That Microsoft had to resort to Hilf shows how lacking in insight they are.
What? Given that Hilf has been running the open source stuff there for awhile, and has been the central point for open source @ MS, he's probably the best person there is to know - really know - where Windows is and isn't strong. That knowledge will both help the short term Windows messaging - advertising, etc. - but given his new position, that will have to have a greater impact on what makes it back to Windows developers as well. Ergo the known weaknesses will get addressed.
It's not just "spin" if it's the truth. Windows is the best platform for certain types of situations, whether that task is running specific commercial or open source software. That 'best' is a subjective measurement which has both emotion and short and long term ROI wrapped up in it, and is different for everyone out there.
This is not a 'lack of insight' on MS' part - this is probably one of the most insightful things they've done in a long time.
It's *most* people's experience. It's just that there's so many linux apologists and ubuntu fanboys here that make it seem like it's just you.:) The other respondant here, where everything just worked, is the exception that proves the rule. It's no good even taking a livecd necessarily - will that prove that it works with your wireless router and VPN connection? Most stores don't have a wireless thing you can connect to, for example.
The biggest issue Linux faces these days for casual and corporate adoption is, in my view, laptop support. Everything *has* to work, first time, cause there's no swapping out parts in laptops. Think you can tell just because the outside of the box says "Broadcom chipset", or even "Broadcom 4318"? Nope, cause you'll have "chipset b" and the drivers will only work with "chipset a", but you can't know that till you open the box. I had a laptop a few years ago where it was the same as the floor model I tested my livecd on, and the box said it was the same components, but the video chipsets were just different enough to not allow 3d acceleration for me. Argh...
Do Apple users think they're different than everyone else? I guess that question is silly - of course they do ('think different' and all that). Well, looking at it now, perhaps this is more organized by the lawyer (does he use Apple products?) than the Apple users directly. I understand their frustration, but suing to have the phone unlocked from AT&T? OK, perhaps this will be a 'fight the good fight' and perhaps they'll actually win. Perhaps this is the only group that feels this passionately about the subject. But why not sue Blackberry for only allowing the Curve 8830 on the TMobile network? I want an 8830, but on AT&T. Should I buy it, sign up for TMobile, then sue RIM? Or TMobile? Or both? I guess I don't quite understand the notion of throwing these other extraneous issues in to the suit, unless they're hoping for *something* to stick.
No, you can't actually have that. See, the majority of "open source" development is all about scratching an itch. Most developers don't have that same itch that you're having. They don't have "users" - they run their own machines, maybe give accounts to a few friends/colleagues, but they don't have the problem that you have. Therefore, the secure FTP with jailing is probably not on the horizon.
Honestly, I've had the same problem, and what you're asking for is something that would benefit many people. It's just that this probably won't come about in the 'open source' development world because it's a pretty non-sexy problem, and is moderately low-level to deal with (sockets, ssl, etc.)
I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.
Well, my guess is that you *are* tolerating it, as are millions of others, simply because you're using it (either older versions of IE, or current versions of Firefox). Can't comment on IE7 cause I don't use it much, but IE6 rarely crashed for me. IE3-5.5, almost daily crashes.
5 years ago people people would constantly belittle IE users because it had frequent crashes, and pointed to the 'superior' Mozilla suite. Today, FF has morphed in to something which can't be used, with plugins, for more than a couple days max without needing to be reset. I add the caveat in there about 'with plugins' because I'm not sure I know many people who run a bare-metal Firefox. Most people use one or more extensions. This has been a huge marketing push for FF - "It's lean! Only use what you need! Get rid of 'bloat' - package everything in extensions!"
Putting things in extensions makes the base 'leaner' but has lead to a situation where there's no centralized testing for, or even acknowledgement of, memory leak bugs (and other bugs, but this is the obvious one). I still read comments from people who claim they never have leaks with FF (we'll see some on this thread no doubt). It's not that I don't believe them, but their usage patterns are likely different from mine. I have about 6 plugins that I love to use, and I like to keep my browser going. The idea that MSIE is more "stable" than FF for daily usage should remind people that resting on your laurels is not an option. What cut the mustard 5 years ago isn't gonna cut it any more.
We've made big improvements in overall polish and stability since the releases that many people remember badly (2005, 2006). 2007 Spring looks much better, has far fewer package quality problems and runs more stably than those releases on most systems.
