Tracking purchases is very difficult by comparison to tracking clicks, a generalised solution would require putting a google postevent pixel/resource onto the purchase page of all advertisers sites and then using cookie information to tally it up to click/view events. This is probably too expensive to implement for what is suppose to be a fairly automated low cost advertising solution.
Some affilliate schemes (where money is paid on various events occuring) or more expensive advertising solutions do offer postclick/postview tracking solutions as it's useful information for advertisers to be able to track. This is particularly the case where advertising is suppose to be directly driving sales and is not a general brand awareness campaign.
Also what Mr Gates is forgetting YET AGAIN, is that I like to own my own data or movies.
With Emusic.com you do own the music but u can download it to any PC whenever you want. This, along with streaming is obviously more convenient that carrying around little discs that get scratched. Obviously they will try to screw the whole thing up with DRM but the idea is nice and it probably is the future.
I understand that, what i worry about is the fedora legacy release cycle is following a 1-2-3 and out policy with such quick FC releases the total lifetime support for Fedora Core is quite crap when compared to say redhat 7.3
I do some work saturdays for a charity here in the UK that refurbishes computers and ships them out to places like schools in South Africa.
We provide a full decommisioning and secure hard disk wiping service. I am currently helping them set up a trial linux roll out onto some of the PC's they ship.
Anyone in the UK interested in donating Pentium 233MHz equivalent or above you can find more details here:
http://www.computeraid.org/donatedetails.htm
Sorry I don't know off the top of my head the address of similar organisations elsewhere.
We used to not get compensated at all for out of hours support (which there was a lot of).
We lost a good sys-admin whom I'm sure left atleast partially due to the unreasonable and uncompensated demands on his time. After he left I was doing more out of hours support myself.
Eventually it got to the point where I figured it was in the best interests of the *company* that all out-of-hours work was compensated.
Why? Well, for several reasons: It's a hidden expense and causes employees to get very annoyed and some cases cause their work to suffer too. Without making the company feel the costs they won't dedicate the time during working hours for employees to sort out the software bugs and system glitches.
I am now much happier, I get time-off-in-lieu but more importantly we have more failover systems, better monitoring and emergency procedures and more of the system bugs fixed. I don't think this would have happened to the degree it has if I hadn't requests time off in lieu for out-of-hours-support during a company meeting.
He might think he's saving money by pushing work and expenses onto employees but it may actually damage the business.
When I was about about 14/15 years old I was messing about writing an encryption algorithm (nothing secure:) in Turbo Pascal on my Dads work PC.
I was trying to get it to recurse over a given directory structure and enrypt every file. I tested the recursion for the first time and it seemed to be taking a very long time for my few test files. I ctrl-C'd out with a sinking feeling in my stomach. I then tried to shell to DOS and I got an error message about command.com being corrupt.
Yes I'd made the classic error and passed the program the wrong slash encrypting from c:/ up including command.com.
Remember OO fanboys like myself are usually using OO in an attempt to develop and maintain a large complex system amongst a team of developers.
Particularly in an Agile team (we do XP) managing a relational database and SQL is a right pain. The model is completely orthogonal to OO and often you end up having to use the database for some reason or other when all you really want to do is persist a few objects the data is already described in the object model and now you have to describe it all over again for a relational model and then produce some kind of mapping system or mapping file.
XP and many agile processes are about developing with change in mind. Eg You will get this wrong, or the customer will change his mind. Either way you should be able to change the system with low cost. Once you decide to use a RDBMS regardless of how you achieve the object to relational mappings maintenance becomes a monumental pain in the arse.
You need to set up processes/scripts for automating database related stuff so anyone can create a database and modify preferably locally in their workspace to ensure the tests still run before releasing. Schema migration will inevitably need to take place at some point on a live database that can't be taken down, meaning your object to relational mappings may need to support two schemas mappings for a while. evem without the OO mapping part schema migration can be pain. Automated tests could previously be fully unit based but now become semi functional and possibly have to run on a copy of the database to stop them from messing up data. Speed can easily become an issue, objects are invariable in memory and doing operations on them is fast. The database may need to be optimized or the queries optimised an in-memory caching layer might need to be introduced. But worse there are problems related to shared knowledge in a small agile team where everyone needs to suddenly understands relations and SQL in addition to OO. This is essential otherwise you will have pairs/individuals blocking waiting for a DBA or really screwed up Database OO integration. Shared knowledge of the entire system is key to good XP whereas in other non-agile projects you just give the job to a good Database administrator.
