Unfortunately we were unable to examine your PC due to technical difficulties.
Well, that was exciting. And no, this wasn't the Slashdot effect as it loaded the ActiveX garbage just fine. It's just once it was here it died a horrible, "browser renders entire surface as white" death.
I guess this is the start of the "Microsoft is serious about PC games" initiative. Frankly, I could give a flying frootloop about the PC games scene these days: for the $500 the top end video cards go for I can pick up *two* console systems and a smattering of games, or one console and go freaking insane with games. Yeah, you can't do RTS or FPS as cleanly on consoles as on PC, but both genre's are in such serious ruts that it doesn't matter. And yes, I am aware how "pretty" PC graphics can be... but I'm there for the game play not the sparklies. I'm perfectly happy to watch the technology trickle down into consoles.
The last straws were the copy protection that demands I stop performing my job as a software developer to play a lousy game (quick hint, the debugger *ins't* so I can hack your freaking game) and the "your DVD isn't a CD, thus you are screwed out of your cash" crap.
You do realize that is talking about *physical manufacture* of products. There is a reason it is broken up the way it is. You may have read the entire law, but *understanding* is another issue I see. "Either separately or appened to any article manufactured or sold" uses the word "article" in the sense of "a good". This clause was added to ensure that the manufacture of presidential seals (the physical things) was only to be done "for the official use of the Government..."
Applying a law about the manufacturing of physical seals to a satire site's display of a seal (which *is* covered in section A, and avoids the "fraud" requirement) is just silly.
Makes one wonder if he *read* the section he cut and pasted into his comment, doesn't it. Quite clearly the use in satire isn't an attempt to give "a false impression of sponsorship or approval". What amused me more is the other respondents who *also* didn't read the section and tried to come up with other reasons why such use was ok anyway. I particularly liked "the law is unconstitutional" one.
ArcSoft PhotoStudio (5.5 is the current version) came with my camera. This is actually a decent product that does the basics that a photographer (not a computer graphics wizard) would want to do. It even comes as a full install of the product in the camera box.
This is so much better than then adware which came with my cheaper camera which made me spit in anger when it started spitting out "to use this feature, pull out your credit card and bend over". Note to manufacturers: either bundle something like ArcSoft PhotoStudio or don't bother wasting space on my drive. I don't mind paying for the bundle *if* I get something I can actually use. Pretending I got something I can use and then "timing out" in 15 days or disabling random menu items is a sure way to the bit bucket and unending hatred for your company.
I'm not suggesting "back to the future". I was simply pointing out you beat the poster up for suggesting things that have been done and continue to be done. Your personal opinion of the merits of the design notwithstanding, you for all practical purposes called the poster a moron for suggesting that OOP might have some use in operating system realms (the "third paragraph of beatdown"). Yet, it is quite clear that it isn't as far fetched as your verbal beating of the poster would make it appear.
Not everyone is doing desktop programming and even there I'm not entirely convinced that hardware support for a more encapsulated view of the enviroment is a *bad* thing. Just because something is the current flavor (and has massive inertia due to installed bases) doesn't mean it is the only or even best way to do something.
Of course, I take more offense at the fact that modern PC designs still rely on an hardware interrupt scheme that is so failure prone that a single misbehaving device can cripple the entire system. Which makes a lot of the discussion about "reliability through userland drivers" a fairly moot point.
You know, all that would be interesting if it wasn't blown out of the water by the existance of machines that used a high level language as the operating system. The Lisp machines seemed to do just fine running on hardware that directly supported Lisp itself as the assembly code, and I would argue that there is nothing that would prevent a modern incarnation of an OOP based version of the same ideas. You could use them in embedded design where memory footprints need to be kept small and processor speeds are poor, so inefficency hampers low cost design. Maybe call them Java Processors?
So Joe can change his site to something inappropriate and it appears on my website? Woo, sign me up. I want to have my content to be changeable by third parties, why yes I do. Spammers would never acquire a domain that I linked to a while back and fill my site with pharmacy ads, no sir.
That is a tough question. If we were truly engineers, it would be similar to consulting engineers today: you would carry E&O because that is part of being a professional engineer. Rules like suggested (holding the company responsible) would turn freelancers into E&O carrying professionals, by default. I personally own part of a larger software house and do consulting individually. We carry E&O on the software house *and* I carry E&O on my own consulting company (even though the latter is just me).
