I'm not saying that PGSQL is already a match for Oracle, though often it is.
My point is that with sufficient (esp. financial) committment, PGSQL could be upgraded arbitrarily close to Oracle in functionality, so that eventually PGSQL could become an excellent replacement for Oracle.
All you would need is a major player with the resources to put behind it and a willingness to torpedo Oracle.
Until this announcement Sun had the former but not the latter. Now, I'm not so sure.;-)
...to hear the purveyor's of insanely expensive commercial software boasting about how they're switching from expensive commercial software to free software?
Perhaps Sun should announce their commitment to PostgreSQL.
If the show is actually smaller this year than last, Linux may be saturating its existing markets.
Computer hobbyists who love a platform where everything is open for experimentation are a small (and fun) market that has mostly been reached already.
Entrepreneurs who are starting out with more brains than cash have found Linux (and *BSD) to be a wonderful platform -- if their business model puts a lot of weight on server-side computing.
Those businesses were once growing like weeds, but after too many years searching in vain for profits, they are now vanishing like the morning frost.
Those two markets are nearly saturated now, though they'll continue to grow over time, especially in less-developed economies.
For Linux shows to continue to grow, Linux will need to become extremely attractive to much larger markets that get attention from end users. Embedded markets can be huge, but the Linux part would be invisible and wouldn't be of much interest to the end user.
Otherwise, these shows will end up sharing venues with Science Fiction conventions.;-)
If your fridge asks the printer to print something, then status messages for that print job will be returned to the requester automatically. If the fridge has any message display mechanism, it can decide to display the messages. Or it can ignore them. What the fridge does with its messages isn't the printer's concern.
The printer and the fridge have no need to reprogram each other. They just need to send messages in standard formats appropriate for the class of device: a printer or a fridge.
Java was designed to run on general-purpose clients, and it's only there that the idea of sending executable code makes more sense than sending remote API calls. I think that will mostly mean clients with browsers, and I expect.Net to become more successful at this than Java due to MS's dominance of this type of client.
Sun pushed *binary* compatibility so hard because Java's claim to fame was taking what loaded into your browser from static content to full executable apps -- making the underlying OS irrelevant in the process. "Death to Windows!"
It didn't work out. Client side Java is essentially dead. "Death to Java applets!" C#/.Net will become what Java only dreamed it could be -- but, sadly, only on Windows.
In the meantime, Java hit pay dirt on the server, because the language is so easy and productive to work in and the result is so portable.
Source portability would have been sufficient on the server, though. I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect they could have created a better server-side programming language if they had designed for 100% *source* portability, then instead of constraining themselves to binary portability and security sufficient for running *anybody's* binaries on *anybody's* client, had instead optimized for high performance plus ease of rapid, bug-free development -- more like Eiffel.
I think C# takes the best of Java and adds a lot of goodies that many of us appreciate. Implementing C# for BSD or Linux is a matter of implementing an ECMA standard, just like ECMAScript (and unlike Java). I'd love to have a C# for GCC.
I'm not sure how much of.Net is going to be standardized, though, so it may have to be cloned. I hope that happens because I really like what I see of.Net and I REALLY don't want to use a Windows server.
Nobody hates progress more. Welcome to my world: Northern California.
The voters in places like Mendocino, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Oakland... tend to consider the scientific method to be part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy". Their politics reflect how far beyond scientific reasoning they've "evolved".
I am getting really tired of all these magic, foolprof ways that could have prevented 9/11.
Gee, that's too bad, because they're going to keep coming until one (or more likely more) of them work. You can often solve problems by generating lots of mostly silly ideas as step one.
Maybe there isn't enough connectivity yet, but that will gradually change as all aircraft, ships at sea, buoys, mountaintops, satellites, etc. become nodes. This might be one incentive to create it.
Cameras can be disabled with duct tape, true, so why are there still so many security cameras out there? Why do so many criminals get caught on camera?
Just put an arbitrarily large number of small CCD cameras on board and you'll solve the duct tape problem. Imagine a strip of one-way glass (smoky, mirrored, whatever) running the length of the aircraft ceiling, with who knows how many cameras behind it.
Nobody monitoring live info? That would change the instant any camera went dark, or whited out, or whatever. All remaining cameras would immediately get live viewers, and the previous N minutes of recorded video from all the cameras would be retransmitted ASAP to the nearest listener.
What do you do if a box goes down, shoot down the plane? No, you escort it down and only shoot if it violates the escort.