A problem with this is, and you probably are already aware, is that the 2005 release was touted as 'polished' and 'stable' and 'greatly improved' at the time as well. We've heard the spin before, and it'll probably take another couple releases before you win people back from Ubuntu and Fedora and whatever else people migrated to. Mandrake/Mandriva lost me in '05 (and I tried the '06 and '07 as well) for a few reasons.
1. Cutting edge packages were more readily available on other distros (php5, etc.). 2. To rectify #1, I tried to join the "club" on multiple occasions, and they could never process my US-based credit card.:( 3. Flaky admin tools. Every release we get more perl and python based GTK crap that is just broken out of the box. The *feel* of those tools was/is just horrid. Very nice to look at, but painful once you use them in the real world.
I've got a family member who's still with mandriva, and based on his view of '08, I might give it another shot, but there's little incentive to switch from kubuntu these days. The admin interfaces don't suck, I don't have to join a club, and the bulk of the current/new software I want is packaged for that distro.
One canard trotted out by MS defenders *used* to be "Windows has more vulnerabilities discovered because it's so popular, everyone attacks it!". Watch for that line to be modified in the coming months as more MS proponents switch to "it's more secure by design". Keeping the "only more vulnerabilities discovered because it's so widely installed" would imply that Vista is not widely installed/used, which is not good PR.
So, when Linux had fewer vulnerabilities, it was because it was obscure. When Vista has fewer vulnerabilities, it's because it's fundamentally more secure. I'm not trying to be sarcastic here - it may very well be *true*. It's just something to keep in mind as you watch the never-ending stream of these 'vulnerability/exploit' reports come out every few months.
Sorry - the previous google cache link was to the 90 day writeup, not the 6 month writeup. Here's the text of the 6 month writeup... (site is very slow right now).
Windows Vista - 6 Month Vulnerability Report Submitted by Jeff Jones on Thu, 2007-06-21 11:53. Topic(s): | Client | Corporate Management | Information Security | Operating Systems
I was somewhat surprised (but pleased) at the level of interest back when I published my Windows Vista - 90 Day Vulnerability Report. It was about the earliest span of time I thought might give us some indicators, and the indicators did look good. (Though, I did not give us an "A+", in spite of some of the attributions;-)
Six months is a much more interesting time frame, and gives us the opportunity to see if the early trend indicators are holding up, or if the early signs of progress were a short-term gain. Also, I thought it was worth going a little deeper in the analysis to look at the total fixed and unfixed vulns as I did last time, plus these additional views:
* Include a comparison view of Linux distribution workstation builds that exclude vulnerabilities non-default optional components as well as OpenOffice and other applications that do not have equivalents on Windows XP.
* Include a comparison view that excludes Low and Medium severities to just focus on High severity vulnerabilities fixed and unfixed in the first 6 months, and
* A comparison view that combines both of these
For the full details, or to print the report, you can download the report in pdf.
For those that only want the executive summary, here is a key chart that shows the publicly disclosed High severity vulnerabilities during the first 90 days of availability, broken down by vulns fixed and vulns unfixed. Note that this chart is showing the reduced Linux builds that exclude non-default and optional components without equivalents on WIndows. (clicking the chart also gets you to the full report.)
High Severity Vulns, Fixed and Unfixed in First 6 Months of Windows, Red Hat, Novell SUSE, Ubuntu, Apple Mac
The results of the analysis show that Windows Vista continues to show a trend of fewer total and fewer High severity vulnerabilities at the 6 month mark compared to its predecessor product Windows XP (which did not benefit from the SDL) and compared to other modern competitive workstation OSes (which also did not benefit from an SDL-like process).
If you share the opinion that Windows and applications ported to Windows get a higher level of researcher scrutiny than other OSes, then the 6-month results are even more positive. If you don't share that opinion, then they still stand on their own...
Read, Enjoy, Forward.
Best regards ~ Jeff
Full Disclosure: I work for Microsoft - read my previous blog post, Exactly how biased am I?.
Also, I'd like to make a shameless plug for my other blog, http://blogs.technet.com/security, where I sometimes post more personal entries such as The Saga of My Luggage & British Air and Building My Windows Vista Media Center - Part 1 - The System.
There's probably a chicken/egg issue in there as well. If the sales guys initially mention "windows/osx" and the people doing the buying know "ahh, we have those" there may be no further questions about requirements. I can certainly understand there may not be much *demand* for it, but would people buy it if it was available? Probably some - the question remaining being is it worth it to do a linux port?
