What's most interesting is that it should be clear, this letter is a response to House members' complaints that:
* House.gov tools for posting video are not very user friendly.
* House.gov is out of disk space.
In order to continue responding to increased demand for video, House members need the ability to use other sites. Maybe they are considering big sites like YouTube as a place they can put content which would otherwise *have* to go on House.gov. A lot of candidates are using YouTube for official campaign videos, perhaps they just want the same simple forum for actively communicating with their constituents, so that we don't all feel they *only* know how to get and stay in office. Some of them write laws and, apparently, deal with issues that most slashdot users do every day, like filling hard drives.;)
I don't see that this in any way creates new restrictions or has anything to do with members of any party, or talk radio, or twitter, or blogging..
C'mon Slashdot, did YOU read the PDF? Please don't post political stories about documents without reading them, or at least change the title from:
"Nancy Pelosi vs. The Internet"
to:
"Crazy Blogger makes up story about House.gov IT solution to full drives.";)
I want to agree adamantly here. I am a returning student, a successful engineer, with job offers falling through the window, but they are boring. I have taught myself over ten programming languages, chuckle as I walk by OS debates of "Windows v OSX", and really, REALLY wish that I had not been in such a damned rush to get a boring job.
I'm majoring in Mathematics now, something you can get a decent level of Bachelor coverage in about anywhere, or even fill in at a local community college if your main four-year doesn't go as far as you want - they will help once you've exhausted their curriculum.
Also, BTW, make SURE to WRITE a lot of PAPERS about POEMS by some DEAD GUY. If it doesn't help you get laid, it will help you to quip at people for your whole life.
AND FINALLLY:)
If you think that studying CS will help you to make VIDEO GAMES throw in some Fine Art, get your history credits with Art History, something.
Some of the greatest programmers I ever worked with had liberal arts degrees - the Historian helped us to avoid critical mistakes with far-reaching consequences, the English major always knew what to name that new Class or Function, and the Physics wuss with No Math could make a mean martini.
Anyway, I would like to echo that you should be fine, and also that esp with Math and probably some other highly conceptual subjects, it is widely regarded that they are much easier to learn at your age than at mine.
So, there are reasons to go in both directions. Even a technical school should offer you opportunities to take some 'core education' courses, and again, you can usually go beyond the curriculum with a few courses at local community colleges or another uni, once you've exhausted the curriculum.
Make sure to talk to both schools about your goals on both fronts and see if one of them gives you more flexibility. consider also that many people start at one four-year institution, and transfer to another as a Junior or so. Nothing is in stone.
Be careful not to get confused here. Bell is two kinds of providers: a telecom provider and a backbone provider, which means in many cases that they would be at both ends of your DSL, with a provider in the middle.
Most ISPs have more than one uplink - most decent ones, at least, so having Bell-based-DSL doesn't mean you will be filtered at the IP Level, at all. You can have a DSL line going through Bell which ends you up at a UUNET IP Address.
Sure, and Novell Netware was around before that, and Mainframes. I mean, GEEZ, did Google invent the frakking SERVER? C'mon people the Internet is nothing new, you can't change the future, STOP TELLING ME THAT I AM GETTING OLD!!!
Nothing to fo with where the stars were when they were born Actually, I'd argue that it has everything to do with the relation between the rest of the world's schedule as relies on the position of the stars when they were born. don't forget that our measurement of time is based, scientifically, upon our position in relation to the nearest star. Would you say it's unscientific to go on 'faith' that traffic will suck on your average major thoroughfare between 7am and 9am, 4pm and 6pm, and that in most of the USA at least, it's not very safe to drive around between, say, 1am and 3am, unless you like street racing?
well, there you go. astrology at its' best is maybe a folk science, perhaps it isn't that jupiter is here or there or we can see this or that star in the sky which is the *cause*, as perceived, but that it's a familiar road sign. astronomical events have an effect on the mood and behaviour of the people of earth - ask any police officer about a full moon. so, perhaps astrology is a social science, a branch of anthropology studying the behaviour of people in relation to cosmic events with some hope of gaining predictive value.
