The HelixCode chaps are writing something called Evolution which may go some way to solving your particular problems. From a look'n'feel point of view, it seems to be heavily inspired by Outlook 2000, and from reading the brief description at the above URL, it seems as though will have similar functionality. It's not clear it will support the (admittedly good) calendar/scheduling functionality as Outlook 2000, but I would guess that couldn't be too far away.
Ofcourse, this is for Gnome, rather than KDE, but i'm sure that chunks of it will be reusable by the KDE developers, or, at least, it should provide the push to get similar functionality under KDE (or is it already there?).
Or, possibly more useful would be to keep an eye on rpmfind.net, although i'm not sure how often they update their database of rpms.
It'll be interesting to see which of the major distros/vendors is first out the door with usable rpms. Given that this is such a major release of such a major piece of software, I would of thought that it would be in the interests of the vendors to get some good PR within the community by being first to market.
Still, best to get it right, I guess.
I am still suprised no one is putting effort in to getting rpms out of the mozilla milestones.
Tangent: Been a good few days for major releases, no? I'm enjoying Helixcode (and just wait 'til other people start creating other interesting "mini distros" with helix-update) at the moment, beta Crypto Moz has hit the streets, and now xf4. Woo!
I heard (about two years ago) that there was a pretty big loop-hole in getting sponsored work visas.
Turns out you can/could get a recruitment agency to sponsor you. They then contract you out, erm, as a contractor, but technically you're working for the agency, etc., etc.
Seemed to work for a guy I used to work with in the UK, anyway. Also gave him time to have lots of long breaks between contracts and go travelling around Australia.
Not sure if the government has wised up to this yet...
Even if this isn't the case, there will be web log files which could be used for data mining.
How about openssh.com - someone wanna prove to me they've turned logging on their httpd off so that they aren't collecting log files that could be used for data mining?
I expect (but then, what would I know?) that this is out of date crypto export controls coming in to play - nothing more, nothing less. Ofcourse Sony wants to have decent crypto in this thing - lots of people are saying how you'll be able to download lots of lovely Sony-sourced movies/songs/whatever to your box via a cable connection (or whatever), so why shouldn't they put decent crypto there?
While you Americans cry in to your Cheerios about how unfair it is you can't get your hands on these boxes for a few more months (how long do you think it'll take for the Japanese government to step aside to let Sony make billions for the Japanese economy off the back of the PS2?), i'll be having a good ol' chuckle to myself, thinking back to the days of poor ol' Zimmerman and the hassles he went through thanks to PGP and the US Governments futile attempts to stop the world getting it's hands on decent crypto.
I'm Australian. I live in London. I buy CDs online too, but from Australian websites.
Strangely, thanks to the exchange rate being what it is at the moment, it is (or, perhaps more correctly, can be) cheaper to get Australian pressings of UK artists from Australia and pay airmail rates than to buy from, say, amazon.co.uk
It's even better if I want to get Australian artists, obviously - an import Australian album can cost the equivalent of over AUS$50 in the UK. Ouch.
They show how to get Jack Straw (important government chap in the UK) guilty of committing a crime. That is, they encrypted a confession to an actual (undisclosed) crime, destroyed the key, and sent him the encrypted data. Jack Straw is now in possession of some information that would pressumably be of interest to the police, but he is unable to provide the decryption key (because he never had it in the first place), but, ofcourse, as many people are pointing out, how do you prove you don't have the key...
While the example of the above site is, considering the circumstances, a fairly light-heated example, consider this: lots of politicans/business people (or anyone, really) are accussed, and investigated, of serious crimes regularly. How easy will it become to provide encrypted data to the person under investigation, without their knowledge, and then inform the police that that person is in possession of encrypted data that may (or may not? who can tell?) be of interest to their investigations. Police find data, ask for key, person is flung in jail.
Ooops.
I really hope Mark Thomas can squeeze a show in about this before the current season ends - I believe the shows are still being taped. (Mark Thomas is similar to Michael Moore, for you US people - only much, much better at what he does.)
