Just curious: have you taken steps to inform other users that Mono APIs are not based on, and thus incompatible with, Dotnet APIs?
The Mono Project itself is pretty clear about it. Like, on the left, you get the non-.NET stack in a BIG RED BOX, and on the right, you get the.NET stack in a BIG BLUE BOX. You can install one, the other, or both, depending on whether you need.NET or not. Most Linux developers and most open source developers don't need what's in the BIG BLUE BOX.
I ask this because one could easily form the impression from Mono promotional material that it is a complete and compatible implementation of Dotnet. For example, the first sentence in the Mono FAQ reads: "The Mono Project is an open development initiative sponsored by Ximian that is working to develop an open source, Unix version of the Microsoft.NET development platform."
And what is wrong with that? Ximian is sponsoring the Mono project to develop a UNIX version of the Microsoft.NET development platform. That's their business interest in it. It doesn't mean that that's all it's good for. Plenty of companies have sponsored gcc development for their purposes, but your use of it is probably completely different.
It doesn't claim that it is "complete" yet (in fact, the roadmap tells you how complete things are), although they are clearly aiming for that.
Before jumping on the MS band-wagon you should realize that they will never allow mono to become equal, better, or fully compatible to win32.NET.
Before going on and on about Mono, you should at least know a little about it. Mono is a development effort producing several things: an implementation of of ECMA C#, an extensive set of bindings to open source software, and, separately, a Microsoft.NET compatible set of libraries.
If Mono stopped working on the Microsoft.NET compatible libraries tomorrow, it would make no difference to me or to most other Mono users. The purpose of the Mono.NET implementation is not to develop new open source software on top of it, it is to let Windows users migrate their.NET software to Linux. Making it easy for Windows developers to migrate to Linux is a good thing.
But most Mono development is taking place using the open source APIs: Gtk#, Gnome, open source XML tools, etc. Those are already better than Microsoft.NET and they are easier to learn for OSS developers.
Its hard to believe that such a bastion of MS hate groups as/. would rather embrace an MS product like.net
Yes, and the resolution to that contradiction is that you misunderstand what is going on. People aren't embracing an MS product, they are embracing an open language (C#) together with the open source libraries they already know and use (Gnome, etc.).
A little trolling of my part;-) I know... but he started: "PHP forces you to use scalable mechanisms for state management (in contrast to, say, Java)".
That is what the article said. It was in response to Michalson's claim that the article doesn't give any reasons for why PHP should be good for scalable web development.
This is just flaming.
No, flaming would be if I called you a "retard, incapable of reading comprehension at the elementary school level". Even if I had made an incorrect statement about PHP, it wouldn't amount to flaming. What I actually did was to paraphrase a statement from the article.
No, I just think. But go back and happily consume what people feed you: Java, iPod, Macintosh, multimedia plugins. All the really "hot", "cool", and "high-tech" stuff--some bimbo supermodel says so, after all. Just don't use your brain--you might accidentally generate a thought.
MS should have the right to ship their software any way they like.
No, they shouldn't: anti-trust law says they shouldn't.
A monopoly does not occur when one firm has a huge market-share, or even 100% market-share. In the classical (and true) sense of the word -- before Statists started redefining it -- a monopoly only exists when the State creates artificial barriers to entry,
What difference does it make what you call it? If enough people are hurt by some business practice, they vote people into office who regulate that business, and they have every right to do so. Corporations and the free market exist because we, as a democratic society, have chosen to create them, for our own benefit. You don't have any rights other than those granted to you by the Constitution and the laws of this nation, and both are subject to change by the citizens of this nation.
We tried the other way before, the way in which people have intrinsic, unlimited property rights. We also have classical names for those kinds of arrangements: feudalism and monarchy. That's what your way of thinking leads to. Would you like to go back to that? I wouldn't.
You don't like Word...fine, but guess what, there's no learning curve practically.
If you ever have tried to teach new users to use a word processor, you'd know that Word has got to be one of the most obscure and unusable GUI programs in widespread use. Hint: that's why they have all those "courses" where they teach people how to use it.
Having 50 free programs don't mean jack if: 1. you can't install/run them easily 2. define a standard of usability among them all 3. coordinate thier appearance and setup
Fortunately, Linux does all that.