whether your average horoscope has any unique insight is questionable, but i have definitely always thought of my astrological sign as my place within a greater whole, about as estimated as the person above who talked about estimating the speed at which a pen falls from a desk. as with any subject, i've tried to learn about it through a mix of reading, exposure to oral tradition, and experiments of forming hypotheses and playing them out.
on most days, though, i don't think much about astrology - my mood is probably more connected to whether the sky is clear and blue or cloudy.
now fortune cookies, that's a better question. scientists don't eat chinese food and enjoy what is essentially a game of chance. perhaps some people simply feel that given a deck of cards, the universe will deal them to us with enough entropy to fool.
or yanno, maybe it's all a crock. what isn't a crock these days?
Ah, also want to comment on the 4200 PATA option, yes that is lame. I believe this is a smaller-than-normal form factor, and also I feel this was designed with the SSD in mind, and that someone in Marketing said: Give me a $2k option and we'll move forward. A Middleground would be nice, but check this article:
Apparently, that 80G 4200rpm drive is also a single platter, which might affect its' performance *positively*. No other drive can fit in the space of the SSD. So, maybe I'm wrong, and they thought of this - I imagine the SSD and HD manufacturers more or less know who they are competing with in that space, and that their products will have to fit in the same design as each other.
With education discount, I've got a nice model priced at $2909 with 1.6Ghz, SSD, SuperDrive, Ethernet, and AppleCare. I spent about this much on my 12" MBP and don't recall heavily using any features it had that this won't. I also think that the external drive will be nice because it might be possible to *type* while burning, which is a real problem using a portable with integrated burner as main computer.
Yeah I don't really want to sell you on the Air, I just think it deserves more props. If you enjoy having an optical drive with you everywhere, yanno, that's great. My optical drive is a redheaded stepchild that rarely works, and that has been the case for three portables. I don't think I would go to a plastic case to gain mobility - I dropped my 12" PowerBook once from within a backpack, while walking, it bounced on the pavement, and continued working for months until someone sat on the screen while it was open. Those plastic cases crack, the power supply breaks, and really, you don't ever want to use that computer again.
If you price the SSD as a retail purchase, you will see that Apple is actually getting a really good deal on them, afaict.
As far as lack of wired ethernet, again, you don't take the ethernet cord with you - if you have a usb drive, ethernet, etc.. at each desk, it's much quicker to plug them all in at once using a $25 USB hub. Leave the dongle on the cable - I used to have a spare AC adapter which I left at work, and one I kept at home, just so I wouldn't have to fumble with them all the time. Now, of course, I just yank on the cord to get it from my loft bed down to the shelf on my desk.
Keep in mind that Dongle will probably work with any computer you can throw at it, for years. It's not like a dongle that goes with a pmcia card, it's the whole thing. Plug it into a Dell running GNU/Linux, five bucks says it'll work.
I will say that I'd like the option to bring a spare battery, but the size - the size! My main concern is that the battery degrades over time and I tend just to replace them. This could be a great excuse to have Apple upgrade your entire machine and sell the old as refurb, who knows. Mac Genii have told me many times that they feel a customer's experience will be degraded on any machine - portables, at least - that is ever opened after it leaves the factory.
It would be great to see a smaller MacBook Pro, something more like that 12" which has a bit of thickness to it, and maybe now thanks to Penryn, can tolerate some added heat from a GPU. Maybe giving the Air a GPU would even tip the scales for me, but expandable ram, swappable battery, and higher proc speeds in a thicker, but still backpack-sized package sound like they would please you.
If you aren't trying to fit this into a small backpack or something, get a 15", seriously. I want the Air for on campus because I can't carry my 15" along with several 13" books unless I bring a monstrous bag.
I'm dissappointed to see the press quoting the Mac crowd as hating the Air, because I've been running my MBP ragged trying to earn money to buy one, and it would be very sad if Apple decided to stop selling them before I could. It's clear, however, that Apple needs to look at you.
