Every once in a while there comes a time of expansion in human knowledge, technology, and commerce. One symbol of such an age is the caravelle, which was the vehicle of geographic exploration and discovery in the middle ages. Caravelles carried explorers, as well as goods, to their destinations. But that expansion would not have been possible if ocean routes had been strictly controlled, if naval traffic across the oceans had been highly regulated.
Now the Internet is the new "ocean" and the media broadcasters are the new "caravelles". When high quality content is created and exchanged, all parties involved can find a benefit in the process. As the author of that article pointed out, "...Internet streaming and new media create incentives for more Canadian productions since profitability in the emerging environment will depend upon original content that can be distributed across all platforms, old and new... If Canadian broadcasters are unable to rely on cheap U.S. programming, they will be forced to compete by investing in their own original content. This will dramatically alter Canadian content production from one mandated by government regulation to one mandated by market survival."
In this age of the new "caravelle" it is content creation that can boost commerce, rather than traffic regulation.
Patents are a form of (intelectual) property. Asking companies to donate patents would be like asking landowners to donate their unworked land, with the only difference that patents will expire some day. What could be done though would be to impose heavy fees on companies for unused patents.
"why isn't OpenOffice already available by default on new PC's and Workstations?"
man, that's easy: imagine you run a hardware company; you want to sell you products and maximize your profit; users want windows (for whatever reasons); you get a deal from m$ for windows if it's pre-installed on the hardware you sell; you want that deal, so you try not to piss m$ off, so you don't event think of ooo; m$ is happy, you are happy, but users don't get to learn ooo. that being said, i have tried switching to ooo twice and was disappointed with missing features such as page numbering or an import filter for wp. also, m$ office has become a de facto standard because we all use at work, therefore it would greatly help if ooo user interface was as similar as possible to the m$ office user interface.
It seems to me that you mistake science for technology. And BTW, Pascal is (still) used as a *teaching tool* for the simple reason that it has two important features: first, it is somewhat foolproof (strong typing, range checking, etc.), which you need when you teach programming to students who have never programmed a computer; second, it is nicely structured, logical, and easy to read in English, so it makes learning easier and faster. When I learned hang-gliding, the first lessons were on a very stable, relatively low-performance hang-glider; of course, nobody would fly that gear in a competition. Bottom line, teaching is a profession and Computer Programming is another; each have their purpose and tools.
Maybe a distinction should be made between Computer Science and Computer Technology; Computer Programming has "arms" in both, but the "real-world" Computer Programming may have to do more with the latter. Universities teach Computer Science (the former) and stay reasonably away from any particular software product, no matter how popular it is. Colleges, on the other hand, are more business-oriented and teach "real-world" Computer Programming to their students. This is not surprising. What I am surprised with is that, given your experience in this field, you didn't include Delphi on your list of RAD tools:)
The computer programmer has become a commodity. People learn programming by themselves, at home, and by the time they are in their late twenties they can get a job without having a degree in CS. It only takes inteligence, a few good books or tutorials (there are plenty available on the Web), and a computer (another commodity, of course) to become a good computer programmer. That is why it is now so easy to export jobs overseas. Gates' suggestion should probably be read as follows: "Do something others have not done, stay ahead of everybody else, that is the only kind of job security you can get as a computer programmer!" He may be right.
Presumably due to a slashdot effect, I have been unable to read that posting. But the author was obviously wrong about one thing: it is possible to discuss these things about Linux. Sadly enough, the discussion here is mostly about why "he is wrong", with a few notable exceptions. If everything was so great about Linux then people wouldn't spend money on Windows and MacOS X. The fact is, there are pros and cons are there is personal choice. And there are evangelists.
RHEL-4 was released a long time ago. I used to run RHEL-3 on my server and the online upgrade to RHEL-4 was very easy and no packages became broken in the prcess. Therefore I find it difficult to understand why you didn't get the upgrade. That being said, the KDE desktop RHEL-4 shipped with lacked some features and I strongly recommend the KDE-3.5 upgrade from the apt.kde-redhat.org repository.
The article doesn't mention real-time support so I guess RHEL-5 will not include such a feature. That's too bad because Novell already have it in SLERT and can price it as they want.
