In ancient times, before WWW, folks dialed in to bulletin board systems for sharing. Citadel was there. Lately Citadel has been updated to provide many more means of access. The most popular is likely web access using a browser.
Citadel is a suite of packages in Debian GNU/Linux which you can install in a minute or two. You can install it on a PC or a server to provide web services, LAN service or just to serve your local PC.
Unlike phpBB and other PHP scripts, Citadel is written in C so is a bit faster than an interpreted web application. This allows it to scale better and serve a growing organization. It even has clustering so if you ever do max out a server, you can add additional instances and keep going.
I became interested in Citadel when I read that Largo FL was not happy with Evolution + Groupwise from Novell. I was curious what alternatives there might be. Citadel is trivial to install and works very well for many purposes. Compared to the $25K per annum that Largo spends on their system, Citadel has very high performance/$. Try it out. I think it can be useful for an individual, family, or small to medium sized businesses or organizations. Check out www.citadel.org
I created a short video showing the installation and initial usage of Citadel in a virtual machine:
Skype had a problem. They had created a wonderful product that people loved but for which people did not want to pay. M$ is awash with cash and is trying to provide all kinds of service on the web. At first glance that looks like a match except that users are not locked-in to Skype. There are plenty of other services people can use: telcos, their own VOIP, ekiga, KPhone, etc.
Since I don’t want anything to do with M$, I will now have to use a different VOIP solution. I have used ekiga before so that will likely do. I already have Pidgin installed as well and it can do voice.
It seems to me that M$ has outbid everyone just to keep Skype out of the hands of Google or FaceBook rather than to make money. I expect this will add to the losses of their on-line division.
Here in Manitoba, Canada, we are having a very wet spring. A late snowstorm dumped a lot of water on the land and now we have a few days of rain during the peak of runoff. The Assiniboine river is peaking today but the levees are giving way so the government has decided to breach the levees in such a way that the river will flood only 150 homes instead of 500 or more if the levees failed randomly.
This crisis was sprung on us because some upstream water gauges gave erroneous readings. When the river exceeded expectatiions the error was discovered too late to build up levees. This is a combination of problems coming together in the worst possible way.
This is why I am not an executive. Having to make such important decisions based on fuzzy information is not what I do…
Judge Alsup has made an order about the meaning of technical terms in the Oracle v Google suit. One item in the order is: Both “intermediate form code” and “intermediate form object code” will be construed to mean “executable code that is generated by compiling source code and is independent of any computer instruction set.”Continue reading ‘Executable’
M$ is trying to denigrate XP, you know, their most successful OS ever, in order to get folks to buy a new PC with “7″. In an advertising campaign in which “Julie” opines that she has all she needs in her old PC, M$ convinces her that new hardware like an all-in-one or a touch screen really do require a purchase of a new PC. The argument is specious. The Wintel treadmill is something you can escape by going sideways. You can keep your old PC longer. You can install new software on it like Debian GNU/Linux. You can make it a thin client to get more performance. You can use cloud services. Likely Julie is doing a lot of that already with GMail, and FaceBook. Touch on a desktop PC is not compelling and she could use a tablet if she cannot type…
In a way, M$ is its worst enemy. As it has convinced people that they must buy a new PC to get anything new in IT, they have also convinced people that a new anything is good: tablet, notebook, smart thingie… and many of these do not come with that other OS. Expect further poor quarters for that cash-cow.
How many cycles of the Wintel treadmill does it take to convince the subject that the next revolution is actually the same as the last one? The problem for M$ is that people are not gerbils and can solve the problem of spending years getting nowhere.
My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.
My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.
I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.
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