We use Tomcat on Windows, in production. I can't say how it scales versus Tomcat on Linux because all of our performance problems are related to the database anyway. Tomcat just chugs along.
If it doesn't suit your sense of humor, then don't pay any attention.
I'll never understand people who post to a topic on Slashdot complaining that the topic bores them. The internet is a big thing, if you aren't interested in what you read here, then go somewhere else.
Well, Chrome, Internet Explorer 9, and Firefox all have a better handle on this than Oracle. They all update automatically, with no user intervention required. Firefox was the last one to start doing that.
Adobe PDF Reader and Flash frequently have security flaws. Chrome includes its own PDF Reader to avoid the problems with Adobe reader. Chrome includes its own build of Flash so Google developers can release security fixes faster than Adobe does. Firefox checks the versions on Adobe PDF Reader and Flash player and if you're out of date, it prompts you to update them. I'm not sure what IE does, if anything.
Sun and now Oracle, though, rest on their laurels. Their "auto-update" feature for Java is not fully automatic, there are manual steps involved, and even worse after each update it resets the update check interval to something absurd like once a month or longer and if you want more frequent checks for updates it has to be reset to once every few weeks. Oracle needs to ask Google or the open source community for help to have Java update function exactly like Chrome's updates. Then they could ensure far more Java users have fixes installed more quickly.
Let me rephrase my statement - you will still run into DRM, but it will be beaten.
If Sony or any other company has me stream all of my movie content from their servers, they can block my use of movies I've purchased at any time for any reason. The best I can do is hire a lawyer and spend more than the moneys originally cost to fight it. But the embedded DRM on DVDs is a fixed technology by definition, they can remotely update the firmware of players but they can't remotely modify the disks themselves. So once the DVD cryptography was cracked, it stayed cracked.
Likewise Blu Ray is now broken. I see nothing to indicate that future physical media DRM schemes will suddenly become flawless.
Thanks. I realize DRM is on physical media already. But since the embedded DRM on DVDs has been cracked and the embedded DRM on Blu Rays has been cracked, I'm confident that the next brilliant DRM scheme for physical media will likewise be beaten.
Another nice thing about physical media is that you can lend it to your friends, pass it on to your children, etc... without running into digital rights management restrictions.
Although it may not matter - if nobody has a physical DVD player anymore in thirty years, passing on my DVD collection to the kids or offering to lend it to friends is meaningless.
The only time I notice a performance difference between the two is when I use a bookmarks folder to open six or eight sites at the same time. Firefox takes a while to finish - and I'm assuming the problem is related to writing the files it's receiving to the cache folder, because the problem is much worse if I'm copying large files when I do it. Chrome seems to do better.
At this point I think Chrome is still the superior browser, but I'm desperately hoping Firefox catches up completely or almost completely. I don't want a world where just one browser, even an open source one, is the undisputed king.
Actually, PDFs can have exploits that have nothing to do with Javascript. If the problem is Javascript, they can deliver it directly to Firefox and don't need to embed them in the PDF. But the real risks are buffer overflows and similar exploits that attack the PDF rendering program directly, which is typically Adobe PDF Reader.
The Firefox developers are aware that they're behind Chrome and IE on this, and they're definitely working on it. Starting at some point last year, Firefox automatically warns users when their browser plugins are out of date. PDF.js in Firefox, once it becomes the default for showing PDFs, will eliminate Adobe PDF Reader as a source of error
With IonMonkey, Firefox has closed the performance gap with Chrome well enough that I would no longer consider Chrome's speed as a deciding factor when choosing a browser. But now Firefox has three remaining Chrome features to tackle:
1. Sandboxing plugins, as you said.
2. Multi-process, so that errors in individual tabs don't crash the entire browser.
3. (Least important.) Updates in Firefox are automatic, but not transparent. Making them transparent would help.
They did that because an awful lot of PCs hacked by a website were hacked through security flaws in the PDF viewer. Writing the PDF viewer in Javascript means that the Mozilla developers only need to make Javascript in Firefox secure to protect the machine from intentionally badly formed PDFs, and of course they already needed to secure Javascript so that's no extra security work.
