Addendum to my own post above: There's always the handful of Russian and Soviet movies available on DVD, but those won't have any English dubbing or subtitles. And do you think the Americans are going to stand for the Russian cosmonauts watching something they can't?
Don't worry about the Russians. They're probably stuck watching VHS tapes on a dusty old multisystem VCR. There aren't a whole lot of DVDs being made with Russian translations. In Russia, a typical solution is to watch an American or Western European DVD with the sound turned off, and simultaneously play an unofficial MP3 dubbed translation downloaded from the net.
Unfortunately, they don't have fast Internet access in space, so they can't download the MP3s up there. And it seems unlikely an American space shuttle crew would think to burn some CDs of the Russian audio dubs to bring along.
Maybe they have a cheap off-brand DVD player like an Apex, so the Russians can play pirated VideoCDs.. that's one video format for which one can get movies dubbed in Russian that are playable on a DVD player. Either way, they likely have to wait for a Russian crew to fly up to bring them any such pirated stuff. Hollywood would have a fit if illegal VideoCDs and unofficial dubbed soundtracks were being transported on an American spacecraft.
Sounds to me like you found your answers, but you either don't have the money or you resent having to pay more for ruggedized cases, wider operating temperature ranges, etc.
Sure, you can get plenty of 2.1 megapixel cameras for $400 or so, but you wouldn't want to take them out on a rainy day, much less swim with them. $700 for submersible sounds fair, seeing as it's the price of a lot of plastic-cased 3-megapixel models that I'd be afraid to take outdoors at all, like the Nikon 880.
Check with some of the big specialty shops like B+H Photo and see if they carry aftermarket waterproof enclosures for other models. They might.
Weatherproofing and waterproofing electronic equipment is expensive. It adds thickness and weight, and makes every switch and dial a design challenge.
Applixware is powerful, flexible... and eccentric. It was one thing four years ago when they made the only full-featured office productivity suite for Unix. It's quite another nowadays with StarOffice 5.x on the market. StarOffice has a UI easy to transition to from mainstream office suites, it offers an implementation of VBA as a macro language and a lower cost per seat (free, if you don't want ot trust vendor support).
It didn't help when Applix spun it off into a new division with a new name and didn't do any marketing whatsoever to inform anyone that the product still existed, or where to find it. A cryptic "Vistasource" logo tucked away on the Applix website doesn't cut it.
Anyware, their thin-client solution, beat Sun, Microsoft, Corel et al to the market by four years and counting. It was written in Java and actually works! However, Applix made accessing the demo difficult and confusing, and must have spent $30 on marketing it.
On a side note, what exactly does Abiword pose a threat to? Windows Wordpad? Netscape Composer? Surely not to a word processor. Wake me up when it does tables. And floating footnotes.
Real's servers cost serious money for more than a dozen or so streams, but then again so does the bandwidth for those streams. Do the math and figure out how much connectivity you'll be paying for at your co-lo facility. Surely you don't plan to do high-volume streaming over a single T1 to your office.
Next, do you need good quality across North America? Maybe you need to mirror on both coasts. Need to go beyond North America, or have increased reliability? Then you'll probably need to do sign on with Akamai.
No, the server licenses are just the beginning. Unless you're only talking about a few low-bandwidth streams, in which case you can use the free or cheap Real servers.
So make your server platform decision based on what OSes you need to support clients on, and how bad it would be for your business model to require a player many people don't already have (i.e. Quicktime 4 or above). If you're counting on visitors who aren't paying you directly, you should probably limit your choices to Real and WIndows Media.
Anyway, why run your own servers at all? Why buy the hardware and bandwidth if you can just outsource your hosting to a company that already has fiber, giant servers and a contract with Akamai? Do you have login and tracking issues that video hosting services can't support?
Yes, it looks like they've thought out the peer-review process.
They have 12 (yes, twelve) articles currently posted. Hardly enough of a head start to preclude alternative projects from starting up, should someone conceive a better way of doing this.
Tribal Voice's PowWow has been around longer than AOL's internet gateway to its instant messaging. They have always had tacky, cheap-looking software and a small number of active users. Three million? Sure, maybe cumulative in the 5 years after they first launched.
They had more active users than MSN and Yahoo instant messaging in the end? I find that hard to believe. This is like saying Vivo is still a "threat" to RealPlayer and MS Media Player, or that the Amiga is a "threat" to anything.
Like many CMGI acquisitions, TribalVoice was a cheap, third-rate product snapped up at a fire-sale price from yet another owner that couldn't make it fly.
Yep, a Cobalt RaQ costs more than a "regular" server with the same hardware specs running a vanilla Linux distro. But then you have to pick and apply the appropriate security patches.
Then you write a bunch of scripts to automate setting up virtual servers for e-mail, web, FTP, file services, disk quotas, databases and shell accounts.
Next, recompile Apache to support the usual hosting stuff like PHP, database access, IMAP, FrontPage extensions, ChiliASP, etc. And install and configure some webmail software and modify it to support the virtual hosting.
Okay, now that you've done all that, install and configure a remote management system that will let you administer the machines and accounts in bulk, and write or cobble together easy web interfaces to let customers manage mail accounts, permissions, access contro, etc.
Ready? Now get a tech writer to put together user documentation for your customers. And keep someone on staff to watch security lists and figure out how to deploy security patches and software upgrades safely without breaking any of your customers' sites.
