I'm completely serious about that. I really think the world would be a better place without Bill Gates. I truly hope that someone puts a bullet in his head, very soon.
When I first heard about Bill Gates' involvement in this project, I was a little worried that he'd use it to try to lock up the telecommunications market. But the project's failure just proves one thing: Bill Gates does not know how to design stuff. All of Microsoft's best-selling products are based on designs ripped off from others -- the general-purpose desktop OS (Digital Research), the GUI (Xerox/Apple), the web browser (Netscape)... the list goes on and on. Can you recall anything that originated in Redmond that people actually wanted?
His Billness is now the "chief software architect" in Redmond, heading up the design of a "revolutionary" new product line. This is supposedly the Windows version that has databases embedded everywhere, and a line of applications that use these new API's. This isn't something customers are asking for, and it isn't something their competitors are delivering. Perhaps, by chance, it's something nobody wants? Perhaps it's just an attempt to foist ever more complex API's on the world, so both app and OS competitors will be challenged to keep up? Or perhaps Bill is just a little too overconfident?
I'm happy to see the Teledesic project die. Hopefully Bill will die soon too.
Ok, so many of these items seem ridiculous when you consider them to be potential "digital piracy" devices. But what if the CBDPBPDBPPTA (whatever) does pass?
Can't you imagine the Slashdot headlines?
Store audio files with Barbie from the we're-very-desperate-now dept. Digital Music Lover writes: "Now that the CPTBPTPBTPBA has passed, mainstream digital music recording has come to a complete halt. Music lovers now have to pay every time they want to listen to a recording on their Fritz/Palladium enabled PC's, and they can't record that music for later use. However, some clever hackers in Germany figured out a way around this problem. They modified a 'Barbie talking cash register' with some custom DSP chips and an Ethernet interface. Now instead of ringing up the price of a loaf of bread, Barbie plays the latest Metallica recording instead!
It is my hope and prayer that we never get to this point. But if the Pigopolists do prevail, I can definitely see the hacker community desperately trying to store digital music any way they can.
I don't understand why there are so many people saying this is bad or implying that people who use Linux don't need it because they are so good. I must have missed the evolutionary step that made all Linux users so perfect that they never make mistakes. That is all the Recycle Bin is.
Well, it goes something like this:
Install an operating system without trashcan support
??
Profit!
Re:SPECint / SPECfp vs. POWER4 / US III / P4
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 2
Actually, there's something fishy about treating benchmarks found on HP's web site as if they were truly objective. Is it any coincidence that Sun (who, despite the encroachment of Linux, is still the commercial Unix market leader) did the worst, and Itanium (the challenger) did the best?
If that chart appeared on Tom's Hardware or a similar site, I'd be more inclined to take it at face value.
I'm tired of all the Netscape-bashing. AOL has spent a lot of money developing Mozilla -- true, there's some amount of outside development, but the bulk of it has been funded by AOL for use in their Netscape product. The least you can do is lend a few kind words. Personally, I use the Netscape-branded browser (Netscape 7 is a very good browser on all three platforms) and I use their portal site. You should, too. All of this stupid Slashdot groupthink of "Mozilla good, Netscape bad!" completely ignores the fact that if there were no Netscape, there would be no Mozilla. Or the more likely scenario -- if AOL hadn't acquired Netscape, Netscape might have gone out of business without the backing of a big tech player, and most of you would be using Mozilla 0.2 right now.
Give Netscape some credit, folks. They're trying to be a good open source citizen. Don't disappoint them with a childish "take take take" attitude.
This isn't a mouse or a "natural keyboard" we're talking about here. This is stuff which requires actual drivers. Complicated drivers.
Keep something in mind: when Microsoft released its previous generation of hardware (mice, keyboards, joysticks, etc.) they weren't thinking about Linux at the time. They felt confident that they owned the PC space. Nowadays, even though they still have the monopoly more or less intact, they do know that Linux is looking to break into that space, and has a better than fair chance of doing so.
Microsoft needs to de-commoditize the PC platform.
The best way to de-commoditize the PC platform is to turn it into the Windows PC Platform. Palladium is a big part of this, to be sure. Whatcha wanna bet that these new Win-Fi(tm) devices are going to tie into the Palladium infrastructure for security? And of course their chipsets will be full of Innovative Microsoft Patented Technology. Try to write a Linux driver... get smacked by the DMCA.
