Rendezvous, Microsoft And Apple 484
serendigital writes "MacCentral reports that a BusinessWeek article entitled: 'A Rendezvous with Redmond?' has -- with Rendezvous -- created an actual threat to Microsoft. As reported by MacCentral, it's interesting to note that BusinesWeek's 'Byte of the Apple' columnist Charles Haddad is on temporary leave and this article was written by a substitute columnist."
VOIP (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing really new... (Score:3, Interesting)
Home usage only (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh yeah, and
"Here's another idea that crossed my mind. How about using Rendezvous to power local-phone traffic inside a midsize office? Get rid of the wires. Use cheap voice-over-IP phones plugged into Macs equipped with Wi-Fi cards. No more need for inside plant specialists to check wiring or string cables to the desks."
Oh yeah, I -REALLY- want my phone to drop out whenever someone tries to microwave their lunch.
All of this is fun for small networks, but there is a reason no one has done a lot of this before, because it doesn't scale well.
This is sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Food for thought, when ever I converse with the people who do a great job and run they're IT department efficiently, and Apple/Macintosh is part of the conversation, they have no problem with it. I quote in a conversation just last Friday, "in our company we do what ever it takes to get the job done in the most efficient and effective way, at this time Mac's are not part of our makeup, but if that's the direction we need to go in the future, then we will. I am loyal to my company, not Microsoft and certainly not Dell.
And it works for games, too (Score:5, Interesting)
I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed that "Pop-pop" is rendezvous-enabled. No need to "host" a game -- you just see each other, double-click to request a game.
What is interesting is that even though "normal host a game over IP" stuff still works, and is dead-easy to config, rendezvous seems to be relatively easy to drop into an app.
I was skeptical at first, but now I'm curious to see what neato things people will start to implement using rendezvous.
ZeroConf on Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, what exactly are the security implications? Obviously there are certain things you don't want to broadcast to just anybody! Rendezvous could make wardriving even easier...
scarey (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm seeing a lot of features but where is the security? This looks a lot like how older versions of windows used to share the contents of your drive over ethernet but not dialup without asking and theres a good reason they stopped doing that.
Or have I missed something?
The writer is on crack (Score:5, Interesting)
The first thing Apple shipped using rendez-vous was iChat. The iTunes demo refered to has yet to ship. (you can get the same fuctionnality using iCommune though).
Then, it's not that magical. It only works on one subnet, no way to manually add hosts to the resolver (at least not without serious hacking).
What's the deal with Safari helping you change your printer config? IF your printer advertises itself as a web serveur via Rendez-vous, AND you ask safari to display Rendez-vous-discovered bookmarks, then yes, you can directly access the printer's config pages. But the article does not make this clear at all. And this is different from auto-discovering printers, which I have yet to test since the old HPs we use are still go for a couple hundred thousand pages.
The wild guesses about distributed computing are still a pipe dream, Rendez-vous or not.
And at work, somehow, aliases of Rendez-vous-mountedd servers won't resolve after unmounting the server. Aliases made of servers mounted via AFP or Appletalk will resolve and mount the server.
Rendez-vous is cool, but it still has a long way to go before it is as polished (from a user POV) as the old Appletalk system.
Microsoft's response (Score:5, Interesting)
a) Ignore
b) FUD
c) Embrace/extend/destroy
One important question: Does the Apple Public Source License (under which Rendezvous has been released) give Apple the ability to stop Microsoft from embracing/extending/destroying?
Rendezvous vs. AppleTalk (Score:5, Interesting)
Has Rendezvous really addressed the issue that got AppleTalk locked out of a lot of corporate networks? I wonder how it compares to AT.
Re:Two things... (Score:3, Interesting)
Before you flame me, note I now have a Mac in my office and am loving it more each day I use it. Changing the culture in the organization, however, will be tough. I'm a manager, which means I get to decide how to implement policy, but I don't make it. And the current policy is, Macs are not supported nor approved for purchase. In fact, the Mac in my office is one we confiscated from Marketing when the decision was made (not mine) to convert them all to PCs. Their loss, my gain!
We'll see how things shake out for the future. I'm certainly being converted, so much so that I have a 12" G4 PB on order for my personal use.
(could make an interesting switcher story. I, the evil tech support manager, confiscated a Mac from those rebel marketing people, plugged it in, fell in love, kept it for myself, muhahahahha...)
Anyway, sounds like there must be a way in the jet direct cards to name the printer for rendevous purposes.... I'll take a look later, maybe, whenever I find I need to print something out! :)
Re:Frying Pan; Fire (Score:2, Interesting)
wait a minute... let me get this straight... the physical look of a desktop system is the most important feature to you?!? The thing I like about x86 systems is that they're easy to configure... I'm talking about hardware configuration... leaving software out of the picture completely. It's easy to get ram from any number of manufacturers. You have a million video card choices. Upgrading a processor is as easy as pulling a lever. Changing modems (if you like that sorta thing) is simple, as are NICs and sound cards. Adding or removing drives are as easy as plugging a few idiot-proof cables.
granted, I've never been inside of a mac, but from what I know it's all propriety apple stuff. Well, the video card may be an exception, but I'm not positive.
umm... the moral of the story, if there is one, is that it doesn't matter WHAT your system looks like. It's the ease of use, and the power that matter.