Such coverage is expensive and would seriously limit entry into the field. Is a web designer a "programmer"? Does the mis-rendering of his HTML (in Firefox as opposed to IE, for example) make him liable for damages? (Loss of business claims, oh hoo-ray). If so, web designers had better start charging a *lot* more for their services so they can cover themselves properly.
On the other hand, I have never had to *use* the E&O insurance for more than a contract checkoff item. Part of that is maintaining professional relationships: if something goes wrong (and if you are in the industry long enough it will) you *must* make things right again.
I guess the question comes down to: are people willing to suffer the increased costs of imposing liability? If software default liability becomes common, it *will* drive the lower end of the industry to companies that can protect them in bulk and those professional freelancers who remain will be more expensive than they are today.
the XML draft specification was prepared in November 1996. Good luck with that January 28, 1997 filing date.
As the article points out, XML is an outgrowth of SGML, which goes way before these filings. Yet somehow both patents manage to recognize neither SGML nor XML as prior art. Patent trolls indeed, I'm looking forward to the crunching sound their company makes when it is crushed. XML is too entrenched for the big players to ignore these losers.
Give this man a dollar! E&O insurance actually increases the rate at which lawsuits are filed (since you have a better chance of actually being paid out). Now, the threat of having your E&O insurance premiums increase is a motivator, I don't think it is much of one as the scenario where you don't have E&O insurance and you are "self insuring".
Net result: not much additional motivation to secure code, more suits and thus costs increase to feed the lawyers instead of the process.
Let's see: do we hold employees at an auto factory responsible when unrealistic timetables means shoddy workmanship, or do we hold the employer who chooses speed to market over quality responsible? If that failure means the death of someone, do we sue the manufacturer or the guy who made the poor weld?
Large software companies have more in common with factories than they do with law firms or medical practices, two places where the liability *is* on the individual. The employees don't get to choose how much time is spent designing quality and security into the product, nor do they get to choose how much quality assurance is done on the back end (although that is a lesser solution to quality code, it is still necessary).
The day that every programmer is licensed the way that doctors and lawyers are is the day I will reassess this position, but for now programmers are *not* in the position to make the decisions that lead to quality code. I'm not convinced that licensing would ensure that, but without licensing coders are nothing more that code churners cranking to the beat of the employers drum.
Blu-Ray players use Java to execute the menus and multimedia aspects of the disks. All Blu-Ray systems must support the Java Virtual Machine. On a PC, I would assume that Java on the box is the easiest solution (I guess it is theoretically possible to have it on the drive via a co-processor, but what are the odds of that?)
I note that my spell checker kindly changed all Blu-Ray to Blue-Ray in my first message. Adding to dictionary.:)
Considering that the 360 uses a standard DVD drive out of the gate it would seem pretty obvious that if Blue-Ray gains traction and the disks and drives are in bulk production at a reasonable rate that Microsoft's "decision" will be about as long term as the decision to not include a next gen drive at all.
I guess it is *possible* that Microsoft has drank the coolaid to such an extent that they would prefer to hobble themselves than use a competitor's product (the Java requirement of Blue-Ray must be killing them). Even if so, it will simply mean they have a drive that is only really useful for gaming. I sometimes wonder if part (and only a small part to be sure) of the Game Cube's lackluster sales was the fact that is played "games only", removing the "but we can play CDs/DVDs on it" excuse. However, that is much less of an issue every day as DVD players are nearly available as toy surprises in cereal boxes.
Blue-Ray drives and disks have been available since the July in Japan as opposed to the HD-DVD which is still vaporware (just this month the first sample drives have shipped). I have to give Blue-Ray some credit for being available, some more for having a pretty important backers (Sony's commitment to it in the PS3 has a lot more credibility than "Xbox will have HD-DVD, maybe, someday"). The movie industry has made it clear they don't plan to *ignore* Blue-Ray (which was the earlier stance of some). HD-DVD looks forward to a more and more uphill battle if they can't pull more important backing than Microsoft out of their hat.
Yet it is pretty clear that management didn't outline the rules and responsibilities and instead of doing so "took him to the room". That isn't management, that is freaking out *after* the cat is out of the bag. Real management would have never allowed un-reviewed code out of it's hands nor would it have sent someone to a meeting without ground rules.