As a scripting language, Javascript is still slow compared to something like well-written C++. But Firefox 18 is pretty close to the latest version of Chrome for Javascript performance (e.g. arewefastyet.com ), so I bet the PDF viewer in Javascript works quickly enough.
They are focused on their own projects, and calling attention to the moral flaws in the commercial offerings is part of their method to recruit people to support the GNU alternatives. That includes support from developers but also from people doing testing, documentation, spreading the information about the value of free software further, and donating money.
As for Linux vs Hurd, I'm not qualified to say if there are fundamental architectural problems in Hurd that prevent it from being as good as Linux. But I do think it's fair to say Linux has benefitted from tens of thousands or maybe millions of more hours of focused effort from great developers than Hurd. And an awful lot of the people bright enough to apply the same class of improvements to Hurd don't care about the differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3, so they don't consider it a good investment of their time.
You're mixing two topics that aren't related to each other.
Has Stallman ever said, "A unified design is bad"? Has he ever said that elegant user interfaces are undesirable? Has he ever lead a protest against beautiful hardware? Has he ever even claimed to be an expert on user interface design?
The elegant design and easy user interface is incredibly handy, and valuable. The jail is the part that does not need to come along with it, and is immoral and hurts consumers and competition. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation are focused on the latter, not the former.
I'm an FSF member, and I'm not hoping to see a command shell open at all times on all consumer electronic devices, or pushing for Emacs keystrokes as the primary way of interacting with your smart phone. I would love to see a build of Android, or Firefox OS that beats Apple for simplicity and ease-of-use, on a hardware device that beats the iPhone for elegant design, but that runs software with an FSF-approved licenses ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html ) from boot loader to UI. Nothing that the FSF advocates goes against that. Once a customer bought the device, he would have all the tools he wanted to modify or replace the running software with something bloated, slow, and needlessly complicated. But that's a freedom he deserves to have, and someone like your mother with the same device would run it as-is and never even notice that it had free software.
That's where MS wants to take their market -- Incompatibility land.
Right. And in their defense, that's where they built their fortune. So no matter whether you like it or not, that's where their entire business model is. Of course they won't abandon it, their tiny physical device sales (Xbox360, Kinect, Surface tablets) and small services sales ( Windows Azure, Microsoft CRM, etc.. ) can't make up for all of the revenue they depend upon from Windows and Office.
But incompatibility benefits them at our expense, and I'm hoping (and I would be praying, if I was the religious type) that the future is Android, Chrome OS, Blackberry 10, Firefox OS, WebOS, Tizen, and of course Debian, Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, Mint, etc...
I understand your point, but consider that Microsoft doesn't blink at suing Android device makers for patent infringement. If some other search company, like DuckDuckGo or whatever, was withholding access to APIs from Microsoft for no reason, it would be a case of Microsoft being in the right and the other side being wrong.
In this case, it's just a battle. "You sue my partners to get some money and make products with my software more expensive? Fine, I block your API access to the most popular video sharing website on the net. Here's the licensing requirement for API access to Youtube: stop suing Android manufacturers, and it's all yours."
Anti-competitive? Google hasn't gone after Amazon for custom Android on the Kindle, Barnes & Noble for custom Android on the Nook Tablet, CyanogenMod for custom Android, or all the little side projects that build custom versions of Android. Google only went after Acer because Acer was going to make phones for a Chinese company with a web store full of hacked versions of Google Android apps.
Acer was making a phone with the Aliyun operating system made by the Chinese company Alibaba. Aliyun's application store used pirated versions of the official Google applications for Android ( Maps, Voice, Gmail, etc... ) and also pirated versions of other applications from the Play Store. That's why Google used the legalese in their contract with Acer to block the production of the phone.
Google doesn't go after Amazon for the Kindle, Barnes & Noble for the Nook tablet, CyanogenMod, the Android for x86 project, and dozens of other significant and insignificant forks of Android because none of those forks are using Android in a way that uses Google services while hijacking the advertising revenue and blocks Android application developers from getting their percentage of application sales.
First of all, Ubuntu development on some of their key projects works the same way as Google's development for Android does - they build it in secret, release the source later, and don't let the global community dictate features. I like the Unity desktop in Ubuntu, I'm writing this post from Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity desktop, but Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical didn't take community input for the design and included features like the Amazon.com shopping lens in 12.10 over the objections of the community.
