Our CDW rep told us yesterday that MS is now telling them that it will not release until sometime in 2011. Its third hand info however and needs to be taken with a lump of salt.

Ah! The oddity of the Vista file deletion. I don't get why it takes so long to delete files in that OS. Its not a big deal, just mystifying as to why it can be noticably longer than anything else. I put in a sweet screaming 5 drive Raid 5 array, and it doesn't speed up file deletion a lick. Go figure. Makes me want to dig out a copy of Norton Commander from somewhere. I am happy though that it is one of the very very few 'issues' I have had with it (Vista) however. :)

Denotation of precidence regarding GPL with proprietary code[^] Just because a case doesn't make it to pass/fail verdict (i.e. settlement), doesn't mean it has no bearing on future cases. In fact, those are actually the cases that form the legal basis for further suits in many cases. Many things were decided by the court in the couple of cases that have been heard so far. The other actual case that was heard was in Germany. I have not spent an ounce of time looking for reference, but it exists and is used as basis in legal challenges already. Once a case makes it to decision, that one will trump the others, but to suggest they have no bearing is not correct. Whether you believe that there is basis in fact or not, the cases themselves show that you are definately opening yourself up for litigation if you operate anywhere in the proprietary world. Most companies are not going to hire a lawyer first to decide what products to use to build a saleable product for themselves. They are going to take the road that they know they are protected in without the expense of an attorney. GPL has its purpose and use, its just not very compatible with corporate law and profit taking. Is that a bad thing? That's your decision not mine. Do you wear dancing shoes to a foot race?

Whatever tact you want to take. There may be a way to circumvent the issue as you suggest. The real question is however, if you own the company, what kind of litigation do you want to expose your business to and can you fiancially survive the consequences. GPL has catastrophic consequences for your company should you be wrong. That alone keeps a great number of companies away from anything GPL. Financial statements from the likes of MS, Oracle and SUN all emphatically support that logic.

Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote:

Gary Wheeler wrote: What's even more insidious about the GPL is that if you use utility code covered by the GPL, the GPL metastasizes to include your application as well. That is untrue. As long as you do not link against (on source level or binary level) GPL protected utilities, your application is not tainted. If the utility is LPGPL'd, it allows you to link against it on a binary level (dynamic loading due to technical reasons. Static linking is basically just a special case of linking against source...)

You are the one that is wrong. There are several existing case law judgements in favor of GPL for just that. The most famous one being where MySQL was used as a data repository for a proprietary application. GPL won and the company lost the rights to their own code. (has happened at least twice on a major scale now)

Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote:

Gary Wheeler wrote: Frankly, I believe the purpose of the GPL is to make it easier for mother's basement boys like Richard Stallman to steal the hard work of their betters. The GPL was created to prevent the reverse - to make it less easy for companies to just take their code and make it their own. + the usual philosophical crap from Stallman.

And wrong again. Copyright actually covers the case you state. GPL does actually address allowing others to use your contributions freely. That IS what GPL is all about. Allow you to make modifications to code I wrote under a GPL without you being fearful of a lawsuit from me.

Pete O'Hanlon wrote:

Yes - you'd cost a company millions for no real benefit.

Agreed. The benefit is not in changing the code, but in changing the hardware. If you are not leveraging the high transaction capability of the Mainframe, you ought to ditch it. Replace it with a scalable server farm. Something I have personally done at several facilities, such as Hospitals. The annual support overhead and cost of keeping Mainframe Sys Admins around is huge for mainframes (along with the required Annual Support cost from the manufacturer). You need to justify that cost first. It certainly can be justified, but in a lot of cases it is not.

ROTFLMAO!!!!! How true! Worth a good laugh anyways!

Amen to that! Me stay away too as I have enough frustration trying to satisfy clients (who really don't understand what they want or need). Don't need idiots bashing things they really don't understand to begin with (such as outdated and buggy firmware resulting in an OS error message, somehow being the fault of the OS, DUH!).

lol! I like that site. Must be Bill is not the anti-christ anyways as Win95 is dead and the world didn't end. Oh, well. I also love how religious oriented people (aka wackos :wtf: ) will make any apocolyptic biblical passage fit anything they hate. Got to give them credit for imagination anyways. They get a zero for predictions in my book though as the world is going to end at least once a year. :doh:

If it involves a Microsoft product in any way, it MUST be a conspiracy! (Good Lord, {groan})

environment: vb .net (v2+, no v3 support yet here on production machines) I need to be able to display an html physcial file as a thumbnail on a web page. I can't put my finger on an easy solution. If I have to convert it to an image (bmp, jpg, etc), I don't want to do it as it adds too much overhead to the process. I would rather just throw a new browser up and display the whole doc instead. I need to write code that produces as little overhead as possible. I just can't see the path to the end of this without a conversion in the middle. Is there one? Why: We produce (some) documents via an XML translation to html (via XSLT). The output is written and stored in a physical file location (for later use). The user is allowed to FAX the document where we pull the file from the drive, attach the doc as a file to email and send it along to our fax server as an attachment. That all works great already. But I wanted to display what is going to be faxed on the web page as a thumbnail before sending the doc.

If you place your offices in North Korea, I am told that the Politics talk becomes non-existant. If it does happen, the employee becomes non-existent.

Strictly from memory here, but I believe Woz built the machine and demonstrated it before he had ANY plans of ANY sort. It was a hobby. His friend Steve Jobs convinced him to sell the machine and they got together and found someone (Bytes or Byteshop or some name like that) to buy a few and then... the Apple I was born. Not the other way around.

Wow, you really believe that? You haven't read much from the Woz have you. He was as anti-planning as any startup has ever been.

PowerShell 2.0 ~ greatly enhanced scripting capabilites. Multitouch support ~ Can now code to this interface. (This is a major plus for me). (Improved) Multifunction device support ~ better enumeration of devnodes with each function obtaining its own GUID now instead of shared which creates coding issues. Windows Installer 5.0 ~ alleviates current issues with controlling permissions on installed services projects. AppLocker ~ gives me the ability to better manage client applications (by version) in my corporate environment.

I have found that shortening it to plain old "F..." covers nearly all applications, (except perhaps alien invasion, then it's holy f...)

My friend, I am sorry if I took your pointed barb to substantiate my 'opinion' with facts and bullet points as an afront. Perhaps it was your approach that drew ire instead? If you really want bullet points, go to Microsoft.com as I am not in the employ of Microsoft and haven't any intent of justifying their product to anyone. I merely stated that I liked the product and thought it was a good value in response to the original question. As I said originally "Personally, I can hardly wait! I really want to get my hands on some of the sweet tools in the package. I am sure it will irk some of the real MS haters, but I firmly believe Vista was a substantial improvement over XP. My experience with the beta Seven versions suggests the same will be true of Seven over Vista. "

Whilst I really do like their products, their ranking in the Forbes list of wealthiest companies substantially backs up your argument.

Sure! You hold the gun still and wait until I move in front, then you can pull the trigger. It's pretty obvious you fall in the 'haters' category. It's fine with me. You can feel as you like. I don't mind at all. This is not a religious issue for me. Its what I like, prefer and want. Those are as many 'bullet' points as you will get.

Scared me for a minute! Thought it was my Ex-wife again! :omg: