Use it or loss it should be the way to go. You get granted a patent or buy it and if in say 2 years you don't have a commercially available product that uses that patient it goes into public domain. You can't sue someone unless you have an actual product that customers could have bought instead after that period. Before that period you can sue as normal since it might take a couple years to spin up production. But sitting on it and hoping someone infringes is BS.
I lived in east Germany for a couple years me and all my friends lived in flats that had radiators. But yeah electricity prices were ridiculous something like 25cents euro per kWh.
That is more to do with a lot of europe using radiators for heating I think. In Canada where I live ~90% of heating is done with natural gas. People use a bit more power since it is darker earlier in the day but not drastically more compared to a 35C day with the AC on. As you mentioned to UK and western europe generally have milder weather than northern US and Canada so even if they are using electricity to heat the house going from say -2C versus -20C is a little different in energy use.
Seasonal affects: electricity demand is usually peak in the summer when people kick their air conditioners in. So works pretty well seasonally actually. The problem is night and day differences.
Storing: the solar arrays that heat water can do this. Electric cars could be used for this: discharge into the grid from say 5-9pm and then charge over night. Also, and this should have been incentivized decades ago: load should be balanced as much as possible. Building expensive infrastructure that is only turned on for a few hours a day is crazy. Could have been done by originally building the grid out to average load + say 5%. No peaker reactors, just that is it. Level it within 5% or do without your toaster strudel 8pm lard ass:-).
For capital software investments their is typically a cycle 3-10 years depending on the training required and cheapness of the company. Sometimes things don't line up (money available for the 2M software now new release of windows next year, probably another year after that before the vendor has the kinks out of their software for that release) and the company simply doesn't want to wait another couple years to get rid of their by then ~5 year old system.
Agreed with the testing required for healthcare stuff but also I think it becomes an excuse to let old cludgy things kick around for ever because they work... sort of... and no one can be found willing to bother to fix it and go through all the pain of getting approvals again to fix the "little problems" with the existing systems. Liability concerns put a pretty big theshold on the size of organizations and the size of problems that can be attempted to solve. I've developed several apps that my app doesn't necessarily care to commercialize and have some interest from other hospitals but just because of the liability headache no one wants to touch it. So instead each hospital can hire someone like me and develop similar tools themselves, wasteful but each $500 app isn't worth the time to go through approvals and deal with the risk.
Mah I get your argument. I like Win 7 and wish my org had upgraded years ago. But healthcare: each computer has ~20k of software on it all of which would need to be validated as working on Win 7 and the vendors would have to support it that way etc. Since our IT is also one of our principle software vendors they have no incentive to support newer tech: "devs say we'd rather do X which we can sell for Y to ~40% of our customers", and the sys admin department says "Ok we just won't upgrade anything for 10 years" problem solved. Thanks McKesson.
The think with.Net 4.5: the CTP of async works on XP for that reason alone it should be working on XP. Add to that that Office 2007 shipped for XP with the ribbon interface (which.Net 4.0 doesn't have) and that 4.5 is just an in place upgrade of 4.0 (Ie a superset of the functionality all of 4.0 is still in there) I don't see the point in dropping it. In my mind if the OS isn't EOL yet than the dev tools should support it.
Jan 2000 was when Gates stopped being CEO was the point I started the clock in my post. But even if you grab say 2005 well after Gates stopped being CEO (or really any period ~2years ago, it still holds share yield has grown under Ballmer. To me yield matters more than share price, or at least it should, since that is really where value is generated not in some artificial group of nutjobs deciding that FB is worth $38/share with shit for earnings just because it is cool. If you buy the local corner store you don't care what people think about your company, you care about the speed that dollars enter the till.
Good point with the board position though. Think he was for a while chief software architect which I think is the role where he would muddling around with product development more so than the board role.