Point is, if you want to use a Cobalt as a "regular" Linux box, it's overpriced and awkward, and not particularly cutting-edge. But if you're looking to provide web hosting for small-business and personal customers, it's mighty cheap and easy, since it's preconfigured for hosting, supported for hosting, comes with end-user documentation, and can be thrown into a rack and added to your hosting farm in a few minutes out of the box.
At the Consumer Electronics Show now wrapping up, Sony showed its first CDR-compatible DVD players. The engineers and marketers said it was because of market demand, and that they did it over the objections of Sony Music. Maybe if y'all read some real news sources and not just rumor-and-conspiracy sites like Slashdot, you'd know this.
To repeat: Sony fought supporting CDR playback until now, and have been backed into it by consumer demand.
Remember: the Playstation 2 doesn't play VideoCDs at all, in a market where all other DVD players can play VideoCDs. Sony sells DVDs and CDs. They do resist any technology that erodes those businesses heavily until they're forced to do otherwise.
If you want a DVD player that can play CDRs, CD-RW, VCD, SVCD, XVCD, MP3s and so forth, everybody knows the way to go is with no-name Chinese-made players, because the Chinese domestic market demands these features, so the manufacturers include support for all of the above. VCDs pressed on CDR media are extremely popular in China, and are in fact driving much of the market for players.
I won't speak for making the site indexable by the major outside engines. However, I came up with a nifty solution for local searching back in my StoryServer days, and it took less than an hour to implement:
Generate a separate set of text files containing your content, with the query terms necessary for determining the real page's dynamic URL as the filename. That is, if you have "/articles/index.jsp?article=134", then you might name the resulting text file in a separate directory--which doesn't even have to be web accessible--as "article-134.txt".
Use a plain old text indexer like htDig to index the text files periodically
When a user performs a search, don't let itr return links to the text files. Instead, grab the filename and split its elements and splice the query terms into a reconstructed URL for the "real" dynamic article. You can index separate sections of a large site simply by dumping each area's text files into a separate directory.
If you have a more sophisticated search engine that can deal with item tagging (for metadata like keywords, creation dates, authorship, description, title, etc.), all the better. Create your text files with the appropriate tags and metadata pulled from your database and get that indexed too, and when displaying search results you can parse it back out of the text file or straight from the database if you want. Verity's engine is very nice for this.
My first thought was that this sounded boring and artificial. It's a quest to visit arbitrary coordinates. Then you get to the last of his anecdotes, where they introduced themselves to a farmer who owned the land they needed to cross and took one of his kids along on the hunt.
Another trek put them a half mile out on a snowmobile trail, on foot.
For one thing, Domino servers run fine on Linux, not to mention Solaris and several other Unixes, and do so better than they do on NT/Win2K. Domino also runs on the AS/400, an OS so stable you may not need in-house staff for it.
As someone else already asked, what on earth does Exchange/Outlook do that Domino/Notes doesn't? Exchange has finally become genuinely competitive with Domino, but its offline application and data replication features are still far behind. Development for Domino gets you something that runs in native Windows and native Mac clients as well as over the web with no modifications. With Exchange, you have to choose development targeting Outlook or the web, and you can forget the native Mac client, which hasn't been updated in years, though a catch-up version has been "in the works" since at least 1997.
Moving to Exchange means the only OS on which you can deploy full-featured apps you build is Windows. It limits your choice of databases, management systems, webservers, development tools and even directory services, thanks to Exchange 2000's liberal use of Active Directory for storing settings in a manner that won't cross easily to standard LDAP directories.
Point is, if you're already a 100% MS shop first looking for groupware, Exchange is a fine candidate. But it's not "better" than Domino: at best it's an equal as long as Unix servers, mainframes, Mac desktops and EJB application servers aren't a forseeable part of your company's backend. In which cases Domino is the hands-down better platform, since it has first-party developer interfaces to all of the above.
As for open source and free solutions, there's nothing out there that comes close. No web calendaring solution comes close to what you get with Domino or Exchange (or Groupwise, for that matter). Just try syncing a bunch of palms with an open-source web calendar. And pleasant as a generic IMAP server can be for mail and shared discussion folders, you can't use it for forms routing.. and for that sort of thing, the only interface you can present is web, web, web. And that doesn't sync offline. Plus, LDAP's nice for a shared address book, save for the awkwardness of using entirely different interfaces and applications for accessing it and editing it.
Point is, once they've been to the big city called Domino, they sure as heck aren't going to back to the Middle Ages that open mail, calendaring and contact management offer.
I don't think this hurts customers very much, although it does have the side effect of either giving your e-mail address to Microsoft or visiting their web site more often.
You're on to something here. Microsoft gets to show ads and place promotional messages in its e-mail newsletters and on its web pages--even the bug report pages.
Maybe the revenue derived from these ads (even if it's cross-marketing of other Microsoft products) is so great that they'll start issuing bulletins for nonexistent bugs just to draw more traffic to their security announcement site.
Uh, TeX isn't going to replace HTML and XML as a web standard. Ever. Apart from math and certain other scientific notation, it is not easier to work with or more readable than SGML-based languages. Nor is it in any meaningful way "more scriptable". Nor does it have a decent object model. Nor, now that we're finally moving into XML, is it especially "more" extensible. CSS and XSL stylesheets are more elegant than TeX macros. TeX isn't paticularly display-independent, seeing as it's designed for typesetting. Many of its core commands are for precise layout, not semantic markup.