I'm not saying that these solutions don't suggest their own problems. I'm also skeptical of live video transmissions in the near term. I'm just saying that if you want to solve a problem, you don't immediately dismiss all solutions that appear to have some sort of flaw. There may be something of value in some of them.
Like most real people, I'll use whichever I like the most, provided it doesn't cost more above the alternatives than I'm willing to pay for its advantages over the alternatives.
Unless I have a strong personal objection to the behavior of the specific company involved, I'm not going to reject a technical alternative based on generic anti-corporate political drivel.
...is fundamental to almost all human mental activities. Chess doesn't train you to "recognize patterns" any better than grocery shopping or driving do.
What chess does do is train you to recognize chess patterns, which is not a skill applicable to anything other than chess, and to recognize more general patterns of generic competition, which a lot of other activities can teach you equally well.
Of course, this is all just based on what it seems like to me. Not very scientific, I'll have to admit.
I value various intellectual activities for the "use it or lose it" reasons you mention. Even so, I think there are more useful intellectual activities than chess that should also be equally good at staving off dementia. (You be the judge whether it has worked.;-) )
...DO have applications in the real world. Not as specific details but as abstract concepts.
But that's pretty much what I'm saying. What I decided was that those same abstract concepts could be found all over the place. There was nothing special about chess -- other than just chess itself.
If being great at chess is the prime objective, there's no better path than getting great at chess. If the goal is preparation for more important battles of wits, though -- things often likened to "a chess match" -- chess didn't appear (to me) to be more useful than a whole lotta other activities.
When I was a kid, strategic encounters of all sorts were likened to chess matches, so it seemed to me that getting good at chess would just make me a more savvy competitor in all sorts of situations.
After a while, I began to understand that the way to win in chess was to become "fluent" in the patterns of chess itself, and that those patterns didn't really have any important analog elsewhere.
Once it appeared that putting a lot of effort into mastery of chess wasn't doing anything for me besides making me better at chess, I gave it up.
Shortly thereafter I replaced it with programming. Talk about "out of the frying pan, into the fire....";-)
...is a pretty standard technique for intellectual lightweights trying to make themselves sound "enlightened" and "free thinking". It's right up there with instant disparagement of anything made or done by "Micro$oft", with praise for the nobility of any theft of intellectual property, with labeling anyone who objects to having his intellectual property stolen a "fascist", and so on.
The poster wasn't proposing a ban on all criticism of America, just objecting to the sophomoric Slashdot editorial practice of inserting a jab at the US when introducing any story about any other country so they'll appear "balanced".
And he got called a "fascist" in return. How predictable....
I believe I understood just fine the first time. I just didn't agree.
You claim that IP protection is not a big incentive. As evidence, you refer to great works created in days prior to IP protection and you say that surely I can't argue with the evidence.
You're mistaken. Your "evidence" doesn't show that IP protection is not a big incentive. It merely shows that IP protection is not the *only* incentive, which isn't your claim and isn't in dispute.
I look at the extraordinary diversity of music (much of it the output of millions of dollars of electronics), software (requiring chips to run on that cost billions in R&D), movies (usually requiring millions of dollars of technological products alone to create), of amazing inventions and billion-dollar wonder drugs, and I claim that IP protection *is* a big incentive to the creators of these things.
Unfortunately, that doesn't constitute "proof", either. The only thing that might would be two parallel universes running the last century or so with two different IP protection parameters.
Short of that, all we can look to is suggestive evidence, then we have to make a personal judgment. If you can't see the extraordinary fecundity and diversity of intellectual creation in our time, versus the unprotected past, or in nations with IP protection versus those with little or none, or if you see it but claim it is coincidental and still claim that people would have created most of it with no possibility of ownership of their creations, then we're not likely to be able to persuade each other.
If you think IP protection isn't a major incentive driving most (not all, but most) of the great software, songs, books, and movies currently being created, then Napster probably has nothing to worry about. It will be just as popular hosting community folk songs and high school hair bands.
IE won't stand a chance once Mozilla is released.
And I'm sure you'd do fine restricting your movie viewing to films that were created solely for the sake of giving to the world with no thought of ownership of the end product. I'm sure that if there were no IP laws, an open source version of Lord of the Rings would still be created and that would be every bit as good as the commercial one.
You have to understand that what's written in one of these licence agreements and your actual, enforceable terms of contract are not the same at all.
