why should music be ANY different than other forms of free market ?
Exactly:) And pretty much all markets have laws that are set to keep some form of balance between the seller and the buyer, be it anti-trust (hi Microsoft!), or...copyright. If the only reason people aren't willing to pay is because they can easily break laws, well, thats not exactly like other forms of "free" market (I put quotes there because there is very few 100% free markets)
Now, one can say some laws shouldn't be...but until they change, well...
You can make a perfectly standard compliant site that still renders broken. Standard compliant just means you use valid code. It doesn't mean you coded well, and even the most standard compliant browsers render crap differently (since the standard specs is swiss cheese to begin with).
So thats not surprising, between that and the fact that IE8 is most likely not 100% compliant (though even if it was...it would have to both be compliant AND fill in the holes in the cheese the same way someone else did...The world went 180 degrees, since a few years ago, it was the other way around)
But developers of these sites clearly do NOT care as long as the site 'loads'.
The standard itself is broken (like almost everything the W3C craps out). That said, virtually all "very compatible" web sites don't validate, because to be as compatible as possible (and that means not just with IE6/IE7/Firefox/Webkit/Opera), you have to compromise. Then for some flashy effects you have to compromise some more. And then if you want to do some particular things, have em be cross browser AND don't want a mess of tables, some stuff is simply impossible even if CSS3 was fully implemented.
Do not forget so many of these sites rely upon Microsoft's ASP.NET, ASP and/or IIS
IIS is a web server that can serve any kind of content, so what does that have to do with it? And ASP.NET can (and aside for a few controls, actually does) output perfectly compliant HTML/CSS. Even more so, if you use third party controls (and most do), outputting perfectly compliant XHTML strict markup and css that is also compliant with most accessibility standards will be the default unless the developer themselves add code that breaks it.
"It doesn't work right with Gmail, even in compatibility mode"
That means its doing user agent sniffing and going from that, and isn't made to go with a newer version... Compatibility mode is pretty much exactly IE7's rendering engine. So if it doesn't work, well...
Actually, they depend upon an HTML engine answering their calls to the APIs
No, thats not how it works. In a modern development environment, the developers would pop the dialog box that would show all their installed and registered components... the dev goes down the list, and go "Hmm...Adobe PDF renderer...nope... Gecko? Hmm...no... IE Control...bingo!". If they (and they most likely were) using something a little less "drag and drop", they had to make a conscious decision to pick and load an instance of that particular COM control. Its pretty god damn likely that the Steam and WoW developers had access to alternate browsers (Is there really anyone in IT who doesnt at least have some form of alternative browser installed?), so if Firefox's installer doesn't register and expose the rendering engine in an easily discoverable and consumable method, thats their loss...
Now the first thing that came to my mind when I was typing the above at first was "Well, maybe the Steam/WoW team figured it would be one less dependency", but really, these engines are a couple of megs at most, if that, and modern installer toolkits (like InstallShield) will pick it up automatically either way... so really, it HAD to be a conscious decision, and the availability of the rendering engine was probably not the first reason, considering the date those software were first created.
The IE COM component is just dead easy to use. The gecko rendering engine API blows balls.
Which only works when there's very few people doing this (for the "wow" factor), and would make an impossibly high barrier for entry (higher than now...). So you'd have some artists making a killing, and even more good ones not being able to get close (worse so than now).
I mean, you can barely get people to give money to save children with cancer. Being able to "make a killing" from donations...thats definitely a temporary phenomenon. -Maybe- breaking even if you're REALLY good and you beg people ala Wikipedia?
And a desktop video card is user switchable(relatively speaking), and it is definitely quite fragile, has a shit looking exterior, and doesn't slide in or out.
I know what you're gonna think/say. Compared to a TYPICAL removable battery... then yeah, thats true. Nothing stopping them from making an ugly and fragile (well, as fragile as it can be without being dangerous...there IS chemicals in there) thing that needs a few screws to take out.