1. MySQL Uses the GPL 2. MySQL Doesn't Use the GPL 3. Integration With an Existing Environment 4. Product Maturity 5. Feature Set Maturity 6. Availability of Certification 7. Corporate Considerations 8. Perception of Scalability
They all have *some* merit, but all are very dependent on your situation. 1 and 2 seem to cancel each other out, as in if #1 is an issue for you, #2 probably wouldn't be. #3 is sort of weak, arguing that if you already have many other databases, adding yet another different system is detrimental. That's not an argument against MySQL, but against disparate systems altogether. The rest of the issues are matters of degree. "While MySQL does have a certification training program, its training availability is not nearly as widespread as for, say, Oracle or MS-SQL Server." True, but if you're comfortable with the level of quality of certified MySQL people, then go forward. It'll contribute to the general upward spiral of adoption, hiring, certification and so on. MySQL is going to keep growing, it's just a matter of how quickly and in what directions.
I had taxes done at HRBlock last year. I normally do them myself, but between multiple employers, multiple home sales, multiple streams of income (consulting, wife's business), and having lived in 3 states, I wanted someone with more experience to take care of things. They offered a 'peace of mind' program for an extra $39 to cover mistakes up to $5000. I took it, and actually had chance to use it. I missed this, but so did they - no schedule D was filed at all. Just an oversight, but it was an extra $400+ in taxes I owed. HRBlock redid all the amended paperwork in a week, I paid the taxes, and they cut me a check to reimburse me a week later. If/when I get an interest/penalties letter, HRBlock will cut a check for that as well. While I don't normally use a service like that, they *do* offer some degree of protection. True it's at an extra cost, but when you're talking about potentially thousands in taxes/penalties, being able to get any sort of insurance is probably worth it.
I've been on the fence about shopping at walmart for awhile. They're never my first choice, and I think I've only been shopping there about 5 times in the past year. After this, it's one more reason not to shop there. Yet another reason - unrelated - was that the last couple times I've been there I had great service from a particular employee. In both cases I made a point to call up the store's regional manager and praise this person. Two months later I found out that this employee had not received any mention, acknowledgement or recognition. Just seemed to speak volumes about how they treat their people, and this latest move speaks to how they treat their customers.
I'm sorry to see the spamarchive gone, but do want to point out that http://www.watchmyspam.com/ (*) has been going for a few months now. Not trying to one up spamarchive, as I've never heard of them, but WMS provides an RSS feed of current spam, which would make integrating the spam in to your own applications that much easier.
* While it's not fully web 2.0 compliant, it does have a shiny logo, is still in 'beta', and uses some javascript for not much real benefit.
This doesn't make much sense. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but the method used to write the software you use has little or, dare I say, *nothing* to do with how many people you know. I have know people on both sides of the camp who've switched to the other side, and both saw productivity boosts, for different reasons. I've known LAMP developers who sit in their cube all day and don't talk to people or join groups or projects or anything like that. Likewise, developers using MS products, for example, can be quite involved in numerous projects and social groups centering around.NET. Some of those projects themselves may be open source, but that's only part of the issue.
The way the software you choose to use is written has little to do with how you choose to use it and participate in the surrounding ecosystems.
I'm not sure. I bet it would help, but I've noticed small improvements (not benchmarked or anything) on netbeans running under Java 6, but I may have just been imagining it.:)
Java as Open Source will help in creating smaller versions - perhaps very lightweight browser-plugins - optimized for particular use (media, number crunching, etc.). These browser plugins will help revive Java as a thin-client/web2.0 (3.0?) player in browser-based apps, possibly even making some small inroads against Flash. The 'apollo' project from Adobe may put the kibosh on this, but the increased-eyeballs angle will likely prevent a complete obliteration from happening to desktop Java.
Java will become even faster. Although this has happened in 2006, with the release of Java 6, the full impact will be a refitting of the niche Java apps out there to work specifically with Java 6 and the speed improvements there. This will give some Java some good PR points and case studies with the 'Java is slow' crowd (which I'm definately a member of).
(As I think one of the panelists in the article said) - there will be a greater acceptance of dynamic languages (ruby/php/python/etc) in Java shops, as Java6's support for dynamic languages (JSR 223 I think) will help increase productivity for Java devs willing to think outside their javaBox.
