OECD Tax database gives us a pretty close to median level of taxation for those countries when state and local taxes for all countries are figured in. Interestingly however, another unbiased source seems to show the OECD numbers as being a bit low in their local tax numbers. Either way, it doesn't look like we are among the lowest of the nations, unless by lowest you mean lowest 30-40 percentile. We definitely aren't among the highest though.
The reason I challenged the figures in the first place is that the US is modeled after a union, not a centralized govenment. Even though since the civil war it has become much more centralized than it was originally, the state governments still share a very large burden of the job of govenment and hence a large expense that is not centrally collected, so a direct comparison to a near fully centralized govenment is extremely biased towards downshifting an American tax burden. In absolutely no case is the state burden 0% and the actual rate of local taxes is more believable at the OECD reported comparable mean of 6.4% which pushes out of the extreme lower end of the spectrum.
The issue is what is fundamentally wrong with taking money from those that can afford it and giving it to those who are less fortunate is that you are giving a financial incentive to people to be less fortunate. You create a working class that is enslaved to a lower class and remove a great incentive for the lower class to move into the working class. This lower class grows (because greed and laziness are fundamental parts of human nature that you cannot erase) and the burden on the working class grows. As the population of the working class grows their votes in a representative republic grow and they have more power to demand even more compensation from the "more fortunate" working class, which cyclically creates a bigger disinsentive to be part of the working class and grows the ranks of the lower class. Eventually, the truely ambitious escape the society by doing business on a black market and the society either collapses or reaches an equilibrium of everyone being median poor.
Contrast that to a society that only offers a moderate saftey net so that people don't starve on the street (they don't starve in the street in the US by the way... far from it). In such a society, where bare necessities but absolutely no luxuries are attainable for a non-working class, and the working class is allowed to keep most of their earnings, the incentive to be part of the working class is large. People don't die in the streets and the working class has more money to spend on streamlined incentivised charities which target people with those traits they see as most beneficial or those misfortunes which seem most neglected or most deplorable. There is no incentive to remain non-working and there is much more money to be used to give people a "hand up rather than a hand out".
Now, lets sprinkle in some greed. With greed the socialist system breaks down faster. In the Lasse-faire society some of the working class are greatly incentivised to point out inefficiencies in the status quo of the market and offer their own solutions at great profit to themselves. This creates more opportunity for the non-working class to move into the working class by expanding the economy and creating new markets and more expendible cash for the greedy, now upper class person, to give to targeted charities. The effect is cyclically reinforcing rather than cyclically detrimental and the overall economy booms, eventually forcing it's neighbors to form economic unions in order to even compete in the same market and leading to slashdot flamewars as to why the greedy Americans are so rich and powerful and how unfair it is that their own poor, compassionate, socialist asses can't afford those gas guzzling Hummer H2's they would admit they wanted if it was politically acceptable... but I digress.:)
I agree that idealised systems cannot and never will exist. That is the precise reason to choose capitalism over socialism. Socialism has a requirement that the system be idealistic. Greed and corruption must be eliminated or at least greatly curbed in order for the system to function at any decent level. Capitalism however is extremely resilient to such non idealistic conditions. It thrives in greedy or non greedy societies and can even survive pretty nasty levels of corruption and can even reverse such corruption when it does exist. The resilience factor is it's great appeal and why capitalists do not argue idealisms.
Then that data is COMPLETELY invalid. You cannot discount US State taxes as state governments are a HUGE part of US law and infrastructure. That would be like counting "European union tax" and ignoring Britain's taxes and then stating that people in Europe have almost no tax burden.
That completely depends on the work. For me personally, if my work consisted of picking up pony doo behind parades, then no, a philosophy of life=work would lead to a miserable existence. If my work consists of research and development into natural language processing, or making porno films, then spending all my time working is a very good life.
It shows the days in september wrongly, but the weird thing is, if you go before september, it jumps you to near the year 3000000, but it is NOT an integer rollover because it doesn't jump you to the max integer... you can go up from there.
Right. It's about re-purposing the to-do lists. The preprinted to-do, or digital to-do lists are useless unless you know how to use them. That's I would recommend the seminar more than the actual planner;)
I actually love the Franklin system. Not the tote-bags, Palm plugins, etc, but a simple pocket sized paper franklin with no extras, and the training seminar on tape. I have to say that even when I'm not actively using the franklin planner, the habits formed and insights from the seminar are the best crash course I've come across in real organizational skills. That said, every "extension" to the system I've ever tried was a waste of time.