The difference really, between a removable and a non-removable battery is the tech support and the enclosed instructions, IMO:)
A switchable battery isn't bigger, heavier or last less. At best, Apple is using the 0.1% of room they gain from not having to put a flap to put a larger, bigger, heavier battery in (which will last a little longer). Its just not significant overall so no one minds. But the battery is definitely not lighter just because you cant remote it.
Well, at least in the schools I went to, sleeping in class wasn't allowed either, and thats not disruptive.
Still, I'd see it as a preventive step. Texting in class isn't a big deal, but texting during an exam (which often happens in the same room, under similar circonstances) can have pretty dire consequences.
Indeed. Though I guess I am biaised, but as a software developer, I sure get more than pennies on the dollar. Thats covered by copyright too!. Videogame -publishers- get nothing compared to the actual content creators (programmers, designers...). And MMOs aside, the only thing that allows games to be profitable is fanboys and copyright laws.
There's a lot more. The traditional mediums (written, movies, music) do have a fucked up economy around them. That has more to do with the distribution system though. Getting something on the shelves of walmart is troublesome (thus why something like Steam works so well for videogames, and online in general for many types of software), and only organizations like the RIAA can reliably pull it off, giving them a pseudo-monopoly.
Find better ways of putting stuff in the hands of the customers, and that issue of "the artist gets pennies, if they're lucky" goes away, and artists will get quite a bit. But killing their industry when there's finally hope of a new publishing system makes them dependant on the "old ways" until it dies.
Laws on this differ from countries to countries, and this is definately not in my country, so I wouldn't know... but quite a few laws in developed countries have clauses related to "intent". And when you're called "The pirate bay", and you go around screaming that you're untouchable and that your ways will go on, its pretty clear what your intent is.
Now, if that matters at all in this case is another story, but there IS a huge difference between Google and TPB.
Starter Edition is to be sold in all countries, unlike Vista's Starter. The basic edition, geared to developing countries, do not have that limitation.
Its funny really. If they change the UI too much, people bitch that they changed it just for the sake of changing it, and thats its the same OS with a pretty face. If they change mostly the backend and whats under the hood, then people say "Its an overglorified service pack"
So I'll ask you. Have you actually looked at the extent of the changes they made to Windows under the hood? No, it didn't break much compatibility because they didn't change something that does, such as the driver subsystem. Still, the changes, for example the new service trigger engine, the user mode scheduler, the remoting system, the amount of new APIs added, the UI revamp (not like XP to Vista, but still quite significant), the software DX renderer, the upgrades to the enterprise service versions, the updates of many of the userland apps, the netbook and touchscreen features, yadah yadah yadah... overall, I'd dare say its one of the more massive updates to Windows in a long time, and greater than XP -> Vista in term of features. But yes, a lot of customers won't notice this, on top of people being comfy in the XP -> Vista release schedule (and their comfortable zone got shaken off as MS came back to the old release schedule), so they have to do this and give it.
The vast majority of PCs sold are done so through vendors. Vendors already have the ability to "replace" IE (it still has to be there for compatibility reasons, but the user doesn't have to know, and all actions that will invoke a browser will invoke whatever the vendor wants).
None do it.
So how exactly would a plugin architecture help? You can already plug in an entire browser, and its very, very easy. And no one do it.
Make a law that force OEMs to put another browser? Sure. As long as IE is still bundled if you buy a retail version of the OS. I don't want to have clean disks look like HP or Toshiba's restore disks.
That said, IE dominating has little to do with it being bundled. Remember that for an extremely long time, it had little or no competition. It was debated in court (and MS lost) that it was because they bundled it. Was it? I'd argue no. IE was wiping the floor with all alternatives back then, in a time when people WOULD download alternate browsers. Hell, originally, ISPs here would bundle Netscape (before IE was bundled), and everyone I knew went and downloaded IE, even the computer dummies. Why? Well, the gap between IE and Netscape was MUCH larger than the gap between Firefox and IE today. Far, far bigger, and developers happily coded "IE-only" far before it had market advantage, just because it was that much better.
