Yes, I'm a windows user. The point of my first comment is that we shouldn't wait for Microsoft, we should do it ourselves.
By all means go ahead and try, but I think you'll find it hard without access to the filing system sources. To do this kind of thing properly, it needs to be an OS design decision rather than a collection of interesting plugins.
I'd like to be able to add a rule to IE that says "When you open this, DO NOT follow any external links", to kill web bugs, etc.
IE is proprietary, you'll have to ask Microsoft to do it for you. Or use mozilla....
That's not quite the same thing. It doesn't let you search their current bugs for one thing, only report new ones and see the status of your own bugs. That strikes me as being very dumb, as it'll massively increase the number of dupes Apples developers have to contend with. It also prevents external discussion of bugs, users swapping workarounds etc.
Honestly, a decent bugzilla is something I'm always grateful for, it makes working with developers and yes, getting your work done so much easier. I hope they don't let it get like the GNOME bugzilla however, full of bugs from years ago that were never even triaged (they are clearing it up now though).
Nah, it wouldn't be. There's a lot more to "open source" than seeing the source code. Lack of central control is another one. If MS gave away the source to Windows tomorrow, it'd still suck, because Windows by its very nature has to be centrally controlled and maintained.
Linux is by nature distributed and people are working very hard to ensure that it's pluggable and still works, for instance desktop standards, the LSB etc. If Windows was open sourced, it'd immediately be forked to remove all the dodgy monopolistic integration stuff, but Windows can't cope with forks, it's hard enough just dealing with the versions Microsoft themselves put out! The whole thing would collapse.
Yeah, you definately need to get in touch with Hans. When Reiser4 is ready (soonish, it's in 2.6) we're taking the first step to exactly that. Hans has been working on having good performance for very small files for some time now.
One of his more interesting ideas is to make files and directories the same... so you can write:
$ cat dog.jpg/width
500px
$ display dog.jpg
Once this is done, he wants to start removing proprietary file formats that implement databases on top of the filing system and replace them with lots of small files. This is much better than Explorer shell extensions because it's in the kernel level. I take it that you're a Windows user, so you'll have to wait for Longhorn and hope they do the right thing though....
Re:CMYK, and GIMP UI vs. drop-down menus
on
Film Gimp
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· Score: 2
As I understand it (can anyone improve my understanding?) a lot of the work done for Film Gimp will likely end up rolled back into Gimp. This sounds great.
Sorry, if you read the mailing lists it seems that FG is basically a fork. They want to rendezvous at some point with v1.2.3 but they're saying that's a challenge. For instance they've made a lot of changes to the front end, they'd all have to be ported to GTK2 and to be frank I'd be surprised if they could be bothered.
The point is that they are all in one place, under one roof, and that (presumably) the company has mandated Linux. It's not much in terms of the global number of users no (18mil is a tad optimistic imho though) but the point is that most of those users will home desktop users and sometimes at work because they asked for it.
This is a professional level deployment, a very different kettle of fish.
Let's build a virtual folder driver for Windows 98 and upward, to allow APPLICATIONS to virtualize the information they manage
A few tips, next time you make a marketing pitch, try defining what the words you use mean (in this case virtualizing) and don't WRITE IN CAPS.
OK. I think I know what you're on about. Let's see. Writing a "virtual folder driver", or in Windows-speak an Explorer shell extension, is hard. Very hard. I tried it myself once, it took about a week before I got a simple demo working, and that was without nice stuff like drag and drop etc. There is practically no quality documentation on it, and half way through I torched some internal state persistance mechanism and the whole right hand side of the explorer window went white, and never came back (i found by launching IE and turning it into an explorer window i didn't have to reinstall).
However, stuff like zip folders shows it can be done, and done relatively well.
It would be nice to have an email manager than presents emails as a list of files, or folders. Sending could be as easy as copying files to a folder, and then specifying an address
Folders, list of files.... uh, you mean like most email programs? OK, they're not files, but you get a tree view with lists of emails in pretty much every GUI mail app. Sending sounds hard using that mechanism, why is this easier than having it all integrated into one user interface?
