Recent Comments

Yes. I can't figure out how to filter comments below a threshold on this site, but it was obvious on Soylent. Missing feature, perhaps.

The problem is "average" companies tend to be very different. I think non windows setups work best in medium sized companies with one to three tech staff. If they're too small they don't have the resources to get Linux in place. Too big and existing infrastructure (inevitably Microsft) is too far entrenched. The key to the process becomes getting the top decision maker on board with moving to that system. Most managers are too apathetic to care about things that are already "working fine", and don't want to move into unfamiliar territory.

The biggest block I've typically experienced are people demanding Windows/Office. Calc is no Excel, and I'll concede that, but many people insist on using MS Word but could just as well be using freaking Wordpad for all the functionality they used. That kind of thing. Where I work I've given up trying to migrate off of Windows due to various special purpose programs, but I've been doing well on the server side. I don't like the over complexity of Exchange, but have to admit it's been pretty good to me. Still, I'd really like to get us off of it, although our love affair with "Public Folders" will probably never allow that.

Their French brethren have come up with a proxying client that translates all the proprietary MAPI stuff into open standards (IMAP, SMTP, CARDDAV, Caldav). It's here: http://davmail.sf.net/. I've used it at corporate clients any number of times without a hitch.

It's not impossible, though it's not ideal: even Exchange allows IMAP functionality, I'm told, though you have to manually make it available. Let's say you have existing Microsoft software ecosystem and want to make a switch. Me, I'd start by changing out Exchange first and let everyone continue to use Outlook as an IMAP client to whatever Linux solution I had on the back end.

But if for some reason they started with the desktops, then they could have conceivably just let Exchange continue as an IMAP server in the gap. Obviously, we could probably learn something by reading the article before speculating, but what fun is that?

I've followed Kolab on and off since at least 2001, when the Kompany was still around (rememeber them? Produced Rekall, the first good GUI MySQL database software for Linux?). Kolab was just getting started and everyone was hot to produce a decent Exchange replacement. Looks like they made huge strides since then - congrats to them.

I'm waiting until I can purchase employees in the cloud too, that way my office link going down wouldn't affect productivity and the data center can manage all that HR crap.

Outlook Web Access :) completely compatible with linux, except I cant send email while using chrome.

I wonder what the base software requirements would be for "Joe Average Company" to consider using a Linux distribution in preference to Windows? Windows probably has a huge advantage due to inertia, and we've been promised the "year of Linux on the desktop" probably for the last 15 years now, but I'm finding that LibreOffice can do everything I'd want to do in Word or Excel (and probably PowerPoint as well) and if Kolab has mail/calendar functionality equivalent to Exchange, then I'm wondering if there's anything essential for general office use that's missing now? And Linux is cheaper than Windows too... :D

Who knows, maybe Exchange runs on Wine? :D

More realistically, they might've stuck with a Windows Echange server, but used a compatible Linux client on the desktop(s). Assuming they didn't just make do with sendmail and Thunderbird, and some Unixy calender application (cron?).

Well if they switched to Linux last year and they're only now going to Kolab, they must be using something in that gap. Although now that I think on it, maybe they're just toughing out the loss in functionality temporarily. Or they stuck with Exchange (assuming that's what they used) and are interfacing with that, which I'd be interested to know how that went.

Kolab?

All the different devices that might be embedded in the various components will have different buses, frequencies, voltage requirements, current-draw, etc. You can't even force compatbility as there's no freaking way you'd want to add an expensive bridge to a 1c ambient light sensor, for example.

However, if you want pluggable-to-a-limited-extent hardware, there's already Jolla.

I've looked at Kolab off and on a few times over the last several years. It really seems to have grown up, and is offering very nice enterprise level functionality. I'm impressed.

"It seems that everyone in the phone industry wants to keep everything as proprietary and locked-down as possible"

I think that's the reason this won't go very far, not in the US anyway. Phone vendors want to keep the idea of phone + phone plan together. They want the upgrade to be an incentive to stick with contracts, so I'd think the last thing they'd want is a modular phone that allows a person to swap out the radio module for $30 and go with another vendor.

Personally I'd like to see this happen. I was shopping around for a SMALL Android Phone and hardly any qualified for what I wanted. The Sony Xperia looked like a well rounded phone in the profile I wanted, but each model missed a different key feature I wanted - really, it's like they read my mind and omitted a different thing on each phone model to piss off me specifically. If I could have taken the features I wanted and glued them together, I would have bought one.

Assuming they had the typical corporate setup, I'd assume before they had something like Outlook/Exchange before they migrated last year. So what are they using now?

Sounds interesting to me - I'll be happy for anything other than the Hershey Bar form factor, and if modularity gets us more options, that's good. Sometimes I'm happy with my touch keyboard and sometimes I like the physical keyboard. Perhaps this approach would allow me both. Likewise, I'd be happy to go without a camera.