Both sides suffered failures, but management is supposed to, you know, manage these things and not blow up at the apparently unmanaged employee.
If the programmer was not supposed to comment during the meeting on such subjects then manager suffered a colossal failure by not making that clear. We always have ground rules on what can and can not be discussed and *anyone* taking *anyone* to a meeting with clients without such grounds rules is a fool and should be fired themselves.
Regarding the extra functionality, I agree that it should have gone through management, which would have been able to assign a value and probably made a few bucks. On the other hand, the scope of that change was not mentioned: if it was a line of code that needed altering then I would have probably wrote that off as a bundled bug fix, not a new feature. Again, the fact that the programmer had not been brought up to speed on what was and was not allowable indicates a complete failure of communications channels in the organization.
Either you are going to control company outputs and discussions and have the rules to do so in place, or management is griping about its own failures to organize and control the company.
I'm with your first paragraph, but your second paragraph is utterly wrong. Big media companies *are* busy working towards completely digital paths to the final output devices. They are not doing that because they have given up on plugging the analog hole. If they had given up on doing that, they wouldn't have new laws on the books about camcorders in theaters.
In the end, this does prove that once you can see or hear it you can copy it. It doesn't prove they won't try to prevent it (if you will recall, the "project and record" copy devices for old analog film were attacked on grounds of copyright infringement capabilities). In fact, if you think that this is going to be ignored, may I direct your attention to the pile of "watermarking" patents for video and audio? The goal is to be able to trace (or eventually block) any watermarked audio: and that watermark is designed to survive a trip through the analog hole. Not that it works yet, but the effort continues.
While the views of the pundit may be questionable sometimes, it *is* a conflict of interest to charge fees for protection against your own flaws. Initially I'm sure they will try to continue securing the operating system while considering this service a backstop for users who violate basic common sense. When viewed that way, the extra fees make sense: I haven't had a security *alert* about an attempted infection in many years, mostly because I secure my environ and don't do stupid things. But for those who can't handle such things, and extra fee "security blanket" is acceptable.
In the long run though, if the security software becomes a security blanket for *Microsoft* and basically is a required purchase to host a secure environment despite the security efforts of administers outside such extra fee tools, it would appear to be nothing more than a backdoor to charge annual fees to all those who dare resist the "Software Assurance" garbage. Oh, and them too, just more fees.
Yeah, "server-push" was a misstatement caused by too quick posting. Proof reading isn't for/. posts. In the end, polling can be quite efficient ("anything new"->"nope") in terms of bandwidth and server resources and in effect is updates from the server as needed (the collaborative word processor shown recently makes it good use of such techniques). The old "content push" clients were nothing more than this (since actually pushing to firewalled or NATted clients is nearly impossible).
But in the end, my enthusiasm is from the idea of central management and zero client side impact as compared to the heavier apps that used to be the norm for this level of interactivity. Since our product is already web based, our (personal) main gains are in reducing the server load by doing micro updates on demand instead of brute force page rebuilds.
I think the main reason for "why now" is that the browser market has stabilized around two platforms that are reliable enough to pull it off. Back when you had to support 4.0 versions of browsers it just wasn't going to happen.
On the subject of the browsers adding support for ajax, I'm not really sure that's going to be a great thing. Ajax snuck up on people because Javascript, CSS and XHTML were standard *enough* to make it work... any extensions by the vendors will probably be completely incompatible.
Yes, I can see some features being useful (whiteboarding for one *is* a nice business feature) but my point was that GAIM is a decent workhorse that I was able to customize to my taste (I use it on Linux as well) without being distacted by all the spinny shiny nonsense that the mainstream clients have become.
The one "Summer of Code" project I was following was the GAIM collaborative code editor: anyone know what happened to that plug in? (Now that I think about it... *that* is what makes GAIM a nice business IM: I can control what garbage gets thrown into the mix.)
Well, when I read this article there were two people with experience (one with a fair commentary even), you, and four other comments. I guess he beat the odds.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that was exciting. And no, this wasn't the Slashdot effect as it loaded the ActiveX garbage just fine. It's just once it was here it died a horrible, "browser renders entire surface as white" death.