The seminar isn't about hyping products, thankfully. It's really good and I'd recommend it to anyone.
Personally, I've just started using KDE Kontact. It's simple and intuitive and has most of the features of outlook. There are some things it's missing for me (tasks blocking tasks and task delegation) but for those things I plan on rolling up my sleeves, implementing them and submitting a patch. I've never found a system that does everything I want, so my plan from this point on is to adopt an OSS tool and make it do what I want, that way I get what I need and everyone else benefits.
Have you seen the confinement though? I had the opportunity to visit a veal farm recently. I was looking forward to baby cows duck taped to plywood with their ears nailed to the ceiling... What I got was a bunch of cows in little cow apartments. They got to move around and stretch and had lots of good fatty food and water and were all very happy and curious to see me. It didn't seem cruel at all actually. Sure, they can't run around, but they have a better life than me in my cubicle.
Not moving on to the advanced features just yet is exactly why I would teach Java first before C++. Java is like C++ with training wheels. It supports all your basic OO in a very constrained format that makes it hard to make dumb mistakes in. It teaches you interface based programming, single inheritance models and other good OO techniques. Too many new C++ programmers start multi-inheriting and dynamic casting right off the bat and end up not learning the importance of KISS until they really get bitten by it. Later, after they have all their good habits well ingrained, take off the training wheels and show them C++ where they will still use all the good habits, but see the benefit and magic of occassionally shoving default implementation into the interface, or templatizing implementation superclasses. If you give them C++ too early they will be too apt to spend all there time exploring the esoteric instead of the fundamental.
Yes, I'm not saying there isn't a net loss of energy in something like shale oil or the like. I think there probably is. That is besides the point. People will still pay for a nice energy packaging even iff it contains less energy than it cost to produce. I charge my cell phone battery, even though that is a net loss of energy simply because I like to carry my cell phone with me. We don't care about net losses of energy because energy is not a scarce resource. A limitless supply of it strikes the Earth's surface each second. We only care that it comes in handy little packages.
Now no one is going to use oil to drill oil when there is a net loss... that's just silly. When we move to net loss production we will be using less handy packages of energy (like wind) to produce more handy packages (oil). That isn't a problem because currently there is NO infrastructure to produce oil from these sources... it must be built from scratch.
It is government that is adverse to risk, not free markets. Look at spaceship one... where is the guarantee on that making money? Look at the speculative dotcom boom. When there is lots of money to be made, companies will risk it all. Maybe not the big entrenched ones that are already making money hand over fist, but those smaller firms with nothing to lose are very willing to risk it all on a long shot.
It's not all about energy cost, but rather which form of energy sells for the most.
If we mine oil using oil then yes, energy cost matters. But if we use solr/wind/etc.. energy to mine oil we can support a large energy loss because the energy we are getting in the form of oil comes in a nice package AND there is a supporting infrastructure ready to use it, both of which statements are false about solar and wind.
So it still comes down to how much is that guy willing to pay at the pump before changing his infrastructure.
Aye, I work at MS (for the next 30 days) but I don't think that makes my statements hypocritical. I don't think MS is an "evil" corporation at all, in fact, I would venture to say it's more ethical than most large organizations. They make decisions I don't agree with at times, but so does any rule by committee organization. They are a for profit public corporation, you know.
I don't think, however, that they are the be-all-end-all of software development by any means and I think that competition is good for them and the end user. Personally, I use very few MS products because I think most of them have better alternatives out in the market, for my uses. MS is the volkswagon of software. It's cheap, it gets the minimal job done and it doesn't take much training to know how to drive it. I just do my part to make the products a little bit better and they pay me hansomely for it. When I do get to make policy, I make it according to what I feel is best for both the company and it's customers, but no one at MS is responsible for ALL the decisions here, and there are some really bad ones, both technological and marketing.
To invoke godwin preemptively, I'm not aiding the Nazis to exterminate Jews here... I'm improving some C++ code at a company that sells software. Take a step back and gain some ethical perspective:)
Don't drom Windows support. Simply up the "minimum required" specs for Windows machines, and release benchmarks comparing the same machine running the game on Windows and Linux.
Personally, on my website, I like to detect the agent-string of the browser and if it's IE, I put up a nice warning that "we have detected that you are using a browser that is incapable of handling many elements of HTML. Some page elements on this site may not display correctly. If you would like to upgrade your bowser to a newer version without these limitations you may find free downloads at [firefox] or [opera]." It's a nice way of telling people I'm not going to go out of my way to support an inferior system that doesn't want to stick to standards.