Over the last year or two, some of the WinModem chipset makers have started to warm up to Linux -- by releasing specs or by writing actual drivers. You can be sure that if Microsoft is the chipset maker, the binary-only, Windows-only drivers will come directly out of Redmond.
Arrgh. I am sick and tired of the Slashdot editors pushing this idea that the BBS is a thing of the past. The BBS community is alive and well on the Internet. It's single-line dialup systems that are dead.
BBS's still provide the greatest sense of a cohesive online community out there. Better than "blog" type nonsense, and certainly better than what the likes of MSN and AOL have to offer.
I've run UNCENSORED! BBS for 14 years and I'm not about to stop now. And the 200+ users aren't going to stop logging in, either. Modern BBS's offer access via telnet/ssh or web, your choice. And the Internet-connectedness of it all has made it possible for BBS communities to attain geographic diversity, something which was not possible when you had to deal with long distance modem calls.
Please, people, let's get the perspective straight. The BBS is alive and well, so stop pushing this "bygone era" myth.
When I first read the title I thought it said Wireless Whales. I thought all whales were wireless. I've never seen one swimming around the ocean while tethered to the nearest continent with fiber optic cable...
I'm not fully confident that stringing together Postfix, Cyrus, OpenLDAP, etc. is really going to produce a cohesive groupware server. Yes, it'll work, but it'll be difficult to install.
The real value here, though, is that the KDE project will now be defining a bunch of standard interfaces by which open groupware will access its back end services. Even if they don't get the back end perfect the first time around, by the time they're done they will have a very detailed set of specifications for the rules by which an open groupware client will talk with an open groupware server. Sure, there are standards for the basic protocols -- IMAP, SMTP, etc. -- but there are no standards for things like, which IMAP folder contains your task list? What's the URL to find another user's free/busy times?
I think this is a big step forward, but it can be done even better. (Full disclosure: I am a developer on the Citadel project, which aims to provide an easy-to-install groupware server; we're doing it as a single integrated server instead of stringing together multiple existing unintegrated packages. So my view on this is admittedly subjective.)
This news doesn't really come as any big surprise. Hewlett Packard always, always, always does what its Redmond-dwelling masters tell it to do.
Look at the history of OpenMail, for example:
When OpenMail was first released, they had a Windows NT version in the works. Microsoft told them to knife it because it would threaten Exchange. They did.
When Linux became popular, OpenMail began another rise. It was about to become prominent again, and possibly threaten Exchange again. This time, Microsoft told them to kill the product completely on all platforms. And they did.
Now that Perens guy is a nuisance. He makes too much noise, so Microsoft told them to fire him. Of course, they did.
I have no respect for a company that is such a pushover, and certainly no respect for a company so tightly bound to Microsoft.
I work at a mid size hosting facility, and we've done quite a bit of experimentation with iSCSI. In my opition it's not ready yet. Either that or it's just a bad idea, full stop.
We do quite a bit with our SAN -- there are a coupla IBM 2105 ESS ("Shark") boxen in the back of the data center with many terabytes of disk online. It's all about Fibre Channel. At least as fast as SCSI, effectively faster when you have all sorts of cache running on the storage side, and you have the flexibility to define exactly how much disk goes to what server, and you can add more dynamically without a power down, etc.
Unfortunately, Fibre Channel is expensive. It requires expensive host bus adapters and even more expensive switches. And of course it runs over fiber optic cable, which isn't exactly penny kit. So the industry decided to try running it over Ethernet.
Now there are iSCSI-to-Fibre gateways, such as Cisco's 5420 Storage Router (which we've evaluated), but there are just problems in general with running block level storage over a TCP/IP network...
For one thing, it's only as reliable as your network. If you have a network problem such as a down switch/hub etc, you lose your disks immediately.
Unlike SCSI and Fibre Channel, you can't boot from an iSCSI volume. This is because your operating system has to be loaded, and your TCP/IP stack initialized, before you can load the iSCSI driver.
Most operating systems want to load their storage drivers before they load their networking drivers. Doing it the other way around challenges all sorts of assumptions made by various system software out there. Sounds trivial, but again, we've evaluated it, and the result ain't pretty.
By putting block level storage on your LAN, you've increased the capacity requirements by several orders of magnitude. To get any reasonable performance you're going to need Gigabit Ethernet everywhere -- and if you're going to make that kind of investment, you might as well be doing Fibre Channel.