For another thing, most web pages are at least in part machine generated these days. Between imports from WYSIWYG text editors, templating systems with simplified HTML input, web publishing platforms, databases and so forth, the winning language is the one that programmers can write generators for more easily. HTML wins here, and XML pretty much wraps it up, with nice high-level APIs for generating them from every programming language from RPG and LotusScript to Perl, VB, C++ and Java. As for generating TeX, I think there are some Perl classes and maybe if you rip through the code for LyX you could patch something together for C.
I daresay, Microsoft's XML representations of Word documents have a better shot at supplanting HTML than TeX does, and that's not exactly likely.
Next, as for viewing TeX in a web browser: ou already can, at least on certain platforms. IBM has a plugin for Win32 (ant least) caled TechXplorer or some such. It's been around for years. It renders TeX just fine for the several hundred scientists and mathematicians who want to do such things. If you're curious, sniff around their Alphaworks site.
E-mail's probably not the point here. Groupware is, especially calendaring, meeting scheduling, shared employee directories and so forth. The Echange/Outlook combo gives you that, and a nice snappy IMAP server doesn't. Insisting on staying with your generic POP/IMAP solution is hobbling your company. If your company is big enough to benefit from real groupware, then you should spend the money on, yes, commercial groupware. But not Exchange.
The first big reason to avoid the Exchange/Outlook combo is its 99% focus on Windows clients. The only full-featured Outlook client is for Windows. There is an outdated, semi-functional one for the Mac missing many key features, and with no ability to connect over the Internet at all. Exchange does have very nice web-based functionality as far as such things go, but in the end, that's still web-based calendaring, email and so on, with zero integration with other apps.
Second is the not-inconsiderable security problem. Outlook's problem isn't simply that it's highly vulnerable to viruses and trojans; so are many of its competitors. The big problem here is that all such trojans and viruses are written for Outlook. Nobody writes viruses targeting Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise, not because they're less vulnerable, but because Outlook's the biggest target to hit. With any networked Windows environment you need three layers of virus protection: realtime on the desktop, realtime on the servers, and realtime on your e-mail system and its gateways. That said, most of these precautions are protecting against things that attack Outlook and Outlook Express only.
Third is vendor lock-in. Want to make use of Exchange's collaborative features and real enterprise calendaring and resource allocation? You'll generally need not just any major database server, but MS SQL Server. Want to upgrade your mail client but keep the current versions of your word processor and spreadsheet? No can do, if you're using MS Office. Got Unix servers and mainframes you'd like to put your mail system on for high availanbility? Exchange only runs on WinNT and 2000.
I'd go with Notes/Domino. Besides supporting the Mac fully, it has richer web functionality, extending to nearly any custom apps you write. It supports offline users better, with the ability to deliver even interactive apps for offline use. It's seldom if ever the target of viruses and worms, and best of all its servers scale like a champ, running not just on WinNT and Win2K, but also on most Unixes (not to mention Linux) as well as the AS/400 and System/390 midrange and mainframe systems. With Exchange you have to add more physical servers for every x users. With Domino, you can migrate your entire system to big iron quickly, you can choose your ideal HTTP server, databases and so forth, and seldom if ever have to change so much as a line of your custom code.
Outlook is a user's dream and often an administrator's worst nightmare. Domino gives you more flexibility on both the server and the desktop, and far fewer security headaches.
HP OpenMail is a nifty drop-in replacement for Exchange that allows use of most of Outlook's non-mail features, but it doesn't address any of the problems raised by deploying Outlook.
Outlook's vulerabilities as the #1 target of virus authors cannot be understated. Ask Ford or any of the other Fortune 500 companies whose entire mail systems were taken offline for between 1 and 3 days when the "ILOVEYOU" trojan hit.
It's ignored because it's not meant to be used.
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W3 Releases Amaya 4.0
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· Score: 3
There's no "conspiracy" against Amaya. Amaya's always been an unusable testbed. Jigsaw is a tool for experimenting with server architecture and modularity and isn't meant for actual production use. Amaya is a tool for testing proposed new versions of CSS, HTML and especially nowadays the HTTP protocol. Nobody involved with the project expects anyone to really use it as a browser or an editing tool.
VCDs you buy are pretty much limited to Hong Kong movies, anime and cheap porn. But those of you who haven't run Windows in a while may be surprised to know that even the freebie video editing software that comes with DV camcorders and firewire cards can burn VCDs. It's quickly becoming a popular way to distribute home movies.
Shoot digital footage of the kid, edit it on your PC, and burn a couple of VCDs for the grandparents. It's easier than writing out to videotape.
It's certainly nice that it plays DVDs, and a lot of people who get it as a game console will probably use it as their DVD player too.
But wireless remotes are third-party, and it won't play VCDs, SVCDs and so forth, as any cheap DVD player will do for half the price. Indeed, it's one of very few DVD players that can't play VCDs. Heck, for the PS2's price of $300 USD, you can get a 5-disc DVD changer from a reputable brand and have enough money left over to buy a couple of DVDs.
So it's a pleasant enough feature, but it's hardly a reaason for anyone, much less a/. reader, to buy a PS2.
Dave != Samba. And Samba on OS X is okay, but...
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Samba Under OS X?
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· Score: 2
DAVE is primarily an SMB client for the Mac. It performs the function of the Linux/BSD smbmount utility, allowing a Mac to attach to SMB fileshares as transparent volumes. It also includes a Network Neighborhood-like network/share browser, and allows users to connect to SMB printers through the Chooser. It can do filesharing in the other direction, but that's not its main job, and you'll seldom see the classic MacOS version running a serious SMB fileserver. Maybe performance will be better in the OS X port.