On your first point. The Windows VM is in no way horribly slow, in fact it's a very elegant VM, comparable to Java, although not as mature. VM's however, are bloated by definition compared to native code. Show me a substancially better VM out there than.NET. Java is good, and mature, but inferior in concept... and available on windows from the same primary vendor I might add which is not an advantage for Linux. The NT SMP has always been the best in the business, orders of magnitude faster than Linux until the 2.4 kernels. SMP reperation was the big push for 2.4 precicely because of how much NT kicked it's ass. The NTFS File system has no peer in security; it's the best, hands down, and not too shabby on speed either. I have no idea why you picked NT's strongest points as examples here. You could have chosen examples like GNU/Linux being leaps and bounds ahead in cluster support, standardization of code, small footprint, intelligent RAM allocation and file caching, HID responsiveness, a sane file locking strategy, better all around browsers, better interoperability, etc... but Net Stack, VM, SMP and File System are things that NT did right. Where Windows truely excels, however is the proliferation of highly polished workstation applications, ease of configuration and live updating. And games, but that's just the popularity of the platform speaking.
there aremany examples of linux security holes. Try being on the gentoo mailing list for a bit, you'll see how secure this "bullet proof" OS is. Security is an issue for everyone right now and open source is just as vulnerable. Windows gets targeted more than Linux because it controls much more of the machines out there making for a target rich environment. Recent reports have not shown OSS to be substantially more secure. You can however make an arguement that at least with OSS you have the chance to close the holes yourself or do your own code audits, which IMO is a very nice bonus.
And as for your last point, my arguement was not in speed of development. Both OS's have been progressing rapidly. I simply said that just because MS approximates release dates and misses them does not, by itself, show development to be slower on Windows. Linux does not set dates at all, so it is an unfair comparison.
And before you peg me for a windows enthusiast, I'm typing this on Firefox, from my gentoo workstation, mantained via CFEngine on my primary server, alongside my performance cluster of gentoo boxes, behind my Linux firewall. I've got 2 machines here (out of 18) that run Windows. 1 is a test machine I use to verify my products still work under Windows, and my girlfriend's laptop. I much prefer Linux, as it is a much more sane development environment and is perfect for all my clustering needs, and I happen to think it's the best OS out there for my uses. That doesn't mean that Windows isn't ahead in a few areas.
Your ad hominem attack, "I think that includes most people who consider themselves educated," is unwarranted. Your critique of my statement changes the subject, and your conclusions describe fatalism, not materialism.
VS includes the entire IDE, not just.NET, so all C++, VB, j++,.NET, GUI Editor, etc is included. I would have to guess that almost EVERY mainstream windows product uses VS in some way nowdays.
Re:What does Microsoft use?
on
Visual Studio Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've been on a few teams here at MS, and I must say that the source isn't that hard to get too. Now getting WRITE permissions too it is a pain, but right now I can see all the source to SQL, most of the source to the CLR and VS, some of office, some Windows, and I'm sure anything else could be gotten by just asking. (if it exists... I was looking for diamond.exe source a couple weeks ago to fix an AV we keep getting and apparently no one has compiled that thing since '96 and we couldn't find it.)
VSHelp around Version 5 completely kicked ass too... That has been steadily going downhill for some reason. PM's seem to think that loading us down with gigs of text and no decent search capabilities is a "feature".
1) HUH?!? MS has alot of features which leave Linux in the dust. That said, the opposite is also true. The OS's have traditionally had different focuses.
2) Linux devs continually release horribly insecure code also. Many studies have shown they rank pretty close to the same in "unintended" security holes. IE is a special case as it it a hole by design;)
3) Neither can Linux. It's done when it's done. Just because MS puts hard dates down years in advance, doesn't change the fact that it's done when it's done.
Now that being said, using VS to develop for linux seems a stretch... What the hell do they do? Some fancy plug-in to run GCC under cygwin instead of CL.exe, get rid of the project and nmake files in favor of some autotool files, and then use VS as a text editor?? You'd have to be a hardcore MS Freak to go that far, and then why are you developing for Linux anyway??
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, so I did some research.
OECD Tax database gives us a pretty close to median level of taxation for those countries when state and local taxes for all countries are figured in. Interestingly however, another unbiased source seems to show the OECD numbers as being a bit low in their local tax numbers. Either way, it doesn't look like we are among the lowest of the nations, unless by lowest you mean lowest 30-40 percentile. We definitely aren't among the highest though.