Compared to that, a perfectly ACID2/ACID3/W3C compliant browser with all other related standard technologies (like vector graphics) isn't that big of a step up from IE. (Read that again, I didn't say it wasn't a big step up...but that its almost insignificant compared to the IE vs Netscape gap of old). And then they had no competition until Firefox (Mozilla was a joke until then). By then it was too late. Sure, you could argue there wasn't competition because they had killed the market... but really, its a market that shouldn't be. Similar to software patents maybe? A stupid market is a stupid market.
The point is, a browser is now standard feature of an OS, just like an OS is more or less standard feature of a personal computer, an engine is to a car, cables come with electronic appliances, etc.
Yes, back then, it was not so, Microsoft bundling IE hurt competition, and they should pay for that if the law thinks it did not pay enough already. Thats fine. But unbundling it in today's context is ridiculous, times changed.
Not really. Its all over the place in flea markets, and god did my family get caught a lot. Its not the main way piracy occurs, correct, but its a significant chunk anyway. Very typical of small computer stores that will "sell" you photoshop and MS Office for cheap...
Every Specific Action of Copyright Infringement != Loss of Sale
If the average person has 10 pieces of gold total to spend 1 piece of gold each on copyrighted works and instead pirates 1,000 different copyrighted works, you cannot say that the market lost 1,000 pieces of gold. That's just common sense.
You're right, not all copyright infringement is a loss of sale, that is undebatable. Saying that if someone has "10 pieces of gold", they only have 10 pieces to spend, is also a total falicy though.
First, people want their stuff. Even if its a bad game, a bad movie...many want it anyway, just...cuz. If they couldn't pirate it, they'd sacrifice something else. One less meal at the restaurant, one less iPhone (ok, thats pushing it I guess, they MUST have their iphone...), and their priorities would switch around. Some will find the money elsewhere to take that 10 pieces and make it 20.
Case in point: When I was about 11, during the early-ish days of the SNES, as games were starting to hit the mass... I had a friend who was really getting into them. THey were expensive, and he wanted a lot...so at 11, he was doing odd jobs...babysitting, newspaper, doing the lawns, and ended up quite a collection, waking up at 5 in the morning to do stuff before school started. As people got jealous of him, a couple started doing the same, to get their game fix. Others would rent them instead... That was before all of the rental stores went bankrupt in the area (and that predates gametaps). When Chrono Trigger came out, there was 40 copies on the shelves of the local rental store. You're not going to see that today. Those are still sales (and in many cases, the rental place pays a premium for the right, too).
Today, anyone who wants the games that bad and cannot afford em, will just get a pirated copy. I'm talking hundreds of sales, just from the people in my immediate surrounding. And whenever some DRM scheme or whatever manages to delays piracy by a little bit, or a lot (like MMOs...not DRM, but if you want to play for "real", not much choice but to shell out), whoops, look at that, sales start pouring from these same damn people.
All that to say: yes, each action of copyright infringement is not a loss of sale. But taken together, it IS significant loss of sales.
Yeah, I just meant that some things are so performance intensive that even C isn't good enough for 100% of it, so obviously.NET won't either:)
And yeah, the place where.NET finds itself the most is for the.NET 3.0 stuff. WPF is literally everywhere in the newer stuff, WCF is defacto standard for new communication related stuff, and Windows Workflow is in most of their enterprise tools.
Or hell, just understand that on-the-job learning is part and parcel of being a software developer. The idea that every hire must match some fixed set of criteria is really quite silly... better to hire someone who has demonstrated, through their work experience, an aptitude for learning on their feet, than someone with some finite skillset.
Thats actually what they did, else I wouldn't have gotten the job. Note that I did say the requirements weren't overly specific. They wanted someone with talent, not someone with a list of specific skill. Fact remains, especially in time of recession, people who are "good" are all taken. They're not rare...they just all already have jobs they like, so hiring them is tricky.
Its also worse that people with actual software development, engineering, and architecture skills are extremely rare (relatively speaking). If you need someone to hack up a kernel, ironically, its easier to find than someone who can architect a system (even though the later is vastly easier). And it just takes too long to train someone for that, when it should be something a qualified professor teach, but unis never do. So as soon as you need someone down that path, if its for a mission critical job...you better start looking on all continents.
Salary means pretty little since cost of living differs by as much as 200% depending on where you are in the US. We'll leave it at: they gave me more than I asked (it actually surprised me, when I got the offer on paper and noticed it was a good chunk more, yet I was asking more than the 75th percentile for a senior dev in my area), and its near 6 figure for a position with absolutely no management tasks involved, and no need to ever do more than 9 to 5.
That, and the person they got "on the other continent" is, as far as I know, getting paid close to 100$/hour on payroll + full benefits + bonus (they're vastly more experienced than I am, though).
I guess some people think thats peanuts, I suppose. I don't.
a copy of a not very successful proprietary virtual machine and framework that has been partially abandoned by its own masters
Wow....what?.NET is pretty much everywhere now...and parts of Windows -ARE- in it...not the kernel, no (thats like saying C/C++ are failures because you still need assembly for performance critical parts...), but a significant chunk of the user land tools, and a very very big portion of the various tools Microsoft provide are in.NET... from PowerShell, to Sharepoint, going by parts of Visual Studio, SQL Server, Biztalk, the UI of most of their new tools and components, etc.
The huge chunks of legacy code (Office...) can't easily be ported for obvious reason, but abandoned platform? Thats amusing as hell.
No, the thing is Mono basically pulled an "embrace and extend" on.NET, in some ways. They share a lot in common, but the idea is that instead of worrying about cross platform issues between 2 implementations of roughly the same thing, you can simply use Mono everywhere. Mono -itself- works on Windows.
Its a similar concept as how being cross platform with C++ isn't -so- tough if you use the same compiler on all platforms(I know my example is a bit of a stretch, bear with me), but if you start using different -compilers-, even on the same platform it will get dodgy.
Mono cannot implement the entire.NET framework and be 100% compatible with it..NET is Windows specific, and has stuff that ties into Active Directory (not just LDAP, but the actual Active Directory), the Windows registry, GDI+, interop with older Microsoft platforms, DirectX, etc. You could get close, sortoff, but 100%? No. So what Mono is doing, is implementing everything part of the ECMA standard, then adding stuff around it. For example, they have a version of Reflection (I forget the name of it) thats better and more powerful than the.NET version, by a lot. They have their own GUI frameworks, libs, etc, that are not available on the normal.NET (though most will work under the Microsoft CLR).
So targeting -just- Mono will give you pretty good cross platform. Forget about the Microsoft.NET here: while they're fairly compatible, they're still 2 distinct platforms, and there's nothing forcing you to target both.
Well, first, there's always the thing that big corps like IBM and Microsoft have so many patents, that technically its probably impossible to code ANYTHING without hitting some. Now, if they'll enforce them, or more so: if those patents are valid at all, is another debate...but basically everything is patented =P
That being said, only part of.NET is part of the ECMA (and other) standards, and MS does have patents on bits and pieces of the "integration" stuff... that is, if you implement a.NET framework and C#, and do something clean from there, you're pretty much 100% A-OK. If you start copying the Windows stuff, like WinForm, ASP.NET, WPF, the GDI+ wrappers, etc, it gets a bit dodgier.
Supposingly the mono guys are VERY careful and think this through before going after a new part, and make very sure everything is implemented clean room (since.NET is so easy to decompile, and that recently the source was published for reference purpose, one has to be careful).
So for all practical purpose, Mono is clean (well, as clean as software based on another can be). But there's always the "what if..." in the back of the mind of people.