Frankly, I do plan to replace my MBP, as I have a nice 17" SGI 1600SW DFP on my desk, apple's new wireless keyboard, and with the SSD I expect a 1.6 or 1.8 speed Air to compete with my two year old 1.83 MBP, esp when dealing with virtual machines and the like.
I don't know that I'll buy another Pro until they go Quadra, which of course maybe is the new pie-in-the-sky like a G5 PB. One day someone will consider the CPU Whine in my first-gen to make it a collector's item, but I promised Chuck Csuri when he signed it that I wouldn't sell it.
Ack! Dear fellow 12" PowerBook owner, please abridge! The Air is perfect for us. Do not forget the heat issues of that machine, at least if you ran the last generation of it at 1.5Ghz - Apple discontinued it for this reason and is only exploring this territory again thanks to smaller die.
The Air plugs into a big screen, supports USB which was *designed* to expand via a hub, because the number-of-ports problem is a dead, beaten horse from the 80s and 90s. You can get a really decent looking 4-port hub on Amazon for $25 which is about the size of an index finger. From a practicality perspective, I'd rather have all my devices stay plugged into the hub, and just have one plug to plug when I come home to my desk. Don't forget that USB hubs are designed to chain, as well, up to 128 or 256, if not further, IIRC.
The only practical use for FW is video, which yes, you should have a 15 or 17" Pro for if you want to do field editing. You also shouldn't be complaining about Price if you have a RED cam. Unless you put a 15krpm drive in a FW case, you'll have a lot of trouble telling the difference between it and USB - I have two of the same model drive from the same manufacturer, and benchmarked them pretty close, to my dismay. The iPod can't connect to FireWire for years now, sadly.
Maybe by 'crippled' you're talking about the optical drive, or the graphics chip - fair enough, but don't forget that if you're talking ultraportable, it offers an SSD which I look forward to strapping to my back while sprinting around downtown - some people call this sort of swap-out-craziness a 'tradeoff'. The external optical drive is a godsend, IMO, because taking your slot-loading optical drive around with you everywhere as part of the main computer is an invitation for street dust to enter your machine and esp to haze up your optical lens.
As for Graphics, eh, I ran a major graphics community website for a good couple of years and was many times talked down from the belief that I couldn't use a 13" MacBook for serious graphics work - though of course it's bound to be limited. There's no reason that the Air should be considered "crippled" on this point.
C'mon, give up some love for the Air. Compared to the 12" PB, this thing is cooler, faster, smaller, has two cores, more RAM, motha fricking flash storage, an LED backlit screen and boasts five hours of battery life, though of course, that depends largely on the software you run and whether you can type fast enough to recharge it a little.;)
Two points to make here:
(a) slashdot always use funny words to sound smart. I don't hear the word 'gifting' in my normal day-to-day life, but if you want to talk about electronics and 'giving', you're talking about 'gifting'.
(b) speaking as someone who gifted two Macbooks last year to people who should probably have gotten coal in their stockings, the gift of knowledge is not quite the same as an expensive sweater.
I really hope that the people I bought computers for use them to find a clue.
I'm sorry, and IANAL, but the right of first sale doctrine does not relate in any way to F/OSS or the GPL. If you CONVEY a binary executable copy, you MUST take personal responsibility for distributing the FULL SOURCE DISTRIBUTION which will produce that binary. No exchange of money or business relationship must exist, only a conveyance.
If I allow you to browse my computer's hard drive, via http, and it is full of binary GPL software, i'd better:
Mono is quickly catching, I think 2.0 at least is ISO certified, and 3.0 is really more about the.NET lib than the runtime / architecture - and who cares about Microsoft's lib when you just want to talk to Cocoa?;)
It sounds like they are somewhere between 1.1 and 2.0, and that 3.0 is an addon to the MS apis, which has little to do with the core. 3.5 is really the next target with some updates to the core, but it really sounds about as significant as a python point release.
So, sure, Mono lags a bit, but from the C# and other # developers I've talked to, it has the most important stuff, and that's how it's been developed, by taking codebases and trying to make them work.
