Compare with C# where your typical app, whether a GUI app or a server app, can't be ported to work with Mono without reworking loads of things. Or what about the other way? Can you take things built with the Mono toolset on Unix and run it with the Microsoft VM on Windows
Hey that's not my experience at all!
I write apps in a mixture.NET/Mono on my Mac and deploy them on Windows (desktop software) and Linux (typically server side). I do use Visual Studio in VMWare for applications that are exclusively for Windows, but that's just because VS is so good it's expedient in the short term.
I have had zero cross platform porting issues (of course Mac OS X GUI aside, as with Java).
It's just drag and drop the DLL or source between Windows, Linux and Mac. It works between Apache/mod_mono or Windows Server with IIS/.NET and with desktop applications (or self contained server software). Due to unrelated network issues I've switched server platforms at the last minute (in one day) from Mono my Mac (where I'd built everything) to a FreeBSD box, to a Solaris Box to a Windows IIS box with.NET and the software itself was fine, without any prior testing on the alternative platforms with no recompiling.
Even the more complicated multithreading stuff and network stuff works just fine. The only problems are the ones I create, like if I know I need to hook into Windows specific platform libraries - but that's exactly the same as the situation with Java (you know it's quicker to implement, but screws portability and sometimes you just have to make a judgement call based on your situtation). Of course if you use something like one of the (many) Mono libraries for abstraction / convenience you can bundle the ones you use with your app, even if it's to be deployed on.Net.
I don't agree with that, I really think it's very good in practice. I write C# software for both.Net and Mono on my Mac, with Windows and Linux my primary target platforms. It's really highly portable, and with very low resource impact requirements to boot (far, far lower than Java out of the box IME).
You can use C# w/ Mono to create games games for X-Box 360, the Wii and even the iPhone (see Unity3D), as well as Windows. The Apache module mod_mono makes it a snip to deploy, and it's just drag and drop to deploy the same websites or web services under IIS, nothing platform dependant about it.
Certainly, Windows and Linux are the environments which enjoy the best support for desktop applications (on Mac OS X you have to use an ObjC bridge, because of the proprietary UI), but in practice it's not any more abstraction than is need to create a decent UI in Java (arguably less, though it's probably fair to say that pretty simple cross platform UI's are easier to implement in Java, anything remotely sophisticated requires pretty much the same effort in either).
It's worth nothing that porting FROM something like Mono or DotGNU to.NET is far easier than the other way round, as the Microsoft tools tend to embrace Microsoft's own extensions which are not covered by the C#language specification, of which all the commonly used methods seem to implemented fully by the Mono team, but P/Invoke calls to native Windows DLL's obviously cause issues when porting - and that's almost always where the gripes come from.
If you start out with Mono then you won't have that problem. The Mono team have actually done a better job than MS in providing a wide range of libraries for platform abstraction and to implement common functions, and if you start out with Mono, there is no reason not to just bundle the Mono libraries you use with your app, regardless of platform it's run on.
For example if an app I wrote causes a BSOD because it triggers a bug in another companies code (eg MS) then good luck getting them to fix it. I have to change my code (which worked) in order to put in a hack to bypass someone elses bug - possibly making me liable for bugs that I had to introduce because someone else didn't fix theirs.
This is the biggest problem I can see for small companies.
I've just spent two weeks resolving out a bug caused by a number of specific Anti-Virus software products doing network intercepts on Windows systems (which were covertly (my to my annoyance) silently buffering networking traffic from my app).
Fortunately I have the tools needed to identity and resolve the issue here, because I work for a large company (though our product is not a commercial one, and has a small target user base). However, small companies don't have the resources to spend all the time (and money) required to compatibility testing with crummy or esoteric third party software which behaves poorly.
I agree that refunds are the right course of action. Though I believe most regions in the world have already robust enough legislation if it were enforced, additional laws to make liability of software vendors clearer would be fine with me.
Forcing QA processes is surely not the way to go - you can't legislate for it as it's too complex. Perhaps you could have minimum requirements for certain types of specific software however (like 'best practice' guidelines). I'm thinking software where public safety is an issue, perhaps where a large number of financial transactions are involved.
Like other standards / accreditations (like ISO) people don't necessarily follow it (and almost never all of the time), but even so that sort of thing can still have a positive impact on how an organisation behaves. Forcing companies to publicly and openly disclose their QA / testing and bug fixing policies/processes in a fixed format could be a good consumer benchmark, for example (were the right criteria specified).
The dealt with this already (sadly). The RIP Act allows the state to send you for jail for 5 years if you can't (or won't) supply the means (i.e. passpharse / key) to decrypt content in your possession.
The legislation was drafted so poorly that it is to the extent that if someone gives you some encrypted data on a disk and you don't know the key and the police demand it, then you fall foul of it and can go to jail.
Anecdote:
Someone actually performed a stunt at a press conference at the time and confronted a minister supporting the bill as I recall, but handing them over a floppy disk with the confession to a real crime they had committed (most likely something real but trivial, like theft I presume) and informed her they had burned the disk containing the key and that as such she was now withholding evidence of a crime and so had fallen foul of the law.
For dramatic flair, they had a video of them burning the disk with the decryption key.
The minister responded "that's not what the legislation says". The protagonist responded it was to which the minster replied "well, that's not what it means".
Would be great if anyone could remember who was involved.
I remember reading about that distro a while ago too.
Solaris has Linux binary compatibility, but that requires a patch from Sun to be installed, though I am sure you could replicate it's functionality (unhelpfully I can't answer directly as I don't know if they have done that or not).
In theory it could run both Solaris and Linux binaries. In practice I imagine getting vendor software designed for Solaris, including software from Sun, to run on it would be an uphill struggle. Would be interesting to play with though (but I can't see me wanting to use it over Linux or Solaris proper in a production environment).
FreeBSD supports Linux binary compatibility as a kernel compile time option (and now available as a module I think).
This could mean in theory you would "only" need to have a base package with the FreeBSD kernel and have it load FreeBSD specific kernel modules and that could be a base install from which existing Debian packages could be installed. Although, in practice I can image it would really mean updating other packages as well as the installer, e.g. like those for bootloaders, to ensure they were aware that using a FreeBSD kernel was an option.
As a point of interest, Solaris 10 is also compatible with Linux binaries, if you have the appropriate compatibility package installed. In theory (license permitting) the same thing could be done with Sol 10.
Bit off topic:
Solaris could REALLY do with better package management - Sun's own patches are inconsistent and some of the defaults are terrible (such as being insecure by default) and of course it lacks both the sophistication and convince of apt+dpkg on Debian. Often Sun packages don't even check for pre-requisites properly, I find them very sloppy and haphazard - this is frustrating especially as without some essential packages software may still run, but behave unexpectedly.