A virtualized database would present a list of folders in place of a table, with the fields being individual files, some read only (sequence numbers, keys, etc). To update the data, you just write to the file containing the appopriate field. If you wanted to add a field, you just copy a new file into the folder.
You need to check out the work of Hans Reiser. He's been advocating exploding monolithic file formats out into many small files for some time. However, it is not an UI level thing, it's purely meant for programmers, to increase the power of the OS. Having list boxes, check boxes etc work quite well for humans.
There is great power in letting an APPLICATION control the virutalization of the OS, this is why the idea of GNU/HURD is important for the future.
Wha???? You're confused. The Hurd has nothing to do with most of what you're talking about.
Look, if you want to go write an explorer view for email that's cool, let me know when you're done. The reason Microsoft are replacing NTFS with a filing system (probably a raw sqlserver partition) is not because they enjoy pain, but because to do the kind stuff you're getting at requires a far more powerful filing system layer than Windows currently has. Once you can do flexible queries on the data in the datastore, then you can start to think about storing email in the database and being able to search it from Explorer, but you still haven't solved any of the UI issues that raises.
LOL! How many times has Gates "bet the company"? And yet strangely enough it's still here. Maybe that's because when you hold all the cards, you always win the bets? Of course bet the company makes it sound like he's still a risk taking businessman.
....a new easier to use desktop OS where all of the applications have the same easier to use user interface.
Wasn't that supposed to be explorer? OpenDoc? Konqueror (about the best implementation to date, and that's not saying much). I hope that's a misquote. Those sorts of interfaces have always failed remarkably quickly. Of course the technology to have a truly generalized UI is years away if it's possible at all, and so if you try to unify them you end up with a constantly changing yet still strangely inflexible GUI.
Ease of use is always good, but so far Longhorn seems remarkably vague UI wise, all we've really heard is that it'll have a database filing system. Maybe he's intending to introduce a strong HIG a la GNOME/Apple.
Set up a mail filter to bounce all spam you get to her address! Genius. Make sure you remember to check her website every so often though so she can't change her address.
If you're using the Razor you can change your mail filters file to do this. Make sure you bounce the messages as opposed to forwarding them, that way she can't block the addresses, bouncing also doesn't leave a record of where it came from afaik.
I dunno, if only 20 of us did this, that's 20x the normal amount of spam she's receiving. It'd be hard to find the genuine mail amongst all that. I think she'd get the message.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but Longhorn is the codename for the next general Windows release, ie meant for the desktop, it's not.NET Server which is something entirely different and without any of the SQL based filing system stuff
If you've got an unfortunate friend stuck in Outlook, Cloudmark [cloudmark.com] does a decent job of cleaning up the mess, and Mozilla's soon-to-be turned on anti-spam features are looking nice.
It should be noted that Cloudmark is the newly commercialized version of Vipuls Razor, open source and originally developed for Linux/UNIX systems. It works by having a P2P network of reporting servers and a large number of people reporting spam. It then matches your incoming messages against that incoming spam. I think soon they're going to roll out more advanced "fuzzy" algorithms that can detect spam even when it's been subtly altered. It's not 100% effective but it's not too bad, and it's more satisfying to drop spam into the "SPAM Pending" folder, and watch it get reported than simply deleting it. I'd guess it's cut down my spam by about 60-70%. The best thing about the Razor is that a) it can be setup server side, so you don't even see the spam as it's filtered by your mail client and b) it's not easily defeated.
I've heard reports that some spammers are fine tuning their emails to just miss the SpamAssasin regexs, and stuff like the Mozilla bayesian mail filters only react to what you get, the Razor reacts to what 180,000+ people get.