Haha so true. People that get all pissy because someone would rather have one button to do the build rather than have to type a couple lines of flags into gcc, or fiddle around with a makefile etc rather than get things done:-) If your customer is going to see it or worse your customer's customers its got to look good. A big part of a successful program is one that is just fun to use. Sadly for those of us that aren't skilled in graphical design, that often means minimal number of buttons to get something done and pretty buttons and other interface elements all along the way. Nothing makes me wince more than looking at something like the POS system at a video store that is old school dos with a horrid interface pattern. I get it that you don't necessarily want to clutter the till area with a mouse but still, when it becomes press tab 20 times then type this bizarre key combination to get another menu to fill out that becomes painful, it works so it is still around, but it doesn't bring any joy to anyone's life.
4.5 not supporting XP touche. That said lots of threads saying that MS might port it since it just overwrites 4.0. There is a thread to vote for adding it so that 4.5 will support every platform that 4.0 does. I think it should kind of silly that the CTP for a significant feature works on XP but the "baked" version doesn't. Ribbon control has been around since 2007 but you don't get it on XP because we decided in 2012 that we will only ship that version of.Net to win 7 and greater? Boo. Should have been available much sooner, and even if not still should be available for the platform.
I don't think it was an accident that XBox was good and cheap. Design decisions: commodity PC like hardware: oddles of people that already know how to code games for something like that, the hardware's commodity use in other areas give you volume effects you are unlikely to get with some odd "emotion engine" architecture etc. For XBox 360: HDDVD: bad guess, at the time no one knew which would win I don't think this is the reason why XBox 360 was cheaper, it was cheaper because it used relatively more mainstream hardware rather than some oddball CPU that was being produced in small volume.Kinect: something pretty awesome from what I've seen of it online (I live in a bubble with my 55" screen and PS3 so no XBox for me but consider it comparable) and the next logical step from the Wii mote. Might add for example a whole lot of touch like gestures to tablets and desktops without the need for a touch screen and the mess of having someone touching your screen all the time.
.Net EOL? Source? I've only heard that from people not working at MS, everyone from MS that I've heard talk are talking about the new features (what they can say anyways) for the next version of the framework. Why would they have gone to all the trouble of making WinRT understand javascript, HTML5, C++,.Net etc if they didn't plan on keeping it around? It would have made more sense to just say ".Net for desktop apps and ASP, for this new cool thing we think you'll all love you'll be able to use the web tech you are probably already good with". C# IMHO is just a beautiful language, the new C++ standard has a lot of the niceness of.Net but still nice and a lot of people know how to use it = not going anywhere. Just like people always predict the death of COBOL or Fortran: useful languages gain a huge codebase, established market of people familiar with them, university/college courses to teach people them etc. It doesn't go away in a few years it takes decades. Since.Net relies on a VM to run MS is pretty much stuck making at least the current version of.Net work on future systems for the next few releases. If they don't people will make their own (Mono for example) or build the libraries out and make a native compiler.
Vista->Win 7 agreed. Email: I'm thinking more servers with Exchange. Not sure what the MS tech from the 90's was but most people I knew were using sendmail or something similar back then part of the reason why people were going nuts for Sun hardware and geeks in robes praying to the UNIX gods was still cool because it let you do something useful on your win 95 box windows didn't really have anything comparable for internet and email.
Exactly. I might add that I live in a country that didn't go tits up a few years ago so while money was used to stimulate the economy their wasn't much of a bailout (other than a bit to the US autos since we make a lot of parts for them). I'm spiteful (not jealous because I want to be worth the money they earn not just earn it) that these performance incentives get given when the performance is good and when it is bad. That companies have interlocking board memberships effectively guaranteeing every year that executive pay will raise not becuase of external competitive market for top talent but because all the top talent meet together and agree "yep we deserve a raise this year".
As a shareholder (via company pension, government pension and personal retirement savings) it pisses me off that my money is given away to executives that didn't earn it (high salary for provable high value add I'm okay with, high salary because your whole industry just happens to be having a good year (a la commodity companies) not so much), giving it away to charities, giving it away to politicians etc. No. You're a business, make the products/services that your good at and customers will pay you for and give me, the owner, the profit from the gusiness that I funded with my money at risk not some local troop of girl guides so you can get a photo op in the local newspaper looking like a great guy (always easiest to look generous when you are giving away someone elses money without even having the decency of telling them beforehand). So that is why I'm spitful: only executives (via usually their whiping boys if not directly by being the chair of the board (shouldn't be allowed IMHO), or via incenstuous interlocking board memberships) get to give themselves a raise. The employees under them get told "no we can't afford it, bad economy blah blah", the business owners get told "sorry their isn't much profit left it was a bad year so we had to "reinvest" everything", executives? For the most part a pat on the back and a reliable 5-10% raise every year.