The US courts always take into account the relative legal sophistication of the parties to a contract, as well as who actually wrote the contract vs. who simply clicked "I agree". A corporate lawyer may put it in the contract, and a consumer may "agree" (in any form), yet that doesn't make it so, and the lawyer has no illusions about that.
Because of the court's inherent bias based on the legal sophistication of the parties, the more sophisticated you are, the scarier the contract you have to write. The court will tell a company, "you can't claim that right now if you didn't claim it originally," but they won't say that to the consumer.
I work for a company that agressively enforces anti-piracy provisions. I don't know of a single case of a raid on an individual. We also conduct raids, but always against large-scale pirates. We either have a search warrant or we ask them to invite us in.
You may be amazed that a pirate would invite us in, but we get in by promising (honestly) much lower financial penalties if they let us in voluntarily. They know we're telling the truth because these guys are never just simple consumers who put one copy on all of his home machines. These guys are always large-scale pirates -- often serious guys with guns -- and they know the rules of the piracy game.
The contracts are written with teeth for these guys, and the courts enforce them against pros like these, but for consumers they're little more than reminders not to give away free copies.
For those for whom money *is* the barrier to computer literacy, I would certainly support a program that allowed you to *earn* a free computer by taking, and passing, some basic, free classes on how to use the computer (for something other than games.) I would let you take that class as many times as necessary for you to pass, including private tutors if you are really trying but couldn't figure it out. You wouldn't be able to keep earning computers, though. Limit of one per customer.
I think the majority of the "oppressed classes" would stay away in droves, though, at least in developed economies.
We have a public library here where I live, right on the border between a rather wealthy neighborhood and a poor one. It's not hard to tell the residents apart -- on average (and I'm only talking statistics, not individuals).
When you enter this library, it's immediately obvious that the people inside are overwhelmingly from the wealthy neighborhood, despite the fact that use of the library is entirely free.
You would think it would be the opposite, since the wealthy can afford to buy their own books and magazines, so it would seem that price is not the major factor.
The library also offers free adult literacy classes, which aren't well attended, except by the volunteer tutors and a few Asian recent immigrants.
I'm glad we have this resource, but people who almost all own televisions, yet express no interest in free books, are unlikely to use a free computer to leave the ranks of the Have-Nots and join the Haves.
Its widely accepted that european software companies have the more complicated and more inovative and more difficult to sell applications
Widely accepted by whom? Wishful thinking and repeated assertions don't add up to wide acceptance -- except arguably among Europeans.
This is just another variant on the endless stream of "American Xs may be more popular, but most people consider European Xs to be better" oxymorons that European self-esteem seems to require in steady doses. Measurable data shows X is greater than Y, but *repeated assertions* demonstrate that the reverse is, in fact, true. Sure.
You claim Linux as an example of European innovation. Do you remember an earlier OS called "Unix", created by AT&T? Which of the two was more innovative, the original or the clone? I guess it depends on whether you're European or not.
You claim StarOffice as another example. Exactly how is an unbelievably poor knockoff of X more innovative than X itself?
Fortunately for you, a lot of us Yanks don't need this kind of nonsense in order to appreciate the talent and accomplishment of our European counterparts. I have enormous respect for European developers, but I get pretty tired of hearing this kind of drivel.
In all US companies for which I've worked (on both the US east coast and west coast), management has considered overseas programmers neither intrinsically better nor worse than American programmers. They were simply considered cheaper in direct costs (salary & benefits) and more expensive in indirect costs (logistics of various sorts).
How the costs totaled up (in both prior estimates and pilot studies) determined which way they would go. In many cases a hybrid solution was chosen: bring some of the overseas programmers to the US and let *them* manage their own remote teams.
I also worked as regular employee of one rather prestigious UK software firm (in the UK) and indirectly with a few continental European and Japanese software firms. Their attitudes were quite different. They bent over backwards to avoid employing any non-citizen, with the partial exceptions that all would consider Americans for specialist work and the UK companies would accept other Commonwealthers (Canadians, Aussies, Kiwis, etc.) for grunt work.
So true. If C# had started out on Linux, the Slashdotters would have been crowing about it as a magnificent step forward in GUI/application development.
*As a language*, it's an extraordinary improvement over what commercial developers realistically are forced to use for commercial GUI app dev: C/C++ or maybe VB.
Slashdot Mirror
vacuum gloves, radiation belts, high-velocity hardware...
I'm not saying that PGSQL is already a match for Oracle, though often it is.
