no way, http://www.igniterealtime.org/.
Openfire is amazing and with thier Sparks client it gets even better.
Includes SSL, open API, different database backend, including LDAP. I've been running it for my office on a linux box connecting to a windows AD authentication. Best part about it is you can manage everyones contact lists. So no more invite this person add this person.
Openfire (formerly Wildfire) is a real time collaboration (RTC) server dual-licensed under the Open Source GPL and commercially. It uses the only widely adopted open protocol for instant messaging, XMPP (also called Jabber). Openfire is incredibly easy to setup and administer, but offers rock-solid security and performance
I've got to second parent's promotion of igniterealtime.org. I set it up for a distributed group of IT workers. It's reliable, comes packaged inside Jetty, but runs in a variety of java application servers. Good database abstraction, great ldap authnz and groups integration, client/server encryption via ssl as well as client to client encrypted chat.
The best part about it is jabber/xmpp, which means that you don't need to ask about a single multi-platform client. Sure, Pidgin runs on Windows/OS X/Linux/Solaris/etc, but you don't have to limit your users to a single client choice. Adium, iChat, Psi, meebo.com work great!
The only problem is that jabber/xmpp doesn't have a mature voice or video component (yet?).
Well, one thing that was correct in the article: tables are still the best way to organise a html page. At least for relatively complex websites. There is absolutely no replacement for tables, when it comes to aligning elements to each other, both horizontally and vertically.
CSS just doesn't cut it for relative positioning to multiple elements in a column. For simple layouts, CSS is great. It works, it looks neat, and is very maintainable. But as soon as you start needing a proper grid style layout, it just falls to pieces. There's no way that CSS can replace tables in that instance, unless you use absolute positioning and meticulously calculate the exact sizes and positions you want. But then you're left with a complete mess, much worse than using tables to begin with.
As long as you keep the table as simple as possible, and use CSS to layout the simple elements, then it's still very maintainable. Just try to avoid using tables for every little thing, and the design is generally fine.
Whoaaaa there. Why is this modded +5 insightful? The parent is completely wrong. Tables are not, at all, the best way to organize an html page. Why? Because that's mixing the appearance of the page with the content of the page. Once this happens, pages have to be individually maintained.
It's true that CSS grids are hard.
This is because they are so much more flexible than html tables for layout.
There are a number of pre-existing, opensource css grid setups available (check out http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/), if you don't want to reinvent the wheel.
Also, one can absolute position columns by percentage of the page, which generally answers parent's fear of layout math.
In general, the attitude of the parent is exactly what web professionals have been fighting for the past... 6 years or so. It's disheartening to see people on/. agree.
Now, to facilitate a dynamic website (e.g. - message board, journal, or whatever), you have to generate the XML file upon insert (which are generally a small fraction of the read load) using a trigger or embedded in the code.
This is silly.
If you have to "generate the XML file" every time the data changes, why not just write an x/html file and serve it?
Even better, why not cache the x/html file instead of generating it all the time.
I would've taken away your computer for a couple of weeks if you spoke to me like that (or if you bypassed my measures), probably along with your cellphone, your ipod and all your music. And if you still had a bad attitude, I'd take your door off the hinges. If you STILL didn't get it, I'd come to school with you and follow you around, making sure your friends saw you, until you begged for mercy.
Add to that most of the deaths just didn't make sense. Except for Mad-Eye (and possibly Dobby), basically all the other major deaths were random, they had no purpose in the story and didn't advance the plot in any major way. The only sacrificial death was Harry, and he didn't even die (and don't get me started on the overly sappy epilogue).
irritates me most is installers that force you to read and agree to a Free Software license
I couldn't disagree more. I love agreeing to Free Software licenses. I see that familiar GPL preamble and it's a small breath of fresh air because I'm so used to having to agree to ridiculous crap like waving my rights to sue and not expecting purchased software to function.
I don't care that forcing a user to agree to a distribution license before use is inappropriate, I think it's great marketing material for F/OSS for people that do read EULA's.
I read your whole OSX article. I'm going to read your Vista review next. I do some work as an Apple System Administrator in a university setting, so I'm a bit of an OSX power user.
The two major criticisms of yours that I agree with are: Word processor availability. If X11 is too technical for a user, there are no great Free/OpenSource alternatives to MS Word (yet?).
Bean (http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html) is gaining mindshare though, but doesn't compare to OpenOffice/MS Word in functionality.
Hardware costs. Apple RAM costs a pretty penny.
