There's a clear economic message here - can you see it yet? When the cost of breaking DRM is higher than the profit to be made, DRM wins. It doesn't have to be perfect. You missed an important piece of the equation, the cost of making DRM hard to break. So far the weak point in DRM solutions has been mostly in an insecure implementation. So the cost of breaking DRM must be greater than the profit to be made _and_ the cost of making it. It seems that for some reason the cost of making secure DRM increases exponentially to the cost of breaking it.
"Windows 7" will be an incremental change to Vista with some bug fixes and a desire to gain a better image in the market than the ironically sullied Vista has. How can MS develop features in less than 1 year that they couldn't manage to make in 4? If you are right that Windows 7 will be an incremental change over Vista, then technically they would have had 5 years to develop those features.
I'd say Windows releases are more like Batman movies, each ones sucks more than the one before until it gets "re-imagined" into a new series (Win2k), which starts the process over (XP, Vista).
Or maybe like Bond movies, where they're all pretty much the same, only the plots get less believable and you're left longing for the "classic" Bond who didn't need insane gizmos to get the job done. Yes, I like that analogy better.
The answer is: SRV record Yes, I was lazy and didn't look into it before posting, I should have known something like that existed, so that you didn't have to manually configure every server you wanted to communicate with.
I've currently got pidgin running and its talking to people over AIM...its talking to people on MSN...and its talking back into my corporate jabber network over the VPN... Yes, but you have to have an account for each and every one of those. You also can't hold a group session between your AIM friends, your MSN friends, and your co-workers, can you?
XMPP would allow you to have a jabber account on your corporate network, and talk to somebody on AIM, ICQ, or another company's japper network, without having to have accounts on those servers. Think of it like email, you have yourname@yourisp.com, and I have myname@myisp.com, but you can send me an email without signing up with myisp.com. Well now we get the same flexibility with IM. The only thing I see missing is an MX-like DNS record for IM servers.
Only problem is, it is a pain to configure. Also, windows versions don't look very stable. Windows version has been very stable for me, I've not had any problems with either Doxygen or Graphviz. It also includes a configuration wizard that is both easy to understand and powerful. There is also an Eclipse plugin that lets you configure and run Doxygen.
I agree with all these guys, Doxygen is a great way to get an overview of the structure of the code, and the call/caller graphs will help you walk through the way it all works. If the code is commented, most of that will be pulled into the generated files, but even without documentation, being able to follow call/caller links from a function of interest, and link directly to the line of code where it happens, it a wonderful feature. If you can host a PHP program locally or remotely, you can get automatic search functionality from it also.
What gives you an impression that a lot of geeks use Ubuntu? I didn't say every geek _uses_ Ubuntu, I said every geek knows what is going on in Ubuntu's development. Now before you jump on me again, let me clarify that. Not all geeks care about Ubuntu, but just about all geeks read Slashdot (if any geek here does not, please correct me). Now, it seems that Slashdot has to post a story about anything at all that happens with respect to Ubuntu, and I fully expect a St. Valentine's day post announcing the feature freeze.
Re Feb 14: Most geeks have no clue what you are talking about... Feb 14 is the date of Ubuntu 8.10 feature freeze, I would think every geek knows that.
I use small icons, and move the Bookmark Toolbar up to the menu bar, then hide the bookmarks toolbar. If you need more space you can hide the status bar. If you _still_ need more space, press F11 to go into fullscreen mode.
it doesn't integrate with Windows as well as Microsoft applications (this was always a complaint with Lotus Notes on a company I worked for). Of all of the many many (many) things wrong with Lotus Notes, they complain about that?
I think you under estimate flock mentality. If sun changes the spec, and the independent implementations can't because of patents/copyright/etc. than the independents will tend to get less support. We know this is true especially with such a large player. True, but the fact that Sun is a minority player in J2EE implementations means that if the others don't support the new version of the spec, it will effectively be dead. Besides, I think the spec is written by the JCP, so the other vendors most likely have a say in any changes made.
That's like saying AMD being bought by Intel is the same as AMD being bought by GE. Corporate motivation is an important aspect of any purchase like this. Again true, and I did mention that I thought Sun's motivations were more in line with the open source community that other companies may be. The difference with your analogy is that Sun's acquisition of MySQL doesn't reduce the number of database providers in the market. There is also the fact that Sun isn't the only company that can offer support for Solaris+Glassfish+MySQL, so there won't really be any decrease in competition for support either. If anything, I would hope that the acquisition would provide cheaper bundled support for the entire stack, than individual support for each component.
