For me, Eclipse far exceeds Visual Studio. Perhaps this is because I don't develop products which use Microsoft technologies.
I, too, have heard that Visual Studio is the best, and I was forced to use it a few times (VS6), for school, to develop console-based C applications (to help my friends). But I personally didn't like the IDE at all. I used Dev-C++ at home at the time, and it was exactly what I needed. Now, I use Eclipse mainly, because of its better tools and extensibility.
I haven't tried Visual Studio.NET, nor do I intend to. However, your post proves my point - that IDE preferences are mainly subjective, and thus not a good point for which to base a survey on.
Firstly, the survey comprised of asking executives questions about various issues, rather than focusing plainly on statistics. Moreover, DiDio added that companies usually did not keep track of the operating costs, and yet the study sought to equate the costs of running Windows with that of running Linux.
And, according to the article that detailed the survey, developing applications and securing servers were the two major cost differences. DiDio highlighted Visual Studio as a boon for Windows users in developing software, while completely forgetting IDEs that exist on Linux which help development, and are far better than Visual Studio.
To most Linux users, and those in the know, that reeks of bias. Most executives would be more familiar with Windows systems than Linux systems, because of their experience with the former. Moreover, it is highly likely that executives wouldn't have heard about Eclipse or KDevelop as much as Visual Studio, simply because of marketing reasons.
DiDio, herself, added that Microsoft's shift to a monthly security update cycle and increased efforts to combat security issues were the main drivers behind its new ratings. Linux's security program is not trumpeted as loudly as Microsoft's "Patch Tuesday" is.
She deserved the criticism for not pointing out these obvious flaws. Whether the "extremists" were a bit too radical is another case altogether.
How is someone half way across the world supposed to know if you're Amish? If they kept information about your lifestyle, you'd find that to be an invasion of privacy. I'd doubt anyone in Slashdot, much less Pune, India, would have guessed you were Amish.
If it's unlikely Congress will pass a law to help its own citizens protect their privacy, that's a reason to stop voting for those guys, and not a reason to stop outsourcing.
So they should start aborting outsourcing attempts because the US doesn't have data privacy laws?
Rather than phoning up your banks and finding out where your information is ending up, which can be a tedious process, shouldn't you be phoning up your congress representatives and asking them to enact laws which provide for your privacy?
Assuming that the editors did not point out that they were Indian, I'm quite sure that the trolls would be able to put 2 and 2 together and figure it out.
Racism has nothing to do with the dissemination of information, but more to do with the lack thereof.
I never said these emerging countries were hot because of a lack of IP laws and protections. I actually said:
No, IP is not needed to pull nations up. It would be nice, but it's clearly not a requirement.
Technology-wise, there might be little, if anything, truly original coming out of these countries. But that has more to do with the fact that these countries have been stuck in lower-order industries like agriculture and manufacturing for decades. Top that off with the fact that the education levels in these countries are still quite low, relative to the US and Europe.
However, over time, especially with Asia's affinity towards science and engineering, we will see more innovation from these countries, with or without IP laws.
China hasn't generated significant innovative art or technology, recently anyway, because the main means of sustenance was manufacturing.
That is changing now, but that doesn't mean that IP is necessary for developing countries to progress, as Schwartz believes.
Both China and India, unlike the US and Europe, have to deal with a large portion of their populations being in the primary and secondary industries, where innovation is unlikely.
IP law will only maintain the status quo, with the West providing the innovations (due to the relatively high level of education and number of people in tertiary industries), and China and India providing the cheap labor to produce the goods.
India's disregard for pharmaceutical patents has enabled India's doctors and pharmaceutical companies to provide cheaper alternatives to health care. This is so successful that Americans and Europeans are flocking there to get quality medical care at a cheaper rate. India's disregard for patents has progressed the medical industry there by decades.
Unfortunately, patents are now gaining acceptance in India and China, to a certain degree.
It's partially due to Western pressure however, as both Western governments and Western companies are requesting intellectual property protection, which is something both India and China are gladly giving, as they face the risk of losing investment. Case in point: Apple forced an Indian site to give up hosting PlayFair, IIRC, even though India didn't have any DMCA-like laws which criminalized the use or creation of something like PlayFair.
As for Sun, I guess, as the saying goes, no publicity is bad publicity.
Perhaps more interestingly, Sun is trying to ally itself with the open-source community by going up against one of its pillars, the GPL. And this is right after squabbling with RedHat.
Schwartz desperately needs a copy of Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people."
Economies and nations need intellectual property (IP) to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Interesting. The world's hottest economy right now is China, which has a poor record when it comes to IP. Other emerging nations, such as India, Indonesia and Brazil also have poor IP records.
No, IP is not needed to pull nations up. It would be nice, but it's clearly not a requirement.
I know there is a group of developers who will continue to maintain Seamonkey. I happen to be one of them.
However, my point was that ignoring loyal users is not the sole domain of non-free software vendors, as the OP seemed to imply. Even though open-source developers can continue to develop a product after it is no longer supported, it still doesn't make it right.
Rather than marketshare, software vendors, both open- and closed-source, should be focusing on their loyal customers/users. However, they are managed by business school graduates, to whom, profit is everything.
Although it may be offtopic, but non-free software vendors aren't the only ones dropping support for popular products and disappointing their loyal users. Mozilla recently did that with Seamonkey, so that they could focus on Firefox.
User loyalty means nothing anymore. It's all about the bottom-line.
And yet many users respond to long 419 scams and 30-word emails about enlarging penises. As the saying goes, "size doesn't matter; it's what you do with it that does."
Right. In any other industry. But Symbian is in the same industry - software. They, both Symbian and its competitors, don't have to make it that extra bit secure, because they can patch it later on.
