> Taking Apache for example, could it bundle PHP with it to make everyone start using PHP and > kill off ASP.NET and/or IIS to dominate the web application server market? Absolutely not.
Having triple the market share of all your competitors *combined* makes you a monopoly; what you *do* with that position is a separate issue.
Apache has enough market share in the web server software market overall to count as a monopoly in that market. Whether an open-source application could successfully *abuse* a monopoly to break into additional markets is, so far as I'm aware, an open question; to my knowledge it has not yet even been attempted. Nonetheless, abusing the position is not part of the definition of a monopoly.
I'll give you Apache for sure, and (historically, at least) BIND and Sendmail. But I can't let Wordpress/Drupal/Joomla pass. These all have less than 20% market share *combined*, and that really doesn't count as dominating squat.
> it would be completely unique - somehow it manages to dominate market share, and yet its > competitors can copy any of its features or redistribute their own flavor of the same product?
You mean like Apache, which has had 70-80% market share since the mid nineties, and is distributed under a permissive open-source license? Microsoft has put *serious* effort over 10+ years into trying to unseat it and has so far managed to drive most of Apache's (other) real competitors from the market, but has not managed to take significant market share away from Apache itself.
> "It's asserting that bundling leads to market share. I don't know how you can make the claim with a straight face." > And if anyone falls for this, they need to look in the mirror and ask themselves, who they'll be suckered by next.
Yeah, he left out a word. Try it like this: "It's asserting that bundling necessarily leads to market share. I don't know how you can make the claim..."
I think we all know that bundling *sometimes* leads to market share. IE, for instance, gained *majority* market share while it was still an obviously inferior product, mostly due to bundling. (It then shored up its market share to 90% by other means, but that's another story.) Notepad and Wordpad quite obviously owe the overwhelming majority of whatever market share they have to bundling.
But it doesn't *necessarily* work. NetMeeting has almost no market presence, despite having been bundled with every OS Microsoft has shipped since 1996. The MSN IM application has been bundled with Windows since 1999 or so and yet has, what, 15% market share? 20%? Nothing like what IE has, certainly. Outlook Express has been bundled with Windows for just as long, and has even less market share than MSN Messenger. Safari has a smaller market share than the OS X version of Firefox, though admittedly Safari has only been bundled for a relatively short time.
But the real reason the Mozilla foundation shouldn't allow Firefox to be bundled with Windows is because it would give Microsoft leverage that you DO NOT want them to have.
> We would expect the limit of three applications wouldn't affect very many people.' but... > 70% of Windows users have between eight and 15 windows open at any one time."
I'm not sure I buy either of those statements outright -- the truth is probably somewhere in between. Nonetheless, if I had to pick between the two, the former seems closer to reality than the latter. There is no way on earth anywhere near 70% of Windows users have 8+ windows open on a typical day. 70% of Linux users, sure, and maybe even higher. 30% of Windows users, possibly. But more than half of Windows users? Not in this universe.
I might believe that 70% of Windows users have 8+ *programs* running at any given time, but only if you count programs that generally run with no open windows. Gratuitous OEM-bundled system-tray weather doodads of dubious quality, and their ilk; instant messaging clients that run all the time even though they're almost never needed (not least the one that comes bundled with the operating system, not to mention the stupid MySpace one); antivirus (which, however, the summary specifically says is excluded from the count); anti-spyware/anti-adware, or in many cases the malware itself; that Nero thinggummy that the PC makers like to pre-install for no obvious reason, despite the fact that Windows Explorer has adequate CD-RW support built in; preloaders for stuff NOBODY uses frequently enough to actually want it preloaded at system start (*cough* Adobe Reader); update-checkers for stuff that almost nobody cares whether it's up to date or not (such as the JVM), which for added bonus points generally go ahead and run even if you're in a limited account; the list goes on and on. If these sorts of things count toward the total, I kind of hope Windows Starter *does* take off, just to call attention to the fact that users don't really need all that dross and flotsam running all the time.
But as far as actual windows open at once, my observation of Windows users suggests that a *LOT* of them (possibly not the majority, but almost certainly more than 30%) never go beyond two window at a time except by mistake, such as when a link on a website opens a new window -- and when it does happen, they get confused. And the only way they get two windows open at once is if one of them is the My Documents window and they double-click something in it that opens in another window, in which case most of them are not aware that the My Documents window is still open in the background.