I raised this with Sun at an open event in London, while they were launching the Sun Fire x86 range (which are really excellent servers) which Andy Bechtolsheim gave a presentation on. They asked for general open questions and made a polite enquiry regarding package management. They seemed to have no idea their existing solution was so poor (compared to package management on Debian, Red Had and even FreeBSD) and were _very_ dismissive of the polite inquiry. They looked at each other for a moment, a bit confused and responded "Most of our vendors run hundreds or thousands of systems" they sniffed, "and have no trouble managing their packages".
Of course having seem hundreds of Solaris boxes over the years I know most major Sun customers they only/think/ they have no problem keeping their systems patched and up to date. The reality is they slap them behind private networks, are usually not patched after installed and are almost never patched thereafter (despite having a a number of essential bug fixes in their patches). This accounts for not only security holes but also a great deal of bugs.
I wasn't expecting the 9400M to be great, but there are some titles it's really good with (try the Flatout racing demo with it, for example - handles even modest FSAA (2x-4x) and high level Anisotropic Filtering and native display resolutions on the MBP).
The Nvidia drivers suck a bit on Mac OS X though. Unlike the ATI, they don't provide a control panel to tweak settings like forced FSAA, which I find frustrating, and (just like ATI) the cards perform much better under Windows on the same system.
On my MBP, WoW is playable, but not great on the 9400M and very good on the 9600M GT (with FSAA, AF) - but due to better drivers on Windows it's better on both - pretty good on the 9400M even.
It doesn't help that companies like EA are chucking out atrociously poor quality ports, which are are only barely playable even on the 9600M GT. Eve Online and City of Heroes rely on Transgaming's Cider and, with the exception of a few issues in the new Eve Online engine for Mac, are just fine (they certainly perform well, maintaining good frame rates at max quality) - so I don't know why EA's ports such so much.
Or that you have less demanding needs than some people and are for some reason entirely unable to appreciate anyone might want to do more than the sort of work that you do.
Frankly a 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of DDR3, the solid state disk and decent dedicated graphics card are crucial to my productivity - as is an easy to maintain UNIX operating system.
I have to run a range of tools, from MySQL DB's (with Sequel Pro GUI), C#/PHP/Perl/HTML/CSS tools for web site and web service development (Coda/Textmate), Virtual Machines for Windows development and testing - including one development environment (Visual Studio + XP) and two target platforms for build testing (one XP, one Vista), tools like GIMP & Pixelmator for graphic design - as well as productivity tools like Omigraffle, Pages, Neo Office (etc). I can run these and still hop into a game to relax for a bit (and play Eve Online, City of Heros, etc) without having to shut things down, which allows me to jump straight back into being productive.
If I didn't have a high end spec'd system (hardware and decent OS) I couldn't even get my work done (when it comes to serious multitasking Windows I consistently find doesn't play nicely and of course it doesn't come with a decent set of developer tools) let alone play games.
Of course Linux is equally up to the task (and often faster and less memory hungry than Mac OS X) but as great as Ubuntu is it's still not as trouble free an experience as using Mac OS X (in particular due to lack of open drivers and inferior support from commercial software vendors).
Why can't people just prefer apple, and not be fanatical about it? Oh, right, because then that wouldn't justify the increased expense.
Personally I like the hardware and design of the MacBook Pro, the software is nice too, but for me it's not worth the extra coin.
So, what you are saying is other people "fanatical" just because they don't place the same cash value on something as you do. Now THAT is a fanatical view point.
As someone who bought it once (for a gaming PC) and who has to use to test Win32 builds on I wouldn't take Vista again for free either, I'd stick with Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Debian and Solaris.
Not only would I not use Vista as my primary OS even if the computer it game on was free, you would have to pay me a very significant amount. Compared to other operating systems it's just not very good software (and Windows 7 seems like it might be only only slightly better than Vista in practice).
Rather than incrementally improving Windows XP Microsoft have take a step backwards - just as they did when they launched XP. Windows XP was widely regarded as worse than Windows 2000 when it was launched (and took quite a while, and a couple of Service Packs, to get it to the stage where people were broadly happy with it). The same thing happened with Windows 98 compared to Windows 95 (it took a couple of updates to '98 before it reached the stage where it was better than '95).
Microsoft keep making the same mistakes with their operating systems, mistakes they seem to manage to avoid with their other software - despite big changes to the Office suite and to their development tools, including Visual Studio they don't seem to have made the same mistakes with them. (IMO WinCE/Pocket PC/Windows Mobile has stood still for 10 years and that at least IE is technically moving forward albeit very, very slowly).
No way, I call BS! No computer yet built is powerful enough to cope with more than two separate instances of Adobe software running concurrently. 8)
I run three instances of VMware under Mac OS X here myself and do all my Windows only development on it (mostly in Visual Studio and some stuff with mono and with gcc) - I have the other two instances for testing purposes (with alternate OS versions/network configurations, handy to have different snapshots to test different service packs and different Windows system configurations).
I find using VMware much nicer than developing on a straight Windows installation (though I'm sure you could do the same with Virtual PC/VMware on Windows). I really like having the Mac as the parent OS, were I develop all the Linux server side code, cross platform Windows/Mac clients and manage web content, etc.
I wish the local file system integration was a bit better though. I have to run a separate SVN client in Windows as it "mounts" the local file system on the host OS like it was a network share, which has limitations (like Visual Studio not liking that).
If a book is already mentioned, adding it's ISBN is never going to be invalid because of context, it's always relevant because it clarifies exactly which book you are talking about and makes it easier to lookup. There is no "other side of the argument" in that scenario, there is no defense for messing with it as administrator, it's just plain crazy.
I can believe that happened because I've seen similar nonsense happen. There is no meta moderation, no accountability, no means by which to express dissent with bad moderation built in to the system, so zealots and administrators are free to push their own agendas (though typically on highly marginal topics, which is a small mercy).
On one occasion that springs to mind, I'd written up information about some software I was familiar with (but have no particularly strong feelings about, there no partiality in the content) purely to clarify it's function and requirements and had it repeatedly re-edited by the original author on basis it was "opinion" and or "original research" rather than fact, which was blatantly nonsense as the information was simply easily verifiable and rather dry factual data.
It was clear from looking at the history the original author created this article but didn't want *anyone* else editing it, so he was watching it and reverting any changes. This developed into a discussion in 'talk' where he came up with both the "opinion" and or "original research" arguments and he went all to say how much of an expert he was on wikipedia "after getting into a few months ago".
No, I don't work in banking or finance - and neither do anything but a very small proportion of people in London (despite it being a significant and iconic sector).