I thought Microsoft had dropped support for OpenGL a long time ago. And also (correct me if I'm wrong) I thought that OpenGL had to be integrated with the operating system. When MS dropped support, they effectively froze progress for OpenGL on that platform. If the changes are as widespread as it seems, what's to stop Microsoft just not updating their graphics code to compensate?
It shouldn't do. Both OpenGL and Direct3D are somewhat object oriented, the difference being that OpenGL uses a flat C style API with handles (though they aren't called that) to expose those objects whereas Direct3D uses COM.
If you're going to experiment with them, stick with OpenGL. Direct3D is possibly at this point in time more powerful, but there is massively more code involved to do the same amount. We've been writing a MMORPG in Delphi (pythianproject.org) that uses OpenGL and writing a true object oriented wrapper around it was a cinch. We did explore Direct3D a few years ago, any maybe it has improve a lot since then (I don't know) but the OpenGL API is very well designed and easy to understand.
I remember seeing a Horizon that dealt with bacteriophages some time ago. It highlighted the fact that most of the research was being done in Russia and the conditions the researchers worked in were appalling. Power cuts could easily wipe out a colony of very promising phages.
In particular one thing I remember was that for some types of phage, you had to feed them, I think raw meat was a good choice. The viruses actually ate the meat. Phages have the advantage of being as adaptable as the bacteria however.
What about nanotech? I wonder if by the point that antibiotic resistant bacteria becomes a problem whether we'll have sufficiently advanced nanotechnology to make our own killer molecules.
Still, what does this mean for the folks who made the Crossover plugin program?
Not much really. CrossOver plugin is useful for stuff other than the QuickTime plugin, although i'd guess that's what drives sales as most other plugins of any popularity have Linux versions available (glares at apple). Plugin is an interesting side line they have, but the real product is CX Office, which as a general wine distro is very popular.
But nonetheless they continue to encode trailors (which are all anybody outside of Macland seems to use QT for anyway) using Sorensen.
Does it strike anybody else as rather funny that so much effort has been put into the ability to watch adverts? I mean outside of Apples own adverts and the trailors it buys up, what is Sorensen used for these days (on platforms other than the mac).
Clearly not a codec implementation then, or not a full one
I have no idea whether it is or isn't, but one possibility is that's a codec implementation but requires some data tables which cannot legally be copied. The codecs for older sorensen versions had this problem, to decode them you needed large tables of numbers which were of course copyrighted.
Besides, Sorenson will sue them into oblivion when/if they do get it working.
Nah. Why should they? Have you actually used MPlayer? It's a command line client, with famously dodgy internals (ie the code probably can't be easily reused). It doesn't pose them any threat. Anyway, who would they sue? It's not like you can just pick a random developer and send them a letter from your lawyers.
Because the right-click context menu is a windows-ism, and as such, people who have never used windows don't care. In fact, if you gave them another button they wouldn't use it, much like how windows users don't care they are missing the ever-so-useful middle button.
How many people have used a computer but never, ever used Windows (or Linux, or RISC OS, or....) ?
And if it's a Windowsism, why do Mac apps have context menus at all?
One of the things I do when my email gets too big, run a vb script that saves all attachments. Then deletes the attachment from the email. I can take a 100meg folder and reduce it to 5 megs. Currently I have a few mailing lists and that plus normal work email its easy to get about 30 megs of email a day. (hourly statistics, office docs, etc)
Well, there's no VB implementation for Linux afaik, so no. You can do something similar though with external scripts I think. I'm curious about this too actually, I'll look into it.
Can you administrate permissions on your outlook folders and mailing lists with evolution mail? (exchange compatible question again)
No idea, sorry, I'd guess if this is an Exchange server feature then the Connector would adhere to its rules
Rich format or just html for email?
Come on, use your noggin! HTML of course, why bother with rich text when HTML can do it all? Bear in mind outside of Outlook land, html isn't at all dangerous, so it's perfectly trustable.
Meeting options?
I saw the screenshot of the meeting availability option, does that work with exchange's availability meeting info?
