It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine. If a company or individual donates a machine to your school, it must be donated with the operating system that was installed on the PC.
Which law states this? A state law? Federal law? Decree of the UN?
What if I donate PCs that I built myself without an OS "installed"?
A "legal requirement" sounds very much like a scare tactic. If anything, you'd think they'd want the opposite - they'd want a school to get a bunch of PCs, but then REPURCHASE more Windows licenses 'just to be sure', upping MS' sales.
They pretty much get a sale for every PC in the US now anyway. I'd be interested to know what their license sales are per year vs the number of PCs sold that year. I've a hunch Windows license sales may be higher than PC sales.
You're comparing PHP and CF in the above post. I don't think CF's object model is anything to write home about. It's not perfect in PHP, but it's improving some. And as a development/web language - sorry - it's still light years ahead of CF in terms of price/performance/scalability.
You don't spend a Saturday in a soup kitchen because you get something tangible from it.
MANY things in life are done without regard for *tangible* gain, but people still are motivated out of selfish greed anyway.
WHY do people spend time helping in a soup kitchen? *BECAUSE IT MAKES THEM FEEL GOOD*. Maybe not *physically* good, but spiritually good. Or morally superior. Or whatever. But we're all always motivated by selfishness.
I also plan to set a database program in VB (one of the certificates in the MCSD suite) against a MySQL or Postresql db and show that there are free alternatives that works as well as SQL server.
I would qualify that - you'll probably have at least one person in the group who's up on MySQL and/or PostgreSQL deficiencies (yes, they have them). Don't try to convince them that MySQL can be a drop-in replacement for SQL Server 2000. Both MySQL and PostgreSQL *can* be used in many situations, and should be considered along with other options re: price/performance, but don't go overboard and talk down to MS people saying MySQL is as good as (or better) than SQL Server. It does a disservice to everyone involved.
Covering RPMs and/or apt-get technology might be useful at the end of 2 day overview.
What would help more than anything else is showing people where/how to get help - online resources (RPMfind, for example) and whatnot. There's only so much you can cram in to two days - don't overdo it. Cover the basics in detail, and give resources to visit afterwards for people who want to learn more and/or experiment.
One - people don't generally pay a 'yearly' license fee for most software. It may work out this way with upgrades, but MS seems to be roughly every 2-3 years for an upgrade cycle.
"24 hour support desk" = IRC? That's a really good line. Honestly, there's lots of good reasons to switch, but that's not a good one.
Also - do, or do not. There is no try.:) (been dying to quote Yoda for years!)
THANK YOU! Excellent point. But no good - half the the "we hate 'M$' and will support 'Java' because it's cool!" crowd probably don't even know what Qt is.
That's rich - me a 'grass roots' MS supporter. Anyone who knows me knows I'm pretty far from that. But I'm not here to match credentials with someone.
Sun is trying to go after many of MS' markets. C and Lisp have had *much* more time to mature and grow mind share among developers. Java is a relative newcomer, but the stakes are higher for Sun because they're basing a lot of their business on it.
Sun (and/or Sun supporters) bitched because MS dropped the JVM from XP. Newsflash - Sun is a billion dollar company that could *well* afford to get current JVMs to a huge portion of the population (at least in this country right now) if they so chose. Instead, they require a 8-10 meg download which most people on dialup won't do. People on dialup (hint - the majority of the net users out there) don't have current JVMs - any experience they may have with Java apps or applets will suck. Java's image goes down the pan to the ordinary user.
I said before, I don't think Java necessarily needs to be open source - any company trying to do open source really needs to be committed to the whole process, not just buzzwords. VB doesn't need to be open sourced because there's one company that provides fairly regular updates, tools, etc., (Microsoft) and they've done a very good job of coaxing/buying/convincing developers to developer on their platform. Additionally (and more importantly, imo) desktop apps written in VB generally don't suck as much as Java ones. Yeah, I've heard all about the threading model/event handlers and Java 1.4, etc. Plain fact is, Sun doesn't make it easy to make nice desktop apps with Java. Not as easy as MS makes it with VB.