Yep. Just a question of how well.Net 4.5 (and 5.0 in ~1-2 years I imagine) are supported in VS2010. All I know so far is the async stuff seems to work fine (both functionally in running code and autocompletion, intellisense etc at dev time). Not sure about the gui stuff (ribbon), or WCF and such as I don't use them. Another thing that could of been mentioned in the origional post: VS2012 doesn't support XP it's dead... finally. My work still runs XP so at least until they upgrade I couldn't run VS2012 in an unvirtualized manner at work anyways. I get it that this release supports metro and they are really trying to push people to upgrade their whole stack but it would be nice if even if they couldn't for some reason support metro development on XP they at least had the option of not installing the pieces for metro and use it on XP for desktop/web development (which is all I intend to use it for anyways).
No a gui developer (among other things). Manager/product owner looking over the shoulder doesn't want to wait for compiles to see if that (0.03, 0.5) => (0.05, 0.5) code change made things look right. Even if it is well documented creating say Words ribbon in code would be painful. Could be done but painful. I coded graphics in the 90's with nothing but MFC, pain.
I didn't mention it but there is also the whole code side of things too. How helpful the documentation (intellisense/object browser level) will be in an IDE that wasn't designed for the framework version. Should be okay if it is all feed from the imbedded XML docs and reflection but who knows? (When has MS ever followed one of their own guidelines/best practices in its entirety?). I'm using 4.5 beta for async functionality and it seems to be good enough. Didn't realize that ribbon was part of the 4.5 upgrade too. Didn't go looking for it in the IDE no real good place to put it as I tend to try to make things simple enough that all that is needed is a date picker and GO button and all the eye candy is in the data visualization. Still I don't want to have to learn that I need to cast my radiobutton as a IRibbonComponent before feeding it into a and IObservable collection of IRibbonComponent that I data bind the ribbon or some other convoluted crap to before I can "make it go". Drag and drop, fix what I have to in code and the rest is all business logic is the way I like to fly.
"They don't know what to say. They don't know what to do."
Porn teaches you how to interact with women "Suck my dick bitch now get down and let me bust on your face." What is so hard about that (besides the fact it is offensive and the majority of girls are not facial fans)?
How can tossing off ruin you? The romans didn't use enough religious nutjobs as torches and we continue to have to live with societies that want to make you feel guilty for having pleasure in your life.
I agree. My guess on this: they really really want the windows store to be successful. Apple gets it easy because so few people actually bother to make desktop apps for Mac (yeah I know Office, Adobe, Matlab etc exist for mac but very very small compared to MS land, or even Linux). Since their really isn't the mentality in the apple community of buying packaged software for the desktop for every little think you want like companies do with windows anyone dreaming of getting rich on the platform automatically jumped all over their store. MS is the complete opposite: companies are used to directly marketing to customers and are very suspicious of MS trying to get control over everything sold on the platform (rightly so).
The express versions I think were always intended for people learning development/hobbyist. "Real work" was supposed to be done by a paid version. It makes since that MS wouldn't want to encourage people to spend their time learning how to develop apps the "old" way when who knows win 9 might not have a desktop at all.
You can (at least as the moment not sure when VS 2011 Win 8 ships) get the.net compiler for free. You can still code in.Net and compile it. An MSDN subscription might be useful but most things you can find out for free on the web, heck the framework docs are all up on the web for free too (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/618ayhy6%28v=vs.100%29 for example). Compiling.Net from the command line is no worse than doing a C build with gcc from the command line. Search a bit to figure out what you need to type then throw it into a script so you can forget it. Not supplying an IDE (which is essentially just a glorified text editor/file browser that knows how to build a project) doesn't mean you can't develop for the platform.
