would only take a few weeks before the Internet was owned, operated, and taxed by corporate lobbyists.
Some people hate those cheesy Flash animations on badly designed web sites, but Flash is soooooo much more than that. And it's a good thing that they've got so much inertia going for Flash, because Macromedia will be a lot more platform-agnostic than, say, Microsoft or Sun.
This is a big deal, people.
It's called what the market will bear. Red Hat sets their prices based on their best guess about the value of their product in relation to how many people are willing to buy it at any given price point. If they're charging too much ... hey, this isn't Windows, people -- there's competition in the Linux marketplace, and someone else will step in to fill what Dell perceives to be an unfilled market for a "value" enterprise Linux.
Let's put things into perspective here. Do you want to know who the top polluter of 2004 was?
It wasn't automobines.
It wasn't factories.
It wasn't even hot air from all the political rhetoric we've had to face this year.
The top polluter of 2004 was... Mount Saint Helens.
Really makes you stop and think, doesn't it?
Did it occur to anyone, that perhaps he just believes the Red Hat distro to be the only distro of any real threat to Windows, and Solaris (of course, doesn't mean he's correct). Why is that statement taken as him attributing the Linux kernel to Red Hat?
Because if that were the case, he would have adopted his usual tack (which I find somewhat insulting) of spelling "Linux" with a lowercase L.
Look at the rest of his blog, and you'll see what I mean.
Also announced today were the plans to construct a new NASA engineering and research center in Bangalore, India. NASA is expected to be able to meet its budget constraints within the next three years.
Several side benefits are going to be realized as well. For example, the new space food will consist mostly of Hummus, which after processing by the astronauts will provide additional fuel for space travel, resulting in the ability to sustain longer orbits and/or travel longer distances.
- Just how big is this big iron? Is it too big to fit on my ironing board? The device's physical footprint in its facility matters.
- What is its heat dissipation? Ironing boards aren't data centers, people: we want a high heat dissipation, to get the job done quickly.
- Does it have the industry's latest features? I want my big iron to have power management, in case I accidentally leave it plugged in.
These are just a few things I absolutely need to know about before I buy a big iron.I fail to see why this is so special. Aside from the "shoebox form factor" this isn't anything one could not accomplish simply by buying a bunch of 250GB SATA drives, and a nice 6 or 8 port SATA controller.
They may not be all that common anymore, but full-size tower cases still exist, and they exist for just this kind of reason.
Plant your PC/Mac and watch a house grow?"
Clearly, planting an Apple computer will produce an apple tree.
Planting a Sun computer would probably produce sunflowers.
Planting an SGI computer would probably produce Hollywood-quality cartoon plants.
Planting a Windows machine would probably end up getting your yard declared a Superfund site.
One would think that Intel, better than anyone else, should know one simple fact about the computer universe:
Try as you might, you just can't get rid of x86.
RISC vendors failed. Intel's own RISC efforts failed. Itanium is an overengineered design that nobody wants. What did they think was going to happen?
In the world of computers, especially PC type computers, backwards compatibility is king. That's what keeps incumbents like Intel and (especially) Microsoft on top. You'd think they'd know this better than anyone else. Has AMD beaten Intel at its own game? Time will tell.
Look on the bright side: the complete failure of Itanium in the marketplace (let's call it what it is, even though Intel hasn't officially thrown in the towel yet) means that we won't be stuck with an entire generation of computing where Intel calls the shots. Can you imagine what would have happened if Itanium prevailed and nobody else was allowed to produce a compatible processor?
Hold on, take this into consideration before you hit that "flamebait" button. I'm responsible for a large number of Linux systems at a hosting center, and this is our single biggest complaint:
There needs to be a consistent driver API across each major version of the kernel.
A driver compiled for 2.6.1 should work, in its binary form, on 2.6.2, 2.6.3, and 2.6.99. If Linus wants to change the API, he should wait until 2.7/2.8 to do so.
The current situation is completely ridiculous. Anything which requires talking to the kernel (mainly drivers, but there are other things) needs either driver source code (watch your Windows people laugh at you when you tell them that) or half a dozen different modules compiled for the most popular Linux distributions. These days, that usually means you're going to get a RHEL version, and possibly nothing else. What happens when you're competent enough to maintain Fedora or Debian, but you don't have driver binaries? (Yeah I know, White Box or Scientific, but that's not the point.)
In fact, I recently had to ditch Linux for a project which required four different third-party add-ons, because I couldn't find a Linux distribution common to those supported by all four. We had to buy a Sun machine and use Solaris, because Sun has the common sense to keep a consistent driver API across each major version.
Yes, I've heard all the noise. Linus and others say that a stable driver API encourages IHV's to release binary-only drivers. So what? They're going to release binary-only drivers anyway. Others will simply avoid supporting Linux at all. LSB is going to make distributing userland software for Linux a lot easier, but until Linus grows up and stabilizes the driver API, anything which requires talking to the kernel is still stuck in the bad old days of 1980's-1990's. Come on people, it's 2004 and it's not too much to expect to be able to buy a piece of hardware that says "Drivers supplied for Linux 2.6" and expect to be able to use those drivers.
This article assumes that Bill Gates is someone important in the email world. Is he? I don't think so. He didn't invent email. His company didn't invent email. In fact, Microsoft's level of innovation in the email space is exactly zero. So why do we care how much spam he gets? Yes, he's one of the world's most hated people, and his email address is widely known. So what?
How does the announcement that they will work together to insure interoperability mean that RPM is losing popularity?
It doesn't. Anyone who has actually read the LSB already knows that LSB specifies RPM as the official, common, package manager.
This is really about Intel finally coming to terms with the fact that nobody wants to buy Itanium chips. That's where Intel was headed, and Intel assumed that everyone would follow along. Unfortunately, Itanium's future depended on technology advancements that never happened, and a rate of adoption that nobody was willing to pursue.
This is why Xeon became an architectural dead end: Intel wasn't willing to move the technology forward, because Xeon was supposed to be superseded by Itanium.
Did you know that "Pentium M" is actually based on the same technology they originally called Pentium Pro? It's true. It was a good design. It didn't do all that well initially because its 16-bit performance was abysmal, and people were still running a lot of 16-bit software at the time. Now that everything is 32-bit, Pentium Pro (now Pentium M) is just fine. The fact that it gets used in laptops is a testament to its ratio of performance to power consumption.
Intel would be wise to move forward with this. They ought to ditch Xeon entirely, and perhaps even graft the AMD64 instruction set onto this chip.
Why does AMD have to turn into an Intel killer in one swift move? These changes don't happen overnight, you know. There was a time when Intel itself was a feisty little upstart, sitting in the shadow of the then-giant Fairchild Semiconductor.
If you're now asking yourself "Fairchild who?" then you're probably too young to remember that Intel wasn't always "Chipzilla."
How ironic. In the 1960's, there was a big push for all-electric homes (electric heat, electric hot water heaters, electric stoves) because nuclear power promised to make electricity so inexpensive, it wouldn't be worth metering -- we'd all someday just pay a flat monthly rate to keep the grid and the plants maintained.
Well, we all know how that particular story ended up. But who would have imagined, back in the days of 40 cent per minute interstate calling, that someday telephone service would become so cheap that it wouldn't be worth metering? Unmetered telephone service? Now you're just crazy talking!
I suppose it's somewhat ironic (in an Alanis Morrisette fashion, not true irony) that it's really just people problems, not technology problems, that we have to solve in order to make these things come true.