I have not seen many good alternatives to OO -> relational mappings. I am of the opinion that relational databases are a neccessary evil for OO data peristance because a) They are the standard for persistance. b) They can scale well. c) They have a reliable track record of not breaking. d) You can query them for more generic stuff or producing reports.
Remember OO developers often don't want to "query" the db in a traditional sense. They just want to be able to pull out and put in objects maybe based on some property. They like to keep logic and data and presentation separate where possible (MVC) -sacrafices have to be made for performance sometimes
Still I hope and pray that someone comes up with something better suited to OO development. Something like Prevayler maybe: http://www.prevayler.org/wiki.jsp
Which of the following scenarios best represent your organization's top IT goal?
1) Reduce the number of servers in my environment 2) Upgrade from an older Microsoft platform, such as Windows 9x/NT 3) Migrate away from some or all of a Linux/UNIX server environment 4) Other (please specify, 255 character max)
People upgraded from win 3.1 to 95 if they wanted to run the better/newer applications that were only available on 95.
People that want to access better/newer application only available to Avalon will upgrade to Longhorn.
Regardless of whether this happens in 1 year or over 5 years, what other possibility is there?
A next gen web API is inevitable as it benefits users, businesses and developers. So the real question is whose will become the adhoc standard, the open source API or the Windows one?
Oh no, wait, I forgot! There is no alternative to the windows one, well i guess that one might win!
But Joel thinks the new API will not improve web apps so much that users and developers will need to flock to it.
That is clearly wrong IMO, I develop web application using DHTML/cookies/webpages etc, A proper Web API will allow some companies to write proper applications delivered over the web. Imagine trying to compete against those companies by writing one of todays crappy webpage based pseudo-apps. Developers won't have much choice.
Also microsoft always have the option of upgrading IE/windows in Win2k to include more of the.NET framework if they feel that they don't have enough of a stranglehold to pull off the HTML->XAML move.
I agree about the developers and I fear developers will move to windows development in droves once Avalon/Indigo is released because at last someone will have created a proper Web API. I hate microsoft but I can't deny that a proper web API is long, long overdue.
Will mozilla gain critical usage level before Avalon/longhorn?
And even if Mozilla by some miracle got more than 5% market share would it even matter?
No one is going to want to develop old style web application using the typcial DHTML/HTTP/Cookie/ServerSideSession hacks of today when there is a proper API for developing Rich GUI web apps using Avalon/Indigo in windows.
I am afraid that the Mozilla of today is similar in some respects to the DR-DOS v's MS-DOS war. Micorosft doesn't care because they are already developing the next generation toolset Windows3.1. The equivalent today being Avalon/Indigo.
Mozilla/Gnome are obviously aware this is happening after the Amazon Avalon demo but what are they going to do about it? They don't have the market share for it to be worth creating a competitor next gen technology so they may be left trying to emulate Avalon/Indigo support in Mozilla, but this next Gen toolset is largely not standards based and is owned and driven by microsoft (AFAIK).
Sorry to sound depressing but microsoft is both still winning the current HTML broswer war AND putting all it's resources into the next generation web technology which once released will probably leave projects like mozilla and Opera in a similar situation to DR-DOS, u know, nice and all that but it won't run any of your windows apps so what's the point?
To be honest I think this is very similar to the fact that system builders configure machines with high spec CPU and low RAM because users are stupid and buy these systems. Hard disk manufactures make big hard disks that die quickly because users understand gigabytes and not Mean time to failure numbers.
Normal users NEED systems with more memory and hard disks that don't fail within 2 years. Because normal users don't know what RAID is and don't backup.
I believe this is what the DOD do with particularly sensitive data, I heard this 2nd hand so I can't confirm it.
They drill a whole into the sealed room containing the servers, large enough to fit an ethernet cable in then they run Blanca on the disks, then they seal up the hole.
Yes indeed, and I believe microsoft will be converting most of it current client side apps onto the avalon/.NET framework. Meaning you will be able to use the XML layout descreptions to write either fully local apps like Gnucash or load them over the web.
We need this functionality in Gnome/KDE asap.
Kind of like the way X-servers normally run in localhost mode but can connect to a remote machine (perhaps not the best example - but that kind of client/server separation that can all run on one machine)
As far as I know XUL doesn't allow you to run application outside of the browser, doesn't have native widget support and doesn't use web services. So as web-application API's go it's pants.