;-)
My point is that with sufficient (esp. financial) committment, PGSQL could be upgraded arbitrarily close to Oracle in functionality, so that eventually PGSQL could become an excellent replacement for Oracle.
All you would need is a major player with the resources to put behind it and a willingness to torpedo Oracle.
Until this announcement Sun had the former but not the latter. Now, I'm not so sure.
...to hear the purveyor's of insanely expensive commercial software boasting about how they're switching from expensive commercial software to free software?
Perhaps Sun should announce their commitment to PostgreSQL.
If the show is actually smaller this year than last, Linux may be saturating its existing markets.
;-)
Computer hobbyists who love a platform where everything is open for experimentation are a small (and fun) market that has mostly been reached already.
Entrepreneurs who are starting out with more brains than cash have found Linux (and *BSD) to be a wonderful platform -- if their business model puts a lot of weight on server-side computing.
Those businesses were once growing like weeds, but after too many years searching in vain for profits, they are now vanishing like the morning frost.
Those two markets are nearly saturated now, though they'll continue to grow over time, especially in less-developed economies.
For Linux shows to continue to grow, Linux will need to become extremely attractive to much larger markets that get attention from end users. Embedded markets can be huge, but the Linux part would be invisible and wouldn't be of much interest to the end user.
Otherwise, these shows will end up sharing venues with Science Fiction conventions.
If your fridge asks the printer to print something, then status messages for that print job will be returned to the requester automatically. If the fridge has any message display mechanism, it can decide to display the messages. Or it can ignore them. What the fridge does with its messages isn't the printer's concern.
.Net to become more successful at this than Java due to MS's dominance of this type of client.
The printer and the fridge have no need to reprogram each other. They just need to send messages in standard formats appropriate for the class of device: a printer or a fridge.
Java was designed to run on general-purpose clients, and it's only there that the idea of sending executable code makes more sense than sending remote API calls. I think that will mostly mean clients with browsers, and I expect
Sun pushed *binary* compatibility so hard because Java's claim to fame was taking what loaded into your browser from static content to full executable apps -- making the underlying OS irrelevant in the process. "Death to Windows!"
It didn't work out. Client side Java is essentially dead. "Death to Java applets!" C#/.Net will become what Java only dreamed it could be -- but, sadly, only on Windows.
In the meantime, Java hit pay dirt on the server, because the language is so easy and productive to work in and the result is so portable.
Source portability would have been sufficient on the server, though. I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect they could have created a better server-side programming language if they had designed for 100% *source* portability, then instead of constraining themselves to binary portability and security sufficient for running *anybody's* binaries on *anybody's* client, had instead optimized for high performance plus ease of rapid, bug-free development -- more like Eiffel.
I think C# takes the best of Java and adds a lot of goodies that many of us appreciate. Implementing C# for BSD or Linux is a matter of implementing an ECMA standard, just like ECMAScript (and unlike Java). I'd love to have a C# for GCC.
.Net is going to be standardized, though, so it may have to be cloned. I hope that happens because I really like what I see of .Net and I REALLY don't want to use a Windows server.
I'm not sure how much of
And he may not actually be anti-semitic, just doing the only thing his tiny mind can think of to get attention.
Nobody hates progress more. Welcome to my world: Northern California.
The voters in places like Mendocino, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Oakland... tend to consider the scientific method to be part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy". Their politics reflect how far beyond scientific reasoning they've "evolved".
I am getting really tired of all these magic, foolprof ways that could have prevented 9/11.
Gee, that's too bad, because they're going to keep coming until one (or more likely more) of them work. You can often solve problems by generating lots of mostly silly ideas as step one.
Maybe there isn't enough connectivity yet, but that will gradually change as all aircraft, ships at sea, buoys, mountaintops, satellites, etc. become nodes. This might be one incentive to create it.
Cameras can be disabled with duct tape, true, so why are there still so many security cameras out there? Why do so many criminals get caught on camera?
Just put an arbitrarily large number of small CCD cameras on board and you'll solve the duct tape problem. Imagine a strip of one-way glass (smoky, mirrored, whatever) running the length of the aircraft ceiling, with who knows how many cameras behind it.
Nobody monitoring live info? That would change the instant any camera went dark, or whited out, or whatever. All remaining cameras would immediately get live viewers, and the previous N minutes of recorded video from all the cameras would be retransmitted ASAP to the nearest listener.
What do you do if a box goes down, shoot down the plane? No, you escort it down and only shoot if it violates the escort.