If you can't figure out how to download a program and install it (a task infinatly more easy in windows)
Linux is so far ahead of Windows in the area of software installation that you're like a cave man looking at a computer: you lack the concepts even to understand what it is doing, let alone to figure out whether it is doing it well.
To make this concrete: on Linux, you don't "download a program and install it". Instead, you get an on-line comprehensive and searchable catalog of available software, you pick what you want, and the rest happens automatically from then on: downloads, installs, bug fixes, etc.
Re:Spare the rod, bring on the bullwhip
on
Linux Users Are Spoiled
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· Score: 2, Informative
Ever tried to set up a 56k modem in linux? Don't go there.
Why not? Modems are trivial under Linux because they are so well standardized. Plug it in (USB or Serial) and software like yast or wvdial will pick it up.
Winmodems, of course, will not work in general, but if you buy a Windows modem for your Linux computer, what do you expect?
Get a printer working under CUPS? Faster to ask your neighbour to print it.
No harder in general than on Macintosh (which also uses CUPS) or Windows. As usual, you have the choice of either using a printer install tool or picking the drivers manually in the CUPS web interface.
Windows is like a flashy SUV. Looks great, illusion of safety,easy to drive, buts WILL tip over at a moments notice.
Windows is not easy to drive; it's more like a broken SUV sitting in your driveway--you can sit in it, and look pretty, but you end up going where you need to go on foot anyway, provided, of course, you can get the doors open and get out.
- no difficult choices during setup (pre-configured PCs)
Not only can you get Linux pre-installed, you also get options like Knoppix. And if you really want to install something from scratch, SuSE installs more easily than Windows.
- no need to read difficult manpages and other such stuff
If you just want to use Linux like you use Windows (run GUI apps), you don't have to read any more documentation than on Windows. Quite to the contrary, actually: Linux GUI apps have benefitted from having been developed with more hindsight compared to Windows.
- most hardware just works out of the box
That's a myth. On Linux, many devices just work after you plug them in, because Linux has so much hardware support built in.
On Windows, on the other hand, most hardware comes with separate driver CDs and instructions for how to install it. You know: insert the CD before connecting the device (or was it after?). Often, the driver doesn't work with current Windows versions, so you need to download new binary drivers from some web site. And doing a Windows upgrade is like Russian roulette--you always have to wonder what hardware stops working afterwards.
- no need to choose between distros - no need to choose between multiple software packages that do the same job, just differently
Ah, yes, you hate choice--you would have been right at home in the USSR--one centrally planned choice for everything--no need to think. Just follow the supreme leader Gates into the bright, bright future of the centrally planned Windows utopia.
Pardon the rest of us while we continue to engage in the messy by useful business of evaluating options, making choices, and participating in a free market.
As a Windows user, I think I'm spoiled. I love having a simple, unified interface shared by almost all the programs I use.
The notion that Windows programs have a "simple, unified interface" is so ridiculous that, either you must "use" your Windows machine mainly to heat your apartment and to look pretty on your desk, or you have used it so long that you are completely blind to what a mess it actually is.
1 - Gimp doesn't crash randomly when editing very large images
That's unlikely to change: C just makes it too much work to deal with unexpected conditions like out-of-memory or out-of-diskspace, so people just handle the most obvious cases and fix others as they come up. Maybe a particular bug that causes this will get fixed, but there will be others lurking somewhere. Don't blame the Gimp developers for that--it's not like Microsoft or Apple or anybody else do it better when writing C code.
2 - I can save some text in OpenOffice as.DOC and be certain it'll show up in Word as good as I made it.
You will never be certain of that because Microsoft is actively trying to prevent it and because the DOC format is a disaster.
What you can do is save some text in RTF or HTML and have it show up correctly in Word (to the degree that Word itself doesn't have bugs). I don't see why that isn't good enough for you.
In the future, you might be able to save text in Word XML format and have it show up correctly in Word, but Microsoft may have created legal obstacles to doing that.
Now I slog through my days running Mac OS X. The drudgery of one-click installs.