The reason I challenged the figures in the first place is that the US is modeled after a union, not a centralized govenment. Even though since the civil war it has become much more centralized than it was originally, the state governments still share a very large burden of the job of govenment and hence a large expense that is not centrally collected, so a direct comparison to a near fully centralized govenment is extremely biased towards downshifting an American tax burden. In absolutely no case is the state burden 0% and the actual rate of local taxes is more believable at the OECD reported comparable mean of 6.4% which pushes out of the extreme lower end of the spectrum.
The issue is what is fundamentally wrong with taking money from those that can afford it and giving it to those who are less fortunate is that you are giving a financial incentive to people to be less fortunate. You create a working class that is enslaved to a lower class and remove a great incentive for the lower class to move into the working class. This lower class grows (because greed and laziness are fundamental parts of human nature that you cannot erase) and the burden on the working class grows. As the population of the working class grows their votes in a representative republic grow and they have more power to demand even more compensation from the "more fortunate" working class, which cyclically creates a bigger disinsentive to be part of the working class and grows the ranks of the lower class. Eventually, the truely ambitious escape the society by doing business on a black market and the society either collapses or reaches an equilibrium of everyone being median poor.
:)
Contrast that to a society that only offers a moderate saftey net so that people don't starve on the street (they don't starve in the street in the US by the way... far from it). In such a society, where bare necessities but absolutely no luxuries are attainable for a non-working class, and the working class is allowed to keep most of their earnings, the incentive to be part of the working class is large. People don't die in the streets and the working class has more money to spend on streamlined incentivised charities which target people with those traits they see as most beneficial or those misfortunes which seem most neglected or most deplorable. There is no incentive to remain non-working and there is much more money to be used to give people a "hand up rather than a hand out".
Now, lets sprinkle in some greed. With greed the socialist system breaks down faster. In the Lasse-faire society some of the working class are greatly incentivised to point out inefficiencies in the status quo of the market and offer their own solutions at great profit to themselves. This creates more opportunity for the non-working class to move into the working class by expanding the economy and creating new markets and more expendible cash for the greedy, now upper class person, to give to targeted charities. The effect is cyclically reinforcing rather than cyclically detrimental and the overall economy booms, eventually forcing it's neighbors to form economic unions in order to even compete in the same market and leading to slashdot flamewars as to why the greedy Americans are so rich and powerful and how unfair it is that their own poor, compassionate, socialist asses can't afford those gas guzzling Hummer H2's they would admit they wanted if it was politically acceptable... but I digress.
I agree that idealised systems cannot and never will exist. That is the precise reason to choose capitalism over socialism. Socialism has a requirement that the system be idealistic. Greed and corruption must be eliminated or at least greatly curbed in order for the system to function at any decent level. Capitalism however is extremely resilient to such non idealistic conditions. It thrives in greedy or non greedy societies and can even survive pretty nasty levels of corruption and can even reverse such corruption when it does exist. The resilience factor is it's great appeal and why capitalists do not argue idealisms.
Then that data is COMPLETELY invalid. You cannot discount US State taxes as state governments are a HUGE part of US law and infrastructure. That would be like counting "European union tax" and ignoring Britain's taxes and then stating that people in Europe have almost no tax burden.
That completely depends on the work. For me personally, if my work consisted of picking up pony doo behind parades, then no, a philosophy of life=work would lead to a miserable existence. If my work consists of research and development into natural language processing, or making porno films, then spending all my time working is a very good life.
KDE's Kontact does something REALLY weird.
It shows the days in september wrongly, but the weird thing is, if you go before september, it jumps you to near the year 3000000, but it is NOT an integer rollover because it doesn't jump you to the max integer... you can go up from there.
I just scheduled a meeting for September 5th, 1752!
Right. It's about re-purposing the to-do lists. The preprinted to-do, or digital to-do lists are useless unless you know how to use them. That's I would recommend the seminar more than the actual planner ;)
I actually love the Franklin system. Not the tote-bags, Palm plugins, etc, but a simple pocket sized paper franklin with no extras, and the training seminar on tape. I have to say that even when I'm not actively using the franklin planner, the habits formed and insights from the seminar are the best crash course I've come across in real organizational skills. That said, every "extension" to the system I've ever tried was a waste of time.
The seminar isn't about hyping products, thankfully. It's really good and I'd recommend it to anyone.