Its also the enterprise edition, which is meant for scenarios where Oracle and DB2 are the only alternative, and also only in their more expensive packages. If you don't need the package deal, then it will be a toss up which is more expensive, depending on number of user or machines (depending if you go by user or CPU) and the features you need. You don't get SQL Server Enterprise when all you need is a database engine.
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Exactly :) And pretty much all markets have laws that are set to keep some form of balance between the seller and the buyer, be it anti-trust (hi Microsoft!), or...copyright. If the only reason people aren't willing to pay is because they can easily break laws, well, thats not exactly like other forms of "free" market (I put quotes there because there is very few 100% free markets)
Now, one can say some laws shouldn't be...but until they change, well...
You can make a perfectly standard compliant site that still renders broken. Standard compliant just means you use valid code. It doesn't mean you coded well, and even the most standard compliant browsers render crap differently (since the standard specs is swiss cheese to begin with).
So thats not surprising, between that and the fact that IE8 is most likely not 100% compliant (though even if it was...it would have to both be compliant AND fill in the holes in the cheese the same way someone else did...The world went 180 degrees, since a few years ago, it was the other way around)
The standard itself is broken (like almost everything the W3C craps out). That said, virtually all "very compatible" web sites don't validate, because to be as compatible as possible (and that means not just with IE6/IE7/Firefox/Webkit/Opera), you have to compromise. Then for some flashy effects you have to compromise some more. And then if you want to do some particular things, have em be cross browser AND don't want a mess of tables, some stuff is simply impossible even if CSS3 was fully implemented.
IIS is a web server that can serve any kind of content, so what does that have to do with it? And ASP.NET can (and aside for a few controls, actually does) output perfectly compliant HTML/CSS. Even more so, if you use third party controls (and most do), outputting perfectly compliant XHTML strict markup and css that is also compliant with most accessibility standards will be the default unless the developer themselves add code that breaks it.
You have your answer there:
"It doesn't work right with Gmail, even in compatibility mode"
That means its doing user agent sniffing and going from that, and isn't made to go with a newer version... Compatibility mode is pretty much exactly IE7's rendering engine. So if it doesn't work, well...
No, thats not how it works. In a modern development environment, the developers would pop the dialog box that would show all their installed and registered components... the dev goes down the list, and go "Hmm...Adobe PDF renderer...nope... Gecko? Hmm...no... IE Control...bingo!". If they (and they most likely were) using something a little less "drag and drop", they had to make a conscious decision to pick and load an instance of that particular COM control. Its pretty god damn likely that the Steam and WoW developers had access to alternate browsers (Is there really anyone in IT who doesnt at least have some form of alternative browser installed?), so if Firefox's installer doesn't register and expose the rendering engine in an easily discoverable and consumable method, thats their loss...
Now the first thing that came to my mind when I was typing the above at first was "Well, maybe the Steam/WoW team figured it would be one less dependency", but really, these engines are a couple of megs at most, if that, and modern installer toolkits (like InstallShield) will pick it up automatically either way... so really, it HAD to be a conscious decision, and the availability of the rendering engine was probably not the first reason, considering the date those software were first created.
The IE COM component is just dead easy to use. The gecko rendering engine API blows balls.
Which only works when there's very few people doing this (for the "wow" factor), and would make an impossibly high barrier for entry (higher than now...). So you'd have some artists making a killing, and even more good ones not being able to get close (worse so than now).
I mean, you can barely get people to give money to save children with cancer. Being able to "make a killing" from donations...thats definitely a temporary phenomenon. -Maybe- breaking even if you're REALLY good and you beg people ala Wikipedia?
And a desktop video card is user switchable(relatively speaking), and it is definitely quite fragile, has a shit looking exterior, and doesn't slide in or out.
I know what you're gonna think/say. Compared to a TYPICAL removable battery... then yeah, thats true. Nothing stopping them from making an ugly and fragile (well, as fragile as it can be without being dangerous...there IS chemicals in there) thing that needs a few screws to take out.
