Keep in mind, MSDN licenses are annual subscriptions - so MS developers pay for the dev tools EVERY YEAR, and they keep on paying .......

..... and who in their right mind would thing for more then 1 second it would NOT be used to spy on the US - lets face it, if you want to black-male people you might as well target the richest country in the world first :-)

So how long will it be before someone sells this service for Advertising - or add a banner "this broadcast was brought to you by...."

NZ changed the dates for it 'summer' last year - it was published a year out - all major distros and time servers had had the new dates loaded and it was mostly seamless.

MS even put out an update to update the timezone file on Windows ....

The only people that had any problems where those that where running old system (read big Unix/ mainframe system that never miss a beat - but do not accept updates either, due to being isolated from the outside world - they needed the timezone file to be manually updated) , or had not applied the updates.
Mostly - moving the date by 2 weeks at each end of 'summer' was a none event - but it meant I was able to get home and have beer on the deck in the afternoon sum :-)

Cheers

Dude - OSGI is soooo much more then Tomcats class loader separation. Think of a SINGLE web app (war file in Tomcat) that needs to use two versions of the same jar file (think apache-commons).... This is OSGI -binding to specific library versions WITHIN the same class loader context - all dependencies specified in the manifest file. But I agree with the reviewer - if you are not running into enterprise level lass loader issues, dependency issues, and other resource management (pooling etc) management, you probably will be a while away from needing OSGI, but in an enterprise scale environment, OSGI solves some very nasty problems. Nick

Mobile is Sexy - PCs are "old news" - it is as simple as that. Marketing is saying that the future is mobile - so everyone is focusing their efforts to product mobile - PCs as we know then are dead - I would not be surprised if you will not be able to buy a PC as we know it in 5 yeas time. Nick

It depends on your requirements - if you can install other shells such as powershell, perl, java, python .... then pick your poison. If you want to maintain your initial statement of a single file (and here my assumption is that it must run an all windows machines in your network) - DOS works. Why make it pretty ? There is nothing wrong with a simple text menu in DOS - provided it is simple.

So If I stand on my PC and fall off, and injure a nerve and develop any syndrome....... .am I allowed to say the PC caused it?
GROW UP

I feel sorry for you all with a tax system that is impossible to track.

The obvious solution is to ignore the fact that it is ecommerce and treat the sale as though the person was standing at the shop counter ordering goods - this is the idea behind ecommerce - a virtual shop.
This way the tax that should be applied is the tax of the state where the business is located. The sales channel should not effect the tax rate.

Back to my origional point - having differing state and regional tax rates is nuts. NZ introduced a flat tax (GST) on every item purchased or service rendered - no exceptions- some 15 years back - this is working well. Aus introduced a similar thing a few years back and it seems to be working- even though they added a whole bunch of exceptions that are exempt which increases the complexity of administratioon (AKA COST).

The US needs to bring its tax system in to the 1980's level of thinking (we wont ask you to advance too far:-) )