As a meeting option wouldn't be useful without a server to coordinate on, and Ximian don't make a server, I'd guess the answer would have to be yes.
Netmeeting (for meetings)
Some of our meetings are spread around the US, so we use netmeeting so people can watch the powerpoint slideshow. Also a few of us can work on a document at the same time, or watch someone give a demo. All the netmeeting info is included in the email, the user just has to click and view. (That is still confusing for some people...)
Unless NetMeeting runs under Wine, no. I believe the rdesktop protocol it uses is available on Linux too now, but I don't know exactly.
Recall emails.
No, that's a non-feature imho. You said it yourself, you don't use it, most people get by without it somehow. Not a big loss.
I usually shill for the gift economy, so I'll do so again here.
Here's a statement for you: In my humble opinion micropayments are the way forward.
Why? Firstly, music is now effectively a post-scarcity commodity. That means it has a replication cost of zero, which also means it's effectively impossible to charge for it. Oops, that's the RIAAs business model down the tubes, hence the fact that they are trying to reintroduce scarcity back into music with DRM.
If we assume they fail however (and economics says they will) then what comes next? I say the ability to send small amounts of money easily and quickly to artists. I hear new music all the time, mostly off the radio. When I hear a track, I don't want to have to track down the album or (more often, for trance) single and buy it on CD, wait for the CD to arrive and then rip it, when I can just press a button and have it available right there and then. I want to be able to do this, but I also want those artists to be rewarded so they continue to make kickass tracks.
If I can send a few euros to my favourite artists, I'm happy. But it's got to be easy. Let's address a few common complaints against this system:
1) Nobody will pay. - there will be a balance between people who pay and people who don't. The system itself will find this equilibrium. At first yeah, I expect some artists will croak because it's new and people don't understand that "you, yes YOU" have to pay up to let them continue. Once there have been a few high profile failures, people would get the idea. We pay with gifts to street performers because it's traditional and a part of our culture - hopefully music tipping would become the same.
2) Artists could not make a living from it. I think they could. It depends on how long the system takes to scale up of course. To start with, perhaps artists could not make a living from it. It might take years, decades even! Look at free software. I think people, the majority of people, could be supported writing free software, by doing contract work (you want this feature, pay me and i'll write it for you) and variations. But Linux is not yet at the point where the market for that is big enough. It would be the same for music.
3) It's not technically possible. No, not yet, that's why I'm working on Genio/PingID/SourceID/whatever-the-hell-it-is-toda y: at pingid.org - digital identity is necessary to allow for low overhead financial transactions imho. It's the first step. Bandwidth is fairly simple, you can use p2p techniques or IP Multicast when it finally arrives to allieviate those issues. And of course such an economy would be decentralised anyway.
4) Who will filter out the dross. As one poster (rightly) pointed out above, quite a lot of unsigned music is rubbish. The record companies do one thing, and that's choose the best of the independant artists. Yes, they manufacture artists as well, but my point is that we need a way of filtering the wheat from the chaff. My solution to this is the reviewer heirarchy - people review tracks that enter the system in their particular musical taste. Reviewers on the next tier up read those reviews, choose the most promising tracks, and choose them, then reviewers above them do the same etc, and you end up with the top 40 of the gift economy.
I think it can work. But I don't have time to start, and it would take years to build it up. But now surely must be the right moment in history to attempt it.
Does anybody know why RedHat are losing so much money. Arguably they are the most successful Linux business. I believe in their last shareholder report it talked about restructuring their embedded division or something. They seem to be growing still - shouldn't they be focussed on making money first?
OK. Let's see what happens when we try and make Microsoft open up some communications protocols.
