To be fair, my understanding of XNA is that it's not exactly a 'write once, run anywhere' kind of model, but more that if you wanted to put out a game for both Windows and XBox and used XNA, you could reuse 99% of the code if you leaned on the XNA library as much as possible.
We should start a pool on how long it'll be before we see a national-media news story about someone putting this "business model" into practice and being caught. Maybe a second pool could try to guess the media nickname of that perpetrator, e.g., "The Facebook Bandit".
So where's the inducement to go WP7 instead of iPhone?
It's (relatively) easy to develop a game that can run on a Windows box, on an XBox, and on a WP7 phone -- which provides a potential user base which dwarfs the iPhone.
Granted, these are going to be simpler games than they could be if a developer restricts themselves to something that will run smoothly on a phone, but there's still some money to be made there.
Don't think about the kind of games that come on a DVD; think about the kinds of small games you can buy/download on XBox Live.
Something like Puzzle Fighter isn't going to struggle to be converted to a phone, and since (presumably) the XBox version was written in XNA, it's an easy port.
Umm, why not make the WP7 actually useful for being used on a phone first? It's cool to have a mobile gaming console in the pocket, but then I would probably buy a PSP and not Windows smartphone...
I assume because this is a project of the XNA/XBox/gaming guys and not the phone / windows mobile guys.
Therefore pointing out that Childs' sentence is way out of line with sentences handed out in similar cases is a a compelling argument that his punishment was, in fact, unfair.
That's just it -- the author didn't manage that. All of those sentences were pretty well on the same order of magnitude.
As much as Netscape 4.x could be called terrible, I don't think it would have been enough even if Netscape 4.x was merely as good as IE4.
Perhaps not; unfortunately, we'll never know because it never got that far.
Probably a better analogy on my part was that while Microsoft was plotting to murder Netscape, Netscape chugged a bottle of Drano, set itself on fire, and then jumped off a bridge while shooting itself repeatedly. Microsoft's murder plot was pretty good and maybe it would have been successful, but there's no way to know for sure.
Really, if there were any shotgun blasts that were fired, it was from Microsoft failing to making IE secure enough from attack for such a long period, Firefox was able to gain some traction for those worried about (if nothing else) the homogenous security risk.
Oh, no question that after Netscape died, Microsoft got complacent about IE and opened the door for competition. They were their own worst enemy, but what they did to IE still utterly pales to what Netscape did to Netscape a few years earlier. It was also a stupid business decision, but in the grand scale of stupidity it doesn't even compare.
I loved Netscape in its day, and if I'm harsh about the way its management sabotaged it it comes from that love. There comes a point where even someone who's a fan of a piece of software has to admit that it's makers have done the equivalent of buying a condom company and deciding to ship all of its products from then on pre-ventilated for your pleasure.
Understand that to be good, a system of laws not only needs to strive for justice in assessing its sentences or lack thereof, but must also strive (to some degree) to be pragmatic. That's why our standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" rather than "beyond any doubt", for example. That's also why we have the concept of a plea bargain, something which is about guaranteed to produce a disproportionate sentence to the actual crime.
We strive for justice in sentencing, but it is not and can never be an exact science. You have, in essense, rounding errors. Sometimes you steal a cheap car and get 3 years and a guy steals an expensive car and gets 2 years. That's just a limitation of the system. As long as you're not executing people for shoplifting and always trying to improve the system as much as is reasonable you're doing the best you can as a society.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this precedent endangers all of us in the IT field -- taken to its extreme, it means employers can lay claim to anything that ex-employees know, if it helps them run their systems or their networks better.
I disagree. Childs was asked to provide access to the relevant networks while still an employee and refused.
You can't set yourself up as the only person with access to something and refuse to provide it to anyone else, including your superiors, so, yeah, I think it's an exaggeration to make the generalization you did.
In most cases you still wouldn't see criminal charges filed for doing even that, but this isn't most cases.