In fact, if I'm looking for a phone for my daughter, I'd be willing to pay extra for a phone without a camera. Let some other guy's daughter sext herself all over Web 2.0. Those things are a menace.

My ASUS transformer tablet has an HDMI out that I've connected to a TV to watch a movie or two on. The best I could manage was 720p though. Plus, the hardware acceleration can't always keep up with the high-end encoding settings and it skips. I've tried Atoms (45nm) and AMD Brazos (40nm) with mixed results as well.

Since a real desktop-grade processor can decode full HD in software without breaking a sweat and still only use 10-15 watts at the wall, I've kinda given up on the whole "low end" / "low power" HTPC setup.

Regarding the cycle, modern smartphones are already more powerful than mainframes of ancient times, and they don't look like they will be getting less powerful so it's more a matter of how we use them.

As long as we are constrained by the speed of light, latency can be an issue, connectivity is also a problem so people are going to want a computer+data with them.

Until brain-computer interfaces become much better I think there'll be a market for PCs (whether laptops or desktops) - since they can be a lot more powerful and capable. Smartphones on the other hand might lose significant share to wearables once the latter start augmenting people in many ways a phone can't. Telekinesis/telepathy/eidetic memory/video-audio recognition would be more seamless with a wearable than a phone- it's the difference between someone seemingly doing autistic savant/magical stuff and someone using a phone to do them.

But central servers still aren't going to go away either - search, etc. Maybe the Tor chat thing will start mass adoption of "P2P" messaging and other stuff. Given the slow adoption of IPv6 I doubt Tor will scale to billions of users and remain "decentralized"- the NSA may run the mega/giganodes ;).

It didn't work out so well. Was very unstable when using hardware-accelerated playback. And frankly I don't really see any mini arm-based PC working quite as well as a regular Intel machine running a full-blown OS. Maybe and Android device would be workable.

But for now, I get the most utility with a mini Intel i5 box running full Windows 7. Tried Linux for a while, but flash sucks in it, and likely always will. And since a lot of web-based TV content is delivered via flash, that was that.

If the aim of this is to do for phones what IBM did for the PC back in the eighties (i.e. provide a framework which anyone can build components against), then it's probably a good thing. Is there some catch which I'm missing though? It seems that everyone in the phone industry wants to keep everything as proprietary and locked-down as possible, and this seems to be moving in the other direction...

Why no UPNP/DLNA option? It's far superior to any of these... although I suppose you do need a "Smart" TV to use it.

"A great end user experience across any device".

What device has a good desktop experience other than an actual desktop? I find it hard to believe corporations are excited about any form of desktop, and most companies I know of are happier to be rid of them and certainly aren't concerned about replicating the desktop experience on other things. (Isn't that what Microsoft always wanted with their Pocket PC line which was never popular?)

Desktops in the cloud are great!

... Except when the network is down. Then nobody can do anywork at all.
... or when the cloud provider suddenly goes belly up, leaving you stranded.
... or when the cloud gets hacked, and all your corporate secrets get stolen
... or when a government secretly requests those same secrets for the benefit of its corporations
... or when the cloud provider sells or uses for its own benefit those corporate secrets
... or when the provider suddenly changes the infrastructure, leaving you with a product that no longer suits your need
... or when existing infrastructure didn't meet all existing requirements to begin with, forcing you to kludge together some sort of workaround
... or when the provider increases the price year by year until the savings that going to the cloud initially brought you have vanished.

Yeah, but aside from all that, desktop clouds are great!

I've got FreeNAS with the Plex Media Server plug in blasting out my media. The family can watch on their ipads, Nexus tablets, and via a Roku/Plex connected to the TV, different movies all at once. I'm actually stunned at how well it works. Cable TV can now officially kiss my gringo butt.

The Plex app is like XBMC but a bit newer/better. The new Roku runs it. Roku wants me to subscribe to a bunch of channels, which I don't do and don't need to do. The fact it runs Plex and picks up my FreeNAS over wireless is the only trick it needs to do.

I could have saved a few bucks by installing a Chromecast which now also runs Plex, but I was reticent to do so and Plex makes you buy something called PlexPass which sounds suspiciously like an attempt to work me into a subscription model, which I don't want.

That article from 1968 was spectacular! As I wrote on comp.misc, I'm a fan "in theory" of the centralized computing model. Certainly it makes maintenance and admin easier, reduces the chances that some employee will leave your customer database in a strip club/bar, etc. But I have worked for most of the last 10 years in Africa on some really awful bandwidth connections, and here it would be a non-starter.

It's a reminder to me you need resiliency and backup and all this cloud horsesh*t doesn't provide either. If your desktops are in the cloud, one busted telephone line that takes down your ADSL connection buys you a snow day. It just doesn't work.

Personally, I'm still on the "keep the servers in house" bandwagon, because at work they migrated us all to Office365 cloud solution by Microsoft, and it's been pretty imperfect. We've even had some trouble with things like wrong certs blocking access, etc., it's been a hassle and I'm not happy with it.