Not a fan of his personality but since Gates has left: XBox,.Net, Windows server ~3X gain in market share, dido database solutions. Dominant in most large corporations for email as well. They've done some good things, they've done some bad things like all companies. In pure business sense they are doing pretty good: http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/earning_yield#series=type:company,id:MSFT,calc:earning_yield&zoom=&startDate=6/30/2002&endDate=5/25/2012&format=real&recessions=false earnings yield went from ~1.75% to ~10% since 2002 (couldn't get a chart out to 2000 when Gates left) while they traded ~flat since the dot com boom. So MS today has the earnings to back up the valuation versus MS of Gates day. They might have boggled the phone, screwed the pouch with Vista etc but they earn money, at least now. Consumer software isn't the only source of revenue.
I think CEOs that need to be crapped on are the ones that gave them selves bonuses when they were getting government bailouts and losing money. Or the second they got out of government ownership decide to reward themselves with 10's of millions as deferred payment for all those hard years of ~1M/yr salaries.
Intellisense for HTML, javascript CSS etc that is huge too if you are into web dev (other than XBAP apps fortunately I've avoided the alphabet soup that is web development but mah, it's there if you need it.
Agreed VS is hands down better than anything I've seen for free (net beans, eclipse, KDevelop, Monodevelop, emacs, vi etc etc) just don't compare. A lot of them are good if that is what you have access to but given a choice between any of them and even the express addition of VS, VS wins hands down..net 4.5 has extra controls but also works with vs 2010. I'm curious if the IDE will pick up icons for the controls and add them to the tools tab. I've had some third party charting tools that showed up properly in the tools if it was referenced in the project. Hopefully the same happens here with core features added to.Net that weren't originally around when VS2010 shipped. Or a service pack.
Sadly my work likely won't fork over ~2-5k for and IDE. They'll just ask: can't you use a free tool and I'll have to admit, yeah I can but somethings will be a bit harder to do. They'll just have me keep using whatever is free and piss away $100 a day in productivity since it is money already budgeted for rather than trying to squeeze some money from somewhere for proper tooling.
My, albeit limited, experience with MySpace is that it is a completely different animal. It is designed as a simple personal website with extras to allow you to interact with your "fans". FB from the ground up was designed to find other people and interact with them. The wall/profile is more of a way of knowing you got the right Melissa Etheridge before you start throwing your tomatoes.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably the first case of jewish terrorism, can I get an Oh Snap?
Use it or loss it should be the way to go. You get granted a patent or buy it and if in say 2 years you don't have a commercially available product that uses that patient it goes into public domain. You can't sue someone unless you have an actual product that customers could have bought instead after that period. Before that period you can sue as normal since it might take a couple years to spin up production. But sitting on it and hoping someone infringes is BS.
I lived in east Germany for a couple years me and all my friends lived in flats that had radiators. But yeah electricity prices were ridiculous something like 25cents euro per kWh.
That is more to do with a lot of europe using radiators for heating I think. In Canada where I live ~90% of heating is done with natural gas. People use a bit more power since it is darker earlier in the day but not drastically more compared to a 35C day with the AC on. As you mentioned to UK and western europe generally have milder weather than northern US and Canada so even if they are using electricity to heat the house going from say -2C versus -20C is a little different in energy use.
Seasonal affects: electricity demand is usually peak in the summer when people kick their air conditioners in. So works pretty well seasonally actually. The problem is night and day differences.
Storing: the solar arrays that heat water can do this. Electric cars could be used for this: discharge into the grid from say 5-9pm and then charge over night. Also, and this should have been incentivized decades ago: load should be balanced as much as possible. Building expensive infrastructure that is only turned on for a few hours a day is crazy. Could have been done by originally building the grid out to average load + say 5%. No peaker reactors, just that is it. Level it within 5% or do without your toaster strudel 8pm lard ass :-).
A GWh not a 22 gigawatts per hour, 22GWh. 22 giga joules per hour would have made sense though :)
For capital software investments their is typically a cycle 3-10 years depending on the training required and cheapness of the company. Sometimes things don't line up (money available for the 2M software now new release of windows next year, probably another year after that before the vendor has the kinks out of their software for that release) and the company simply doesn't want to wait another couple years to get rid of their by then ~5 year old system.