I found this a very telling statement. If your management are bozos, don't try to change them or point out their bozo-ness. Just pack up and move on. They hold all the cards. You will be punished for trying to fix anything that makes them look bad.
The question I'd put to you in response is: have you ever had a job where your managers were not only bozos, but the kind of bozos who would attempt to blame you when things inevitably went wrong?
I have, and you know? I can play that office-political game well enough. I know when my good advice won't be heeded, and I know to make sure I have my clear, polite, lucid warnings in writing along with management overriding them in writing such that I can clearly, unambiguously prove to my boss's boss what really happened when the decision goes south.
The thing is this, though: if you don't enjoy office politics (and I've yet to meet a truly technical person who did), having to work that way is draining. Instead of giving full focus to the technical challenges of your day, you're splitting half your attention to making sure your ass is covered. Even when I won (and I usually won), I still really lost because I hated my job. When something goes wrong, I don't want to be placing or deflecting blame, I want to be solving the damn problem.
Some companies work that way, and some don't. The only way to win some games is not to play, or in this case, to look for a new job.
I'm not against a nuanced view of a problem, but I don't think this article actually is that.
It's more like the equivalent of grounding your kid for two weeks for shoplifting and having to hear about how all his friends got punished less for stealing bigger things. It's more a misdirection than a thoughtful examination of the issue at hand.
That's not to say that I'm advocating for what happens to Childs as fair/appropriate, incidentally -- only that I think this article makes a very weak argument against it.
You can skip reading TFA; all of it that's relevant to the headline is in the article summary.
Most of the article is pointing out other people who did worse things and got lighter sentences. Frankly, I think that's a useless argument; for any crime, you can just about always find someone who committed a greater crime and received a lesser sentence. So what?
I think there's a lot of an interesting dialogue to be had about the Terry Childs case, but this particular article doesn't add anything to that discussion.
This isn't limited to IE though. Mac Office has vast incompatibilities with the windows version (most notably a lack of support for macro's, which they'll rectify in the next release).
It's because the mac team at microsoft is completely separate from everyone else.
In my imagination, the Mac Office team at Microsoft is ostracized, kept in a pit, and prodded to work through threats and intimidation. Kind of like in Silence of the Lambs: "It puts the macros in the Office or else it gets the hose again!"
I don't get it. IE became the defacto standard because it was pre-installed on MS Windows. And MS Windows became the defactor standard because it comes with every computer pre-installed.
Ah no:
1) Netscape came pre-installed by some (most?) OEMs at that time. I don't have numbers on this but it was hard to find a computer that didn't have it.
2) Netscape was out first; a lot of people were settled into using Netscape before there even really was an IE. Netscape started with the dominant market position.
3) While Netscape for a while was superior, later versions of Netscape were terrible -- as in, not as good as the previous versions of Netscape. Eventually even people who hated IE of that era (including me) started using it just because they were so damn tired of how buggy Netscape had become.
I don't deny that Microsoft had a big and unfairly used advantage in having the dominant operating system, but in the grand scheme of things, that amounts to Microsoft trying to slip Netscape roofies while Netscape was busy firing a shotgun at itself as fast as it could.
In a large number of cases, because its a corporate machine where the corporation has a critical webapp that breaks when you try to run it on anything other than IE6. There's a LOT corporations out there like that.
Yup; however, IE8 gives you "compatibility mode" for that. So basically you can run the IE6 web apps that no one wants to replace in what amounts to IE6 and use something more modern for everything else.
Of course, I've already worked at one company since where their web devs were using that as a license to keep making IE6-only web apps. Ugggggh.
Whoever modded this troll never had to code in the IE 5.5 era. The Windows and Mac versions had the same version number but were different programs with different deviances from the standards.
Completely true. And somehow, Netscape of that era was even worse -- you'd frequently have some rendering bug in Netscape X which was fixed again in Netscape X.1 and broken again in X.2.
