only if you promote it as such, however, i'm surprised no one (especially around here) has shifted the responsibilty over to Microsoft yet -- i.e. actually write a file sharing application that uses (or at least proxies in some way) the native functions of windoze:
- require all files that are to be shared, in an actual shared folder
- use Indexing Services locally to crawl the content, this would not only allow proper indexing of any text based(doc, pdf, whatever) content, but plugins could easily be written for other formats i.e. mp3 tags, etc
i would think the trick to this type of app would be to be able to make the local indexes published out to the 'net somehow - if i were a coder i might have better insight into this - but the jist of it is that file sharing has been around since networking began, it was kind of the whole point.. make it "illegal" to use what's already built into the operating system and you'll have to force the evil empires to defend them in court..
interesting that the concept of "supportability" hasn't seem to come into play for anybody here.
ignoring windows - microsoft, as a software developer has a responsibility to provide adequate support for the applications they sell. as a result, those said applications are written for specific platforms, which in most all cases is Windows (i think the frontpage extensions are still put out for *nix.) Anybody who has ever had the misfortune to be in product support will identify very quickly that it is impossible to legitmately support a product on a platform that an app isn't written for.
there's a reason newer versions of office don't work on windows 3.1, 95, whatever - is it because it's not technically possible? not necessarily - but since they weren't written for, weren't tested on, weren't marketed to those other operating systems, there's absolutely no way to determine if a given problem is legitimately with the application or something with the underlying operating system.
especially with apps that share dll's such as ms' does -- remember dll hell? i sure do.. i used to be in pss for the evil empire and know first hand what a pain in the ass it is to try and support applications that can be affected by another app dropping a similar dll (but oh yet not quite the same) in the wrong spot at the wrong time -- this is no different. for obvious reasons, WINE was never tested for compatibility by the software company and subsequently cannot be officially supported by them, now can it..
(and before anyone accuses me of just being a fanboi, i run suse on my laptop, so i'm an equal opportunity offender)
i'll preface this with a disclaimer that i'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but these things have some seriously scary potential -- probably more so in other countries than ours, but nonetheless..
i heard an interesting argument against them last night on our local "liberal" radio station (i have the conservative one on the presets too, i'm pretty darn moderate)
picture this if you will:
you go to a political rally for someone or some cause that is against the current regieme(sp) - an agent of can hang out in the crowd, or just place readers at the entrance/exit to scan for the RFID's that the Gap has been so nice to put in your clothes.
the now know who was there, who you were with, what your political views are, etc, etc. all with a simple database correlation query..
like the picture? place one of those outside of blackhat or any hax0r meetings etc and let the fun begin..
-r
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only if you promote it as such, however, i'm surprised no one (especially around here) has shifted the responsibilty over to Microsoft yet -- i.e. actually write a file sharing application that uses (or at least proxies in some way) the native functions of windoze:
- require all files that are to be shared, in an actual shared folder
- use Indexing Services locally to crawl the content, this would not only allow proper indexing of any text based(doc, pdf, whatever) content, but plugins could easily be written for other formats i.e. mp3 tags, etc
i would think the trick to this type of app would be to be able to make the local indexes published out to the 'net somehow - if i were a coder i might have better insight into this - but the jist of it is that file sharing has been around since networking began, it was kind of the whole point.. make it "illegal" to use what's already built into the operating system and you'll have to force the evil empires to defend them in court..
-rr-interesting that the concept of "supportability" hasn't seem to come into play for anybody here.
ignoring windows - microsoft, as a software developer has a responsibility to provide adequate support for the applications they sell. as a result, those said applications are written for specific platforms, which in most all cases is Windows (i think the frontpage extensions are still put out for *nix.) Anybody who has ever had the misfortune to be in product support will identify very quickly that it is impossible to legitmately support a product on a platform that an app isn't written for.
there's a reason newer versions of office don't work on windows 3.1, 95, whatever - is it because it's not technically possible? not necessarily - but since they weren't written for, weren't tested on, weren't marketed to those other operating systems, there's absolutely no way to determine if a given problem is legitimately with the application or something with the underlying operating system.
especially with apps that share dll's such as ms' does -- remember dll hell? i sure do.. i used to be in pss for the evil empire and know first hand what a pain in the ass it is to try and support applications that can be affected by another app dropping a similar dll (but oh yet not quite the same) in the wrong spot at the wrong time -- this is no different. for obvious reasons, WINE was never tested for compatibility by the software company and subsequently cannot be officially supported by them, now can it..
(and before anyone accuses me of just being a fanboi, i run suse on my laptop, so i'm an equal opportunity offender)
i'll preface this with a disclaimer that i'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but these things have some seriously scary potential -- probably more so in other countries than ours, but nonetheless.. i heard an interesting argument against them last night on our local "liberal" radio station (i have the conservative one on the presets too, i'm pretty darn moderate) picture this if you will: you go to a political rally for someone or some cause that is against the current regieme(sp) - an agent of can hang out in the crowd, or just place readers at the entrance/exit to scan for the RFID's that the Gap has been so nice to put in your clothes. the now know who was there, who you were with, what your political views are, etc, etc. all with a simple database correlation query.. like the picture? place one of those outside of blackhat or any hax0r meetings etc and let the fun begin.. -r