Second, Google is trying to stamp out incompatible forking or forking that uses pirated versions of Google's official applications. That was the cause of the recent tiff with Acer over their planned phone for the Chinese market running the Aliyun operating system - the Aliyun application store contained pirated Android apps, including pirated Google apps. Google is not trying to stop Amazon or Barnes & Noble or CyanogenMod or anyone else from making custom versions of Android or including their own application stores, but if you want the official Android applications with the Google name you need to get them from Google's own store or enter a business agreement with Google (which is why the Android Google Maps app is not available on a non-rooted Kindle Fire, for example).
But if you want a really open mobile operating system, I think our desperate, doomed hopes should be pinned to Firefox OS, WebOS, and Tizen OS. I believe the development for all three of those is completely out in the open and the community has more feature input. But I would be shocked if any get real traction in the market.
Non-voting shares are not sold over the counter, and have no affect on the numbers presented by the SEC.
I did not know that, thanks for educating me.
I believe the terms of my non-voting shares contract indicates that if the company is sold, I get a piece of the purchase money in proportion to the non-voting shares I hold at the time of the sale. I am also permitted to sell my shares to other employees or purchase shares from other employees. The two fellows that own the voting shares also hold the highest portion of the non-voting shares, so in the event of a sale they get the biggest piece of that pie. Since all of this is worthless unless the company is sold for a hefty price, I mostly ignore my shares except when making pointless contributions to a Slashdot discussion.
With Android you can use the Native Development Kit if you want to do things that it's not feasible to do well with Java/Dalvik. So I presume Tizen could do the same. HTML5 would be for mainstream applications like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope and weather widgets. I presume you could still write native applications in C or whatever language you wanted, Tizen is open source after all.
In terms of performance, Javascript is on a path to become the fastest interpreted language in the world. IE, Opera, Safari, and especially Chrome and Firefox are locked in a performance war and of course Chrome and Firefox are fully open source so anyone can benefit from their work. Watch the performance jumps between the various editions of Tom's Hardware's "Browser Grand Prix" web browser comparison test. I believe Chrome does in fact to JIT translation for Javascript, and since Firefox's performance is not too far behind I suspect they do too.
Platform independence with Java for Android gave Google three big advantages in additions to the ones Belial6 mentioned:
1. The barrier to entry for developers was very low. You can write Android applications using a Mac, a Windows PC, or a Linux PC. For iOS and Windows Phone, you need a Mac or Windows PC, respectively, to develop for it.
2. Java is more widely known and easier to learn than C++ or Objective C.
3. Java has security features built into its virtual machine - you can launch a Java program with specific restrictions on what APIs it can use or what portions of the filesystem it can access. I presume Dalvik has the same features. I believe it would be much harder to enforce the same constraints on a native application. ( I am not saying Java security is flawless - security flaws in the JVM are discovered often, including in enforcement of the security restrictions. But I suspect even so, it's easier to restrict an application written in Java from certain activities than to restrict the equivalent C++ or Objective C application. )
To be fair, the handful of people that pay attention to Windows Phone are probably the same handful of consumers that knew Windows Phone 8 was coming in Q4 and also knew that no older Windows Phone devices would get upgraded with the new software.
I've seen Windows Phone and I like it, but I'm not surprised it's dead in the market. Microsoft comes out with Windows Mobile, a few Microsoft enthusiasts buy it, then they abandon it. Then Microsoft comes out with Windows Phone 7, a few Microsoft enthusiasts buy it, and then they abandon it again. Microsoft took the early adopters who could be the people using word of mouth to build hype for their product, and screwed them. Between that and the fact that Microsoft brought its big guns to the mobile game at least four years after Apple and Google, I'm not surprise it's a failure.
In general, I agree with your logic. But in the particular case of smart phones and wireless plans in the US, from my research it's cheaper to go no-contract if you're an individual but cheaper to get a contract if you're buying for two or more people (and plan to stay with the carrier for at least two years).