Just plug the television into a cheap old power bar (you know, the kind you probably have three of sitting around because you used to have your computer plugged into them but you don't trust their surge protectors any more because they're several years old), and switch the power bar off when you aren't using the TV. Then it'll draw zero watts.
> I'd like to make an argument that going open source would save the university money
Wrong argument. This is a college. If you want open source (or for that matter anything different from what the school has been doing) to fly, you need to coherently argue that it will improve the students' learning opportunities.
I'd forgotten about linuxconf. I think I was blocking out those memories. It was horrible -- especially the Gnome version, but just linuxconf in general, really. I don't remember all the details, because it's been a while, but ISTR that it was a real pain to use and furthermore screwed up configuration files sometimes beyond repair. It was actually significantly less hassle to just read the man pages and edit the config files by hand.
I also have some really bad memories of what happened when you ran out of swap space, before the memory management improvements in the kernel landed (somewhere around 2.0 or 2.2 IIRC). Simple actions like closing a window (in order to free up some memory and get the system back into a working state) could take *HOURS*, if you even had the patience to wait (rather than, say, giving up and power cycling, although given what I know now I suspect ctrl-alt-backspace might have been an available intermediate solution; you'd still lose unsaved data in applications, but at least you probably wouldn't get filesystem corruption).
> Many of those 3.7 million people would be marching into their local Radio Shack and Best Buy > stores trying to buy converter boxes next weekend right before the scheduled cutoff on Feb. 17.
My observation of human behavior indicates that may of them would NOT have gone to buy the things until *after* the cutoff on February 17 and now _will_ not go to buy them until after the cutoff in June or whenever.
> And if the electronics association's numbers are right, the boxes would have sold out.
And nothing of value would have been lost.
Actually, I would just about put down money that not as many people will go buy the things as the estimates suggest. I think a lot of people will keep putting it off, even after the transition, until they realize they don't actually miss broadcast television at all, since they hardly ever watched it anyway and can easily find better things to do with their time. Sure, there are a lot of people who *do* watch television constantly and *would* miss it, but almost all of them have cable.
Just because it makes sense doesn't mean it won't take some getting used to. After neigh on a quarter of a century of listening to Mac zealots rant incessantly about how terribly unjust and unrighteous and uncool it is that anyone would ever have to type a command to get a computer to do something, it's *weird* to see them make any sense.
> This is very unlikely unless you were installing something using a really, really crappy installer.
In the Windows universe, that's the usual way to install things. The package manager, such as it is (MSI) leaves something to be desired, and since almost all of the software is third-party, it usually doesn't come in that kind of package anyway. Practically everything, *including* some of Microsoft's own software, instead comes in executable-installer format. There are several major competing installers, all of which are mediocre or worse, and then a lot of software houses just rolls their own, which is seldom much better.
It's kind of like the bad old days when every application developer wrote his own makefiles by hand, except that instead of typing three commands, the user just has to click Next about eight times.
He had already stated that he was talking specifically about Windows XP Professional Edition. Adding "in Windows" to the end of the statement is unnecessary clarification. Anyone who read his comment already knew that part.
> We can declare that 1 + 1 = 3 is an axiom and then derive a whole bunch of things from this
Technically, yeah, you can, but you have to *remove* from your system any axioms that would lead to contradictions when you start deriving theorems. (Unless what you're trying to do is prove by mathematical induction that 1 + 1 = 3 is false, in which case finding a contradiction is the _goal_.) In the case of 1 + 1 = 3 you end up getting rid of all references to 2, at which point 3 merely becomes the symbol for two, which isn't very useful.
Much more interesting is what happens when you declare that the sum of the angles of a triangle is greater than 180 degrees.
In this context, the word "reduced" means something along the lines of "explained in detail". Mathematicians use the word this way with fair regularity; not sure about physicists.
Although, frankly, window.open is a piece of DOM that never should have been introduced in the first place, and if it were just diked out of the codebase entirely, no significant harm would befall anyone, and sites would stop finding ways around the existing popup blocking (this is, what, the _third_ time that's happened). Popups shouldn't have to be blocked, because the capability to pop-up windows via the DOM just shouldn't exist in the first place.
It's not about advertisements. I mean, yes, advertisements have a strong tendency to be associated with pop-ups, but for me the advertising isn't the issue. The issue is that how I choose to keep the windows arranged on my workstation is none of the website's $#@! business. Extra browser windows opening up that I did not expressly request is something I don't want to have happen, EVER, completely irrespective of whether the content that's popping up is an advertisement, the main content of the site, or whatever else it might be.