Mac OS X doesn't have one-click installs. Some software has an installer that asks a lot of questions, some software gets dragged to the application folder. OS X software that comes with an installer often doesn't come with an uninstaller, so you don't know what it did or how to get rid of it.
And, of course, when a new version of the software comes out, you have to track it down and install it. That is, of course, provided your software doesn't "phone home" to its manufacturer and asks you to update it, often at inappropriate times.
Contrast that kind of cumbersome manual system with Linux's automatic system: most "installs" on Linux are zero-click, since almost all the software you need comes preinstalled. And software updates to all software (operating system, applications, etc.) are handled through a single, consistent interface.
And gone are those sweet, sweet hours of dealing with hardware compatibility issues!
Quite true: some hardware just works on OS X and a lot of hardware just doesn't have OS X support. On Linux, some hardware just works (more than on OS X), a lot of hardware can be made to work if you invest some effort, and some hardware just doesn't have drivers.
So, it's your choice: you can either pick OS X, with its limited hardware support, or you can pick Linux, which has more hardware support and gives you the option of spending additional time to get quirky hardware to work.
Add to that the cruel twist of LOTS of documentation where little is needed!
If you call a flimsy picture book on "how to set up your iMac" "LOTS of documentation"; if you really want documentation on your Mac, you have to go out and buy books. If you want documentation on your Linux systems, you can get gigabytes on-line, and bookshelves full of documentation at all levels.
If you want an OS that "just works", Linux is actually a better choice: no drivers to install when you get new Linux-compatible hardware (they are included in the distribution) and no applications to install (they are included in the distribution). Apple should be as scared as Microsoft.
One thing Java does well is portability ("the right tool for the job")
But Java isn't the right tool for the job when developing for multiple platforms. When I write software for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh using something like wxWindows or Qt, I know I can always make it work on all three platforms; in the worst case, I just add a little bit of platform specific code until whatever was wrong in the toolkit gets fixed. With Java, when the Java implementation doesn't work right on some platform, I'm stuck until Sun eventually gets around to fixing the problem, which may be months later, years later, or never.
From the point of view of writing for multiple platforms, Java is a disaster: it's a tool that works sometimes for cross-platform development, but you won't know whether it can get the job done until you try.
The legality of Mono along with it's incomplete implementation of C# make is pretty unsuitable for anything.
If you are willing to put up with the "legality of Java", I don't see why you have any problems with the "legality of Mono". Sun has numerous patents on Java, Sun owns most of the specifications (yes, even specifications coming out of the JCP), and if you as much as look at the specifications, you have looked at Sun intellectual property. I'll take an ANSI and ECMA standard together with a complete set of open source APIs over that any day.
As for the "completeness", Mono's C# implementation is complete and Mono gives you complete set of APIs that are not based on Microsoft's APIs. At this point, it looks like Microsoft wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they were foolish enough to challenge Mono. And that's a whole lot better than one can say about anything Java-related.
How so? Our national budget is greater, our GDP numbers are higher -- in fact, per capita, only Luxembourg ranks higher than the U.S.
GDP is a lousy measure of wealth; if you do want to look at numbers, you have to take into account national and personal debt, quality of life indexes, income disparities, etc.
They can blame us for being devils and oppressors, and I'm sure they believe it 100% [...] but that doesn't change the fact that underneath it all, they see us as the rich people whose destruction would free up wealth for themselves.
People in the middle east may or may not be envious of our wealth, but they are angry at the US (meaning, the US government) because the US government is responsible for creating and keeping in power people like the Shah and Saddam Hussein.
Have a look at your Linux installation. Do you even have a Java runtime installed? What are the dependencies when you try to remove them? Chances are good that, even if you happen to have a Java runtime installed, you can remove it without losing any functionality you use. Compare that with, say, Perl.
Unless you have a rather unusual and specific need (Tomcat, JSP, Java homework problems, you probably will never need Java on your Linux system.
It's true that people have started a lot of projects in Java: there has been a huge flurry of "X-in-Java", where "X" is any existing piece of software, but few of those projects have been successful. And most Java projects that have yielded something useful are just Java projects to produce tools for Java programming, rather than anything any normal user might want to use.
Strictly speaking, gcj is not "Java", as defined by Sun.
