<sarcasm>When you put it like that, it's so simple!</sarcasm>
I have nothing but respect for the PostgreSQL guys - they are a damn smart bunch, let's hope they can put some work into making upgrading a replicated setup a lot easier in the near future - there's so many points at which that could fail it scares me!
Those companies spend billions developing, testing, and getting FDA approval on a single drug. Then, after that, they have to bear the legal liability if there are unintended side effects
Them's the breaks, if they don't like it they should get out of Pharma and into something less risky. They stay in Pharma though because the payoffs can be huge - but as with any gamble, when it doesn't payoff you lose a lot of money, and maybe even go bankrupt.
What I've never understood is why a company as large as Microsoft never tried to create a second operating systems team with the goal of having it produce a new operating system from a clean slate?
What do you think NT was? Granted, they incorporated the Win16 API, but it was pretty much a new operating system. It took them many years (i.e. until the launch of Windows XP) to merge the consumer line (windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME) and business line (NT 3.51, 4, Windows 2000) into one cohesive codebase. Remember all that hoopla about how ME was going to be built on NT technology and then it never happened (they release a broken update to 98)?
Microsoft brought across a lot of people from DEC who previously worked on VMS to create this great new operating system. In the beginning it was meant for what everyone at the time thought was Intel's future roadmap (a RISC chip that never took off). It was also built from the ground up to be cross-platform (running on DEC Alpha's, MIPS, PowerPC and x86) with a robust HAL.
NT is actually a pretty good architecture as far as OS design goes, but it's true that backwards compatability is causing some problems. My solution would be somewhat akin to what Apple did during the Mac OS 9-OS X transition (and what you are suggesting)...e.g. when a legacy windows 3.1 app is launched, a copy of Windows 3.1 is loaded up to execute it. Obviously, you wouldn't need the entire operating system, it would be much stripped down - things like device drivers would simply be stubs. Same thing for DOS programs (something like DosBox springs to mind).
Yes, this would create a performance hit at the moment, but as on-cpu virtualization and multiple-cores becomes more common-place, they could be put to use powering such a solution. As long as you can still run your 1993 Accounting Software which has become entrenched in your organisation, will it matter that it takes a few seconds longer to launch and a few megabytes of memory more to run?
Ridiculously slow 4200RPM hard-drive that has no place being in anything other than an ultra-low power consuming laptop
that are conspiring against you. My fiancee runs Tiger on her year-old 12" iBook with none of the aforementioned problems, but she's got 512MB of memory in there and that probably makes all the difference.
Apache was NOT the first free web server. Both CERN httpd and NCSA's httpd predate it, and both were free.
Well, Apache started off as a set of patches for NSCA httpd afer Rob McCool (still the best name in Computer Science) left, so it could be seen as the continuation of NCSA httpd, so, more of a name change than a new product.
Like use a BSD license and charge for modifications for custom versions of the software, tech support, documentation, training. I could also release the code I write to a commercial license and have a commercial version.
If you want to go down this road, I'd suggest using a dual GPL/Commercial license (ala Trolltech QT) as with BSD, there's nothing stopping anyone taking your code and using it commercially, whilst keeping to code closed and not giving you a cent. With GPL/Commercial, if the don't buy commercial, their product must also be GPL, if they buy commercial, they can stay closed source.
If you look at the companies that have a successful OSS business model, most of them use GPL rather than BSD.
Honestly. I have known more programmers that never finished college that write better code, faster, and more efficient than the guys that went for 4-6 years to a top notch institution.
Problem is, as a recruiter, do you want to go with the person who dilligently attended lectures and graduated with a decent degree (who can also program very well) - or - with the dropout who was unable to manage his time effectively (i.e. balance his open source/pet projects with actual required workload).
True, if a candidate has a proven track record since dropping out (maybe doing consulting) then the lack of a degree shouldn't be taken into account, but HR, like everyone else, want's to cover their behinds. In fact HR MORE than anyone else, as they're always the first to go in takeovers and layoffs (hey, we're not hiring, why do we need em?).
The 99% rate is a rough guesstimate from work I've done over the past year.
As an example, the js file that's used in the admin interface of our e-Commerce software. It's 890 lines long (excluding comments) and weighs in at around 34k.
I wrote it to target firefox first, and then would make any tweaks needed to make it work cross browser. The only tweaks I needed were in a little bit of DOM munging and were:
"Safari Ghost Node Fix", whereby you set the name of an input element that's been removed from the dom tree to nothing as otherwise it still gets submitted with the form.