There's a strong argument for getting software in front of students. If someone learns product x at school, once they're employed, they are, in many cases, more likely to recommend any employers purchase that product in the future.
This is why all of the commercial app companies are always so desperate to get their products installed for use by students. Just look at all the educational pricing deals, etc., offered by these companies.
I will get really excited (well, as much as one can about software) when I hear of educational institutions removing Windows/Office in favour of, say, KOffice, for use by their non-geek students.
Ofcourse, with continuing budget squeezes, and the rapid improvement of various pieces of "free" (as in beer) software, it's getting to the point where the universities have to start seriously considering installing Linux and friends to keep the bottom line in the black (or to free up resources for other areas within their organisations).
It helps that Linux is such a techie orientated product - everyone knows of stories of Linux slipping in the backdoor of organisations because one of the tech staff needed something done cheap, quick, reliably, etc. From some of the other comments posted it appears as though this has been happening at a lot of uni's, and is now reaching some sort of critical mass where it is being offically acknowledged by various university administrations.
I will be _really_ suprised if we don't see announcements from the big Linux distro companies shortly regarding them offering favourable support deals to educations institutions in return for being their preferred supplier (if they haven't already made such deals).
The above link is really quite cool - it goes to Lightning on Demand: "Specialists in large-scale Tesla Coils, Lorentz Guns and other interesting high pulsed-power devices".
Lots of pretty pictures of people getting struck by lightning (well, not quite, and it's not at all gruesome - have a look).
I think the journalist in the above article has got it all wrong. I can't see anything on the Altavista site regarding the source being opened up.
What they are doing, however, is running an affiliate program that pays web site owners a commission (3c per click through, in this case) for each user that is referred to one of the various AltaVista search facilities from another web page (that has applied, and been approved, for this program).
This is not anything particularly new - as it happens, GoTo.com has been running a very similar scheme for quite a while. GoTo.com's program, as well as AltaVista's, is managed by befree.net.
So, you sign up, put the search boxes on your site, typically pointing to a unique url so they can track your referals, and start collecting money. You don't host their search engine - merely point to it.
If, on the other hand, i've missed something, I would appreciate any pointers to the actual AltaVista source code.
According to this article at news.com, this is the start of them open-sourcing their software.
Which makes sense - make it open so people can check the security. Other people can do the work of porting it to numourous wierd and wonderful platforms. They still make revenue because they're providing a service (including to users of unoffical, say, Linux ports). Everyone wins.
Slashdot Mirror
Do a search for "net-fu" and you should find what you're looking for.
...j
According to this article, one way of valuing your site is based on the number of unique users per month.
They reckon (for a US based site) that $470.50/unique user/month is a fair figure.
...j
Didn't screaming.net do the 0800 number thing long before AOL started their (similar) deal?
Whatever - much kudos to AOL UK for being extremely vocal in their dislike of the UK telco charging structures.
..
Indeed - for all we know they could close source it, and roll some of the functionality in to AOL 5.x (or whatever version they're up to now).
Could just be that they saw a commercial opportunity with one of the employee's code, rather than anything more "sinister".
...j
The HelixCode chaps are writing something called Evolution which may go some way to solving your particular problems. From a look'n'feel point of view, it seems to be heavily inspired by Outlook 2000, and from reading the brief description at the above URL, it seems as though will have similar functionality. It's not clear it will support the (admittedly good) calendar/scheduling functionality as Outlook 2000, but I would guess that couldn't be too far away.
Ofcourse, this is for Gnome, rather than KDE, but i'm sure that chunks of it will be reusable by the KDE developers, or, at least, it should provide the push to get similar functionality under KDE (or is it already there?).
...j
Not session tracking, but a similar idea:
http://type.something.here.real ly.fuckingsucks.net/
(and sorry for the sailor talk).
Replace "type.something.here" with, say, a company name.