Personally, I've just started using KDE Kontact. It's simple and intuitive and has most of the features of outlook. There are some things it's missing for me (tasks blocking tasks and task delegation) but for those things I plan on rolling up my sleeves, implementing them and submitting a patch. I've never found a system that does everything I want, so my plan from this point on is to adopt an OSS tool and make it do what I want, that way I get what I need and everyone else benefits.
Have you seen the confinement though? I had the opportunity to visit a veal farm recently. I was looking forward to baby cows duck taped to plywood with their ears nailed to the ceiling... What I got was a bunch of cows in little cow apartments. They got to move around and stretch and had lots of good fatty food and water and were all very happy and curious to see me. It didn't seem cruel at all actually. Sure, they can't run around, but they have a better life than me in my cubicle.
Not moving on to the advanced features just yet is exactly why I would teach Java first before C++. Java is like C++ with training wheels. It supports all your basic OO in a very constrained format that makes it hard to make dumb mistakes in. It teaches you interface based programming, single inheritance models and other good OO techniques. Too many new C++ programmers start multi-inheriting and dynamic casting right off the bat and end up not learning the importance of KISS until they really get bitten by it. Later, after they have all their good habits well ingrained, take off the training wheels and show them C++ where they will still use all the good habits, but see the benefit and magic of occassionally shoving default implementation into the interface, or templatizing implementation superclasses. If you give them C++ too early they will be too apt to spend all there time exploring the esoteric instead of the fundamental.
Yes, I'm not saying there isn't a net loss of energy in something like shale oil or the like. I think there probably is. That is besides the point. People will still pay for a nice energy packaging even iff it contains less energy than it cost to produce. I charge my cell phone battery, even though that is a net loss of energy simply because I like to carry my cell phone with me. We don't care about net losses of energy because energy is not a scarce resource. A limitless supply of it strikes the Earth's surface each second. We only care that it comes in handy little packages.
Now no one is going to use oil to drill oil when there is a net loss... that's just silly. When we move to net loss production we will be using less handy packages of energy (like wind) to produce more handy packages (oil). That isn't a problem because currently there is NO infrastructure to produce oil from these sources... it must be built from scratch.
It is government that is adverse to risk, not free markets. Look at spaceship one... where is the guarantee on that making money? Look at the speculative dotcom boom. When there is lots of money to be made, companies will risk it all. Maybe not the big entrenched ones that are already making money hand over fist, but those smaller firms with nothing to lose are very willing to risk it all on a long shot.
It's not all about energy cost, but rather which form of energy sells for the most.
If we mine oil using oil then yes, energy cost matters. But if we use solr/wind/etc.. energy to mine oil we can support a large energy loss because the energy we are getting in the form of oil comes in a nice package AND there is a supporting infrastructure ready to use it, both of which statements are false about solar and wind.
So it still comes down to how much is that guy willing to pay at the pump before changing his infrastructure.
Aye, I work at MS (for the next 30 days) but I don't think that makes my statements hypocritical. I don't think MS is an "evil" corporation at all, in fact, I would venture to say it's more ethical than most large organizations. They make decisions I don't agree with at times, but so does any rule by committee organization. They are a for profit public corporation, you know.
:)
:) )
I don't think, however, that they are the be-all-end-all of software development by any means and I think that competition is good for them and the end user. Personally, I use very few MS products because I think most of them have better alternatives out in the market, for my uses. MS is the volkswagon of software. It's cheap, it gets the minimal job done and it doesn't take much training to know how to drive it. I just do my part to make the products a little bit better and they pay me hansomely for it. When I do get to make policy, I make it according to what I feel is best for both the company and it's customers, but no one at MS is responsible for ALL the decisions here, and there are some really bad ones, both technological and marketing.
To invoke godwin preemptively, I'm not aiding the Nazis to exterminate Jews here... I'm improving some C++ code at a company that sells software. Take a step back and gain some ethical perspective
(and secretly I'm just a gentoo fanboy
Don't drom Windows support. Simply up the "minimum required" specs for Windows machines, and release benchmarks comparing the same machine running the game on Windows and Linux.
Personally, on my website, I like to detect the agent-string of the browser and if it's IE, I put up a nice warning that "we have detected that you are using a browser that is incapable of handling many elements of HTML. Some page elements on this site may not display correctly. If you would like to upgrade your bowser to a newer version without these limitations you may find free downloads at [firefox] or [opera]." It's a nice way of telling people I'm not going to go out of my way to support an inferior system that doesn't want to stick to standards.