When assigning an onlick from javascript, assigning a function (e.g. node.onclick=function() { do onlick stuff here }; as internet explorer didn't like it otherwise.
That was all the tweaks I had to do, I coded to the standards (e.g. things like document.getElementById()). The script isn't doing trivial things either, it allows adding, removing and sorting rows in a "product options" sub-form (all the dom munging), turning fieldsets dynamically into a tabbed pane interface (if the browser is up to it), client-side form field validation, postbacks for forms within forms...and lots more besides.
I use a third-party Cross Browser XMLHTTPRequest library for the AJAX parts of the admin interface (used for getting the fields required by kelkoo for a specific product category), but even that is small (240 lines including copyright attribution) and mostly of that is for opera versions that don't support a native XMLHTTPRequest object.
Granted, if you are doing XMLHTTPRequest (AJAX) you need to do some browser specific stuff, but for an awful lot of things if you stick to the standards you'll be ok.
As far as ASP.NET as a platform goes, true, there are still issues, but they are being worked on and there's no denying 2.0 is a lot better than 1.0/1.1. As far as comparing it to PHP, it's like comparing Apples to oranges. ASP.NET is an entire event driven framework for web application development. You no longer need to write/provide all that repetetive code for things like validation, data display etc. it's mostly taken care of. PHP is a web scripting language - a blank canvas that does very little for you, hence the big push for enterprise frameworks (Prado, Zend Framework etc...). I'm not knocking PHP, our main flagship products are built on top of it, albeit with our own framework that's built over the last 5 years. I've almost finished a big ASP.NET 2 app and was able to get going much quicker and therefore complete it on a very tight budget, I don't know if I could have done the same in PHP.
I can see why some people don't like the way ASP.NET forces them to work. You have to be content with giving up a little control, but it means your productivity skyrockets as you're no longer dealing with nitty gritty things. And if a certain control doesn't work the way you want, extend or replace it with a Custom Web Control (like I've done for rendering table-less menus).
no two web browsers seem to be able to use the same Javascript
It used to be like that, but hasn't for a while. Since EMCA script became a standard and the current raft of browsers was released it's been a much more level playing field.
As long as you code to the standards, 99% of the time everything works as it should, cross browser. I'm not just talking things like alert('hello world!'), but serious, manipulating the DOM, fancy effects like no-refresh tabs that use sliding images for the background. There's no denying that browser manufacturers could do a bit more, for instance I keep running into a ghost form element problem on Safari (remove an input item from the DOM, dissapears from screen but still gets posted back) but these require just minor tweaks to fix.
then any browser that supports Java can run a Java servlet and it can be programmed to be easy to use.
First of all, Applets run in browsers, not servlets. Secondly, I've not looked into it for a while, but is usability for the disabled of applets still a problem? If so that's a big problem right there, no gov or public sector contracts (in the UK at least, Disability Discrimination Regs).
As far as ASP.NET (at least 2.0) goes, everything seems to work as advertised, validators do their thing client side, and then server side when postback occurs (except in "Downlevel" browsers which only use the server side validators). There should be no denying ASP.NET had flaws in v1/1.1, it didn't output the best html (still doesn't, but it's a lot better) and a lot of things were very IE specific, but they've listened to the critics (most of whom were dyed in the wool MS developers and MVP's who wanted dearly to use ASP.NET for gov contracts but couldn't) and created something that's a joy to use.
Windows NT was built from the beginning to run on multiple processors, it had a very advanced hardware abstraction layer built in. The other versions never sold very well and there were problems with application support (e.g. people targetting multiple processor arch's). Apple has clevery overcome this obstacle by including "Rosetta" from the start, something similar existed for NT Alpha called FX!32 but I suspect by the time it was released it was too little too late to save the OS.
I'm sure that the HAL is in place in NT derived operating systems to this day and if MS were so inclined they could do another port. However, there's no real business need (as there is for Apple with their transition) so it's never been done. They target the largest installed hardware base.
The issue with getting Windows on Macintel to work is that EFI is so fundamentally different to the traditional BIOS XP expects that you require either the source code of the OS kernel to make it work or have to, as has been done here, provide essentially a bios emulator. This is nothing to do with portability or HAL's, it's about having access to the fundamentally low-level parts of the operating system, something people outside MS don't have.
But of course anyone who is is willing to tolerate MyISAM tables (which mysql's full text indexes still seem to require) already has pretty low standards for their data. (I don't mean "low standards" in a derogatory way.)