"Piracy" seems to be anything that goes against what those large entertainment companies would like the rest of the world to do. They are even "concerned" with how and where people listen to the music, or watch the movies that they purchase. In Canada, we pay a fee for every blank media purchased to compensate the artists. But let's have a look at the global picture. With regards to purchasing music, people fall in three categories: (a) those who have the means to pay for it and don't care about P2P and such; (b) those who have limited means and prefer to buy something else if they can get the music for free on P2P networks; and (c) those who really can't afford to buy the music anyway. Categories (a) and (c) are of no concern to the music industry; it's category (b) they put the blame on for the alleged drop in music sales. What is the percentage of people in that category? If we were to believe the industry reports, it's mainly the young people, particularly the students. What the industry reports don't mention is that these young people simply have a different approach to shopping: they download, listen to, and then, if they like it, they purchase it. They want to show off their original copy of the music they like to their friends. Yes, they do exchange custom-made audio CDs, and that is perfectly normal despite what the industry would like us to believe. Why be forced to buy a music package if you only like two or three tunes on an audio CD? This is the main issue: the music industry refuse to set up a global distribution system whereby people can buy custom-made audio CDs at a reasonable price. This issue has been somewhat addressed by Apple with iTunes but drawbacks of their particular approach have immediately become obvious (e.g., the requirement to own an iPod; DRM restrictions). In the old times, people would buy audio cassettes and copy the tunes they liked most to create custom-made audio cassettes. The problem was that audio quality decreased when a copy was made, and even in time. That is why industry was not very concerned with such kind of "piracy". But then they decided to take advantage of the new technologies. Now it costs close to nothing to duplicate a digital audio CD. But they still want us to believe that such a copy is worth $15-$20. They claim that, because of "piracy", artists don't receive the royalties they are due; in fact, for each CD that sells for $20 the artist only gets $1-$2, the difference ending up in the pockets of the industry. Let these "pirates" know how to compensate the artists, without a third party becoming involved, and I bet they would agree to do that. Because without the artists there would be no music, no creativity, no art. The rest is only a matter of leverage, of muscle flexing. Industry believed that new technologies will allow them to gain complete control over what people do with the music they purchase. That proved to be an illusion.
While using unlicensed software is unethical*, so is using a de facto monopoly to sell software at US prices in a country where the average income is less than US$300 per month.
----
*no Microsoft engineers were injured in this... experiment
As a long time user of Microsoft (since Windows 3.0), MacOS (since MacOS 6.0), and Linux (since RedHat 4.0) software I can assure you that it's not that simple. Microsoft are "bad" because of their borderline marketing practices (there are enough references to that in other posts) and because in the past they have chosen to release "unfinished" products to the public while working on the next releases of those same products. But in fact, their marketing practices are no different from what other companies do, or would have done in their place, and they are so visible only because of their success. Besides, Microsoft got away with selling buggy software because people accepted to buy that software. One should remember that there was a time when Windows 3.1, or Windows 95, would crash on a regular basis and people would still choose to buy IBM XT/AT compatibles & Windows over Macintosh & MacOS because Apple computers were too expensive and only an "elite" could afford the Apple hardware. The geeky look and feel of the Unix/Linux software didn't help, either. So yes, Microsoft have done some bad things in the past but the end users were no bystanders in the process. Microsoft practices were not invented at Microsoft, they just excelled at turning them into profit. But what I think Microsoft has always been best at is being receptive to what the end users want and developing strategies to implement it. Moreover, they have created what they call an "ecosystem" around Windows and Office, which allowed smaller companies to strive; no one can deny that. I have a friend who is a network admin and he once said: "Should I hate Microsoft? I have a job because they are what they are."
If I ran a company and I had to pick an operating system for my employees, I would go with MacOS X; if I were to develop software as an application service provider (e.g., developing web-based applications) I would choose Linux; if I were a desktop application developer I would choose Windows; and as a user, both at work and at home I prefer Windows, because it has the best multimedia, gaming, and productivity support. That is a fact that I cannot ignore at present; if that were to change in the near future, then I might reconsider my choices:)
"complexity the Next Big Thing in design" -- Apple have already done that: an iPod is both extremely complex and extremely simple in design. Add sleekness and you get a "cool" gadget. As for the MSN and Yahoo web sites, maybe they are "complex" but I think they defy what is known as "reader's expectations".
Linux is not ready for the world, not the other way around.
