Interesting - so how do you in fact get "approval" to run software on your computer? I wonder where this control would stop, would you need to get OEM permission to install a text editor, word processor or graphics program?

The car analogy doesn't really work here, it's more like a VHS recorder where you can put in tape rentals, tapes that you've made from TV or tapes that you might borrow from a neighbor. Does Zenith need to give you permission every time you want to play a tape? That's ludicrous and it sets a dangerous precedent. You don't void your DVD player warrenty if you try to play a home made movie in it - do you?

It looks like Newegg ended up doing the right thing here ultimately, although I will say that for most PC hardware I've stopped shopping there as they generally don't have the best prices.

Be very careful with GWT, the transpiling converts your Java to JavaScripted equivalents. If there is a problem with the browser interpreting the resulting JavaScript you're going to have a very bad day.

Honestly, if you're building a Java based site, I would take advantage of JSF to bind your presentation to your middle tier and then pick a JavaScript framework to help automate some of the trickier pieces of your presentation. I happen to like Dojo although it's been a couple years since I've used it in a project, and jQuery is really quite good also. You'll want a JavaScript library like this to help isolate you from browser JS incompatibilities -- and if something does go wrong you'll have one place to fix it.

If there is a problem with the resulting JavaScript on something like Dojo, you can open the source code and fix it. This is a huge benefit IMHO and not something GWT offers.

As far as database goes, if your requirements are fairly basic then you may want to look at Hibernate, this is going to give you an ORM that will eliminate a lot of standard CRUD work.

Agreed. It looks like something a grade school student could have written - not a multi-national corporation with billions of dollars in assets. Unfortunately, it's a criteria businesses use to measure the viability of a software company.

During the .com bubble, I was asked more than once to develop a description of a software system and/or methodology that could be submitted for a patent. Fortunately, I took the time to prove this work was not something entirely new and that these were designs I had already used at previous companies.

Investors are looking for protection. If they pour millions of dollars into something they don't want it to get "stolen". In the world of software, this kind of protection is unreasonable. The best you can do is protect yourself from someone copying your work exactly - which is a copyright -- otherwise its called competition.

This kind of scheme makes perfect sense to me. Then individual companies would become their own certificate authority and could self-sign as needed. As a consumer, the only decision I need to make is if I trust the destination and after doing this once I shouldn't need to do it again. Of course, as a company I won't have to keep shelling out pointless cash to a CA that doesn't really do anything for me.

If my next visit to https://visa.com/ turns out to be a phishing site (don't bother following the link, it appears Visa's site is SSL challenged), then I'll likely get a prompt that says something like https://visa4scam.com/ has a certificate that you don't already trust - do you want to trust it? Smart browsers could say stuff like did you know that you already trust a certificate from visa.com and it has a different domain or IP address, and even indicate that this may not in fact really be Visa.

Honestly, I'm not sure the identity checks associated with EV really mean anything either. It's entirely for encryption purposes, and as a hacker unless I can hijack the actual domain there isn't much I can do with it.

I've been at the other end of the Bob and Bill argument. What happens when Bob actually needs a new laptop (RAM to run a VM in this case) and the fastest laptop in the company has both insufficient memory (which cannot be upgraded) and a processor which is completely inappropriate for virtualization.

The catch here is the company has a spending freeze for the rest of the year and the customer wants it delivered in 3 months. The argument that Bill needs a new laptop as well goes out the window at his point, there isn't any money in the budget to do that.

So in this case Bob happened to have a personal laptop with the memory and processor needed for this work. Ironically, Bill's old laptop broken halfway through this project and he ended up with Bob's old laptop until after the project... at which point Bob had been issued an even older laptop and decided to just keep bringing his personal laptop to work until the company can afford to buy something appropriate for his software development work.

btw, this wasn't a startup or a mom & pop company. At the time they were nearly 1000 employees with 10 offices -- and while today they are a very different company it shows that there is plenty of gray area on this topic. I think companies that prohibit employees from bringing personal computer equipment to work are doing themselves a disservice, but on the flipside of that if employees were entirely responsible for a PC then that would be equally problematic.

