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Red Hat Develops Online Desktop
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed May 09, 2007 01:24 PM
from the hope-your-isp-is-reliable dept.
from the hope-your-isp-is-reliable dept.
pete314 writes "Red Hat announced this week at their San Diego Red Hat Summit that they are planning to compete with Microsoft on the desktop by building an 'online desktop' that will integrate local data with online services. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens argued that: 'To user the desktop metaphor is dead. We don't believe that recreating a Windows paradigm in an open source model will do anything to advance the productivity in the life of users.'"
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Competingwith Microsoft Google? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google partner? (Score:4, Insightful)
They may not end up competing with Google, rather they may end up partnering with Google. Google has a lot of the apps available right now.
Parent
Re:Competingwith Microsoft Google? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google's online offerings have matured, and are quite powerful, but there's still the disconnect when going offline. Not until I can work offline and seamlessly integrate/sync when I go back online will it be really effective.
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Lemme boot the terminal (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Lemme boot the terminal (Score:4, Insightful)
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Doesn't seem to slow them down any... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Competing with Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
And therefore they're reimplementing the Windows 98 Active Desktop...?
Re:Competing with Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the Windows 98 Active Desktop has a chance of being successful now that always-on Internet connections are vastly more common. There was another technology built into Internet Explorer 4.0 that also died from lack of use. It was called "channels", and was very similar to RSS. Yet today, RSS and Atom are wildly popular. Sometimes the technology doesn't need to change if the world does.
Parent
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What about when you are offline? (Score:5, Insightful)
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dude.
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Not at all. It just introduces a synchronization step when you go back online. Windows does this already with its file servers - if you go offline and have some shared files open, you can still use them normally, save them, etc. But when you go online, the files get synchronized back to the server so they can be backed up, opened from other workstations, etc. It's supposed to be the best of both worlds.
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An online OS most likely means you have a base framework that allows you to connect and inter
Re:What about when you are offline? (Score:5, Informative)
The mozilla team has already talked about Firefox 3's upcoming support for running online apps while offline, as a sort of hybrid, but still within the browser. Just do a search for "web applications offline' and you'll find dozens of articles including how-to sites from tool providers for making Web apps that will function offline right now.
I'm not sold on Web applications. I'm not sold on a strategy of bypassing MS by building everything on top of them. I'd rather see cross platform applications with internet capabilities, or hybrid solutions, that still allow me to take advantage of the benefits of the OS. From a practical standpoint, however, my automatic bibliography formatting service allows me to automatically format bibliography references right now using Google Docs, but I can't use the same functionality in Wordpad or in MSWord for that matter; so in some ways online apps are already allowing me to bypass the limitations of Microsoft's OS.
Parent
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Remove applications or web application are software where the view and maybe part of the controller is run in the browser, locally on one's computer. The model is generally run remotely on the server. For example, gmail has a nice view run locally in the browser. Google's servers store and process and retrieve your email. gmail CANNOT be run locally. You cannot send or receive
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A "web application" isn't if it does not require remote for processing and storing. It is just a local application run in a browser.
True, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about applications that run via a Web browser and integrate with a Web service (Google Docs), but which also run locally without Web access, albeit with some features disabled. It is important to note, we were speaking about the desktop metaphor being dead, and when your app is running locally in a browser, that does seem to be the case to a significant extent.
For example, gmail has a nice view run locally in the browser.
I'm afraid I have no idea what you were trying to say with that sentence. Could you
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Hmm, good question. It is an OS X system service called "BibliographyService." It may have come with BibDesk, but it does not seem to be grouped with the other services from there. It may be a stand alone service I grabbed somewhere.
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Actually, many of us could not work without an internet connection anyways so it is a moot point for those tied to Blackberries and live connections. Remember how many people freaked out when the Blackberry servers went down?
I've talk to many whose company now includes a Sprint or Verizon card because they need always on connections no matter where they are with the current apps.
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But you're sitting right there, in one of the tubes!!!
Quick - someone tell Apple that they're DOOMED! (Score:4, Funny)
Quick - someone tell Apple that they're DOOMED!
Re:Quick - someone tell Apple that they're DOOMED! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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Is Red Hat really relevant anymore? (Score:3, Insightful)
After dealing with their nightmarish support system this month after a bug caused me to lose connection to my SAN, and dealing with the scam that is RHCE certification (30% pass rate is BS -- they're just milking retakes at $750 a pop), I can say that Red hat is really going downhill fast. They're becoming more and more focused on the bottom line and less on the little guy who got them to where they are.
Yeah (Score:4, Funny)
Order a free CD from Ubuntu and bin it.
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I'm not sure how you measure this... If you just went by
Re:Is Red Hat really relevant anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Even if we don't use their distribution, we still benefit from their effort (lots of OSS development going on at RH), so what's the problem?