It's not a Javascript issue, either. I don't mind Javascript, for the most part. Websites can use Javascript to do whatever they want with their own content. Change images when the mouse rolls over, alter the list of available choices in one drop-down box when the another one is changed, insert asynchronously-retrieved content into the page on the fly, whatever. The content belongs, after all, to the site. I'm just a viewer. I gave the site a certain amount of screen real estate on my system, and it can display in that space what it will. If I don't like it, I'll close the tab, but as long as I've got the site open, it's allowed to display what it likes in that space.
But it's *not* okay for the scripts on sites to be able to do things *beyond* the bounds of the space they've been given. (I don't mean the part of the page that's scrolled out of view. That's still part of their space, even if it's not visible currently.) It's not okay for a website to change my wallpaper, for instance. (Yes, in some browsers, at one time, that was actually possible. Not lately, thank goodness.) It's not okay for a website to change my browser settings (e.g., change my start page, add itself to my bookmarks, hide portions of the browser chrome). And it's very much not okay for a website to start opening up additional browser windows (or tabs for that matter) beyond the one(s) I've given it.
> I think what you meant to say was "Many web designers count on Javascript for BASIC functionality such as > layout, menus, and following links these days. Turning off Javascript neuters almost every site you browse." > Don't blame NoScript for that problem. Blame sloppy developers that use JavaScript for duties that they shouldn't.
While this is true, it doesn't mean that a completely script-free web experience is enjoyable.
Honestly, I don't see what all the fuss is about. This sort of thing is *exactly* the sort of problem capability policies were originally designed to solve, back in the nineties. With capability policies you can *allow* the scripts on sites to do the things you think it's okay for them to do (e.g., dynamically insert content into the page, which is actually a really nice feature in a lot of cases) and still prohibit websites from doing things you *don't* think it's okay for them to do, such as open additional windows, dork around with the status bar, etc. Are there really still slashdot readers who don't know about capability policies, after all these years?
No reasons he can give would be good enough. The English language does not really contain sufficiently scathing terminology to articulate my disdain for Mono, but I'll make a brief attempt anyway...
The whole.NET thing was a solution in desperate need of a problem in the first place, *even* if you're only concerned, ever, about supporting the Microsoft Windows platform.
Cloning it for *nix systems was and remains an inherently brain-damaged idea, a worse-than-useless thoroughly misguided disaster, *both* in terms of open-source ideology *and* practicality. Not only will it *never* have any hope of accomplishing the original stated goal of widespread cross-platform compatibility, but it also fails badly as a development platform generally.
In terms of open-source ideology, Mono is an abdication of platform design to a proprietary monopolistic corporation. Even though the implementation is not proprietary, it still has to follow the design put forward by the proprietary corporation, and that makes it totally unacceptable to anyone who is serious about software freedom.
In terms of practical issues, which are more important to me, Mono is an abdication of platform design, not just initially but also going forward, to an organization with a long history of some of the worst platform design in the industry, not only from a security perspective but also in terms of the impact the platform has on how software developers do their work. *Even* if the design of the current version of.NET looks pretty good (a premise I am not entirely willing to grant), there is no reason to believe that will be the case five years from now. If the Mono team wanted to develop a *useful* development platform, they would decouple themselves from compatibility with.NET and instead build something that can go in whatever direction the open-source community needs it to go in the future. As it stands, Mono is shackled to Microsoft, the king of bad design decisions. Why on earth would I want to develop software for a platform that has no future?
Mono servers no useful purpose whatsoever and instead actively detracts from the open-source community.
> Visual Studio (which I admin, I think is awesome) is such a great IDE
I couldn't disagree more. Visual Studio has some of the most actively terrible usability that I've ever seen. It's gratuitously complex where simplicity would be more effective and yet simultaneously lacks basic features that competing software (including text editors that make no pretext of being IDEs) has had for decades. I have yet to find a single thing about it that I like, period. Even when you're writing something as inherently simple as a basic single-SELECT-statement database query (tSQL), almost any other tool -- including even the extremely basic Query Analyzer that comes with MS SQL Server -- is orders of magnitude better, and makes the job take less than half as long as it would if you tried to suffer through doing it in VS.