On contract for Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile I'm pretty sure the first phone and its minutes and data cost a lot more than a no-contract plan, but each additional phone shares the plan for a flat $40 or $45 extra. Verizon, for example, is $80 per month for no-contract smart phone plans with 2GB of data but about $120 per month for a roughly equivalent contract plan. For an individual, the no-contract option saves money. But for two people, either way they spend $160 per month and with a contract the purchase price of their two phones is $400, while on no-contract the purchase price of the two phones could be as much as $1200.
AT&T Wireless is $65 per month for no contract smart phones, but it's $15 per GB after the first (so if you use more than 1 GB of data per month, you're spending $80, same as the Verizon Wireless no contract smart phone plan). And the on-contract pricing is similar.
Sprint, as far as I can tell, doesn't have its own no-contract plans and instead farms that out to subsidiaries Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile. Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile don't let you bring your own device, as far as I can tell, so you can save money on their contracts but you're restricted to phones a few generations old. I don't particularly care if my phone can't play Angry Birds Star Wars, but with my Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V (purchased 18 months ago) even when I'm using the house wifi it takes twenty five seconds to render the mobile web page with the local weather report. The next time I purchase a phone, it won't be Virgin Mobile - I've decided having a nerfed smart phone is a waste.
Of course if you really want to save money, you skip the funky phones entirely and go for a cheap feature phone and no contract setup. The next time I buy a phone, I may go for a big upgrade and spend a fortune on a top of the line Samsung, HTC, or LG device on another carrier. But I might just decide to keep more money in my bank account and drop back to a feature phone.
Companies can issue some of their stock as non-voting shares - you get a piece of the profits, but no say in the governance of the company. The tiny company that employs me operates that way - I can buy as much non-voting shares as I can afford, but the two founders own all of the voting shares and don't plan to sell, so no matter how much company stock I buy, I have zero say in the governance of the business.
As far as I know, Microsoft does not have non-voting shares, so as you said 10% shares means 10% of the votes. Maybe you already knew that, but I think the_arrow did not.
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Damn, I understood some of that. And here I thought I wasted my time trying to read a Java performance book from Oracle.
So where did you learn it? I'm just curious.
Nice username, by the way.
We use Tomcat on Windows, in production. I can't say how it scales versus Tomcat on Linux because all of our performance problems are related to the database anyway. Tomcat just chugs along.
If it doesn't suit your sense of humor, then don't pay any attention.
I'll never understand people who post to a topic on Slashdot complaining that the topic bores them. The internet is a big thing, if you aren't interested in what you read here, then go somewhere else.
Well, Chrome, Internet Explorer 9, and Firefox all have a better handle on this than Oracle. They all update automatically, with no user intervention required. Firefox was the last one to start doing that.
Adobe PDF Reader and Flash frequently have security flaws. Chrome includes its own PDF Reader to avoid the problems with Adobe reader. Chrome includes its own build of Flash so Google developers can release security fixes faster than Adobe does. Firefox checks the versions on Adobe PDF Reader and Flash player and if you're out of date, it prompts you to update them. I'm not sure what IE does, if anything.
Sun and now Oracle, though, rest on their laurels. Their "auto-update" feature for Java is not fully automatic, there are manual steps involved, and even worse after each update it resets the update check interval to something absurd like once a month or longer and if you want more frequent checks for updates it has to be reset to once every few weeks. Oracle needs to ask Google or the open source community for help to have Java update function exactly like Chrome's updates. Then they could ensure far more Java users have fixes installed more quickly.
Let me rephrase my statement - you will still run into DRM, but it will be beaten.
If Sony or any other company has me stream all of my movie content from their servers, they can block my use of movies I've purchased at any time for any reason. The best I can do is hire a lawyer and spend more than the moneys originally cost to fight it. But the embedded DRM on DVDs is a fixed technology by definition, they can remotely update the firmware of players but they can't remotely modify the disks themselves. So once the DVD cryptography was cracked, it stayed cracked.
Likewise Blu Ray is now broken. I see nothing to indicate that future physical media DRM schemes will suddenly become flawless.
Thanks. I realize DRM is on physical media already. But since the embedded DRM on DVDs has been cracked and the embedded DRM on Blu Rays has been cracked, I'm confident that the next brilliant DRM scheme for physical media will likewise be beaten.
Thanks. To the credit of the FSF, the GNU website for Hurd links to a PDF that lists the criticisms you mentioned, among others.