In short XUL is just a layout description language, it could be used as part of a full web application API but it isn't. I don't think XUL is designed specifically for web applications, I think it's mainly used for fully downloadable client side applications such as Mozilla, firefox and thunderbird.
These XUL client side application and the GUI still doesn't run very fast under linux. XAML/Avalon/.NET could end up running web application with a better/faster GUI than Mozilla manages to render itself using XUL!
The problem is that HTML/cookies/dhtml and server side sessions have long been used to try create applications. HTML was never designed for this it was designed as a markup language for documents.
The current way of producing web-application using HTML templates/scripts etc, is basically just a hack that we have used for several years because the operating systems doesn't support any convenient way of running normal style applications that are served over the web. There have been a few attempts but the only real one - client side java applets was poorly implemented and squashed by microsoft.
I really don't think it will be possible to hold back the broad adoption of a proper way of developing web-applications.
By "proper" web-application I mean ones that work like normal applications and are not pseudo-page based. Applications that can use real widgets, object based state and use web services to communicate with servers.
I hate microsoft but this will be a revolutionary change for the web and a change that is long overdue. At work when the executives realise what XAML actually means in terms of useability they will just ditch non-IE browser support claiming they are old "old browser" not supporting proper web application. And in many ways they will be right, that is unless gnome-mozilla get a move on with native widgets support and proper web/desktop integration.
Take internet banking for example. The application is the same 99% of the time but it's so slow and has a horrible page based HTML gui. It should be just cached XAML/glade files or whatever and have a secure web-API update the balance when I double click to run the app. Same with amazon and several web-apps I have developed in the past.
I develop a contextual/live feed advertising system (yes flame me if you wish) and we have one guy who attends IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) events here in the UK, so I get to hear about all the "latest and greatest" advertising formats.
In response to the adblocking technology several new ad formats are being approved for general usage and they all suck.Basically the new ad formats are much much bigger than the current sizes. I can't remember what sizes they were but I was crying when I was told. (bad luck 800x600 users)
Other "great" news from the cutting edge of advertising is that more full movie streaming ads will become popular (obviously with advertisers not with users)
And worst of all what are currently blockable popup ads will be replaced with Flash overlays that fly around screen.
Apparently the IAB did an expensive study in the states into what normal users thought of all these new ad formats (pop-ups, pop-unders, flash overlays, dhtml etc,) And the result was that most users call all annoying ads "pop-ups" and they really hate them. Well duh, I'm not sure what the point of *that* study was for.
On the plus side I remember hearing that IAB guidlines will recommend all flash overlays have a close button.
So in general the whole state of affairs depresses me ALOT. I don't think the IAB/advertisers have even got Avalon on their radar yet, but I imagine Avalon ads will enable a whole new generation of annoying ads.
For normal users this will all suck, but most of the ads probably won't work on a standard debian install so/.ers don't have too much to worry about.
1. IBM's SWT requires C++ interfaces and it needs gnome in addition to current GTK bindings. SWT is the fastest best API supporting most common platforms it runs 10 times faster than mozilla because it uses native widgets.
2. XUL needs to be mapped to SWT bindings so it has faster native cross platform support. This would be the quickest way to get mozilla to run and look like a native app on most platforms.
With these two changes people can develop cross platform apps with native GUI's either directly in C, Java or using XUL for layout.
3. Once that is done you can clone XAML/Avalon.
If I have any spare time this weekend I will put togethor the neccessary patches;)
Slashdot Mirror
Tracking purchases is very difficult by comparison to tracking clicks, a generalised solution would require putting a google postevent pixel/resource onto the purchase page of all advertisers sites and then using cookie information to tally it up to click/view events. This is probably too expensive to implement for what is suppose to be a fairly automated low cost advertising solution.
Some affilliate schemes (where money is paid on various events occuring) or more expensive advertising solutions do offer postclick/postview tracking solutions as it's useful information for advertisers to be able to track. This is particularly the case where advertising is suppose to be directly driving sales and is not a general brand awareness campaign.
Mod Parent up.
.wmf files if such codecs exist.
The following files are referred to collectively, as the "Windows Media Files":
wma9dmod.dll, wmadmod.dll, wmspdmod.dll, wmv9dmod.dll, wmvdmod.dll
Linspire/Lindows can replace these windows files with legal open source codecs that can play back
Also what Mr Gates is forgetting YET AGAIN, is that I like to own my own data or movies.