The people who live in London who are overwhelmingly not in finance do not deserve to have their taxes siphoned off when the city itself is in need of re-investment and suggesting that underfunding in urban areas of the UK is justifiable because 'bankers are greedy' is a non sequitur.
That's your problem: meanness and greed.
You seem to want my money for no particular reason and to accuse me of being greedy for resenting parting with it. I disagree with your assessment.
But another way of looking at it is exploitation. Your argument about "globally uncompetitive industries" is usually an argument about how the controllers of the money supply manage to relocate resources to places in the world where exploitation is maximal.
Schemes like the EU Common Agricultural Policy and US Steel Subsidies are exercise in maximizing exploitation - of those that sustain and provide themselves by those that don't. They predominantly unsustainable because they are poorly run businesses.
Instead of fostering entrepreneurs we stifle them by keeping competitors who should be out of business still going. With very few exceptions* it makes no sense to waste money on handouts through subsidies.
* Reasonable exceptions including, for example, in the wake of seismic changes in an industry leading to mass redundancies in a compressed time period, or due to rarely occurring and disruptive external factors. Not including excuses that run along the lines of 'we failed to adapt to changes in industry evident decades years ago and we still can't turn a profit'.
I do, and I agree with you. As I said, urban areas are virtually always net contributers to government coffers, while rural areas are net benefactors.
The UK, incidentally, has the same issue on a wider scale in Europe, and why the UK gets a rebate from the EU - because such a large proportion of the EU budget is spent on farming subsidies - thanks to the infamous (protectionist, and backwards) Common Agricultural Policy.
Of course, despite receiving the rebate the UK is still the second largest net contributor (and receive much smaller CAP funding than France, Germany, Spain, Italy and other leading nations).
Got to say it really depends on the model - some have been really lousy and defective (the last plastic MacBook range have a crack in the casing issue which was never resolved and the first generation G4 PowerBook range have serious issues - mine literally fell apart, as did two others I know of). Of course the battery issues over time are universal (and the actual battery capacity on the new MacBook's is less than on the old ones, which is madness).
The current unibody MacBook/MacBook Pro range do seem build to last though (minor issue with the battery cover being very slim and easy to bend so its slack, but very easy to bend the clips back so it's tight again once you know what's going on).
I've had about a half dozen Apple laptops in 8-9 years (2 stolen, the rest upgrades) and I've never had any hardware problems with an Apple laptop beyond the physical design though, specifically the case or keyboard - never had any issues with ports blowing, fans going, device compatibility, etc.
Where Apple really shine is the support IMO. I have my MacBook back once, my first PowerBook G4 in twice and my last PowerBook G4 in 3 times. Each time Apple repaired it for free with zero issues (drop off and collect later and pickup/redeliver) within 10 days, including twice where I was responsible for the problem but was not changed (and they replaced the keyboard, motherboard, trackpad AND case). And that's without the extended Apple Care warranty (I think I've only taken that once, I should really get it for my new MacBook Pro...).
The outstanding level of little or no-quibbles support has kept me buying Apple products again and again, especially when the competition (Sony, I'm looking at you here) are often so awful when it comes to support even when products have obvious design flaws that are responsible for the problem, they almost always want to charge you the full laptop price at 'cost' to fix the problem (i.e. they just want to give you a new laptop as a 'fix').
Personally, I'd rather pay a small premium for a product and know I'll get great service rather than get a bargain that might end up being a major hassle. I feel that way about lots of products/services.
For example I'd rather pay 180 GBP and fly British Airways than pay 40 GBP and fly Easyjet or Ryanair, because I've fucked up before and BA have gotten me out of hole more than once - including giving me a free ticket when I turned up at the wrong London airport, and one day I had a little too much fun in Amsterdam and missed my flight by an entire day (as I had no idea what day it was) they just let me hop on the next plane where a seat was available.
Compare that to flying Easyjet, which I've only flown return twice (and never gain) as they managed to goof up, one error (of closing a checkout desk 10-15 minutes early) resulted in me being stuck in a largely closed airport for 11 hours.
There is obviously room for both approaches in the market though, some people would rather pay less up front and take the punches as they come (although usually, what I've observed is they really demand is unreasonably cheap *and* high quality).
I see you've posted that elsewhere, but I'll respond to it here:
You are absolutely right, it does. It's universally true that urban areas are net contributers.
The contradictory argument above that proclaims that region 'already gets more than its fair share' while acknowledging that it subsidizes the rest of the country (which indeed it does, of that there is no doubt). The means by which banks supposedly rip of 'profit' from others remains an unexplained mystery.
Even in spite of this long standing inequality, Londoners will be the ones forking out for the majority of the Olympic build. I'm inclined to be okay with the latter (given London will be the primary benefactor), but you wouldn't think that was the case from the noise being made in the provinces, where you'd think all their regions are net contributors rather than benefactors.
If the money wasn't leeched from London then we'd have billions to spend on improving the quality of life for millions of people - instead it goes to improve the quality of life to many small number of unsustainable communities that are not able to support themselves and have rely on economic subsidies and handouts (especially in regions with formerly large manufacturing bases).
I am certainly not against wealth redistribution, but I see little point in spending the money wastefully trying to prop up globally uncompetitive industries and on unemployment/retraining for people who are grown adults and ought to show responsibility for their own welfare (instead of expecting the state to nanny them and carry them through hard times).
That constant leeching of wealth is why other major metropolitan cities in the world shine while so much of London remains grimy and run down despite it's exceptional prosperity - unlike other large and notable properties cities in the world funds are not being re-invested in the city itself.
Retail versions of Mac OS X are not DRM'd or copy protected. However, bundled versions don't behave in quite the same way as retail versions.
As I was inheriting her old 13" MacBook, I thought to use the Leopard install disk that came with her machine to upgrade from Tiger on the older box. But it came up with a message to the effect that "You cannot install this software on this computer".
You often can't use the installation CD that is bundled with a Mac on another, older Mac. That was the case with Mac OS Classic too. For some reason that can be bit hard to fathom Apple have a history of making the operating installs discs that are bundled with Mac's different to retail versions of the OS.
On the face of it the most plausible reasons for this are it's possibly discourage casual piracy from people using restore discs from new Mac's to upgrade older Mac's (i.e. without buying a new licensed copy for each system, or a family pack) and/or because the bundled restore CD's often have system specific software bundled with them (not just iLife but has everything from Nanosaur 2 to Omnigraffle) that isn't part of the Operating System itself (and is occasionally from a third party).
To confuse matters, these discs do often work on other Mac's that are newer, which undermines the otherwise plausible explanations above above. With that in mind, They seem so keen to create work for themselves by maintaining different copies of the OS as it must be more expensive to QA and to support.