The way I get around that in a legacy app we support is by having all the "important" data in InnoDB tables and then simply have a MyISAM "search" table that contains the full text of each record and a pointer back to the original.
If the table gets hosed for any reason it's easy to rebuild. Sure, it's not the most elegant solution out there but it works for us.
The reason it takes so long to startup is because you have the overhead of:
Loading the JVM
Reading and Verifying the ByteCode of the classes to be loaded
Running a JIT compile cycle to get your optimised machine code
Starting execution.
All of that takes time, that's why it takes so long. Ruby on the other hand has the overhead of:
Loading the interpreter
Opening a ruby script
After that it simply follows the instructions in the script...slowly (by comparison, but not in the grand scheme of things).
It's a given that startup times can be a bit on the long side for Java apps, however, how many times do you start an IDE in a given day? How many times does that J2EE app have to start (if the programmers knew what they were doing not very often).
Being a slow starter does then mean you don't want to write a console app that munges some data quickly and then exits...that's just silly...use perl/c/whatever instead. For large apps that are started infrequently, it's not so clear cut.
As for ruby in an enterprise app, it may start faster but which one serves request faster and which one scales better? I think you'll find it's a well configure J2EE stack.
When asked if downloading music via P2P is 'stealing', respondents uniformly replied that it wasn't, so their downloads ceased being counted in MPAA music theft figures. The MPAA in a separate announcment stated it had no legal standing in curent cases and withdrew all complaints and charges against all music 'sharers'.
That is the case, the MPAA doesn't have any legal standing against music sharers. Movie uploaders on the other hand it does. MPAA=Motion Picture Ass. of America, RIAA=Recording Industry Ass. of America.
I never have figured out how MySQL could open up its source and put some sort of Open Source license on it, then get commercial customers to pony up non-trivial buckage.
First of all, nothing is stopping anyone from using the GPL version commercially. The only limitation is if you link against any MySQL GPL code your app must also be under a GPL compatible license.
The reason people pay for a license is either a) To have someone to shout at/demand a hotfix from or b) to redistribute an app that embeds or link against the MySQL codebase.
How is this any different from if she met him on a dating site? In a bar? In a club? It's not. Standard "stranger danger" common sense still applies.
Always meet in a busy location, e.g. a restaurant at lunchtime. At the end of the date have a friend pick you up. Always let people know who you are with/where you are going.
There are bad people out there, myspace is just another in a long line of places to meet them.
Or, keeping an internal memo that reveals the company has broken laws etc. secret. DRM of this kind (and on emails, something else they want to implement) makes it very difficult for whistleblowers to collect evidence and expose a company that should rightly be exposed.
The effects of DRM are certainly chilling. Also, as far as trade secrets go, there are laws designed to protect those. DRM will only ever be (ab)used to hide things that shouldn't be hidden and to strip away fair use rights. The media companies weren't able to do it through the law courts, so they sneak in fair-use crippling measures by the back door.
Simply put, OS X for x86 requires at least SSE2 to run. With the G3 they still have code-pathways in OSX for PPC that don't require a VPU, however, since they have no backwards compatability issues (e.g. they don't have to support 7-10 year old x86 chips) OS X for x86 uses SSE3 extensively. Some clever hackers have managed to bypass that somewhat and emulate all needed calls in SSE2, but that's as far as they can go.
So my first comment still stands, not going to see it on an XBOX. You'd have better luck running OSX PPC on an XBox 360, but it's still never going to happen.
Companies need to keep logs of pretty much everything these days. Plus with having a system running in-house you can firewall off other IM services and not worry about employees using IM for non-work uses.
Finally (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) it integrates perfectly into you existing outlook/exchange server directory.
but to say that this feature is the only reason and that there are no leaks is simply false.
Did ben say that? No, quoth his post: "All versions of Firefox no doubt leak memory - it is a common problem with software this complicated. We look to fix the issues where we can. David Baron and others have done a huge amount of excellent work in this area.".
Yes, there were, and still are memory leaks (although they are doing their best at finding them and squishing them), but the large footprint that most people are seeing is because of this feature.
...the $15,000 (and 0.005c per unit) is paid by the Graphics Card manufacturers (e.g. BFG, XFX, Asus etc. etc. etc.), the initial yearly payment to "join the club" and the 0.005c per unit for the crypto keys. True, that cost may be passed along the chain as higher prices, but I would wager it will be a couple of dollars at most.
