I think that the grandparent's argument of the boils down to the fact that stealing physical goods deprives the owner of those goods, whilst copying it does not deprive them of the ability to use it.
The trouble is, while the anti-copyright crowd keep making that argument, it isn't really true.
Suppose you make your money by producing creative works. Typically, the up-front cost of that creation is high, but the marginal cost of copying and distribution is low. In most cases, you will market the product at a relatively low price, in order to amortise the sunk costs over the entire consumer base and sell at a cost the market will bear.
The major advantage of copyright over most other legal frameworks that I have seen proposed is that it supports this sharing of costs among the consumer base, so that many people can each contribute a small part of the overall cost but all can benefit from the entire work. This makes the creation and distribution of many works viable where relying on direct funding seems unlikely to work.
The economics of the entire industry depend on this mechanic working. However, while copying does not deprive the original holder of the material of their own copy, it certainly could have a potential impact on the market. If you reduce the size of that market, then you reduce the number of people contributing to the pool that pays (or doesn't pay) for the original cost of the work, which affects the financial viability of the product in the first place. Equally, for works that are going to break even anyway, reducing the size of the market will reduce the profit that the work makes, which is a disincentive to invest more in order to produce better works.
Some people claim that content providers are making enough from paying customers anyway, but that's a silly argument for several reasons. Firstly, it ignores the fundamental unfairness of the law-abiding subsidising the law-breaking. Secondly, it doesn't work in the limit: if we legalised copying and everyone behaved as the law-breakers do today, then the creators would have no income stream and the incentive to create and share new works would be gone. Thirdly, "content providers" in these claims usually actually means Big Media/"MAFIAA", and ignores the fact that many small organisations and individuals create valuable content and are just trying to make a living from it, and many small businesses and individual careers come to an early end because they can't make enough money.
Some people claim that you can't assume every illegal copy represents a lost sale. Well, no, of course you can't. But it's equally absurd to pretend that everyone who would have bought a work legally still does so even though they already have an illegal copy of the material. People used to claim that they were "just trying" works to "see if they like them before they buy", but since these days we have hard statistics from things like recent games with on-line elements and the popularity of specific works on P2P networks, we know very well that huge numbers of people are ripping products that are new/popular and continuing to use them well beyond just trying them out.
Some people claim that they are somehow doing content providers a favour by "marketing" their product for free. It's a good job not everyone takes that view, or there would be a whole lot of marketing but still no sales, and marketing is a cost centre rather than a revenue generator. And of course, content providers have the option to distribute taster material or even entire products for free if they wish to do so; if the marketing argument really does work, then those providers who give their work away for free will benefit and market forces will promote this behaviour in the long term. Given that this hasn't happened in the past decade, I won't hold my breath, though.
In short, while copying a work illegally may not deprive the original holder of a copy, it most certainly can deprive them of their ability to use it.
Several people seem to be making an argument like yours, so let's step back for a moment and analyse what you're saying.
In one sentence, you say that many business owners depend on having a functioning web site for their business. Sure, I'll buy that; I run businesses with on-line elements myself, and downtime is no fun.
In the next sentence, you make a common anti-copyright argument about "potential" lost sales. Again, there is some merit there: I certainly wouldn't claim that every illegally distributed copy of a work results in an actual lost sale.
The trouble is, you can no more prove that a web site going down cost a sale (or caused some other form of damage to a non-commercial site) than you can prove that giving someone an illegal copy of some music/movie/software did. We could probably agree that some significant amount of damage is being done in many such cases, but we couldn't accurately quantify that damage in any objective way.
Given that people who are almost certainly infringing copyright are frequently getting away with it on legal technicalities, and awards of damages in the few cases that have gone to court have been either limited initially or reduced on appeal because the original award was disproportionate to the proven actual damages, I find it hard to have much sympathy with hypothetical arguments about how knocking out domains that are probably being used mostly or entirely for illegal purposes is somehow causing some huge loss to some legitimate business.
Apparently a US court has issued a warrant permitting this action. Given that they are presumably far more qualified to interpret US law than I am as a non-lawyer from outside the US, perhaps you should take the matter up with them?
And the cognitive dissonance is not in sticking meticulously to the distinction between physical property and IP, it's in basing much of the advocacy for infringing copyright on the distinction, but then crying like a baby just because the government flipped a few bits that also did not harm anyone's personal property, put anyone in jail, or otherwise cause any actual, demonstrable harm to anyone. Either control of data can have a real world value worthy of legal protection or it can't, but the position of the freeloaders in this discussion appears to be that information they want to take has no value but the information they want to control is sacrosanct. I can't see that as anything but transparent hypocrisy.
Probably because they convinced a judge that sites like torrent-finder.com were being used almost exclusively by those deliberately breaking the law, which of course they could argue simply by observing the publicly available content those sites were advertising, while the major search engines are predominantly used by everyday people for legal activities and because of their automated nature may also be used by people looking for other purposes.
Fortunately, unlike a significant proportion of Slashdot posters, the average judge does understand the difference, can identify when a group of law-breakers is taking the piss, and will authorise the relevant authorities to do something about it where the law permits.
It's odd how the freeloaders are always quick to claim that IP is not real property, infringing copyright is not theft, they wouldn't have bought it anyway, etc., yet just because the authorities changed a few records in a DNS database after seeking a court order and acting with full judicial oversight, the sky is falling and it's some profound invasion of their fundamental human rights or something. Hypocrisy, meet Denial; Denial, this is Hypocrisy.
Indeed. The summary seems to suggest that just because it's a non-profit organisation doing the reposting and they gave some sort of credit, they have carte blanche to completely ignore copyright. It's surprising that any judge would behave this way, so I'm thinking there is more to this story than we have heard so far.
Are you sure about all of that? I've been looking into a small claims action recently, and the form you put in does have a box for fees for the lawyers, for example. I get the feeling it's more of a cultural thing, where if an individual is up against a company and the company shows up with £10,000 of lawyers to defend a £100 case then the court is unlikely to award costs. I'm not sure your description of where the case would be heard is entirely consistent with what I've been reading either.