Whoops! Oh yeah, Java people say "desktop apps suck" (cause Java isn't good at it) "web services are the way to go". Whatever. You've got a hell of an uphill battle against MS. I'm not HAPPY about this at all. Personally, I'd rather see more people get behind Perl as ime it's much more cross platform AND faster to develop in. But it doesn't have a single huge corporation (Sun) behind it, so it doesn't get the mindshare/press Java and MS do.
Also your line about "ignorance and sophistry" looks great in the same paragraph as "M$". Keep it up!:)
"Users just want apps that do what they say they are going to do and provide some sort of value to them, they don't care what language they are written in."
And they can get those already natively with Windows. There won't be *any* sort of market demand at any level for Java stuff on a mass scale unless there's some demand from consumers. MS isn't shipping a JVM with XP, and consumers don't give a damn.
Sun shouldn't market the Java 'language' to my mom - Sun should market the idea of a Java 'platform' to my mom. Consumers currently want/expect Windows. With enough cajoling (as long as the Java stuff is relatively good) consumers *could* very well start wanting/expecting a Java platform instead of Windows.
As you know, Java has not made any significant headway in this space due mainly to its awfully slow Swing implementation. While the recent release of JDK1.4 has brought significant performance gains, it's still nowhere near the speed of its native Windows applications with respect to fast, snappy responses
That's right - when you can't compete, leave the arena.
I'd guarantee my QT app (or wxwindows, or even GTK) would run circles around your Java Swing app and run on multiple platforms.
soon you will see more
OK - "soon". I was thinking 2 years ago when I heard 'soon' back then too. JAVA IS NOT NEW. Sun needs to have delivered stuff years ago. They can't get out of promise mode. The guy below was right - IBM has done more for Java than Sun *ever* has, except for write API definitions.
"Microsoft has successfully planted and nurtured the seed in people's heads that just because it isn't supporting Java in Windows XP, Java is dead"
I don't think MS had much to do with it. Sun and a seemingly large segment of the Java community and many industry pundits made a big stink about XP not including Java. I don't recall MS saying much one way or the other except saying you could download a JVM from their site. The Java community themselves planted this seed of doubt.
"As you know, Java has not made any significant headway in this space due mainly to its awfully slow Swing implementation. While the recent release of JDK1.4 has brought significant performance gains, it's still nowhere near the speed of its native Windows applications with respect to fast, snappy responses"
I'm not going to say Sun should open source Java, but for heaven's sake, make a GUI toolkit that doesn't suck. You can't cite Java's 'newness' as an excuse anymore.
However little you think of VB (especially VBScript) MS has provided a huge number of tools to make development easy and painless - and the results are often decent. I remember being able to put together *simple* VB data collection forms back in 94-95 without having too much idea what the hell I was actually doing. There STILL nothing like that for Java. - Go ahead, flame away. I'm not a hardcore Java guy, but someone else here at the office is, and we constantly see shortcomings. That's not to say there's not strengths too, but still shortcomings. Open sourcing Java *MIGHT* help overcome many of those shortcomings (especially in the GUI toolkit area).
I keep repeating this on various boards - if Sun was serious about getting Java to the masses, they'd carpet bomb the hell out of the US with CDs ala AOL with the latest JVM for multiple platforms. That they DON'T do this speaks volumes. Better yet - get AOL to bundle it on their CDs and have an installer with lots of nice Java packages - an 'intro to Java' for the common man. Explain the cross-platform benefits, etc. - something my mom could understand.
Amused, perhaps, by this undying loyalty to NS4.7. 8%, maybe, are using it? Which versions? Cause 4.72 handles things different from 4.77 and 4.79.