Agreed with the testing required for healthcare stuff but also I think it becomes an excuse to let old cludgy things kick around for ever because they work ... sort of ... and no one can be found willing to bother to fix it and go through all the pain of getting approvals again to fix the "little problems" with the existing systems. Liability concerns put a pretty big theshold on the size of organizations and the size of problems that can be attempted to solve. I've developed several apps that my app doesn't necessarily care to commercialize and have some interest from other hospitals but just because of the liability headache no one wants to touch it. So instead each hospital can hire someone like me and develop similar tools themselves, wasteful but each $500 app isn't worth the time to go through approvals and deal with the risk.
Mah I get your argument. I like Win 7 and wish my org had upgraded years ago. But healthcare: each computer has ~20k of software on it all of which would need to be validated as working on Win 7 and the vendors would have to support it that way etc. Since our IT is also one of our principle software vendors they have no incentive to support newer tech: "devs say we'd rather do X which we can sell for Y to ~40% of our customers", and the sys admin department says "Ok we just won't upgrade anything for 10 years" problem solved. Thanks McKesson.
The think with .Net 4.5: the CTP of async works on XP for that reason alone it should be working on XP. Add to that that Office 2007 shipped for XP with the ribbon interface (which .Net 4.0 doesn't have) and that 4.5 is just an in place upgrade of 4.0 (Ie a superset of the functionality all of 4.0 is still in there) I don't see the point in dropping it. In my mind if the OS isn't EOL yet than the dev tools should support it.
Jan 2000 was when Gates stopped being CEO was the point I started the clock in my post. But even if you grab say 2005 well after Gates stopped being CEO (or really any period ~2years ago, it still holds share yield has grown under Ballmer. To me yield matters more than share price, or at least it should, since that is really where value is generated not in some artificial group of nutjobs deciding that FB is worth $38/share with shit for earnings just because it is cool. If you buy the local corner store you don't care what people think about your company, you care about the speed that dollars enter the till.
Good point with the board position though. Think he was for a while chief software architect which I think is the role where he would muddling around with product development more so than the board role.
Haha so true. People that get all pissy because someone would rather have one button to do the build rather than have to type a couple lines of flags into gcc, or fiddle around with a makefile etc rather than get things done :-) If your customer is going to see it or worse your customer's customers its got to look good. A big part of a successful program is one that is just fun to use. Sadly for those of us that aren't skilled in graphical design, that often means minimal number of buttons to get something done and pretty buttons and other interface elements all along the way. Nothing makes me wince more than looking at something like the POS system at a video store that is old school dos with a horrid interface pattern. I get it that you don't necessarily want to clutter the till area with a mouse but still, when it becomes press tab 20 times then type this bizarre key combination to get another menu to fill out that becomes painful, it works so it is still around, but it doesn't bring any joy to anyone's life.
It's been all downhill since Dawson's Creek got cancelled.
4.5 not supporting XP touche. That said lots of threads saying that MS might port it since it just overwrites 4.0. There is a thread to vote for adding it so that 4.5 will support every platform that 4.0 does. I think it should kind of silly that the CTP for a significant feature works on XP but the "baked" version doesn't. Ribbon control has been around since 2007 but you don't get it on XP because we decided in 2012 that we will only ship that version of .Net to win 7 and greater? Boo. Should have been available much sooner, and even if not still should be available for the platform.
I don't think it was an accident that XBox was good and cheap. Design decisions: commodity PC like hardware: oddles of people that already know how to code games for something like that, the hardware's commodity use in other areas give you volume effects you are unlikely to get with some odd "emotion engine" architecture etc. For XBox 360: HDDVD: bad guess, at the time no one knew which would win I don't think this is the reason why XBox 360 was cheaper, it was cheaper because it used relatively more mainstream hardware rather than some oddball CPU that was being produced in small volume.Kinect: something pretty awesome from what I've seen of it online (I live in a bubble with my 55" screen and PS3 so no XBox for me but consider it comparable) and the next logical step from the Wii mote. Might add for example a whole lot of touch like gestures to tablets and desktops without the need for a touch screen and the mess of having someone touching your screen all the time.