As a white-box PC manufacturer, as long as you purchase a graphics card with full HDCP support, from a company who has paid the fee, you'll be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
<sarcasm>When you put it like that, it's so simple!</sarcasm>
I have nothing but respect for the PostgreSQL guys - they are a damn smart bunch, let's hope they can put some work into making upgrading a replicated setup a lot easier in the near future - there's so many points at which that could fail it scares me!
Those companies spend billions developing, testing, and getting FDA approval on a single drug. Then, after that, they have to bear the legal liability if there are unintended side effects
Them's the breaks, if they don't like it they should get out of Pharma and into something less risky. They stay in Pharma though because the payoffs can be huge - but as with any gamble, when it doesn't payoff you lose a lot of money, and maybe even go bankrupt.
What I've never understood is why a company as large as Microsoft never tried to create a second operating systems team with the goal of having it produce a new operating system from a clean slate?
What do you think NT was? Granted, they incorporated the Win16 API, but it was pretty much a new operating system. It took them many years (i.e. until the launch of Windows XP) to merge the consumer line (windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME) and business line (NT 3.51, 4, Windows 2000) into one cohesive codebase. Remember all that hoopla about how ME was going to be built on NT technology and then it never happened (they release a broken update to 98)?
Microsoft brought across a lot of people from DEC who previously worked on VMS to create this great new operating system. In the beginning it was meant for what everyone at the time thought was Intel's future roadmap (a RISC chip that never took off). It was also built from the ground up to be cross-platform (running on DEC Alpha's, MIPS, PowerPC and x86) with a robust HAL.
NT is actually a pretty good architecture as far as OS design goes, but it's true that backwards compatability is causing some problems. My solution would be somewhat akin to what Apple did during the Mac OS 9-OS X transition (and what you are suggesting)...e.g. when a legacy windows 3.1 app is launched, a copy of Windows 3.1 is loaded up to execute it. Obviously, you wouldn't need the entire operating system, it would be much stripped down - things like device drivers would simply be stubs. Same thing for DOS programs (something like DosBox springs to mind).
Yes, this would create a performance hit at the moment, but as on-cpu virtualization and multiple-cores becomes more common-place, they could be put to use powering such a solution. As long as you can still run your 1993 Accounting Software which has become entrenched in your organisation, will it matter that it takes a few seconds longer to launch and a few megabytes of memory more to run?
that are conspiring against you. My fiancee runs Tiger on her year-old 12" iBook with none of the aforementioned problems, but she's got 512MB of memory in there and that probably makes all the difference.
Apache was NOT the first free web server. Both CERN httpd and NCSA's httpd predate it, and both were free.
Well, Apache started off as a set of patches for NSCA httpd afer Rob McCool (still the best name in Computer Science) left, so it could be seen as the continuation of NCSA httpd, so, more of a name change than a new product.
Develop in Firefox, try in other browsers, fix any wierdness.
Like use a BSD license and charge for modifications for custom versions of the software, tech support, documentation, training. I could also release the code I write to a commercial license and have a commercial version.
If you want to go down this road, I'd suggest using a dual GPL/Commercial license (ala Trolltech QT) as with BSD, there's nothing stopping anyone taking your code and using it commercially, whilst keeping to code closed and not giving you a cent. With GPL/Commercial, if the don't buy commercial, their product must also be GPL, if they buy commercial, they can stay closed source.
If you look at the companies that have a successful OSS business model, most of them use GPL rather than BSD.
Honestly. I have known more programmers that never finished college that write better code, faster, and more efficient than the guys that went for 4-6 years to a top notch institution.
Problem is, as a recruiter, do you want to go with the person who dilligently attended lectures and graduated with a decent degree (who can also program very well) - or - with the dropout who was unable to manage his time effectively (i.e. balance his open source/pet projects with actual required workload).
True, if a candidate has a proven track record since dropping out (maybe doing consulting) then the lack of a degree shouldn't be taken into account, but HR, like everyone else, want's to cover their behinds. In fact HR MORE than anyone else, as they're always the first to go in takeovers and layoffs (hey, we're not hiring, why do we need em?).
The 99% rate is a rough guesstimate from work I've done over the past year.
As an example, the js file that's used in the admin interface of our e-Commerce software. It's 890 lines long (excluding comments) and weighs in at around 34k.
I wrote it to target firefox first, and then would make any tweaks needed to make it work cross browser. The only tweaks I needed were in a little bit of DOM munging and were:
That was all the tweaks I had to do, I coded to the standards (e.g. things like document.getElementById()). The script isn't doing trivial things either, it allows adding, removing and sorting rows in a "product options" sub-form (all the dom munging), turning fieldsets dynamically into a tabbed pane interface (if the browser is up to it), client-side form field validation, postbacks for forms within forms...and lots more besides.