I think I'd rather bite the bullet and make myself finally learn to use vi (which I have steadfastly avoided doing ever since I was first introduced to it a dozen or so years ago) than try to develop actual application software using Visual Studio.
Unless you work for a vendor that sells Linux-based solutions, and have a job title something along the lines of "Deployment Options Specialist", there really isn't any reason to *try* to think about all of the various configuration and deployment options. What would be the point? You're Doing It Wrong.
The right approach is to ask, "In our situation, what do we need the software to do?"
> A design company needs to know exactly what they will be printing, and their printers > work on CMYK, not RGB like your screen (and therefore most programs). They therefore > prefer to work with CMYK
Unless they have a *monitor* that supports CMYK, this preference is pretty much irrelevant. Software cannot magically turn your computer screen's additive medium into a paper-like subtractive one. It's physically impossible. Photoshop's CMYK support is mostly just a buzzword. (Okay, yeah, so there's also the ability to specify rich black. I think I'll maybe wet my pants over that one.)
You missed the fact that he was listing the GDPs according to Purchasing Power Parity, not in exchange-rate terms. In other words, while what you point out is true as far as it goes, he had already corrected for it.
> You mean, American companies sell Chinese products in US for eight times the price they paid in China?
I think Pier 1 Imports does something like that...
But in any case exchange rates don't necessarily track closely with purchasing power, and even if they did, purchasing power considers the collection of goods most people buy, but which of those goods are the cheapies and which ones are the big-ticket items varies from one country to another, sometimes quite significantly. That's why trade is so advantageous in the first place.
In Cameroon, mangoes are cheap, when they're in season. Uber-poor people, like, say, the children of subsistence farmers, eat them for breakfast. Where I live, a single fresh mango costs more than a two-pound bag of rice, which would feed the Cameroonian child for a fortnight. But they can't afford rice for breakfast. Sometimes they might get it for supper. The relative costs of things are not necessarily the same from one country to another.
So just because imports get marked way up from one country to another doesn't necessarily imply anything particular about the economic relationship between the two countries.
You're also missing the fact that the US is not importing only from China. We have trade relations with most of the countries on the planet. It's a pretty connected world these days.
Slashdot Mirror
> Taking Apache for example, could it bundle PHP with it to make everyone start using PHP and
> kill off ASP.NET and/or IIS to dominate the web application server market? Absolutely not.
Having triple the market share of all your competitors *combined* makes you a monopoly; what you *do* with that position is a separate issue.
Apache has enough market share in the web server software market overall to count as a monopoly in that market. Whether an open-source application could successfully *abuse* a monopoly to break into additional markets is, so far as I'm aware, an open question; to my knowledge it has not yet even been attempted. Nonetheless, abusing the position is not part of the definition of a monopoly.
I'll give you Apache for sure, and (historically, at least) BIND and Sendmail. But I can't let Wordpress/Drupal/Joomla pass. These all have less than 20% market share *combined*, and that really doesn't count as dominating squat.
> it would be completely unique - somehow it manages to dominate market share, and yet its
> competitors can copy any of its features or redistribute their own flavor of the same product?
You mean like Apache, which has had 70-80% market share since the mid nineties, and is distributed under a permissive open-source license? Microsoft has put *serious* effort over 10+ years into trying to unseat it and has so far managed to drive most of Apache's (other) real competitors from the market, but has not managed to take significant market share away from Apache itself.
> "It's asserting that bundling leads to market share. I don't know how you can make the claim with a straight face."
> And if anyone falls for this, they need to look in the mirror and ask themselves, who they'll be suckered by next.
Yeah, he left out a word. Try it like this:
"It's asserting that bundling necessarily leads to market share. I don't know how you can make the claim..."
I think we all know that bundling *sometimes* leads to market share. IE, for instance, gained *majority* market share while it was still an obviously inferior product, mostly due to bundling. (It then shored up its market share to 90% by other means, but that's another story.) Notepad and Wordpad quite obviously owe the overwhelming majority of whatever market share they have to bundling.
But it doesn't *necessarily* work. NetMeeting has almost no market presence, despite having been bundled with every OS Microsoft has shipped since 1996. The MSN IM application has been bundled with Windows since 1999 or so and yet has, what, 15% market share? 20%? Nothing like what IE has, certainly. Outlook Express has been bundled with Windows for just as long, and has even less market share than MSN Messenger. Safari has a smaller market share than the OS X version of Firefox, though admittedly Safari has only been bundled for a relatively short time.