If you're ignoring parts of CSS which 'confuse' NS4.x, then you're ignoring quite a bit of CSS. Are you not putting it in at all? If so, your site will not be its best on other browsers. *Other* people are 'suffering' (I realize it's not *suffering* like slavery or death or anything!) because you're catering to an admittedly small percentage of users who refuse to upgrade to the current millenium.
Either the site will be blander than it might otherwise be by more use of CSS (arguable enhancing visitors experiences) or you're working around NS4 bugs by having two versions, or using non-CSS stuff.
I don't particularly *care* what the hell you do on your site(!):) but I just find it amusing that you're doing a "CSS-compliant site" but still having to jump through hoops for NS.
They've had *years* to correct it and have chosen not to.
http://www.modssl.org/docs/2.6/ssl_faq.html#ToC48 is the only one that I can find right now, but there's another MS KB article as well on a similar but different topic. The KB article states that using SSL with non-MS browsers and IIS can cause problems.
You're assuming people will always look elsewhere. It's a PAIN to get people to switch (they have to learn new buttons, etc) and if after switching from IE-based AOL to a NS-based AOL things either don't work properly or don't work at all, what would you do? "Switch back" is my guess.
If something was working for you, then you switch and things are worse, what is your natural reaction? As much as I'd like to see this happen, I suspect AOL will lose some people and MSN will gain some as a result.
NOTE above I didn't say that things just won't work at all. My own theory is that IIS will sporadically drop stuff and/or give lower priority to requests from non-IE browsers. It won't be 'you can't visit here!' plastered on the site. Just subtle performance differences.
"You're trying to make fun of the version numbering for Mozilla, but I've got IE 6 installed right now, which lists it's version number as: 6.0.2600.0000.xpclnt_qfe.010827-1803."
But it's generally known as IE6.
Now I've heard some paranoid things before, but Microsoft is not quite so stupid as to cripple the performance of their software for a competing browser, just to make "15% of the web" slower to surf for Mozilla users.
DR DOS.
Now that that's out of the way, I'm being conservative when I say 15%. I've watched my wife surf, and probably 50-60% of the sites she visits are IIS-based.
They will INSTANTLY lose credibility with MANY IIS MAINTAINERS.
Whoops! Here I thought it was CEOs and CIOs and whatnot that make purchasing decisions, not 'IIS maintainers'. People will take what's pushed to them by IIS, by and large, and MS is smart enough to go after *large* public customer accounts with gusto. It's not Amazon, but bn.com is IIS based. They are a very big company with a lot of public exposure (stores around the country, etc). That's just one example.
Doesn't matter how many people are using mozilla - if they sites they're going to to shop/browse don't work, they won't use that browser. And it's a hell of a lot easier to change a few servers at a few companies than it is to try to get people to switch en-masse to a new browser.
So you're redoing things to be CSS1.0 compliant AND Netscape 4.x compliant - just NOT USING parts of CSS that break NS4.x? Why bother to try to code to 'standards' then? Will you leave out CSS stuff that looks bad/wrong under various versions of IE as well?
We're all missing the server equation here - MS is pretty damn big in the server side of things.
Yeah yeah yeah - quote netcraft at me with Apache = 60% and so on. I believe it too, but it doesn't matter. *MANY* commerce site - the things your parents and friends visit - run on IIS (for better or for worse). You can argue percentages all you want, but there's enough of them out there. Heck Macs are about 5% of the computer market, but some people still care about them.
If you even concede that IIS has a 15% share of servers conducting commerce, that's a big number.
My point? If mozilla ever starts to be a credible browser threat, IIS7 (or 8 or whatever) will suddenly either not work with mozilla at all, OR give lower priority treatment to mozilla requests. Or, better yet, just occasionally drop requests, making it even harder to diagnose.
"Works fine when I use IE7.5, but danged if Mozilla 1.01.02RC3 (cause that's about where they'll be) crashes sometimes!"