Unfortunately, that's not really true. It is more likely that front-line staff who did know better and customers/citizens will pay the price for management's/government's lack of vision, which isn't the same thing at all.
It's actually worse than that. If Facebook is going to wind up having direct access to your e-mail, then they are also able to mine information from your contacts (who may not wish to have anything to do with Facebook, have not given their consent, and have no way of detecting in advance that this will happen) from your end.
This, of course, is pretty standard Facebook MO; see the whole fiasco about importing contact details etc. lately. However, it's even more creepy than usual, because it's entering a space where people expect that e-mail is passed from senders to recipients through neutral service providers, without the mass of data mining on the way. And yes, I do have similar concerns about Google Mail.
IMHO, service providers should be service providers and social/data mining companies should be social/data mining companies. The trend to mix them up fundamentally compromises privacy on a new level and ultimately could undermine the whole collaborative/open nature of Internet communications. It's somewhat like the common carrier principle: you can provide a communications channel transparently and neutrally, and be accorded some basic protections for doing so, or you can actively be involved in scanning or altering the content, but then you need to be regulated for privacy purposes, editorially responsible for the content, etc. Providing the exemptions/protections without the responsibility seems like a recipe for disaster to me.
On the bright side, perhaps we will finally get the long-overdue switch to end-to-end encrypted e-mail by default after enough unfortunate people get burned due to leaks.
After playing with the numbers for a while he discovered that while the candy store on the first floor was making a significant profit, the movies them selves were making a significant loss. Being almost as smart as you he promptly decided to stop showing movies.
Which would be a fine and insightful lesson, if Microsoft's sales of Windows and Office and their major server products actually depended on their sales of Visual Studio or their enterprise software lines or whatever other examples you brought up before... which as far as I can see, they don't. Of all the companies I worked for as an employee and all the clients I've worked with since going independent, I can't think of a single one that didn't use Windows and Office as its standard desktop install, and I can't think of a single one that did use any MS back office software other than the major server product lines (SQL Server, Exchange, etc.). Maybe my experience is somehow right in the tail end of the curve, but it spans everything from small businesses to one of the largest corporations on the planet, so the odds of my having this experience if your view of the significance of MS back office products is correct must be infinitessimal.
If you don't know what Enterprise Software is, you really should try to close your mouth.
Given that today I run multiple companies of my own, and my past experience includes various enterprise management/workflow stuff in some much larger companies, I think we can safely assume that I know what so-called enterprise tools are for. Your repeated ad hominem attacks aren't really convincing anyone of anything, you know.
However, personal details aren't important here anwyay. As a matter of fact, Microsoft's entire enterprise offering constitutes a tiny fraction of their overall profitability, and that is divided among numerous product lines. Using some.Net in those means nothing; if the product isn't working out, Microsoft could kill it off tomorrow or completely replace it with some new offering built on some new technology, and their investors wouldn't even notice the footnote in the next quarter's report.
I don't understand your apparently strong and highly defensive feelings on this subject. No-one seems to be disputing that Microsoft use.Net for some of their smaller products; I'm certainly not. Nor have I seen anyone claim that C# is not a nice language for putting together quick in-house tools, or that Java or C++ or $OTHER_LANGUAGE is "better" than C#.
The only point I was making was that Microsoft have a history of killing off development platforms, even major ones with massive pools of developers actively using them. In that context, learning Microsoft tools and technologies may not be the best investment of the OP's time and effort, given that MS themselves haven't bet anything valuable enough on those same tools and technologies to guarantee they won't kill them off again a year or two down the line.
We have been talking about Java around here, in the space that you so ignorantly list above, could you point to some typical Java solutions?
Who is talking about Java? I think you have me confused with someone else.
Most of the small businesses like mine are either using in-house tools or SaaS on-line offerings these days. The only really huge businesses I've worked in recently enough to know anything about how they do similar things tend to be tied up with the likes of SAP.
I'm not going to bother writing any more, given that the rest of your post is just one unpleasant and unfounded accusation after another. Your posting history suggests that you do little on Slashdot other than spread vague Microsoft advocacy and/or FUD about alternative approaches, which makes you either a fairly obvious shill or just a fanboy. You suggest that my view of the world is quite limited. Physician, heal thyself.
VS.NET 2010 is written in WPF. If that doesn't say much, I don't know what does.
Writing Office 2010 in it would have.
There are lots of people in this discussion citing the effective rewriting of VS as an example of how much MS is willing to rely on.Net and how beneficial they believe it to be. Then, a post or two further down, we find people asking why MS would rewrite Office in.Net when they have a well-established native code base.
Now, either.Net offers compelling advantages or it doesn't. If moving VS to WPF was a good business move that shows the way of the future and the rewrite of the code base was justified by the benefits, then why didn't they make the same call with Office, where UI development must be at least as demanding and improvements would have a far wider impact? And if they're not willing to commit their big money application to the latest.Net technologies for whatever reason, why should anyone else?
Remember, this discussion started with a question about which languages the OP should learn to further a career. It seems to me that one of the first things the OP should therefore ask is whether any candidate is likely to be around long enough to prove valuable in career development.
OK, I give up. A few hours after the discussion starts, and suddenly lots of posts that are critical of MS are getting downmods in rapid succession, while posts that are obvious FUD or overstatements of Microsoft's advantages are getting upmods? I admit my tone in the parent post wasn't terribly mature, but the points are still valid, and in any case I was no more hostile or vague than the various upmodded pro-MS posts in this discussion. How long does it take for Google alerts to notify the MS marketing people to come and hijack the discussion?
History also teaches us that the languages with the largest code base will be the ones that stick around not any of the other 'holier than thou' languages.
Unfortunately, that isn't really true in Microsoft world: look at what happened to Visual Basic 6.