~Jon~
Promiscuous sharing with Rendezvous and Wifi (Score:1, Interesting)
The article is wrong on this point. iTunes does not support Rendezvous or sharing. But what if it did? Would strangers be sharing music at Starbucks, airport terminals, college lecture halls or other places where Wi-Fi enabled laptops congregate?
The Register takes this scenario one step further with the Rendez-Pod [theregister.co.uk], a Bluetooth and Rendezvous enabled iPod. "You could get promiscuous with strangers: you could pair and exchange a song on the same short bus ride."
Re:Home usage only (Score:2, Interesting)
A. Wireless is not 100 Mbit (networks aren't measured in Megabytes 'MB', rather in Megabits), it can reach at best about 50 Mbit (54 I believe for 802.11g and a little overhead)
B. Wireless is not "base-t", that stands for twisted-pair medium.
C. Broadcast traffic saturates ANY ethernet (that means tcp/ip) based LAN, it's not the wire that gets flooded with packets, it's the clients trying to transmit data on the medium (i.e. twisted pair, wireless, etc.)
D. At least in wired networks you can do a little more segmenting with devices like switches whereas in wireless, any device in range transmits to the same medium.
E. I watch the interface usage on my gentoo "elegant machine", residing on a relatively large wireless network (major university) and even just normal broadcast traffic can take it up to between 4-10% usage. Imagine if an inefficient Apple protocol were unleased on it... it wouldn't be pretty.
An additional point of interest, I don't see security measures hinted at and I can imagine they are probably lacking and generally ineffective. Think twice before you criticize the architecture that fuels business.
Re:Frying Pan; Fire (Score:5, Interesting)
I can also pretty much put in any kind of memory I want, so long as it complies with the expected stats:
168 Pin PC100 SDRAM DIMM
Changing modems and NICs are easy on Macs too, assuming you're just putting them in the PCI slot. You just have to make sure you have a driver for them. It is true that sometimes Mac drivers do not exist for the cards, but as I understand this is also true in *nix. Sound cards aren't as easy to change but I have never in my 10+ years of using computers felt a need to change mine.
The reason I prefer Macs is...surprise, surprise! The ease of Hardware configuartion! I have used PCs for many things over the years, and consistently found that setting up new hardware can be difficult on PCs whereas it is generally a breeze on the Mac.
Honestly, it really is just familiarity that drives my preference. If I had been raised on Windows, no doubt I would use that instead.
However, I think that it's wrong to say that the appearance of a computer should have no say in your preference.
When I get my next car, my #1 priority is that it be a nice shade of blue. I really don't have any major preference beyond that, so long as it looks good, gets decent mileage and is fairly dependable. These days, a lot of cars fit that bill, but if it ain't blue, I ain't buying it. Is it a stupid criteria? Maybe. But it's a criteria nonetheless. A lot of people tie up their identity in their "look", and their computer might fall under that too.
If you were buying some piece of shit computer that looked pretty, then I'd agree that it was a stupid decision. But Apple computers aren't pieces of shit.
Re:One more reason I am considering getting a Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Home usage only (Score:3, Interesting)
But, the IETF work on Service Location Protocol does scale beyond a subnet, and once you add an (optional) SLP directory service, clients stop multicasting, only the dir service multicasts to advertise its existence; everything just talks straight to the service.
Where all these device discovery protocols fail on the office LAN is there is no point knowing there are 15 printers within two datagram hops, you want to print to the closest machine, and you dont want to have to install another print driver to do so...
Re:On leave? Good (Score:3, Interesting)
There are solutions to this, of course. For instance if you are printing to printers on a PC network, I'd advise getting GimpPrint. It takes a lot of Linux printer drivers for GIMP, adds some nice UI, and makes them general OSX drivers. (The underlying CUPS printing system is very nice - its just that printer dirvers often are woefully underpowered in their native OSX forms)
GimpPrint [macupdate.com]
The other solution to accessing a Windows network with a Mac is the "write it down solution." Hardly ideal, although to be fair, something Linux users also typically end up doing. There are some freeware/shareware solutions that provide browsers. Not all of them work equally though. (i.e. they don't really solve the underlying issues) The following is one that many people like. (I personally only have a few shares and thus only need to set them up once, after which "who cares?"
SMB Browse [macupdate.com]
My point isn't that this is a huge problem. (It isn't) But it is something that is vastly easier in XP than in OSX. Further many "less tech savvy" individuals will have problem hooking their Mac to their PC network. Hopefully Apple will resolve this in 10.3. (Certainly they need to seriously revamp the Finder due to its lack of multithreading and poor FTP support along with the SMB problems)
Rendezvous ROCKS (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, they just launch iChat when they log in in the morning, and boom-- instant, zero-config buddy list of everyone in the department. Need to ask someone a question? No more hollering over cubes or using the phone, a quick IM does the trick. Need to send someone a file? No more e-mailing or putting it on the server for the person who needs it. Drag it and drop it onto their name in the buddy list, and they'll get a dialog, "Person wants to send you file filename, do you wish to accept?"