AND... AND... AND... How about an edit button that works for 5 seconds etc.? Not necessary though, since I don't know what effect it will have on community building.

Hi!

Is there a place where you are storing the code? Is there a way I can contribute?

Could you please provide a list of features that are coming? For example, karma system, user profile, friending etc.

I'd rather not have a huge central point of failure. The mail server is enough, thank you!

Here is a cool article (from 1968!) describing this what-is-old-is-new-again phenomenon and how it relates to display processors.

It's more relevant for the current X Window / Wayland efforts than full desktop virtualization, but it always gives me a chuckle how such things never seem to change.

Did someone who was born in 1990 come up with this idea? Every so often somebody discovers this "new" idea.

+1 raspi

... thin clients worked out so well the last 50 times they became a corporate fad.

We backed the Ouya "just because", never expecting to actually do anything with it beyond set it on a shelf as a souvenir, but we've found great use for it as a media player using XBMC.

I'm not the target audience for this software, but I'm starting to realize I'm not the target audience for a lot of tech coming out lately. But when I think about the energy, resources, and tech that goes into making a text editor out of browser technology, it depresses me. What happened to the days when all you needed was a good C library and maybe something like ncurses?

Yeah, I know, get offa my lawn.

But all these additional layers cause complexity and slowness and latency and so on. And the end result isn't much better than what we're doing at present.

I find the whole thing depressing, even if it's a technological feat. Reminds me of that XKCD cartoon called 'Abstraction' :

An x64 processor is screaming along at billions of cycles per second to run the Xnu kernel, which is frantically working through all the POSIX-specified abstraction to create the Darwin system underlying OS X, which in turn is straining itself to run Firefox and its Gecko Renderer, which creates a Flash object which renders dozens of video frames every second ... because I wanted to see a cat jump into a box and fall over. I am a God."

PS - nice work Pipedot rendering block quote! This site is gorgeous.

Oh nice, 22nm bay trail atom with 2.5" drive spot, 4 watts at idle.

That's what the CowBoyNeal aka "I don't have a TV you insensitive clod" option is for. Then of course come here and complain more ;)

IRC

Will be XMMP

wiki

Built into the site (instead of the old term "journals")

Bug Tracker

Now up at: http://bugs.pipedot.org/

There is a new bug tracker at bugs.pipedot.org

^ this. I've (very) recently switched to a smartphone. I'm almost unable to install apps because my conscious prevents me from agreeing to their invasive permission requirements (e.g. even though they're most likely necessary for things like in-app purchases, I don't want a non-phone app to access the phone part of my phone - and lacking an option to turn that off, I choose not to install).

I've managed to install 2 ad-supported apps. Whenever I fire them up when accidentally connected to wifi (no 3g connection anyway), they tell me I have a virus. On an android device. In french.

You can imagine my feelings towards diving deeper into this cesspool.

I don't know about you, but if I play games from my childhood, I sincerely hope to mess up a lot less than I did back then...

It's also neither Vim nor Emacs, so I too am struggling to see what this editor's differentiating feature is. Other than "runs in a browser, but sorta not". Also get off my lawn as well...

Now that submission preview has been added, can you please resubmit this with working links?

1. Find someone's profile URL.
2. Copy their profile ID and paste it in front of @facebook.com.
3. Send spam to their @facebook.com address. It will seamlessly be forwarded to their primary address.
4. Profit!!

Hi. I have created code in the past, a certain set of magical regular expressions, that complies with International Domain Names (IDN) version 2 standard, and only allows UTF-8 letters and punctuation (no symbols).

If you want, just tell me where to send this.

I seem to remember that, (many?) years ago, /. itself was mirrored on Usenet. Maybe it even had its own hierarchy, I'm not sure.

I'd say its a matter of cost cutting, but I wouldn't say it's unique to Nintendo. I bought Grand Tourismo 5 a week ago, the DLC voucher is only good for another two months and will then be unavailable. After 2 years availability of online play is fairly iffy. It seems like game companies have caught on that you can showcase online play as a feature, then pull the plug earlier to push purchases closer to the release date. You don't have to put up with the never ending resale market, or people like me who wait at least a year for the price to drop to $20.

Can't they get their heads around the idea that what I really want is an up to date system that will play their entire catalogue of games which comes with the controllers required to do so and with wireless controllers optional at a cost which won't make my wallet cry?

Okay, the Wii is a good start. Wired classic controller can be had quite cheaply. The new games are quite expensive, signature nintendo there, but the old games are way over priced. Also, I can't buy Japanese games for my Australian wii! Gaaaaaaaah!

So, I use my PC. Thanks Nintendo. I am trying to redo my childhood here and you are not helping.

new-and-shiny loving opinion drivers

New euphemism for 'kids'.. thanks!

No TiVo here.. so.. no

Intel NUC DN2820FYKH running OpenElec