I guess this is the start of the "Microsoft is serious about PC games" initiative. Frankly, I could give a flying frootloop about the PC games scene these days: for the $500 the top end video cards go for I can pick up *two* console systems and a smattering of games, or one console and go freaking insane with games. Yeah, you can't do RTS or FPS as cleanly on consoles as on PC, but both genre's are in such serious ruts that it doesn't matter. And yes, I am aware how "pretty" PC graphics can be... but I'm there for the game play not the sparklies. I'm perfectly happy to watch the technology trickle down into consoles.
The last straws were the copy protection that demands I stop performing my job as a software developer to play a lousy game (quick hint, the debugger *ins't* so I can hack your freaking game) and the "your DVD isn't a CD, thus you are screwed out of your cash" crap.
You do realize that is talking about *physical manufacture* of products. There is a reason it is broken up the way it is. You may have read the entire law, but *understanding* is another issue I see. "Either separately or appened to any article manufactured or sold" uses the word "article" in the sense of "a good". This clause was added to ensure that the manufacture of presidential seals (the physical things) was only to be done "for the official use of the Government..."
Applying a law about the manufacturing of physical seals to a satire site's display of a seal (which *is* covered in section A, and avoids the "fraud" requirement) is just silly.
Makes one wonder if he *read* the section he cut and pasted into his comment, doesn't it. Quite clearly the use in satire isn't an attempt to give "a false impression of sponsorship or approval". What amused me more is the other respondents who *also* didn't read the section and tried to come up with other reasons why such use was ok anyway. I particularly liked "the law is unconstitutional" one.
ArcSoft PhotoStudio (5.5 is the current version) came with my camera. This is actually a decent product that does the basics that a photographer (not a computer graphics wizard) would want to do. It even comes as a full install of the product in the camera box.
This is so much better than then adware which came with my cheaper camera which made me spit in anger when it started spitting out "to use this feature, pull out your credit card and bend over". Note to manufacturers: either bundle something like ArcSoft PhotoStudio or don't bother wasting space on my drive. I don't mind paying for the bundle *if* I get something I can actually use. Pretending I got something I can use and then "timing out" in 15 days or disabling random menu items is a sure way to the bit bucket and unending hatred for your company.
I'm not suggesting "back to the future". I was simply pointing out you beat the poster up for suggesting things that have been done and continue to be done. Your personal opinion of the merits of the design notwithstanding, you for all practical purposes called the poster a moron for suggesting that OOP might have some use in operating system realms (the "third paragraph of beatdown"). Yet, it is quite clear that it isn't as far fetched as your verbal beating of the poster would make it appear.
Not everyone is doing desktop programming and even there I'm not entirely convinced that hardware support for a more encapsulated view of the enviroment is a *bad* thing. Just because something is the current flavor (and has massive inertia due to installed bases) doesn't mean it is the only or even best way to do something.
Of course, I take more offense at the fact that modern PC designs still rely on an hardware interrupt scheme that is so failure prone that a single misbehaving device can cripple the entire system. Which makes a lot of the discussion about "reliability through userland drivers" a fairly moot point.
You know, all that would be interesting if it wasn't blown out of the water by the existance of machines that used a high level language as the operating system. The Lisp machines seemed to do just fine running on hardware that directly supported Lisp itself as the assembly code, and I would argue that there is nothing that would prevent a modern incarnation of an OOP based version of the same ideas. You could use them in embedded design where memory footprints need to be kept small and processor speeds are poor, so inefficency hampers low cost design. Maybe call them Java Processors?
So Joe can change his site to something inappropriate and it appears on my website? Woo, sign me up. I want to have my content to be changeable by third parties, why yes I do. Spammers would never acquire a domain that I linked to a while back and fill my site with pharmacy ads, no sir.
I think I can wait for web 2.0, thanks.
Good thing I used "losers" in the body then :)
That is a tough question. If we were truly engineers, it would be similar to consulting engineers today: you would carry E&O because that is part of being a professional engineer. Rules like suggested (holding the company responsible) would turn freelancers into E&O carrying professionals, by default. I personally own part of a larger software house and do consulting individually. We carry E&O on the software house *and* I carry E&O on my own consulting company (even though the latter is just me).
Such coverage is expensive and would seriously limit entry into the field. Is a web designer a "programmer"? Does the mis-rendering of his HTML (in Firefox as opposed to IE, for example) make him liable for damages? (Loss of business claims, oh hoo-ray). If so, web designers had better start charging a *lot* more for their services so they can cover themselves properly.