I use a third-party Cross Browser XMLHTTPRequest library for the AJAX parts of the admin interface (used for getting the fields required by kelkoo for a specific product category), but even that is small (240 lines including copyright attribution) and mostly of that is for opera versions that don't support a native XMLHTTPRequest object.
Granted, if you are doing XMLHTTPRequest (AJAX) you need to do some browser specific stuff, but for an awful lot of things if you stick to the standards you'll be ok.
As far as ASP.NET as a platform goes, true, there are still issues, but they are being worked on and there's no denying 2.0 is a lot better than 1.0/1.1. As far as comparing it to PHP, it's like comparing Apples to oranges. ASP.NET is an entire event driven framework for web application development. You no longer need to write/provide all that repetetive code for things like validation, data display etc. it's mostly taken care of. PHP is a web scripting language - a blank canvas that does very little for you, hence the big push for enterprise frameworks (Prado, Zend Framework etc...). I'm not knocking PHP, our main flagship products are built on top of it, albeit with our own framework that's built over the last 5 years. I've almost finished a big ASP.NET 2 app and was able to get going much quicker and therefore complete it on a very tight budget, I don't know if I could have done the same in PHP.
I can see why some people don't like the way ASP.NET forces them to work. You have to be content with giving up a little control, but it means your productivity skyrockets as you're no longer dealing with nitty gritty things. And if a certain control doesn't work the way you want, extend or replace it with a Custom Web Control (like I've done for rendering table-less menus).
no two web browsers seem to be able to use the same Javascript
It used to be like that, but hasn't for a while. Since EMCA script became a standard and the current raft of browsers was released it's been a much more level playing field.
As long as you code to the standards, 99% of the time everything works as it should, cross browser. I'm not just talking things like alert('hello world!'), but serious, manipulating the DOM, fancy effects like no-refresh tabs that use sliding images for the background. There's no denying that browser manufacturers could do a bit more, for instance I keep running into a ghost form element problem on Safari (remove an input item from the DOM, dissapears from screen but still gets posted back) but these require just minor tweaks to fix.
then any browser that supports Java can run a Java servlet and it can be programmed to be easy to use.
First of all, Applets run in browsers, not servlets. Secondly, I've not looked into it for a while, but is usability for the disabled of applets still a problem? If so that's a big problem right there, no gov or public sector contracts (in the UK at least, Disability Discrimination Regs).
As far as ASP.NET (at least 2.0) goes, everything seems to work as advertised, validators do their thing client side, and then server side when postback occurs (except in "Downlevel" browsers which only use the server side validators). There should be no denying ASP.NET had flaws in v1/1.1, it didn't output the best html (still doesn't, but it's a lot better) and a lot of things were very IE specific, but they've listened to the critics (most of whom were dyed in the wool MS developers and MVP's who wanted dearly to use ASP.NET for gov contracts but couldn't) and created something that's a joy to use.
Windows NT was built from the beginning to run on multiple processors, it had a very advanced hardware abstraction layer built in. The other versions never sold very well and there were problems with application support (e.g. people targetting multiple processor arch's). Apple has clevery overcome this obstacle by including "Rosetta" from the start, something similar existed for NT Alpha called FX!32 but I suspect by the time it was released it was too little too late to save the OS.
I'm sure that the HAL is in place in NT derived operating systems to this day and if MS were so inclined they could do another port. However, there's no real business need (as there is for Apple with their transition) so it's never been done. They target the largest installed hardware base.
The issue with getting Windows on Macintel to work is that EFI is so fundamentally different to the traditional BIOS XP expects that you require either the source code of the OS kernel to make it work or have to, as has been done here, provide essentially a bios emulator. This is nothing to do with portability or HAL's, it's about having access to the fundamentally low-level parts of the operating system, something people outside MS don't have.
But of course anyone who is is willing to tolerate MyISAM tables (which mysql's full text indexes still seem to require) already has pretty low standards for their data. (I don't mean "low standards" in a derogatory way.)
The way I get around that in a legacy app we support is by having all the "important" data in InnoDB tables and then simply have a MyISAM "search" table that contains the full text of each record and a pointer back to the original.
If the table gets hosed for any reason it's easy to rebuild. Sure, it's not the most elegant solution out there but it works for us.
The reason it takes so long to startup is because you have the overhead of:
All of that takes time, that's why it takes so long. Ruby on the other hand has the overhead of:
After that it simply follows the instructions in the script...slowly (by comparison, but not in the grand scheme of things).