The difference really, between a removable and a non-removable battery is the tech support and the enclosed instructions, IMO :)
A switchable battery isn't bigger, heavier or last less. At best, Apple is using the 0.1% of room they gain from not having to put a flap to put a larger, bigger, heavier battery in (which will last a little longer). Its just not significant overall so no one minds. But the battery is definitely not lighter just because you cant remote it.
Well, at least in the schools I went to, sleeping in class wasn't allowed either, and thats not disruptive.
Still, I'd see it as a preventive step. Texting in class isn't a big deal, but texting during an exam (which often happens in the same room, under similar circonstances) can have pretty dire consequences.
Indeed. Though I guess I am biaised, but as a software developer, I sure get more than pennies on the dollar. Thats covered by copyright too!. Videogame -publishers- get nothing compared to the actual content creators (programmers, designers...). And MMOs aside, the only thing that allows games to be profitable is fanboys and copyright laws.
There's a lot more. The traditional mediums (written, movies, music) do have a fucked up economy around them. That has more to do with the distribution system though. Getting something on the shelves of walmart is troublesome (thus why something like Steam works so well for videogames, and online in general for many types of software), and only organizations like the RIAA can reliably pull it off, giving them a pseudo-monopoly.
Find better ways of putting stuff in the hands of the customers, and that issue of "the artist gets pennies, if they're lucky" goes away, and artists will get quite a bit. But killing their industry when there's finally hope of a new publishing system makes them dependant on the "old ways" until it dies.
Laws on this differ from countries to countries, and this is definately not in my country, so I wouldn't know... but quite a few laws in developed countries have clauses related to "intent". And when you're called "The pirate bay", and you go around screaming that you're untouchable and that your ways will go on, its pretty clear what your intent is.
Now, if that matters at all in this case is another story, but there IS a huge difference between Google and TPB.
Yeah, cuz music and movies are the only thing that copyrights apply on /sarcasm
Why not make it run and youtube the result?
Starter Edition is to be sold in all countries, unlike Vista's Starter. The basic edition, geared to developing countries, do not have that limitation.
Its funny really. If they change the UI too much, people bitch that they changed it just for the sake of changing it, and thats its the same OS with a pretty face. If they change mostly the backend and whats under the hood, then people say "Its an overglorified service pack"
So I'll ask you. Have you actually looked at the extent of the changes they made to Windows under the hood? No, it didn't break much compatibility because they didn't change something that does, such as the driver subsystem. Still, the changes, for example the new service trigger engine, the user mode scheduler, the remoting system, the amount of new APIs added, the UI revamp (not like XP to Vista, but still quite significant), the software DX renderer, the upgrades to the enterprise service versions, the updates of many of the userland apps, the netbook and touchscreen features, yadah yadah yadah... overall, I'd dare say its one of the more massive updates to Windows in a long time, and greater than XP -> Vista in term of features. But yes, a lot of customers won't notice this, on top of people being comfy in the XP -> Vista release schedule (and their comfortable zone got shaken off as MS came back to the old release schedule), so they have to do this and give it.
Doesn't change how massive the update is, though.
The vast majority of PCs sold are done so through vendors. Vendors already have the ability to "replace" IE (it still has to be there for compatibility reasons, but the user doesn't have to know, and all actions that will invoke a browser will invoke whatever the vendor wants).
None do it.
So how exactly would a plugin architecture help? You can already plug in an entire browser, and its very, very easy. And no one do it.
Make a law that force OEMs to put another browser? Sure. As long as IE is still bundled if you buy a retail version of the OS. I don't want to have clean disks look like HP or Toshiba's restore disks.