There's already issues with SSL between IE and Apache servers and non IE browsers and IIS. MS controls too much on both sides - IN BUSINESS/COMMERCE, WHERE IT COUNTS - to ever let anything else ever get too big again.
Responses?:)
Re:Jabber shortcomings - not in the book
on
Programming Jabber
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Thank you for your response.
The basic applet is just far *too* basic to be of much use to our situation (and I guess many others). For starters, it assumes you want to allow people to create an account on your server - there seems to be no way to shut that off in the client.
The person I spoke with at Jabber.com told me they'd completely rewritten the jabber server to be high-volume capable, but that they wouldn't be releasing that code. Possibly ever, or possibly just much later. It's an investment for them, and they have every reason *to* keep is secret. If it's open, and people could implement it themselves, why would they pay Jabber.com?
I wasn't wanting to edit the user XML files by hand, but create them programmatically for users.
I've see the jdev lists and it looks like most questions get answered, but I'd gone looking and never found an answers on the xml file structure for user files, but many questions about it.
Again, thanks for answering.:)
Re:Jabber shortcomings - not in the book
on
Programming Jabber
·
· Score: 2
Nope - doesn't work 100% of the time for all the features. We've got something working now, but there's strange things that the server adds in some instances which aren't documented - documented clearly, in any case.
For the record, most of the clients there suck. That's not to say they're all bad, or cast aspersions on the authors. Most of them say 'beta' or 'alpha' or 'version 0.2' - things like that. *MOST* seem to be someone's idea of a programming exercise, and having to wade thru 3-4 clients before finding a decent one isn't a good use of most people's time.
Gabber, GAIM and Everybuddy are fairly standard, but depending on what distro I'm using, they often crash. GAIM is most stable, usually. Having a perl command line client won't count as a 'prebuilt client' for most people. Likewise an Emacs client, while neato, won't cut it for most people used to AIM/Yahoo!. Konverse sounds nice, but I can't get it to run.
Under Windows, Winjab and myJabber seem the most solid/stable, but even they have problems. myJabber has some issue with futzing up if the person you're writing to has an 'away' responder on, and so on. There's so many little niggling things wrong with so many of the clients that it's frustrating to recommend this to people. AIM makes it look so damn simple.:)
Jabber shortcomings - not in the book
on
Programming Jabber
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The book, from what I read of it (not 100% - maybe 60%) is handy, but didn't tell me much beyond the jabber documentation already out there.
What seems to be a huge issue for Jabber is user profile integration with databases. There seems to be an unsupported mysql hack, but the key is 'unsupported'. If you look in the Jabber mail list archives, every month there's people asking how to do it, but NEVER any answers.
Another great one that doesn't get answered - which the book doesn't address either - is the format of the user XML files. Each user by default has an XML file, and many people would like to create them programatically. There is no definitive resource which explains what's in a file and what isn't, and how to put one together. I've hacked something, and it works, but only after several attemps, and it doesn't *feel* good. I'm hesitant to try to add anything else lest I break what's working.
Jabber.com has a huge vested interest in keeping some of this stuff not in the public knowledgebase, because they charge (comparitively) a LOT of money for their stuff.
Last time I spoke with them the minimum to get started was $16,000. Their package offers a completely rewritten jabber server (better thread handling), Oracle and LDAP connectors, and a good Java applet client.
NO ONE in the open source community has even come close to having a Java applet client that is workable in a practical sense.
So yes, the protocol is open, and free, but there doesn't seem to be much consensus on tools, except from Jabber.com and they cost.
What I think Jabber as an open source project needs to focus on:
* XML user file definition and/or database support for user profiles * Good applet client
I swear I can't hit a link in the mozilla mail program without a 50% chance of total mozilla crash. I send my talkbacks - does that count as 'bug reporting'? Under 'what were you doing?' I put 'clicking a link'.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine. If a company or individual donates a machine to your school, it must be donated with the operating system that was installed on the PC.
