What do Zulip / Slack / Hipchat / IRC / ... people do for screensharing and (group) voice calls? We'd love the chat improvements, but without screensharing and voice we're stuck on Skype. :(
Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip
301–310 of 323 posts
Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the context. You can't federate with Google, Microsoft, Facebook anyway -- and you won't convert the world to use your favourite new protocol (most likely). So that just leaves you with an easier problem: how can I host conversations etc for my team/org/my friends? And I think a single, isolated irc server should work fine for that use case, and work fine with many different irc clients? So no, it's not…
That is not an "easier problem" - that is repeating the problem: yet another venue/client/service we all have to be logged into to find one another. Moreover, I'm really not interested in spending any time whatsoever on configuring and maintaining an IRC server and a fleet of bots, nor on teaching non-technical users in how to use the resulting heath-robinson system. Really, no. A world of no. I have run both a priva…
> that is repeating the problem: yet another venue/client/service we all have to be logged into to find one another.
I'm not sure how you can create a new venue without creating a new venue? Perhaps have Google/Facebook/Microsoft/BigCorp create one for you, and the use that? But none of the big players appear to care a whit about facilitating a distributed, self-hosted, open Internet, so that is not going to happen?
> As I see it, the only problem in this domain worth burning hours on is developing a protocol (and interoperable implementations thereof) that achieves everything the likes of Slack and Hipchat can do, only in a decentralized and federated manner.
Any particular reason why you think IRC is inherently not a good building block for such a set of protocols/implementations? I'm not talking about IRC with legacy client support, I'm talking about a system that explicitly breaks comparability with legacy IRC, but still try to build on the years of experience and battle-testing IRC has.
You might be right that it's better to burn IRC to the ground, of course. My takeaway (as an observer, not a server operator in the trenches) is that one takeaway from XMPP/IRC is that:
1) We need authentication of users
2) We need authentication of servers
3) Today, we have no need of plain-text; encrypt and authenticate, or go home.
It appears that 1+3 leaves us with TLS-only, SASL auth if we go the IRC route. For 2) I suppose manual mediation of some kind (eg: server certs with Trust-on-first-Use, possibly a community blacklist?). I'm not sure if this would work, but on the surface it would appear to enable less spam and better security than email currently does.
And it should be much easier to strip down/adapt existing clients and servers than to build an entire new stack?
All that said, it might very well be that IRC server-server federation is hopelessly broken, and there's no hope.
Perhaps some kind of server-auth/community-web-of-trust framework on top of XMPP federation would make more sense?
Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is something wrong with your rendering. What system are you using? It looks to me like the hinting and/or sub-pixel rendering is wrong. I had a lot of problems with this when I moved to Arch Linux because Debian had done some default setup that I needed to figure out in Arch. Here are my xresources for xft if you are using Linux (probably formatted badly, but you can get an idea): Xft.autohint: 0 Xft.lcdfilter:…
Enough other people (who can read other websites perfectly fine) are complaining about breakage that it's pretty clear this site is doing something wrong. "You had one job ..." applies here. Body text on a webpage should be readable on all platforms.
Well, it's up to you if you want horribly mangled text rendering ;-) I won't make a judgement call one way or another on the font weight on the site. I'm just telling you that your font rendering is misconfigured. This is why you can't read that text.
Even for higher font weights, the rendering in your example is atrocious. Compare the sibling post's thicker fonts to yours. Notice how yours are fuzzy on the outside? His are crisp. Now, pick a website with a font you like. Shrink the page down so the characters are really small. Look at the characters closely. Do you see how it looks smeared and how there are pixels of different colours (not just black and gray)? This is the result of the misconfiguration. Good hinting will allow you to shrink the font to a very small size and still have good anti-aliasing. Without playing with it, I don't know if it's just that you have the DPI set wrong, or if you have auto-hinting turned on (which you should never do now that the hinting algorithms are no longer patented), or possibly something else.
If you ever decide to look into it, probably the best keywords to search for is "anti-alias" and "hinting". It seems silly to me to put up with such awful rendering just because you are too stubborn to consider the possibility that you are wrong.
Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
She was Provost there from '93 to '99, which is a little more than teaching [1]. I think that while her willingness to go with the Bush administration's extremist positions (on torture and surveillance, especially) are a dark mark on her career, Dropbox is worth dropping for wholly different reasons (e.g. technical incompetence [2]) than who is on their board. 1. "As the chief academic and chief budgetary officer of…
To be fair, though, her provost tenure there was before her tenure in the Bush administration, where her most egregious acts took place. You can't blame them retroactively for not knowing what a monster she would reveal herself to be in the future.
It isn't about punishing monsters , it is about not trusting our personal data to someone who has professionally committed herself to stealing it.
Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a big difference in scope and impact between merely teaching somewhere and being on the Board of Directors and running it. It's not equivalent.
I disagree. As a professor at Stanford, she's teaching the future rulers of the world how to rule. At Dropbox, she's showing up to board meetings and taking a salary.
Her teaching at Stanford is the same sort of trophy namedropping photo op that being on the board is. You can't actually get a PhD in Hegemony from school.
Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most tech companies (doubly so in the Bay Area) develop on Macs and deploy (servers) on Linux. There'd be little pressure to develop a Linux client since most devs are spending their day on a Mac.
Everyone at my work (a big company) has Linux desktops. Granted we wouldn't use Zulip, or anything else hosted externally for that matter, but this does create a large demand for other types of software running on a Linux desktop from us, e.g. IDEs.
Google Drive doesn't even work on Linux. Linux Desktop will never be more than a VM host or Web Browser host.
Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip
#307Does anyone know if Zulip has support for directory integration? whether it's OpenLDAP or MS AD. Hell, even RADIUS would be ok by me... @@
LDAP is supported: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/b69c6228af03634061cba29f... Also, generic webserver-side REMOTE_USER authentication is supported.
thanks~! Going to try it out then =p
Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no benefit to it only being able to reach some small group of people. There is benefit in being able to include only a small group of people in a particular conversation, but that does not require no interoperability, only a concept of groups and permissions and access controls. In fact, it is completely orthogonal to the lack of interop.
> There's no benefit to it only being able to reach some small group of people. If something can just be locked to only talk inside the intranet/VPN it's better from something that can talk to arbitrary people the world over and is only configured not to via its own groups and permissions inside.
I thought we were talking about Slack, and several other hosted services, which don't fit the description you've just given, at all. But, for a self-hosted chat service, then yes...that's a benefit.
Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every week I have to use a Cisco jabber client, Hipchat, Slack, and Hangouts within the same company. I know it's got less of a "cool" factor because it wasn't invented last week, but I soooo wish everyone would just use IRC. Use irccloud if you want some nice apps and picture embedding.
IRC's lack of scrollback alone kills it for these considerations, unfortunately. If there's an incident or discussion in progress and you only join the room partway through you have no way of catching up to speed.
That's what bouncers are for.
Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enough other people (who can read other websites perfectly fine) are complaining about breakage that it's pretty clear this site is doing something wrong. "You had one job ..." applies here. Body text on a webpage should be readable on all platforms.
Well, it's up to you if you want horribly mangled text rendering ;-) I won't make a judgement call one way or another on the font weight on the site. I'm just telling you that your font rendering is misconfigured. This is why you can't read that text. Even for higher font weights, the rendering in your example is atrocious. Compare the sibling post's thicker fonts to yours. Notice how yours are fuzzy on the outside?…
Well you're responding to a different person, and my font rendering is fine (and I would fix it if it weren't). I'm just pointing out that if a lot of people are having problems reading a site for whatever reason, the site should probably be doing more testing on different configurations, and not be doing such fancy things with font weights. Another common complaint I have is sites using gray text on darker gray backgrounds, which can turn into an unreadable mess on lower contrast or lower brightness displays (like a mobile phone with the screen brightness set lower to save battery).
And FWIW, I'm on a stock MBP, and I just revisited this site and disabled the font-weight: 300 rule on the body text, and everything became a lot more readable for me (if less "stylish"). I think the site might simply need a slight design tweak for readability.