A Fortune 500 company probably isn't limited to local business. They probably do business all over the world. I don't know which one is more globalization challenged, PHP or MySQL, but they're both like Gilligan's Island: primitive as can be.
Whereas NT/2K/XP, SQLServer, ASP.Net, Java, C#,.Net, XML, HTML 4, etc., are Unicode to the bone, the last I checked poor PHP and MySQL were both still stuck in the legacy world of regional character encodings. You can build a global app with Java/Oracle or.Net/SQLServer, but the best you can do is a regional app with PHP/MySQL.
This doesn't only matter for monster projects. Small systems can still be global -- unless you decide to go with tools like PHP & MySQL.
"By upgrading from IIS to Apache/mod_perl, we were able to increase our load capacity from 300 millislashdots to a full 1.2 slashdots while cutting costs by nearly two-thirds...."
Ah the joys of competing against a monopolist.... If this were a simple matter of competing in an open market we would not be having this conversation.
Oh, nonsense. It's pretty pathetic to hear proponents of free software claiming that the competition, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars per unit, has an "unfair" advantage.
True, MS was able to starve Netscape of revenues by shipping a free knockoff of Netscape's commercial product, but it's Linux with the power to do this to MS, not the other way around.
If Linux can't unseat Windows as the most popular general purpose client OS despite being absolutely free, there might be something wrong beyond just an unfair MS monopoly.
Fortunately, the game's not over. Great projects like Mono and others that provide useful technology rather than political rhetoric may one day make Linux a superior choice for the average Joe. Not yet, though.
I love open source software. There's a lot of proprietary software I love, too.
I don't want myself told that I have to use an inferior tool just because it's open source. I don't want my government to have similar restrictions.
If open source is better, then let it *compete*. If free (price) and open source still aren't enough to persuade users to switch, then maybe it's not yet as good as its proponents claim it is, and maybe that's where they should focus their energies.
I hope the Wrath of Khan DVD includes the original episode of Star Trek that it was the sequel to. That would make a great set, and the movie isn't nearly as interesting if you don't have that TV episode in memory.
I'd be interested to know how these codecs perform when streaming things like news or talk radio or foreign language lessons. Clarity at a low bandwidth would support a lot of simultaneous listeners from a low-end server. Clarity at medium bandwidth could provide the extra sound quality needed for something like language learning/practice, again from relatively modest servers.
I've noticed, however, that all of the times when I have personally listened to or read what he has to say, that it's pretty damn reasonable.
Did you "personally" read what he just wrote above? Do you consider his comparison of his obnoxious heckling of a panel discussion on IP to risking one's life to end human slavery to be "pretty damn reasonable"?
The audience was apparently full of people who sympathized with many of his positions. That audience was apparently trying to get him quiet down.
Why? Because of a desperate fear for his personal safety for daring to speak out against the oppressors? No, because his obnoxious "pay attention to me" behavior was both inconveniencing other listeners and reducing the credibility of their ideas where they overlapped with Stallman's.
Stallman is one of those guys whose great intelligence is utterly devoted to the spread of a sort of fundamentalist religion, of destroying the unbelievers, and of being worshipped by the True Disciples.
The company you refer to will end up with a lower market valuation eventually if your assumption that using consultants hurts them in the long run is correct. Their products won't be as good, they'll ship later and bring in lower revenues and they'll eventually run low on cash and customers and market share, regardless of accounting tricks.
If the market notices that companies that use a lot of consultants end up underperforming in the long run, then a company's stock will be penalized at the first rumor of an influx of consultants, and the hand of the market will push companies into using full time employees instead.
On the other hand, if you are wrong about the economics of using consultants, the market will continue to reward such behavior. Perhaps you understand the economics of business success better than the market, but that's not how I'd bet my own money.;-)
Do people really have to look any farther to figure out why today's software is so buggy? The more subtle "gotchas" in a language, the more subtle bugs in the resulting products.
I understand the lure of mastering reams of arcane trivia. In fields like medicine, this is valuable. But, when you have to do so just to use a man-made programming language because of how often things are not what they appear, it is a stinging indictment of the poor design of the language.
I'm a huge fan of.Net. I don't mind using Windows clients, but I want to use Unix/Linux servers. What you're doing is going to make that possible, and I think it's great. Thank you.