Which law states this? A state law? Federal law? Decree of the UN?
What if I donate PCs that I built myself without an OS "installed"?
A "legal requirement" sounds very much like a scare tactic. If anything, you'd think they'd want the opposite - they'd want a school to get a bunch of PCs, but then REPURCHASE more Windows licenses 'just to be sure', upping MS' sales.
They pretty much get a sale for every PC in the US now anyway. I'd be interested to know what their license sales are per year vs the number of PCs sold that year. I've a hunch Windows license sales may be higher than PC sales.
So so late, but what the hell... :)
You're comparing PHP and CF in the above post. I don't think CF's object model is anything to write home about. It's not perfect in PHP, but it's improving some. And as a development/web language - sorry - it's still light years ahead of CF in terms of price/performance/scalability.
The company's name was LOGICON. "CON" is part of their strategy. :)
Mozilla/NS is *much* worse at this than IE.
People back then didn't live as long either tho. 13 years old was 'mid life' for many of them.
You don't spend a Saturday in a soup kitchen because you get something tangible from it.
MANY things in life are done without regard for *tangible* gain, but people still are motivated out of selfish greed anyway.
WHY do people spend time helping in a soup kitchen? *BECAUSE IT MAKES THEM FEEL GOOD*. Maybe not *physically* good, but spiritually good. Or morally superior. Or whatever. But we're all always motivated by selfishness.
I also plan to set a database program in VB (one of the certificates in the MCSD suite) against a MySQL or Postresql db and show that there are free alternatives that works as well as SQL server.
I would qualify that - you'll probably have at least one person in the group who's up on MySQL and/or PostgreSQL deficiencies (yes, they have them). Don't try to convince them that MySQL can be a drop-in replacement for SQL Server 2000. Both MySQL and PostgreSQL *can* be used in many situations, and should be considered along with other options re: price/performance, but don't go overboard and talk down to MS people saying MySQL is as good as (or better) than SQL Server. It does a disservice to everyone involved.
Covering RPMs and/or apt-get technology might be useful at the end of 2 day overview.
What would help more than anything else is showing people where/how to get help - online resources (RPMfind, for example) and whatnot. There's only so much you can cram in to two days - don't overdo it. Cover the basics in detail, and give resources to visit afterwards for people who want to learn more and/or experiment.
One - people don't generally pay a 'yearly' license fee for most software. It may work out this way with upgrades, but MS seems to be roughly every 2-3 years for an upgrade cycle.
:) (been dying to quote Yoda for years!)
"24 hour support desk" = IRC? That's a really good line. Honestly, there's lots of good reasons to switch, but that's not a good one.
Also - do, or do not. There is no try.
THANK YOU! Excellent point. But no good - half the the "we hate 'M$' and will support 'Java' because it's cool!" crowd probably don't even know what Qt is.
That's rich - me a 'grass roots' MS supporter. Anyone who knows me knows I'm pretty far from that. But I'm not here to match credentials with someone.
:)
Sun is trying to go after many of MS' markets. C and Lisp have had *much* more time to mature and grow mind share among developers. Java is a relative newcomer, but the stakes are higher for Sun because they're basing a lot of their business on it.
Sun (and/or Sun supporters) bitched because MS dropped the JVM from XP. Newsflash - Sun is a billion dollar company that could *well* afford to get current JVMs to a huge portion of the population (at least in this country right now) if they so chose. Instead, they require a 8-10 meg download which most people on dialup won't do. People on dialup (hint - the majority of the net users out there) don't have current JVMs - any experience they may have with Java apps or applets will suck. Java's image goes down the pan to the ordinary user.