I guess they figure it's enough of a revenue protector to be worth doing.
But they aren't selling very well - they're being pirated. That's what they keep saying anyway.
"They"? What publisher says games, in general, are not selling very well?
Lots of people not buying games and playing them anyway (and revenues being down on what they could be as a result) doesn't prevent games from selling well - the two are not always mutually exclusive. Illegal copying is problem, but on consoles at least it's not bad enough to prevent games from being financially successful. It just means that retailers, publishers and developers ultimately make less money - an inconvenient truth for some.
Copying is a much bigger problem for PC titles however as it's much easier to copy games on PC's. PC games sales are generally much smaller in number than sales on consoles and this makes the PC games market even more vulnerable sales lost through illegal copying.
Of course in fantasy pirate land, content creators only benefit from piracy, because it engenders positive mindshare that somehow ultimately translates into enough new sales that they outweigh the lost potential sales....somehow (for some reason no one ever goes in to detail about how the economics of that are supposed to work).
I love Galaxy too and I also really liked Sunshine on the Game Cube - though I thought Mario 64 was completely horrible, largely due to the game play inhibiting limitations imposed by the N64 hardware, as much as a fair number of people apparently loved it.
Sunshine got some criticism for being short, and Paper Mario has gotten positive reviews with a small amount of criticism but Galaxy is absolutely a real work of art. The only criticism I've heard of Galaxy is from someone who didn't like "that it was a collection of mini games", which I can't understand at all.
I also thought Sonic Adventure in 3D on the Dreamcast was superb, and the best Sonic outing of all time, which I realize is a minority opinion. I never understood why it got so much flack for having a narrative element. I thought Sonic Adventure 2 was less impressive, partly by virtue of being a sequel. However, I think the most recent Sonic 3D title Sonic and the Secret Rings is not just bad but absolutely dire - a steaming travesty with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever.
I think ports of 2D to 3D games are very hit and miss. To make a great 3D title I think you need to adopt mechanics that best suit 3D, and that can mean departing from some of the feel of the 2D original. If that happens some people are going to be unhappy with the move to 3D if you don't, the game will probably suck because it's too much of a round peg in a square hole and so even more people (very likely most people) will think it sucks.
I think the challenge of how similar a sequel to a predecessor a title should be isn't unique to 2D-to-3D conversions though (and is not even unique to games, or even to software in general). If a format doesn't evolve then it will grow stale, boring and lose followers, if it does evolve then some people are bound to not like the new direction and stop following it. You might end up with new followers as a result (that is people who didn't like the original format, but do like the new one) but you can't expect to always come out ahead indefinitely.
Re:recommended for advanced programmers
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I'm using and deploying C#.NET on Linux in a production environment right now, and I'm absolutely not a Microsoft fan and wouldn't have wanted to anywhere near Windows or Visual Studio prior to.NET and C#.
Mono is absolutely amazing for cross platform development. I develop on Mac OS X, deploy on Linux (and other Unix platforms) and on Windows it it Just Works (TM). I'll admit the first time I ran an app on Windows (with.NET) that I'd developed on Mac OS with IIS I was taken aback with how flawlessly it worked. I've found the only target platform specific code I have is that which I knowingly and deliberately call (for example, to inspect the registry on Windows).
I'm really loopy over the syntax of C#. It's very, very tight and both development and deployment for things like SOAP web service is ridiculously easy - and even more impressive with Mono than with using ISS to server the same content (which generates a lot of automatic documentation and examples for service).
The only major issue I have with Mono right now is that it's not ready for widespread end user application deployment on Mac OS X for GUI applications - it's both unstable and not fully native. However it would still be absolutely fine on Mac OS X server software, code which is called from a Cocoa application (the road I think I am going to have to go down for the Mac version of the application I'm currently working on) or for bespoke / enterprise application deployment.
Of course, I think it's important to mention to that Mono really isn't to.NET what WINE is to Win32 application compatibility - which is an understandable, if inaccurate initial conclusion to come to about it...
While applications built with Mono in mind work great on both Mono and on.NET for Windows,.NET applications written on Windows with Visual Studio are necessarily going to work under Mono without issue, because it's easy to do platform specific code in Visual Studio, particularly when writing desktop software.
So in that respect it's absolutely true to say.NET has issues, but when using Mono it works really well for cross platform application development (with the exception of the caveats mentioned for Mac OS X). Under Linux, I've had no such issues. I will say it takes a bit of work to deploy and package Mono applications for end user deployment, and for now shouldn't be taken too lightly (tools like mkbundle and macpack are great, but in practice can take some work to get up and running under a Windows environment in particular.)
The games you've mentioned - City of Heroes and Star Wars Galaxies, PlanetSide are all Sci-Fi MMO's. The Matrix Online, RF Online (which is much like Lineage 2, only with robots and mechs) and The Saga of Ryzom spring to mind (I think it got canned too - and good riddance).
If you want explicitly spaced based MMO's - other than Star Wars Galaxies - currently Eve Online, Tabula Rasa and the rather aging Anarchy Online options (as is Vendetta Online, on a much smaller scale, but it's kinda cute and of course runs on Linux and Mac OS X).
Earth and Beyond was pretty good when it was going, and not unsuccessful - even Electronic Arts admitted it was profitable, just not enough for them to bother with.
The suggestion as posed wouldn't work of course, but it would be entirely possible to require all companies releasing software with DRM on it (or media, for that matter) to hand over a tested and proven unlocking mechanism (including private keys) to be held in escrow - most practically to a government body.
The software to unlock the media / keys could be held privately and would be released to the public domain in the event of the company either goes bankrupt or (possibly as a result of being bought) ceased to meet obligations to provide a mechanism for allowing access to already purchased content to be utilized (obviously that would have to be defined by legislation as well).
If you make it illegal to release software/media without first doing this, and force companies who do it to pay the relatively paltry admin fees associated with the cost of running such a program this would protect consumers and boost confidence in DRM'd media.
(I heard this proposed in CNET's Buzz Out Loud a few months ago I think).
This would really be quite straightforward draft as legislation goes (although of course there is some danger as it's an IT project, and you can't trust most governments with them!). The biggest hurdle to this happening is that there are no large bodies interested in pushing such legislation - and the companies who do support strong lobbing organizations don't realize how this could be in their own best interests.
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Compare with C# where your typical app, whether a GUI app or a server app, can't be ported to work with Mono without reworking loads of things. Or what about the other way? Can you take things built with the Mono toolset on Unix and run it with the Microsoft VM on Windows
Hey that's not my experience at all!