Samba is primarily an SMB fileserver, and mostly overlaps with Dave in its ability to act as an SMB print client, and on a few OSes can also act as an SMB file-access client via smbmount.
OS X can run Appleshare IP Server, a package that can also act as an SMB fileserver, and has nice admin tools for doing so.
Beyond open-source religious issues and the nominal cost of Appleshare IP Server, the main reasons to run Samba on OS X are as follows:
Authentication against NT domains rather than against the MacOS users/groups or whatever the given Mac is authenticating against
SMB print serving
SMB print client, for those extremely rare cases when you have a network printer that does speak SMB but doesn't speak Appletalk or LPD, or you're doing job auditing through an SMB print queue
Yes, it plays DVDs. But if you want a wireless remote, you have to go third-party. And it doesn't play VCDs, SVCDs and the like, unlike most $170 DVD players nowadays.
And right now, a PS2 runs $300. For about $260, you can get a 5-disc DVD changer(!) that will play DVDs, VCDs and SVCDs, both commercial discs and homemade ones burned to CD-R and CD-RW.
Point is, without at least the VCD support, I still need a real DVD player anyway. So the only good reason to get a PS2 anytime soon is for the (you guessed it) games.
For the server-side protection, I'd have a look at Sophos's product.
As for the automatically-distributed client, you should evaluate (for free) Trend Micro's OfficeScan Corporate Edition to see if it plays nice with Samba. It runs no code on the server. The software and updates get delivered via client pull, initiated by Windows login scripts, and the admin interface can be run from any Windows machine with proper share access to the distributing host.
/. posts stories like this once every couple of months, and it's always one of the same five scam artists with a prototype that has flown--once--a couple hundred feet.
90-minute flying time on a tank of fuel? Somebody please wake me up when someone flies one of these for ten minutes straight.
I use Chase. Can't recommend them as a bank, seeing as they charge fees if you so much as breathe. But their online banking works perfectly fine with Netscape on *nix, though their servers are a bit on the slow side. And they're American, of course, so I don't know what good that does someone in Tronna.
That said, give me a fucking break. The percentage of people running Linux on their desktop is somewhere south of 1%, and of those, I dare say half have access to a Windows or Mac system on a reglar basis. Because of the enormous risks involved, banking software is developed and updated very, very slowly and conservatively. Any feature change or bug fix goes through several levels of testing and typically needs sign-off from four or five people before it's allowed into production. Even for, say, a form-validation script.
Sure, most web sites don't have platform-dependency problems (at least in regard to IE 4.x-5.x and Netscape 4.x). It's a shame they wrote such cranky code that it exposes the tiny incomatibilities between Netscape on Win32 and Netscape on *nix. All true.
But how many customers does lack of Linux support chase away from any web site? I mean, really? I mean, there are profitable web-based services out there that don't even support Macs. And Macs account for something like ten times the number of web users than all Unixes combined.
Vinyl does sound better than a CD. I'm not talking about the S/N ratio, either. Sure, CDs have better silence than vinyl and they generally don't warp or pop. But because they're higher-resolution than a CD you not only get the very high frequencies that you wouldn't think matter. You also get better reproduction of complex harmonics. This is what all that headroom 100KHz frequency response gets you. And the sampling rate that leads to it allowss for a higher S/N ratio, too.
It must be nice to be unable to hear the difference between a 320k MP3 and a CD on your "$3000 sound system", because I can hear the difference on the $80 speakers connected to my PC and on my $800 "sound system". I'm not exactly an audiophile. CDs are good enough that I almost never buy vinyl anymore, but part of that comes from the added convenience of the CD. It's playable on portables and in a car, it's easier to carry, and so forth.
But every time I put on some vinyl, even if it's technopop or garage rock, the room warms up.
So here's a digital format that should please nearly all the classical music afficionados out there who spend tens of thousands of dollars constructing acoustically-perfect "listening rooms". Nothing bad about that. At the very least, it finally creates a reasonably lossless way to digitize analog material for archival and preservation purposes--although any archivist will tell you that the real archives themselves for long-term preservation should be old-fashioned stamped analog discs.
These two markets--archivists and money-is-no-object audiophiles--should be covered with about 20,000 of these devices. So what about the rest of us? I have serious doubts that the difference between this and DVD-Audio can be heard on even a $3,000 home theater system.
Sony (and presumably Philips/Magnavox) intend to build support for this into all of their players starting sometime soon, maybe a year from now. The thing is, nearly all the DVD players being sold today can play the competing DVD-Audio discs. None, not even Sony's, and not any of those millions of Playstation2s shipping in the next year, can play SACDs.
Ultimately, this is about patent royalties. Sony and Philips have been collecting royalties on every CD player and CD drive sold for over a decade now, and SACD is about trying to do it again for another decade. DVD-A is the format endorsed by everyone in the industry except Sony and Philips. Is it a good professional archival format? Nah. Is it both better and more flexble than CD? Yep.
So here's the ugly truth. The MP3 revolution seems to have proven that most people have tin ears. Ask a hundred people. 98 of them will tell you that 128Kbps MP3 is "CD quality". Fact is, it's inferior to Minidisc, to FM radio and--in many respects--analog cassettes. But it doesn't have hisses and pops, and that's all most folks really notice. Heck, 320Kbps MP3 sounds crappy next to a CD, even on a $400 stereo.
If people think MP3 is "good enough"--when it can't even hold a candle to CD--why is the mass market going to embrace SACD over DVD-A? Especially when they'll have DVD-A players available from dozens of manufacturers and SACD players most likely available from... three?