I'm not saying that these solutions don't suggest their own problems. I'm also skeptical of live video transmissions in the near term. I'm just saying that if you want to solve a problem, you don't immediately dismiss all solutions that appear to have some sort of flaw. There may be something of value in some of them.
Keep the suggestions coming.
Like most real people, I'll use whichever I like the most, provided it doesn't cost more above the alternatives than I'm willing to pay for its advantages over the alternatives.
Unless I have a strong personal objection to the behavior of the specific company involved, I'm not going to reject a technical alternative based on generic anti-corporate political drivel.
...is fundamental to almost all human mental activities. Chess doesn't train you to "recognize patterns" any better than grocery shopping or driving do.
What chess does do is train you to recognize chess patterns, which is not a skill applicable to anything other than chess, and to recognize more general patterns of generic competition, which a lot of other activities can teach you equally well.
Of course, this is all just based on what it seems like to me. Not very scientific, I'll have to admit.
I value various intellectual activities for the "use it or lose it" reasons you mention. Even so, I think there are more useful intellectual activities than chess that should also be equally good at staving off dementia. (You be the judge whether it has worked. ;-) )
You say:
...DO have applications in the real world. Not as specific details but as abstract concepts.
But that's pretty much what I'm saying. What I decided was that those same abstract concepts could be found all over the place. There was nothing special about chess -- other than just chess itself.
If being great at chess is the prime objective, there's no better path than getting great at chess. If the goal is preparation for more important battles of wits, though -- things often likened to "a chess match" -- chess didn't appear (to me) to be more useful than a whole lotta other activities.
When I was a kid, strategic encounters of all sorts were likened to chess matches, so it seemed to me that getting good at chess would just make me a more savvy competitor in all sorts of situations.
;-)
After a while, I began to understand that the way to win in chess was to become "fluent" in the patterns of chess itself, and that those patterns didn't really have any important analog elsewhere.
Once it appeared that putting a lot of effort into mastery of chess wasn't doing anything for me besides making me better at chess, I gave it up.
Shortly thereafter I replaced it with programming. Talk about "out of the frying pan, into the fire...."
...is a pretty standard technique for intellectual lightweights trying to make themselves sound "enlightened" and "free thinking". It's right up there with instant disparagement of anything made or done by "Micro$oft", with praise for the nobility of any theft of intellectual property, with labeling anyone who objects to having his intellectual property stolen a "fascist", and so on.
The poster wasn't proposing a ban on all criticism of America, just objecting to the sophomoric Slashdot editorial practice of inserting a jab at the US when introducing any story about any other country so they'll appear "balanced".
And he got called a "fascist" in return. How predictable....
I believe I understood just fine the first time. I just didn't agree.
You claim that IP protection is not a big incentive. As evidence, you refer to great works created in days prior to IP protection and you say that surely I can't argue with the evidence.
You're mistaken. Your "evidence" doesn't show that IP protection is not a big incentive. It merely shows that IP protection is not the *only* incentive, which isn't your claim and isn't in dispute.
I look at the extraordinary diversity of music (much of it the output of millions of dollars of electronics), software (requiring chips to run on that cost billions in R&D), movies (usually requiring millions of dollars of technological products alone to create), of amazing inventions and billion-dollar wonder drugs, and I claim that IP protection *is* a big incentive to the creators of these things.
Unfortunately, that doesn't constitute "proof", either. The only thing that might would be two parallel universes running the last century or so with two different IP protection parameters.
Short of that, all we can look to is suggestive evidence, then we have to make a personal judgment. If you can't see the extraordinary fecundity and diversity of intellectual creation in our time, versus the unprotected past, or in nations with IP protection versus those with little or none, or if you see it but claim it is coincidental and still claim that people would have created most of it with no possibility of ownership of their creations, then we're not likely to be able to persuade each other.
If you think IP protection isn't a major incentive driving most (not all, but most) of the great software, songs, books, and movies currently being created, then Napster probably has nothing to worry about. It will be just as popular hosting community folk songs and high school hair bands.
IE won't stand a chance once Mozilla is released.
And I'm sure you'd do fine restricting your movie viewing to films that were created solely for the sake of giving to the world with no thought of ownership of the end product. I'm sure that if there were no IP laws, an open source version of Lord of the Rings would still be created and that would be every bit as good as the commercial one.
...creating innovative software, books, movies, music....
Somebody has to do the actual creative work so the pirates and open source developers will have something to copy.
You have to understand that what's written in one of these licence agreements and your actual, enforceable terms of contract are not the same at all.