With Emusic.com you do own the music but u can download it to any PC whenever you want. This, along with streaming is obviously more convenient that carrying around little discs that get scratched. Obviously they will try to screw the whole thing up with DRM but the idea is nice and it probably is the future.
I understand that, what i worry about is the fedora legacy release cycle is following a 1-2-3 and out policy with such quick FC releases the total lifetime support for Fedora Core is quite crap when compared to say redhat 7.3
I do some work saturdays for a charity here in the UK that refurbishes computers and ships them out to places like schools in South Africa.
We provide a full decommisioning and secure hard disk wiping service. I am currently helping them set up a trial linux roll out onto some of the PC's they ship.
Anyone in the UK interested in donating Pentium 233MHz equivalent or above you can find more details here:
http://www.computeraid.org/donatedetails.htm
Sorry I don't know off the top of my head the address of similar organisations elsewhere.
I hope supporting all these fedora core distros doesn't mean fedora legacy will give up supporting older redhat distros like Redhat 7.3
Now I see that fedora core is re-released so frequently I am even less enthusiastic about upgrading our Redhat 7.3 production servers to FC.
Oh god I'm going to have learn debian aswell aren't I?
At least with thereg first you get the poor reporting first hand :)
We used to not get compensated at all for out of hours support (which there was a lot of).
We lost a good sys-admin whom I'm sure left atleast partially due to the unreasonable and uncompensated demands on his time. After he left I was doing more out of hours support myself.
Eventually it got to the point where I figured it was in the best interests of the *company* that all out-of-hours work was compensated.
Why? Well, for several reasons:
It's a hidden expense and causes employees to get very annoyed and some cases cause their work to suffer too.
Without making the company feel the costs they won't dedicate the time during working hours for employees to sort out the software bugs and system glitches.
I am now much happier, I get time-off-in-lieu but more importantly we have more failover systems, better monitoring and emergency procedures and more of the system bugs fixed. I don't think this would have happened to the degree it has if I hadn't requests time off in lieu for out-of-hours-support during a company meeting.
He might think he's saving money by pushing work and expenses onto employees but it may actually damage the business.
Yes I can just imagine having the CEO on the phone
9PM
CEO rings: "ALL THE CUSTOMERS ARE PHONING ME, NOTHING IS WORKING IT'S A CRISIS"
I plug in my dial up modem beep-bopp-beeeep-beep-beep - engaged tone.
Me: Yes I'll be right with you... I just need to get my flatmate off the phone.
When I was about about 14/15 years old I was messing about writing an encryption algorithm (nothing secure:) in Turbo Pascal on my Dads work PC.
I was trying to get it to recurse over a given directory structure and enrypt every file. I tested the recursion for the first time and it seemed to be taking a very long time for my few test files. I ctrl-C'd out with a sinking feeling in my stomach. I then tried to shell to DOS and I got an error message about command.com being corrupt.
Yes I'd made the classic error and passed the program the wrong slash encrypting from c:/ up including command.com.
Put me off programming for nearly 2 days.
Hi, I am an OO fanboy.
Remember OO fanboys like myself are usually using OO in an attempt to develop and maintain a large complex system amongst a team of developers.
Particularly in an Agile team (we do XP) managing a relational database and SQL is a right pain. The model is completely orthogonal to OO and often you end up having to use the database for some reason or other when all you really want to do is persist a few objects the data is already described in the object model and now you have to describe it all over again for a relational model and then produce some kind of mapping system or mapping file.
XP and many agile processes are about developing with change in mind. Eg You will get this wrong, or the customer will change his mind. Either way you should be able to change the system with low cost. Once you decide to use a RDBMS regardless of how you achieve the object to relational mappings maintenance becomes a monumental pain in the arse.
You need to set up processes/scripts for automating database related stuff so anyone can create a database and modify preferably locally in their workspace to ensure the tests still run before releasing.
Schema migration will inevitably need to take place at some point on a live database that can't be taken down, meaning your object to relational mappings may need to support two schemas mappings for a while. evem without the OO mapping part schema migration can be pain.
Automated tests could previously be fully unit based but now become semi functional and possibly have to run on a copy of the database to stop them from messing up data.
Speed can easily become an issue, objects are invariable in memory and doing operations on them is fast. The database may need to be optimized or the queries optimised an in-memory caching layer might need to be introduced.