Vista->Win 7 agreed. Email: I'm thinking more servers with Exchange. Not sure what the MS tech from the 90's was but most people I knew were using sendmail or something similar back then part of the reason why people were going nuts for Sun hardware and geeks in robes praying to the UNIX gods was still cool because it let you do something useful on your win 95 box windows didn't really have anything comparable for internet and email.
Exactly. I might add that I live in a country that didn't go tits up a few years ago so while money was used to stimulate the economy their wasn't much of a bailout (other than a bit to the US autos since we make a lot of parts for them). I'm spiteful (not jealous because I want to be worth the money they earn not just earn it) that these performance incentives get given when the performance is good and when it is bad. That companies have interlocking board memberships effectively guaranteeing every year that executive pay will raise not becuase of external competitive market for top talent but because all the top talent meet together and agree "yep we deserve a raise this year".
As a shareholder (via company pension, government pension and personal retirement savings) it pisses me off that my money is given away to executives that didn't earn it (high salary for provable high value add I'm okay with, high salary because your whole industry just happens to be having a good year (a la commodity companies) not so much), giving it away to charities, giving it away to politicians etc. No. You're a business, make the products/services that your good at and customers will pay you for and give me, the owner, the profit from the gusiness that I funded with my money at risk not some local troop of girl guides so you can get a photo op in the local newspaper looking like a great guy (always easiest to look generous when you are giving away someone elses money without even having the decency of telling them beforehand). So that is why I'm spitful: only executives (via usually their whiping boys if not directly by being the chair of the board (shouldn't be allowed IMHO), or via incenstuous interlocking board memberships) get to give themselves a raise. The employees under them get told "no we can't afford it, bad economy blah blah", the business owners get told "sorry their isn't much profit left it was a bad year so we had to "reinvest" everything", executives? For the most part a pat on the back and a reliable 5-10% raise every year.
Yep. Just a question of how well .Net 4.5 (and 5.0 in ~1-2 years I imagine) are supported in VS2010. All I know so far is the async stuff seems to work fine (both functionally in running code and autocompletion, intellisense etc at dev time). Not sure about the gui stuff (ribbon), or WCF and such as I don't use them. Another thing that could of been mentioned in the origional post: VS2012 doesn't support XP it's dead ... finally. My work still runs XP so at least until they upgrade I couldn't run VS2012 in an unvirtualized manner at work anyways. I get it that this release supports metro and they are really trying to push people to upgrade their whole stack but it would be nice if even if they couldn't for some reason support metro development on XP they at least had the option of not installing the pieces for metro and use it on XP for desktop/web development (which is all I intend to use it for anyways).
No a gui developer (among other things). Manager/product owner looking over the shoulder doesn't want to wait for compiles to see if that (0.03, 0.5) => (0.05, 0.5) code change made things look right. Even if it is well documented creating say Words ribbon in code would be painful. Could be done but painful. I coded graphics in the 90's with nothing but MFC, pain.
I didn't mention it but there is also the whole code side of things too. How helpful the documentation (intellisense/object browser level) will be in an IDE that wasn't designed for the framework version. Should be okay if it is all feed from the imbedded XML docs and reflection but who knows? (When has MS ever followed one of their own guidelines/best practices in its entirety?). I'm using 4.5 beta for async functionality and it seems to be good enough. Didn't realize that ribbon was part of the 4.5 upgrade too. Didn't go looking for it in the IDE no real good place to put it as I tend to try to make things simple enough that all that is needed is a date picker and GO button and all the eye candy is in the data visualization. Still I don't want to have to learn that I need to cast my radiobutton as a IRibbonComponent before feeding it into a and IObservable collection of IRibbonComponent that I data bind the ribbon or some other convoluted crap to before I can "make it go". Drag and drop, fix what I have to in code and the rest is all business logic is the way I like to fly.
"They don't know what to say. They don't know what to do."
Porn teaches you how to interact with women "Suck my dick bitch now get down and let me bust on your face." What is so hard about that (besides the fact it is offensive and the majority of girls are not facial fans)?