That's why our iSCSI stuff is just sitting around doing nothing right now.
The only place I can see iSCSI being used at this time is for really temporary quick-and-dirty setups, such as a programmer needing another 100 GB online for a one-week project. But even then, NAS seems like a better idea.
Gee, this would be just the thing for Digital Rights Management. Imagine, if your CPRM or Palladium personal ID were coded into the glasses! You would only see things they wanted you to see, and only things you've paid for, of course.
Don't let the Slashdot groupthink let you arrive at the incorrect conclusion that BBS's are a thing of yesteryear. The worthless ones have died, but there are still hundreds of online communities around; they're on the 'net now, and they're still the best places around to meet people worth having conversations with. BBSing didn't die -- it just changed its form a little.
I was interviewed for the documentary a little less than a year ago. It was a lot of fun and I hope it'll serve to get the word out that the hobbyist BBS is still one of the few places on the 'net still untainted by corporate pigopolist influence.
My BBS is linked below in my sig, in case anyone wants to drop by.
It would be the equivalent of Microsoft giving away a Linux distribution "MS Linux" that crashes often, doesn't run most of the GNU programs (gcc included), has a different set of C libraries with their own quirks, and uses a really old version of Gnome as a fixed, non-configurable GUI.
Then everyone would say "I tried Linux, it came with Windows, but it sucks" and it would take a lengthy, unwanted explanation to let them know that their "free Linux" was crippled. Even then most will never try it again.
That's quite true. By that description, one might wonder if Lindows is secretly a Microsoft plot to discredit Linux from the inside?
Go ahead and mod this as 'Funny' if you want, but think about it: no, I'm not suggesting that it's actually true, but one thing that the Lindows people seem to be really good at is establishing relationships with OEM's and generally getting the product out there. They seem to be doing better at communicating with the preload universe than any other Linux distributor seems to have been able to do so far.
One thing they don't do well, unfortunately, is build a good version of Linux. That means that a lot of people are going to be seeing Linux for the first time in the form of Lindows. They're going to see a crappy version of Linux, complete with a $99 service that lets them spend hours on a modem downloading packages that everyone else supplies for free on the CD, and they're going to think: "Damn, this sucks. I'm going back to Windows."
As the cliche goes -- you never have a second chance to make a first impression. Look at how MS used this to their advantage to turn people off to Java. Lindows may inadvertently do the same to turn people off to Linux.
Check out the Citadel project. This started as a BBS server, but it's gradually being built up into a groupware system. We've spent the last couple of years building up a solid messaging architecture and a fast, efficient server architecture. Right now it does IMAP, POP3, and SMTP natively (no tedious mucking about with Sendmail or Cyrus), and it's got a web interface, too. It has a single-instance, transactional data store. It has a pluggable, extensible architecture. And one of our design tenets is that it must be easy to install.
No calendaring yet, I'm afraid. We're still finishing up the server foundation. As soon as there are some decent calendar clients out there to test CAP (Calendar Access Protocol) with, we'll start building the calendar server.
I am absolutely serious about this project. This is not vaporware.
There are plenty of geeks out there who would love to own a PDA with 4096 colors! That's the number of colors the Amiga could display. Think of the nostalgia value!
I'll be more than happy to see lots of people get out of the technology sector.
Many of them got in because they thought they saw a big stack of money waiting for them there. It was the next "get rick quick" industry. Hopefully, most of these people are now quite deluded, and ready to move on.
If so, it'll leave the jobs for people who truly do love technology. People that are more likely to search for technologies they love and then go get a job working with them, instead of trying to attach themselves to MCSE=CA$H or some other such nonsense. Seriously, I've actually seen people decide on their career path by thumbing through job advertisements and noting which industries had the highest-paying jobs. Doing that gives you a possibility of eventually landing a job with decent pay, but it's a sure-fire way to guarantee that at some point in the near future, you're going to be miserable.
As the wise philosopher Eric Cartman once said: "Follow your dreams. You can reach your goals. I'm living proof. BeefCAKE!"
What I'd really like to see opened up is either the MAPI extensions used for calendaring/scheduling, or the Exchange wire protocol used to do the same. If either were opened up, we'd be able to extend groupware servers like Citadel to handle Outlook calendaring/scheduling with the same capabilities as an Exchange server.
Let's go, Bill: put your money where your mouth is. Is your software good enough to stand on its own merits instead of being propped up by platform lock-in?