I'm with you on C++, though: it's really showing its age now. I always find it a bit surprising that despite all the progress in the programming industry generally over the past couple of decades, we still haven't built a clearly better replacement language that doesn't have at least one major limitation/weakness compared to C++, though. I guess the serious research is looking in different directions, and the serious industrial money is mostly behind either VM-based platforms like.Net and Java or web-related tools.
I have never seen a single credible source that suggests either Office or SQL Server depends significantly on.Net for its functionality. I'm quite prepared to admit that my knowledge is out of date, or even that my whole argument is flawed because things have moved on, but it's going to take a lot more than a vague, unsupported claim from an AC on Slashdot to convince me when a significant amount of Googling before posting to this discussion turned up nothing.
I've never claimed that Microsoft don't develop any products using.Net, only that they don't seem to be developing the really important products, on which their business success effectively relies, in that way. You talk of "speaking of what you don't know", but I notice that you didn't mention any specific products we could discuss. You did, however, mention three generic areas that sound a lot like the parts of Microsoft that don't actually contribute very much to their bottom line or outright make a loss.
You're still missing the point. If we're talking about whether relying on any particular technology from Microsoft is a reasonably future-proof proposition, then it isn't about what Microsoft would like other developers to use, it's about what Microsoft themselves use. How much of the code behind WM7, and the various supporting projects developed by Microsoft themselves, relies on.Net?
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not for an instant trying to suggest that using VS6 was some sort of nirvana experience. I just find it very telling that, particularly for C++ as you mentioned, a lot of fairly basic features in the UI couldn't be incorporated in time for the VS.Net release. Moreover, despite the presumably honest words from various people on the VS team in the following months, when the closest thing to those features did turn up later (thinking of things like the browse toolbar here) the UI was clunky as hell, where the previous one was a neat enter 1 command, see 1 tree of results kind of deal. This was not progress, and one way or another, the move to supporting the.Net platform or building the VS IDE on that platform seems to have been responsible.
Calling me ignorant doesn't change the facts. Let's consider a few more, shall we? According to Microsoft's recently released 1Q11 financial statement, their operating income or (loss) by division for the past quarter was (in $millions):
Business: 3,388
Windows & Windows Live: 3,323
Server and tools: 1,630
Entertainment and devices: 382
Online services: (560)
The income in their Business division is dominated by Office, and that figure would also include Exchange Server.
Windows and Windows Live is dominated by the Windows desktop OS.
Server and tools includes things like Windows Server and SQL Server. It also includes things like Visual Studio and Silverlight, but if these make a net profit at all then it is lost in the noise.
Entertainment and devices includes things like XBox, Windows Mobile and Zune. Their total contribution is an order of magnitude below the serious divisions. Also note that this particular quarter includes a lot of growth for XBox and the release of Halo: Reach, which alone brought in $350M towards the end of the quarter. (If I'm reading the sources correctly, that figure is revenue rather than operating profit and so isn't directly comparable to the list above, but it still helps to put the relative importance of different parts of this division in perspective.)
The online services (MSN, Hotmail, whatever they're calling the search engine these days) are a significant net loss.
In short, if you're a Microsoft executive, the profitability of your company depends primarily on Office and Windows. At the next level, but a clear step down in significance, are the major server software products and possibly the XBox/gaming area.
The product lines you listed are somewhere in the noise, if they even make an operating profit at all. So no, it's not really a "significant portion" of the Microsoft Enterprise portfolio. The serious enterprise stuff, in terms of the money it makes, is the big server platforms, and approximately none of those are built on.Net. As I said, get back to me when Microsoft are actually building something they really care about on.Net.
Yes, that's exactly the point. Microsoft's essential business interests are not tied to the platform they promote, which on historical evidence means there is a high likelihood that any part of that platform they don't find convenient will wind up getting canned at short notice, leaving anyone whose development projects do rely on it hanging.
Nice little straw man you've built there. Sun never built Open Office or Solaris in Java, but you can''t be foolish to think that that was a vote of no-confidence in the future of Java.
Sun also didn't have a track record of killing development platforms, pulling the rug out from under the feet of developers who used them. Microsoft does have such a record, and has shown its willingness to do exactly that time and again.
And let's face it - while a lot of copying and catch-up was done for the first few iterations of.NET, that was over and done with after the 2.0 release and ever since then MS has been blowing past everyone else out there.
Really? In what context?
For web development, some sort of LAMP stack has been far more popular than.Net since forever and still is, with Java possibly fitting in above.Net as well.
For system software, C is still king, and C++ is a close second. No VM-based framework is likely to change the story here.
Ditto for embedded code, which is a huge part of the overall software development world.
Software for mobile devices is a fast-growing field, but again, most of them can't use.Net, and Microsoft themselves have been reluctant to rely on it even for WM7 because of the performance implications.
In short, if you really think MS is somehow blowing past "everyone else out there", I respectfully suggest that you haven't really looked "out there" much lately.
Visual Studio is arguably the best IDE out there
Very arguably. I haven't used the 2010 edition yet, so maybe you can help me out. Has it got the basic code navigation tools back that Visual C++ 6 had yet? And does it include even basic refactoring in all of the supported programming languages yet?
Linq was a total game changer
Sorry, but only someone with very limited experience in the programming world could claim that with a straight face. LINQ is a cute feature, sure, but both the underlying concepts and the programming language/platform features used to implement them have been around for decades.
ASP.NET MVC fixed the travesty that was the past decade of Webforms
Right. Do let us know when building a basic, efficient, standards-compliant web app with the Microsoft stack is less painful than having your teeth extracted, and has an expected longevity for the code base that is greater than 2–3 years. Until then, I suspect most of us who do this stuff for a living will continue to use Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, or even Java, in preference to trusting that Microsoft's latest tools will last longer than any of the previous ones have.
The future looks really bright for.NET, and not so much for Java.
Reports of Java's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Java the language has been a pain in the **** since forever. However, the JVM platform is well established, and there are several potentially interesting languages targetting that platform with ideas at least as interesting than anything in recent.Net platforms. None of this stuff is going anywhere in the near future.