But a more serious problem is that Java lacks the signal handling, terminal control, and other features that people expect of high-quality command line programs.
So, yes, you can write some command line programs in Java, using gcj, and get decent performance. I have done it. But using Java still limits you pretty severely compared to other languages, gcj or not.
about the possible merits of open-sourcing Java vs the market's demand for continuing compatibility
That phrasing suggests that open sourcing would have threatened compatibility, but the exact opposite would have been the case: under Sun's processes, Java has fallen apart: several different toolkits (AWT, Swing, SWT,...), several incompatible 3D APIs, incompatible and incomplete implementations (Sun's, gcj, etc.), several incompatible levels (J2SE, J2ME, J2EE,...), and on and on. Even among Java implementations based on Sun's code, there are wild incompatibilities. C# and Mono are futher incompatible branches off the Java tree. Open sourcing Java could have reduced those incompatibilities because people wouldn't have had to reinvent the wheel just in order to get around Sun's licensing restrictions; something like Swing, for example, would have died its well-deserved death early on, instead of being kept alive artificially by Sun.
Of course, why any of this is worth worrying about anymore, I don't understand. Java has failed on all its promises: its promise to become a platform-independent way of delivering applications via the Internet, its promise of becoming a universal client development language, and even its promise of becoming a good server-side development language. Java hangs on in education, but as Pascal shows, that doesn't mean much. And some big corporations with too much money still try to use Java for "enterprise systems", but you can sell those guys anything.
That's why Switzerland and Sweden don't factor in. They don't have nearly the wealth, visibility, or influence that the U.S. has.
The Swiss are quite a bit wealthier than Americans.
But you're absolutely right that the Swiss don't have the visibility: that's the point, after all. The US sticks out because US politicians meddle in just about every conflict around the world where a profit is to be made or influence to be gained. (By chance, that may sometimes also align with humanitarian interests or just causes, but often it clearly does not.)
The Middle East is not a resource-rich region,
The Middle East (and in particular the nations where terrorism comes from) are enormously resource rich. It's exactly the disparity between their wealth of resources and the poverty of their populations that causes people to get angry. And the US is propping up the regimes that run those countries.
and its culture is not built on the same individualist foundations.
Those people want the same freedoms you want--they just happen to believe that the US is preventing them from getting them. Think about it for a moment: the US is making politicial and military deals with monarchies and dictators in the Middle East. In some cases, the US has even thrown out democratic governments and replaced them with dictators because it suited US interests.
Yes, it is true that common Linux GUIs (Gnome, KDE) look more and more like Windows.
But there are several points to keep in mind:
the GUI is only a small part of the OS and not the reason many linux users use linux
the Windows GUI is not original either: most of it is copied from other systems
even as far as GUIs go, the Linux GUIs are more featureful, powerfulN and consistent than Windows
linux developrs don't have much of a choice: regular users switching to linux demand a Windows-like GUI because they don't want to have to relearn everything
Linux being configurable to look like Windows is a necessary evil for now. When Windows marketshare has declined sufficiently, common Linux GUIs can say good bye to Windows and go their own ways.
Lies and hipocrasy are common in all cultures, it's just the west that practices self flagilation on the issue.
As well we should. Maybe you would be happy to live under a lying dictator as long as he brings home the bacon, but I want to live in a free and democratic society, with a strict separation of religion and politics, and with rational decisions based on accurate information.
The only way to avoid being a target of terrorists is to be so weak that you are irrelevant to world affairs, but that also means you are too weak to make changes you want.
In the long term, the way to avoid being the target of terrorists is to make sure that people around the world have the same freedoms and wealth as we do. And our record on that count is pretty mixed.
In the short term, the way to gain friends around the world is to behave consistently and justly, and our record on that count is also quite mixed.
Slashdot Mirror
Just curious: have you taken steps to inform other users that Mono APIs are not based on, and thus incompatible with, Dotnet APIs?
.NET stack in a BIG BLUE BOX. You can install one, the other, or both, depending on whether you need .NET or not. Most Linux developers and most open source developers don't need what's in the BIG BLUE BOX.
.NET development platform."
.NET development platform. That's their business interest in it. It doesn't mean that that's all it's good for. Plenty of companies have sponsored gcc development for their purposes, but your use of it is probably completely different.