Some comments:.NET and CoreFoundation have more in common than you clearly understand, you should learn a bit about the former. Also, the work of maintaining a Ruby bridge and a Python bridge is far more than maintaining one.NET bridge which would be accessible to two python implementations, ruby, java, php, managed C++, boo, and whatever 900 other langauges come out for the CLI.
Hey, man, I hate Microsoft, and I love my Mac. I even like Objective-C, but the CLI is an evolution in compiler chains. Imagine the computing world as a whole failed a course when Java was developed, and CLI is the result of really fucking paying attention in class this time.
Ignoring this advancement could really give those bastards an edge, so for the sake of those that come after us, let's keep focused. Microsoft: evil. CLI: an ECMA/ISO-flavoured pacifier for redmond's rabid backwards-compatibility-status-quo crowd.
FYI:
* Objective-C's garbage collection comes from gcc, it's called boehm-weimers, and it's what everyone except cPython uses these days. Java,.NET, ObjC, they all build with gcc --enable-boehm-gc or whatever.
* The Common Language Infrastructure - the ISO standard - outlines a C++-like language which is sort of 'the assembler of.NET' It's pretty smart stuff, I hate to give Microsoft credit, but I'm pretty sure they just stole the idea from someone.;)
"You should learn to distinguish the English and Australian accents. It really isn't that hard."
Are you serious? Every brit I've met lately is trying to sound like an Aussie, which sounds so bad that it makes Aussies sound like brits.
Thanks for taking the job, though, I really need to catch up on LOST.
I totally agree with the core idea of this last post. I think that rails represents a ruby-oriented implementation of patterns that are popular all over the application development world, on and off the web. I hear great things about it, I don't really love it, I also prefer Python, but damned if I am not glad that Perl users at least think they are object-oriented.
Maybe on the CLI / Mono /.NET/CLR we can all become better friends and share patterns without so much infrastructure work.:)
BTW, let us not forget that Python is the only language named after a BBC production, and also, I'm pretty sure the doctah would not have time for dollar signs or know what the fuck chomping is.
Slashdot Mirror
What's most interesting is that it should be clear, this letter is a response to House members' complaints that:
* House.gov tools for posting video are not very user friendly.
* House.gov is out of disk space.
In order to continue responding to increased demand for video, House members need the ability to use other sites. Maybe they are considering big sites like YouTube as a place they can put content which would otherwise *have* to go on House.gov. A lot of candidates are using YouTube for official campaign videos, perhaps they just want the same simple forum for actively communicating with their constituents, so that we don't all feel they *only* know how to get and stay in office. Some of them write laws and, apparently, deal with issues that most slashdot users do every day, like filling hard drives. ;)
I don't see that this in any way creates new restrictions or has anything to do with members of any party, or talk radio, or twitter, or blogging..
C'mon Slashdot, did YOU read the PDF? Please don't post political stories about documents without reading them, or at least change the title from:
"Nancy Pelosi vs. The Internet"
to:
"Crazy Blogger makes up story about House.gov IT solution to full drives." ;)
I want to agree adamantly here. I am a returning student, a successful engineer, with job offers falling through the window, but they are boring. I have taught myself over ten programming languages, chuckle as I walk by OS debates of "Windows v OSX", and really, REALLY wish that I had not been in such a damned rush to get a boring job.
:)
I'm majoring in Mathematics now, something you can get a decent level of Bachelor coverage in about anywhere, or even fill in at a local community college if your main four-year doesn't go as far as you want - they will help once you've exhausted their curriculum.
Also, BTW, make SURE to WRITE a lot of PAPERS about POEMS by some DEAD GUY. If it doesn't help you get laid, it will help you to quip at people for your whole life.
AND FINALLLY
If you think that studying CS will help you to make VIDEO GAMES throw in some Fine Art, get your history credits with Art History, something.
Some of the greatest programmers I ever worked with had liberal arts degrees - the Historian helped us to avoid critical mistakes with far-reaching consequences, the English major always knew what to name that new Class or Function, and the Physics wuss with No Math could make a mean martini.