Cross browser development in that era sucked. Good luck getting something to render even close to the same on all the various versions of IE and Netscape. Although it seems like a terrible piece of software now, at the time, the dominance of IE6 was like a cool glass of water, because even though you were writing broken non-standard HTML to get something to render the way you wanted on IE6, at least you weren't having to browser sniff and then choose between ten different broken versions of the same page.
I'm not convinced that Google has more patents to sue Oracle over than vice versa.
If it were a contest of brilliance, innovation, or technical savvy I'd bet on Google over Oracle ten times out of ten. But in one of possibly-dubious patent ligitation? That's right in Oracle's wheelhouse.
I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus
Generally I would agree with you, but if I was looking at migrating an existing project using MySQL with minimum effort (and I think that's going to be a very common case) I might think twice.
1) I agree with the generics comment and wonder what value they really have outside of having typed collections. I struggle to find a decent use of them and often see them used where the implementation limits future maintenance. I know in C++ templateing was a huge? feature, which generics seem similar to. I don't do any of C++ work so maybe I'm just missing the point but I struggle to see much value in it. At least in the work that I do.
The simplicity of on-demand typed collections is, in practical purposes, most of it.
I think about the Java projects I worked on in the pre-generics days, and developers had settled on one of two approaches:
1) By default, go ahead and create a strongly-typed collection class for every single class, regardless of whether or not you're ever going to use it. Sure, you can code-generate those, and mostly they did. But now you've basically doubled your number of classes for no good reason.
2) Use the Java collections/arrays (and if I'm mangling the names here, I apologize, but I'm going back some years) of objects; when you need to do something with the collection, get your iterator and cast each object back to the appropriate type. From an OO perspective, passing around arrays of objects and the recieving methods needing to know to cast them back to the right kind of object never felt good to me, and I saw mistakes made because of it more than once.
The nice thing about having generics is that if you need a List of foo, you just can make a List of foo without needing to create a separate object for it. If you instead need a dictionary or a sorted list or whatever other type of basic collection full of foos, that's available on demand as well. You can pass these strongly typed collections around to methods and iterate through them without having to cast them back. Because there's no good reason to create a ton of fooCollection classes, if you DO see one in the class heirarchy, it's usually a strong indicator that there's special business logic involved, which was easy to miss in the forest of typed collection objects in scenario 1 above.
All in all I think the presence of generics makes code a lot more readable and can save you time writing it. It's nothing you couldn't work around, but once you haven't had to you wonder how you ever did.
In fact if your project uses Spring you can pretty much swap out key technologies with little effort if they end up being deficient or get obsoleted in the future. If the project you had to maintain with the Struts cowboy didn't use it, well I guess you're pretty much fucked there.
Yeah, I'd say it's only in the last year or two that existing projects that I've rolled onto had a reasonable chance of having used Spring. The worst architected projects never did.
The.NET version of Spring isn't bad, but definitely Spring is a lot more standard in the Java world -- it feels like for a project made today, using Spring is the default.
I'm sure people have written competing MS technologies for similar reasons as that Struts hating guy.
They definitely do, but I think it's fair to say it's a lot rarer -- and someone who picks one for a project knows they're coloring outside the lines, so to speak. In most cases, if there's value in it, MS jumps on it pretty quickly, if less quickly than the Open Source world manages. For example you had people creating Monorail at one point, which was sort of a.NET answer to Ruby on Rails, and there's not a lot good I can say about Monorail. MS's version of the same idea is much better.
In our industry you can't pan a whole technology stack because some retards fuck up an implementation.
Honestly, for a several year period, every Java project I rolled onto was a fucked up implementation, and when making the wrong architectural choices is the standard behavior instead of the exception I think that does say something. But, in most areas the Java community is in that place anymore, either.
While Java the platform has been slow to adopt features, it does have quite a thriving open source community that gives it a lot of additional functionality (for free as in beer I might add).
Yeah, that's absolutely true. (My professional work is about evenly split between Java and.NET development.)