On the other hand, I have never had to *use* the E&O insurance for more than a contract checkoff item. Part of that is maintaining professional relationships: if something goes wrong (and if you are in the industry long enough it will) you *must* make things right again.
I guess the question comes down to: are people willing to suffer the increased costs of imposing liability? If software default liability becomes common, it *will* drive the lower end of the industry to companies that can protect them in bulk and those professional freelancers who remain will be more expensive than they are today.
According to this:
/ webmaster-2002/materials/savory/slides/img18.html
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops
the XML draft specification was prepared in November 1996. Good luck with that January 28, 1997 filing date.
As the article points out, XML is an outgrowth of SGML, which goes way before these filings. Yet somehow both patents manage to recognize neither SGML nor XML as prior art. Patent trolls indeed, I'm looking forward to the crunching sound their company makes when it is crushed. XML is too entrenched for the big players to ignore these losers.
"and only a small part to be sure", troll.
Give this man a dollar! E&O insurance actually increases the rate at which lawsuits are filed (since you have a better chance of actually being paid out). Now, the threat of having your E&O insurance premiums increase is a motivator, I don't think it is much of one as the scenario where you don't have E&O insurance and you are "self insuring".
Net result: not much additional motivation to secure code, more suits and thus costs increase to feed the lawyers instead of the process.
Let's see: do we hold employees at an auto factory responsible when unrealistic timetables means shoddy workmanship, or do we hold the employer who chooses speed to market over quality responsible? If that failure means the death of someone, do we sue the manufacturer or the guy who made the poor weld?
Large software companies have more in common with factories than they do with law firms or medical practices, two places where the liability *is* on the individual. The employees don't get to choose how much time is spent designing quality and security into the product, nor do they get to choose how much quality assurance is done on the back end (although that is a lesser solution to quality code, it is still necessary).
The day that every programmer is licensed the way that doctors and lawyers are is the day I will reassess this position, but for now programmers are *not* in the position to make the decisions that lead to quality code. I'm not convinced that licensing would ensure that, but without licensing coders are nothing more that code churners cranking to the beat of the employers drum.
Blu-Ray players use Java to execute the menus and multimedia aspects of the disks. All Blu-Ray systems must support the Java Virtual Machine. On a PC, I would assume that Java on the box is the easiest solution (I guess it is theoretically possible to have it on the drive via a co-processor, but what are the odds of that?)
:)
I note that my spell checker kindly changed all Blu-Ray to Blue-Ray in my first message. Adding to dictionary.
Considering that the 360 uses a standard DVD drive out of the gate it would seem pretty obvious that if Blue-Ray gains traction and the disks and drives are in bulk production at a reasonable rate that Microsoft's "decision" will be about as long term as the decision to not include a next gen drive at all.
I guess it is *possible* that Microsoft has drank the coolaid to such an extent that they would prefer to hobble themselves than use a competitor's product (the Java requirement of Blue-Ray must be killing them). Even if so, it will simply mean they have a drive that is only really useful for gaming. I sometimes wonder if part (and only a small part to be sure) of the Game Cube's lackluster sales was the fact that is played "games only", removing the "but we can play CDs/DVDs on it" excuse. However, that is much less of an issue every day as DVD players are nearly available as toy surprises in cereal boxes.
Blue-Ray drives and disks have been available since the July in Japan as opposed to the HD-DVD which is still vaporware (just this month the first sample drives have shipped). I have to give Blue-Ray some credit for being available, some more for having a pretty important backers (Sony's commitment to it in the PS3 has a lot more credibility than "Xbox will have HD-DVD, maybe, someday"). The movie industry has made it clear they don't plan to *ignore* Blue-Ray (which was the earlier stance of some). HD-DVD looks forward to a more and more uphill battle if they can't pull more important backing than Microsoft out of their hat.
That's nifty if you can get it, but my state isn't participating:
p (updated as of July 2005).
http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/cc/20030613c2.as
So if you are in a state that allows it, I think this is an excellent idea. For the rest of us, I guess we will have to fend for ourselves.
Yet it is pretty clear that management didn't outline the rules and responsibilities and instead of doing so "took him to the room". That isn't management, that is freaking out *after* the cat is out of the bag. Real management would have never allowed un-reviewed code out of it's hands nor would it have sent someone to a meeting without ground rules.