But the real reason the Mozilla foundation shouldn't allow Firefox to be bundled with Windows is because it would give Microsoft leverage that you DO NOT want them to have.
> We would expect the limit of three applications wouldn't affect very many people.'
but...
> 70% of Windows users have between eight and 15 windows open at any one time."
I'm not sure I buy either of those statements outright -- the truth is probably somewhere in between. Nonetheless, if I had to pick between the two, the former seems closer to reality than the latter. There is no way on earth anywhere near 70% of Windows users have 8+ windows open on a typical day. 70% of Linux users, sure, and maybe even higher. 30% of Windows users, possibly. But more than half of Windows users? Not in this universe.
I might believe that 70% of Windows users have 8+ *programs* running at any given time, but only if you count programs that generally run with no open windows. Gratuitous OEM-bundled system-tray weather doodads of dubious quality, and their ilk; instant messaging clients that run all the time even though they're almost never needed (not least the one that comes bundled with the operating system, not to mention the stupid MySpace one); antivirus (which, however, the summary specifically says is excluded from the count); anti-spyware/anti-adware, or in many cases the malware itself; that Nero thinggummy that the PC makers like to pre-install for no obvious reason, despite the fact that Windows Explorer has adequate CD-RW support built in; preloaders for stuff NOBODY uses frequently enough to actually want it preloaded at system start (*cough* Adobe Reader); update-checkers for stuff that almost nobody cares whether it's up to date or not (such as the JVM), which for added bonus points generally go ahead and run even if you're in a limited account; the list goes on and on. If these sorts of things count toward the total, I kind of hope Windows Starter *does* take off, just to call attention to the fact that users don't really need all that dross and flotsam running all the time.
But as far as actual windows open at once, my observation of Windows users suggests that a *LOT* of them (possibly not the majority, but almost certainly more than 30%) never go beyond two window at a time except by mistake, such as when a link on a website opens a new window -- and when it does happen, they get confused. And the only way they get two windows open at once is if one of them is the My Documents window and they double-click something in it that opens in another window, in which case most of them are not aware that the My Documents window is still open in the background.
Just plug the television into a cheap old power bar (you know, the kind you probably have three of sitting around because you used to have your computer plugged into them but you don't trust their surge protectors any more because they're several years old), and switch the power bar off when you aren't using the TV. Then it'll draw zero watts.
> I'd like to make an argument that going open source would save the university money
Wrong argument. This is a college. If you want open source (or for that matter anything different from what the school has been doing) to fly, you need to coherently argue that it will improve the students' learning opportunities.
I'd forgotten about linuxconf. I think I was blocking out those memories. It was horrible -- especially the Gnome version, but just linuxconf in general, really. I don't remember all the details, because it's been a while, but ISTR that it was a real pain to use and furthermore screwed up configuration files sometimes beyond repair. It was actually significantly less hassle to just read the man pages and edit the config files by hand.
I also have some really bad memories of what happened when you ran out of swap space, before the memory management improvements in the kernel landed (somewhere around 2.0 or 2.2 IIRC). Simple actions like closing a window (in order to free up some memory and get the system back into a working state) could take *HOURS*, if you even had the patience to wait (rather than, say, giving up and power cycling, although given what I know now I suspect ctrl-alt-backspace might have been an available intermediate solution; you'd still lose unsaved data in applications, but at least you probably wouldn't get filesystem corruption).
> Many of those 3.7 million people would be marching into their local Radio Shack and Best Buy
> stores trying to buy converter boxes next weekend right before the scheduled cutoff on Feb. 17.
My observation of human behavior indicates that may of them would NOT have gone to buy the things until *after* the cutoff on February 17 and now _will_ not go to buy them until after the cutoff in June or whenever.
> And if the electronics association's numbers are right, the boxes would have sold out.
And nothing of value would have been lost.
Actually, I would just about put down money that not as many people will go buy the things as the estimates suggest. I think a lot of people will keep putting it off, even after the transition, until they realize they don't actually miss broadcast television at all, since they hardly ever watched it anyway and can easily find better things to do with their time. Sure, there are a lot of people who *do* watch television constantly and *would* miss it, but almost all of them have cable.
Just because it makes sense doesn't mean it won't take some getting used to. After neigh on a quarter of a century of listening to Mac zealots rant incessantly about how terribly unjust and unrighteous and uncool it is that anyone would ever have to type a command to get a computer to do something, it's *weird* to see them make any sense.
