The latest KDE interface is really slick and almost everything has worked flawlessly on the Dell mini. The only real exception is I haven’t figured out how to make the wireless connection remember my password automatically.

I am waiting to put a SSD card into my desktop machine. It has the ASUS motherboard that supports a direct boot to a mini-linux supporting webbrowser and email .

I am a Fedora Geek

Leslie

First, blogging is more like publishing a paper than writing a note. If I want to write you, I don’t need to publish it for the whole world to see. Yes, through security you can control who sees what content. However, what you are doing is using a publishing system and then hacking it into a messaging system. Possible? Yes. Ideal? No.

Second, with blogging, the intention is to leave content available on a server forever. While this might satisfy US archiving requirements I don’t think people are going to be happy about leaving their deep dark secrets (sent to one person) on a blogging server forever and hope that the security always works for time immemorial.

Third, email has many problems besides spam. Encryption, for one, is a major problem with email today. It is just too difficult for the masses to adopt it. I guess you could handle this through the security system mentioned above.

Fourth, people love the offline convenience of email composing. You could compose in an HTML editor but how many people want to do that? If you use something else, then when you connect it is not just hitting send/receive but rather you must setup everything when you are online. This moves more work from being able to be done offline to requiring it to be done online.

I do agree that we need a replacement for email. Spam, authentication, encryption/privacy, delivery notifications are all major issues needing to be solved. However, I think there is already a replacement out there. Check out http://TrulyMail.com and you will see what I mean.

thanks for the nice words on Wikka. I agree that the popular security concern (“in a wiki everyone can edit and read anything”) is truly unjustified. Several 2nd generation wiki engines (including Wikka, but surprisingly not MediaWiki) offer fine-grained ACL allowing admins to determine who has privileges do access specific kinds of content (e.g. who can read/write/delete a page, read/write/delete a comment, upload/download a file etc).
We’d love to hear more about your experience using Wikka: if you want to share some ideas or requests, feel free to start a userpage on our website or pop by on our #wikka IRC channel at freenode.net

When I read your comment, at first I thought “who would want to add to that?” but considering it more, I agree with your comment about the “relatively controlled” environment enabled by a wiki. (actually I think, perhaps it would have been smart to implement one a long time ago, but that’s another story). I’m wondering whether a wiki coudl actually make some aspects of discovery easier and more clear for all the parties involved. If nothing else, it could centralize and give order to a lot of chaos in a way that e-mail archives or instant messaging or a file server can’t. But I think it might be able to do more too.

Our electronic communication methods now record and disseminate all kinds of communication in ways that nobody used to think about or intend. I believe you essentially said that this can lead to errors, and I would guess, often errors that take place this way can come about even through good-intentioned efforts. It’s a massive amount of work to find and understand what these electronic artefacts are and mean.

With e-mail, it’s sometimes hard to understand the path of the message. Has it been forwarded outside of a work account? Who has been copied on which messages, did they see the entire string of messages or only part? At which points? Did the person forwarding a message change any part of it before forwarding it? Was the content of an attachment accurately represented or received? There are more issues, but e-mail is wild. It gets passed around very easily, and often though innocently, with little understanding of what the actual content (including things like tone of voice, intentions, etc.) of the e-mail message may mean or refer to. Unlike e-mail, wiki pages are not so easily sent to outside mail accounts, nor can they (if set up this way) be changed from person to person without the open and visible tracking of those changes.

In an e-mail, people might be prone to summarize or leave out important points because these points might not be necessary to their particular message (though perhaps very important in some other way) or they don’t take the care to recopy all the information needed or are just careless. Maybe they don’t have the most up-to-date information to refer to in their messages. Again the easy linkability of wiki pages encourages people to link to the same, already existing pages (rather than reinvent the wheel). If they need to, they can correct and update those pages (of course, the history is typically tracked by the wiki with the person’s name, a timestamp, and before/after views), which are then also available to other people that need them. In other words, instead of having many copies of some information that could be inaccurate, there could be a page that many eyes refer to and visibly maintain its accuracy.