The Mono Project itself is pretty clear about it. Like, on the left, you get the non-.NET stack in a BIG RED BOX, and on the right, you get the
I ask this because one could easily form the impression from Mono promotional material that it is a complete and compatible implementation of Dotnet. For example, the first sentence in the Mono FAQ reads: "The Mono Project is an open development initiative sponsored by Ximian that is working to develop an open source, Unix version of the Microsoft
And what is wrong with that? Ximian is sponsoring the Mono project to develop a UNIX version of the Microsoft
It doesn't claim that it is "complete" yet (in fact, the roadmap tells you how complete things are), although they are clearly aiming for that.
Before jumping on the MS band-wagon you should realize that they will never allow mono to become equal, better, or fully compatible to win32 .NET.
.NET compatible set of libraries.
.NET compatible libraries tomorrow, it would make no difference to me or to most other Mono users. The purpose of the Mono .NET implementation is not to develop new open source software on top of it, it is to let Windows users migrate their .NET software to Linux. Making it easy for Windows developers to migrate to Linux is a good thing.
.NET and they are easier to learn for OSS developers.
/. would rather embrace an MS product like .net
Before going on and on about Mono, you should at least know a little about it. Mono is a development effort producing several things: an implementation of of ECMA C#, an extensive set of bindings to open source software, and, separately, a Microsoft
If Mono stopped working on the Microsoft
But most Mono development is taking place using the open source APIs: Gtk#, Gnome, open source XML tools, etc. Those are already better than Microsoft
Its hard to believe that such a bastion of MS hate groups as
Yes, and the resolution to that contradiction is that you misunderstand what is going on. People aren't embracing an MS product, they are embracing an open language (C#) together with the open source libraries they already know and use (Gnome, etc.).
A little trolling of my part ;-) I know... but he started: "PHP forces you to use scalable mechanisms for state management (in contrast to, say, Java)".
That is what the article said. It was in response to Michalson's claim that the article doesn't give any reasons for why PHP should be good for scalable web development.
This is just flaming.
No, flaming would be if I called you a "retard, incapable of reading comprehension at the elementary school level". Even if I had made an incorrect statement about PHP, it wouldn't amount to flaming. What I actually did was to paraphrase a statement from the article.
This guy seems to troll all over the place.
No, I just think. But go back and happily consume what people feed you: Java, iPod, Macintosh, multimedia plugins. All the really "hot", "cool", and "high-tech" stuff--some bimbo supermodel says so, after all. Just don't use your brain--you might accidentally generate a thought.
MS should have the right to ship their software any way they like.
No, they shouldn't: anti-trust law says they shouldn't.
A monopoly does not occur when one firm has a huge market-share, or even 100% market-share. In the classical (and true) sense of the word -- before Statists started redefining it -- a monopoly only exists when the State creates artificial barriers to entry,
What difference does it make what you call it? If enough people are hurt by some business practice, they vote people into office who regulate that business, and they have every right to do so. Corporations and the free market exist because we, as a democratic society, have chosen to create them, for our own benefit. You don't have any rights other than those granted to you by the Constitution and the laws of this nation, and both are subject to change by the citizens of this nation.
We tried the other way before, the way in which people have intrinsic, unlimited property rights. We also have classical names for those kinds of arrangements: feudalism and monarchy. That's what your way of thinking leads to. Would you like to go back to that? I wouldn't.
You don't like Word...fine, but guess what, there's no learning curve practically.
If you ever have tried to teach new users to use a word processor, you'd know that Word has got to be one of the most obscure and unusable GUI programs in widespread use. Hint: that's why they have all those "courses" where they teach people how to use it.
Having 50 free programs don't mean jack if: 1. you can't install/run them easily 2. define a standard of usability among them all 3. coordinate thier appearance and setup
Fortunately, Linux does all that.
If you can't figure out how to download a program and install it (a task infinatly more easy in windows)
Linux is so far ahead of Windows in the area of software installation that you're like a cave man looking at a computer: you lack the concepts even to understand what it is doing, let alone to figure out whether it is doing it well.