I'll judge.NET's success on two factors - employment opportunities and continued innovation and development from Microsoft.
The trouble with that combination is that the best employment opportunities using Microsoft tools tend to arise because there is so often something new and exciting in Microsoft world, where supposedly expert developers can command a premium price for a brief period because most people don't know how to use the new toys yet. Unfortunately, to maintain such a lucrative position in the developer hierarchy, you have to constantly update your knowledge of MS tools and technologies just to stand still. If you don't, you fall
Microsoft moves more and more of their code base to.NET with each release. [...] Office and Windows get more.NET with each release too.
Let's consider the facts about MS Office as they appear from under my rock, shall we?
.Net has been around for nearly a decade: the first version was officially released in 2002, and there had been vast amounts of advance publicity for a considerable period before that.
There have been four major versions of Office released for Windows platforms in that time frame: Office XP, 2003, 2007 and 2010.
Those versions included a huge UI rewrite for the 2007 edition.
Microsoft Office is still written almost entirely in C++.
The new ribbon control for the 2007 UI was first released as an MFC control.
For example the latest visual studio had it's entire UI replaced with WPF (.NET) and it is the most responsive it has been since visual studio version 6.
In other words, they have finally managed to write a user interface that performs as well on 2010 era hardware as the native-code-based Visual Studio did on hardware from more than a decade ago. I'm suitably impressed.
In fact, the move from VC++6 to the.Net platform killed performance and caused all sorts of useful, basic functionality to disappear from the IDE because Microsoft couldn't deal with the inhomogeneity of the various languages and their IDEs fast enough and were reduced to releasing support for the lowest common denominator in some areas. Successive versions over several more years still couldn't catch up to what the VC++6 IDE used to do, even as the compilers (which are mainly written in plain old C++) developed significantly.
Tell me, if one of the world's most powerful software companies couldn't manage to rewrite their own IDE using their own platform to even match the performance and functionality of the old native code version after so long, what does that tell us about how much they believe in that platform?
.NET is Microsoft's future and they ARE eating their dog food.
Not really, but there doesn't seem much point arguing with you further, so I will just give you this link as a starting point to explore for yourself:
Spoilers: Almost all of the software on that list, which includes most key Microsoft products, is still written in C and/or C++. A few programs use Java or web-friendly scripting languages. Almost nothing is written in C#.
.NET development is taking off whether you like it or not.
Sure it is, just like it was last year, and the year before. Get back to us when Microsoft actually rely on.Net and related technologies for their own flagship products like Office, so you know they won't declare those technologies obsolete when they want you to upgrade to the Next Big Thing like they did with Visual J++, Visual Basic 6, almost every database access technology they have ever published, almost every GUI API they have ever published, etc. The web technologies are looking like the next victims, given all the recent chatter about Silverlight and the resounding silence from Redmond where the defensive press releases are supposed to be.
There are many languages you could choose to learn today. History teaches us that almost all of the good ones that don't come from Microsoft will still be around tomorrow. In fact, Microsoft are pretty much the only player in the game that does actively kill off popular mainstream technologies that are still in widespread use.
Sorry, a late edit broke my logic. I meant the games I listed to be examples where there was some innovation in the gameplay or some sort of immersive storyline or a control system that actually made use of the flexibility of a PC, i.e., the final bullet in my list, and where the experience wasn't spoiled automatically by crashing all the time and draconian DRM systems (though the 2GB limit did spoil SupCom on large maps, and requiring a CD in the drive to play a game is irritating).
That said, I don't think anything id ever did with their early games really compares to the plague of DLC and half-finished, bug-ridden crap we seem to be seeing over the past couple of years. The always-on, broadband-everywhere infrastructure needed to support DLC and patch-after-shipping just didn't exist when Doom was the new big thing.
Or just find something else that you enjoy doing instead of assuming your life will be incomplete without playing the latest AAA games titles.
I haven't bought a new big-budget AAA bells-and-whistles game for at least a couple of years. I just got fed up with:
worst of all, the crappy reliability with crashes all the time in every such game I had bought for several years, often without any patch in the useful lifetime of the game;
DRM and related technologies that inconvenience me at best, outright spoil my experience if they go wrong, and by their nature pose a threat to the integrity of any computer they are installed on; and
lack of any real innovation in most games anyway, since new gameplay ideas have been almost entirely replaced by new graphics engines, any deep immersion/substance/storyline tends to be thrown out in favour of endless but monotonous on-line gaming, and control systems and game mechanics on the PC are mostly dumbed down to make an easy console port.
Lately, we can add the whole DLC not-buying-a-whole-game-anyway thing. I was all ready to try out Dragon Age: Origins when it came out, until I read numerous reports that you get characters with some sort of quest marker over their heads right at the start of the game, get to listen to them leading you into their story, and then get hit with a "now put in your credit card number" kind of message. I don't know how much money the gaming industry really make pulling that kind of stunt in the short term, but I guarantee they have lost at least one fairly profitable customer in the long term.
If anyone knows of any counterexamples on PC from the past couple of years, please do suggest them, but I get the feeling no-one has made a Doom or Deus Ex or Baldur's Gate or even Supreme Commander for a long time.
Meanwhile, casual gaming has made PopCap and Zynga rich, and are now the only things our household spends real money on in the gaming market. They mostly have simple but novel game mechanics, they are fun to play, they don't come with any of the crap I mentioned above, and as far as downloading goes, we can easily buy them and install them, which is all we need the "downloadable" part for.
Other than that, we watch stuff on TV, go out and enjoy our various hobbies, invite friends round for dinner or to play board games at the weekend, and basically find other ways to enjoy our leisure time.
Basically, AAA games have become overpriced, unreliable, unpleasant, cookie-cutter crap, so we don't buy them any more. If that sucks for the game studios, don't look this way for sympathy. They don't get some magic entitlement to our hard-earned money, and for what they charge these days for a game that might last me a few hours if it even works at all, we could go out and enjoy a decent meal for two and then go somewhere nice afterwards.