As for the scope of your project, feel free figure it out as you go along like all the rest of us do. The guy mouthing off about your "lies" is an idiot. If you have to choose a technology for an upcoming project and you can't afford to be wrong, you'd better choose from among technologies that already exist. What you are offering is technolgies that *might* exist, that so many of us *want* to exist, but might not if things don't work out, and even if they eventually do exist nobody knows for sure when they'll be ready for production use. That's the way it works for big companies, small startups, OSS projects, pretty much everyone creating new tools. That's what "in development" means to project planners with any sense.
I agree with your post. In fact, I agree more than you apparently do because you wimped out when you slammed marketers:
As for a marketer... True, they are mostly evil.
I'm a senior software architect who is therefore a long-time programmer who works with marketers every day.
The job of a marketer is tough and important. They are not in general "evil", and though there are exceptions, I've met plenty of evil programmers in my time, too, who pride themselves on the amount of harm they can inflict on others.
Programmers who are only interested in scratching their own itch don't do marketing. Those who want to solve problems for others, not as a side effect but as their intentional goal, need to do marketing to find out about the needs of others. They can do this themselves, and a lot of the best programmers do, but after a while, it makes more sense to split up the work, let a marketer communicate with the market so the programmer has more time to program.
Marketers in other industries are similar. While there are situations where the job of the marketer is to fool people into harming themselves, that's no more the general case for marketers than virus writing is the general activity of computer geeks.
Any organization (for profit or otherwise) that wants to meet the needs of others needs people whose job is to keep paying close attention to those needs. It's not easy, it's not evil, and it's certainly no less noble than, for example, programming to meet your own needs.
Having said that, I'll have to say that probably the single biggest factor underlying the various shortcomings of Linux is the disconnect between what potential users need and what OSS programmers build. Part of this is a lack of incentive for programmers to work on things that are needed by others but not very fun to work on, and part is due to a lack of understanding of, or interest in, those needs. Marketers help solve the latter (and a lot of the good in Linux has been the result of marketing).
He was referring to the difference between the values of pi for different dimensions. The question he was addressing was whether pi was the same for every dimension. He offered a value for 3D, a different value for 2D, and said you could calculate the margin of error.
At our company, IT has a lot of people building Web apps, corporate data warehouses, etc., a moderate number devoted to the physical infrastructure (keeping the phones, servers, network bandwidth, etc. working), and a handful of "help desk" people in charge of setting up and supporting people's PCs and Macs. They are not, in general, interchangeable.
Our company has a lot of tech-savvy employees, which is admittedly different from many companies, but we're hardly unique. We engineers don't usually care if the help desk guys want to make and enforce rules about shared resources, such as email or servers. We won't throw a tantrum about not being able to use elm or pine against the company MS Exchange email server.
But we also won't allow the help desk to control our local apps. Even within IT, the Web apps engineers aren't about to let the help desk guys decide whether they can install Perl or not.
Things could change. Security risks could increase, networking could make "local" have less and less meaning, client management could become more valuable, etc.
But for the foreseeable future, I don't see us taking much power out of the hands of the experts (each in his own area) and giving it to these guys.
I understand the cost-savings of standardized and centralized management of certain things shared by all. But we wouldn't want to overdo it and make the people doing the work we sell less effective in order to make the internal help desk more efficient.
Pi is 3.1415926...., not either of the values claimed in the article. Approximations of pi could perhaps have the values claimed in the article. I could approximate pi as 3, but that wouldn't make pi = 3.
Now that I think the wave has passed and people are off reading other articles, I can speak to you almost privately, leastsquares.
I think we both believed what we said, but we also both earned our "Flamebait" mod points.;-)
I want to add that though I believe the things I said, those aren't my only beliefs. I've lived and worked in many countries and have seen with my own eyes that great ideas and smart, talented people are widely, if not quite evenly, distributed around the world.
It's obvious to me that all countries have a lot to learn from other countries, and this absolutely includes Americans having a lot to learn from Europeans (lumping Brits, for better or worse, into the latter category.)
I assure you that I spend a great deal more time recommending to my fellow Americans that they pay more attention to ideas from Europe (and elsewhere) than I spend in debates with Europeans such as this one.
I also like Europeans, in general. I've worked in Europe, and will happily do so again, and even here in the US I work in a department with three Europeans for every American. I like that.
Frankly, though, there's an impediment when trying to persuade Americans to pay more attention to Europe that I don't face when trying to get them to pay more attention to Japan, for example. That is that the European ideas are so often presented to us as "further proof of our European moral and intellectual superiority to you disgusting Americans", while the Japanese ideas tend to be presented as "here's how we're solving this problem".