I write apps in a mixture .NET/Mono on my Mac and deploy them on Windows (desktop software) and Linux (typically server side). I do use Visual Studio in VMWare for applications that are exclusively for Windows, but that's just because VS is so good it's expedient in the short term.
I have had zero cross platform porting issues (of course Mac OS X GUI aside, as with Java).
It's just drag and drop the DLL or source between Windows, Linux and Mac. It works between Apache/mod_mono or Windows Server with IIS/.NET and with desktop applications (or self contained server software). Due to unrelated network issues I've switched server platforms at the last minute (in one day) from Mono my Mac (where I'd built everything) to a FreeBSD box, to a Solaris Box to a Windows IIS box with .NET and the software itself was fine, without any prior testing on the alternative platforms with no recompiling.
Even the more complicated multithreading stuff and network stuff works just fine. The only problems are the ones I create, like if I know I need to hook into Windows specific platform libraries - but that's exactly the same as the situation with Java (you know it's quicker to implement, but screws portability and sometimes you just have to make a judgement call based on your situtation). Of course if you use something like one of the (many) Mono libraries for abstraction / convenience you can bundle the ones you use with your app, even if it's to be deployed on .Net.
I don't agree with that, I really think it's very good in practice. I write C# software for both .Net and Mono on my Mac, with Windows and Linux my primary target platforms. It's really highly portable, and with very low resource impact requirements to boot (far, far lower than Java out of the box IME).
You can use C# w/ Mono to create games games for X-Box 360, the Wii and even the iPhone (see Unity3D), as well as Windows. The Apache module mod_mono makes it a snip to deploy, and it's just drag and drop to deploy the same websites or web services under IIS, nothing platform dependant about it.
Certainly, Windows and Linux are the environments which enjoy the best support for desktop applications (on Mac OS X you have to use an ObjC bridge, because of the proprietary UI), but in practice it's not any more abstraction than is need to create a decent UI in Java (arguably less, though it's probably fair to say that pretty simple cross platform UI's are easier to implement in Java, anything remotely sophisticated requires pretty much the same effort in either).
It's worth nothing that porting FROM something like Mono or DotGNU to .NET is far easier than the other way round, as the Microsoft tools tend to embrace Microsoft's own extensions which are not covered by the C#language specification, of which all the commonly used methods seem to implemented fully by the Mono team, but P/Invoke calls to native Windows DLL's obviously cause issues when porting - and that's almost always where the gripes come from.
If you start out with Mono then you won't have that problem. The Mono team have actually done a better job than MS in providing a wide range of libraries for platform abstraction and to implement common functions, and if you start out with Mono, there is no reason not to just bundle the Mono libraries you use with your app, regardless of platform it's run on.
For example if an app I wrote causes a BSOD because it triggers a bug in another companies code (eg MS) then good luck getting them to fix it. I have to change my code (which worked) in order to put in a hack to bypass someone elses bug - possibly making me liable for bugs that I had to introduce because someone else didn't fix theirs.
This is the biggest problem I can see for small companies.
I've just spent two weeks resolving out a bug caused by a number of specific Anti-Virus software products doing network intercepts on Windows systems (which were covertly (my to my annoyance) silently buffering networking traffic from my app).
Fortunately I have the tools needed to identity and resolve the issue here, because I work for a large company (though our product is not a commercial one, and has a small target user base). However, small companies don't have the resources to spend all the time (and money) required to compatibility testing with crummy or esoteric third party software which behaves poorly.
I agree that refunds are the right course of action. Though I believe most regions in the world have already robust enough legislation if it were enforced, additional laws to make liability of software vendors clearer would be fine with me.
Forcing QA processes is surely not the way to go - you can't legislate for it as it's too complex. Perhaps you could have minimum requirements for certain types of specific software however (like 'best practice' guidelines). I'm thinking software where public safety is an issue, perhaps where a large number of financial transactions are involved.
Like other standards / accreditations (like ISO) people don't necessarily follow it (and almost never all of the time), but even so that sort of thing can still have a positive impact on how an organisation behaves. Forcing companies to publicly and openly disclose their QA / testing and bug fixing policies/processes in a fixed format could be a good consumer benchmark, for example (were the right criteria specified).
The dealt with this already (sadly). The RIP Act allows the state to send you for jail for 5 years if you can't (or won't) supply the means (i.e. passpharse / key) to decrypt content in your possession.
The legislation was drafted so poorly that it is to the extent that if someone gives you some encrypted data on a disk and you don't know the key and the police demand it, then you fall foul of it and can go to jail.
Anecdote:
Someone actually performed a stunt at a press conference at the time and confronted a minister supporting the bill as I recall, but handing them over a floppy disk with the confession to a real crime they had committed (most likely something real but trivial, like theft I presume) and informed her they had burned the disk containing the key and that as such she was now withholding evidence of a crime and so had fallen foul of the law.
For dramatic flair, they had a video of them burning the disk with the decryption key.
The minister responded "that's not what the legislation says". The protagonist responded it was to which the minster replied "well, that's not what it means".
Would be great if anyone could remember who was involved.
I remember reading about that distro a while ago too.
Solaris has Linux binary compatibility, but that requires a patch from Sun to be installed, though I am sure you could replicate it's functionality (unhelpfully I can't answer directly as I don't know if they have done that or not).
In theory it could run both Solaris and Linux binaries. In practice I imagine getting vendor software designed for Solaris, including software from Sun, to run on it would be an uphill struggle. Would be interesting to play with though (but I can't see me wanting to use it over Linux or Solaris proper in a production environment).
FreeBSD supports Linux binary compatibility as a kernel compile time option (and now available as a module I think).
This could mean in theory you would "only" need to have a base package with the FreeBSD kernel and have it load FreeBSD specific kernel modules and that could be a base install from which existing Debian packages could be installed. Although, in practice I can image it would really mean updating other packages as well as the installer, e.g. like those for bootloaders, to ensure they were aware that using a FreeBSD kernel was an option.
As a point of interest, Solaris 10 is also compatible with Linux binaries, if you have the appropriate compatibility package installed. In theory (license permitting) the same thing could be done with Sol 10.
Bit off topic:
Solaris could REALLY do with better package management - Sun's own patches are inconsistent and some of the defaults are terrible (such as being insecure by default) and of course it lacks both the sophistication and convince of apt+dpkg on Debian. Often Sun packages don't even check for pre-requisites properly, I find them very sloppy and haphazard - this is frustrating especially as without some essential packages software may still run, but behave unexpectedly.