CD will be superseded, not because most people want higher-resolution sound quality they can't hear on Britney Spears remixes, but (1) because DVD-A and SACD players will offer things like 6-channel sound and bundled-in DVD video clips, and (2) because the record industry will stop making CDs, just like they stopped making LPs, in order to force everyone to buy the new players and buy yet another copy of Billy Joel's Greatest Hits to go with the LP, cassette and CD they already have.
The best format won't win. The more ubiquitous one will. The question remains which coalition will blink first. Will the Sony-Philips side break down and allow their record companies to start making DVD-As once they see SACD players aren't selling well, or will companies like Matsushita start paying royalties and buying chips from Sony because the Sony/Philips DVD-A embargo has made it impossible to get record stores to carry DVD-As?
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Addendum to my own post above: There's always the handful of Russian and Soviet movies available on DVD, but those won't have any English dubbing or subtitles. And do you think the Americans are going to stand for the Russian cosmonauts watching something they can't?
Don't worry about the Russians. They're probably stuck watching VHS tapes on a dusty old multisystem VCR. There aren't a whole lot of DVDs being made with Russian translations. In Russia, a typical solution is to watch an American or Western European DVD with the sound turned off, and simultaneously play an unofficial MP3 dubbed translation downloaded from the net.
Unfortunately, they don't have fast Internet access in space, so they can't download the MP3s up there. And it seems unlikely an American space shuttle crew would think to burn some CDs of the Russian audio dubs to bring along.
Maybe they have a cheap off-brand DVD player like an Apex, so the Russians can play pirated VideoCDs.. that's one video format for which one can get movies dubbed in Russian that are playable on a DVD player. Either way, they likely have to wait for a Russian crew to fly up to bring them any such pirated stuff. Hollywood would have a fit if illegal VideoCDs and unofficial dubbed soundtracks were being transported on an American spacecraft.
Sounds to me like you found your answers, but you either don't have the money or you resent having to pay more for ruggedized cases, wider operating temperature ranges, etc.
Sure, you can get plenty of 2.1 megapixel cameras for $400 or so, but you wouldn't want to take them out on a rainy day, much less swim with them. $700 for submersible sounds fair, seeing as it's the price of a lot of plastic-cased 3-megapixel models that I'd be afraid to take outdoors at all, like the Nikon 880.
Check with some of the big specialty shops like B+H Photo and see if they carry aftermarket waterproof enclosures for other models. They might.
Weatherproofing and waterproofing electronic equipment is expensive. It adds thickness and weight, and makes every switch and dial a design challenge.
Applixware is powerful, flexible... and eccentric. It was one thing four years ago when they made the only full-featured office productivity suite for Unix. It's quite another nowadays with StarOffice 5.x on the market. StarOffice has a UI easy to transition to from mainstream office suites, it offers an implementation of VBA as a macro language and a lower cost per seat (free, if you don't want ot trust vendor support).
It didn't help when Applix spun it off into a new division with a new name and didn't do any marketing whatsoever to inform anyone that the product still existed, or where to find it. A cryptic "Vistasource" logo tucked away on the Applix website doesn't cut it.
Anyware, their thin-client solution, beat Sun, Microsoft, Corel et al to the market by four years and counting. It was written in Java and actually works! However, Applix made accessing the demo difficult and confusing, and must have spent $30 on marketing it.
On a side note, what exactly does Abiword pose a threat to? Windows Wordpad? Netscape Composer? Surely not to a word processor. Wake me up when it does tables. And floating footnotes.
Real's servers cost serious money for more than a dozen or so streams, but then again so does the bandwidth for those streams. Do the math and figure out how much connectivity you'll be paying for at your co-lo facility. Surely you don't plan to do high-volume streaming over a single T1 to your office.
Next, do you need good quality across North America? Maybe you need to mirror on both coasts. Need to go beyond North America, or have increased reliability? Then you'll probably need to do sign on with Akamai.
No, the server licenses are just the beginning. Unless you're only talking about a few low-bandwidth streams, in which case you can use the free or cheap Real servers.
So make your server platform decision based on what OSes you need to support clients on, and how bad it would be for your business model to require a player many people don't already have (i.e. Quicktime 4 or above). If you're counting on visitors who aren't paying you directly, you should probably limit your choices to Real and WIndows Media.
Anyway, why run your own servers at all? Why buy the hardware and bandwidth if you can just outsource your hosting to a company that already has fiber, giant servers and a contract with Akamai? Do you have login and tracking issues that video hosting services can't support?
Yes, it looks like they've thought out the peer-review process.
They have 12 (yes, twelve) articles currently posted. Hardly enough of a head start to preclude alternative projects from starting up, should someone conceive a better way of doing this.
Tribal Voice's PowWow has been around longer than AOL's internet gateway to its instant messaging. They have always had tacky, cheap-looking software and a small number of active users. Three million? Sure, maybe cumulative in the 5 years after they first launched.
They had more active users than MSN and Yahoo instant messaging in the end? I find that hard to believe. This is like saying Vivo is still a "threat" to RealPlayer and MS Media Player, or that the Amiga is a "threat" to anything.
Like many CMGI acquisitions, TribalVoice was a cheap, third-rate product snapped up at a fire-sale price from yet another owner that couldn't make it fly.
Yep, a Cobalt RaQ costs more than a "regular" server with the same hardware specs running a vanilla Linux distro. But then you have to pick and apply the appropriate security patches.
Then you write a bunch of scripts to automate setting up virtual servers for e-mail, web, FTP, file services, disk quotas, databases and shell accounts.