To make this concrete: on Linux, you don't "download a program and install it". Instead, you get an on-line comprehensive and searchable catalog of available software, you pick what you want, and the rest happens automatically from then on: downloads, installs, bug fixes, etc.
Ever tried to set up a 56k modem in linux? Don't go there.
Why not? Modems are trivial under Linux because they are so well standardized. Plug it in (USB or Serial) and software like yast or wvdial will pick it up.
Winmodems, of course, will not work in general, but if you buy a Windows modem for your Linux computer, what do you expect?
Get a printer working under CUPS? Faster to ask your neighbour to print it.
No harder in general than on Macintosh (which also uses CUPS) or Windows. As usual, you have the choice of either using a printer install tool or picking the drivers manually in the CUPS web interface.
Windows is like a flashy SUV. Looks great, illusion of safety,easy to drive, buts WILL tip over at a moments notice.
Windows is not easy to drive; it's more like a broken SUV sitting in your driveway--you can sit in it, and look pretty, but you end up going where you need to go on foot anyway, provided, of course, you can get the doors open and get out.
- no difficult choices during setup (pre-configured PCs)
Not only can you get Linux pre-installed, you also get options like Knoppix. And if you really want to install something from scratch, SuSE installs more easily than Windows.
- no need to read difficult manpages and other such stuff
If you just want to use Linux like you use Windows (run GUI apps), you don't have to read any more documentation than on Windows. Quite to the contrary, actually: Linux GUI apps have benefitted from having been developed with more hindsight compared to Windows.
- most hardware just works out of the box
That's a myth. On Linux, many devices just work after you plug them in, because Linux has so much hardware support built in.
On Windows, on the other hand, most hardware comes with separate driver CDs and instructions for how to install it. You know: insert the CD before connecting the device (or was it after?). Often, the driver doesn't work with current Windows versions, so you need to download new binary drivers from some web site. And doing a Windows upgrade is like Russian roulette--you always have to wonder what hardware stops working afterwards.
- no need to choose between distros - no need to choose between multiple software packages that do the same job, just differently
Ah, yes, you hate choice--you would have been right at home in the USSR--one centrally planned choice for everything--no need to think. Just follow the supreme leader Gates into the bright, bright future of the centrally planned Windows utopia.
Pardon the rest of us while we continue to engage in the messy by useful business of evaluating options, making choices, and participating in a free market.
As a Windows user, I think I'm spoiled. I love having a simple, unified interface shared by almost all the programs I use.
The notion that Windows programs have a "simple, unified interface" is so ridiculous that, either you must "use" your Windows machine mainly to heat your apartment and to look pretty on your desk, or you have used it so long that you are completely blind to what a mess it actually is.
1 - Gimp doesn't crash randomly when editing very large images
.DOC and be certain it'll show up in Word as good as I made it.
That's unlikely to change: C just makes it too much work to deal with unexpected conditions like out-of-memory or out-of-diskspace, so people just handle the most obvious cases and fix others as they come up. Maybe a particular bug that causes this will get fixed, but there will be others lurking somewhere. Don't blame the Gimp developers for that--it's not like Microsoft or Apple or anybody else do it better when writing C code.
2 - I can save some text in OpenOffice as
You will never be certain of that because Microsoft is actively trying to prevent it and because the DOC format is a disaster.
What you can do is save some text in RTF or HTML and have it show up correctly in Word (to the degree that Word itself doesn't have bugs). I don't see why that isn't good enough for you.
In the future, you might be able to save text in Word XML format and have it show up correctly in Word, but Microsoft may have created legal obstacles to doing that.
Now I slog through my days running Mac OS X. The drudgery of one-click installs.
Mac OS X doesn't have one-click installs. Some software has an installer that asks a lot of questions, some software gets dragged to the application folder. OS X software that comes with an installer often doesn't come with an uninstaller, so you don't know what it did or how to get rid of it.
And, of course, when a new version of the software comes out, you have to track it down and install it. That is, of course, provided your software doesn't "phone home" to its manufacturer and asks you to update it, often at inappropriate times.
Contrast that kind of cumbersome manual system with Linux's automatic system: most "installs" on Linux are zero-click, since almost all the software you need comes preinstalled. And software updates to all software (operating system, applications, etc.) are handled through a single, consistent interface.