Do people really use current operating systems with a mere 512 Megs of RAM? In my professional experience, we're now leaning to two gigs in the mini's. I think that if you buy any $600 machine with the form factor of the mini, it'll be lacking hardware somewhere. (My work desktop machine is a dual 1.8 Ghz G5 that was purchased in 2004 for about $2000. It's awsome. It'll be useable as a desktop computer for 6+ years. The design inside the case is transcendent. Especially coming from dell/hp workstation rat nests.
There were a few mistakes in your review, particularly free/opensource software availability categories. (Check out ffmpegX: http://homepage.mac.com/major4/) (http://www.macgimp.org/)
Although long time Apple software developers practically invented restrictively licensed share and crippleware, there is a healthy and vibrant open source development movement for OSX. I think that these two development communities are distinct.
Lastly, the buzz is that we'll see some changes to Apple's desktop lineup this weekend. I hope with you that Apple will announce a $1500 MacPro or something like it.
I'm not quite up on the Windows stuff, but I believe that roaming profiles are just network mounted home directories, appropriate metadata and central authentication.
On the other hand Apple's portable home directories are designed for laptops, a sometimes connected model. When a user connects their computer to your network, the user's home directory (or the parts of it that are pre-selected) automatically syncs with a copy of their home directory on the server.
I'm not sure what your managed mac environment currently looks like. At the least you'll need some form of network home directories, over samba/MS's SMB/CIFS or NFS. If you've got an existing AD environment that could work. If these laptops never come onto your network, then it's unreasonable to provide backups and you should totally tell your users that.:)
you aren't even really their customer -- you are their product.
Like a farmer raising chickens; they want them strong, well fed, happy, healthy, content, disease free, and they take steps to ensure they stay that way. But at the end of the day, they aren't really in it for the chicken's welfare.
Only with one set of hardware now. Yes, one set of hardware makes it slightly easier on IT staff, but they're still mixed OSes, and now the IT staff has to maintain two OSes on EACH box.
Hrm, will a Mac NetBoot a Windows disk image?
The default Mac image that we use at my place of emplyment includes a copy of Parallels with a configured Windows image.
They may be very good package managers by themselves, I'm not sure. But it's not a solution at all -- I can't get Firefox that way, or any of the other Mac-native open-source apps. And probably for good reason -- Fink, for instance, installs everything to/sw, whereas most apps live in/Applications, and are meant to work from anywhere.
Admittedly, it's a drag that there is no Mac "native" repository system. But Fink and DarwinPorts (it's not discontinued, just a name change to MacPorts and some Apple support) provide many, many more packages than would otherwise be possible.
Thank you for reading the whole thing, though. You haven't said what you think of it, other than that it's inaccurate. Do you disagree with it?
I really do disagree. I know OS X fairly well. I think that with things like launchd and Calendar Server, Apple is contributing to F/OSS in a positive way. I think that darwin is a nice Unix. For me, at least, the traditional unix tools, like grep, find, ps, gcc, perl, make for a more "general-purpose" machine.
I'm not sure what you're criticizing OSX in favor of. As a workstation, it's close to being as flexible as a Linux, and the workgroup management tools come close to being as nice as Microsoft's.
There's a number of inaccuracies with you're post (which I read all of !), however, I'll only respond to two:
1) I, personally, have broken the backlight of a powerbook G4 by dropping it and had it replaced under AppleCare. I sure didn't tell Apple that it had broken because I dropped it though.
2) Then there's things like Software Update -- great for updating your Apple products, but won't update anything else, and there aren't any decent package managers. Unlike WSUS? What makes fink not decent? DarwinPorts? I'd really like to know.
But the real question is why has Linux got so bloated? It didn't. "Back then"... ... "years ago" Linux didn't have those "bells and whistles". It does today, but you are not forced to use them. If you do use them, stop your complaining because you are comparing apples and oranges.
... My Univerity (shitty Humboldt State University in CA)...
Tim,
Some IT staff at Humbolt contribute quite a bit to the open source course management system Moodle. Using some of their modules and contributed code is my only introduction to Humbolt, but from the quality and effort they put into their Moodle stuff, I suspect that your negative comment is more driven from college-age angst and and juvenile antiestablishmentarianism.
Where are they getting 100M from? Could it be that the Wikipedia Foundation is considering to stop being a non-profit organisation and start placing advertising in its articles?
The people who come out the strongest against 'trial lawyers' are the big corporations' PR departments. They want the 'common folk' to think ill of lawyers, because the law -- as imperfect as it is -- is the only equalizer left. And it's being eroded rapidly. And people dissing lawyers all the time helps that process.