Next, recompile Apache to support the usual hosting stuff like PHP, database access, IMAP, FrontPage extensions, ChiliASP, etc. And install and configure some webmail software and modify it to support the virtual hosting.
Okay, now that you've done all that, install and configure a remote management system that will let you administer the machines and accounts in bulk, and write or cobble together easy web interfaces to let customers manage mail accounts, permissions, access contro, etc.
Ready? Now get a tech writer to put together user documentation for your customers. And keep someone on staff to watch security lists and figure out how to deploy security patches and software upgrades safely without breaking any of your customers' sites.
Point is, if you want to use a Cobalt as a "regular" Linux box, it's overpriced and awkward, and not particularly cutting-edge. But if you're looking to provide web hosting for small-business and personal customers, it's mighty cheap and easy, since it's preconfigured for hosting, supported for hosting, comes with end-user documentation, and can be thrown into a rack and added to your hosting farm in a few minutes out of the box.
At the Consumer Electronics Show now wrapping up, Sony showed its first CDR-compatible DVD players. The engineers and marketers said it was because of market demand, and that they did it over the objections of Sony Music. Maybe if y'all read some real news sources and not just rumor-and-conspiracy sites like Slashdot, you'd know this.
To repeat: Sony fought supporting CDR playback until now, and have been backed into it by consumer demand.
Remember: the Playstation 2 doesn't play VideoCDs at all, in a market where all other DVD players can play VideoCDs. Sony sells DVDs and CDs. They do resist any technology that erodes those businesses heavily until they're forced to do otherwise.
If you want a DVD player that can play CDRs, CD-RW, VCD, SVCD, XVCD, MP3s and so forth, everybody knows the way to go is with no-name Chinese-made players, because the Chinese domestic market demands these features, so the manufacturers include support for all of the above. VCDs pressed on CDR media are extremely popular in China, and are in fact driving much of the market for players.
If you have a more sophisticated search engine that can deal with item tagging (for metadata like keywords, creation dates, authorship, description, title, etc.), all the better. Create your text files with the appropriate tags and metadata pulled from your database and get that indexed too, and when displaying search results you can parse it back out of the text file or straight from the database if you want. Verity's engine is very nice for this.
My first thought was that this sounded boring and artificial. It's a quest to visit arbitrary coordinates. Then you get to the last of his anecdotes, where they introduced themselves to a farmer who owned the land they needed to cross and took one of his kids along on the hunt.
Another trek put them a half mile out on a snowmobile trail, on foot.
That counts for something.
For one thing, Domino servers run fine on Linux, not to mention Solaris and several other Unixes, and do so better than they do on NT/Win2K. Domino also runs on the AS/400, an OS so stable you may not need in-house staff for it.
As someone else already asked, what on earth does Exchange/Outlook do that Domino/Notes doesn't? Exchange has finally become genuinely competitive with Domino, but its offline application and data replication features are still far behind. Development for Domino gets you something that runs in native Windows and native Mac clients as well as over the web with no modifications. With Exchange, you have to choose development targeting Outlook or the web, and you can forget the native Mac client, which hasn't been updated in years, though a catch-up version has been "in the works" since at least 1997.
Moving to Exchange means the only OS on which you can deploy full-featured apps you build is Windows. It limits your choice of databases, management systems, webservers, development tools and even directory services, thanks to Exchange 2000's liberal use of Active Directory for storing settings in a manner that won't cross easily to standard LDAP directories.
Point is, if you're already a 100% MS shop first looking for groupware, Exchange is a fine candidate. But it's not "better" than Domino: at best it's an equal as long as Unix servers, mainframes, Mac desktops and EJB application servers aren't a forseeable part of your company's backend. In which cases Domino is the hands-down better platform, since it has first-party developer interfaces to all of the above.
As for open source and free solutions, there's nothing out there that comes close. No web calendaring solution comes close to what you get with Domino or Exchange (or Groupwise, for that matter). Just try syncing a bunch of palms with an open-source web calendar. And pleasant as a generic IMAP server can be for mail and shared discussion folders, you can't use it for forms routing.. and for that sort of thing, the only interface you can present is web, web, web. And that doesn't sync offline. Plus, LDAP's nice for a shared address book, save for the awkwardness of using entirely different interfaces and applications for accessing it and editing it.
Point is, once they've been to the big city called Domino, they sure as heck aren't going to back to the Middle Ages that open mail, calendaring and contact management offer.
I don't think this hurts customers very much, although it does have the side effect of either giving your e-mail address to Microsoft or visiting their web site more often.
You're on to something here. Microsoft gets to show ads and place promotional messages in its e-mail newsletters and on its web pages--even the bug report pages.
Maybe the revenue derived from these ads (even if it's cross-marketing of other Microsoft products) is so great that they'll start issuing bulletins for nonexistent bugs just to draw more traffic to their security announcement site.
Uh, TeX isn't going to replace HTML and XML as a web standard. Ever. Apart from math and certain other scientific notation, it is not easier to work with or more readable than SGML-based languages. Nor is it in any meaningful way "more scriptable". Nor does it have a decent object model. Nor, now that we're finally moving into XML, is it especially "more" extensible. CSS and XSL stylesheets are more elegant than TeX macros. TeX isn't paticularly display-independent, seeing as it's designed for typesetting. Many of its core commands are for precise layout, not semantic markup.