If it's something that ought to be common (enable ftp server? tab through apps? move pictures around?), there is a simple way to do it. As in, brain dead simple 1-2 click operation.
Sure you can enable one, but try to mount a remote one and write files to it - can't be done. They should likely label it a FDP - file download protocol, because you can't generically Transfer - it's one way operations. No doubt the next upgrade to 10.5 will solve all that, but I shouldn't have to wait - Windows has let me write files to FTP servers for years.
The lack of write support is due to the lack of an indication of when the app writing to a file is finished writing to the file, so that it can be written back to the server; as I indicated in another posting, WebDAVfs (which works similarly; that's how an iDisk is implemented, for example) has its own kernel stub file system that talks to the WebDAV client program in userland, and can deliver "file closed" indications.
I must be a bit thick here, but people have been able to write files over networks for years before WebDAV was even an acronym. While there might be some sort of 'under the hood' technical reason for this not being an easy thing to accomplish, FTP clients seem to manage it. OSX was/is supposed to be about making 'hard' computer things 'easy', hiding technical details from users, etc. So why should I need to get a 3rd party app or pay Apple for a.mac account to Transfer a File using a Protocol?
Why not give the ability to write to FTP-mounted volumes? For weeks (on and off) I kept trying to mount an FTP server and was getting 'permission denied' errors, and I kept thinking it was some FTP server permission setting issues (with a 'permission denied' message, what would you think?). Come to find out after much searching that they are simply not writeable. How friendly and usable! I bet I could write to mounted volumes on the.Mac service.;)
Slashdot Mirror
You need to use a mock turtle. :)
That Microsoft had to resort to Hilf shows how lacking in insight they are.
What? Given that Hilf has been running the open source stuff there for awhile, and has been the central point for open source @ MS, he's probably the best person there is to know - really know - where Windows is and isn't strong. That knowledge will both help the short term Windows messaging - advertising, etc. - but given his new position, that will have to have a greater impact on what makes it back to Windows developers as well. Ergo the known weaknesses will get addressed.
It's not just "spin" if it's the truth. Windows is the best platform for certain types of situations, whether that task is running specific commercial or open source software. That 'best' is a subjective measurement which has both emotion and short and long term ROI wrapped up in it, and is different for everyone out there.
This is not a 'lack of insight' on MS' part - this is probably one of the most insightful things they've done in a long time.
It's *most* people's experience. It's just that there's so many linux apologists and ubuntu fanboys here that make it seem like it's just you. :) The other respondant here, where everything just worked, is the exception that proves the rule. It's no good even taking a livecd necessarily - will that prove that it works with your wireless router and VPN connection? Most stores don't have a wireless thing you can connect to, for example.
The biggest issue Linux faces these days for casual and corporate adoption is, in my view, laptop support. Everything *has* to work, first time, cause there's no swapping out parts in laptops. Think you can tell just because the outside of the box says "Broadcom chipset", or even "Broadcom 4318"? Nope, cause you'll have "chipset b" and the drivers will only work with "chipset a", but you can't know that till you open the box. I had a laptop a few years ago where it was the same as the floor model I tested my livecd on, and the box said it was the same components, but the video chipsets were just different enough to not allow 3d acceleration for me. Argh...
Do Apple users think they're different than everyone else? I guess that question is silly - of course they do ('think different' and all that). Well, looking at it now, perhaps this is more organized by the lawyer (does he use Apple products?) than the Apple users directly. I understand their frustration, but suing to have the phone unlocked from AT&T? OK, perhaps this will be a 'fight the good fight' and perhaps they'll actually win. Perhaps this is the only group that feels this passionately about the subject. But why not sue Blackberry for only allowing the Curve 8830 on the TMobile network? I want an 8830, but on AT&T. Should I buy it, sign up for TMobile, then sue RIM? Or TMobile? Or both? I guess I don't quite understand the notion of throwing these other extraneous issues in to the suit, unless they're hoping for *something* to stick.
No, you can't actually have that. See, the majority of "open source" development is all about scratching an itch. Most developers don't have that same itch that you're having. They don't have "users" - they run their own machines, maybe give accounts to a few friends/colleagues, but they don't have the problem that you have. Therefore, the secure FTP with jailing is probably not on the horizon.
Honestly, I've had the same problem, and what you're asking for is something that would benefit many people. It's just that this probably won't come about in the 'open source' development world because it's a pretty non-sexy problem, and is moderately low-level to deal with (sockets, ssl, etc.)