Anyway, I would like to echo that you should be fine, and also that esp with Math and probably some other highly conceptual subjects, it is widely regarded that they are much easier to learn at your age than at mine.
So, there are reasons to go in both directions. Even a technical school should offer you opportunities to take some 'core education' courses, and again, you can usually go beyond the curriculum with a few courses at local community colleges or another uni, once you've exhausted the curriculum.
Make sure to talk to both schools about your goals on both fronts and see if one of them gives you more flexibility. consider also that many people start at one four-year institution, and transfer to another as a Junior or so. Nothing is in stone.
Be careful not to get confused here. Bell is two kinds of providers: a telecom provider and a backbone provider, which means in many cases that they would be at both ends of your DSL, with a provider in the middle. Most ISPs have more than one uplink - most decent ones, at least, so having Bell-based-DSL doesn't mean you will be filtered at the IP Level, at all. You can have a DSL line going through Bell which ends you up at a UUNET IP Address.
Sure, and Novell Netware was around before that, and Mainframes. I mean, GEEZ, did Google invent the frakking SERVER? C'mon people the Internet is nothing new, you can't change the future, STOP TELLING ME THAT I AM GETTING OLD!!!
Some providers charge only for outgoing traffic, so he may be paying only for traffic to the weblog.
well, there you go. astrology at its' best is maybe a folk science, perhaps it isn't that jupiter is here or there or we can see this or that star in the sky which is the *cause*, as perceived, but that it's a familiar road sign. astronomical events have an effect on the mood and behaviour of the people of earth - ask any police officer about a full moon. so, perhaps astrology is a social science, a branch of anthropology studying the behaviour of people in relation to cosmic events with some hope of gaining predictive value.
whether your average horoscope has any unique insight is questionable, but i have definitely always thought of my astrological sign as my place within a greater whole, about as estimated as the person above who talked about estimating the speed at which a pen falls from a desk. as with any subject, i've tried to learn about it through a mix of reading, exposure to oral tradition, and experiments of forming hypotheses and playing them out.
on most days, though, i don't think much about astrology - my mood is probably more connected to whether the sky is clear and blue or cloudy.
now fortune cookies, that's a better question. scientists don't eat chinese food and enjoy what is essentially a game of chance. perhaps some people simply feel that given a deck of cards, the universe will deal them to us with enough entropy to fool.
or yanno, maybe it's all a crock. what isn't a crock these days?
Ah, also want to comment on the 4200 PATA option, yes that is lame. I believe this is a smaller-than-normal form factor, and also I feel this was designed with the SSD in mind, and that someone in Marketing said: Give me a $2k option and we'll move forward. A Middleground would be nice, but check this article:
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/30/maximum-macbook-air-drive-80gb-for-now/
Apparently, that 80G 4200rpm drive is also a single platter, which might affect its' performance *positively*. No other drive can fit in the space of the SSD. So, maybe I'm wrong, and they thought of this - I imagine the SSD and HD manufacturers more or less know who they are competing with in that space, and that their products will have to fit in the same design as each other.
With education discount, I've got a nice model priced at $2909 with 1.6Ghz, SSD, SuperDrive, Ethernet, and AppleCare. I spent about this much on my 12" MBP and don't recall heavily using any features it had that this won't. I also think that the external drive will be nice because it might be possible to *type* while burning, which is a real problem using a portable with integrated burner as main computer.
Yeah I don't really want to sell you on the Air, I just think it deserves more props. If you enjoy having an optical drive with you everywhere, yanno, that's great. My optical drive is a redheaded stepchild that rarely works, and that has been the case for three portables. I don't think I would go to a plastic case to gain mobility - I dropped my 12" PowerBook once from within a backpack, while walking, it bounced on the pavement, and continued working for months until someone sat on the screen while it was open. Those plastic cases crack, the power supply breaks, and really, you don't ever want to use that computer again.
If you price the SSD as a retail purchase, you will see that Apple is actually getting a really good deal on them, afaict.