I said before, I don't think Java necessarily needs to be open source - any company trying to do open source really needs to be committed to the whole process, not just buzzwords. VB doesn't need to be open sourced because there's one company that provides fairly regular updates, tools, etc., (Microsoft) and they've done a very good job of coaxing/buying/convincing developers to developer on their platform. Additionally (and more importantly, imo) desktop apps written in VB generally don't suck as much as Java ones. Yeah, I've heard all about the threading model/event handlers and Java 1.4, etc. Plain fact is, Sun doesn't make it easy to make nice desktop apps with Java. Not as easy as MS makes it with VB.
Whoops! Oh yeah, Java people say "desktop apps suck" (cause Java isn't good at it) "web services are the way to go". Whatever. You've got a hell of an uphill battle against MS. I'm not HAPPY about this at all. Personally, I'd rather see more people get behind Perl as ime it's much more cross platform AND faster to develop in. But it doesn't have a single huge corporation (Sun) behind it, so it doesn't get the mindshare/press Java and MS do.
Also your line about "ignorance and sophistry" looks great in the same paragraph as "M$". Keep it up!
"Users just want apps that do what they say they are going to do and provide some sort of value to them, they don't care what language they are written in."
And they can get those already natively with Windows. There won't be *any* sort of market demand at any level for Java stuff on a mass scale unless there's some demand from consumers. MS isn't shipping a JVM with XP, and consumers don't give a damn.
Sun shouldn't market the Java 'language' to my mom - Sun should market the idea of a Java 'platform' to my mom. Consumers currently want/expect Windows. With enough cajoling (as long as the Java stuff is relatively good) consumers *could* very well start wanting/expecting a Java platform instead of Windows.
As you know, Java has not made any significant headway in this space due mainly to its awfully slow Swing implementation. While the recent release of JDK1.4 has brought significant performance gains, it's still nowhere near the speed of its native Windows applications with respect to fast, snappy responses
That's right - when you can't compete, leave the arena.
I'd guarantee my QT app (or wxwindows, or even GTK) would run circles around your Java Swing app and run on multiple platforms.
soon you will see more
OK - "soon". I was thinking 2 years ago when I heard 'soon' back then too. JAVA IS NOT NEW. Sun needs to have delivered stuff years ago. They can't get out of promise mode. The guy below was right - IBM has done more for Java than Sun *ever* has, except for write API definitions.
"Microsoft has successfully planted and nurtured the seed in people's heads that just because it isn't supporting Java in Windows XP, Java is dead"
I don't think MS had much to do with it. Sun and a seemingly large segment of the Java community and many industry pundits made a big stink about XP not including Java. I don't recall MS saying much one way or the other except saying you could download a JVM from their site. The Java community themselves planted this seed of doubt.
"As you know, Java has not made any significant headway in this space due mainly to its awfully slow Swing implementation. While the recent release of JDK1.4 has brought significant performance gains, it's still nowhere near the speed of its native Windows applications with respect to fast, snappy responses"
I'm not going to say Sun should open source Java, but for heaven's sake, make a GUI toolkit that doesn't suck. You can't cite Java's 'newness' as an excuse anymore.
However little you think of VB (especially VBScript) MS has provided a huge number of tools to make development easy and painless - and the results are often decent. I remember being able to put together *simple* VB data collection forms back in 94-95 without having too much idea what the hell I was actually doing. There STILL nothing like that for Java. - Go ahead, flame away. I'm not a hardcore Java guy, but someone else here at the office is, and we constantly see shortcomings. That's not to say there's not strengths too, but still shortcomings. Open sourcing Java *MIGHT* help overcome many of those shortcomings (especially in the GUI toolkit area).
I keep repeating this on various boards - if Sun was serious about getting Java to the masses, they'd carpet bomb the hell out of the US with CDs ala AOL with the latest JVM for multiple platforms. That they DON'T do this speaks volumes. Better yet - get AOL to bundle it on their CDs and have an installer with lots of nice Java packages - an 'intro to Java' for the common man. Explain the cross-platform benefits, etc. - something my mom could understand.