I raised this with Sun at an open event in London, while they were launching the Sun Fire x86 range (which are really excellent servers) which Andy Bechtolsheim gave a presentation on. They asked for general open questions and made a polite enquiry regarding package management. They seemed to have no idea their existing solution was so poor (compared to package management on Debian, Red Had and even FreeBSD) and were _very_ dismissive of the polite inquiry. They looked at each other for a moment, a bit confused and responded "Most of our vendors run hundreds or thousands of systems" they sniffed, "and have no trouble managing their packages".
Of course having seem hundreds of Solaris boxes over the years I know most major Sun customers they only /think/ they have no problem keeping their systems patched and up to date. The reality is they slap them behind private networks, are usually not patched after installed and are almost never patched thereafter (despite having a a number of essential bug fixes in their patches). This accounts for not only security holes but also a great deal of bugs.
I wasn't expecting the 9400M to be great, but there are some titles it's really good with (try the Flatout racing demo with it, for example - handles even modest FSAA (2x-4x) and high level Anisotropic Filtering and native display resolutions on the MBP).
The Nvidia drivers suck a bit on Mac OS X though. Unlike the ATI, they don't provide a control panel to tweak settings like forced FSAA, which I find frustrating, and (just like ATI) the cards perform much better under Windows on the same system.
On my MBP, WoW is playable, but not great on the 9400M and very good on the 9600M GT (with FSAA, AF) - but due to better drivers on Windows it's better on both - pretty good on the 9400M even.
It doesn't help that companies like EA are chucking out atrociously poor quality ports, which are are only barely playable even on the 9600M GT. Eve Online and City of Heroes rely on Transgaming's Cider and, with the exception of a few issues in the new Eve Online engine for Mac, are just fine (they certainly perform well, maintaining good frame rates at max quality) - so I don't know why EA's ports such so much.
Or that you have less demanding needs than some people and are for some reason entirely unable to appreciate anyone might want to do more than the sort of work that you do.
Frankly a 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of DDR3, the solid state disk and decent dedicated graphics card are crucial to my productivity - as is an easy to maintain UNIX operating system.
I have to run a range of tools, from MySQL DB's (with Sequel Pro GUI), C#/PHP/Perl/HTML/CSS tools for web site and web service development (Coda/Textmate), Virtual Machines for Windows development and testing - including one development environment (Visual Studio + XP) and two target platforms for build testing (one XP, one Vista), tools like GIMP & Pixelmator for graphic design - as well as productivity tools like Omigraffle, Pages, Neo Office (etc). I can run these and still hop into a game to relax for a bit (and play Eve Online, City of Heros, etc) without having to shut things down, which allows me to jump straight back into being productive.
If I didn't have a high end spec'd system (hardware and decent OS) I couldn't even get my work done (when it comes to serious multitasking Windows I consistently find doesn't play nicely and of course it doesn't come with a decent set of developer tools) let alone play games.
Of course Linux is equally up to the task (and often faster and less memory hungry than Mac OS X) but as great as Ubuntu is it's still not as trouble free an experience as using Mac OS X (in particular due to lack of open drivers and inferior support from commercial software vendors).
Why can't people just prefer apple, and not be fanatical about it? Oh, right, because then that wouldn't justify the increased expense.
Personally I like the hardware and design of the MacBook Pro, the software is nice too, but for me it's not worth the extra coin.
So, what you are saying is other people "fanatical" just because they don't place the same cash value on something as you do. Now THAT is a fanatical view point.
As someone who bought it once (for a gaming PC) and who has to use to test Win32 builds on I wouldn't take Vista again for free either, I'd stick with Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Debian and Solaris.
Not only would I not use Vista as my primary OS even if the computer it game on was free, you would have to pay me a very significant amount. Compared to other operating systems it's just not very good software (and Windows 7 seems like it might be only only slightly better than Vista in practice).
Rather than incrementally improving Windows XP Microsoft have take a step backwards - just as they did when they launched XP. Windows XP was widely regarded as worse than Windows 2000 when it was launched (and took quite a while, and a couple of Service Packs, to get it to the stage where people were broadly happy with it). The same thing happened with Windows 98 compared to Windows 95 (it took a couple of updates to '98 before it reached the stage where it was better than '95).
Microsoft keep making the same mistakes with their operating systems, mistakes they seem to manage to avoid with their other software - despite big changes to the Office suite and to their development tools, including Visual Studio they don't seem to have made the same mistakes with them. (IMO WinCE/Pocket PC/Windows Mobile has stood still for 10 years and that at least IE is technically moving forward albeit very, very slowly).
I think that's a load of bollocks.
Link to ONE legitimate bank that uses HTTP (rather than HTTPS) when transmitting login details. ONE.
No way, I call BS! No computer yet built is powerful enough to cope with more than two separate instances of Adobe software running concurrently. 8)
I run three instances of VMware under Mac OS X here myself and do all my Windows only development on it (mostly in Visual Studio and some stuff with mono and with gcc) - I have the other two instances for testing purposes (with alternate OS versions/network configurations, handy to have different snapshots to test different service packs and different Windows system configurations).
I find using VMware much nicer than developing on a straight Windows installation (though I'm sure you could do the same with Virtual PC/VMware on Windows). I really like having the Mac as the parent OS, were I develop all the Linux server side code, cross platform Windows/Mac clients and manage web content, etc.
I wish the local file system integration was a bit better though. I have to run a separate SVN client in Windows as it "mounts" the local file system on the host OS like it was a network share, which has limitations (like Visual Studio not liking that).
In theory is not true, but in practice it usually is?
If a book is already mentioned, adding it's ISBN is never going to be invalid because of context, it's always relevant because it clarifies exactly which book you are talking about and makes it easier to lookup. There is no "other side of the argument" in that scenario, there is no defense for messing with it as administrator, it's just plain crazy.
I can believe that happened because I've seen similar nonsense happen. There is no meta moderation, no accountability, no means by which to express dissent with bad moderation built in to the system, so zealots and administrators are free to push their own agendas (though typically on highly marginal topics, which is a small mercy).
On one occasion that springs to mind, I'd written up information about some software I was familiar with (but have no particularly strong feelings about, there no partiality in the content) purely to clarify it's function and requirements and had it repeatedly re-edited by the original author on basis it was "opinion" and or "original research" rather than fact, which was blatantly nonsense as the information was simply easily verifiable and rather dry factual data.
It was clear from looking at the history the original author created this article but didn't want *anyone* else editing it, so he was watching it and reverting any changes. This developed into a discussion in 'talk' where he came up with both the "opinion" and or "original research" arguments and he went all to say how much of an expert he was on wikipedia "after getting into a few months ago".
That's NOT how people talk. It just isn't. We'd anglicize it. Goa'uld would become Goold. Or Gold. Or maybe Gowoold. or something along those lines.