For another thing, most web pages are at least in part machine generated these days. Between imports from WYSIWYG text editors, templating systems with simplified HTML input, web publishing platforms, databases and so forth, the winning language is the one that programmers can write generators for more easily. HTML wins here, and XML pretty much wraps it up, with nice high-level APIs for generating them from every programming language from RPG and LotusScript to Perl, VB, C++ and Java. As for generating TeX, I think there are some Perl classes and maybe if you rip through the code for LyX you could patch something together for C.
I daresay, Microsoft's XML representations of Word documents have a better shot at supplanting HTML than TeX does, and that's not exactly likely.
Next, as for viewing TeX in a web browser: ou already can, at least on certain platforms. IBM has a plugin for Win32 (ant least) caled TechXplorer or some such. It's been around for years. It renders TeX just fine for the several hundred scientists and mathematicians who want to do such things. If you're curious, sniff around their Alphaworks site.
Good grief.
E-mail's probably not the point here. Groupware is, especially calendaring, meeting scheduling, shared employee directories and so forth. The Echange/Outlook combo gives you that, and a nice snappy IMAP server doesn't. Insisting on staying with your generic POP/IMAP solution is hobbling your company. If your company is big enough to benefit from real groupware, then you should spend the money on, yes, commercial groupware. But not Exchange.
The first big reason to avoid the Exchange/Outlook combo is its 99% focus on Windows clients. The only full-featured Outlook client is for Windows. There is an outdated, semi-functional one for the Mac missing many key features, and with no ability to connect over the Internet at all. Exchange does have very nice web-based functionality as far as such things go, but in the end, that's still web-based calendaring, email and so on, with zero integration with other apps.
Second is the not-inconsiderable security problem. Outlook's problem isn't simply that it's highly vulnerable to viruses and trojans; so are many of its competitors. The big problem here is that all such trojans and viruses are written for Outlook. Nobody writes viruses targeting Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise, not because they're less vulnerable, but because Outlook's the biggest target to hit. With any networked Windows environment you need three layers of virus protection: realtime on the desktop, realtime on the servers, and realtime on your e-mail system and its gateways. That said, most of these precautions are protecting against things that attack Outlook and Outlook Express only.
Third is vendor lock-in. Want to make use of Exchange's collaborative features and real enterprise calendaring and resource allocation? You'll generally need not just any major database server, but MS SQL Server. Want to upgrade your mail client but keep the current versions of your word processor and spreadsheet? No can do, if you're using MS Office. Got Unix servers and mainframes you'd like to put your mail system on for high availanbility? Exchange only runs on WinNT and 2000.
I'd go with Notes/Domino. Besides supporting the Mac fully, it has richer web functionality, extending to nearly any custom apps you write. It supports offline users better, with the ability to deliver even interactive apps for offline use. It's seldom if ever the target of viruses and worms, and best of all its servers scale like a champ, running not just on WinNT and Win2K, but also on most Unixes (not to mention Linux) as well as the AS/400 and System/390 midrange and mainframe systems. With Exchange you have to add more physical servers for every x users. With Domino, you can migrate your entire system to big iron quickly, you can choose your ideal HTTP server, databases and so forth, and seldom if ever have to change so much as a line of your custom code.
Outlook is a user's dream and often an administrator's worst nightmare. Domino gives you more flexibility on both the server and the desktop, and far fewer security headaches.
HP OpenMail is a nifty drop-in replacement for Exchange that allows use of most of Outlook's non-mail features, but it doesn't address any of the problems raised by deploying Outlook.
Outlook's vulerabilities as the #1 target of virus authors cannot be understated. Ask Ford or any of the other Fortune 500 companies whose entire mail systems were taken offline for between 1 and 3 days when the "ILOVEYOU" trojan hit.
There's no "conspiracy" against Amaya. Amaya's always been an unusable testbed. Jigsaw is a tool for experimenting with server architecture and modularity and isn't meant for actual production use. Amaya is a tool for testing proposed new versions of CSS, HTML and especially nowadays the HTTP protocol. Nobody involved with the project expects anyone to really use it as a browser or an editing tool.
(Timothy, what do you know anything about?)
VCDs you buy are pretty much limited to Hong Kong movies, anime and cheap porn. But those of you who haven't run Windows in a while may be surprised to know that even the freebie video editing software that comes with DV camcorders and firewire cards can burn VCDs. It's quickly becoming a popular way to distribute home movies.
Shoot digital footage of the kid, edit it on your PC, and burn a couple of VCDs for the grandparents. It's easier than writing out to videotape.
It's certainly nice that it plays DVDs, and a lot of people who get it as a game console will probably use it as their DVD player too.
/. reader, to buy a PS2.
But wireless remotes are third-party, and it won't play VCDs, SVCDs and so forth, as any cheap DVD player will do for half the price. Indeed, it's one of very few DVD players that can't play VCDs. Heck, for the PS2's price of $300 USD, you can get a 5-disc DVD changer from a reputable brand and have enough money left over to buy a couple of DVDs.
So it's a pleasant enough feature, but it's hardly a reaason for anyone, much less a
Samba is primarily an SMB fileserver, and mostly overlaps with Dave in its ability to act as an SMB print client, and on a few OSes can also act as an SMB file-access client via smbmount.
OS X can run Appleshare IP Server, a package that can also act as an SMB fileserver, and has nice admin tools for doing so.
Beyond open-source religious issues and the nominal cost of Appleshare IP Server, the main reasons to run Samba on OS X are as follows:
Yes, it plays DVDs. But if you want a wireless remote, you have to go third-party. And it doesn't play VCDs, SVCDs and the like, unlike most $170 DVD players nowadays.