TransGaming has done some wonderful things. Their technology is truly helping Linux to be useful in more situations by allowing Windows games to run.
It's really too bad that TransGaming is not a good citizen of the open source community. Their decision to keep their ActiveX libraries proprietary while happily making use of other people's work (the base Wine code) perfectly exhibits the "what's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine" abuse that BSD-like licenses can allow. And TransGaming's decision to fork the Wine code when it went LGPL is another example of this company's lack of respect for the cooperation that makes open source projects work.
I'll support CodeWeavers but I won't support TransGaming. When you take from Wine, you give back to Wine, dammit. A balkanized Wine might provide short-term profit to TransGaming, but it delays that day in the future when all Windows software runs seamlessly on Linux.
I'm of course referring mainly to ditching X. X is a great and powerful/flexible system. I love X, but current implementations lack a lot of things XP and OSX have in terms of colorspace handling and access to hardware functions.
You may think that this is a problem, but the truth of the matter is that people really don't care about low level color handling or anything like that.
For proof, I give you... the Amiga. Three custom VLSI chips. 4096 colors. Hardware blitter functionality. Color cycling. All tightly integrated into the operating system. This incredible hardware/software combination was shoved aside, almost effortlessly, by a platform which, at the time, was running unaccelerated 640x480 in 16 colors. (A few users had more, but the bulk of IBM-compatible PC's at the time were running ordinary VGA.)
So no, we don't need to ditch the X Window System. We just need to have more tightly integrated functionality in the rest of the offering, as you cited in the beginning of your message. It's true: we have way too many different options. KDE or GNOME must die. It doesn't matter which, but one of them has to go away. RPM or DEB must also die. Again, it doesn't matter which. Competing implementations of the same technology on the same platform introduce confusion and let an inferior but unified competitor sneak up the middle and claim the marketshare. This was the downfall of commercial Unix on the desktop (Motif vs. Openlook).
It's time to set aside the "I can do that better" attitude and replace it with a "united we stand" attitude.
My favorite is still Linux Today. But perhaps something different might be in order for the future.
All of the Linux news sites, big and small, seem to be loaded with content pulled from other sites. Indeed, many of the sites make their headlines available in an easily parseable, machine-readable format. Wouldn't it be great, if instead of putting all of the bandwidth etc. expense burden on a few supersites, to have a network of smaller sites all sharing the news articles, and each doing a little reporting and scavenging to contribute.
I know, this sounds vaguely like UseNet, but I'm talking about something with a better signal-to-noise ratio. Something where you have to work a little bit to get things set up and on the sharing network, but once you're online you can provide news for a small group of users without getting killed on the bandwidth costs.
Alternatively, the megasites could eliminate interactive portions like talkbacks/comments entirely, and the community could create a volunteer-run caching network similar to Akamai. Naturally, the megasites themselves would have to return to being noncommercial; nobody wants to spend their own money to voluntarily help some other for-profit organization stay afloat (as Mandrakesoft found out when they tried it).
Ok, these ideas aren't fully thought through, but the point is that there are ways of keeping Linux news sites running out there without having to resort to subscription-based content.
And for ordinary discussions and conversations, I suggest that everyone do what they did in the 1990's: find a nice BBS that you're comfortable on and make it your home. A good one is listed below in my sig, but there are hundreds, possibly thousands more. The community BBS is alive and well, despite CmdrTaco et al's best efforts to try and convince the world that it's a thing of the past.
This sounds like a lot of sour grapes to me. Anyone who works with Linux knows that the desktop is the "final frontier" for Linux -- and that we're moving there, but it's going to take a while.
I think Rasterman is simply angry that the Linux community has largely moved past his little window manager. There was a time when Enlightenment was thought of as "the window manager for GNOME" but it's no coincidence that GNOME usage took a sharp step up when both RedHat and Ximian decided to use Sawfish instead. And then of course there's KDE, which presents a gorgeous desktop without giving Englightenment a second thought.
After trying out Enlightenment, my thoughts were that it was really cool and spiffy -- until you actually tried to do something with your computer. Then it got in the way. Since most people actually want to run some applications, most people set E aside when they were done gawking at the cool graphics and wanted to get some work done.