That's exactly what they did in the show, with main characters frequently using a pronunciation akin to 'goold'.
No, I don't work in banking or finance - and neither do anything but a very small proportion of people in London (despite it being a significant and iconic sector).
The people who live in London who are overwhelmingly not in finance do not deserve to have their taxes siphoned off when the city itself is in need of re-investment and suggesting that underfunding in urban areas of the UK is justifiable because 'bankers are greedy' is a non sequitur.
That's your problem: meanness and greed.
You seem to want my money for no particular reason and to accuse me of being greedy for resenting parting with it. I disagree with your assessment.
But another way of looking at it is exploitation. Your argument about "globally uncompetitive industries" is usually an argument about how the controllers of the money supply manage to relocate resources to places in the world where exploitation is maximal.
Schemes like the EU Common Agricultural Policy and US Steel Subsidies are exercise in maximizing exploitation - of those that sustain and provide themselves by those that don't. They predominantly unsustainable because they are poorly run businesses.
Instead of fostering entrepreneurs we stifle them by keeping competitors who should be out of business still going. With very few exceptions* it makes no sense to waste money on handouts through subsidies.
* Reasonable exceptions including, for example, in the wake of seismic changes in an industry leading to mass redundancies in a compressed time period, or due to rarely occurring and disruptive external factors. Not including excuses that run along the lines of 'we failed to adapt to changes in industry evident decades years ago and we still can't turn a profit'.
I do, and I agree with you. As I said, urban areas are virtually always net contributers to government coffers, while rural areas are net benefactors.
The UK, incidentally, has the same issue on a wider scale in Europe, and why the UK gets a rebate from the EU - because such a large proportion of the EU budget is spent on farming subsidies - thanks to the infamous (protectionist, and backwards) Common Agricultural Policy.
Of course, despite receiving the rebate the UK is still the second largest net contributor (and receive much smaller CAP funding than France, Germany, Spain, Italy and other leading nations).
Got to say it really depends on the model - some have been really lousy and defective (the last plastic MacBook range have a crack in the casing issue which was never resolved and the first generation G4 PowerBook range have serious issues - mine literally fell apart, as did two others I know of). Of course the battery issues over time are universal (and the actual battery capacity on the new MacBook's is less than on the old ones, which is madness).
The current unibody MacBook/MacBook Pro range do seem build to last though (minor issue with the battery cover being very slim and easy to bend so its slack, but very easy to bend the clips back so it's tight again once you know what's going on).
I've had about a half dozen Apple laptops in 8-9 years (2 stolen, the rest upgrades) and I've never had any hardware problems with an Apple laptop beyond the physical design though, specifically the case or keyboard - never had any issues with ports blowing, fans going, device compatibility, etc.
Where Apple really shine is the support IMO. I have my MacBook back once, my first PowerBook G4 in twice and my last PowerBook G4 in 3 times. Each time Apple repaired it for free with zero issues (drop off and collect later and pickup/redeliver) within 10 days, including twice where I was responsible for the problem but was not changed (and they replaced the keyboard, motherboard, trackpad AND case). And that's without the extended Apple Care warranty (I think I've only taken that once, I should really get it for my new MacBook Pro...).
The outstanding level of little or no-quibbles support has kept me buying Apple products again and again, especially when the competition (Sony, I'm looking at you here) are often so awful when it comes to support even when products have obvious design flaws that are responsible for the problem, they almost always want to charge you the full laptop price at 'cost' to fix the problem (i.e. they just want to give you a new laptop as a 'fix').
Personally, I'd rather pay a small premium for a product and know I'll get great service rather than get a bargain that might end up being a major hassle. I feel that way about lots of products/services.
For example I'd rather pay 180 GBP and fly British Airways than pay 40 GBP and fly Easyjet or Ryanair, because I've fucked up before and BA have gotten me out of hole more than once - including giving me a free ticket when I turned up at the wrong London airport, and one day I had a little too much fun in Amsterdam and missed my flight by an entire day (as I had no idea what day it was) they just let me hop on the next plane where a seat was available.
Compare that to flying Easyjet, which I've only flown return twice (and never gain) as they managed to goof up, one error (of closing a checkout desk 10-15 minutes early) resulted in me being stuck in a largely closed airport for 11 hours.
There is obviously room for both approaches in the market though, some people would rather pay less up front and take the punches as they come (although usually, what I've observed is they really demand is unreasonably cheap *and* high quality).
I see you've posted that elsewhere, but I'll respond to it here:
You are absolutely right, it does. It's universally true that urban areas are net contributers.
The contradictory argument above that proclaims that region 'already gets more than its fair share' while acknowledging that it subsidizes the rest of the country (which indeed it does, of that there is no doubt). The means by which banks supposedly rip of 'profit' from others remains an unexplained mystery.
Even in spite of this long standing inequality, Londoners will be the ones forking out for the majority of the Olympic build. I'm inclined to be okay with the latter (given London will be the primary benefactor), but you wouldn't think that was the case from the noise being made in the provinces, where you'd think all their regions are net contributors rather than benefactors.
If the money wasn't leeched from London then we'd have billions to spend on improving the quality of life for millions of people - instead it goes to improve the quality of life to many small number of unsustainable communities that are not able to support themselves and have rely on economic subsidies and handouts (especially in regions with formerly large manufacturing bases).
I am certainly not against wealth redistribution, but I see little point in spending the money wastefully trying to prop up globally uncompetitive industries and on unemployment/retraining for people who are grown adults and ought to show responsibility for their own welfare (instead of expecting the state to nanny them and carry them through hard times).
That constant leeching of wealth is why other major metropolitan cities in the world shine while so much of London remains grimy and run down despite it's exceptional prosperity - unlike other large and notable properties cities in the world funds are not being re-invested in the city itself.
I don't believe this is true any more
Retail versions of Mac OS X are not DRM'd or copy protected. However, bundled versions don't behave in quite the same way as retail versions.
As I was inheriting her old 13" MacBook, I thought to use the Leopard install disk that came with her machine to upgrade from Tiger on the older box. But it came up with a message to the effect that "You cannot install this software on this computer".
You often can't use the installation CD that is bundled with a Mac on another, older Mac. That was the case with Mac OS Classic too. For some reason that can be bit hard to fathom Apple have a history of making the operating installs discs that are bundled with Mac's different to retail versions of the OS.
On the face of it the most plausible reasons for this are it's possibly discourage casual piracy from people using restore discs from new Mac's to upgrade older Mac's (i.e. without buying a new licensed copy for each system, or a family pack) and/or because the bundled restore CD's often have system specific software bundled with them (not just iLife but has everything from Nanosaur 2 to Omnigraffle) that isn't part of the Operating System itself (and is occasionally from a third party).