For most users software falls in four categories: (a) productivity/office; (b) communications; (c) multimedia/gaming; and (d) specialty. Linux does pretty bad in all four categories, with one exception in the communications category: email. The lack of 100% compatibility, not with "standards" but with MS Office and Internet browser software, is a serious hindrance to the adoption of Linux. Moreover, speciality software availability depends on market share and the Linux platform is lagging far behind Windows and MacOS.
None of my two Linux machines, running CentOS and Suse respectivelly, supports my Sony digital camera, my Canon scanner, my Logitech webcam or my Linksys wireless card. One can try putting the blame on vendors but I think that, here again, the problem is with the market share of Linux (or lack thereof) and also with the miriad of Linux distributions available.
One can only dream that one day Linux will benefit from a development and commercial environment such as the one that exists around MS Windows and, to a lesser extend, MacOS X. For now, Linux doesn't sell because it's too deeply burried in unintuitive, undocumented, and unsupported software while it's status quo is heavily defended by armies of evangelists.
there are number of similarities between the u.s. and the roman empire that virtually ran the world 2000 years ago, which i'm not going to mention here. what happened to the people living in that empire? i am not aware of any mass exodus from rome in those times, probably because 1) romans didn't know much about life outside their borders; and 2) they thought they had the best possible life anyway; and 3) they were too busy or afraid or lacked the means to try something new that also involved making major sacrifices. a friend of mine, born in the u.k., once told me that "most americans think that exotic travel is eating other than in macdonalds, or visiting a country where their lawyer doesn't have priviliges". he was joking, right? but if you bother to travel to the capital city of another country, take the time to walk by the u.s. embassy and you'll notice it looks pretty much like a fortress; then wonder why... so, what happened to the roman empire? now it's just another country on the world map and a major tourist attraction. and they passed on the eagle to somebody else. that's a pretty happy "ending", isn't it?;)
science fiction is a benefit to humanity by warning of "what might happen" in the future, by proposing "what-if" scenarios, rather than by attempting to predict the future.
"Anyone who includes misleading "words" or "images" intended to confuse a minor into viewing a possibly harmful Web site could be imprisoned for up to 20 years and fined, the bill says."
Is that more or is it less that what a rapist/murderer/pedophile usually gets?
I wish it could work out that way, but the free market society cannot solve all problems of this society, people die without medical care or starve while food is being trashed in this free market society... but let's get back to our sheep. Short story: I switched to Linux: the OpenOffice suite is buggy because there isn't a market share big enough for the developpers to bother because almost everybody uses MS Office because it came as a deal with Windows; the multimedia tools (KPlayer, mplayerplug-in, etc.) are crappy because there isn't a market share big enough for the developpers to bother because everybody uses WMPlayer because it came bundled with Windows; the web browser (Firefox) cannot open all pages on the Web (not to mention limited plug-in support) because it doesn't have a market share big enough for the *web site* developpers to bother (they're busy evangelizing standards) because everybody uses MS Internet Explorer because it came bundled with Windows. I'm just a user, you know.
The Net is not a giant network providing free, unlimited access to free speech and communication. Worse yet, bandwidth is limited so strategic choices must be made sooner or later by both providers and clients. For example, I would expect Apple Corp. to have to pay my ISP if they want to deliver to me promotional videos in QuickTime format, which they obviously charge their clients for. Will that be reflected on my next bill? That's a possibility we must think of. Maybe that's good news, too -- smaller telcos may get a breather if they can strike better deals with companies such as Google and MSN. What I am more worried about is the concept of toll lanes on the Net and the details of how traffic will be (re)routed to such lanes. When I drive on the freeway I get to choose if I want to pay the price and switch to a toll lane, but how about when I download a large email attachment or file from a friend? Do I have any kind of control over that? I think we are witnessing the end of the "unlimited bandwidth" era for end-users.
Ditto, plugwash. Pascal is one of the most flexible and powerful programming languaguages ever invented. Critics decided its initial shortcomings (overcome in the OO versions released by Borland and the Free Pascal Group) required that it be discarded and replaced with the more "powerful" (read: complicated) programming laguages. IMO, the first great catastrophe that happened in computer programming is the widespread use of C; the second is known as Java. I'll explain.