And that's where Enlightenment stands today: a page in Linux desktop history where Rasterman pushed the limits and showed us what the Linux desktop was capable of being. It certainly inspired a lot of the graphics work that then went into KDE and GNOME standard desktops. But now, Raster's 15 minutes of fame are gone, and he's all pissy about it so he's declaring the Linux desktop dead. Yeah, that's real mature.
We're doing all the right things to get Linux on the mainstream desktop. We'll get there if we keep focused and ignore the sour grapes.
The only thing evil and borgish thing that they might do is to modify their Windows software to only work on *their* emulator. And I bet if they knew how to prevent WINE from running Windows apps, they would probably have already done it.
Actually, I'm somewhat frightened by the fact that Microsoft has not made any attempt at all to either kill the WINE project or prevent their software from running on it. It kind of makes me think that they've got an 'ace' which they're ready to unleash just as soon as WINE finally starts to become usable by non-techies.
What will it be? Do they have some really great legal maneuver so unstoppable that they're confident enough to rely on it? Or do they plan on making the next version of Office depend on some weird crypto chain that only Genuine Microsoft Windows can authenticate? Even worse, will the next version of Visual Studio generate applications that do this, so even third-party apps stop running on WINE?
Yeah, I'm paranoid. WINE is finally getting to the point where it's usable; I think it's entirely possible that within the next year it's going to start approaching the level of accuracy OS/2 had in running Windows apps. The fact that Microsoft appears ok with this so far is extremely suspect.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm completely serious about that. I really think the world would be a better place without Bill Gates. I truly hope that someone puts a bullet in his head, very soon.
When I first heard about Bill Gates' involvement in this project, I was a little worried that he'd use it to try to lock up the telecommunications market. But the project's failure just proves one thing: Bill Gates does not know how to design stuff. All of Microsoft's best-selling products are based on designs ripped off from others -- the general-purpose desktop OS (Digital Research), the GUI (Xerox/Apple), the web browser (Netscape) ... the list goes on and on. Can you recall anything that originated in Redmond that people actually wanted?
His Billness is now the "chief software architect" in Redmond, heading up the design of a "revolutionary" new product line. This is supposedly the Windows version that has databases embedded everywhere, and a line of applications that use these new API's. This isn't something customers are asking for, and it isn't something their competitors are delivering. Perhaps, by chance, it's something nobody wants? Perhaps it's just an attempt to foist ever more complex API's on the world, so both app and OS competitors will be challenged to keep up? Or perhaps Bill is just a little too overconfident?
I'm happy to see the Teledesic project die. Hopefully Bill will die soon too.
Ok, so many of these items seem ridiculous when you consider them to be potential "digital piracy" devices. But what if the CBDPBPDBPPTA (whatever) does pass?
Can't you imagine the Slashdot headlines?
Store audio files with Barbie
from the we're-very-desperate-now dept.
Digital Music Lover writes: "Now that the CPTBPTPBTPBA has passed, mainstream digital music recording has come to a complete halt. Music lovers now have to pay every time they want to listen to a recording on their Fritz/Palladium enabled PC's, and they can't record that music for later use. However, some clever hackers in Germany figured out a way around this problem. They modified a 'Barbie talking cash register' with some custom DSP chips and an Ethernet interface. Now instead of ringing up the price of a loaf of bread, Barbie plays the latest Metallica recording instead!
It is my hope and prayer that we never get to this point. But if the Pigopolists do prevail, I can definitely see the hacker community desperately trying to store digital music any way they can.
Actually, there's something fishy about treating benchmarks found on HP's web site as if they were truly objective. Is it any coincidence that Sun (who, despite the encroachment of Linux, is still the commercial Unix market leader) did the worst, and Itanium (the challenger) did the best?
If that chart appeared on Tom's Hardware or a similar site, I'd be more inclined to take it at face value.
I'm tired of all the Netscape-bashing. AOL has spent a lot of money developing Mozilla -- true, there's some amount of outside development, but the bulk of it has been funded by AOL for use in their Netscape product. The least you can do is lend a few kind words. Personally, I use the Netscape-branded browser (Netscape 7 is a very good browser on all three platforms) and I use their portal site. You should, too. All of this stupid Slashdot groupthink of "Mozilla good, Netscape bad!" completely ignores the fact that if there were no Netscape, there would be no Mozilla. Or the more likely scenario -- if AOL hadn't acquired Netscape, Netscape might have gone out of business without the backing of a big tech player, and most of you would be using Mozilla 0.2 right now.