That said, IE dominating has little to do with it being bundled. Remember that for an extremely long time, it had little or no competition. It was debated in court (and MS lost) that it was because they bundled it. Was it? I'd argue no. IE was wiping the floor with all alternatives back then, in a time when people WOULD download alternate browsers. Hell, originally, ISPs here would bundle Netscape (before IE was bundled), and everyone I knew went and downloaded IE, even the computer dummies. Why? Well, the gap between IE and Netscape was MUCH larger than the gap between Firefox and IE today. Far, far bigger, and developers happily coded "IE-only" far before it had market advantage, just because it was that much better.
Compared to that, a perfectly ACID2/ACID3/W3C compliant browser with all other related standard technologies (like vector graphics) isn't that big of a step up from IE. (Read that again, I didn't say it wasn't a big step up...but that its almost insignificant compared to the IE vs Netscape gap of old). And then they had no competition until Firefox (Mozilla was a joke until then). By then it was too late. Sure, you could argue there wasn't competition because they had killed the market... but really, its a market that shouldn't be. Similar to software patents maybe? A stupid market is a stupid market.
The point is, a browser is now standard feature of an OS, just like an OS is more or less standard feature of a personal computer, an engine is to a car, cables come with electronic appliances, etc.
Yes, back then, it was not so, Microsoft bundling IE hurt competition, and they should pay for that if the law thinks it did not pay enough already. Thats fine. But unbundling it in today's context is ridiculous, times changed.
Not really. Its all over the place in flea markets, and god did my family get caught a lot. Its not the main way piracy occurs, correct, but its a significant chunk anyway. Very typical of small computer stores that will "sell" you photoshop and MS Office for cheap...
You're right, not all copyright infringement is a loss of sale, that is undebatable. Saying that if someone has "10 pieces of gold", they only have 10 pieces to spend, is also a total falicy though.
First, people want their stuff. Even if its a bad game, a bad movie...many want it anyway, just...cuz. If they couldn't pirate it, they'd sacrifice something else. One less meal at the restaurant, one less iPhone (ok, thats pushing it I guess, they MUST have their iphone...), and their priorities would switch around. Some will find the money elsewhere to take that 10 pieces and make it 20.
Case in point: When I was about 11, during the early-ish days of the SNES, as games were starting to hit the mass... I had a friend who was really getting into them. THey were expensive, and he wanted a lot...so at 11, he was doing odd jobs...babysitting, newspaper, doing the lawns, and ended up quite a collection, waking up at 5 in the morning to do stuff before school started. As people got jealous of him, a couple started doing the same, to get their game fix. Others would rent them instead... That was before all of the rental stores went bankrupt in the area (and that predates gametaps). When Chrono Trigger came out, there was 40 copies on the shelves of the local rental store. You're not going to see that today. Those are still sales (and in many cases, the rental place pays a premium for the right, too).
Today, anyone who wants the games that bad and cannot afford em, will just get a pirated copy. I'm talking hundreds of sales, just from the people in my immediate surrounding. And whenever some DRM scheme or whatever manages to delays piracy by a little bit, or a lot (like MMOs...not DRM, but if you want to play for "real", not much choice but to shell out), whoops, look at that, sales start pouring from these same damn people.
All that to say: yes, each action of copyright infringement is not a loss of sale. But taken together, it IS significant loss of sales.
Yeah, I just meant that some things are so performance intensive that even C isn't good enough for 100% of it, so obviously .NET won't either :)
And yeah, the place where .NET finds itself the most is for the .NET 3.0 stuff. WPF is literally everywhere in the newer stuff, WCF is defacto standard for new communication related stuff, and Windows Workflow is in most of their enterprise tools.
Thats actually what they did, else I wouldn't have gotten the job. Note that I did say the requirements weren't overly specific. They wanted someone with talent, not someone with a list of specific skill. Fact remains, especially in time of recession, people who are "good" are all taken. They're not rare...they just all already have jobs they like, so hiring them is tricky.