Computers are like any other machines. The main purpose of the computer is to help people carry out tasks faster than they would do if they didn't have computers. That also includes people who don't do computer programming for a living. Pascal was deemed to be too "easy", even high-school undergrads could write powerful software in Pascal (see the classic essay "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" -- http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html) . C is a programming language that was designed for writing operating systems; it required intimate knowledge on the "innards" of a computer and the language was designed to reflect that. When some people realized that C was actually too complicated for most computing tasks, they removed some of the really useful features and named what was left of it Java; others yet combined it with shell scripting and called the result Perl (which is great for text parsing except that, as someone so nicely put it, some Perl code is virtually indistinguishable from white noise). Of course, the Fortran people learned their lesson and added missing features to that language so that even today many, if not most, computational fluid dynamics scientist at NASA do Fortran, not C or Java programming (I have first hand information to make that assertion).
How meny biologists use C or Java? How many architects? How many mathematicians? How many school teachers?
Young people entering the field of CS have no choice but to accept the paradigm that Java is *the* programming language of the present and, why not, the future. Sure, if you want to do professional desktop programming you have no choice and the large IT corporations will make sure you stay on course.
Slashdot Mirror
Now the Internet is the new "ocean" and the media broadcasters are the new "caravelles". When high quality content is created and exchanged, all parties involved can find a benefit in the process. As the author of that article pointed out, "...Internet streaming and new media create incentives for more Canadian productions since profitability in the emerging environment will depend upon original content that can be distributed across all platforms, old and new... If Canadian broadcasters are unable to rely on cheap U.S. programming, they will be forced to compete by investing in their own original content. This will dramatically alter Canadian content production from one mandated by government regulation to one mandated by market survival."
In this age of the new "caravelle" it is content creation that can boost commerce, rather than traffic regulation.
Patents are a form of (intelectual) property. Asking companies to donate patents would be like asking landowners to donate their unworked land, with the only difference that patents will expire some day. What could be done though would be to impose heavy fees on companies for unused patents.
man, that's easy: imagine you run a hardware company; you want to sell you products and maximize your profit; users want windows (for whatever reasons); you get a deal from m$ for windows if it's pre-installed on the hardware you sell; you want that deal, so you try not to piss m$ off, so you don't event think of ooo; m$ is happy, you are happy, but users don't get to learn ooo. that being said, i have tried switching to ooo twice and was disappointed with missing features such as page numbering or an import filter for wp. also, m$ office has become a de facto standard because we all use at work, therefore it would greatly help if ooo user interface was as similar as possible to the m$ office user interface.
It seems to me that you mistake science for technology. And BTW, Pascal is (still) used as a *teaching tool* for the simple reason that it has two important features: first, it is somewhat foolproof (strong typing, range checking, etc.), which you need when you teach programming to students who have never programmed a computer; second, it is nicely structured, logical, and easy to read in English, so it makes learning easier and faster. When I learned hang-gliding, the first lessons were on a very stable, relatively low-performance hang-glider; of course, nobody would fly that gear in a competition. Bottom line, teaching is a profession and Computer Programming is another; each have their purpose and tools.
The computer programmer has become a commodity. People learn programming by themselves, at home, and by the time they are in their late twenties they can get a job without having a degree in CS. It only takes inteligence, a few good books or tutorials (there are plenty available on the Web), and a computer (another commodity, of course) to become a good computer programmer. That is why it is now so easy to export jobs overseas. Gates' suggestion should probably be read as follows: "Do something others have not done, stay ahead of everybody else, that is the only kind of job security you can get as a computer programmer!" He may be right.
Presumably due to a slashdot effect, I have been unable to read that posting. But the author was obviously wrong about one thing: it is possible to discuss these things about Linux. Sadly enough, the discussion here is mostly about why "he is wrong", with a few notable exceptions. If everything was so great about Linux then people wouldn't spend money on Windows and MacOS X. The fact is, there are pros and cons are there is personal choice. And there are evangelists.
RHEL-4 was released a long time ago. I used to run RHEL-3 on my server and the online upgrade to RHEL-4 was very easy and no packages became broken in the prcess. Therefore I find it difficult to understand why you didn't get the upgrade. That being said, the KDE desktop RHEL-4 shipped with lacked some features and I strongly recommend the KDE-3.5 upgrade from the apt.kde-redhat.org repository.