Give Netscape some credit, folks. They're trying to be a good open source citizen. Don't disappoint them with a childish "take take take" attitude.
This isn't a mouse or a "natural keyboard" we're talking about here. This is stuff which requires actual drivers. Complicated drivers.
Keep something in mind: when Microsoft released its previous generation of hardware (mice, keyboards, joysticks, etc.) they weren't thinking about Linux at the time. They felt confident that they owned the PC space. Nowadays, even though they still have the monopoly more or less intact, they do know that Linux is looking to break into that space, and has a better than fair chance of doing so.
Microsoft needs to de-commoditize the PC platform.
The best way to de-commoditize the PC platform is to turn it into the Windows PC Platform. Palladium is a big part of this, to be sure. Whatcha wanna bet that these new Win-Fi(tm) devices are going to tie into the Palladium infrastructure for security? And of course their chipsets will be full of Innovative Microsoft Patented Technology. Try to write a Linux driver... get smacked by the DMCA.
Over the last year or two, some of the WinModem chipset makers have started to warm up to Linux -- by releasing specs or by writing actual drivers. You can be sure that if Microsoft is the chipset maker, the binary-only, Windows-only drivers will come directly out of Redmond.
Arrgh. I am sick and tired of the Slashdot editors pushing this idea that the BBS is a thing of the past. The BBS community is alive and well on the Internet. It's single-line dialup systems that are dead.
BBS's still provide the greatest sense of a cohesive online community out there. Better than "blog" type nonsense, and certainly better than what the likes of MSN and AOL have to offer.
I've run UNCENSORED! BBS for 14 years and I'm not about to stop now. And the 200+ users aren't going to stop logging in, either. Modern BBS's offer access via telnet/ssh or web, your choice. And the Internet-connectedness of it all has made it possible for BBS communities to attain geographic diversity, something which was not possible when you had to deal with long distance modem calls.
Please, people, let's get the perspective straight. The BBS is alive and well, so stop pushing this "bygone era" myth.
I think it's time for a new moderation category: +5, Really F***ing Scary .
When I first read the title I thought it said Wireless Whales. I thought all whales were wireless. I've never seen one swimming around the ocean while tethered to the nearest continent with fiber optic cable...
I'm not fully confident that stringing together Postfix, Cyrus, OpenLDAP, etc. is really going to produce a cohesive groupware server. Yes, it'll work, but it'll be difficult to install.
The real value here, though, is that the KDE project will now be defining a bunch of standard interfaces by which open groupware will access its back end services. Even if they don't get the back end perfect the first time around, by the time they're done they will have a very detailed set of specifications for the rules by which an open groupware client will talk with an open groupware server. Sure, there are standards for the basic protocols -- IMAP, SMTP, etc. -- but there are no standards for things like, which IMAP folder contains your task list? What's the URL to find another user's free/busy times?
I think this is a big step forward, but it can be done even better. (Full disclosure: I am a developer on the Citadel project, which aims to provide an easy-to-install groupware server; we're doing it as a single integrated server instead of stringing together multiple existing unintegrated packages. So my view on this is admittedly subjective.)
Look at the history of OpenMail, for example:
- When OpenMail was first released, they had a Windows NT version in the works. Microsoft told them to knife it because it would threaten Exchange. They did.
- When Linux became popular, OpenMail began another rise. It was about to become prominent again, and possibly threaten Exchange again. This time, Microsoft told them to kill the product completely on all platforms. And they did.
Now that Perens guy is a nuisance. He makes too much noise, so Microsoft told them to fire him. Of course, they did.I have no respect for a company that is such a pushover, and certainly no respect for a company so tightly bound to Microsoft.
I work at a mid size hosting facility, and we've done quite a bit of experimentation with iSCSI. In my opition it's not ready yet. Either that or it's just a bad idea, full stop.
We do quite a bit with our SAN -- there are a coupla IBM 2105 ESS ("Shark") boxen in the back of the data center with many terabytes of disk online. It's all about Fibre Channel. At least as fast as SCSI, effectively faster when you have all sorts of cache running on the storage side, and you have the flexibility to define exactly how much disk goes to what server, and you can add more dynamically without a power down, etc.
Unfortunately, Fibre Channel is expensive. It requires expensive host bus adapters and even more expensive switches. And of course it runs over fiber optic cable, which isn't exactly penny kit. So the industry decided to try running it over Ethernet.