I'd throw out a few things:
1) Some things, to be done right, kind of need to be baked right into the language. Java's slow uptake and then somewhat odd implementation of generics is, I think, a good example of that.
2) The community around Java is kind of a mixed blessing: you'll get half a dozen solutions to a problem, each of which has different strengths and limitations. The good part of that is that if you pick the right one for the task at hand, you've got a great tool for the job. The bad part is sometimes it's hard to know which is the right one, especially at the start of a project. Sometimes you get painfully far in and figure out that your choice has a limitation you didn't know about that, for your project, matters in a big way. Sometimes even the best case has terrible documentation, and sometimes the combination of pieces you're using produces a problem that none of the pieces have individually.
To be a good Java architect requires that you be a lot more aware of what your options for each piece of your architecture are; if you make your choices right, you probably have as good or better setup than.NET for the same project -- but it's easy to make those choices wrong, and it's especially easy for anyone who has worked on the project before you to have made those choices wrong. I shudder to think of how many Java projects I worked on where some yahoo had decided that (for example) Struts was crap so he was going to roll his own Struts replacement, which managed to fix the one beef he had with Struts while simultaneously creating a hundred new problems.
Although I can also freely admit the shortcomings of the Microsoft approach where, in most cases, you've got one standard way to solve a problem (at least, until the next standard way to solve that problem is rolled out), it's also saved me a lot of frustration on projects where it's limited the hell that other people's bad decisions could create for me down the road.
That's pretty much a wash, as "Controlled by Sun" isn't much better.
I don't know -- I think "Controlled by Sun" was in some ways better than "Controlled by Microsoft"; however, "Controlled by Oracle after Oracle buys Sun" is much, much worse than either.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, my understanding of XNA is that it's not exactly a 'write once, run anywhere' kind of model, but more that if you wanted to put out a game for both Windows and XBox and used XNA, you could reuse 99% of the code if you leaned on the XNA library as much as possible.
(I am not an XNA dev; I may be mistaken.)
We should start a pool on how long it'll be before we see a national-media news story about someone putting this "business model" into practice and being caught. Maybe a second pool could try to guess the media nickname of that perpetrator, e.g., "The Facebook Bandit".
So where's the inducement to go WP7 instead of iPhone?
It's (relatively) easy to develop a game that can run on a Windows box, on an XBox, and on a WP7 phone -- which provides a potential user base which dwarfs the iPhone.
Granted, these are going to be simpler games than they could be if a developer restricts themselves to something that will run smoothly on a phone, but there's still some money to be made there.
You're looking at it the wrong way.
Don't think about the kind of games that come on a DVD; think about the kinds of small games you can buy/download on XBox Live.
Something like Puzzle Fighter isn't going to struggle to be converted to a phone, and since (presumably) the XBox version was written in XNA, it's an easy port.
Umm, why not make the WP7 actually useful for being used on a phone first? It's cool to have a mobile gaming console in the pocket, but then I would probably buy a PSP and not Windows smartphone ...
I assume because this is a project of the XNA/XBox/gaming guys and not the phone / windows mobile guys.
Therefore pointing out that Childs' sentence is way out of line with sentences handed out in similar cases is a a compelling argument that his punishment was, in fact, unfair.
That's just it -- the author didn't manage that. All of those sentences were pretty well on the same order of magnitude.
As much as Netscape 4.x could be called terrible, I don't think it would have been enough even if Netscape 4.x was merely as good as IE4.
Perhaps not; unfortunately, we'll never know because it never got that far.
Probably a better analogy on my part was that while Microsoft was plotting to murder Netscape, Netscape chugged a bottle of Drano, set itself on fire, and then jumped off a bridge while shooting itself repeatedly. Microsoft's murder plot was pretty good and maybe it would have been successful, but there's no way to know for sure.
Really, if there were any shotgun blasts that were fired, it was from Microsoft failing to making IE secure enough from attack for such a long period, Firefox was able to gain some traction for those worried about (if nothing else) the homogenous security risk.