In the former case, we have to wonder how much credibility to give the idea, given that clearly some part of the goal of the presenters isn't to help us solve a problem but to gain some sort of competitive advantage over us, even something as petty as "see, Europeans good, Americans bad".
Nevertheless, there are just too many good ideas and smart people (and people I like) in Europe for me to stop paying attention, and I'll continue to make that point to my fellow Americans.
Yes, despite the claim of "completely tongue-in-cheek", you say you were "pointing out" "further proof" of European stereotypes of Americans and you go on to offer even more "proof". Regardless of the putative position of your tongue, you clearly meant what you implied.
And what stereotype were you offering further proof of? That "Americans (as a generalisation) don't care about the environment". Your evidence? That *you*, a European, own a lower gas mileage car in America than you own in Europe. So, if an American stole money in Paris but not in New York, would that be further proof that Europeans were thieves?
...you are virtually pickled in a vat of daily "this is why we Europeans are actually better than Americans" hogwash, resulting in countless superficial analyses such as this.
This is a cool European engineering competition with about the same level of practical significance for US transportation problems that battle robots competitions have for US manufacturing. Maybe more than zero, but not much.
But, as a European, you're not required to think about an issue beyond the point where you think you've found a way to employ it in the service of proving your superiority to Americans. You're not likely to want to, either, because often the deeper you go the less superior to Americans you might feel, and European self-esteem seems to be on such thin ice as it is.
It's not necessary for MS to create.Net for other platforms. We're not at the mercy of MS.
Even Java gets support for most of its many platforms from entities other than Sun.
.Net on Linux is already well on it's way. It's called theMono Project by Ximian, the same people who created Gnome. If developers on other platforms want to have.Net support and can't get it from MS, they'll get a huge headstart from the LGPL'ed Mono code.
...some people aren't as flexible as you are when it comes to languages.
I'm with you. I think C# is Java-done-better (referring to the source languages only). It has all kinds of improvements over Java that many of us Java programmers have been asking for for years. I intend to use C# when using.Net and Java when using, well, Java.
But a lot of people learned Java as their first and only language and will drag their heels or spout sanctimonious anti-.Net rhetoric based on little more than a secret fear of having to leave the Java nest.
J# will help people like this (after they get comfy with J#, they'll be much closer to C#), it will help users of the old J++, and it may make it a bit easier to port various useful Java utilities over to.Net (the convenience depending on how much they rely on the Java class libs).
J# isn't meant to run on a JVM. It's just one of the.Net family of languages.
All.Net languages are compiled to the same "bytecode" that MS calls MSIL. J# is no exception. It is compiled to MSIL, not to Java bytecode.
Whether you prefer to write your source in Java (using J#), or C#, or VB.Net, or Perl.Net, or whatever, the source gets compiled to the same MSIL.
The MSIL code then runs on the.Net framework in a thing called the "common language runtime", which is similar to a JVM, but designed from the start to *try* to accommodate as wide a range of source languages as possible.
After they become MSIL, they are completely interchangable, regardless of their original source language. You could grab a cool C# utility class off the Web somewhere and use Java "extends" to write a subclass in Java. If you find it easier to parse text with Perl than with Java (who doesn't?), then you could write just the text parser classes in your Java app in Perl.Net.
The idea is that you get to work in a source language that you choose. Unlike the Java world,.Net doesn't limit you to doing everything in a single language. (However, it *does* currently limit you to Windows only, quite unlike Java, but that's changing quickly.
The point of J# is to let Java lovers use Java to create.Net applications. When Ximian's Mono Project is fully up and running (Go Mono!), the MSIL output from J# will become executable on a Linux box. When that happens, a Java programmer who wants to deploy on Linux will suddenly have two excellent class frameworks to choose from: the Java standard and.Net.
Your typical motherboard vendor could care less if Linux runs or not - they want the portion of the market that runs Windows.
That's not how markets work. Not everyone dreams of being yet another competitor in the most crowded market segment. If there is a demand for motherboards that allow you to install a non-MS OS, there will be manufacturers who will gladly target this less-crowded segment.
And lest you worry about Intel building the restriction right into the CPU upstream so the motherboard mfrs downstream don't even have a choice, remember that Intel wants to break free of the MS monopoly grip, not to enforce it.
Slashdot Mirror
A Fortune 500 company probably isn't limited to local business. They probably do business all over the world. I don't know which one is more globalization challenged, PHP or MySQL, but they're both like Gilligan's Island: primitive as can be.