> This is very unlikely unless you were installing something using a really, really crappy installer.
In the Windows universe, that's the usual way to install things. The package manager, such as it is (MSI) leaves something to be desired, and since almost all of the software is third-party, it usually doesn't come in that kind of package anyway. Practically everything, *including* some of Microsoft's own software, instead comes in executable-installer format. There are several major competing installers, all of which are mediocre or worse, and then a lot of software houses just rolls their own, which is seldom much better.
It's kind of like the bad old days when every application developer wrote his own makefiles by hand, except that instead of typing three commands, the user just has to click Next about eight times.
He had already stated that he was talking specifically about Windows XP Professional Edition. Adding "in Windows" to the end of the statement is unnecessary clarification. Anyone who read his comment already knew that part.
> We can declare that 1 + 1 = 3 is an axiom and then derive a whole bunch of things from this
Technically, yeah, you can, but you have to *remove* from your system any axioms that would lead to contradictions when you start deriving theorems. (Unless what you're trying to do is prove by mathematical induction that 1 + 1 = 3 is false, in which case finding a contradiction is the _goal_.) In the case of 1 + 1 = 3 you end up getting rid of all references to 2, at which point 3 merely becomes the symbol for two, which isn't very useful.
Much more interesting is what happens when you declare that the sum of the angles of a triangle is greater than 180 degrees.
In this context, the word "reduced" means something along the lines of "explained in detail". Mathematicians use the word this way with fair regularity; not sure about physicists.
Of course, water is not the only solvent, just the most common one.
> And that's why we have capability policies.
Although, frankly, window.open is a piece of DOM that never should have been introduced in the first place, and if it were just diked out of the codebase entirely, no significant harm would befall anyone, and sites would stop finding ways around the existing popup blocking (this is, what, the _third_ time that's happened). Popups shouldn't have to be blocked, because the capability to pop-up windows via the DOM just shouldn't exist in the first place.
It's not about advertisements. I mean, yes, advertisements have a strong tendency to be associated with pop-ups, but for me the advertising isn't the issue. The issue is that how I choose to keep the windows arranged on my workstation is none of the website's $#@! business. Extra browser windows opening up that I did not expressly request is something I don't want to have happen, EVER, completely irrespective of whether the content that's popping up is an advertisement, the main content of the site, or whatever else it might be.
It's not a Javascript issue, either. I don't mind Javascript, for the most part. Websites can use Javascript to do whatever they want with their own content. Change images when the mouse rolls over, alter the list of available choices in one drop-down box when the another one is changed, insert asynchronously-retrieved content into the page on the fly, whatever. The content belongs, after all, to the site. I'm just a viewer. I gave the site a certain amount of screen real estate on my system, and it can display in that space what it will. If I don't like it, I'll close the tab, but as long as I've got the site open, it's allowed to display what it likes in that space.
But it's *not* okay for the scripts on sites to be able to do things *beyond* the bounds of the space they've been given. (I don't mean the part of the page that's scrolled out of view. That's still part of their space, even if it's not visible currently.) It's not okay for a website to change my wallpaper, for instance. (Yes, in some browsers, at one time, that was actually possible. Not lately, thank goodness.) It's not okay for a website to change my browser settings (e.g., change my start page, add itself to my bookmarks, hide portions of the browser chrome). And it's very much not okay for a website to start opening up additional browser windows (or tabs for that matter) beyond the one(s) I've given it.
And that's why we have capability policies.
> I think what you meant to say was "Many web designers count on Javascript for BASIC functionality such as
> layout, menus, and following links these days. Turning off Javascript neuters almost every site you browse."
> Don't blame NoScript for that problem. Blame sloppy developers that use JavaScript for duties that they shouldn't.
While this is true, it doesn't mean that a completely script-free web experience is enjoyable.
Honestly, I don't see what all the fuss is about. This sort of thing is *exactly* the sort of problem capability policies were originally designed to solve, back in the nineties. With capability policies you can *allow* the scripts on sites to do the things you think it's okay for them to do (e.g., dynamically insert content into the page, which is actually a really nice feature in a lot of cases) and still prohibit websites from doing things you *don't* think it's okay for them to do, such as open additional windows, dork around with the status bar, etc. Are there really still slashdot readers who don't know about capability policies, after all these years?
No reasons he can give would be good enough. The English language does not really contain sufficiently scathing terminology to articulate my disdain for Mono, but I'll make a brief attempt anyway...
