Lord, how I miss KDE3. It worked, simply worked. It didn't lock up. When my Linux box was running KDE3, I don't recall ever having to telnet in to restart a frozen machine. It happens all too often with KDE4. And KDE4 ruined, utterly ruined, KMail, once the best email program I ever used. KDE4's efforts at a "semantic desktop" and a "personal information manager" rendered over a dozen years of email archives unsearchable by anything but find and grep. Restarting, clean-up and reinstalling, etc. never worked. Hello, Thunderbird. You ain't all that great, but at least you let me search old emails. Farewell, KDE. Farewell SUSE. Farewell, Linux. My personal workstation has been Linux since 2000, but it looks like you've driven me back to my first love, the Macintosh.

KMail was always my favorite but the axis of evil that is Akonadi, Nepomuk, and Strigi have ruined it. Not long ago indexing just shut down rendering twelve years of KMail archives about as searchable as the spiral notebooks on my shelf. And that was a good day. On a bad day some filter kicked in and removed the message body from all incoming emails.

No amount of Google searching, no amount of reloading and resetting, no amount question on the KDE boards helped. Indexing might start, but it always froze

Screw KDE. I switched to Thunderbird, finding a Python script that moved all my mail archives from maildir to mbox. I hated to give up maildir, but at least now my email is usable.

I'll second the various recommendations for Firebird.

About 10 years ago our senior engineer asked me to look into open source database systems as a back end for our product. The idea was to target customers who didn't want or couldn't afford Oracle, Sybase, etc. MySQL was out since it can't be use commercially without fee. PostgreSQL (at that time) lacked a robust transaction management system. Firebird was in its infancy, still known as Borland's Interbase, but it was fully open source and had the transaction management chops I needed.

In just a few weeks I had ported over 13K lines of Oracle embedded SQL to Firebird|Interbase. It worked very well, and was easy to install. It's speed, simplicity, and reliability quickly made it our go-to database for inhouse use. When Macintosh went Intel and db vendors stopped supporting Mac, we began using Firebird commercially. It's a champ.

Unless they involve minors, misdemeanor charges--DUI, shoplifting, simple assault, etc--are matter of public record. Why should these charges be an exception?

I fell into CS by accident. My first job out of the Army was to perform analysis and studies for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the Army Reserves misplaced my file and could not confirm my clearances. While I was being recleared, to keep me off overhead I was put on a project that was developing computer systems for tactical units. In November 1982 I was given one of the first GiRDs and told to "think of how you would use this if you were back in the infantry." Shortly after that I was learning SQL and Pascal. So long ago...

...and computing sales tax on a state-by-state business is too difficult for them. Bah!

I Gnu it.

There is nothing new about annotating electronic documents. This has been a part of document management systems for decades. I've been at this company (http://www.mindwrap.com/) for over 15 years. It's been part and parcel of our product since before I arrived. Before that, in 1993, I worked on a FileNet document management system installation. FileNet already had an annotation capability for Windows clients. I wrote a Macintosh implementation for the project.

I second this. I've been using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT, http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/) for about 5 years now with good results. Write in Java, compile to Javascript, and let GWT handle the browser differences. The source is all there if you want to see how their Javascript works, and you can insert you're own Javascript code when and where you want it. Finally, the user's group has been an excellent source of advice.

I'm wondering if this charge is legally provable. I would think the complainant would have to do some reverse engineering of Symantec's software and reverse engineering is most likely forbidden by Symantec's EULA. Without this, how can it be proven what Symantec did or did not find on the computer? Even then, does anyone think it can be made understandable to a judge or 12 jurors?