.Net, XML, HTML 4, etc., are Unicode to the bone, the last I checked poor PHP and MySQL were both still stuck in the legacy world of regional character encodings. You can build a global app with Java/Oracle or .Net/SQLServer, but the best you can do is a regional app with PHP/MySQL.
Whereas NT/2K/XP, SQLServer, ASP.Net, Java, C#,
This doesn't only matter for monster projects. Small systems can still be global -- unless you decide to go with tools like PHP & MySQL.
"By upgrading from IIS to Apache/mod_perl, we were able to increase our load capacity from 300 millislashdots to a full 1.2 slashdots while cutting costs by nearly two-thirds...."
Ah the joys of competing against a monopolist. ... If this were a simple matter of competing in an open market we would not be having this conversation.
Oh, nonsense. It's pretty pathetic to hear proponents of free software claiming that the competition, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars per unit, has an "unfair" advantage.
True, MS was able to starve Netscape of revenues by shipping a free knockoff of Netscape's commercial product, but it's Linux with the power to do this to MS, not the other way around.
If Linux can't unseat Windows as the most popular general purpose client OS despite being absolutely free, there might be something wrong beyond just an unfair MS monopoly.
Fortunately, the game's not over. Great projects like Mono and others that provide useful technology rather than political rhetoric may one day make Linux a superior choice for the average Joe. Not yet, though.
I love open source software. There's a lot of proprietary software I love, too.
I don't want myself told that I have to use an inferior tool just because it's open source. I don't want my government to have similar restrictions.
If open source is better, then let it *compete*. If free (price) and open source still aren't enough to persuade users to switch, then maybe it's not yet as good as its proponents claim it is, and maybe that's where they should focus their energies.
Virtual mod points to you.
I hope the Wrath of Khan DVD includes the original episode of Star Trek that it was the sequel to. That would make a great set, and the movie isn't nearly as interesting if you don't have that TV episode in memory.
I'd be interested to know how these codecs perform when streaming things like news or talk radio or foreign language lessons. Clarity at a low bandwidth would support a lot of simultaneous listeners from a low-end server. Clarity at medium bandwidth could provide the extra sound quality needed for something like language learning/practice, again from relatively modest servers.
I've noticed, however, that all of the times when I have personally listened to or read what he has to say, that it's pretty damn reasonable.
Did you "personally" read what he just wrote above? Do you consider his comparison of his obnoxious heckling of a panel discussion on IP to risking one's life to end human slavery to be "pretty damn reasonable"?
The audience was apparently full of people who sympathized with many of his positions. That audience was apparently trying to get him quiet down.
Why? Because of a desperate fear for his personal safety for daring to speak out against the oppressors? No, because his obnoxious "pay attention to me" behavior was both inconveniencing other listeners and reducing the credibility of their ideas where they overlapped with Stallman's.
Stallman is one of those guys whose great intelligence is utterly devoted to the spread of a sort of fundamentalist religion, of destroying the unbelievers, and of being worshipped by the True Disciples.
The company you refer to will end up with a lower market valuation eventually if your assumption that using consultants hurts them in the long run is correct. Their products won't be as good, they'll ship later and bring in lower revenues and they'll eventually run low on cash and customers and market share, regardless of accounting tricks.
;-)
If the market notices that companies that use a lot of consultants end up underperforming in the long run, then a company's stock will be penalized at the first rumor of an influx of consultants, and the hand of the market will push companies into using full time employees instead.
On the other hand, if you are wrong about the economics of using consultants, the market will continue to reward such behavior. Perhaps you understand the economics of business success better than the market, but that's not how I'd bet my own money.
Everytime I go to Central Park I encounter a new species or two. They appear humanoid, but I'm sure I don't know what planet they're from.
Do people really have to look any farther to figure out why today's software is so buggy? The more subtle "gotchas" in a language, the more subtle bugs in the resulting products.
I understand the lure of mastering reams of arcane trivia. In fields like medicine, this is valuable. But, when you have to do so just to use a man-made programming language because of how often things are not what they appear, it is a stinging indictment of the poor design of the language.
I'm a huge fan of .Net. I don't mind using Windows clients, but I want to use Unix/Linux servers. What you're doing is going to make that possible, and I think it's great. Thank you.