As far as lack of wired ethernet, again, you don't take the ethernet cord with you - if you have a usb drive, ethernet, etc.. at each desk, it's much quicker to plug them all in at once using a $25 USB hub. Leave the dongle on the cable - I used to have a spare AC adapter which I left at work, and one I kept at home, just so I wouldn't have to fumble with them all the time. Now, of course, I just yank on the cord to get it from my loft bed down to the shelf on my desk.
Keep in mind that Dongle will probably work with any computer you can throw at it, for years. It's not like a dongle that goes with a pmcia card, it's the whole thing. Plug it into a Dell running GNU/Linux, five bucks says it'll work.
I will say that I'd like the option to bring a spare battery, but the size - the size! My main concern is that the battery degrades over time and I tend just to replace them. This could be a great excuse to have Apple upgrade your entire machine and sell the old as refurb, who knows. Mac Genii have told me many times that they feel a customer's experience will be degraded on any machine - portables, at least - that is ever opened after it leaves the factory.
It would be great to see a smaller MacBook Pro, something more like that 12" which has a bit of thickness to it, and maybe now thanks to Penryn, can tolerate some added heat from a GPU. Maybe giving the Air a GPU would even tip the scales for me, but expandable ram, swappable battery, and higher proc speeds in a thicker, but still backpack-sized package sound like they would please you.
If you aren't trying to fit this into a small backpack or something, get a 15", seriously. I want the Air for on campus because I can't carry my 15" along with several 13" books unless I bring a monstrous bag.
I'm dissappointed to see the press quoting the Mac crowd as hating the Air, because I've been running my MBP ragged trying to earn money to buy one, and it would be very sad if Apple decided to stop selling them before I could. It's clear, however, that Apple needs to look at you.
Frankly, I do plan to replace my MBP, as I have a nice 17" SGI 1600SW DFP on my desk, apple's new wireless keyboard, and with the SSD I expect a 1.6 or 1.8 speed Air to compete with my two year old 1.83 MBP, esp when dealing with virtual machines and the like.
I don't know that I'll buy another Pro until they go Quadra, which of course maybe is the new pie-in-the-sky like a G5 PB. One day someone will consider the CPU Whine in my first-gen to make it a collector's item, but I promised Chuck Csuri when he signed it that I wouldn't sell it.
Ack! Dear fellow 12" PowerBook owner, please abridge! The Air is perfect for us. Do not forget the heat issues of that machine, at least if you ran the last generation of it at 1.5Ghz - Apple discontinued it for this reason and is only exploring this territory again thanks to smaller die.
;)
The Air plugs into a big screen, supports USB which was *designed* to expand via a hub, because the number-of-ports problem is a dead, beaten horse from the 80s and 90s. You can get a really decent looking 4-port hub on Amazon for $25 which is about the size of an index finger. From a practicality perspective, I'd rather have all my devices stay plugged into the hub, and just have one plug to plug when I come home to my desk. Don't forget that USB hubs are designed to chain, as well, up to 128 or 256, if not further, IIRC.
The only practical use for FW is video, which yes, you should have a 15 or 17" Pro for if you want to do field editing. You also shouldn't be complaining about Price if you have a RED cam. Unless you put a 15krpm drive in a FW case, you'll have a lot of trouble telling the difference between it and USB - I have two of the same model drive from the same manufacturer, and benchmarked them pretty close, to my dismay. The iPod can't connect to FireWire for years now, sadly.
Maybe by 'crippled' you're talking about the optical drive, or the graphics chip - fair enough, but don't forget that if you're talking ultraportable, it offers an SSD which I look forward to strapping to my back while sprinting around downtown - some people call this sort of swap-out-craziness a 'tradeoff'. The external optical drive is a godsend, IMO, because taking your slot-loading optical drive around with you everywhere as part of the main computer is an invitation for street dust to enter your machine and esp to haze up your optical lens.
As for Graphics, eh, I ran a major graphics community website for a good couple of years and was many times talked down from the belief that I couldn't use a 13" MacBook for serious graphics work - though of course it's bound to be limited. There's no reason that the Air should be considered "crippled" on this point.