I had wondered why Hurd hadn't received more investment, and now I know.
Another nice thing about physical media is that you can lend it to your friends, pass it on to your children, etc... without running into digital rights management restrictions.
Although it may not matter - if nobody has a physical DVD player anymore in thirty years, passing on my DVD collection to the kids or offering to lend it to friends is meaningless.
The only time I notice a performance difference between the two is when I use a bookmarks folder to open six or eight sites at the same time. Firefox takes a while to finish - and I'm assuming the problem is related to writing the files it's receiving to the cache folder, because the problem is much worse if I'm copying large files when I do it. Chrome seems to do better.
At this point I think Chrome is still the superior browser, but I'm desperately hoping Firefox catches up completely or almost completely. I don't want a world where just one browser, even an open source one, is the undisputed king.
Actually, PDFs can have exploits that have nothing to do with Javascript. If the problem is Javascript, they can deliver it directly to Firefox and don't need to embed them in the PDF. But the real risks are buffer overflows and similar exploits that attack the PDF rendering program directly, which is typically Adobe PDF Reader.
The Firefox developers are aware that they're behind Chrome and IE on this, and they're definitely working on it. Starting at some point last year, Firefox automatically warns users when their browser plugins are out of date. PDF.js in Firefox, once it becomes the default for showing PDFs, will eliminate Adobe PDF Reader as a source of error
With IonMonkey, Firefox has closed the performance gap with Chrome well enough that I would no longer consider Chrome's speed as a deciding factor when choosing a browser. But now Firefox has three remaining Chrome features to tackle:
1. Sandboxing plugins, as you said.
2. Multi-process, so that errors in individual tabs don't crash the entire browser.
3. (Least important.) Updates in Firefox are automatic, but not transparent. Making them transparent would help.
I hope they manage all three.
They did that because an awful lot of PCs hacked by a website were hacked through security flaws in the PDF viewer. Writing the PDF viewer in Javascript means that the Mozilla developers only need to make Javascript in Firefox secure to protect the machine from intentionally badly formed PDFs, and of course they already needed to secure Javascript so that's no extra security work.
As a scripting language, Javascript is still slow compared to something like well-written C++. But Firefox 18 is pretty close to the latest version of Chrome for Javascript performance (e.g. arewefastyet.com ), so I bet the PDF viewer in Javascript works quickly enough.
They are focused on their own projects, and calling attention to the moral flaws in the commercial offerings is part of their method to recruit people to support the GNU alternatives. That includes support from developers but also from people doing testing, documentation, spreading the information about the value of free software further, and donating money.
As for Linux vs Hurd, I'm not qualified to say if there are fundamental architectural problems in Hurd that prevent it from being as good as Linux. But I do think it's fair to say Linux has benefitted from tens of thousands or maybe millions of more hours of focused effort from great developers than Hurd. And an awful lot of the people bright enough to apply the same class of improvements to Hurd don't care about the differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3, so they don't consider it a good investment of their time.
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." - Steve Jobs, 1996. ( http://gizmodo.com/5483914/steve-jobs-1996-good-artists-copy-great-artists-steal )
Steve Jobs' crusade against Google or anyone else for "theft" is hypocrisy.
You're mixing two topics that aren't related to each other.
Has Stallman ever said, "A unified design is bad"? Has he ever said that elegant user interfaces are undesirable? Has he ever lead a protest against beautiful hardware? Has he ever even claimed to be an expert on user interface design?
The elegant design and easy user interface is incredibly handy, and valuable. The jail is the part that does not need to come along with it, and is immoral and hurts consumers and competition. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation are focused on the latter, not the former.
I'm an FSF member, and I'm not hoping to see a command shell open at all times on all consumer electronic devices, or pushing for Emacs keystrokes as the primary way of interacting with your smart phone. I would love to see a build of Android, or Firefox OS that beats Apple for simplicity and ease-of-use, on a hardware device that beats the iPhone for elegant design, but that runs software with an FSF-approved licenses ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html ) from boot loader to UI. Nothing that the FSF advocates goes against that. Once a customer bought the device, he would have all the tools he wanted to modify or replace the running software with something bloated, slow, and needlessly complicated. But that's a freedom he deserves to have, and someone like your mother with the same device would run it as-is and never even notice that it had free software.