As for the scope of your project, feel free figure it out as you go along like all the rest of us do. The guy mouthing off about your "lies" is an idiot. If you have to choose a technology for an upcoming project and you can't afford to be wrong, you'd better choose from among technologies that already exist. What you are offering is technolgies that *might* exist, that so many of us *want* to exist, but might not if things don't work out, and even if they eventually do exist nobody knows for sure when they'll be ready for production use. That's the way it works for big companies, small startups, OSS projects, pretty much everyone creating new tools. That's what "in development" means to project planners with any sense.
I agree with your post. In fact, I agree more than you apparently do because you wimped out when you slammed marketers:
As for a marketer... True, they are mostly evil.
I'm a senior software architect who is therefore a long-time programmer who works with marketers every day.
The job of a marketer is tough and important. They are not in general "evil", and though there are exceptions, I've met plenty of evil programmers in my time, too, who pride themselves on the amount of harm they can inflict on others.
Programmers who are only interested in scratching their own itch don't do marketing. Those who want to solve problems for others, not as a side effect but as their intentional goal, need to do marketing to find out about the needs of others. They can do this themselves, and a lot of the best programmers do, but after a while, it makes more sense to split up the work, let a marketer communicate with the market so the programmer has more time to program.
Marketers in other industries are similar. While there are situations where the job of the marketer is to fool people into harming themselves, that's no more the general case for marketers than virus writing is the general activity of computer geeks.
Any organization (for profit or otherwise) that wants to meet the needs of others needs people whose job is to keep paying close attention to those needs. It's not easy, it's not evil, and it's certainly no less noble than, for example, programming to meet your own needs.
Having said that, I'll have to say that probably the single biggest factor underlying the various shortcomings of Linux is the disconnect between what potential users need and what OSS programmers build. Part of this is a lack of incentive for programmers to work on things that are needed by others but not very fun to work on, and part is due to a lack of understanding of, or interest in, those needs. Marketers help solve the latter (and a lot of the good in Linux has been the result of marketing).
In Japan and China you tend to walk your buns off as you walk between the nearest public transportation and your destination several times each day.
Same goes for most European capitols. When in such places for more than a week, I always lose weight.
This is at least a factor.
He was referring to the difference between the values of pi for different dimensions. The question he was addressing was whether pi was the same for every dimension. He offered a value for 3D, a different value for 2D, and said you could calculate the margin of error.
At our company, IT has a lot of people building Web apps, corporate data warehouses, etc., a moderate number devoted to the physical infrastructure (keeping the phones, servers, network bandwidth, etc. working), and a handful of "help desk" people in charge of setting up and supporting people's PCs and Macs. They are not, in general, interchangeable.
Our company has a lot of tech-savvy employees, which is admittedly different from many companies, but we're hardly unique. We engineers don't usually care if the help desk guys want to make and enforce rules about shared resources, such as email or servers. We won't throw a tantrum about not being able to use elm or pine against the company MS Exchange email server.
But we also won't allow the help desk to control our local apps. Even within IT, the Web apps engineers aren't about to let the help desk guys decide whether they can install Perl or not.
Things could change. Security risks could increase, networking could make "local" have less and less meaning, client management could become more valuable, etc.
But for the foreseeable future, I don't see us taking much power out of the hands of the experts (each in his own area) and giving it to these guys.
I understand the cost-savings of standardized and centralized management of certain things shared by all. But we wouldn't want to overdo it and make the people doing the work we sell less effective in order to make the internal help desk more efficient.
Pi is 3.1415926...., not either of the values claimed in the article. Approximations of pi could perhaps have the values claimed in the article. I could approximate pi as 3, but that wouldn't make pi = 3.
Now that I think the wave has passed and people are off reading other articles, I can speak to you almost privately, leastsquares.
;-)
I think we both believed what we said, but we also both earned our "Flamebait" mod points.
I want to add that though I believe the things I said, those aren't my only beliefs. I've lived and worked in many countries and have seen with my own eyes that great ideas and smart, talented people are widely, if not quite evenly, distributed around the world.
It's obvious to me that all countries have a lot to learn from other countries, and this absolutely includes Americans having a lot to learn from Europeans (lumping Brits, for better or worse, into the latter category.)
I assure you that I spend a great deal more time recommending to my fellow Americans that they pay more attention to ideas from Europe (and elsewhere) than I spend in debates with Europeans such as this one.
I also like Europeans, in general. I've worked in Europe, and will happily do so again, and even here in the US I work in a department with three Europeans for every American. I like that.