Slashdot Mirror
http://bambooinvoice.org/
I'm not affiliated. I've used the software and extensively used the php framework (CodeIgniter) it's built upon.
no way, http://www.igniterealtime.org/. Openfire is amazing and with thier Sparks client it gets even better. Includes SSL, open API, different database backend, including LDAP. I've been running it for my office on a linux box connecting to a windows AD authentication. Best part about it is you can manage everyones contact lists. So no more invite this person add this person. Openfire (formerly Wildfire) is a real time collaboration (RTC) server dual-licensed under the Open Source GPL and commercially. It uses the only widely adopted open protocol for instant messaging, XMPP (also called Jabber). Openfire is incredibly easy to setup and administer, but offers rock-solid security and performance
I've got to second parent's promotion of igniterealtime.org. I set it up for a distributed group of IT workers. It's reliable, comes packaged inside Jetty, but runs in a variety of java application servers. Good database abstraction, great ldap authnz and groups integration, client/server encryption via ssl as well as client to client encrypted chat. The best part about it is jabber/xmpp, which means that you don't need to ask about a single multi-platform client. Sure, Pidgin runs on Windows/OS X/Linux/Solaris/etc, but you don't have to limit your users to a single client choice. Adium, iChat, Psi, meebo.com work great! The only problem is that jabber/xmpp doesn't have a mature voice or video component (yet?).
Well, one thing that was correct in the article: tables are still the best way to organise a html page. At least for relatively complex websites. There is absolutely no replacement for tables, when it comes to aligning elements to each other, both horizontally and vertically.
CSS just doesn't cut it for relative positioning to multiple elements in a column. For simple layouts, CSS is great. It works, it looks neat, and is very maintainable. But as soon as you start needing a proper grid style layout, it just falls to pieces. There's no way that CSS can replace tables in that instance, unless you use absolute positioning and meticulously calculate the exact sizes and positions you want. But then you're left with a complete mess, much worse than using tables to begin with.
As long as you keep the table as simple as possible, and use CSS to layout the simple elements, then it's still very maintainable. Just try to avoid using tables for every little thing, and the design is generally fine.
Whoaaaa there. Why is this modded +5 insightful? The parent is completely wrong. Tables are not, at all, the best way to organize an html page. Why? Because that's mixing the appearance of the page with the content of the page. Once this happens, pages have to be individually maintained.
It's true that CSS grids are hard.
This is because they are so much more flexible than html tables for layout.
There are a number of pre-existing, opensource css grid setups available (check out http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/), if you don't want to reinvent the wheel.
Also, one can absolute position columns by percentage of the page, which generally answers parent's fear of layout math.
In general, the attitude of the parent is exactly what web professionals have been fighting for the past
Now, to facilitate a dynamic website (e.g. - message board, journal, or whatever), you have to generate the XML file upon insert (which are generally a small fraction of the read load) using a trigger or embedded in the code.
This is silly.
If you have to "generate the XML file" every time the data changes, why not just write an x/html file and serve it?
Even better, why not cache the x/html file instead of generating it all the time.
Dad ? May I please have my door back now ?
Fred's death wasn't sacrificial ?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/20/223
irritates me most is installers that force you to read and agree to a Free Software license
I couldn't disagree more. I love agreeing to Free Software licenses. I see that familiar GPL preamble and it's a small breath of fresh air because I'm so used to having to agree to ridiculous crap like waving my rights to sue and not expecting purchased software to function.
I don't care that forcing a user to agree to a distribution license before use is inappropriate, I think it's great marketing material for F/OSS for people that do read EULA's.
Isaac
Hi Brian!
I read your whole OSX article. I'm going to read your Vista review next. I do some work as an Apple System Administrator in a university setting, so I'm a bit of an OSX power user.
The two major criticisms of yours that I agree with are:
Word processor availability. If X11 is too technical for a user, there are no great Free/OpenSource alternatives to MS Word (yet?).
Bean (http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html) is gaining mindshare though, but doesn't compare to OpenOffice/MS Word in functionality.
Hardware costs.
Apple RAM costs a pretty penny.
Do people really use current operating systems with a mere 512 Megs of RAM? In my professional experience, we're now leaning to two gigs in the mini's. I think that if you buy any $600 machine with the form factor of the mini, it'll be lacking hardware somewhere. (My work desktop machine is a dual 1.8 Ghz G5 that was purchased in 2004 for about $2000. It's awsome. It'll be useable as a desktop computer for 6+ years. The design inside the case is transcendent. Especially coming from dell/hp workstation rat nests.