Oh, no question that after Netscape died, Microsoft got complacent about IE and opened the door for competition. They were their own worst enemy, but what they did to IE still utterly pales to what Netscape did to Netscape a few years earlier. It was also a stupid business decision, but in the grand scale of stupidity it doesn't even compare.
I loved Netscape in its day, and if I'm harsh about the way its management sabotaged it it comes from that love. There comes a point where even someone who's a fan of a piece of software has to admit that it's makers have done the equivalent of buying a condom company and deciding to ship all of its products from then on pre-ventilated for your pleasure.
Understand that to be good, a system of laws not only needs to strive for justice in assessing its sentences or lack thereof, but must also strive (to some degree) to be pragmatic. That's why our standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" rather than "beyond any doubt", for example. That's also why we have the concept of a plea bargain, something which is about guaranteed to produce a disproportionate sentence to the actual crime.
We strive for justice in sentencing, but it is not and can never be an exact science. You have, in essense, rounding errors. Sometimes you steal a cheap car and get 3 years and a guy steals an expensive car and gets 2 years. That's just a limitation of the system. As long as you're not executing people for shoplifting and always trying to improve the system as much as is reasonable you're doing the best you can as a society.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this precedent endangers all of us in the IT field -- taken to its extreme, it means employers can lay claim to anything that ex-employees know, if it helps them run their systems or their networks better.
I disagree. Childs was asked to provide access to the relevant networks while still an employee and refused.
You can't set yourself up as the only person with access to something and refuse to provide it to anyone else, including your superiors, so, yeah, I think it's an exaggeration to make the generalization you did.
In most cases you still wouldn't see criminal charges filed for doing even that, but this isn't most cases.
The linked thread is really interesting -- I'd missed it the first time around and it adds a lot to this discussion.
I found this a very telling statement. If your management are bozos, don't try to change them or point out their bozo-ness. Just pack up and move on. They hold all the cards. You will be punished for trying to fix anything that makes them look bad.
The question I'd put to you in response is: have you ever had a job where your managers were not only bozos, but the kind of bozos who would attempt to blame you when things inevitably went wrong?
I have, and you know? I can play that office-political game well enough. I know when my good advice won't be heeded, and I know to make sure I have my clear, polite, lucid warnings in writing along with management overriding them in writing such that I can clearly, unambiguously prove to my boss's boss what really happened when the decision goes south.
The thing is this, though: if you don't enjoy office politics (and I've yet to meet a truly technical person who did), having to work that way is draining. Instead of giving full focus to the technical challenges of your day, you're splitting half your attention to making sure your ass is covered. Even when I won (and I usually won), I still really lost because I hated my job. When something goes wrong, I don't want to be placing or deflecting blame, I want to be solving the damn problem.
Some companies work that way, and some don't. The only way to win some games is not to play, or in this case, to look for a new job.
I'm not against a nuanced view of a problem, but I don't think this article actually is that.
It's more like the equivalent of grounding your kid for two weeks for shoplifting and having to hear about how all his friends got punished less for stealing bigger things. It's more a misdirection than a thoughtful examination of the issue at hand.
That's not to say that I'm advocating for what happens to Childs as fair/appropriate, incidentally -- only that I think this article makes a very weak argument against it.
You can skip reading TFA; all of it that's relevant to the headline is in the article summary.
Most of the article is pointing out other people who did worse things and got lighter sentences. Frankly, I think that's a useless argument; for any crime, you can just about always find someone who committed a greater crime and received a lesser sentence. So what?
I think there's a lot of an interesting dialogue to be had about the Terry Childs case, but this particular article doesn't add anything to that discussion.
This isn't limited to IE though. Mac Office has vast incompatibilities with the windows version (most notably a lack of support for macro's, which they'll rectify in the next release).
It's because the mac team at microsoft is completely separate from everyone else.
In my imagination, the Mac Office team at Microsoft is ostracized, kept in a pit, and prodded to work through threats and intimidation. Kind of like in Silence of the Lambs: "It puts the macros in the Office or else it gets the hose again!"