The only people who think something like this is a bad thing are the ignorant ones. OF COURSE the devices that use Rendezvous will OFFER security and configurability options-- but the point is, you don't NEED them if all you want to do is get on a network and print to a networked printer. And you don't need to have silly little wizards walk you through the process. Rendezvous is the logical extension of Apple's whole 'it just works' philosophy, and is a wonderful modern incarnation of AppleTalk.
~Philly
Re:Rendezvous vs. AppleTalk (Score:2, Interesting)
I helped manage one college's Mac network at the University of Minnesota back in 1992. I was responsible for putting ethernet cards in old Macs (old at the time, SE, SE30, etc.), sometimes they were too old to even have that, you had to use a SCSI->Eternet adapter. Some of this was 10BaseT, some 10Base2. I can guarantee you the network was chatty. There were a few hundred Macs and probably 50 printers on the network and it was very, very chatty. It was a well deserved reputation IMHO.
Re:This is sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:On leave? Good (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:It scales much better than previous protocols. (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing that would make scaling RV better would be to route link-local addresses. We discussed trying this, but haven't tried it yet. This would allow for multiple 'RV' networks. In all probability, RV may not be ready for this kind of thing, but I don't know all there is to know about RV yet.
As for security, that always has been and always will be between the application layer and the network layer. Think about it: if your host and/or application is insecure, then it won't matter if you run ZeroConf/RV or not.
Re:Rendezvous vs. AppleTalk (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe the SE dates back to 1987(?), so that wouldn't be too surprising. However, I do know that Apple made significant strides in reducing the chattiness of AppleTalk by the mid- to late-90's. But by that time, most network admins were heavily biased against it.
JetDirect (Score:3, Interesting)
- Open up Print Center
- Click the "Add Printer" button
- Select "AppleTalk" as the protocol
- Select the printer that appeared
Dang! I didn't know that JetDirect cards supported AppleTalk! So the moral there is, somewhere in some obscure technical bulletin (probably, knowing HP) there are instructions for setting the name of the JetDirect card.The really sweet part came a few weeks later when I wanted to print a document from OpenOffice. I had never configured the printer settings within X11, and have never even touched
This contrasts very favorably to the time 8 months ago when I configured my Dell laptop with RedHat 7.3 to print to the LaserJet at home.
Apple just supported a standard (Score:2, Interesting)
It is really neat, though.
Re:Home usage only (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the reasons why Apple systems became so popular in the 80's was because of this type of technology that they developed (i.e. AppleTalk Name Binding Protocol). A small publishing business could take a few Macs and a LaserWriter and plug them together using simple cabling and magically the printer just appeared in everyone's Chooser. No print servers required, no DNS, no DHCP. It all 'just worked' the way people needed and wanted it to work.
Since then, networks have gotten more pervasive, and the kinds of peripherals available are much greater and more sophisticated than just printers. So Apple learned from their mistakes (e.g. the chattiness of AT), updated for new types of peripherals and networking requirements and essentially developed (with other peer companies) a next generation of AppleTalk NBP, and they call it Rendezvous/ZeroConf.
Microsoft has simililar technology already in SMB. But most would agree that it is very hard to set up without significant technical expertise and of course it is proprietary, among other well documented limitations.
What is so annoying in threads like this is that so many people just make shit up with a predisposed biased perspective because Apple had something to do with it, and assume Apple can't do anything right. And then so many other people just run with the crap. They assume that some idiot made up some stupid protocol and that there was no thought process and no peer review. They never read the docs and talk about real information. They can't imagine that some smart people may have actually come up with a cool idea, thought about the potential issues and tradeoffs, and solved them as best as anyone could. Luckily there are a few people that try to comat the crap, but most just ignore the real information and continue on spouting the crap, because they really just want to bash.
Just wait a year or so. Rendezvous will be ubiquitous. And people will be benefitting from it and wonder how they ever lived without it. Apple will have lead the way, yet again. And Windows and Linux users will benefit from it just as much as Apple users.
Re:On leave? Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Breathe Air - You could suck down the power supply exhaust, but that doesn't really count. You can however check to see if you can breathe [weather.com] when you go outside.
Sex - Technology has not advanced that far yet, but I've had good luck meeting new people online, then meeting up with them in person.
Ride a bicycle - Buy parts, plan routes, get maps, etc..
Walk through the woods - here [ofdoom.com] you go - it's a QTVR I made a couple of years ago of a walk along a creek to the river it joins up with. All kidding aside, this one probably can have the most computer involvement. After all, you want to get topographic maps somewhere [topozone.com], and maybe check out an overhead view [acme.com] of the area you plan on walking through, not to mention sharing [ofdoom.com] details of where you went with friends.
Re:scarey (Score:3, Interesting)
Sometimes, but rarely.
Ease of Use vs Security is a major issue, and if this covered the entire internet there might be problems, but this is for local networks--if you can't trust them at least enough to know where the printers are, then you are running at a higher security model than most schools, homes, or businesses ever even consider.
Remember, you have to specifically enable a lot of these services on a Mac and generally, after having specifically enabled them, you want people to be able to use them.