How is the price of Windows an ethical decision? Particularly when there are viable alternatives to Windows.
On your first point. The Windows VM is in no way horribly slow, in fact it's a very elegant VM, comparable to Java, although not as mature. VM's however, are bloated by definition compared to native code. Show me a substancially better VM out there than .NET. Java is good, and mature, but inferior in concept... and available on windows from the same primary vendor I might add which is not an advantage for Linux. The NT SMP has always been the best in the business, orders of magnitude faster than Linux until the 2.4 kernels. SMP reperation was the big push for 2.4 precicely because of how much NT kicked it's ass. The NTFS File system has no peer in security; it's the best, hands down, and not too shabby on speed either. I have no idea why you picked NT's strongest points as examples here. You could have chosen examples like GNU/Linux being leaps and bounds ahead in cluster support, standardization of code, small footprint, intelligent RAM allocation and file caching, HID responsiveness, a sane file locking strategy, better all around browsers, better interoperability, etc... but Net Stack, VM, SMP and File System are things that NT did right. Where Windows truely excels, however is the proliferation of highly polished workstation applications, ease of configuration and live updating. And games, but that's just the popularity of the platform speaking.
there are many examples of linux security holes. Try being on the gentoo mailing list for a bit, you'll see how secure this "bullet proof" OS is. Security is an issue for everyone right now and open source is just as vulnerable. Windows gets targeted more than Linux because it controls much more of the machines out there making for a target rich environment. Recent reports have not shown OSS to be substantially more secure. You can however make an arguement that at least with OSS you have the chance to close the holes yourself or do your own code audits, which IMO is a very nice bonus.
And as for your last point, my arguement was not in speed of development. Both OS's have been progressing rapidly. I simply said that just because MS approximates release dates and misses them does not, by itself, show development to be slower on Windows. Linux does not set dates at all, so it is an unfair comparison.
And before you peg me for a windows enthusiast, I'm typing this on Firefox, from my gentoo workstation, mantained via CFEngine on my primary server, alongside my performance cluster of gentoo boxes, behind my Linux firewall. I've got 2 machines here (out of 18) that run Windows. 1 is a test machine I use to verify my products still work under Windows, and my girlfriend's laptop. I much prefer Linux, as it is a much more sane development environment and is perfect for all my clustering needs, and I happen to think it's the best OS out there for my uses. That doesn't mean that Windows isn't ahead in a few areas.
Your ad hominem attack, "I think that includes most people who consider themselves educated," is unwarranted. Your critique of my statement changes the subject, and your conclusions describe fatalism, not materialism.
VS includes the entire IDE, not just .NET, so all C++, VB, j++, .NET, GUI Editor, etc is included. I would have to guess that almost EVERY mainstream windows product uses VS in some way nowdays.
I've been on a few teams here at MS, and I must say that the source isn't that hard to get too. Now getting WRITE permissions too it is a pain, but right now I can see all the source to SQL, most of the source to the CLR and VS, some of office, some Windows, and I'm sure anything else could be gotten by just asking. (if it exists... I was looking for diamond.exe source a couple weeks ago to fix an AV we keep getting and apparently no one has compiled that thing since '96 and we couldn't find it.)
I'm the only one I know on the Redmond campus that uses Emacs!
;)
All the other devs I know use SlickEdit. Except one, who uses VS, but he's new.
Oh, and one guy uses ultraedit, but he's also a BSD and TCL evangelist, so take it with a grain of salt
VSHelp around Version 5 completely kicked ass too... That has been steadily going downhill for some reason. PM's seem to think that loading us down with gigs of text and no decent search capabilities is a "feature".
I detest PMs.
Really.
1) HUH?!? MS has alot of features which leave Linux in the dust. That said, the opposite is also true. The OS's have traditionally had different focuses.
;)
2) Linux devs continually release horribly insecure code also. Many studies have shown they rank pretty close to the same in "unintended" security holes. IE is a special case as it it a hole by design
3) Neither can Linux. It's done when it's done. Just because MS puts hard dates down years in advance, doesn't change the fact that it's done when it's done.
Now that being said, using VS to develop for linux seems a stretch... What the hell do they do? Some fancy plug-in to run GCC under cygwin instead of CL.exe, get rid of the project and nmake files in favor of some autotool files, and then use VS as a text editor?? You'd have to be a hardcore MS Freak to go that far, and then why are you developing for Linux anyway??