I don't think I used the word 'offended'.
:) but I just find it amusing that you're doing a "CSS-compliant site" but still having to jump through hoops for NS.
Amused, perhaps, by this undying loyalty to NS4.7. 8%, maybe, are using it? Which versions? Cause 4.72 handles things different from 4.77 and 4.79.
If you're ignoring parts of CSS which 'confuse' NS4.x, then you're ignoring quite a bit of CSS. Are you not putting it in at all? If so, your site will not be its best on other browsers. *Other* people are 'suffering' (I realize it's not *suffering* like slavery or death or anything!) because you're catering to an admittedly small percentage of users who refuse to upgrade to the current millenium.
Either the site will be blander than it might otherwise be by more use of CSS (arguable enhancing visitors experiences) or you're working around NS4 bugs by having two versions, or using non-CSS stuff.
I don't particularly *care* what the hell you do on your site(!)
They've had *years* to correct it and have chosen not to.
http://www.modssl.org/docs/2.6/ssl_faq.html#ToC48 is the only one that I can find right now, but there's another MS KB article as well on a similar but different topic. The KB article states that using SSL with non-MS browsers and IIS can cause problems.
You're assuming people will always look elsewhere. It's a PAIN to get people to switch (they have to learn new buttons, etc) and if after switching from IE-based AOL to a NS-based AOL things either don't work properly or don't work at all, what would you do? "Switch back" is my guess.
If something was working for you, then you switch and things are worse, what is your natural reaction? As much as I'd like to see this happen, I suspect AOL will lose some people and MSN will gain some as a result.
NOTE above I didn't say that things just won't work at all. My own theory is that IIS will sporadically drop stuff and/or give lower priority to requests from non-IE browsers. It won't be 'you can't visit here!' plastered on the site. Just subtle performance differences.
"You're trying to make fun of the version numbering for Mozilla, but I've got IE 6 installed right now, which lists it's version number as: 6.0.2600.0000.xpclnt_qfe.010827-1803."
But it's generally known as IE6.
Now I've heard some paranoid things before, but Microsoft is not quite so stupid as to cripple the performance of their software for a competing browser, just to make "15% of the web" slower to surf for Mozilla users.
DR DOS.
Now that that's out of the way, I'm being conservative when I say 15%. I've watched my wife surf, and probably 50-60% of the sites she visits are IIS-based.
They will INSTANTLY lose credibility with MANY IIS MAINTAINERS.
Whoops! Here I thought it was CEOs and CIOs and whatnot that make purchasing decisions, not 'IIS maintainers'. People will take what's pushed to them by IIS, by and large, and MS is smart enough to go after *large* public customer accounts with gusto. It's not Amazon, but bn.com is IIS based. They are a very big company with a lot of public exposure (stores around the country, etc). That's just one example.
Doesn't matter how many people are using mozilla - if they sites they're going to to shop/browse don't work, they won't use that browser. And it's a hell of a lot easier to change a few servers at a few companies than it is to try to get people to switch en-masse to a new browser.
So you're redoing things to be CSS1.0 compliant AND Netscape 4.x compliant - just NOT USING parts of CSS that break NS4.x? Why bother to try to code to 'standards' then? Will you leave out CSS stuff that looks bad/wrong under various versions of IE as well?
We're all missing the server equation here - MS is pretty damn big in the server side of things.
:)
Yeah yeah yeah - quote netcraft at me with Apache = 60% and so on. I believe it too, but it doesn't matter. *MANY* commerce site - the things your parents and friends visit - run on IIS (for better or for worse). You can argue percentages all you want, but there's enough of them out there. Heck Macs are about 5% of the computer market, but some people still care about them.
If you even concede that IIS has a 15% share of servers conducting commerce, that's a big number.
My point? If mozilla ever starts to be a credible browser threat, IIS7 (or 8 or whatever) will suddenly either not work with mozilla at all, OR give lower priority treatment to mozilla requests. Or, better yet, just occasionally drop requests, making it even harder to diagnose.