And gone are those sweet, sweet hours of dealing with hardware compatibility issues!
Quite true: some hardware just works on OS X and a lot of hardware just doesn't have OS X support. On Linux, some hardware just works (more than on OS X), a lot of hardware can be made to work if you invest some effort, and some hardware just doesn't have drivers.
So, it's your choice: you can either pick OS X, with its limited hardware support, or you can pick Linux, which has more hardware support and gives you the option of spending additional time to get quirky hardware to work.
Add to that the cruel twist of LOTS of documentation where little is needed!
If you call a flimsy picture book on "how to set up your iMac" "LOTS of documentation"; if you really want documentation on your Mac, you have to go out and buy books. If you want documentation on your Linux systems, you can get gigabytes on-line, and bookshelves full of documentation at all levels.
If you want an OS that "just works", Linux is actually a better choice: no drivers to install when you get new Linux-compatible hardware (they are included in the distribution) and no applications to install (they are included in the distribution). Apple should be as scared as Microsoft.
My big issue with PHP is maintainability-
True: a lot of big PHP packages look awful and can't be touched without falling apart.
Sadly, the same is true of a lot of big software packages written in other languages.
The solution? Hire better programmers or keep your software small and simple. In fact, the former will likely result in the latter.
blow off any MVC separation
I think it's an article of faith, not fact, that MVC contributes anything to maintainability.
I don't see any part of the article addressing how PHP can benefit the developer facing real issues of large scale web development
It does: the author talks about how PHP forces you to use scalable mechanisms for state management (in contrast to, say, Java).
or the maintence challenge of larger code bases on complex sites
Well, PHP generally requires much less code than Java to get the same task done, so that's another advantage for PHP.
One thing Java does well is portability ("the right tool for the job")
But Java isn't the right tool for the job when developing for multiple platforms. When I write software for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh using something like wxWindows or Qt, I know I can always make it work on all three platforms; in the worst case, I just add a little bit of platform specific code until whatever was wrong in the toolkit gets fixed. With Java, when the Java implementation doesn't work right on some platform, I'm stuck until Sun eventually gets around to fixing the problem, which may be months later, years later, or never.
From the point of view of writing for multiple platforms, Java is a disaster: it's a tool that works sometimes for cross-platform development, but you won't know whether it can get the job done until you try.
The legality of Mono along with it's incomplete implementation of C# make is pretty unsuitable for anything.
If you are willing to put up with the "legality of Java", I don't see why you have any problems with the "legality of Mono". Sun has numerous patents on Java, Sun owns most of the specifications (yes, even specifications coming out of the JCP), and if you as much as look at the specifications, you have looked at Sun intellectual property. I'll take an ANSI and ECMA standard together with a complete set of open source APIs over that any day.
As for the "completeness", Mono's C# implementation is complete and Mono gives you complete set of APIs that are not based on Microsoft's APIs. At this point, it looks like Microsoft wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they were foolish enough to challenge Mono. And that's a whole lot better than one can say about anything Java-related.
How so? Our national budget is greater, our GDP numbers are higher -- in fact, per capita, only Luxembourg ranks higher than the U.S.
GDP is a lousy measure of wealth; if you do want to look at numbers, you have to take into account national and personal debt, quality of life indexes, income disparities, etc.
They can blame us for being devils and oppressors, and I'm sure they believe it 100% [...] but that doesn't change the fact that underneath it all, they see us as the rich people whose destruction would free up wealth for themselves.
People in the middle east may or may not be envious of our wealth, but they are angry at the US (meaning, the US government) because the US government is responsible for creating and keeping in power people like the Shah and Saddam Hussein.
For enterprise applications, sensible people should use something higher level than either C/C++ or Java.
Have a look at your Linux installation. Do you even have a Java runtime installed? What are the dependencies when you try to remove them? Chances are good that, even if you happen to have a Java runtime installed, you can remove it without losing any functionality you use. Compare that with, say, Perl.
Unless you have a rather unusual and specific need (Tomcat, JSP, Java homework problems, you probably will never need Java on your Linux system.