But worse there are problems related to shared knowledge in a small agile team where everyone needs to suddenly understands relations and SQL in addition to OO. This is essential otherwise you will have pairs/individuals blocking waiting for a DBA or really screwed up Database OO integration. Shared knowledge of the entire system is key to good XP whereas in other non-agile projects you just give the job to a good Database administrator.
I have not seen many good alternatives to OO -> relational mappings.
I am of the opinion that relational databases are a neccessary evil for OO data peristance because
a) They are the standard for persistance.
b) They can scale well.
c) They have a reliable track record of not breaking.
d) You can query them for more generic stuff or producing reports.
Remember OO developers often don't want to "query" the db in a traditional sense. They just want to be able to pull out and put in objects maybe based on some property. They like to keep logic and data and presentation separate where possible (MVC) -sacrafices have to be made for performance sometimes
Still I hope and pray that someone comes up with something better suited to OO development. Something like Prevayler maybe: http://www.prevayler.org/wiki.jsp
Matt.
Signing up for my copy now :)
Which of the following scenarios best represent your organization's top IT goal?
1) Reduce the number of servers in my environment
2) Upgrade from an older Microsoft platform, such as Windows 9x/NT
3) Migrate away from some or all of a Linux/UNIX server environment
4) Other (please specify, 255 character max)
"UPGRADING WINDOWS TO LINUX".
hehe.
People upgraded from win 3.1 to 95 if they wanted to run the better/newer applications that were only available on 95.
People that want to access better/newer application only available to Avalon will upgrade to Longhorn.
Regardless of whether this happens in 1 year or over 5 years, what other possibility is there?
A next gen web API is inevitable as it benefits users, businesses and developers. So the real question is whose will become the adhoc standard, the open source API or the Windows one?
Oh no, wait, I forgot! There is no alternative to the windows one, well i guess that one might win!
"And that would make my granny or girlfriend upgrade to Longhorn because, exactly?"
Same reason as the win3.1 to win32 upgrade. Because lots of application only run on new computers.
"Why would they want to encourage people to continue running W2k rather than Longhorn?"
They would only do this if they weren't already obtaining critical mass with Avalon on Longhorn.
Mind you given eventually everyone upgrades their computer and there is no competition for Avalon they don't really need to speed up the roll out.
But Joel thinks the new API will not improve web apps so much that users and developers will need to flock to it.
.NET framework if they feel that they don't have enough of a stranglehold to pull off the HTML->XAML move.
That is clearly wrong IMO, I develop web application using DHTML/cookies/webpages etc,
A proper Web API will allow some companies to write proper applications delivered over the web. Imagine trying to compete against those companies by writing one of todays crappy webpage based pseudo-apps. Developers won't have much choice.
Also microsoft always have the option of upgrading IE/windows in Win2k to include more of the
I agree about the developers and I fear developers will move to windows development in droves once Avalon/Indigo is released because at last someone will have created a proper Web API. I hate microsoft but I can't deny that a proper web API is long, long overdue.
Will mozilla gain critical usage level before Avalon/longhorn?
And even if Mozilla by some miracle got more than 5% market share would it even matter?
No one is going to want to develop old style web application using the typcial DHTML/HTTP/Cookie/ServerSideSession hacks of today when there is a proper API for developing Rich GUI web apps using Avalon/Indigo in windows.
I am afraid that the Mozilla of today is similar in some respects to the DR-DOS v's MS-DOS war. Micorosft doesn't care because they are already developing the next generation toolset Windows3.1. The equivalent today being Avalon/Indigo.
Mozilla/Gnome are obviously aware this is happening after the Amazon Avalon demo but what are they going to do about it? They don't have the market share for it to be worth creating a competitor next gen technology so they may be left trying to emulate Avalon/Indigo support in Mozilla, but this next Gen toolset is largely not standards based and is owned and driven by microsoft (AFAIK).
Sorry to sound depressing but microsoft is both still winning the current HTML broswer war AND putting all it's resources into the next generation web technology which once released will probably leave projects like mozilla and Opera in a similar situation to DR-DOS, u know, nice and all that but it won't run any of your windows apps so what's the point?
To be honest I think this is very similar to the fact that system builders configure machines with high spec CPU and low RAM because users are stupid and buy these systems. Hard disk manufactures make big hard disks that die quickly because users understand gigabytes and not Mean time to failure numbers.