"Works fine when I use IE7.5, but danged if Mozilla 1.01.02RC3 (cause that's about where they'll be) crashes sometimes!"
There's already issues with SSL between IE and Apache servers and non IE browsers and IIS. MS controls too much on both sides - IN BUSINESS/COMMERCE, WHERE IT COUNTS - to ever let anything else ever get too big again.
Responses?
Thank you for your response.
:)
The basic applet is just far *too* basic to be of much use to our situation (and I guess many others). For starters, it assumes you want to allow people to create an account on your server - there seems to be no way to shut that off in the client.
The person I spoke with at Jabber.com told me they'd completely rewritten the jabber server to be high-volume capable, but that they wouldn't be releasing that code. Possibly ever, or possibly just much later. It's an investment for them, and they have every reason *to* keep is secret. If it's open, and people could implement it themselves, why would they pay Jabber.com?
I wasn't wanting to edit the user XML files by hand, but create them programmatically for users.
I've see the jdev lists and it looks like most questions get answered, but I'd gone looking and never found an answers on the xml file structure for user files, but many questions about it.
Again, thanks for answering.
Nope - doesn't work 100% of the time for all the features. We've got something working now, but there's strange things that the server adds in some instances which aren't documented - documented clearly, in any case.
For the record, most of the clients there suck. That's not to say they're all bad, or cast aspersions on the authors. Most of them say 'beta' or 'alpha' or 'version 0.2' - things like that. *MOST* seem to be someone's idea of a programming exercise, and having to wade thru 3-4 clients before finding a decent one isn't a good use of most people's time.
:)
Gabber, GAIM and Everybuddy are fairly standard, but depending on what distro I'm using, they often crash. GAIM is most stable, usually. Having a perl command line client won't count as a 'prebuilt client' for most people. Likewise an Emacs client, while neato, won't cut it for most people used to AIM/Yahoo!. Konverse sounds nice, but I can't get it to run.
Under Windows, Winjab and myJabber seem the most solid/stable, but even they have problems. myJabber has some issue with futzing up if the person you're writing to has an 'away' responder on, and so on. There's so many little niggling things wrong with so many of the clients that it's frustrating to recommend this to people. AIM makes it look so damn simple.
The book, from what I read of it (not 100% - maybe 60%) is handy, but didn't tell me much beyond the jabber documentation already out there.
What seems to be a huge issue for Jabber is user profile integration with databases. There seems to be an unsupported mysql hack, but the key is 'unsupported'. If you look in the Jabber mail list archives, every month there's people asking how to do it, but NEVER any answers.
Another great one that doesn't get answered - which the book doesn't address either - is the format of the user XML files. Each user by default has an XML file, and many people would like to create them programatically. There is no definitive resource which explains what's in a file and what isn't, and how to put one together. I've hacked something, and it works, but only after several attemps, and it doesn't *feel* good. I'm hesitant to try to add anything else lest I break what's working.
Jabber.com has a huge vested interest in keeping some of this stuff not in the public knowledgebase, because they charge (comparitively) a LOT of money for their stuff.
Last time I spoke with them the minimum to get started was $16,000. Their package offers a completely rewritten jabber server (better thread handling), Oracle and LDAP connectors, and a good Java applet client.
NO ONE in the open source community has even come close to having a Java applet client that is workable in a practical sense.
So yes, the protocol is open, and free, but there doesn't seem to be much consensus on tools, except from Jabber.com and they cost.
What I think Jabber as an open source project needs to focus on:
* XML user file definition and/or database support for user profiles
* Good applet client
:)
I swear I can't hit a link in the mozilla mail program without a 50% chance of total mozilla crash. I send my talkbacks - does that count as 'bug reporting'? Under 'what were you doing?' I put 'clicking a link'.
How do you know what database they are using?