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I recently took my RHCE for RHEL5. Passed the first time. I went to the ER the night before for pneumonia, and was totally doped up on cough syrup with Codeine and other goodies. I really thought that I failed it, but, surprisingly enough, I didn't.
What I don't like about the RHCE is how you can't even talk about what's on the test, even with the guys who you're testing with. It seems a little odd that to protect the test/certification for future test takers,
took the words right outta my mouth (Score:3, Interesting)
I love it (ironic) when some CIO or other bigwig perports to talk for me. Actually, not only is the desktop still not "dead", but on my desktop is a Mainframe running COBOL/CICS/DB2. Still not dead. Not by a long shot.
Hello, world.
Windows paradigm? (Score:2)
But, then why are try to recreate what has been the Windows paradigm since Microsoft started pushing
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No, I wouldn't say that it has been the key Windows paradigm since that. I meant exactly what I said.
Online services == less freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
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Manual transmissions put you in more control of your car, but automatic transmissions outsell manual transmissions in the U.S. by huge margin. Many cars don't even have manual as an option.
Remember, as sad as it seems to us, we're living in a world where people think "just reboot" is an acceptible solution to problems with your computer.
So I agree with your sentiment, and I think most will agree with your sentiment, but I also think most peo
Yet Another Attempt (Score:3, Interesting)
To succeed you need a system that doesn't view the network as a bolted on thing, but integrates it at the core; Plan9 comes to mind on that front. At least X11 has network transparency, but it needs to be more efficient (think NX), and have far better security built in to really work for this. Bandwidth will slowly but surely fix itself. That leaves security -- and there's a lot required to make that happen. It is an ambitious and worthy goal, but in this case it is possibly a case of biting off more than you can chew: if it isn't transparent, efficient and secure, it isn't going anywhere, and fulfilling those requirements would require vast architectural changes.
Linux as a viable end user OS - Is it time yet? (Score:2, Interesting)
Redhat? What's that? (Score:2)
The right step ... will the implementation work ? (Score:4, Interesting)
The desktop isn't dead but its damn stale - what I would envision is a bi-modal operation: if you have wired or wireless access your "desktop" seamlessly includes your "on-line" resources - applications - data files - links - IM buddies - etc. all integrated into your applications - disk volumes, When offline you would have what you have right now. Of course you would need a method to mark certian files as bi-modal so they would reside in a file cache and be available offline - the OS would handle file sync'ing etc. Or a thumb drive could be a file cache
On the flip side where the desktop is really dead (as in "Dead to You" ) --- I could see you carrying a USB thumb drive that launches a mini-linux session and then you connect to the "server in the sky" to access all your docs - email - applications - etc.
Both ideas are step in the right direction for Linux
No interest whatsoever (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was actively doing business travel, online collaborative apps were a supplement to applications on the desktop, given that the online apps were trustworthy (controlled by my own business). I never had any desire to get rid of local applications, especially since I had to be able to do office work, development and other tasks on the go, with no network access, expensive network access, insecure network access, or unreliable network access. If the "network applications" are downloadable and cached for off-line use, then you have nothing new, that's just semi-automated deployment and update. When it comes to that, externally controlled auto-update is a bad thing in many environments. I want to control when I upgrade, after I know the update is not going to break something. I don't want to log on, find out I can't access an old file, and have no way to restore the previous version of the application. Web services are continuously in beta.
Currently, I have absolutely no need for remote apps. I do all of my work locally and live rurally. Why would I want my applications and/or data externally controlled and unaccessible if I don't have a connection? I have full-featured applications (which would take considerable time to download). I pay for them once (if I have to at all). I have low latency. I can pick and choose which applications I use. I can have multiple versions installed if I need to for compatibility reasons. I control encryption and backups when I need it. What advantage does a "network desktop" get me?
Why bother?
Emerging markets... (Score:5, Funny)
The new metaphor... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I know Sun came up with that one a decade or so ago, and they were spot on, but it wasn't quite there.
The real winners will be the ones who can come up with transparent computing. By that, I mean if the machine is standalone it uses local resources, disk, cpu etc. If it's plugged into a network it automatically makes use of the best available hardware on the LAN.
It's all so manual at the moment.
Long live the desktop metaphor (Score:3, Insightful)
If the desktop metaphor is dead, why is its replacement called the "online desktop"?
The Real Killer (Score:2)
Until then, it'll be something that someone uses rarely because there isn't much point in it.
Hybrid approach (Score:2, Interesting)
I suppose it would require implementing clients twice. I think though, that I would prefer a more accessible system with fewer features rather than a new Office sweet every few years (or w
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Yes, particularly from Unix types who do not understand that people will route their data on a Sneakernet in order to circumvent an inflexible mainframe culture. The typical Linux distro (or all of them) do not understand the Personal Computer or its culture, and often the most intelligent thing they have to say about it is patently untrue (that PCs cause trojans and viruses) ignoring the whole NeXT/OS X experience.
So at least Apple