I sympathise: no major political party is particularly close to representing my views either, and I was happy to see the coalition rather than any of the other plausible results after the election because I hoped the Tories and Lib Dems would cancel out each other's more extreme tendencies and lead to more moderate policy-making. In some ways, it has, but this topic seems to be one where the inmates are running the asylum. Time to write to my (Lib Dem) MP, perhaps...
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the grandparent's argument of the boils down to the fact that stealing physical goods deprives the owner of those goods, whilst copying it does not deprive them of the ability to use it.
The trouble is, while the anti-copyright crowd keep making that argument, it isn't really true.
Suppose you make your money by producing creative works. Typically, the up-front cost of that creation is high, but the marginal cost of copying and distribution is low. In most cases, you will market the product at a relatively low price, in order to amortise the sunk costs over the entire consumer base and sell at a cost the market will bear.
The major advantage of copyright over most other legal frameworks that I have seen proposed is that it supports this sharing of costs among the consumer base, so that many people can each contribute a small part of the overall cost but all can benefit from the entire work. This makes the creation and distribution of many works viable where relying on direct funding seems unlikely to work.
The economics of the entire industry depend on this mechanic working. However, while copying does not deprive the original holder of the material of their own copy, it certainly could have a potential impact on the market. If you reduce the size of that market, then you reduce the number of people contributing to the pool that pays (or doesn't pay) for the original cost of the work, which affects the financial viability of the product in the first place. Equally, for works that are going to break even anyway, reducing the size of the market will reduce the profit that the work makes, which is a disincentive to invest more in order to produce better works.
Some people claim that content providers are making enough from paying customers anyway, but that's a silly argument for several reasons. Firstly, it ignores the fundamental unfairness of the law-abiding subsidising the law-breaking. Secondly, it doesn't work in the limit: if we legalised copying and everyone behaved as the law-breakers do today, then the creators would have no income stream and the incentive to create and share new works would be gone. Thirdly, "content providers" in these claims usually actually means Big Media/"MAFIAA", and ignores the fact that many small organisations and individuals create valuable content and are just trying to make a living from it, and many small businesses and individual careers come to an early end because they can't make enough money.
Some people claim that you can't assume every illegal copy represents a lost sale. Well, no, of course you can't. But it's equally absurd to pretend that everyone who would have bought a work legally still does so even though they already have an illegal copy of the material. People used to claim that they were "just trying" works to "see if they like them before they buy", but since these days we have hard statistics from things like recent games with on-line elements and the popularity of specific works on P2P networks, we know very well that huge numbers of people are ripping products that are new/popular and continuing to use them well beyond just trying them out.
Some people claim that they are somehow doing content providers a favour by "marketing" their product for free. It's a good job not everyone takes that view, or there would be a whole lot of marketing but still no sales, and marketing is a cost centre rather than a revenue generator. And of course, content providers have the option to distribute taster material or even entire products for free if they wish to do so; if the marketing argument really does work, then those providers who give their work away for free will benefit and market forces will promote this behaviour in the long term. Given that this hasn't happened in the past decade, I won't hold my breath, though.
In short, while copying a work illegally may not deprive the original holder of a copy, it most certainly can deprive them of their ability to use it.
Several people seem to be making an argument like yours, so let's step back for a moment and analyse what you're saying.
In one sentence, you say that many business owners depend on having a functioning web site for their business. Sure, I'll buy that; I run businesses with on-line elements myself, and downtime is no fun.
In the next sentence, you make a common anti-copyright argument about "potential" lost sales. Again, there is some merit there: I certainly wouldn't claim that every illegally distributed copy of a work results in an actual lost sale.
The trouble is, you can no more prove that a web site going down cost a sale (or caused some other form of damage to a non-commercial site) than you can prove that giving someone an illegal copy of some music/movie/software did. We could probably agree that some significant amount of damage is being done in many such cases, but we couldn't accurately quantify that damage in any objective way.
Given that people who are almost certainly infringing copyright are frequently getting away with it on legal technicalities, and awards of damages in the few cases that have gone to court have been either limited initially or reduced on appeal because the original award was disproportionate to the proven actual damages, I find it hard to have much sympathy with hypothetical arguments about how knocking out domains that are probably being used mostly or entirely for illegal purposes is somehow causing some huge loss to some legitimate business.
Apparently a US court has issued a warrant permitting this action. Given that they are presumably far more qualified to interpret US law than I am as a non-lawyer from outside the US, perhaps you should take the matter up with them?
And the cognitive dissonance is not in sticking meticulously to the distinction between physical property and IP, it's in basing much of the advocacy for infringing copyright on the distinction, but then crying like a baby just because the government flipped a few bits that also did not harm anyone's personal property, put anyone in jail, or otherwise cause any actual, demonstrable harm to anyone. Either control of data can have a real world value worthy of legal protection or it can't, but the position of the freeloaders in this discussion appears to be that information they want to take has no value but the information they want to control is sacrosanct. I can't see that as anything but transparent hypocrisy.
Probably because they convinced a judge that sites like torrent-finder.com were being used almost exclusively by those deliberately breaking the law, which of course they could argue simply by observing the publicly available content those sites were advertising, while the major search engines are predominantly used by everyday people for legal activities and because of their automated nature may also be used by people looking for other purposes.
Fortunately, unlike a significant proportion of Slashdot posters, the average judge does understand the difference, can identify when a group of law-breakers is taking the piss, and will authorise the relevant authorities to do something about it where the law permits.
It's odd how the freeloaders are always quick to claim that IP is not real property, infringing copyright is not theft, they wouldn't have bought it anyway, etc., yet just because the authorities changed a few records in a DNS database after seeking a court order and acting with full judicial oversight, the sky is falling and it's some profound invasion of their fundamental human rights or something. Hypocrisy, meet Denial; Denial, this is Hypocrisy.
Evil domains?