The Wine project currently faces a problem. The Windows help system doesn't work, and it's proving hard to recreate, because when you call the WinHelp32 APIs, some wierdo messages are passed to and from the APIs to the winhelp executable. This means they can't use the native WinHelp exe, as they don't know how to recreate the API section. As this is a case of internal message passing, I think it could be safely considered a communications protocol, and it's definately not related to DRM or security. The protocol exchange isn't complicated, but it does vary between Win9x and NT
So how do we get Microsoft to give us a report on what these messages mean? I mean, what do we do first? Is there an email address I can send a request to? What happens if they simply laugh me off? They are big, and I am small - how can I enforce this? Anybody??
Er, me? I don't know about you, but I don't have 128mb of MP3s. I don't pirate music on principle, so all I have is my CD collection which while quite large, I don't want to listen to all at once. 128mb of compressed audio is fine for me. And I can always upgrade it later.
Anyway, transferring 20gig over USB1 would take a while, but very few people have FireWire or USB2 enabled machines, so it's kind of a moot point anyway.
This really annoys the h#!! out of me... Most mp3-player manufacturers do this. What is the problem with just making a player that acts as an USB hard drive? Why do we need Windows to transfer files through USB?
Relax! Then go read this. The Neuros is based on (in their words) "an open platform". Unlike the iPod, their database and menu systems are open and based on XML (schemas coming in a few weeks apparently), so even though their synchro software is currently Windows only, making a Linux version should be a snap.
This is a pretty cool MP3 player. It looks good, has some nify features, and is open. Sounds like a serious contender to the iPod to me (at least for anybody semi-geeky).
This sounds much harder, but also more useful. I'd be very (pleasantly) surprised if it works well for anything other than Billboard hits and very popular oldies. Still, it could be nice.
Well, be pleasantly surprised then:) Me and a friend were playing with Shazam (which i guess must be what it uses) and the accuracy was stunning. We tried it with pop hits, obscure jazz singles, trance and it got them all. I'd not heard of most of the jazz tracks for instance (though it's not saying much). It worked very well indeed.
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By all means go ahead and try, but I think you'll find it hard without access to the filing system sources. To do this kind of thing properly, it needs to be an OS design decision rather than a collection of interesting plugins.
I'd like to be able to add a rule to IE that says "When you open this, DO NOT follow any external links", to kill web bugs, etc.
IE is proprietary, you'll have to ask Microsoft to do it for you. Or use mozilla....
Honestly, a decent bugzilla is something I'm always grateful for, it makes working with developers and yes, getting your work done so much easier. I hope they don't let it get like the GNOME bugzilla however, full of bugs from years ago that were never even triaged (they are clearing it up now though).
Linux is by nature distributed and people are working very hard to ensure that it's pluggable and still works, for instance desktop standards, the LSB etc. If Windows was open sourced, it'd immediately be forked to remove all the dodgy monopolistic integration stuff, but Windows can't cope with forks, it's hard enough just dealing with the versions Microsoft themselves put out! The whole thing would collapse.
One of his more interesting ideas is to make files and directories the same... so you can write:
$ cat dog.jpg/width
500px
$ display dog.jpg
Once this is done, he wants to start removing proprietary file formats that implement databases on top of the filing system and replace them with lots of small files. This is much better than Explorer shell extensions because it's in the kernel level. I take it that you're a Windows user, so you'll have to wait for Longhorn and hope they do the right thing though....
Sorry, if you read the mailing lists it seems that FG is basically a fork. They want to rendezvous at some point with v1.2.3 but they're saying that's a challenge. For instance they've made a lot of changes to the front end, they'd all have to be ported to GTK2 and to be frank I'd be surprised if they could be bothered.
This is a professional level deployment, a very different kettle of fish.
A few tips, next time you make a marketing pitch, try defining what the words you use mean (in this case virtualizing) and don't WRITE IN CAPS.
OK. I think I know what you're on about. Let's see. Writing a "virtual folder driver", or in Windows-speak an Explorer shell extension, is hard. Very hard. I tried it myself once, it took about a week before I got a simple demo working, and that was without nice stuff like drag and drop etc. There is practically no quality documentation on it, and half way through I torched some internal state persistance mechanism and the whole right hand side of the explorer window went white, and never came back (i found by launching IE and turning it into an explorer window i didn't have to reinstall).