Why did you try the "cutting-edge" Fedora rather than the RHEL clone CentOS?
The article doesn't mention real-time support so I guess RHEL-5 will not include such a feature. That's too bad because Novell already have it in SLERT and can price it as they want.
"Piracy" seems to be anything that goes against what those large entertainment companies would like the rest of the world to do. They are even "concerned" with how and where people listen to the music, or watch the movies that they purchase. In Canada, we pay a fee for every blank media purchased to compensate the artists. But let's have a look at the global picture. With regards to purchasing music, people fall in three categories: (a) those who have the means to pay for it and don't care about P2P and such; (b) those who have limited means and prefer to buy something else if they can get the music for free on P2P networks; and (c) those who really can't afford to buy the music anyway. Categories (a) and (c) are of no concern to the music industry; it's category (b) they put the blame on for the alleged drop in music sales. What is the percentage of people in that category? If we were to believe the industry reports, it's mainly the young people, particularly the students. What the industry reports don't mention is that these young people simply have a different approach to shopping: they download, listen to, and then, if they like it, they purchase it. They want to show off their original copy of the music they like to their friends. Yes, they do exchange custom-made audio CDs, and that is perfectly normal despite what the industry would like us to believe. Why be forced to buy a music package if you only like two or three tunes on an audio CD? This is the main issue: the music industry refuse to set up a global distribution system whereby people can buy custom-made audio CDs at a reasonable price. This issue has been somewhat addressed by Apple with iTunes but drawbacks of their particular approach have immediately become obvious (e.g., the requirement to own an iPod; DRM restrictions). In the old times, people would buy audio cassettes and copy the tunes they liked most to create custom-made audio cassettes. The problem was that audio quality decreased when a copy was made, and even in time. That is why industry was not very concerned with such kind of "piracy". But then they decided to take advantage of the new technologies. Now it costs close to nothing to duplicate a digital audio CD. But they still want us to believe that such a copy is worth $15-$20. They claim that, because of "piracy", artists don't receive the royalties they are due; in fact, for each CD that sells for $20 the artist only gets $1-$2, the difference ending up in the pockets of the industry. Let these "pirates" know how to compensate the artists, without a third party becoming involved, and I bet they would agree to do that. Because without the artists there would be no music, no creativity, no art. The rest is only a matter of leverage, of muscle flexing. Industry believed that new technologies will allow them to gain complete control over what people do with the music they purchase. That proved to be an illusion.
----
*no Microsoft engineers were injured in this... experiment
The "actual" Dracula's castle is the Poienari stronghold (see http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php?Number =64563 and http://www.webshots.com/search?query=Poienari). Obviously, the later has less real estate value than the Bran castle...
If I ran a company and I had to pick an operating system for my employees, I would go with MacOS X; if I were to develop software as an application service provider (e.g., developing web-based applications) I would choose Linux; if I were a desktop application developer I would choose Windows; and as a user, both at work and at home I prefer Windows, because it has the best multimedia, gaming, and productivity support. That is a fact that I cannot ignore at present; if that were to change in the near future, then I might reconsider my choices :)
"complexity the Next Big Thing in design" -- Apple have already done that: an iPod is both extremely complex and extremely simple in design. Add sleekness and you get a "cool" gadget. As for the MSN and Yahoo web sites, maybe they are "complex" but I think they defy what is known as "reader's expectations".
The article cited mentions cyber criminals in the U.S.A. and Poland, not Romania.
Yes, you must be right... and your comments remind me of this: Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL
For most users software falls in four categories: (a) productivity/office; (b) communications; (c) multimedia/gaming; and (d) specialty. Linux does pretty bad in all four categories, with one exception in the communications category: email. The lack of 100% compatibility, not with "standards" but with MS Office and Internet browser software, is a serious hindrance to the adoption of Linux. Moreover, speciality software availability depends on market share and the Linux platform is lagging far behind Windows and MacOS.
None of my two Linux machines, running CentOS and Suse respectivelly, supports my Sony digital camera, my Canon scanner, my Logitech webcam or my Linksys wireless card. One can try putting the blame on vendors but I think that, here again, the problem is with the market share of Linux (or lack thereof) and also with the miriad of Linux distributions available.
