KDE for Windows

KDE 4.1 is here, and windows.kde.org packed it for Win32 already. As long as there are lots of useful apps in KDE without good win32 alternatives - I installed it on my working XP machine.

While Amarok is still in deep alpha - I couldn't start it. But there are two apps I can't live without - KWrite and Kompare. Both of them have great user interface, and gives you all advanced possibilities you can imagine. There is no other free editor to support about 90 different source file types and full encoding support, with possibility to open file with one encoding and to save with any other. There is no good file comparition program with such pretty and usable interface as Kompare. If you are interested - give it a try!

I am still waiting for Krusader and Okular, but my life under windows is already much simpler.

Security circus

In big outsourcing offices there are lots of security policies, and most of them are stupid enough. Don't you think so?

On my current job there is policy to change passwords every 3 weeks. What for? My first password was something like "R00mpel$htit$hen", while all the next password are "Anykey1", "Anykey2", ..., "AnykeyN". Same for all guys in my team. So, is office security much stronger now?

Java5 forever or Codename: No Future

Java6 exists almost two years now, and Java5 "is in its Java Technology End of Life (EOL) transition period". While I admire people, using top versions of Sun's Java, there are lots of folks, who are still using Java5. All of them have different reasons: someone just don't want to bother saying "Why should I?", someone have some strange compatibility or porting problems. Someone saying about business, about cost of migrating from Java5 to Java6.

But how long your project will exist on Java5? Year or two? You spent your money on your project, do you really want to join it's lifetime with Java5 lifetime?

Let me explain. You have project, you have N services and X users. If your organization has no evolution - everything is just fine. But if your project grows - you have N = N + 1 services and X = X + 50 users each half-year. Once your current hardware will not be enough, you will move to better hardware. On better hardware you will have new operating system that supports all your hardware (for example, Windows 2003 Server supports only 4 CPUs/CPU kernels). And what if there will be no Java5 for that operating system? Sun is not supporting Java3, Java4 and soon Java5 anymore, who will care about your problems and your needs? Red Hat? Or Microsoft? Currently, there is even no possibility to download Java3 directly from Sun, or there is no Java4 for x86_64 platform. Do you want to make your business on zombie products?

Sun gives you the best platform of our times. Sun gives you standards, public APIs, open and flexible platform. Sun gives you own implementation of it's platform, saying there are lots of them around. Sun also guarantee backward compatibility (Java4-Java5 is another step, I am talking only about Java5-Java6 now), and only possible compatibility problem - usage of sun.** API. But even here Sun gave you compiler warning: "sun.** is Sun proprietary API and may be removed in a future release", and it's some king of mental retardation to ignore warnings like this.

So, as for me - if you can't move from Java5 to Java6 - your project is dead, and you is guilty in its death, no matter how long will it take to make it smell like old corpse.