I soooo want doctor.evil and dontbe.evil.
And maybe hearno.evil, seeno.evil and speakno.evil too.
I'll make a fortune...
Indeed. The summary seems to suggest that just because it's a non-profit organisation doing the reposting and they gave some sort of credit, they have carte blanche to completely ignore copyright. It's surprising that any judge would behave this way, so I'm thinking there is more to this story than we have heard so far.
Are you sure about all of that? I've been looking into a small claims action recently, and the form you put in does have a box for fees for the lawyers, for example. I get the feeling it's more of a cultural thing, where if an individual is up against a company and the company shows up with £10,000 of lawyers to defend a £100 case then the court is unlikely to award costs. I'm not sure your description of where the case would be heard is entirely consistent with what I've been reading either.
Unfortunately, that's not really true. It is more likely that front-line staff who did know better and customers/citizens will pay the price for management's/government's lack of vision, which isn't the same thing at all.
It's actually worse than that. If Facebook is going to wind up having direct access to your e-mail, then they are also able to mine information from your contacts (who may not wish to have anything to do with Facebook, have not given their consent, and have no way of detecting in advance that this will happen) from your end.
This, of course, is pretty standard Facebook MO; see the whole fiasco about importing contact details etc. lately. However, it's even more creepy than usual, because it's entering a space where people expect that e-mail is passed from senders to recipients through neutral service providers, without the mass of data mining on the way. And yes, I do have similar concerns about Google Mail.
IMHO, service providers should be service providers and social/data mining companies should be social/data mining companies. The trend to mix them up fundamentally compromises privacy on a new level and ultimately could undermine the whole collaborative/open nature of Internet communications. It's somewhat like the common carrier principle: you can provide a communications channel transparently and neutrally, and be accorded some basic protections for doing so, or you can actively be involved in scanning or altering the content, but then you need to be regulated for privacy purposes, editorially responsible for the content, etc. Providing the exemptions/protections without the responsibility seems like a recipe for disaster to me.
On the bright side, perhaps we will finally get the long-overdue switch to end-to-end encrypted e-mail by default after enough unfortunate people get burned due to leaks.
After playing with the numbers for a while he discovered that while the candy store on the first floor was making a significant profit, the movies them selves were making a significant loss. Being almost as smart as you he promptly decided to stop showing movies.
Which would be a fine and insightful lesson, if Microsoft's sales of Windows and Office and their major server products actually depended on their sales of Visual Studio or their enterprise software lines or whatever other examples you brought up before... which as far as I can see, they don't. Of all the companies I worked for as an employee and all the clients I've worked with since going independent, I can't think of a single one that didn't use Windows and Office as its standard desktop install, and I can't think of a single one that did use any MS back office software other than the major server product lines (SQL Server, Exchange, etc.). Maybe my experience is somehow right in the tail end of the curve, but it spans everything from small businesses to one of the largest corporations on the planet, so the odds of my having this experience if your view of the significance of MS back office products is correct must be infinitessimal.
If you don't know what Enterprise Software is, you really should try to close your mouth.
Given that today I run multiple companies of my own, and my past experience includes various enterprise management/workflow stuff in some much larger companies, I think we can safely assume that I know what so-called enterprise tools are for. Your repeated ad hominem attacks aren't really convincing anyone of anything, you know.
However, personal details aren't important here anwyay. As a matter of fact, Microsoft's entire enterprise offering constitutes a tiny fraction of their overall profitability, and that is divided among numerous product lines. Using some .Net in those means nothing; if the product isn't working out, Microsoft could kill it off tomorrow or completely replace it with some new offering built on some new technology, and their investors wouldn't even notice the footnote in the next quarter's report.
I don't understand your apparently strong and highly defensive feelings on this subject. No-one seems to be disputing that Microsoft use .Net for some of their smaller products; I'm certainly not. Nor have I seen anyone claim that C# is not a nice language for putting together quick in-house tools, or that Java or C++ or $OTHER_LANGUAGE is "better" than C#.
The only point I was making was that Microsoft have a history of killing off development platforms, even major ones with massive pools of developers actively using them. In that context, learning Microsoft tools and technologies may not be the best investment of the OP's time and effort, given that MS themselves haven't bet anything valuable enough on those same tools and technologies to guarantee they won't kill them off again a year or two down the line.
We have been talking about Java around here, in the space that you so ignorantly list above, could you point to some typical Java solutions?
Who is talking about Java? I think you have me confused with someone else.
Most of the small businesses like mine are either using in-house tools or SaaS on-line offerings these days. The only really huge businesses I've worked in recently enough to know anything about how they do similar things tend to be tied up with the likes of SAP.
I'm not going to bother writing any more, given that the rest of your post is just one unpleasant and unfounded accusation after another. Your posting history suggests that you do little on Slashdot other than spread vague Microsoft advocacy and/or FUD about alternative approaches, which makes you either a fairly obvious shill or just a fanboy. You suggest that my view of the world is quite limited. Physician, heal thyself.
VS.NET 2010 is written in WPF. If that doesn't say much, I don't know what does.
Writing Office 2010 in it would have.
There are lots of people in this discussion citing the effective rewriting of VS as an example of how much MS is willing to rely on .Net and how beneficial they believe it to be. Then, a post or two further down, we find people asking why MS would rewrite Office in .Net when they have a well-established native code base.
Now, either .Net offers compelling advantages or it doesn't. If moving VS to WPF was a good business move that shows the way of the future and the rewrite of the code base was justified by the benefits, then why didn't they make the same call with Office, where UI development must be at least as demanding and improvements would have a far wider impact? And if they're not willing to commit their big money application to the latest .Net technologies for whatever reason, why should anyone else?
Remember, this discussion started with a question about which languages the OP should learn to further a career. It seems to me that one of the first things the OP should therefore ask is whether any candidate is likely to be around long enough to prove valuable in career development.