Its also worse that people with actual software development, engineering, and architecture skills are extremely rare (relatively speaking). If you need someone to hack up a kernel, ironically, its easier to find than someone who can architect a system (even though the later is vastly easier). And it just takes too long to train someone for that, when it should be something a qualified professor teach, but unis never do. So as soon as you need someone down that path, if its for a mission critical job...you better start looking on all continents.
Salary means pretty little since cost of living differs by as much as 200% depending on where you are in the US. We'll leave it at: they gave me more than I asked (it actually surprised me, when I got the offer on paper and noticed it was a good chunk more, yet I was asking more than the 75th percentile for a senior dev in my area), and its near 6 figure for a position with absolutely no management tasks involved, and no need to ever do more than 9 to 5.
That, and the person they got "on the other continent" is, as far as I know, getting paid close to 100$/hour on payroll + full benefits + bonus (they're vastly more experienced than I am, though).
I guess some people think thats peanuts, I suppose. I don't.
Wow....what? .NET is pretty much everywhere now...and parts of Windows -ARE- in it...not the kernel, no (thats like saying C/C++ are failures because you still need assembly for performance critical parts...), but a significant chunk of the user land tools, and a very very big portion of the various tools Microsoft provide are in .NET... from PowerShell, to Sharepoint, going by parts of Visual Studio, SQL Server, Biztalk, the UI of most of their new tools and components, etc.
The huge chunks of legacy code (Office...) can't easily be ported for obvious reason, but abandoned platform? Thats amusing as hell.
No, the thing is Mono basically pulled an "embrace and extend" on .NET, in some ways. They share a lot in common, but the idea is that instead of worrying about cross platform issues between 2 implementations of roughly the same thing, you can simply use Mono everywhere. Mono -itself- works on Windows.
Its a similar concept as how being cross platform with C++ isn't -so- tough if you use the same compiler on all platforms(I know my example is a bit of a stretch, bear with me), but if you start using different -compilers-, even on the same platform it will get dodgy.
Mono cannot implement the entire .NET framework and be 100% compatible with it. .NET is Windows specific, and has stuff that ties into Active Directory (not just LDAP, but the actual Active Directory), the Windows registry, GDI+, interop with older Microsoft platforms, DirectX, etc. You could get close, sortoff, but 100%? No. So what Mono is doing, is implementing everything part of the ECMA standard, then adding stuff around it. For example, they have a version of Reflection (I forget the name of it) thats better and more powerful than the .NET version, by a lot. They have their own GUI frameworks, libs, etc, that are not available on the normal .NET (though most will work under the Microsoft CLR).
So targeting -just- Mono will give you pretty good cross platform. Forget about the Microsoft .NET here: while they're fairly compatible, they're still 2 distinct platforms, and there's nothing forcing you to target both.
Well, first, there's always the thing that big corps like IBM and Microsoft have so many patents, that technically its probably impossible to code ANYTHING without hitting some. Now, if they'll enforce them, or more so: if those patents are valid at all, is another debate...but basically everything is patented =P
That being said, only part of .NET is part of the ECMA (and other) standards, and MS does have patents on bits and pieces of the "integration" stuff... that is, if you implement a .NET framework and C#, and do something clean from there, you're pretty much 100% A-OK. If you start copying the Windows stuff, like WinForm, ASP.NET, WPF, the GDI+ wrappers, etc, it gets a bit dodgier.
Supposingly the mono guys are VERY careful and think this through before going after a new part, and make very sure everything is implemented clean room (since .NET is so easy to decompile, and that recently the source was published for reference purpose, one has to be careful).
So for all practical purpose, Mono is clean (well, as clean as software based on another can be). But there's always the "what if..." in the back of the mind of people.
Its also the enterprise edition, which is meant for scenarios where Oracle and DB2 are the only alternative, and also only in their more expensive packages. If you don't need the package deal, then it will be a toss up which is more expensive, depending on number of user or machines (depending if you go by user or CPU) and the features you need. You don't get SQL Server Enterprise when all you need is a database engine.