One can only dream that one day Linux will benefit from a development and commercial environment such as the one that exists around MS Windows and, to a lesser extend, MacOS X. For now, Linux doesn't sell because it's too deeply burried in unintuitive, undocumented, and unsupported software while it's status quo is heavily defended by armies of evangelists.
there are number of similarities between the u.s. and the roman empire that virtually ran the world 2000 years ago, which i'm not going to mention here. what happened to the people living in that empire? i am not aware of any mass exodus from rome in those times, probably because 1) romans didn't know much about life outside their borders; and 2) they thought they had the best possible life anyway; and 3) they were too busy or afraid or lacked the means to try something new that also involved making major sacrifices. a friend of mine, born in the u.k., once told me that "most americans think that exotic travel is eating other than in macdonalds, or visiting a country where their lawyer doesn't have priviliges". he was joking, right? but if you bother to travel to the capital city of another country, take the time to walk by the u.s. embassy and you'll notice it looks pretty much like a fortress; then wonder why... so, what happened to the roman empire? now it's just another country on the world map and a major tourist attraction. and they passed on the eagle to somebody else. that's a pretty happy "ending", isn't it? ;)
Do I need to pay for access to Second Life to communicate globally? I prefer to communicate globally in my First Life, so to speak... it's amazing! ;)
science fiction is a benefit to humanity by warning of "what might happen" in the future, by proposing "what-if" scenarios, rather than by attempting to predict the future.
Is that more or is it less that what a rapist/murderer/pedophile usually gets?
I wish it could work out that way, but the free market society cannot solve all problems of this society, people die without medical care or starve while food is being trashed in this free market society... but let's get back to our sheep. Short story: I switched to Linux: the OpenOffice suite is buggy because there isn't a market share big enough for the developpers to bother because almost everybody uses MS Office because it came as a deal with Windows; the multimedia tools (KPlayer, mplayerplug-in, etc.) are crappy because there isn't a market share big enough for the developpers to bother because everybody uses WMPlayer because it came bundled with Windows; the web browser (Firefox) cannot open all pages on the Web (not to mention limited plug-in support) because it doesn't have a market share big enough for the *web site* developpers to bother (they're busy evangelizing standards) because everybody uses MS Internet Explorer because it came bundled with Windows. I'm just a user, you know.
Jeez, I never thought MS Windows would have requirements higher than a PC game. Unless it is, actually, a new videogame :)
The Net is not a giant network providing free, unlimited access to free speech and communication. Worse yet, bandwidth is limited so strategic choices must be made sooner or later by both providers and clients. For example, I would expect Apple Corp. to have to pay my ISP if they want to deliver to me promotional videos in QuickTime format, which they obviously charge their clients for. Will that be reflected on my next bill? That's a possibility we must think of. Maybe that's good news, too -- smaller telcos may get a breather if they can strike better deals with companies such as Google and MSN. What I am more worried about is the concept of toll lanes on the Net and the details of how traffic will be (re)routed to such lanes. When I drive on the freeway I get to choose if I want to pay the price and switch to a toll lane, but how about when I download a large email attachment or file from a friend? Do I have any kind of control over that? I think we are witnessing the end of the "unlimited bandwidth" era for end-users.
Computers are like any other machines. The main purpose of the computer is to help people carry out tasks faster than they would do if they didn't have computers. That also includes people who don't do computer programming for a living. Pascal was deemed to be too "easy", even high-school undergrads could write powerful software in Pascal (see the classic essay "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" -- http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html) . C is a programming language that was designed for writing operating systems; it required intimate knowledge on the "innards" of a computer and the language was designed to reflect that. When some people realized that C was actually too complicated for most computing tasks, they removed some of the really useful features and named what was left of it Java; others yet combined it with shell scripting and called the result Perl (which is great for text parsing except that, as someone so nicely put it, some Perl code is virtually indistinguishable from white noise). Of course, the Fortran people learned their lesson and added missing features to that language so that even today many, if not most, computational fluid dynamics scientist at NASA do Fortran, not C or Java programming (I have first hand information to make that assertion).
How meny biologists use C or Java? How many architects? How many mathematicians? How many school teachers?
Young people entering the field of CS have no choice but to accept the paradigm that Java is *the* programming language of the present and, why not, the future. Sure, if you want to do professional desktop programming you have no choice and the large IT corporations will make sure you stay on course.