OK, I give up. A few hours after the discussion starts, and suddenly lots of posts that are critical of MS are getting downmods in rapid succession, while posts that are obvious FUD or overstatements of Microsoft's advantages are getting upmods? I admit my tone in the parent post wasn't terribly mature, but the points are still valid, and in any case I was no more hostile or vague than the various upmodded pro-MS posts in this discussion. How long does it take for Google alerts to notify the MS marketing people to come and hijack the discussion?
History also teaches us that the languages with the largest code base will be the ones that stick around not any of the other 'holier than thou' languages.
Unfortunately, that isn't really true in Microsoft world: look at what happened to Visual Basic 6.
I'm with you on C++, though: it's really showing its age now. I always find it a bit surprising that despite all the progress in the programming industry generally over the past couple of decades, we still haven't built a clearly better replacement language that doesn't have at least one major limitation/weakness compared to C++, though. I guess the serious research is looking in different directions, and the serious industrial money is mostly behind either VM-based platforms like .Net and Java or web-related tools.
[citations needed]
I have never seen a single credible source that suggests either Office or SQL Server depends significantly on .Net for its functionality. I'm quite prepared to admit that my knowledge is out of date, or even that my whole argument is flawed because things have moved on, but it's going to take a lot more than a vague, unsupported claim from an AC on Slashdot to convince me when a significant amount of Googling before posting to this discussion turned up nothing.
I've never claimed that Microsoft don't develop any products using .Net, only that they don't seem to be developing the really important products, on which their business success effectively relies, in that way. You talk of "speaking of what you don't know", but I notice that you didn't mention any specific products we could discuss. You did, however, mention three generic areas that sound a lot like the parts of Microsoft that don't actually contribute very much to their bottom line or outright make a loss.
You're still missing the point. If we're talking about whether relying on any particular technology from Microsoft is a reasonably future-proof proposition, then it isn't about what Microsoft would like other developers to use, it's about what Microsoft themselves use. How much of the code behind WM7, and the various supporting projects developed by Microsoft themselves, relies on .Net?
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not for an instant trying to suggest that using VS6 was some sort of nirvana experience. I just find it very telling that, particularly for C++ as you mentioned, a lot of fairly basic features in the UI couldn't be incorporated in time for the VS.Net release. Moreover, despite the presumably honest words from various people on the VS team in the following months, when the closest thing to those features did turn up later (thinking of things like the browse toolbar here) the UI was clunky as hell, where the previous one was a neat enter 1 command, see 1 tree of results kind of deal. This was not progress, and one way or another, the move to supporting the .Net platform or building the VS IDE on that platform seems to have been responsible.
Calling me ignorant doesn't change the facts. Let's consider a few more, shall we? According to Microsoft's recently released 1Q11 financial statement, their operating income or (loss) by division for the past quarter was (in $millions):
The income in their Business division is dominated by Office, and that figure would also include Exchange Server.
Windows and Windows Live is dominated by the Windows desktop OS.
Server and tools includes things like Windows Server and SQL Server. It also includes things like Visual Studio and Silverlight, but if these make a net profit at all then it is lost in the noise.
Entertainment and devices includes things like XBox, Windows Mobile and Zune. Their total contribution is an order of magnitude below the serious divisions. Also note that this particular quarter includes a lot of growth for XBox and the release of Halo: Reach, which alone brought in $350M towards the end of the quarter. (If I'm reading the sources correctly, that figure is revenue rather than operating profit and so isn't directly comparable to the list above, but it still helps to put the relative importance of different parts of this division in perspective.)
The online services (MSN, Hotmail, whatever they're calling the search engine these days) are a significant net loss.
In short, if you're a Microsoft executive, the profitability of your company depends primarily on Office and Windows. At the next level, but a clear step down in significance, are the major server software products and possibly the XBox/gaming area.
The product lines you listed are somewhere in the noise, if they even make an operating profit at all. So no, it's not really a "significant portion" of the Microsoft Enterprise portfolio. The serious enterprise stuff, in terms of the money it makes, is the big server platforms, and approximately none of those are built on .Net. As I said, get back to me when Microsoft are actually building something they really care about on .Net.
Yes, that's exactly the point. Microsoft's essential business interests are not tied to the platform they promote, which on historical evidence means there is a high likelihood that any part of that platform they don't find convenient will wind up getting canned at short notice, leaving anyone whose development projects do rely on it hanging.
Nice little straw man you've built there. Sun never built Open Office or Solaris in Java, but you can''t be foolish to think that that was a vote of no-confidence in the future of Java.
Sun also didn't have a track record of killing development platforms, pulling the rug out from under the feet of developers who used them. Microsoft does have such a record, and has shown its willingness to do exactly that time and again.
And let's face it - while a lot of copying and catch-up was done for the first few iterations of .NET, that was over and done with after the 2.0 release and ever since then MS has been blowing past everyone else out there.
Really? In what context?
For web development, some sort of LAMP stack has been far more popular than .Net since forever and still is, with Java possibly fitting in above .Net as well.
For system software, C is still king, and C++ is a close second. No VM-based framework is likely to change the story here.
Ditto for embedded code, which is a huge part of the overall software development world.
Software for mobile devices is a fast-growing field, but again, most of them can't use .Net, and Microsoft themselves have been reluctant to rely on it even for WM7 because of the performance implications.
In short, if you really think MS is somehow blowing past "everyone else out there", I respectfully suggest that you haven't really looked "out there" much lately.
Visual Studio is arguably the best IDE out there
Very arguably. I haven't used the 2010 edition yet, so maybe you can help me out. Has it got the basic code navigation tools back that Visual C++ 6 had yet? And does it include even basic refactoring in all of the supported programming languages yet?
Linq was a total game changer
Sorry, but only someone with very limited experience in the programming world could claim that with a straight face. LINQ is a cute feature, sure, but both the underlying concepts and the programming language/platform features used to implement them have been around for decades.