That's where MS wants to take their market -- Incompatibility land.
Right. And in their defense, that's where they built their fortune. So no matter whether you like it or not, that's where their entire business model is. Of course they won't abandon it, their tiny physical device sales (Xbox360, Kinect, Surface tablets) and small services sales ( Windows Azure, Microsoft CRM, etc.. ) can't make up for all of the revenue they depend upon from Windows and Office.
But incompatibility benefits them at our expense, and I'm hoping (and I would be praying, if I was the religious type) that the future is Android, Chrome OS, Blackberry 10, Firefox OS, WebOS, Tizen, and of course Debian, Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, Mint, etc...
I understand your point, but consider that Microsoft doesn't blink at suing Android device makers for patent infringement. If some other search company, like DuckDuckGo or whatever, was withholding access to APIs from Microsoft for no reason, it would be a case of Microsoft being in the right and the other side being wrong.
In this case, it's just a battle. "You sue my partners to get some money and make products with my software more expensive? Fine, I block your API access to the most popular video sharing website on the net. Here's the licensing requirement for API access to Youtube: stop suing Android manufacturers, and it's all yours."
Anti-competitive? Google hasn't gone after Amazon for custom Android on the Kindle, Barnes & Noble for custom Android on the Nook Tablet, CyanogenMod for custom Android, or all the little side projects that build custom versions of Android. Google only went after Acer because Acer was going to make phones for a Chinese company with a web store full of hacked versions of Google Android apps.
Acer was making a phone with the Aliyun operating system made by the Chinese company Alibaba. Aliyun's application store used pirated versions of the official Google applications for Android ( Maps, Voice, Gmail, etc... ) and also pirated versions of other applications from the Play Store. That's why Google used the legalese in their contract with Acer to block the production of the phone.
Google doesn't go after Amazon for the Kindle, Barnes & Noble for the Nook tablet, CyanogenMod, the Android for x86 project, and dozens of other significant and insignificant forks of Android because none of those forks are using Android in a way that uses Google services while hijacking the advertising revenue and blocks Android application developers from getting their percentage of application sales.
First of all, Ubuntu development on some of their key projects works the same way as Google's development for Android does - they build it in secret, release the source later, and don't let the global community dictate features. I like the Unity desktop in Ubuntu, I'm writing this post from Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity desktop, but Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical didn't take community input for the design and included features like the Amazon.com shopping lens in 12.10 over the objections of the community.
Second, Google is trying to stamp out incompatible forking or forking that uses pirated versions of Google's official applications. That was the cause of the recent tiff with Acer over their planned phone for the Chinese market running the Aliyun operating system - the Aliyun application store contained pirated Android apps, including pirated Google apps. Google is not trying to stop Amazon or Barnes & Noble or CyanogenMod or anyone else from making custom versions of Android or including their own application stores, but if you want the official Android applications with the Google name you need to get them from Google's own store or enter a business agreement with Google (which is why the Android Google Maps app is not available on a non-rooted Kindle Fire, for example).
But if you want a really open mobile operating system, I think our desperate, doomed hopes should be pinned to Firefox OS, WebOS, and Tizen OS. I believe the development for all three of those is completely out in the open and the community has more feature input. But I would be shocked if any get real traction in the market.
Non-voting shares are not sold over the counter, and have no affect on the numbers presented by the SEC.
I did not know that, thanks for educating me.
I believe the terms of my non-voting shares contract indicates that if the company is sold, I get a piece of the purchase money in proportion to the non-voting shares I hold at the time of the sale. I am also permitted to sell my shares to other employees or purchase shares from other employees. The two fellows that own the voting shares also hold the highest portion of the non-voting shares, so in the event of a sale they get the biggest piece of that pie. Since all of this is worthless unless the company is sold for a hefty price, I mostly ignore my shares except when making pointless contributions to a Slashdot discussion.
With Android you can use the Native Development Kit if you want to do things that it's not feasible to do well with Java/Dalvik. So I presume Tizen could do the same. HTML5 would be for mainstream applications like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope and weather widgets. I presume you could still write native applications in C or whatever language you wanted, Tizen is open source after all.
