I am very happy. I am enjoying my Jaunty -> Karmic upgrade more than my Vista -> Win7 upgrade.

I prefer emusic. They're the first service that was cost effective and more convenient than piracy. They have all my music (I prefer electronica and industrial), so I never bother with iTunes.

If I want to pay iTunes prices and not deal with the BS DRM, I can go to Amazon.

I could really care less about another music store. They're probably just preparing for Android to hit iPhones with music capability.

A decent mp3 player on Linux...that would be interesting. Amarok is glacially slow and incredibly unstable. Rhythmbox is reasonable, but has bugs with ID3 tags that I never deal with in Musicmatch in the old days and Media Monkey today on windows.

Have you tried using AMD's drivers with 2 monitors? They don't work! Their configuration process is tedious and error prone. Their Catalyst software is incredibly amateurish and dated-looking. nVidia's configuration process is not ideal, but I can always get my nVidia cards working in Linux. I am now a lifelong nVidia customer.

It's a shame because I like AMD cards and really love their CPUs, but their cards don't work. AMD doesn't care about Linux. I have tried 3 AMD cards in the last 4 years (I tried 3 different cards 2 months ago) and had to return all of them because they don't work in Linux. I scoured the web for help with the various errors and posted on the forums and couldn't get them working on two monitors. I tried writing support and they told me to go f**k myself (in polite terms, of course).

I don't think you understand. Let me give you an example. With Spring, I can browse their SVN trunk and see what they're up to. I can use unreleased software, submit bugs, and possible even submit patches. With BDB, I only see Zips of releases, making it relatively inconvenient to contribute. I love the BDB guys, but getting involved is really encumbered by Oracle. SpringSource and JBoss, on the other hand, do a great job of encouraging involvement.

Open Source In Name Only not only hinders an application's progress and development, but it's not really sustainable. Why give out something for free, call it Open Source, but not seek help from the community? It makes me think the commercial companies are just going to dump it when they figure out they're not making any money off of it.

Also, Oracle Forums SUCK. They're slow and buggy. Honestly, with the one exception of BDB, I have never seen software improve after Oracle got their hands on it (& I credit the motivated Sleepycat team, especially Mark Hayes...not Oracle). I'm not a fan of Oracle's main DB and everything else they've put out, with the exception BDB, has been awful, amateurish garbage. I used to hate Microsoft and they I started working with Oracle products and really started appreciating MS.

Glassfish v3 is on of the best web containers I've seen yet. It's as fast as Jetty and Tomcat and just as easy to use. I'd hate to see it die in favor of WebLogic or plummet to mediocrity, like the rest of the Oracle Family.

Obviously, I'm a bit worried about MySQL as well. Sun was just starting to put out compelling products and figuring out what to do with Java, I hope Oracle doesn't make anything worse.

I love BDB. Oracle bought them and now they've hampered open source involvement. You can't see their source repositories. All you can do is get a zip of their latest release. I don't think any non-Oracle employee contributes to BDB. Read-only open source is barely open-source. I don't want the same to happen to Java, Glassfish, and Netbeans.

Try actually benchmarking Java http://kano.net/javabench/ Server-side Java is one of the fastest scalable platforms available.

If you think writing code for Java 5+ is "fashion," I don't think you're a very experienced programmer.

Generics and java.util.Concurrent are mandatory for scalable systems nowadays. Java 5 added a lot of features to make code more reliable, not mindless fluff.

If you're not using the latest features of the language where appropriate, you're doing your employer a huge disservice.

Sorry, buddy, but you need to learn your technology. Just because people will employ you to write on outdated systems, doesn't mean you're doing your company a favor by refusing to learn the latest technologies and writing your code to run on JDK 1.4.

Fortunately, this is a local and not a global situation. This would affect the mosquitoes near the laser, but none that are out of "line of sight." It's far less devastating than spraying with DDT or other chemicals. I see this as a great innovation and look forward to less mosquito bites when sitting on my deck.

Why do I care about your lousy browser? If it only runs on Mac and PC, it is not a serious browser. The Linux browser market is expanding due to netbooks and phones.

Screw Apple. I always though iTunes was a pretty crappy program. It performs poorly, crashes often, and was always behind its competitors in terms of features.

Why bother supporting Safari? If I want enthusiasts and casual users to support my site, I only need to code for IE and Firefox. Firefox has better plugins anyway.

Speed? Firefox 3.1 is pretty fast, We'll have to see just how fast Safari 4 is when both Firefox 3.1 and Safari 4 are officially released. I doubt Safari will be much faster than Firefox 3.1 on Windows.

Think Differently? I don't see any difference between Apple and MS these days. They both try to tie you into proprietary formats and do a piss poor job of supporting other operating systems. IE runs poorly on Mac and (relatively) well on Windows, Safari barely ran on Windows and was well supported on Mac. I don't see how Apple is any better. They're just Microsoft in a prettier dress.

Ignoring your grammar difficulty, the majority of useful applications out there require a non-embedded database solution...therefore, some configuration is mandatory, for pretty much any application on any platform. To all of you complainers, I work on an application which deploys successfully to Jetty, Tomcat, JBoss 4.2, and Glassfish (as just the ones I've tested). In fact, I test it on all 4 platforms on a regular basis. Sorry, but it works perfectly for me.

Java is a great platform that gives excellent performance and scales well. Outside of initial JNDI datasource configuration (which is technically optional, but very much a best practice), I've had relatively few issues deploying from container to container. I think you folks are exaggerating the effort needed to successfully deploy Java applications.

I'm sorry, learning Java requires a bit of effort. It is a serious language designed to do serious work and optimized for larger, mission-critical projects. It's my first choice of a tool for writing a server side project and the one of the very few I'd choose for a project with more than 3 coders (.NET is the only other serious contender in the arena of large projects). I'm sorry you're having so much difficulty and all I can suggest is that you spend a little more time reading the tutorial and documentation and less time spreading baseless FUD.

I really wonder how many of these critical statements in these comments are being made by experienced, proficient Java developers, and how many are simply being made by a bunch of second rate self-proclaimed coders who are bitter that Java requires a bit greater understanding of OOP and the language to write a useful application than PHP or Ruby.

First of all, I agree. Google has jumped the shark, which is good for us all. I'm sick of the Google hype. Everyone fawns over every half-baked Google project, such as this one. I'm really getting sick of their arrogance and will be enjoying watching them fall.

The worst part is that they are only supporting Windows. If it was multi-platform like lindenlabs second life, I'd be willing to consider it an interesting experiment that could lead to a platform for something entertaining...perhaps some interesting games down the road. I can't see anything useful or even interesting about avatar chat.

The worst part is that Google gets headlines for such a stupid idea...just because their Google. If a startup came up with a useless Windows 3D chat client, it'd never make it to Slashdot. Stop buying into the Google hype CmdrTaco. I hope they bribed you well for this story.