...j
Or, possibly more useful would be to keep an eye on rpmfind.net, although i'm not sure how often they update their database of rpms.
It'll be interesting to see which of the major distros/vendors is first out the door with usable rpms. Given that this is such a major release of such a major piece of software, I would of thought that it would be in the interests of the vendors to get some good PR within the community by being first to market.
Still, best to get it right, I guess.
I am still suprised no one is putting effort in to getting rpms out of the mozilla milestones.
Tangent: Been a good few days for major releases, no? I'm enjoying Helixcode (and just wait 'til other people start creating other interesting "mini distros" with helix-update) at the moment, beta Crypto Moz has hit the streets, and now xf4. Woo!
...j
I heard (about two years ago) that there was a pretty big loop-hole in getting sponsored work visas.
Turns out you can/could get a recruitment agency to sponsor you. They then contract you out, erm, as a contractor, but technically you're working for the agency, etc., etc.
Seemed to work for a guy I used to work with in the UK, anyway. Also gave him time to have lots of long breaks between contracts and go travelling around Australia.
Not sure if the government has wised up to this yet...
...j
Even if this isn't the case, there will be web log files which could be used for data mining.
How about openssh.com - someone wanna prove to me they've turned logging on their httpd off so that they aren't collecting log files that could be used for data mining?
WTF is your point?
...j
You can (or, possibly, can't) find out more at http://spidermonkey.helixcode.com/.
The above server is referenced in their xml files.
There - clear as mud.
...j
Anyone wanna take bets on how long it'll take for someone to reverse engineer the MS extensions?
IIRC, doesn't Australia (and possible elsewhere) speicifically allow reverse engineering to mainting interopribility (or somesuch)?
Do the reverse-engineering in the US, or wherever, and get an Aussie friend to publish the results on an Australian web server.
What, you mean the rest of the world can see that web server? Oh well, too bad...
...j
I expect (but then, what would I know?) that this is out of date crypto export controls coming in to play - nothing more, nothing less. Ofcourse Sony wants to have decent crypto in this thing - lots of people are saying how you'll be able to download lots of lovely Sony-sourced movies/songs/whatever to your box via a cable connection (or whatever), so why shouldn't they put decent crypto there?
While you Americans cry in to your Cheerios about how unfair it is you can't get your hands on these boxes for a few more months (how long do you think it'll take for the Japanese government to step aside to let Sony make billions for the Japanese economy off the back of the PS2?), i'll be having a good ol' chuckle to myself, thinking back to the days of poor ol' Zimmerman and the hassles he went through thanks to PGP and the US Governments futile attempts to stop the world getting it's hands on decent crypto.
...j
(Gee, I must be in a bad mood today).
I'm Australian. I live in London. I buy CDs online too, but from Australian websites.
Strangely, thanks to the exchange rate being what it is at the moment, it is (or, perhaps more correctly, can be) cheaper to get Australian pressings of UK artists from Australia and pay airmail rates than to buy from, say, amazon.co.uk
It's even better if I want to get Australian artists, obviously - an import Australian album can cost the equivalent of over AUS$50 in the UK. Ouch.
...j
Look at http://www.stand.org.uk/ - this is an important site.
They show how to get Jack Straw (important government chap in the UK) guilty of committing a crime. That is, they encrypted a confession to an actual (undisclosed) crime, destroyed the key, and sent him the encrypted data. Jack Straw is now in possession of some information that would pressumably be of interest to the police, but he is unable to provide the decryption key (because he never had it in the first place), but, ofcourse, as many people are pointing out, how do you prove you don't have the key...
While the example of the above site is, considering the circumstances, a fairly light-heated example, consider this: lots of politicans/business people (or anyone, really) are accussed, and investigated, of serious crimes regularly. How easy will it become to provide encrypted data to the person under investigation, without their knowledge, and then inform the police that that person is in possession of encrypted data that may (or may not? who can tell?) be of interest to their investigations. Police find data, ask for key, person is flung in jail.
Ooops.
I really hope Mark Thomas can squeeze a show in about this before the current season ends - I believe the shows are still being taped. (Mark Thomas is similar to Michael Moore, for you US people - only much, much better at what he does.)
...j
Very good news indeed.
There's a strong argument for getting software in front of students. If someone learns product x at school, once they're employed, they are, in many cases, more likely to recommend any employers purchase that product in the future.
This is why all of the commercial app companies are always so desperate to get their products installed for use by students. Just look at all the educational pricing deals, etc., offered by these companies.
I will get really excited (well, as much as one can about software) when I hear of educational institutions removing Windows/Office in favour of, say, KOffice, for use by their non-geek students.
Ofcourse, with continuing budget squeezes, and the rapid improvement of various pieces of "free" (as in beer) software, it's getting to the point where the universities have to start seriously considering installing Linux and friends to keep the bottom line in the black (or to free up resources for other areas within their organisations).
It helps that Linux is such a techie orientated product - everyone knows of stories of Linux slipping in the backdoor of organisations because one of the tech staff needed something done cheap, quick, reliably, etc. From some of the other comments posted it appears as though this has been happening at a lot of uni's, and is now reaching some sort of critical mass where it is being offically acknowledged by various university administrations.
I will be _really_ suprised if we don't see announcements from the big Linux distro companies shortly regarding them offering favourable support deals to educations institutions in return for being their preferred supplier (if they haven't already made such deals).
...j
Yuppers. Suprised more people haven't noticed.
The VA Linux press release is over there. ANDN share prices have jumped through the roof on pre-trading, apparently.
...j
The above link is really quite cool - it goes to Lightning on Demand: "Specialists in large-scale Tesla Coils, Lorentz Guns and other interesting high pulsed-power devices".
Lots of pretty pictures of people getting struck by lightning (well, not quite, and it's not at all gruesome - have a look).
...j
Be an Internet Search Partner (from the home page). Right down the bottom of that page, you'll see a link to the AltaVista Affiliate Network, which is what the article is talking about.
T&C's, FAQs, etc., can be found at the second URL.
...j
...from what I can tell, at least.
I think the journalist in the above article has got it all wrong. I can't see anything on the Altavista site regarding the source being opened up.
What they are doing, however, is running an affiliate program that pays web site owners a commission (3c per click through, in this case) for each user that is referred to one of the various AltaVista search facilities from another web page (that has applied, and been approved, for this program).
This is not anything particularly new - as it happens, GoTo.com has been running a very similar scheme for quite a while. GoTo.com's program, as well as AltaVista's, is managed by befree.net.
So, you sign up, put the search boxes on your site, typically pointing to a unique url so they can track your referals, and start collecting money. You don't host their search engine - merely point to it.
If, on the other hand, i've missed something, I would appreciate any pointers to the actual AltaVista source code.
...j
Here's a cute little project that shouldn't take very long to do:
A Napster proxy.
Run a server on one of the common ports, say, 80, and reroute requests to the real Napster servers.
What's that saying about routing around censorship, etc.?
...j
Except in this case, the source that TiVo has been forced to release under the GPL isn't related to the Gemstar lawsuit.
Gemstar is interested in the method, rather than any specific implimentation (in this case, at least).
...j
(IANAL, etc)
RedHat may have no/litte IP, but there have a good brand, and that goes a hell of a long way.
...j
"It's nice to see things taking shape for Crusoe so quickly"...
It's been five or more years, hasn't it?
...j
According to this article at news.com, this is the start of them open-sourcing their software.
Which makes sense - make it open so people can check the security. Other people can do the work of porting it to numourous wierd and wonderful platforms. They still make revenue because they're providing a service (including to users of unoffical, say, Linux ports). Everyone wins.
Hurrah for open source! Etc!
...j
...can someone point me to sites registering through opensrs? or other generally dirt-cheap registries?
...j
(being a tightwad and all)