Frankly, though, there's an impediment when trying to persuade Americans to pay more attention to Europe that I don't face when trying to get them to pay more attention to Japan, for example. That is that the European ideas are so often presented to us as "further proof of our European moral and intellectual superiority to you disgusting Americans", while the Japanese ideas tend to be presented as "here's how we're solving this problem".
In the former case, we have to wonder how much credibility to give the idea, given that clearly some part of the goal of the presenters isn't to help us solve a problem but to gain some sort of competitive advantage over us, even something as petty as "see, Europeans good, Americans bad".
Nevertheless, there are just too many good ideas and smart people (and people I like) in Europe for me to stop paying attention, and I'll continue to make that point to my fellow Americans.
Yes, despite the claim of "completely tongue-in-cheek", you say you were "pointing out" "further proof" of European stereotypes of Americans and you go on to offer even more "proof". Regardless of the putative position of your tongue, you clearly meant what you implied.
And what stereotype were you offering further proof of? That "Americans (as a generalisation) don't care about the environment". Your evidence? That *you*, a European, own a lower gas mileage car in America than you own in Europe. So, if an American stole money in Paris but not in New York, would that be further proof that Europeans were thieves?
...you are virtually pickled in a vat of daily "this is why we Europeans are actually better than Americans" hogwash, resulting in countless superficial analyses such as this.
This is a cool European engineering competition with about the same level of practical significance for US transportation problems that battle robots competitions have for US manufacturing. Maybe more than zero, but not much.
But, as a European, you're not required to think about an issue beyond the point where you think you've found a way to employ it in the service of proving your superiority to Americans. You're not likely to want to, either, because often the deeper you go the less superior to Americans you might feel, and European self-esteem seems to be on such thin ice as it is.
It's not necessary for MS to create .Net for other platforms. We're not at the mercy of MS.
.Net support and can't get it from MS, they'll get a huge headstart from the LGPL'ed Mono code.
Even Java gets support for most of its many platforms from entities other than Sun.
.Net on Linux is already well on it's way. It's called theMono Project by Ximian, the same people who created Gnome. If developers on other platforms want to have
...some people aren't as flexible as you are when it comes to languages.
.Net and Java when using, well, Java.
.Net (the convenience depending on how much they rely on the Java class libs).
I'm with you. I think C# is Java-done-better (referring to the source languages only). It has all kinds of improvements over Java that many of us Java programmers have been asking for for years. I intend to use C# when using
But a lot of people learned Java as their first and only language and will drag their heels or spout sanctimonious anti-.Net rhetoric based on little more than a secret fear of having to leave the Java nest.
J# will help people like this (after they get comfy with J#, they'll be much closer to C#), it will help users of the old J++, and it may make it a bit easier to port various useful Java utilities over to
J# isn't meant to run on a JVM. It's just one of the .Net family of languages.
.Net languages are compiled to the same "bytecode" that MS calls MSIL. J# is no exception. It is compiled to MSIL, not to Java bytecode.
.Net framework in a thing called the "common language runtime", which is similar to a JVM, but designed from the start to *try* to accommodate as wide a range of source languages as possible.
.Net doesn't limit you to doing everything in a single language. (However, it *does* currently limit you to Windows only, quite unlike Java, but that's changing quickly.
.Net applications. When Ximian's Mono Project is fully up and running (Go Mono!), the MSIL output from J# will become executable on a Linux box. When that happens, a Java programmer who wants to deploy on Linux will suddenly have two excellent class frameworks to choose from: the Java standard and .Net.
All
Whether you prefer to write your source in Java (using J#), or C#, or VB.Net, or Perl.Net, or whatever, the source gets compiled to the same MSIL.
The MSIL code then runs on the
After they become MSIL, they are completely interchangable, regardless of their original source language. You could grab a cool C# utility class off the Web somewhere and use Java "extends" to write a subclass in Java. If you find it easier to parse text with Perl than with Java (who doesn't?), then you could write just the text parser classes in your Java app in Perl.Net.
The idea is that you get to work in a source language that you choose. Unlike the Java world,
The point of J# is to let Java lovers use Java to create
Your typical motherboard vendor could care less if Linux runs or not - they want the portion of the market that runs Windows.
That's not how markets work. Not everyone dreams of being yet another competitor in the most crowded market segment. If there is a demand for motherboards that allow you to install a non-MS OS, there will be manufacturers who will gladly target this less-crowded segment.
And lest you worry about Intel building the restriction right into the CPU upstream so the motherboard mfrs downstream don't even have a choice, remember that Intel wants to break free of the MS monopoly grip, not to enforce it.