Now there are iSCSI-to-Fibre gateways, such as Cisco's 5420 Storage Router (which we've evaluated), but there are just problems in general with running block level storage over a TCP/IP network...That's why our iSCSI stuff is just sitting around doing nothing right now.
The only place I can see iSCSI being used at this time is for really temporary quick-and-dirty setups, such as a programmer needing another 100 GB online for a one-week project. But even then, NAS seems like a better idea.
Gee, this would be just the thing for Digital Rights Management. Imagine, if your CPRM or Palladium personal ID were coded into the glasses! You would only see things they wanted you to see, and only things you've paid for, of course.
Don't let the Slashdot groupthink let you arrive at the incorrect conclusion that BBS's are a thing of yesteryear. The worthless ones have died, but there are still hundreds of online communities around; they're on the 'net now, and they're still the best places around to meet people worth having conversations with. BBSing didn't die -- it just changed its form a little.
I was interviewed for the documentary a little less than a year ago. It was a lot of fun and I hope it'll serve to get the word out that the hobbyist BBS is still one of the few places on the 'net still untainted by corporate pigopolist influence.
My BBS is linked below in my sig, in case anyone wants to drop by.
That's quite true. By that description, one might wonder if Lindows is secretly a Microsoft plot to discredit Linux from the inside?
Go ahead and mod this as 'Funny' if you want, but think about it: no, I'm not suggesting that it's actually true, but one thing that the Lindows people seem to be really good at is establishing relationships with OEM's and generally getting the product out there. They seem to be doing better at communicating with the preload universe than any other Linux distributor seems to have been able to do so far.
One thing they don't do well, unfortunately, is build a good version of Linux. That means that a lot of people are going to be seeing Linux for the first time in the form of Lindows. They're going to see a crappy version of Linux, complete with a $99 service that lets them spend hours on a modem downloading packages that everyone else supplies for free on the CD, and they're going to think: "Damn, this sucks. I'm going back to Windows."
As the cliche goes -- you never have a second chance to make a first impression. Look at how MS used this to their advantage to turn people off to Java. Lindows may inadvertently do the same to turn people off to Linux.
Check out the Citadel project. This started as a BBS server, but it's gradually being built up into a groupware system. We've spent the last couple of years building up a solid messaging architecture and a fast, efficient server architecture. Right now it does IMAP, POP3, and SMTP natively (no tedious mucking about with Sendmail or Cyrus), and it's got a web interface, too. It has a single-instance, transactional data store. It has a pluggable, extensible architecture. And one of our design tenets is that it must be easy to install.
No calendaring yet, I'm afraid. We're still finishing up the server foundation. As soon as there are some decent calendar clients out there to test CAP (Calendar Access Protocol) with, we'll start building the calendar server.
I am absolutely serious about this project. This is not vaporware.
There are plenty of geeks out there who would love to own a PDA with 4096 colors! That's the number of colors the Amiga could display. Think of the nostalgia value!
I'll be more than happy to see lots of people get out of the technology sector.
Many of them got in because they thought they saw a big stack of money waiting for them there. It was the next "get rick quick" industry. Hopefully, most of these people are now quite deluded, and ready to move on.
If so, it'll leave the jobs for people who truly do love technology. People that are more likely to search for technologies they love and then go get a job working with them, instead of trying to attach themselves to MCSE=CA$H or some other such nonsense. Seriously, I've actually seen people decide on their career path by thumbing through job advertisements and noting which industries had the highest-paying jobs. Doing that gives you a possibility of eventually landing a job with decent pay, but it's a sure-fire way to guarantee that at some point in the near future, you're going to be miserable.
As the wise philosopher Eric Cartman once said: "Follow your dreams. You can reach your goals. I'm living proof. BeefCAKE!"
What I'd really like to see opened up is either the MAPI extensions used for calendaring/scheduling, or the Exchange wire protocol used to do the same. If either were opened up, we'd be able to extend groupware servers like Citadel to handle Outlook calendaring/scheduling with the same capabilities as an Exchange server.
Let's go, Bill: put your money where your mouth is. Is your software good enough to stand on its own merits instead of being propped up by platform lock-in?
TransGaming has done some wonderful things. Their technology is truly helping Linux to be useful in more situations by allowing Windows games to run.