It's true that people have started a lot of projects in Java: there has been a huge flurry of "X-in-Java", where "X" is any existing piece of software, but few of those projects have been successful. And most Java projects that have yielded something useful are just Java projects to produce tools for Java programming, rather than anything any normal user might want to use.
Which is why a Java shell is needed. Everything runs inside the shell's VM, so there is no need to load the VM for each command.
And how is that going to work with C/C++ programs? How is that going to do signal handling? Environment variables? Pipes?
Strictly speaking, gcj is not "Java", as defined by Sun.
But a more serious problem is that Java lacks the signal handling, terminal control, and other features that people expect of high-quality command line programs.
So, yes, you can write some command line programs in Java, using gcj, and get decent performance. I have done it. But using Java still limits you pretty severely compared to other languages, gcj or not.
Why not put aside the additional effort of writing portable C, C++ etc etc, and just get on with fulfilling the specs by using... Java?
Because there is not necessarily any "additional effort". Java makes some things easier and many other things a lot harder than C++.
Fortunately, you can have all the advantages Java gives you over C++ without many of its limitations, by using C#.
about the possible merits of open-sourcing Java vs the market's demand for continuing compatibility
...), several incompatible 3D APIs, incompatible and incomplete implementations (Sun's, gcj, etc.), several incompatible levels (J2SE, J2ME, J2EE, ...), and on and on. Even among Java implementations based on Sun's code, there are wild incompatibilities. C# and Mono are futher incompatible branches off the Java tree. Open sourcing Java could have reduced those incompatibilities because people wouldn't have had to reinvent the wheel just in order to get around Sun's licensing restrictions; something like Swing, for example, would have died its well-deserved death early on, instead of being kept alive artificially by Sun.
That phrasing suggests that open sourcing would have threatened compatibility, but the exact opposite would have been the case: under Sun's processes, Java has fallen apart: several different toolkits (AWT, Swing, SWT,
Of course, why any of this is worth worrying about anymore, I don't understand. Java has failed on all its promises: its promise to become a platform-independent way of delivering applications via the Internet, its promise of becoming a universal client development language, and even its promise of becoming a good server-side development language. Java hangs on in education, but as Pascal shows, that doesn't mean much. And some big corporations with too much money still try to use Java for "enterprise systems", but you can sell those guys anything.
That's why Switzerland and Sweden don't factor in. They don't have nearly the wealth, visibility, or influence that the U.S. has.
The Swiss are quite a bit wealthier than Americans.
But you're absolutely right that the Swiss don't have the visibility: that's the point, after all. The US sticks out because US politicians meddle in just about every conflict around the world where a profit is to be made or influence to be gained. (By chance, that may sometimes also align with humanitarian interests or just causes, but often it clearly does not.)
The Middle East is not a resource-rich region,
The Middle East (and in particular the nations where terrorism comes from) are enormously resource rich. It's exactly the disparity between their wealth of resources and the poverty of their populations that causes people to get angry. And the US is propping up the regimes that run those countries.
and its culture is not built on the same individualist foundations.
Those people want the same freedoms you want--they just happen to believe that the US is preventing them from getting them. Think about it for a moment: the US is making politicial and military deals with monarchies and dictators in the Middle East. In some cases, the US has even thrown out democratic governments and replaced them with dictators because it suited US interests.
The US ousted Iran's democratically elected president, destroyed Iran's democracy, and replaced it with a brutal dictatorship.
But there are several points to keep in mind:
Linux being configurable to look like Windows is a necessary evil for now. When Windows marketshare has declined sufficiently, common Linux GUIs can say good bye to Windows and go their own ways.
Lies and hipocrasy are common in all cultures, it's just the west that practices self flagilation on the issue.
As well we should. Maybe you would be happy to live under a lying dictator as long as he brings home the bacon, but I want to live in a free and democratic society, with a strict separation of religion and politics, and with rational decisions based on accurate information.
The only way to avoid being a target of terrorists is to be so weak that you are irrelevant to world affairs, but that also means you are too weak to make changes you want.
In the long term, the way to avoid being the target of terrorists is to make sure that people around the world have the same freedoms and wealth as we do. And our record on that count is pretty mixed.
In the short term, the way to gain friends around the world is to behave consistently and justly, and our record on that count is also quite mixed.