666 posts at the time of writing ... nice.
How can tossing off ruin you? The romans didn't use enough religious nutjobs as torches and we continue to have to live with societies that want to make you feel guilty for having pleasure in your life.
I agree. My guess on this: they really really want the windows store to be successful. Apple gets it easy because so few people actually bother to make desktop apps for Mac (yeah I know Office, Adobe, Matlab etc exist for mac but very very small compared to MS land, or even Linux). Since their really isn't the mentality in the apple community of buying packaged software for the desktop for every little think you want like companies do with windows anyone dreaming of getting rich on the platform automatically jumped all over their store. MS is the complete opposite: companies are used to directly marketing to customers and are very suspicious of MS trying to get control over everything sold on the platform (rightly so).
The express versions I think were always intended for people learning development/hobbyist. "Real work" was supposed to be done by a paid version. It makes since that MS wouldn't want to encourage people to spend their time learning how to develop apps the "old" way when who knows win 9 might not have a desktop at all.
You can (at least as the moment not sure when VS 2011 Win 8 ships) get the .net compiler for free. You can still code in .Net and compile it. An MSDN subscription might be useful but most things you can find out for free on the web, heck the framework docs are all up on the web for free too (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/618ayhy6%28v=vs.100%29 for example). Compiling .Net from the command line is no worse than doing a C build with gcc from the command line. Search a bit to figure out what you need to type then throw it into a script so you can forget it. Not supplying an IDE (which is essentially just a glorified text editor/file browser that knows how to build a project) doesn't mean you can't develop for the platform.
Not a fan of his personality but since Gates has left: XBox, .Net, Windows server ~3X gain in market share, dido database solutions. Dominant in most large corporations for email as well. They've done some good things, they've done some bad things like all companies. In pure business sense they are doing pretty good: http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/earning_yield#series=type:company,id:MSFT,calc:earning_yield&zoom=&startDate=6/30/2002&endDate=5/25/2012&format=real&recessions=false earnings yield went from ~1.75% to ~10% since 2002 (couldn't get a chart out to 2000 when Gates left) while they traded ~flat since the dot com boom. So MS today has the earnings to back up the valuation versus MS of Gates day. They might have boggled the phone, screwed the pouch with Vista etc but they earn money, at least now. Consumer software isn't the only source of revenue.
I think CEOs that need to be crapped on are the ones that gave them selves bonuses when they were getting government bailouts and losing money. Or the second they got out of government ownership decide to reward themselves with 10's of millions as deferred payment for all those hard years of ~1M/yr salaries.
Intellisense for HTML, javascript CSS etc that is huge too if you are into web dev (other than XBAP apps fortunately I've avoided the alphabet soup that is web development but mah, it's there if you need it.
Agreed VS is hands down better than anything I've seen for free (net beans, eclipse, KDevelop, Monodevelop, emacs, vi etc etc) just don't compare. A lot of them are good if that is what you have access to but given a choice between any of them and even the express addition of VS, VS wins hands down. .net 4.5 has extra controls but also works with vs 2010. I'm curious if the IDE will pick up icons for the controls and add them to the tools tab. I've had some third party charting tools that showed up properly in the tools if it was referenced in the project. Hopefully the same happens here with core features added to .Net that weren't originally around when VS2010 shipped. Or a service pack.
Sadly my work likely won't fork over ~2-5k for and IDE. They'll just ask: can't you use a free tool and I'll have to admit, yeah I can but somethings will be a bit harder to do. They'll just have me keep using whatever is free and piss away $100 a day in productivity since it is money already budgeted for rather than trying to squeeze some money from somewhere for proper tooling.
But the US company will win.
Gay antelope sticking head up a two headed gerbil, crap wrong search engine. They'll be some questions from my LinkedIn connections tomorrow.
My, albeit limited, experience with MySpace is that it is a completely different animal. It is designed as a simple personal website with extras to allow you to interact with your "fans". FB from the ground up was designed to find other people and interact with them. The wall/profile is more of a way of knowing you got the right Melissa Etheridge before you start throwing your tomatoes.