Both sides suffered failures, but management is supposed to, you know, manage these things and not blow up at the apparently unmanaged employee.
If the programmer was not supposed to comment during the meeting on such subjects then manager suffered a colossal failure by not making that clear. We always have ground rules on what can and can not be discussed and *anyone* taking *anyone* to a meeting with clients without such grounds rules is a fool and should be fired themselves.
Regarding the extra functionality, I agree that it should have gone through management, which would have been able to assign a value and probably made a few bucks. On the other hand, the scope of that change was not mentioned: if it was a line of code that needed altering then I would have probably wrote that off as a bundled bug fix, not a new feature. Again, the fact that the programmer had not been brought up to speed on what was and was not allowable indicates a complete failure of communications channels in the organization.
Either you are going to control company outputs and discussions and have the rules to do so in place, or management is griping about its own failures to organize and control the company.
I'm with your first paragraph, but your second paragraph is utterly wrong. Big media companies *are* busy working towards completely digital paths to the final output devices. They are not doing that because they have given up on plugging the analog hole. If they had given up on doing that, they wouldn't have new laws on the books about camcorders in theaters.
In the end, this does prove that once you can see or hear it you can copy it. It doesn't prove they won't try to prevent it (if you will recall, the "project and record" copy devices for old analog film were attacked on grounds of copyright infringement capabilities). In fact, if you think that this is going to be ignored, may I direct your attention to the pile of "watermarking" patents for video and audio? The goal is to be able to trace (or eventually block) any watermarked audio: and that watermark is designed to survive a trip through the analog hole. Not that it works yet, but the effort continues.
I presume you haven't heard of Wild Tangent? They already do that. Or RealArcade? They already do that. I know there are a few others I'm missing...
Downloadable casual games are reasonable even over dial up considering most don't have the massive art asset library that a mainstream game requires.
While the views of the pundit may be questionable sometimes, it *is* a conflict of interest to charge fees for protection against your own flaws. Initially I'm sure they will try to continue securing the operating system while considering this service a backstop for users who violate basic common sense. When viewed that way, the extra fees make sense: I haven't had a security *alert* about an attempted infection in many years, mostly because I secure my environ and don't do stupid things. But for those who can't handle such things, and extra fee "security blanket" is acceptable.
In the long run though, if the security software becomes a security blanket for *Microsoft* and basically is a required purchase to host a secure environment despite the security efforts of administers outside such extra fee tools, it would appear to be nothing more than a backdoor to charge annual fees to all those who dare resist the "Software Assurance" garbage. Oh, and them too, just more fees.
Yeah, "server-push" was a misstatement caused by too quick posting. Proof reading isn't for /. posts. In the end, polling can be quite efficient ("anything new"->"nope") in terms of bandwidth and server resources and in effect is updates from the server as needed (the collaborative word processor shown recently makes it good use of such techniques). The old "content push" clients were nothing more than this (since actually pushing to firewalled or NATted clients is nearly impossible).
But in the end, my enthusiasm is from the idea of central management and zero client side impact as compared to the heavier apps that used to be the norm for this level of interactivity. Since our product is already web based, our (personal) main gains are in reducing the server load by doing micro updates on demand instead of brute force page rebuilds.
I think the main reason for "why now" is that the browser market has stabilized around two platforms that are reliable enough to pull it off. Back when you had to support 4.0 versions of browsers it just wasn't going to happen.
On the subject of the browsers adding support for ajax, I'm not really sure that's going to be a great thing. Ajax snuck up on people because Javascript, CSS and XHTML were standard *enough* to make it work... any extensions by the vendors will probably be completely incompatible.
Yes, I can see some features being useful (whiteboarding for one *is* a nice business feature) but my point was that GAIM is a decent workhorse that I was able to customize to my taste (I use it on Linux as well) without being distacted by all the spinny shiny nonsense that the mainstream clients have become.
The one "Summer of Code" project I was following was the GAIM collaborative code editor: anyone know what happened to that plug in? (Now that I think about it... *that* is what makes GAIM a nice business IM: I can control what garbage gets thrown into the mix.)
Well, when I read this article there were two people with experience (one with a fair commentary even), you, and four other comments. I guess he beat the odds.
I'm not angry... and why would I use some "business IM client" when I'm already doing so? GAIM + Jabber with SSL is a great business client.