A wiki might also decrease the confusion that results when someone innacurately responds to a forwarded or group e-mail, because s/he didn’t read the entire string of messages or certain key recipients were left off and didn’t have full knowledge of what was being written about. I suppose there is no guarantee that anyone will read an entire wiki page either, but at least there is just one version of the wiki page rather than any number of copies of different e-mail accounts.

The wiki, though it feels at first glance like a lot of chaos, actually imposes a transparent control on its content which e-mail, instant messaging, shared file servers, etc. lack. If people were to use a wiki more frequently and e-mail less frequently maybe it would ultimately save a company a lot of work during a legal discovery process.

My opinion is that such posts in relatively “controlled” environments such as wikis pale in comparison to the rubbish that can be broadcast via email, instant messaging and the like–all of which is also discoverable in such situations.

Any thoughts on this, or any information that might be useful on this topic?
Best regards,
Lee

The Platonic tree (say) can only have clarity if there are enough “real” trees (copies) to give it a shape. Thus, a nice paradox: the more copies there are (I’m assuming imperfect copies, although that might not be suitable for your discussion), the more well-defined the Platonic ideal becomes.

My 1 cent plus a copy.

Because you mentioned “customers” plural, I’m guessing that you’re interested in the sorts of debugging and modifications associated with the people and organizations participating in FOSS communities. If that’s the case then it seems like it would be good to ask how OpenPro facilitates those communities around its software and how it manages the changes, improvements, and direction of its community. Open source projects that don’t manage and foster their communities adeptly can result in chaos, which might do more harm to the future of the software than to help it. Yet the benefits of these communities (benefits of an open source ecosystem) are a valuable reason to be considering an open source solution.

Have you found that OpenPro confers typical free and open source software rights for modifying its code as you might need (are they now licensing it under an Open Source Initiative or FSF approved license)? I think it is important to verify that you would have those rights if this is something you intend to make use of. Unless I’ve made an error, to my eyes, OpenPro doesn’t clearly present those community characteristics mentioned above. Of course, if you don’t necessarily insist on a FOSS ERP solution such characteristics might not have the same importance to you (lack thereof may not be a considered a weakness).

But the crux of my point, and looking back at my post I may have rambled on about a couple things confusing the issue, is that impressions a vendor gives, ought to be validated against what it can actually provide for your needs. This would be true for any software but I chose to discuss OpenPro because I had some first-hand experiences that seemed to bear out this point. First, the handling of its “open source-ness” and second, the unwillingness to demonstrate the surprisingly immense range of functionality it claims to support. In the first case this has an impact on the future of the product, its roadmap and its viability. In the second case the impact quite specifically affects what you will achieve with it for your business requirements.

You asked about OpenMFG. I personally have not been party to an in-depth demonstration of its software (so I cannot fairly comment on its capabilities), though CEO Ned Lilly, has been quite willing to give me earnest responses to questions.

You asked about other ERP systems that support the Mac OS. Here are a few that you might want to look into, to my knowledge they support OS X as a server platform (not sure if you’re looking at it for the client side or not).

Compiere – http://www.compiere.com
OpenMFG – http://www.openmfg.com
openTaps ERP – http://www.opentaps.org

I understand that the following support Unix or provide hosted services–perhaps it would be worth checking if Mac OS X is also supported.
Adonix – http://www.adonix.com
OpenBravo – http://www.openbravo.com
Epicor – http://www.epicor.com
Lawson – http://www.lawson.com
Metasystems – http://www.metasystems.com
NetSuite – http://www.netsuite.com
Pronto – http://www.pronto.com.au
QAD – http://www.qad.com

In the end I sold my Zaurus (a bit sadly but I couldn’t justify it for my needs). I haven’t seen the ideal device built at an appropriate cost-point yet.

Although the screen is alittle small for reading, there is a very useful zoom function built in. There are two keys on the keybord that increase or decrease the size of text on the screen which makes it a lot easier to view. When you’re done, just shrink it back to it’s normal size again.

Did you buy anything in the end? I have the same sentiments regarding the OQO as you; I’d love to have one, but the price is just too prohibitive.