However, stuff like zip folders shows it can be done, and done relatively well.
It would be nice to have an email manager than presents emails as a list of files, or folders. Sending could be as easy as copying files to a folder, and then specifying an address
Folders, list of files.... uh, you mean like most email programs? OK, they're not files, but you get a tree view with lists of emails in pretty much every GUI mail app. Sending sounds hard using that mechanism, why is this easier than having it all integrated into one user interface?
A virtualized database would present a list of folders in place of a table, with the fields being individual files, some read only (sequence numbers, keys, etc). To update the data, you just write to the file containing the appopriate field. If you wanted to add a field, you just copy a new file into the folder.
You need to check out the work of Hans Reiser. He's been advocating exploding monolithic file formats out into many small files for some time. However, it is not an UI level thing, it's purely meant for programmers, to increase the power of the OS. Having list boxes, check boxes etc work quite well for humans.
There is great power in letting an APPLICATION control the virutalization of the OS, this is why the idea of GNU/HURD is important for the future.
Wha???? You're confused. The Hurd has nothing to do with most of what you're talking about.
Look, if you want to go write an explorer view for email that's cool, let me know when you're done. The reason Microsoft are replacing NTFS with a filing system (probably a raw sqlserver partition) is not because they enjoy pain, but because to do the kind stuff you're getting at requires a far more powerful filing system layer than Windows currently has. Once you can do flexible queries on the data in the datastore, then you can start to think about storing email in the database and being able to search it from Explorer, but you still haven't solved any of the UI issues that raises.
LOL! How many times has Gates "bet the company"? And yet strangely enough it's still here. Maybe that's because when you hold all the cards, you always win the bets? Of course bet the company makes it sound like he's still a risk taking businessman.
Wasn't that supposed to be explorer? OpenDoc? Konqueror (about the best implementation to date, and that's not saying much). I hope that's a misquote. Those sorts of interfaces have always failed remarkably quickly. Of course the technology to have a truly generalized UI is years away if it's possible at all, and so if you try to unify them you end up with a constantly changing yet still strangely inflexible GUI.
Ease of use is always good, but so far Longhorn seems remarkably vague UI wise, all we've really heard is that it'll have a database filing system. Maybe he's intending to introduce a strong HIG a la GNOME/Apple.
If you're using the Razor you can change your mail filters file to do this. Make sure you bounce the messages as opposed to forwarding them, that way she can't block the addresses, bouncing also doesn't leave a record of where it came from afaik.
I dunno, if only 20 of us did this, that's 20x the normal amount of spam she's receiving. It'd be hard to find the genuine mail amongst all that. I think she'd get the message.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but Longhorn is the codename for the next general Windows release, ie meant for the desktop, it's not .NET Server which is something entirely different and without any of the SQL based filing system stuff
It should be noted that Cloudmark is the newly commercialized version of Vipuls Razor, open source and originally developed for Linux/UNIX systems. It works by having a P2P network of reporting servers and a large number of people reporting spam. It then matches your incoming messages against that incoming spam. I think soon they're going to roll out more advanced "fuzzy" algorithms that can detect spam even when it's been subtly altered. It's not 100% effective but it's not too bad, and it's more satisfying to drop spam into the "SPAM Pending" folder, and watch it get reported than simply deleting it. I'd guess it's cut down my spam by about 60-70%. The best thing about the Razor is that a) it can be setup server side, so you don't even see the spam as it's filtered by your mail client and b) it's not easily defeated.
I've heard reports that some spammers are fine tuning their emails to just miss the SpamAssasin regexs, and stuff like the Mozilla bayesian mail filters only react to what you get, the Razor reacts to what 180,000+ people get.