Normal users NEED systems with more memory and hard disks that don't fail within 2 years. Because normal users don't know what RAID is and don't backup.
I believe this is what the DOD do with particularly sensitive data, I heard this 2nd hand so I can't confirm it.
They drill a whole into the sealed room containing the servers, large enough to fit an ethernet cable in then they run Blanca on the disks, then they seal up the hole.
The new servers are in a new sealed room.
Yes indeed, and I believe microsoft will be converting most of it current client side apps onto the avalon/.NET framework. Meaning you will be able to use the XML layout descreptions to write either fully local apps like Gnucash or load them over the web.
We need this functionality in Gnome/KDE asap.
Kind of like the way X-servers normally run in localhost mode but can connect to a remote machine (perhaps not the best example - but that kind of client/server separation that can all run on one machine)
As far as I know XUL doesn't allow you to run application outside of the browser, doesn't have native widget support and doesn't use web services. So as web-application API's go it's pants.
In short XUL is just a layout description language, it could be used as part of a full web application API but it isn't. I don't think XUL is designed specifically for web applications, I think it's mainly used for fully downloadable client side applications such as Mozilla, firefox and thunderbird.
These XUL client side application and the GUI still doesn't run very fast under linux. XAML/Avalon/.NET could end up running web application with a better/faster GUI than Mozilla manages to render itself using XUL!
The problem is that HTML/cookies/dhtml and server side sessions have long been used to try create applications. HTML was never designed for this it was designed as a markup language for documents.
The current way of producing web-application using HTML templates/scripts etc, is basically just a hack that we have used for several years because the operating systems doesn't support any convenient way of running normal style applications that are served over the web. There have been a few attempts but the only real one - client side java applets was poorly implemented and squashed by microsoft.
I really don't think it will be possible to hold back the broad adoption of a proper way of developing web-applications.
By "proper" web-application I mean ones that work like normal applications and are not pseudo-page based. Applications that can use real widgets, object based state and use web services to communicate with servers.
I hate microsoft but this will be a revolutionary change for the web and a change that is long overdue. At work when the executives realise what XAML actually means in terms of useability they will just ditch non-IE browser support claiming they are old "old browser" not supporting proper web application. And in many ways they will be right, that is unless gnome-mozilla get a move on with native widgets support and proper web/desktop integration.
Take internet banking for example. The application is the same 99% of the time but it's so slow and has a horrible page based HTML gui. It should be just cached XAML/glade files or whatever and have a secure web-API update the balance when I double click to run the app. Same with amazon and several web-apps I have developed in the past.
Matt
lol. Yay to make my job easier.
I develop a contextual/live feed advertising system (yes flame me if you wish) and we have one guy who attends IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) events here in the UK, so I get to hear about all the "latest and greatest" advertising formats.
/.ers don't have too much to worry about.
In response to the adblocking technology several new ad formats are being approved for general usage and they all suck.Basically the new ad formats are much much bigger than the current sizes. I can't remember what sizes they were but I was crying when I was told. (bad luck 800x600 users)
Other "great" news from the cutting edge of advertising is that more full movie streaming ads will become popular (obviously with advertisers not with users)
And worst of all what are currently blockable popup ads will be replaced with Flash overlays that fly around screen.
Apparently the IAB did an expensive study in the states into what normal users thought of all these new ad formats (pop-ups, pop-unders, flash overlays, dhtml etc,) And the result was that most users call all annoying ads "pop-ups" and they really hate them. Well duh, I'm not sure what the point of *that* study was for.
On the plus side I remember hearing that IAB guidlines will recommend all flash overlays have a close button.
So in general the whole state of affairs depresses me ALOT. I don't think the IAB/advertisers have even got Avalon on their radar yet, but I imagine Avalon ads will enable a whole new generation of annoying ads.
For normal users this will all suck, but most of the ads probably won't work on a standard debian install so
no.
1. IBM's SWT requires C++ interfaces and it needs gnome in addition to current GTK bindings. SWT is the fastest best API supporting most common platforms it runs 10 times faster than mozilla because it uses native widgets.
;)
2. XUL needs to be mapped to SWT bindings so it has faster native cross platform support. This would be the quickest way to get mozilla to run and look like a native app on most platforms.
With these two changes people can develop cross platform apps with native GUI's either directly in C, Java or using XUL for layout.
3. Once that is done you can clone XAML/Avalon.
If I have any spare time this weekend I will put togethor the neccessary patches
Matt.