In terms of performance, Javascript is on a path to become the fastest interpreted language in the world. IE, Opera, Safari, and especially Chrome and Firefox are locked in a performance war and of course Chrome and Firefox are fully open source so anyone can benefit from their work. Watch the performance jumps between the various editions of Tom's Hardware's "Browser Grand Prix" web browser comparison test. I believe Chrome does in fact to JIT translation for Javascript, and since Firefox's performance is not too far behind I suspect they do too.
Platform independence with Java for Android gave Google three big advantages in additions to the ones Belial6 mentioned:
1. The barrier to entry for developers was very low. You can write Android applications using a Mac, a Windows PC, or a Linux PC. For iOS and Windows Phone, you need a Mac or Windows PC, respectively, to develop for it.
2. Java is more widely known and easier to learn than C++ or Objective C.
3. Java has security features built into its virtual machine - you can launch a Java program with specific restrictions on what APIs it can use or what portions of the filesystem it can access. I presume Dalvik has the same features. I believe it would be much harder to enforce the same constraints on a native application. ( I am not saying Java security is flawless - security flaws in the JVM are discovered often, including in enforcement of the security restrictions. But I suspect even so, it's easier to restrict an application written in Java from certain activities than to restrict the equivalent C++ or Objective C application. )
To be fair, the handful of people that pay attention to Windows Phone are probably the same handful of consumers that knew Windows Phone 8 was coming in Q4 and also knew that no older Windows Phone devices would get upgraded with the new software.
I've seen Windows Phone and I like it, but I'm not surprised it's dead in the market. Microsoft comes out with Windows Mobile, a few Microsoft enthusiasts buy it, then they abandon it. Then Microsoft comes out with Windows Phone 7, a few Microsoft enthusiasts buy it, and then they abandon it again. Microsoft took the early adopters who could be the people using word of mouth to build hype for their product, and screwed them. Between that and the fact that Microsoft brought its big guns to the mobile game at least four years after Apple and Google, I'm not surprise it's a failure.
In general, I agree with your logic. But in the particular case of smart phones and wireless plans in the US, from my research it's cheaper to go no-contract if you're an individual but cheaper to get a contract if you're buying for two or more people (and plan to stay with the carrier for at least two years).
On contract for Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile I'm pretty sure the first phone and its minutes and data cost a lot more than a no-contract plan, but each additional phone shares the plan for a flat $40 or $45 extra. Verizon, for example, is $80 per month for no-contract smart phone plans with 2GB of data but about $120 per month for a roughly equivalent contract plan. For an individual, the no-contract option saves money. But for two people, either way they spend $160 per month and with a contract the purchase price of their two phones is $400, while on no-contract the purchase price of the two phones could be as much as $1200.
AT&T Wireless is $65 per month for no contract smart phones, but it's $15 per GB after the first (so if you use more than 1 GB of data per month, you're spending $80, same as the Verizon Wireless no contract smart phone plan). And the on-contract pricing is similar.
Sprint, as far as I can tell, doesn't have its own no-contract plans and instead farms that out to subsidiaries Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile. Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile don't let you bring your own device, as far as I can tell, so you can save money on their contracts but you're restricted to phones a few generations old. I don't particularly care if my phone can't play Angry Birds Star Wars, but with my Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V (purchased 18 months ago) even when I'm using the house wifi it takes twenty five seconds to render the mobile web page with the local weather report. The next time I purchase a phone, it won't be Virgin Mobile - I've decided having a nerfed smart phone is a waste.
Of course if you really want to save money, you skip the funky phones entirely and go for a cheap feature phone and no contract setup. The next time I buy a phone, I may go for a big upgrade and spend a fortune on a top of the line Samsung, HTC, or LG device on another carrier. But I might just decide to keep more money in my bank account and drop back to a feature phone.
Companies can issue some of their stock as non-voting shares - you get a piece of the profits, but no say in the governance of the company. The tiny company that employs me operates that way - I can buy as much non-voting shares as I can afford, but the two founders own all of the voting shares and don't plan to sell, so no matter how much company stock I buy, I have zero say in the governance of the business.
As far as I know, Microsoft does not have non-voting shares, so as you said 10% shares means 10% of the votes. Maybe you already knew that, but I think the_arrow did not.