ASP.NET MVC fixed the travesty that was the past decade of Webforms
Right. Do let us know when building a basic, efficient, standards-compliant web app with the Microsoft stack is less painful than having your teeth extracted, and has an expected longevity for the code base that is greater than 2–3 years. Until then, I suspect most of us who do this stuff for a living will continue to use Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, or even Java, in preference to trusting that Microsoft's latest tools will last longer than any of the previous ones have.
The future looks really bright for .NET, and not so much for Java.
Reports of Java's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Java the language has been a pain in the **** since forever. However, the JVM platform is well established, and there are several potentially interesting languages targetting that platform with ideas at least as interesting than anything in recent .Net platforms. None of this stuff is going anywhere in the near future.
I'll judge .NET's success on two factors - employment opportunities and continued innovation and development from Microsoft.
The trouble with that combination is that the best employment opportunities using Microsoft tools tend to arise because there is so often something new and exciting in Microsoft world, where supposedly expert developers can command a premium price for a brief period because most people don't know how to use the new toys yet. Unfortunately, to maintain such a lucrative position in the developer hierarchy, you have to constantly update your knowledge of MS tools and technologies just to stand still. If you don't, you fall
Microsoft moves more and more of their code base to .NET with each release. [...] Office and Windows get more .NET with each release too.
Let's consider the facts about MS Office as they appear from under my rock, shall we?
For example the latest visual studio had it's entire UI replaced with WPF (.NET) and it is the most responsive it has been since visual studio version 6.
In other words, they have finally managed to write a user interface that performs as well on 2010 era hardware as the native-code-based Visual Studio did on hardware from more than a decade ago. I'm suitably impressed.
In fact, the move from VC++6 to the .Net platform killed performance and caused all sorts of useful, basic functionality to disappear from the IDE because Microsoft couldn't deal with the inhomogeneity of the various languages and their IDEs fast enough and were reduced to releasing support for the lowest common denominator in some areas. Successive versions over several more years still couldn't catch up to what the VC++6 IDE used to do, even as the compilers (which are mainly written in plain old C++) developed significantly.
Tell me, if one of the world's most powerful software companies couldn't manage to rewrite their own IDE using their own platform to even match the performance and functionality of the old native code version after so long, what does that tell us about how much they believe in that platform?
.NET is Microsoft's future and they ARE eating their dog food.
Not really, but there doesn't seem much point arguing with you further, so I will just give you this link as a starting point to explore for yourself:
The Programming Languages Beacon
Spoilers: Almost all of the software on that list, which includes most key Microsoft products, is still written in C and/or C++. A few programs use Java or web-friendly scripting languages. Almost nothing is written in C#.
.NET development is taking off whether you like it or not.
Sure it is, just like it was last year, and the year before. Get back to us when Microsoft actually rely on .Net and related technologies for their own flagship products like Office, so you know they won't declare those technologies obsolete when they want you to upgrade to the Next Big Thing like they did with Visual J++, Visual Basic 6, almost every database access technology they have ever published, almost every GUI API they have ever published, etc. The web technologies are looking like the next victims, given all the recent chatter about Silverlight and the resounding silence from Redmond where the defensive press releases are supposed to be.
There are many languages you could choose to learn today. History teaches us that almost all of the good ones that don't come from Microsoft will still be around tomorrow. In fact, Microsoft are pretty much the only player in the game that does actively kill off popular mainstream technologies that are still in widespread use.
Sorry, a late edit broke my logic. I meant the games I listed to be examples where there was some innovation in the gameplay or some sort of immersive storyline or a control system that actually made use of the flexibility of a PC, i.e., the final bullet in my list, and where the experience wasn't spoiled automatically by crashing all the time and draconian DRM systems (though the 2GB limit did spoil SupCom on large maps, and requiring a CD in the drive to play a game is irritating).
That said, I don't think anything id ever did with their early games really compares to the plague of DLC and half-finished, bug-ridden crap we seem to be seeing over the past couple of years. The always-on, broadband-everywhere infrastructure needed to support DLC and patch-after-shipping just didn't exist when Doom was the new big thing.
Or just find something else that you enjoy doing instead of assuming your life will be incomplete without playing the latest AAA games titles.
I haven't bought a new big-budget AAA bells-and-whistles game for at least a couple of years. I just got fed up with:
Lately, we can add the whole DLC not-buying-a-whole-game-anyway thing. I was all ready to try out Dragon Age: Origins when it came out, until I read numerous reports that you get characters with some sort of quest marker over their heads right at the start of the game, get to listen to them leading you into their story, and then get hit with a "now put in your credit card number" kind of message. I don't know how much money the gaming industry really make pulling that kind of stunt in the short term, but I guarantee they have lost at least one fairly profitable customer in the long term.
If anyone knows of any counterexamples on PC from the past couple of years, please do suggest them, but I get the feeling no-one has made a Doom or Deus Ex or Baldur's Gate or even Supreme Commander for a long time.
Meanwhile, casual gaming has made PopCap and Zynga rich, and are now the only things our household spends real money on in the gaming market. They mostly have simple but novel game mechanics, they are fun to play, they don't come with any of the crap I mentioned above, and as far as downloading goes, we can easily buy them and install them, which is all we need the "downloadable" part for.
Other than that, we watch stuff on TV, go out and enjoy our various hobbies, invite friends round for dinner or to play board games at the weekend, and basically find other ways to enjoy our leisure time.
Basically, AAA games have become overpriced, unreliable, unpleasant, cookie-cutter crap, so we don't buy them any more. If that sucks for the game studios, don't look this way for sympathy. They don't get some magic entitlement to our hard-earned money, and for what they charge these days for a game that might last me a few hours if it even works at all, we could go out and enjoy a decent meal for two and then go somewhere nice afterwards.
I sympathise: no major political party is particularly close to representing my views either, and I was happy to see the coalition rather than any of the other plausible results after the election because I hoped the Tories and Lib Dems would cancel out each other's more extreme tendencies and lead to more moderate policy-making. In some ways, it has, but this topic seems to be one where the inmates are running the asylum. Time to write to my (Lib Dem) MP, perhaps...