Sun does control the J2EE spec from which Tomcat is specified True, but then again how many J2EE implementations are there today? Sun isn't even the market leader in this space, obviously they're not using their ownership of the J2EE spec to stop competition. Sun also controls the Java specification, but again there are several independent implementations, though here Sun is the dominant player. Sun can't revoke the license it's already given out for these specs, so I don't think there is any worry about their ownership of them.
Sun will soon control the MySQL database. Yes, but MySQL AB was previously in control of the MySQL database. It's only changing ownership from one corporate entity to another. If it were another company, then maybe I would worry about the future of open-source MySQL, but not with Sun.
Sun owns Java. Sun will soon own MySQL. If you have a Tomcat/J2EE environment running open source, you will soon be having to deal with a single vendor with control over your environment, because most systems only give lip service to PostgreSQL but fully support MySQL. Expect the support bills to go up. Sun does not own Tomcat, Apache does. Perhaps you're thinking Glassfish? It doesn't matter really, a well written J2EE app can be moved from Glassfish/MySQL to JBoss/Postgres to Weblogic/Oracle with very little effort. The only thing you would need to be concerned about is SQL syntax compatibility.
I think the claim was that linking to the GPL'd header files to produce the MySQL drivers would make the drivers GPL, and therefore any program that linked the drivers would also be GPL.
Why does Firefox need a WSUS-like management option, when Windows already has WSUS? Just add Firefox to your list of applications you want WSUS to keep updated for you.
Admins can have client PCs pull IE updates through automatic updates on the client, and WSUS as the distribution source. This works on the client side with system services accounts - no client privs required. So just add Firefox to WSUS and have those privileged update processes on the client pull the Firefox updates too.
They have to be able to handle installation problems like errors, partial installations, complete failures, etc. from a central location. They must also be able to mitigate and recover from these issues. They also need to be able to configure/reconfigure any and all settings in the application from a central location, preferably from a pre-existing management system like group policy. Finally, they need to be able to test updates for reliability and compatibility before distributing those updates to the clients. Relying on users to perform updates or even automated self updates is not an option in a corporate environment. Isn't that what Windows Update is for? Just use that.
50% of what I do on my internal network involves opening files. I haven't found away to open files stored on the internal network through FF. For browsing and opening files, most operating system ship with a file browser. Windows Explorer in Windows, Finder in OSX, Nautilus on Gnome, Konqueror on KDE, etc. Firefox is not a file browser, so it does not support file browsing. Firefox is a web-browser, it is meant for browsing web pages.
As far as I know, there is no easy way to push FF out to a desktop regardless if it's Windows, Mac or Linux. If it's Linux, there are plenty of ways. You can host your own repository and put it there, you can host it on a network share and remotely run the install on each machine, you can simply add it to the user's NFS-mounted user home and it'll be there on the next log in, etc. I'm sure OSX has much the same capabilities.
The problem seems to be the Windows mentality that every application must provide it's own install/update/uninstall architecture, then in reality this should be the responsibility of the OS, why can't you add third-party repositories to Windows Update?.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say Windows releases are more like Batman movies, each ones sucks more than the one before until it gets "re-imagined" into a new series (Win2k), which starts the process over (XP, Vista).
Or maybe like Bond movies, where they're all pretty much the same, only the plots get less believable and you're left longing for the "classic" Bond who didn't need insane gizmos to get the job done. Yes, I like that analogy better.
XMPP would allow you to have a jabber account on your corporate network, and talk to somebody on AIM, ICQ, or another company's japper network, without having to have accounts on those servers. Think of it like email, you have yourname@yourisp.com, and I have myname@myisp.com, but you can send me an email without signing up with myisp.com. Well now we get the same flexibility with IM. The only thing I see missing is an MX-like DNS record for IM servers.
I agree with all these guys, Doxygen is a great way to get an overview of the structure of the code, and the call/caller graphs will help you walk through the way it all works. If the code is commented, most of that will be pulled into the generated files, but even without documentation, being able to follow call/caller links from a function of interest, and link directly to the line of code where it happens, it a wonderful feature. If you can host a PHP program locally or remotely, you can get automatic search functionality from it also.
Oh wait, are you talking about something else?
I use small icons, and move the Bookmark Toolbar up to the menu bar, then hide the bookmarks toolbar. If you need more space you can hide the status bar. If you _still_ need more space, press F11 to go into fullscreen mode.
I think the claim was that linking to the GPL'd header files to produce the MySQL drivers would make the drivers GPL, and therefore any program that linked the drivers would also be GPL.
Only accept updates signed by a key you trust.
Why does Firefox need a WSUS-like management option, when Windows already has WSUS? Just add Firefox to your list of applications you want WSUS to keep updated for you.
The problem seems to be the Windows mentality that every application must provide it's own install/update/uninstall architecture, then in reality this should be the responsibility of the OS, why can't you add third-party repositories to Windows Update?.