There were a few mistakes in your review, particularly free/opensource software availability categories.
(Check out ffmpegX: http://homepage.mac.com/major4/)
(http://www.macgimp.org/)
Although long time Apple software developers practically invented restrictively licensed share and crippleware, there is a healthy and vibrant open source development movement for OSX. I think that these two development communities are distinct.
Lastly, the buzz is that we'll see some changes to Apple's desktop lineup this weekend. I hope with you that Apple will announce a $1500 MacPro or something like it.
Isaac
I'm a professional web developer. I use Firefox and Thunderbird on Windows, OSX, Ubuntu and Solaris. Hear Hear for Mozilla!
...
The Mozilla Foundation:
reinvigorating open web standards
fighting IE
multiplatform
showing the world that open source software works!
Thanks again Mozilla, we love you.
Isaac Vetter
Hey Steve,
:)
n t_Admin_v10.4B.pdf
I'm not quite up on the Windows stuff, but I believe that roaming profiles are just network mounted home directories, appropriate metadata and central authentication.
On the other hand Apple's portable home directories are designed for laptops, a sometimes connected model. When a user connects their computer to your network, the user's home directory (or the parts of it that are pre-selected) automatically syncs with a copy of their home directory on the server.
I'm not sure what your managed mac environment currently looks like. At the least you'll need some form of network home directories, over samba/MS's SMB/CIFS or NFS. If you've got an existing AD environment that could work. If these laptops never come onto your network, then it's unreasonable to provide backups and you should totally tell your users that.
See the "User Management for Portable Computers" section of this document:
http://images.apple.com/server/pdfs/User_Manageme
Isaac
And this command: /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDA gent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -users admin -privs -all -restart -agent -menu`
`sudo
can be used to allow VNC connections on a remote machine while logged into the command line.
What you really want is a stock image of OSX with the right applications installed to cover all of your users and "Portable Home Directories"
Like a farmer raising chickens; they want them strong, well fed, happy, healthy, content, disease free, and they take steps to ensure they stay that way. But at the end of the day, they aren't really in it for the chicken's welfare.
mod parent up.
Hrm, will a Mac NetBoot a Windows disk image?
The default Mac image that we use at my place of emplyment includes a copy of Parallels with a configured Windows image.
http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/firefox x 1.5
http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/firefo
Admittedly, it's a drag that there is no Mac "native" repository system. But Fink and DarwinPorts (it's not discontinued, just a name change to MacPorts and some Apple support) provide many, many more packages than would otherwise be possible.
Thank you for reading the whole thing, though. You haven't said what you think of it, other than that it's inaccurate. Do you disagree with it?
I really do disagree. I know OS X fairly well. I think that with things like launchd and Calendar Server, Apple is contributing to F/OSS in a positive way. I think that darwin is a nice Unix. For me, at least, the traditional unix tools, like grep, find, ps, gcc, perl, make for a more "general-purpose" machine.
I'm not sure what you're criticizing OSX in favor of. As a workstation, it's close to being as flexible as a Linux, and the workgroup management tools come close to being as nice as Microsoft's.
Isaac
1) I, personally, have broken the backlight of a powerbook G4 by dropping it and had it replaced under AppleCare. I sure didn't tell Apple that it had broken because I dropped it though.
2) Then there's things like Software Update -- great for updating your Apple products, but won't update anything else, and there aren't any decent package managers. Unlike WSUS? What makes fink not decent? DarwinPorts? I'd really like to know.
Isaac
Yet another reason for the term: GNU/Linux.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.google.com
Tim,
Some IT staff at Humbolt contribute quite a bit to the open source course management system Moodle. Using some of their modules and contributed code is my only introduction to Humbolt, but from the quality and effort they put into their Moodle stuff, I suspect that your negative comment is more driven from college-age angst and and juvenile antiestablishmentarianism.
>>I'm experiencing frequent crashes on an up to date Mac PowerMac.
...
>
>According to Apple's televison commercials, that just doesn't happen!
Crashes of Firefox 2.0, that is
I'm experiencing frequent crashes on an up to date Mac PowerMac.
or the rich dude is Larry Page or Sergey Brin.
I've read through most of the mailing list thread, it's a good read.0 06-October/045536.html .
Isaac
Interestingly, one of the posters implies that the 100M is coming from Google: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2
The people who come out the strongest against 'trial lawyers' are the big corporations' PR departments. They want the 'common folk' to think ill of lawyers, because the law -- as imperfect as it is -- is the only equalizer left. And it's being eroded rapidly. And people dissing lawyers all the time helps that process.