And right now, a PS2 runs $300. For about $260, you can get a 5-disc DVD changer(!) that will play DVDs, VCDs and SVCDs, both commercial discs and homemade ones burned to CD-R and CD-RW.
Point is, without at least the VCD support, I still need a real DVD player anyway. So the only good reason to get a PS2 anytime soon is for the (you guessed it) games.
For the server-side protection, I'd have a look at Sophos's product.
As for the automatically-distributed client, you should evaluate (for free) Trend Micro's OfficeScan Corporate Edition to see if it plays nice with Samba. It runs no code on the server. The software and updates get delivered via client pull, initiated by Windows login scripts, and the admin interface can be run from any Windows machine with proper share access to the distributing host.
/. posts stories like this once every couple of months, and it's always one of the same five scam artists with a prototype that has flown--once--a couple hundred feet.
90-minute flying time on a tank of fuel? Somebody please wake me up when someone flies one of these for ten minutes straight.
I use Chase. Can't recommend them as a bank, seeing as they charge fees if you so much as breathe. But their online banking works perfectly fine with Netscape on *nix, though their servers are a bit on the slow side. And they're American, of course, so I don't know what good that does someone in Tronna.
That said, give me a fucking break. The percentage of people running Linux on their desktop is somewhere south of 1%, and of those, I dare say half have access to a Windows or Mac system on a reglar basis. Because of the enormous risks involved, banking software is developed and updated very, very slowly and conservatively. Any feature change or bug fix goes through several levels of testing and typically needs sign-off from four or five people before it's allowed into production. Even for, say, a form-validation script.
Sure, most web sites don't have platform-dependency problems (at least in regard to IE 4.x-5.x and Netscape 4.x). It's a shame they wrote such cranky code that it exposes the tiny incomatibilities between Netscape on Win32 and Netscape on *nix. All true.
But how many customers does lack of Linux support chase away from any web site? I mean, really? I mean, there are profitable web-based services out there that don't even support Macs. And Macs account for something like ten times the number of web users than all Unixes combined.
Vinyl does sound better than a CD. I'm not talking about the S/N ratio, either. Sure, CDs have better silence than vinyl and they generally don't warp or pop. But because they're higher-resolution than a CD you not only get the very high frequencies that you wouldn't think matter. You also get better reproduction of complex harmonics. This is what all that headroom 100KHz frequency response gets you. And the sampling rate that leads to it allowss for a higher S/N ratio, too.
It must be nice to be unable to hear the difference between a 320k MP3 and a CD on your "$3000 sound system", because I can hear the difference on the $80 speakers connected to my PC and on my $800 "sound system". I'm not exactly an audiophile. CDs are good enough that I almost never buy vinyl anymore, but part of that comes from the added convenience of the CD. It's playable on portables and in a car, it's easier to carry, and so forth.
But every time I put on some vinyl, even if it's technopop or garage rock, the room warms up.
So here's a digital format that should please nearly all the classical music afficionados out there who spend tens of thousands of dollars constructing acoustically-perfect "listening rooms". Nothing bad about that. At the very least, it finally creates a reasonably lossless way to digitize analog material for archival and preservation purposes--although any archivist will tell you that the real archives themselves for long-term preservation should be old-fashioned stamped analog discs.
These two markets--archivists and money-is-no-object audiophiles--should be covered with about 20,000 of these devices. So what about the rest of us? I have serious doubts that the difference between this and DVD-Audio can be heard on even a $3,000 home theater system.
Sony (and presumably Philips/Magnavox) intend to build support for this into all of their players starting sometime soon, maybe a year from now. The thing is, nearly all the DVD players being sold today can play the competing DVD-Audio discs. None, not even Sony's, and not any of those millions of Playstation2s shipping in the next year, can play SACDs.
Ultimately, this is about patent royalties. Sony and Philips have been collecting royalties on every CD player and CD drive sold for over a decade now, and SACD is about trying to do it again for another decade. DVD-A is the format endorsed by everyone in the industry except Sony and Philips. Is it a good professional archival format? Nah. Is it both better and more flexble than CD? Yep.
So here's the ugly truth. The MP3 revolution seems to have proven that most people have tin ears. Ask a hundred people. 98 of them will tell you that 128Kbps MP3 is "CD quality". Fact is, it's inferior to Minidisc, to FM radio and--in many respects--analog cassettes. But it doesn't have hisses and pops, and that's all most folks really notice. Heck, 320Kbps MP3 sounds crappy next to a CD, even on a $400 stereo.
If people think MP3 is "good enough"--when it can't even hold a candle to CD--why is the mass market going to embrace SACD over DVD-A? Especially when they'll have DVD-A players available from dozens of manufacturers and SACD players most likely available from... three?
CD will be superseded, not because most people want higher-resolution sound quality they can't hear on Britney Spears remixes, but (1) because DVD-A and SACD players will offer things like 6-channel sound and bundled-in DVD video clips, and (2) because the record industry will stop making CDs, just like they stopped making LPs, in order to force everyone to buy the new players and buy yet another copy of Billy Joel's Greatest Hits to go with the LP, cassette and CD they already have.
The best format won't win. The more ubiquitous one will. The question remains which coalition will blink first. Will the Sony-Philips side break down and allow their record companies to start making DVD-As once they see SACD players aren't selling well, or will companies like Matsushita start paying royalties and buying chips from Sony because the Sony/Philips DVD-A embargo has made it impossible to get record stores to carry DVD-As?