It's a given that startup times can be a bit on the long side for Java apps, however, how many times do you start an IDE in a given day? How many times does that J2EE app have to start (if the programmers knew what they were doing not very often).
Being a slow starter does then mean you don't want to write a console app that munges some data quickly and then exits...that's just silly...use perl/c/whatever instead. For large apps that are started infrequently, it's not so clear cut.
As for ruby in an enterprise app, it may start faster but which one serves request faster and which one scales better? I think you'll find it's a well configure J2EE stack.
When asked if downloading music via P2P is 'stealing', respondents uniformly replied that it wasn't, so their downloads ceased being counted in MPAA music theft figures. The MPAA in a separate announcment stated it had no legal standing in curent cases and withdrew all complaints and charges against all music 'sharers'.
That is the case, the MPAA doesn't have any legal standing against music sharers. Movie uploaders on the other hand it does. MPAA=Motion Picture Ass. of America, RIAA=Recording Industry Ass. of America.
Safari is an OSS project too.
No it isn't, WebKit, the rendering engine Safari uses, is an open source project. Safari itself is very much closed source.
Spent fuel is still a problem because chances are, that spent fuel pool wont be there in20,000 years.
Neither will you or I, so let's let our children's children's children's great great great .... grandkids worry about that one ;o)
I keed.
Or you could use the array copy function instead of a loop.
I never have figured out how MySQL could open up its source and put some sort of Open Source license on it, then get commercial customers to pony up non-trivial buckage.
First of all, nothing is stopping anyone from using the GPL version commercially. The only limitation is if you link against any MySQL GPL code your app must also be under a GPL compatible license.
The reason people pay for a license is either a) To have someone to shout at/demand a hotfix from or b) to redistribute an app that embeds or link against the MySQL codebase.
How is this any different from if she met him on a dating site? In a bar? In a club? It's not. Standard "stranger danger" common sense still applies.
Always meet in a busy location, e.g. a restaurant at lunchtime. At the end of the date have a friend pick you up. Always let people know who you are with/where you are going.
There are bad people out there, myspace is just another in a long line of places to meet them.
Keeping corporate proprietary info secure
Or, keeping an internal memo that reveals the company has broken laws etc. secret. DRM of this kind (and on emails, something else they want to implement) makes it very difficult for whistleblowers to collect evidence and expose a company that should rightly be exposed.
The effects of DRM are certainly chilling. Also, as far as trade secrets go, there are laws designed to protect those. DRM will only ever be (ab)used to hide things that shouldn't be hidden and to strip away fair use rights. The media companies weren't able to do it through the law courts, so they sneak in fair-use crippling measures by the back door.
Simply put, OS X for x86 requires at least SSE2 to run. With the G3 they still have code-pathways in OSX for PPC that don't require a VPU, however, since they have no backwards compatability issues (e.g. they don't have to support 7-10 year old x86 chips) OS X for x86 uses SSE3 extensively. Some clever hackers have managed to bypass that somewhat and emulate all needed calls in SSE2, but that's as far as they can go.
So my first comment still stands, not going to see it on an XBOX. You'd have better luck running OSX PPC on an XBox 360, but it's still never going to happen.
...Sarbanes Oxley
Companies need to keep logs of pretty much everything these days. Plus with having a system running in-house you can firewall off other IM services and not worry about employees using IM for non-work uses.
Finally (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) it integrates perfectly into you existing outlook/exchange server directory.
but to say that this feature is the only reason and that there are no leaks is simply false.
Did ben say that? No, quoth his post: "All versions of Firefox no doubt leak memory - it is a common problem with software this complicated. We look to fix the issues where we can. David Baron and others have done a huge amount of excellent work in this area.".
Yes, there were, and still are memory leaks (although they are doing their best at finding them and squishing them), but the large footprint that most people are seeing is because of this feature.
Seeing as the XBOX only supports SSE (IIRC) there's no way it's going to happen. You're better off running pearpc on xbox instead.
...the $15,000 (and 0.005c per unit) is paid by the Graphics Card manufacturers (e.g. BFG, XFX, Asus etc. etc. etc.), the initial yearly payment to "join the club" and the 0.005c per unit for the crypto keys. True, that cost may be passed along the chain as higher prices, but I would wager it will be a couple of dollars at most.
As a white-box PC manufacturer, as long as you purchase a graphics card with full HDCP support, from a company who has paid the fee, you'll be fine.