Huh. It's been 100% for me so far with the shitty IE6 apps I've had to work with.
Either I've got lucky or someone managed to write even shittier IE6 apps than I've encountered. :)
I don't get it. IE became the defacto standard because it was pre-installed on MS Windows. And MS Windows became the defactor standard because it comes with every computer pre-installed.
Ah no:
1) Netscape came pre-installed by some (most?) OEMs at that time. I don't have numbers on this but it was hard to find a computer that didn't have it.
2) Netscape was out first; a lot of people were settled into using Netscape before there even really was an IE. Netscape started with the dominant market position.
3) While Netscape for a while was superior, later versions of Netscape were terrible -- as in, not as good as the previous versions of Netscape. Eventually even people who hated IE of that era (including me) started using it just because they were so damn tired of how buggy Netscape had become.
I don't deny that Microsoft had a big and unfairly used advantage in having the dominant operating system, but in the grand scheme of things, that amounts to Microsoft trying to slip Netscape roofies while Netscape was busy firing a shotgun at itself as fast as it could.
In a large number of cases, because its a corporate machine where the corporation has a critical webapp that breaks when you try to run it on anything other than IE6. There's a LOT corporations out there like that.
Yup; however, IE8 gives you "compatibility mode" for that. So basically you can run the IE6 web apps that no one wants to replace in what amounts to IE6 and use something more modern for everything else.
Of course, I've already worked at one company since where their web devs were using that as a license to keep making IE6-only web apps. Ugggggh.
Whoever modded this troll never had to code in the IE 5.5 era. The Windows and Mac versions had the same version number but were different programs with different deviances from the standards.
Completely true. And somehow, Netscape of that era was even worse -- you'd frequently have some rendering bug in Netscape X which was fixed again in Netscape X.1 and broken again in X.2.
Cross browser development in that era sucked. Good luck getting something to render even close to the same on all the various versions of IE and Netscape. Although it seems like a terrible piece of software now, at the time, the dominance of IE6 was like a cool glass of water, because even though you were writing broken non-standard HTML to get something to render the way you wanted on IE6, at least you weren't having to browser sniff and then choose between ten different broken versions of the same page.
Oh, that's so funny because it's so true.
The disturbing thing is, not only will anyone you talk to about the Sims tell you a torture story, but they'll be vastly different torture stories.
I'm not convinced that Google has more patents to sue Oracle over than vice versa.
If it were a contest of brilliance, innovation, or technical savvy I'd bet on Google over Oracle ten times out of ten. But in one of possibly-dubious patent ligitation? That's right in Oracle's wheelhouse.
I don't think "too different from MySQL" is necessarily a minus
Generally I would agree with you, but if I was looking at migrating an existing project using MySQL with minimum effort (and I think that's going to be a very common case) I might think twice.
1) I agree with the generics comment and wonder what value they really have outside of having typed collections. I struggle to find a decent use of them and often see them used where the implementation limits future maintenance. I know in C++ templateing was a huge? feature, which generics seem similar to. I don't do any of C++ work so maybe I'm just missing the point but I struggle to see much value in it. At least in the work that I do.
The simplicity of on-demand typed collections is, in practical purposes, most of it.
I think about the Java projects I worked on in the pre-generics days, and developers had settled on one of two approaches:
1) By default, go ahead and create a strongly-typed collection class for every single class, regardless of whether or not you're ever going to use it. Sure, you can code-generate those, and mostly they did. But now you've basically doubled your number of classes for no good reason.
2) Use the Java collections/arrays (and if I'm mangling the names here, I apologize, but I'm going back some years) of objects; when you need to do something with the collection, get your iterator and cast each object back to the appropriate type. From an OO perspective, passing around arrays of objects and the recieving methods needing to know to cast them back to the right kind of object never felt good to me, and I saw mistakes made because of it more than once.