Microsoft is leading the way with frivolous IP lawsuits against Motorola and HTC, and potentially now Acer and Asustek. Apple has been busy too, they attacked HTC for stealing iPhone technology and Sanho for making replacement cables for your Mac. Meanwhile, Oracle appears to be looking for victims in the Java camp and is now leading the way with a suit against Google. Heck, even Paul Allen got into the fray with his lawsuit against just about everybody -- from Apple to YouTube.

I think more than anything, this is an artifact of a bad economy. Companies are looking for ways to make money in a climate where consumers still aren't buying things. You don't have to take my word for it, according to Google the volume of news articles referencing "lawsuit" has steadily been on the increase since around mid-2008.

I've been seeing this trend in our local LUG as well, and while I certainly don't think desktop Linux is dead there are a good percentage of users who are considering a Mac at the same time they look at new Linux alternatives.

Honestly, RedHat did a disservice with Fedora, not only did they leave corporate users in the lurch but they also ballooned the OS in the process -- which was frustrating. I think Ubuntu has been doing great things to commercialize the desktop Linux market but they have taken a UI approach that is alienating for many users. The added quandary of ubuntu-restricted-extras tends to confuse newbies, it's just not something they are use to...

I think Apple is going to continue to cannibalize the PC market by taking away sales for Linux/Solaris workstations, and of course every so often a Windows PC will get poached. Linux definitely has demonstrated how capable it is in a server environment and I don't think it will be going away anytime soon, getting to the desktop is going to require a PC vendor who is able (willing) to sell it.

I think the development tools are going to help win or lose this platform. For anyone who has developed on the competition (particularly BlackBerry and iPhone) you'll know that there is plenty of room in this regard. If MS can improve the state of the art as it relates to mobile app development, then they may just be able to carve a slice out of the mobile device market.

With that said, they have an uphill battle since since the entrenched mobile market has such a strong majority (BlackBerry / iPhone / Android) and at least two of these vendors have a compelling app marketplace. I've played with a few of the Phone 7 devices and I think the UI might need some work, but this is something that can be improved on. Assuming the development environment has a flexible and robust separation to the presentation tier, this should be rather seamless.

We'll see...

Give Sun's Java a different name and abandon it. Start promoting the new Oracle Java (closed source) as Java(TM), maybe using the pre-existing Oracle Java together with JRocket as the basis for a new Java engine. Charge a modest licensing fee for the developer engine and then wait for corporate clients to start lining up.

Honestly, I can't think of any large production Java shop that would just "wing it" with the open source Java "clone" -- they would want the commercially supported version.

With that said, there is one sticking point -- the JCP. Oracle is already in talks to "streamline" the JCP methodologies, they would have to play this card very carefully if they really wanted a change like this to stick. Otherwise, you're right - a free fork would take over and the JCP would adopt that Java sans Oracle but with a different name...

What about the prospect of having to pay for Oracle Java? The client would continue to be free (JRE) but if you want to compile code it will cost you. How would Java fair if there was a $100 developers license?

Certainly the open source Java compilers would gain a significant foothold, but with Oracle steering the JCP it seems likely they would eventually corner the market...

It's funny how everyone talks about longevity and upgrades. My last full desktop machine was an AMD Athlon 64, it was a fabulous machine but within a few years of purchasing it AMD had a slew of new multi-core processors available... unfortunately they required the new AM2 socket and not my legacy 939 socket.

Bummer. After maxing out the RAM at 4GB there wasn't a lot more I could do. The caps on my video board blew up at one point, so I upgraded to a snazzy new board but it never did much for my Compiz effects or any of my Windows gameplay for that matter. I did add a hard drive to it, but between Firewire, USB 3 and eSATA this is something you can do now pretty easily on a laptop.

I've gone through this same experience a few times before, usually the upgrade path ends up getting thwarted by a new memory format / speed, CPU socket changes, or new card slot formats that obsoletes everything you've got. Sometimes there are things you can keep, with hard drives typically being on that list, but there are always improvements in capacity / performance that virtually warrants the new disk.