I thought Microsoft had dropped support for OpenGL a long time ago. And also (correct me if I'm wrong) I thought that OpenGL had to be integrated with the operating system. When MS dropped support, they effectively froze progress for OpenGL on that platform. If the changes are as widespread as it seems, what's to stop Microsoft just not updating their graphics code to compensate?
If you're going to experiment with them, stick with OpenGL. Direct3D is possibly at this point in time more powerful, but there is massively more code involved to do the same amount. We've been writing a MMORPG in Delphi (pythianproject.org) that uses OpenGL and writing a true object oriented wrapper around it was a cinch. We did explore Direct3D a few years ago, any maybe it has improve a lot since then (I don't know) but the OpenGL API is very well designed and easy to understand.
In particular one thing I remember was that for some types of phage, you had to feed them, I think raw meat was a good choice. The viruses actually ate the meat. Phages have the advantage of being as adaptable as the bacteria however.
What about nanotech? I wonder if by the point that antibiotic resistant bacteria becomes a problem whether we'll have sufficiently advanced nanotechnology to make our own killer molecules.
Not much really. CrossOver plugin is useful for stuff other than the QuickTime plugin, although i'd guess that's what drives sales as most other plugins of any popularity have Linux versions available (glares at apple). Plugin is an interesting side line they have, but the real product is CX Office, which as a general wine distro is very popular.
Does it strike anybody else as rather funny that so much effort has been put into the ability to watch adverts? I mean outside of Apples own adverts and the trailors it buys up, what is Sorensen used for these days (on platforms other than the mac).
I have no idea whether it is or isn't, but one possibility is that's a codec implementation but requires some data tables which cannot legally be copied. The codecs for older sorensen versions had this problem, to decode them you needed large tables of numbers which were of course copyrighted.
Besides, Sorenson will sue them into oblivion when/if they do get it working.
Nah. Why should they? Have you actually used MPlayer? It's a command line client, with famously dodgy internals (ie the code probably can't be easily reused). It doesn't pose them any threat. Anyway, who would they sue? It's not like you can just pick a random developer and send them a letter from your lawyers.
How many people have used a computer but never, ever used Windows (or Linux, or RISC OS, or ....) ?
And if it's a Windowsism, why do Mac apps have context menus at all?
Well, there's no VB implementation for Linux afaik, so no. You can do something similar though with external scripts I think. I'm curious about this too actually, I'll look into it.
Can you administrate permissions on your outlook folders and mailing lists with evolution mail? (exchange compatible question again)
No idea, sorry, I'd guess if this is an Exchange server feature then the Connector would adhere to its rules
Rich format or just html for email?
Come on, use your noggin! HTML of course, why bother with rich text when HTML can do it all? Bear in mind outside of Outlook land, html isn't at all dangerous, so it's perfectly trustable.
Meeting options?
I saw the screenshot of the meeting availability option, does that work with exchange's availability meeting info?
As a meeting option wouldn't be useful without a server to coordinate on, and Ximian don't make a server, I'd guess the answer would have to be yes.
Netmeeting (for meetings) Some of our meetings are spread around the US, so we use netmeeting so people can watch the powerpoint slideshow. Also a few of us can work on a document at the same time, or watch someone give a demo. All the netmeeting info is included in the email, the user just has to click and view. (That is still confusing for some people...)
Unless NetMeeting runs under Wine, no. I believe the rdesktop protocol it uses is available on Linux too now, but I don't know exactly.
Recall emails.
No, that's a non-feature imho. You said it yourself, you don't use it, most people get by without it somehow. Not a big loss.
I'm currently using office undervmware.
You may wish to look into CrossOver office
Here's a statement for you: In my humble opinion micropayments are the way forward.
Why? Firstly, music is now effectively a post-scarcity commodity. That means it has a replication cost of zero, which also means it's effectively impossible to charge for it. Oops, that's the RIAAs business model down the tubes, hence the fact that they are trying to reintroduce scarcity back into music with DRM.