The nice thing about having generics is that if you need a List of foo, you just can make a List of foo without needing to create a separate object for it. If you instead need a dictionary or a sorted list or whatever other type of basic collection full of foos, that's available on demand as well. You can pass these strongly typed collections around to methods and iterate through them without having to cast them back. Because there's no good reason to create a ton of fooCollection classes, if you DO see one in the class heirarchy, it's usually a strong indicator that there's special business logic involved, which was easy to miss in the forest of typed collection objects in scenario 1 above.
All in all I think the presence of generics makes code a lot more readable and can save you time writing it. It's nothing you couldn't work around, but once you haven't had to you wonder how you ever did.
In fact if your project uses Spring you can pretty much swap out key technologies with little effort if they end up being deficient or get obsoleted in the future. If the project you had to maintain with the Struts cowboy didn't use it, well I guess you're pretty much fucked there.
Yeah, I'd say it's only in the last year or two that existing projects that I've rolled onto had a reasonable chance of having used Spring. The worst architected projects never did.
The .NET version of Spring isn't bad, but definitely Spring is a lot more standard in the Java world -- it feels like for a project made today, using Spring is the default.
I'm sure people have written competing MS technologies for similar reasons as that Struts hating guy.
They definitely do, but I think it's fair to say it's a lot rarer -- and someone who picks one for a project knows they're coloring outside the lines, so to speak. In most cases, if there's value in it, MS jumps on it pretty quickly, if less quickly than the Open Source world manages. For example you had people creating Monorail at one point, which was sort of a .NET answer to Ruby on Rails, and there's not a lot good I can say about Monorail. MS's version of the same idea is much better.
In our industry you can't pan a whole technology stack because some retards fuck up an implementation.
Honestly, for a several year period, every Java project I rolled onto was a fucked up implementation, and when making the wrong architectural choices is the standard behavior instead of the exception I think that does say something. But, in most areas the Java community is in that place anymore, either.
While Java the platform has been slow to adopt features, it does have quite a thriving open source community that gives it a lot of additional functionality (for free as in beer I might add).
Yeah, that's absolutely true. (My professional work is about evenly split between Java and .NET development.)
I'd throw out a few things:
1) Some things, to be done right, kind of need to be baked right into the language. Java's slow uptake and then somewhat odd implementation of generics is, I think, a good example of that.
2) The community around Java is kind of a mixed blessing: you'll get half a dozen solutions to a problem, each of which has different strengths and limitations. The good part of that is that if you pick the right one for the task at hand, you've got a great tool for the job. The bad part is sometimes it's hard to know which is the right one, especially at the start of a project. Sometimes you get painfully far in and figure out that your choice has a limitation you didn't know about that, for your project, matters in a big way. Sometimes even the best case has terrible documentation, and sometimes the combination of pieces you're using produces a problem that none of the pieces have individually.
To be a good Java architect requires that you be a lot more aware of what your options for each piece of your architecture are; if you make your choices right, you probably have as good or better setup than .NET for the same project -- but it's easy to make those choices wrong, and it's especially easy for anyone who has worked on the project before you to have made those choices wrong. I shudder to think of how many Java projects I worked on where some yahoo had decided that (for example) Struts was crap so he was going to roll his own Struts replacement, which managed to fix the one beef he had with Struts while simultaneously creating a hundred new problems.
Although I can also freely admit the shortcomings of the Microsoft approach where, in most cases, you've got one standard way to solve a problem (at least, until the next standard way to solve that problem is rolled out), it's also saved me a lot of frustration on projects where it's limited the hell that other people's bad decisions could create for me down the road.
ASP wasn't even released until 2002. That's even two years after PHP 4.
ASP.NET, maybe. Old school ASP was circa 1998.
That's pretty much a wash, as "Controlled by Sun" isn't much better.
I don't know -- I think "Controlled by Sun" was in some ways better than "Controlled by Microsoft"; however, "Controlled by Oracle after Oracle buys Sun" is much, much worse than either.