Who approved this "article"?

This is great news for many of us who run Linux desktops. As this is one of the 2 laptops Dell delivers preinstalled with Linux in the dell.com/ubuntu program.

About 4 months ago I got an XPS 15, with almost identical specs ( 256 SSD, 16GB Ram, 4-Core i7 CPU, etc. ). But I had to void my warranty minutes after I opened the box to replace Windows with Ubuntu, so I'm basically on my own support-wise after spending north of $2K.

This laptop would have been perfect for someone like myself and hope its Linux configuration makes enough sales so that it's still around when I need a new computer 2-3 years from now.

It randomly crashes for no apparent reason while running code that has run cleanly thousands upon thousands of times in the past.

And are you implying that doesn't happen with the C runtime?

Or seriously implying this happens less often when developers code in C/C++?

I'd rather see people bitch about no delegates or lack of LINQ-like system.

I agree with your other points. But Java doesn't have a single LINQ-like system. But has many to chose from...

QueryDSL and jOOQ has most of the Linq-to-Object features.

Together with Java Persistence API and it's type-safe Criteria Query

...but then, they fire up Eclipse, or NetBeans, or Guiffy, or enable the Java support in their browser, or try to run an app on their favorite feature phone. And they wait for it to become responsive... ...and wait...

Would be funny if it where true, but Netbeans on my computer loads faster than Visual Studio. And both runs equally as fast.

But Java was the important thing we couldn't let die. And it isn't open source so the community couldn't steal it away from oracle.

Java is fully open-sourced and the most open-sourced programming language I know. OpenJDK is the same source code Oracle uses for its JDK. It's easy to download and compile all Java executables. Here is a guide and a Youtube video detailing how to build the JDK.

Java is defined and updated by the JSR process, which resembles RFCs. And also by the JEP process which tells you exactly what's being built into Java and when. You can also use their bugtrackers and mailing lists to track Oracle engineers' work.

I've learnt a ton just by tracking those lists.

The question you should be asking is - which shared calendar protocol should we choose?

Good call on the question remark, I'd disagree with your answer.

The problem is that iCalendar isn't calendar 'line' or 'sharing protocol, it's more of a 'serialization/persistance' protocol. iCalendar does not define any connection or query methods. Things like that have to be defined if there is to be any interop. We've actually written tools around the iCalendar/WebDAV combo, they work great for smaller teams, but you run into problems very quickly has the team grows or the calendar's use increases.

As things settle down, CalDAV, a.k.a RFC 4791 will probably become more of an entrenched calendar sharing standard. I've been working on a CalDAV Outlook plugin, Open Connector for quite some time. CalDAV is supported by Apple Calendaring products, Mozill thunderbird, Oracle calendaring server and a bunch of other open-source and commercial packages.