At this point, my expectation is that every system upgrade will require a new system. So... why not just buy a laptop? It provides the added benefit of being portable. For casual computing, I'll probably start looking at a tablet (slate) PC once the selection of systems matures.

It does make for a nice demo, but I also noticed the empty space on the home screen. Don't they have buttons on the bottom? There's a "Back" button, if forward was so important that it should be on the home screen then that should have appeared as a button on the bottom as well.

I also wonder about how difficult it will be to navigate when the screen is constantly moving. On my other mobile devices (iPhone and BlackBerry) the icons appear in the same location on the home screen every time. This makes it possible to launch apps without actually having to really look at the device. While these icons have a lot of additional data in them, it will require me to check the screen with greater frequency to determine where a button is to launch an app.

Not providing backward compatibility with Windows Mobile was a huge mistake IMHO, it will significantly curb adoption for existing WinMo users (companies in particular). If they are going to have to re-write things, I suspect most will start looking at BB instead -- or possibly iPhone if there is enough critical mass.

I don't see Apple doing this, while I think MS might make a step in this direction the culture at Apple is typically to avoid these kinds of partnerships. The few times they have tried this, the results have been less than satisfactory.

It's more likely Microsoft will buy someone outright like RIM -- the Windows Mobile platform isn't going anywhere, so the best play is to acquire the industry leader and integrate that with the Windows operating system. There are a few technical barriers for a roadmap like this (eg: BlackBerry is a Java platform), but it will give MS the mindshare it needs to dominate the mobile space.

It remains to be seen what kind of role Google can play in the mobile device market. While Android has some compelling features, it's not nearly as polished as the Apple iPhone nor does it have the maturity of something like the BlackBerry. More importantly, Google is not yet an innovator in the mobile device market - they have copied may of the ideas that are already there and may in fact still be technologically outpaced by the next generation of Apple's iPhone.

Coming primarily from BlackBerry development, I think this "platform fragmentation" is going to be a real challenge. While the general application architecture is neat, if the device hardware is tweaked for different devices this is going to make it increasingly difficult to develop for.

Until the BlackBerry JDE included pre-compiler directives, it was a nightmare to support different device hardware. To make matters worse, some hardware API calls (eg: GPS unit) were disabled by certain carriers even if the device supported it. Of course, the advent of the BB Storm brought a whole new world of hurt with a rotating screen not to mention all the new calls you needed to make for the keyboard to appear / disappear whenever needed.

Since nothing is backward compatible, a BB app compiled for the Storm with JDE 4.7 won't run on a 4.6 device. So the result? You end up with a different JAD file for each operating system version. Don't even get me started on having to sign your apps for the privilege of using "protected" system API calls. Everything runs fine until you get the program onto a real device where the privileged calls are rejected by the BB os and of course the universe of signed API calls changed from release to release as well.

Google may already be on the road to this El Dorado, I think they are going to need to define a reference platform that all Android powered devices must support. If they don't tackle this now, manufacturers will create variants on the core phone concept and the application marketplace will begin to fracture. The idea that you can build a Midlet and bring it from one device to another hasn't been successful, the display metrics of these phones are too varying and the capabilities of the hardware are diverse -- establish a minimal platform requirement for your applications (ala: iPhone) and this problem goes away.

I agree -- more significantly, Microsoft has no ability to maintain parity between platform versions of MS Office. While I tried running MS Office on my Mac, the lack of support for VBA Macros made it almost impossible to use with documents my colleagues were sending me. Fortunately, OpenOffice has excellent support in this regard and after navigating the security settings I was able to run the same macros my Windows counterparts are running.

Microsoft is seriously missing the boat here, I gather they are going to "fix" this in a subsequent release of Office but the damage is already done. I've got OO installed now and don't really see any reason to go back.

With all that said, my observation on the parent story is the same as before - these patent infringement cases in regards to software are bogus. Computer programs should be treated according to copyright law, it is simply too easy for more than one person to dream up the same idea and create a computer application for that.