I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.
Well, my guess is that you *are* tolerating it, as are millions of others, simply because you're using it (either older versions of IE, or current versions of Firefox). Can't comment on IE7 cause I don't use it much, but IE6 rarely crashed for me. IE3-5.5, almost daily crashes.
5 years ago people people would constantly belittle IE users because it had frequent crashes, and pointed to the 'superior' Mozilla suite. Today, FF has morphed in to something which can't be used, with plugins, for more than a couple days max without needing to be reset. I add the caveat in there about 'with plugins' because I'm not sure I know many people who run a bare-metal Firefox. Most people use one or more extensions. This has been a huge marketing push for FF - "It's lean! Only use what you need! Get rid of 'bloat' - package everything in extensions!"
Putting things in extensions makes the base 'leaner' but has lead to a situation where there's no centralized testing for, or even acknowledgement of, memory leak bugs (and other bugs, but this is the obvious one). I still read comments from people who claim they never have leaks with FF (we'll see some on this thread no doubt). It's not that I don't believe them, but their usage patterns are likely different from mine. I have about 6 plugins that I love to use, and I like to keep my browser going. The idea that MSIE is more "stable" than FF for daily usage should remind people that resting on your laurels is not an option. What cut the mustard 5 years ago isn't gonna cut it any more.
Serious question here, since you love the file dialog so much...
How can you get a gnome file dialog to show the file created date *and* time?
We've made big improvements in overall polish and stability since the releases that many people remember badly (2005, 2006). 2007 Spring looks much better, has far fewer package quality problems and runs more stably than those releases on most systems.
:(
A problem with this is, and you probably are already aware, is that the 2005 release was touted as 'polished' and 'stable' and 'greatly improved' at the time as well. We've heard the spin before, and it'll probably take another couple releases before you win people back from Ubuntu and Fedora and whatever else people migrated to. Mandrake/Mandriva lost me in '05 (and I tried the '06 and '07 as well) for a few reasons.
1. Cutting edge packages were more readily available on other distros (php5, etc.).
2. To rectify #1, I tried to join the "club" on multiple occasions, and they could never process my US-based credit card.
3. Flaky admin tools. Every release we get more perl and python based GTK crap that is just broken out of the box. The *feel* of those tools was/is just horrid. Very nice to look at, but painful once you use them in the real world.
I've got a family member who's still with mandriva, and based on his view of '08, I might give it another shot, but there's little incentive to switch from kubuntu these days. The admin interfaces don't suck, I don't have to join a club, and the bulk of the current/new software I want is packaged for that distro.
Good luck with the Mandriva stuff though!
One canard trotted out by MS defenders *used* to be "Windows has more vulnerabilities discovered because it's so popular, everyone attacks it!". Watch for that line to be modified in the coming months as more MS proponents switch to "it's more secure by design". Keeping the "only more vulnerabilities discovered because it's so widely installed" would imply that Vista is not widely installed/used, which is not good PR.
So, when Linux had fewer vulnerabilities, it was because it was obscure. When Vista has fewer vulnerabilities, it's because it's fundamentally more secure. I'm not trying to be sarcastic here - it may very well be *true*. It's just something to keep in mind as you watch the never-ending stream of these 'vulnerability/exploit' reports come out every few months.
Sorry - the previous google cache link was to the 90 day writeup, not the 6 month writeup. Here's the text of the 6 month writeup... (site is very slow right now).
;-)
...
Windows Vista - 6 Month Vulnerability Report
Submitted by Jeff Jones on Thu, 2007-06-21 11:53. Topic(s): | Client | Corporate Management | Information Security | Operating Systems
I was somewhat surprised (but pleased) at the level of interest back when I published my Windows Vista - 90 Day Vulnerability Report. It was about the earliest span of time I thought might give us some indicators, and the indicators did look good. (Though, I did not give us an "A+", in spite of some of the attributions
Six months is a much more interesting time frame, and gives us the opportunity to see if the early trend indicators are holding up, or if the early signs of progress were a short-term gain. Also, I thought it was worth going a little deeper in the analysis to look at the total fixed and unfixed vulns as I did last time, plus these additional views:
* Include a comparison view of Linux distribution workstation builds that exclude vulnerabilities non-default optional components as well as OpenOffice and other applications that do not have equivalents on Windows XP.