The US courts always take into account the relative legal sophistication of the parties to a contract, as well as who actually wrote the contract vs. who simply clicked "I agree". A corporate lawyer may put it in the contract, and a consumer may "agree" (in any form), yet that doesn't make it so, and the lawyer has no illusions about that.
Because of the court's inherent bias based on the legal sophistication of the parties, the more sophisticated you are, the scarier the contract you have to write. The court will tell a company, "you can't claim that right now if you didn't claim it originally," but they won't say that to the consumer.
I work for a company that agressively enforces anti-piracy provisions. I don't know of a single case of a raid on an individual. We also conduct raids, but always against large-scale pirates. We either have a search warrant or we ask them to invite us in.
You may be amazed that a pirate would invite us in, but we get in by promising (honestly) much lower financial penalties if they let us in voluntarily. They know we're telling the truth because these guys are never just simple consumers who put one copy on all of his home machines. These guys are always large-scale pirates -- often serious guys with guns -- and they know the rules of the piracy game.
The contracts are written with teeth for these guys, and the courts enforce them against pros like these, but for consumers they're little more than reminders not to give away free copies.
For those for whom money *is* the barrier to computer literacy, I would certainly support a program that allowed you to *earn* a free computer by taking, and passing, some basic, free classes on how to use the computer (for something other than games.) I would let you take that class as many times as necessary for you to pass, including private tutors if you are really trying but couldn't figure it out. You wouldn't be able to keep earning computers, though. Limit of one per customer.
I think the majority of the "oppressed classes" would stay away in droves, though, at least in developed economies.
We have a public library here where I live, right on the border between a rather wealthy neighborhood and a poor one. It's not hard to tell the residents apart -- on average (and I'm only talking statistics, not individuals).
When you enter this library, it's immediately obvious that the people inside are overwhelmingly from the wealthy neighborhood, despite the fact that use of the library is entirely free.
You would think it would be the opposite, since the wealthy can afford to buy their own books and magazines, so it would seem that price is not the major factor.
The library also offers free adult literacy classes, which aren't well attended, except by the volunteer tutors and a few Asian recent immigrants.
I'm glad we have this resource, but people who almost all own televisions, yet express no interest in free books, are unlikely to use a free computer to leave the ranks of the Have-Nots and join the Haves.
I hereby award you a virtual mod point since I don't have any real ones to offer. thanks for the interesting links.
Its widely accepted that european software companies have the more complicated and more inovative and more difficult to sell applications
Widely accepted by whom? Wishful thinking and repeated assertions don't add up to wide acceptance -- except arguably among Europeans.
This is just another variant on the endless stream of "American Xs may be more popular, but most people consider European Xs to be better" oxymorons that European self-esteem seems to require in steady doses. Measurable data shows X is greater than Y, but *repeated assertions* demonstrate that the reverse is, in fact, true. Sure.
You claim Linux as an example of European innovation. Do you remember an earlier OS called "Unix", created by AT&T? Which of the two was more innovative, the original or the clone? I guess it depends on whether you're European or not.
You claim StarOffice as another example. Exactly how is an unbelievably poor knockoff of X more innovative than X itself?
Fortunately for you, a lot of us Yanks don't need this kind of nonsense in order to appreciate the talent and accomplishment of our European counterparts. I have enormous respect for European developers, but I get pretty tired of hearing this kind of drivel.
In all US companies for which I've worked (on both the US east coast and west coast), management has considered overseas programmers neither intrinsically better nor worse than American programmers. They were simply considered cheaper in direct costs (salary & benefits) and more expensive in indirect costs (logistics of various sorts).
How the costs totaled up (in both prior estimates and pilot studies) determined which way they would go. In many cases a hybrid solution was chosen: bring some of the overseas programmers to the US and let *them* manage their own remote teams.
I also worked as regular employee of one rather prestigious UK software firm (in the UK) and indirectly with a few continental European and Japanese software firms. Their attitudes were quite different. They bent over backwards to avoid employing any non-citizen, with the partial exceptions that all would consider Americans for specialist work and the UK companies would accept other Commonwealthers (Canadians, Aussies, Kiwis, etc.) for grunt work.
So true. If C# had started out on Linux, the Slashdotters would have been crowing about it as a magnificent step forward in GUI/application development.
*As a language*, it's an extraordinary improvement over what commercial developers realistically are forced to use for commercial GUI app dev: C/C++ or maybe VB.