C'mon, give up some love for the Air. Compared to the 12" PB, this thing is cooler, faster, smaller, has two cores, more RAM, motha fricking flash storage, an LED backlit screen and boasts five hours of battery life, though of course, that depends largely on the software you run and whether you can type fast enough to recharge it a little.
currently hearing in my head: harder, better, faster, stronger
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Sr2JneittqQ
Apple should change their slogan to "Our.Work.is.Never.Over."
Two points to make here: (a) slashdot always use funny words to sound smart. I don't hear the word 'gifting' in my normal day-to-day life, but if you want to talk about electronics and 'giving', you're talking about 'gifting'. (b) speaking as someone who gifted two Macbooks last year to people who should probably have gotten coal in their stockings, the gift of knowledge is not quite the same as an expensive sweater. I really hope that the people I bought computers for use them to find a clue.
I'm sorry, and IANAL, but the right of first sale doctrine does not relate in any way to F/OSS or the GPL. If you CONVEY a binary executable copy, you MUST take personal responsibility for distributing the FULL SOURCE DISTRIBUTION which will produce that binary. No exchange of money or business relationship must exist, only a conveyance.
/usr/src is full ;)
If I allow you to browse my computer's hard drive, via http, and it is full of binary GPL software, i'd better:
(a) close it up
(b) make sure
Cheers!
J
Mono is quickly catching, I think 2.0 at least is ISO certified, and 3.0 is really more about the .NET lib than the runtime / architecture - and who cares about Microsoft's lib when you just want to talk to Cocoa? ;)
Have a look here for details:
http://mono-project.com/Roadmap
It sounds like they are somewhere between 1.1 and 2.0, and that 3.0 is an addon to the MS apis, which has little to do with the core. 3.5 is really the next target with some updates to the core, but it really sounds about as significant as a python point release.
So, sure, Mono lags a bit, but from the C# and other # developers I've talked to, it has the most important stuff, and that's how it's been developed, by taking codebases and trying to make them work.
Some comments: .NET and CoreFoundation have more in common than you clearly understand, you should learn a bit about the former. Also, the work of maintaining a Ruby bridge and a Python bridge is far more than maintaining one .NET bridge which would be accessible to two python implementations, ruby, java, php, managed C++, boo, and whatever 900 other langauges come out for the CLI.
Hey, man, I hate Microsoft, and I love my Mac. I even like Objective-C, but the CLI is an evolution in compiler chains. Imagine the computing world as a whole failed a course when Java was developed, and CLI is the result of really fucking paying attention in class this time.
Ignoring this advancement could really give those bastards an edge, so for the sake of those that come after us, let's keep focused. Microsoft: evil. CLI: an ECMA/ISO-flavoured pacifier for redmond's rabid backwards-compatibility-status-quo crowd.
FYI: * Objective-C's garbage collection comes from gcc, it's called boehm-weimers, and it's what everyone except cPython uses these days. Java, .NET, ObjC, they all build with gcc --enable-boehm-gc or whatever.
* The Common Language Infrastructure - the ISO standard - outlines a C++-like language which is sort of 'the assembler of .NET' It's pretty smart stuff, I hate to give Microsoft credit, but I'm pretty sure they just stole the idea from someone. ;)
"You should learn to distinguish the English and Australian accents. It really isn't that hard." Are you serious? Every brit I've met lately is trying to sound like an Aussie, which sounds so bad that it makes Aussies sound like brits. Thanks for taking the job, though, I really need to catch up on LOST.
I totally agree with the core idea of this last post. I think that rails represents a ruby-oriented implementation of patterns that are popular all over the application development world, on and off the web. I hear great things about it, I don't really love it, I also prefer Python, but damned if I am not glad that Perl users at least think they are object-oriented.
.NET/CLR we can all become better friends and share patterns without so much infrastructure work. :)
Maybe on the CLI / Mono /
BTW, let us not forget that Python is the only language named after a BBC production, and also, I'm pretty sure the doctah would not have time for dollar signs or know what the fuck chomping is.
http://bitmonk.net/