* Include a comparison view that excludes Low and Medium severities to just focus on High severity vulnerabilities fixed and unfixed in the first 6 months, and
* A comparison view that combines both of these
For the full details, or to print the report, you can download the report in pdf.
For those that only want the executive summary, here is a key chart that shows the publicly disclosed High severity vulnerabilities during the first 90 days of availability, broken down by vulns fixed and vulns unfixed. Note that this chart is showing the reduced Linux builds that exclude non-default and optional components without equivalents on WIndows. (clicking the chart also gets you to the full report.)
High Severity Vulns, Fixed and Unfixed in First 6 Months of Windows, Red Hat, Novell SUSE, Ubuntu, Apple Mac
The results of the analysis show that Windows Vista continues to show a trend of fewer total and fewer High severity vulnerabilities at the 6 month mark compared to its predecessor product Windows XP (which did not benefit from the SDL) and compared to other modern competitive workstation OSes (which also did not benefit from an SDL-like process).
If you share the opinion that Windows and applications ported to Windows get a higher level of researcher scrutiny than other OSes, then the 6-month results are even more positive. If you don't share that opinion, then they still stand on their own
Read, Enjoy, Forward.
Best regards ~ Jeff
Full Disclosure: I work for Microsoft - read my previous blog post, Exactly how biased am I?.
Also, I'd like to make a shameless plug for my other blog, http://blogs.technet.com/security, where I sometimes post more personal entries such as The Saga of My Luggage & British Air and Building My Windows Vista Media Center - Part 1 - The System.
Full: http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:l2ZWLi31QdIJ: blogs.csoonline.com/node/218+http://blogs.csoonlin e.com/node/218&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=fir efox-a
: blogs.csoonline.com/node/218+http://blogs.csoonlin e.com/node/218&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=us&strip= 1
Text only:
http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:l2ZWLi31QdIJ
There's probably a chicken/egg issue in there as well. If the sales guys initially mention "windows/osx" and the people doing the buying know "ahh, we have those" there may be no further questions about requirements. I can certainly understand there may not be much *demand* for it, but would people buy it if it was available? Probably some - the question remaining being is it worth it to do a linux port?
1. MySQL Uses the GPL
2. MySQL Doesn't Use the GPL
3. Integration With an Existing Environment
4. Product Maturity
5. Feature Set Maturity
6. Availability of Certification
7. Corporate Considerations
8. Perception of Scalability
They all have *some* merit, but all are very dependent on your situation. 1 and 2 seem to cancel each other out, as in if #1 is an issue for you, #2 probably wouldn't be. #3 is sort of weak, arguing that if you already have many other databases, adding yet another different system is detrimental. That's not an argument against MySQL, but against disparate systems altogether. The rest of the issues are matters of degree. "While MySQL does have a certification training program, its training availability is not nearly as widespread as for, say, Oracle or MS-SQL Server." True, but if you're comfortable with the level of quality of certified MySQL people, then go forward. It'll contribute to the general upward spiral of adoption, hiring, certification and so on. MySQL is going to keep growing, it's just a matter of how quickly and in what directions.
P.S. Printable version here -> http://www.cio.com/article/print/113111
I had taxes done at HRBlock last year. I normally do them myself, but between multiple employers, multiple home sales, multiple streams of income (consulting, wife's business), and having lived in 3 states, I wanted someone with more experience to take care of things. They offered a 'peace of mind' program for an extra $39 to cover mistakes up to $5000. I took it, and actually had chance to use it. I missed this, but so did they - no schedule D was filed at all. Just an oversight, but it was an extra $400+ in taxes I owed. HRBlock redid all the amended paperwork in a week, I paid the taxes, and they cut me a check to reimburse me a week later. If/when I get an interest/penalties letter, HRBlock will cut a check for that as well. While I don't normally use a service like that, they *do* offer some degree of protection. True it's at an extra cost, but when you're talking about potentially thousands in taxes/penalties, being able to get any sort of insurance is probably worth it.
DRM would be more like having speed limits but having car manufacturers artificially prevent the cars from going over 65mph.
Not sure why Sun isn't advertising their new commitment to selling 'optimized SPAM' systems. The marketing just writes itself...
I've been on the fence about shopping at walmart for awhile. They're never my first choice, and I think I've only been shopping there about 5 times in the past year. After this, it's one more reason not to shop there. Yet another reason - unrelated - was that the last couple times I've been there I had great service from a particular employee. In both cases I made a point to call up the store's regional manager and praise this person. Two months later I found out that this employee had not received any mention, acknowledgement or recognition. Just seemed to speak volumes about how they treat their people, and this latest move speaks to how they treat their customers.
I'm sorry to see the spamarchive gone, but do want to point out that http://www.watchmyspam.com/ (*) has been going for a few months now. Not trying to one up spamarchive, as I've never heard of them, but WMS provides an RSS feed of current spam, which would make integrating the spam in to your own applications that much easier.
* While it's not fully web 2.0 compliant, it does have a shiny logo, is still in 'beta', and uses some javascript for not much real benefit.
This doesn't make much sense. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but the method used to write the software you use has little or, dare I say, *nothing* to do with how many people you know. I have know people on both sides of the camp who've switched to the other side, and both saw productivity boosts, for different reasons. I've known LAMP developers who sit in their cube all day and don't talk to people or join groups or projects or anything like that. Likewise, developers using MS products, for example, can be quite involved in numerous projects and social groups centering around .NET. Some of those projects themselves may be open source, but that's only part of the issue.
The way the software you choose to use is written has little to do with how you choose to use it and participate in the surrounding ecosystems.
As others pointed out, I think it's just you.
Try it without 'visitors' and put in 'weight' or something:
"My weight rose 10% to 180 pounds" - meaning I was 164 before, then adding 10% (16) on to that, I got to 180 - well 180.4.
"The car price was reduced 5% to $15,000" - was around $15,800 before, then 5% of that - $790 - was taken off, leaving $15010.
Rewrite the sentence with only percentages - what sense would it make?
"Visitors to Google's sites rose 9.1 percent to 475.7 percent..." - that just seems meaningless as a sentence.
I'm not sure. I bet it would help, but I've noticed small improvements (not benchmarked or anything) on netbeans running under Java 6, but I may have just been imagining it. :)
In no particular order:
Java as Open Source will help in creating smaller versions - perhaps very lightweight browser-plugins - optimized for particular use (media, number crunching, etc.). These browser plugins will help revive Java as a thin-client/web2.0 (3.0?) player in browser-based apps, possibly even making some small inroads against Flash. The 'apollo' project from Adobe may put the kibosh on this, but the increased-eyeballs angle will likely prevent a complete obliteration from happening to desktop Java.
Java will become even faster. Although this has happened in 2006, with the release of Java 6, the full impact will be a refitting of the niche Java apps out there to work specifically with Java 6 and the speed improvements there. This will give some Java some good PR points and case studies with the 'Java is slow' crowd (which I'm definately a member of).
(As I think one of the panelists in the article said) - there will be a greater acceptance of dynamic languages (ruby/php/python/etc) in Java shops, as Java6's support for dynamic languages (JSR 223 I think) will help increase productivity for Java devs willing to think outside their javaBox.
write files to an ftp server.
If it's something that ought to be common (enable ftp server? tab through apps? move pictures around?), there is a simple way to do it. As in, brain dead simple 1-2 click operation.
Sure you can enable one, but try to mount a remote one and write files to it - can't be done. They should likely label it a FDP - file download protocol, because you can't generically Transfer - it's one way operations. No doubt the next upgrade to 10.5 will solve all that, but I shouldn't have to wait - Windows has let me write files to FTP servers for years.
The lack of write support is due to the lack of an indication of when the app writing to a file is finished writing to the file, so that it can be written back to the server; as I indicated in another posting, WebDAVfs (which works similarly; that's how an iDisk is implemented, for example) has its own kernel stub file system that talks to the WebDAV client program in userland, and can deliver "file closed" indications.
.mac account to Transfer a File using a Protocol?
I must be a bit thick here, but people have been able to write files over networks for years before WebDAV was even an acronym. While there might be some sort of 'under the hood' technical reason for this not being an easy thing to accomplish, FTP clients seem to manage it. OSX was/is supposed to be about making 'hard' computer things 'easy', hiding technical details from users, etc. So why should I need to get a 3rd party app or pay Apple for a
Why not give the ability to write to FTP-mounted volumes? For weeks (on and off) I kept trying to mount an FTP server and was getting 'permission denied' errors, and I kept thinking it was some FTP server permission setting issues (with a 'permission denied' message, what would you think?). Come to find out after much searching that they are simply not writeable. How friendly and usable! I bet I could write to mounted volumes on the .Mac service. ;)