.NET thing was a solution in desperate need of a problem in the first place, *even* if you're only concerned, ever, about supporting the Microsoft Windows platform.
.NET looks pretty good (a premise I am not entirely willing to grant), there is no reason to believe that will be the case five years from now. If the Mono team wanted to develop a *useful* development platform, they would decouple themselves from compatibility with .NET and instead build something that can go in whatever direction the open-source community needs it to go in the future. As it stands, Mono is shackled to Microsoft, the king of bad design decisions. Why on earth would I want to develop software for a platform that has no future?
The whole
Cloning it for *nix systems was and remains an inherently brain-damaged idea, a worse-than-useless thoroughly misguided disaster, *both* in terms of open-source ideology *and* practicality. Not only will it *never* have any hope of accomplishing the original stated goal of widespread cross-platform compatibility, but it also fails badly as a development platform generally.
In terms of open-source ideology, Mono is an abdication of platform design to a proprietary monopolistic corporation. Even though the implementation is not proprietary, it still has to follow the design put forward by the proprietary corporation, and that makes it totally unacceptable to anyone who is serious about software freedom.
In terms of practical issues, which are more important to me, Mono is an abdication of platform design, not just initially but also going forward, to an organization with a long history of some of the worst platform design in the industry, not only from a security perspective but also in terms of the impact the platform has on how software developers do their work. *Even* if the design of the current version of
Mono servers no useful purpose whatsoever and instead actively detracts from the open-source community.
> Visual Studio (which I admin, I think is awesome) is such a great IDE
I couldn't disagree more. Visual Studio has some of the most actively terrible usability that I've ever seen. It's gratuitously complex where simplicity would be more effective and yet simultaneously lacks basic features that competing software (including text editors that make no pretext of being IDEs) has had for decades. I have yet to find a single thing about it that I like, period. Even when you're writing something as inherently simple as a basic single-SELECT-statement database query (tSQL), almost any other tool -- including even the extremely basic Query Analyzer that comes with MS SQL Server -- is orders of magnitude better, and makes the job take less than half as long as it would if you tried to suffer through doing it in VS.
I think I'd rather bite the bullet and make myself finally learn to use vi (which I have steadfastly avoided doing ever since I was first introduced to it a dozen or so years ago) than try to develop actual application software using Visual Studio.
Unless you work for a vendor that sells Linux-based solutions, and have a job title something along the lines of "Deployment Options Specialist", there really isn't any reason to *try* to think about all of the various configuration and deployment options. What would be the point? You're Doing It Wrong.
The right approach is to ask, "In our situation, what do we need the software to do?"
While it is inevitable that a boy becomes a man, what is not inevitable is that a man becomes a sword.
> A design company needs to know exactly what they will be printing, and their printers
> work on CMYK, not RGB like your screen (and therefore most programs). They therefore
> prefer to work with CMYK
Unless they have a *monitor* that supports CMYK, this preference is pretty much irrelevant. Software cannot magically turn your computer screen's additive medium into a paper-like subtractive one. It's physically impossible. Photoshop's CMYK support is mostly just a buzzword. (Okay, yeah, so there's also the ability to specify rich black. I think I'll maybe wet my pants over that one.)
You missed the fact that he was listing the GDPs according to Purchasing Power Parity, not in exchange-rate terms. In other words, while what you point out is true as far as it goes, he had already corrected for it.
> You mean, American companies sell Chinese products in US for eight times the price they paid in China?
I think Pier 1 Imports does something like that...
But in any case exchange rates don't necessarily track closely with purchasing power, and even if they did, purchasing power considers the collection of goods most people buy, but which of those goods are the cheapies and which ones are the big-ticket items varies from one country to another, sometimes quite significantly. That's why trade is so advantageous in the first place.
In Cameroon, mangoes are cheap, when they're in season. Uber-poor people, like, say, the children of subsistence farmers, eat them for breakfast. Where I live, a single fresh mango costs more than a two-pound bag of rice, which would feed the Cameroonian child for a fortnight. But they can't afford rice for breakfast. Sometimes they might get it for supper. The relative costs of things are not necessarily the same from one country to another.
So just because imports get marked way up from one country to another doesn't necessarily imply anything particular about the economic relationship between the two countries.
You're also missing the fact that the US is not importing only from China. We have trade relations with most of the countries on the planet. It's a pretty connected world these days.