If we assume they fail however (and economics says they will) then what comes next? I say the ability to send small amounts of money easily and quickly to artists. I hear new music all the time, mostly off the radio. When I hear a track, I don't want to have to track down the album or (more often, for trance) single and buy it on CD, wait for the CD to arrive and then rip it, when I can just press a button and have it available right there and then. I want to be able to do this, but I also want those artists to be rewarded so they continue to make kickass tracks.
If I can send a few euros to my favourite artists, I'm happy. But it's got to be easy. Let's address a few common complaints against this system:
1) Nobody will pay. - there will be a balance between people who pay and people who don't. The system itself will find this equilibrium. At first yeah, I expect some artists will croak because it's new and people don't understand that "you, yes YOU" have to pay up to let them continue. Once there have been a few high profile failures, people would get the idea. We pay with gifts to street performers because it's traditional and a part of our culture - hopefully music tipping would become the same.
2) Artists could not make a living from it. I think they could. It depends on how long the system takes to scale up of course. To start with, perhaps artists could not make a living from it. It might take years, decades even! Look at free software. I think people, the majority of people, could be supported writing free software, by doing contract work (you want this feature, pay me and i'll write it for you) and variations. But Linux is not yet at the point where the market for that is big enough. It would be the same for music.
3) It's not technically possible. No, not yet, that's why I'm working on Genio/PingID/SourceID/whatever-the-hell-it-is-toda y: at pingid.org - digital identity is necessary to allow for low overhead financial transactions imho. It's the first step. Bandwidth is fairly simple, you can use p2p techniques or IP Multicast when it finally arrives to allieviate those issues. And of course such an economy would be decentralised anyway.
4) Who will filter out the dross. As one poster (rightly) pointed out above, quite a lot of unsigned music is rubbish. The record companies do one thing, and that's choose the best of the independant artists. Yes, they manufacture artists as well, but my point is that we need a way of filtering the wheat from the chaff. My solution to this is the reviewer heirarchy - people review tracks that enter the system in their particular musical taste. Reviewers on the next tier up read those reviews, choose the most promising tracks, and choose them, then reviewers above them do the same etc, and you end up with the top 40 of the gift economy.
I think it can work. But I don't have time to start, and it would take years to build it up. But now surely must be the right moment in history to attempt it.
Does anybody know why RedHat are losing so much money. Arguably they are the most successful Linux business. I believe in their last shareholder report it talked about restructuring their embedded division or something. They seem to be growing still - shouldn't they be focussed on making money first?
The Wine project currently faces a problem. The Windows help system doesn't work, and it's proving hard to recreate, because when you call the WinHelp32 APIs, some wierdo messages are passed to and from the APIs to the winhelp executable. This means they can't use the native WinHelp exe, as they don't know how to recreate the API section. As this is a case of internal message passing, I think it could be safely considered a communications protocol, and it's definately not related to DRM or security. The protocol exchange isn't complicated, but it does vary between Win9x and NT
So how do we get Microsoft to give us a report on what these messages mean? I mean, what do we do first? Is there an email address I can send a request to? What happens if they simply laugh me off? They are big, and I am small - how can I enforce this? Anybody??
Anyway, transferring 20gig over USB1 would take a while, but very few people have FireWire or USB2 enabled machines, so it's kind of a moot point anyway.
Relax! Then go read this. The Neuros is based on (in their words) "an open platform". Unlike the iPod, their database and menu systems are open and based on XML (schemas coming in a few weeks apparently), so even though their synchro software is currently Windows only, making a Linux version should be a snap.
This is a pretty cool MP3 player. It looks good, has some nify features, and is open. Sounds like a serious contender to the iPod to me (at least for anybody semi-geeky).
Well, be pleasantly surprised then :) Me and a friend were playing with Shazam (which i guess must be what it uses) and the accuracy was stunning. We tried it with pop hits, obscure jazz singles, trance and it got them all. I'd not heard of most of the jazz tracks for instance (though it's not saying much). It worked very well indeed.