To confuse matters, these discs do often work on other Mac's that are newer, which undermines the otherwise plausible explanations above above. With that in mind, They seem so keen to create work for themselves by maintaining different copies of the OS as it must be more expensive to QA and to support.
I guess they figure it's enough of a revenue protector to be worth doing.
But they aren't selling very well - they're being pirated. That's what they keep saying anyway.
"They"? What publisher says games, in general, are not selling very well?
Lots of people not buying games and playing them anyway (and revenues being down on what they could be as a result) doesn't prevent games from selling well - the two are not always mutually exclusive. Illegal copying is problem, but on consoles at least it's not bad enough to prevent games from being financially successful. It just means that retailers, publishers and developers ultimately make less money - an inconvenient truth for some.
Copying is a much bigger problem for PC titles however as it's much easier to copy games on PC's. PC games sales are generally much smaller in number than sales on consoles and this makes the PC games market even more vulnerable sales lost through illegal copying.
Of course in fantasy pirate land, content creators only benefit from piracy, because it engenders positive mindshare that somehow ultimately translates into enough new sales that they outweigh the lost potential sales....somehow (for some reason no one ever goes in to detail about how the economics of that are supposed to work).
I love Galaxy too and I also really liked Sunshine on the Game Cube - though I thought Mario 64 was completely horrible, largely due to the game play inhibiting limitations imposed by the N64 hardware, as much as a fair number of people apparently loved it.
Sunshine got some criticism for being short, and Paper Mario has gotten positive reviews with a small amount of criticism but Galaxy is absolutely a real work of art. The only criticism I've heard of Galaxy is from someone who didn't like "that it was a collection of mini games", which I can't understand at all.
I also thought Sonic Adventure in 3D on the Dreamcast was superb, and the best Sonic outing of all time, which I realize is a minority opinion. I never understood why it got so much flack for having a narrative element. I thought Sonic Adventure 2 was less impressive, partly by virtue of being a sequel. However, I think the most recent Sonic 3D title Sonic and the Secret Rings is not just bad but absolutely dire - a steaming travesty with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever.
I think ports of 2D to 3D games are very hit and miss. To make a great 3D title I think you need to adopt mechanics that best suit 3D, and that can mean departing from some of the feel of the 2D original. If that happens some people are going to be unhappy with the move to 3D if you don't, the game will probably suck because it's too much of a round peg in a square hole and so even more people (very likely most people) will think it sucks.
I think the challenge of how similar a sequel to a predecessor a title should be isn't unique to 2D-to-3D conversions though (and is not even unique to games, or even to software in general). If a format doesn't evolve then it will grow stale, boring and lose followers, if it does evolve then some people are bound to not like the new direction and stop following it. You might end up with new followers as a result (that is people who didn't like the original format, but do like the new one) but you can't expect to always come out ahead indefinitely.
I'm using and deploying C# .NET on Linux in a production environment right now, and I'm absolutely not a Microsoft fan and wouldn't have wanted to anywhere near Windows or Visual Studio prior to .NET and C#.
Mono is absolutely amazing for cross platform development. I develop on Mac OS X, deploy on Linux (and other Unix platforms) and on Windows it it Just Works (TM). I'll admit the first time I ran an app on Windows (with .NET) that I'd developed on Mac OS with IIS I was taken aback with how flawlessly it worked. I've found the only target platform specific code I have is that which I knowingly and deliberately call (for example, to inspect the registry on Windows).
I'm really loopy over the syntax of C#. It's very, very tight and both development and deployment for things like SOAP web service is ridiculously easy - and even more impressive with Mono than with using ISS to server the same content (which generates a lot of automatic documentation and examples for service).
The only major issue I have with Mono right now is that it's not ready for widespread end user application deployment on Mac OS X for GUI applications - it's both unstable and not fully native. However it would still be absolutely fine on Mac OS X server software, code which is called from a Cocoa application (the road I think I am going to have to go down for the Mac version of the application I'm currently working on) or for bespoke / enterprise application deployment.
Of course, I think it's important to mention to that Mono really isn't to .NET what WINE is to Win32 application compatibility - which is an understandable, if inaccurate initial conclusion to come to about it...
While applications built with Mono in mind work great on both Mono and on .NET for Windows, .NET applications written on Windows with Visual Studio are necessarily going to work under Mono without issue, because it's easy to do platform specific code in Visual Studio, particularly when writing desktop software.
So in that respect it's absolutely true to say .NET has issues, but when using Mono it works really well for cross platform application development (with the exception of the caveats mentioned for Mac OS X). Under Linux, I've had no such issues. I will say it takes a bit of work to deploy and package Mono applications for end user deployment, and for now shouldn't be taken too lightly (tools like mkbundle and macpack are great, but in practice can take some work to get up and running under a Windows environment in particular.)
The games you've mentioned - City of Heroes and Star Wars Galaxies, PlanetSide are all Sci-Fi MMO's. The Matrix Online, RF Online (which is much like Lineage 2, only with robots and mechs) and The Saga of Ryzom spring to mind (I think it got canned too - and good riddance).
If you want explicitly spaced based MMO's - other than Star Wars Galaxies - currently Eve Online, Tabula Rasa and the rather aging Anarchy Online options (as is Vendetta Online, on a much smaller scale, but it's kinda cute and of course runs on Linux and Mac OS X).
Earth and Beyond was pretty good when it was going, and not unsuccessful - even Electronic Arts admitted it was profitable, just not enough for them to bother with.
You don't need to "hack" an iPhone to run your own software on it (or anybody else's 3rd party software).
Apple provide tools to self-sign and install software on your iPhone as free of charge downloads.
The suggestion as posed wouldn't work of course, but it would be entirely possible to require all companies releasing software with DRM on it (or media, for that matter) to hand over a tested and proven unlocking mechanism (including private keys) to be held in escrow - most practically to a government body.
The software to unlock the media / keys could be held privately and would be released to the public domain in the event of the company either goes bankrupt or (possibly as a result of being bought) ceased to meet obligations to provide a mechanism for allowing access to already purchased content to be utilized (obviously that would have to be defined by legislation as well).
If you make it illegal to release software/media without first doing this, and force companies who do it to pay the relatively paltry admin fees associated with the cost of running such a program this would protect consumers and boost confidence in DRM'd media.
(I heard this proposed in CNET's Buzz Out Loud a few months ago I think).
This would really be quite straightforward draft as legislation goes (although of course there is some danger as it's an IT project, and you can't trust most governments with them!). The biggest hurdle to this happening is that there are no large bodies interested in pushing such legislation - and the companies who do support strong lobbing organizations don't realize how this could be in their own best interests.