It's really too bad that TransGaming is not a good citizen of the open source community. Their decision to keep their ActiveX libraries proprietary while happily making use of other people's work (the base Wine code) perfectly exhibits the "what's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine" abuse that BSD-like licenses can allow. And TransGaming's decision to fork the Wine code when it went LGPL is another example of this company's lack of respect for the cooperation that makes open source projects work.
I'll support CodeWeavers but I won't support TransGaming. When you take from Wine, you give back to Wine, dammit. A balkanized Wine might provide short-term profit to TransGaming, but it delays that day in the future when all Windows software runs seamlessly on Linux.
For proof, I give you
So no, we don't need to ditch the X Window System. We just need to have more tightly integrated functionality in the rest of the offering, as you cited in the beginning of your message. It's true: we have way too many different options. KDE or GNOME must die. It doesn't matter which, but one of them has to go away. RPM or DEB must also die. Again, it doesn't matter which. Competing implementations of the same technology on the same platform introduce confusion and let an inferior but unified competitor sneak up the middle and claim the marketshare. This was the downfall of commercial Unix on the desktop (Motif vs. Openlook).
It's time to set aside the "I can do that better" attitude and replace it with a "united we stand" attitude.
My favorite is still Linux Today. But perhaps something different might be in order for the future.
All of the Linux news sites, big and small, seem to be loaded with content pulled from other sites. Indeed, many of the sites make their headlines available in an easily parseable, machine-readable format. Wouldn't it be great, if instead of putting all of the bandwidth etc. expense burden on a few supersites, to have a network of smaller sites all sharing the news articles, and each doing a little reporting and scavenging to contribute.
I know, this sounds vaguely like UseNet, but I'm talking about something with a better signal-to-noise ratio. Something where you have to work a little bit to get things set up and on the sharing network, but once you're online you can provide news for a small group of users without getting killed on the bandwidth costs.
Alternatively, the megasites could eliminate interactive portions like talkbacks/comments entirely, and the community could create a volunteer-run caching network similar to Akamai. Naturally, the megasites themselves would have to return to being noncommercial; nobody wants to spend their own money to voluntarily help some other for-profit organization stay afloat (as Mandrakesoft found out when they tried it).
Ok, these ideas aren't fully thought through, but the point is that there are ways of keeping Linux news sites running out there without having to resort to subscription-based content.
And for ordinary discussions and conversations, I suggest that everyone do what they did in the 1990's: find a nice BBS that you're comfortable on and make it your home. A good one is listed below in my sig, but there are hundreds, possibly thousands more. The community BBS is alive and well, despite CmdrTaco et al's best efforts to try and convince the world that it's a thing of the past.
This sounds like a lot of sour grapes to me. Anyone who works with Linux knows that the desktop is the "final frontier" for Linux -- and that we're moving there, but it's going to take a while.
I think Rasterman is simply angry that the Linux community has largely moved past his little window manager. There was a time when Enlightenment was thought of as "the window manager for GNOME" but it's no coincidence that GNOME usage took a sharp step up when both RedHat and Ximian decided to use Sawfish instead. And then of course there's KDE, which presents a gorgeous desktop without giving Englightenment a second thought.
After trying out Enlightenment, my thoughts were that it was really cool and spiffy -- until you actually tried to do something with your computer. Then it got in the way. Since most people actually want to run some applications, most people set E aside when they were done gawking at the cool graphics and wanted to get some work done.
And that's where Enlightenment stands today: a page in Linux desktop history where Rasterman pushed the limits and showed us what the Linux desktop was capable of being. It certainly inspired a lot of the graphics work that then went into KDE and GNOME standard desktops. But now, Raster's 15 minutes of fame are gone, and he's all pissy about it so he's declaring the Linux desktop dead. Yeah, that's real mature.
We're doing all the right things to get Linux on the mainstream desktop. We'll get there if we keep focused and ignore the sour grapes.
What will it be? Do they have some really great legal maneuver so unstoppable that they're confident enough to rely on it? Or do they plan on making the next version of Office depend on some weird crypto chain that only Genuine Microsoft Windows can authenticate? Even worse, will the next version of Visual Studio generate applications that do this, so even third-party apps stop running on WINE?
Yeah, I'm paranoid. WINE is finally getting to the point where it's usable; I think it's entirely possible that within the next year it's going to start approaching the level of accuracy OS/2 had in running Windows apps. The fact that Microsoft appears ok with this so far is extremely suspect.