People are used to their software having flaws. People are not going to ask Symbian or the phone manufacturers to change their phones because of a virus, just as those same people don't ask Dell or HP to change their PCs for them when they get hit by the latest adware from Golden Palace.
Knowing all that, I, too, would release a marginally insecure product to get marketshare. It's not right, but I can understand.
Perhaps they decided the extra time and effort required to make it that much more secure wasn't worth the wait. Decisions such as these are based more on marketing and business than IT and security.
I'm sure we'd all love to have super-secure devices and software. But that takes time. And competitors whose products are not as secure would steal your market-share. Do you think users are going to wait months to use a product with similar functionality but that is 10% more secure?
Neither did I. It's about the bottomline. Plain and simple.
It depends. If the malware authors get their hands on the patches before the vast majority of users do, and manage to figure out what was patched, you would theoretically see an upsurge in the number of exploits, assuming that the vulnerability which was patched was exploitable.
With the slow move towards 3G services, it is a given that exploits will rise, and malware will spread faster.
I, for one, will stick with 2.xG services and phones, because all I really want is a phone.
Perhaps, but it's not a good strategy. They did it recently with forcing people to upgrade to MSN6.
If they continue forcing users to upgrade all the time, they would lose users to other services, like Jabber, ICQ, AOL and YahooIM, due to frustration.
ICQ's networks still work with older versions of the client. I'm currently using 2003b.
How are they going to block a codec? Perhaps they could fudge the codec a bit, but that would break compatibility with MSN Messenger 6, frustrating their own customers. In any case, the differences in assembly code between MSN7 and MSN6 would be seen quite quickly, and the revelant changes could be made to libmimic.
Perhaps they could ban non-MSN clients, but that hasn't worked too well in the past.
I don't think MSN would try something like that. After all, they're all about interoperability right?
The panel was formed to save government agencies the time and trouble of running open tenders. It was also formed to provide Linux-based services.
Yes, perhaps this may lock out smaller companies or organizations, but it does promote open source usage by making it simpler to get.
The main goal, as I see it, is to break the Microsoft stranglehold. If it requires the use of larger companies at the expense of smaller ones, so be it. If Linux captures a large share of the market, through these designated companies, then smaller players can come in and compete directly based on technical merit.
If Ubuntu is better than SuSE is, let it compete against SuSE. But Ubuntu doesn't have much chance to compete against the might of Microsoft without the help of Novell, IBM and others.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, Eclipse far exceeds Visual Studio. Perhaps this is because I don't develop products which use Microsoft technologies.
.NET, nor do I intend to. However, your post proves my point - that IDE preferences are mainly subjective, and thus not a good point for which to base a survey on.
I, too, have heard that Visual Studio is the best, and I was forced to use it a few times (VS6), for school, to develop console-based C applications (to help my friends). But I personally didn't like the IDE at all. I used Dev-C++ at home at the time, and it was exactly what I needed. Now, I use Eclipse mainly, because of its better tools and extensibility.
I haven't tried Visual Studio
IDEs which I mentioned have extensibility with well-documented APIs, support numerous languages and platforms and are a lot cheaper.
Perhaps Eclipse is not as good as Visual Studio for Microsoft technologies, but overall, it is better.
Firstly, the survey comprised of asking executives questions about various issues, rather than focusing plainly on statistics. Moreover, DiDio added that companies usually did not keep track of the operating costs, and yet the study sought to equate the costs of running Windows with that of running Linux.
And, according to the article that detailed the survey, developing applications and securing servers were the two major cost differences. DiDio highlighted Visual Studio as a boon for Windows users in developing software, while completely forgetting IDEs that exist on Linux which help development, and are far better than Visual Studio.
To most Linux users, and those in the know, that reeks of bias. Most executives would be more familiar with Windows systems than Linux systems, because of their experience with the former. Moreover, it is highly likely that executives wouldn't have heard about Eclipse or KDevelop as much as Visual Studio, simply because of marketing reasons.
DiDio, herself, added that Microsoft's shift to a monthly security update cycle and increased efforts to combat security issues were the main drivers behind its new ratings. Linux's security program is not trumpeted as loudly as Microsoft's "Patch Tuesday" is.
She deserved the criticism for not pointing out these obvious flaws. Whether the "extremists" were a bit too radical is another case altogether.
How is someone half way across the world supposed to know if you're Amish? If they kept information about your lifestyle, you'd find that to be an invasion of privacy. I'd doubt anyone in Slashdot, much less Pune, India, would have guessed you were Amish.
If it's unlikely Congress will pass a law to help its own citizens protect their privacy, that's a reason to stop voting for those guys, and not a reason to stop outsourcing.
So they should start aborting outsourcing attempts because the US doesn't have data privacy laws?
Rather than phoning up your banks and finding out where your information is ending up, which can be a tedious process, shouldn't you be phoning up your congress representatives and asking them to enact laws which provide for your privacy?
Assuming that the editors did not point out that they were Indian, I'm quite sure that the trolls would be able to put 2 and 2 together and figure it out.
Racism has nothing to do with the dissemination of information, but more to do with the lack thereof.
For more information about these medical tourists:
Surgeries, Side Trips for 'Medical Tourists'
Doctor Visits
If you want more, Google "medical tourists"
I never said these emerging countries were hot because of a lack of IP laws and protections. I actually said:
No, IP is not needed to pull nations up. It would be nice, but it's clearly not a requirement.
Technology-wise, there might be little, if anything, truly original coming out of these countries. But that has more to do with the fact that these countries have been stuck in lower-order industries like agriculture and manufacturing for decades. Top that off with the fact that the education levels in these countries are still quite low, relative to the US and Europe.
However, over time, especially with Asia's affinity towards science and engineering, we will see more innovation from these countries, with or without IP laws.
China hasn't generated significant innovative art or technology, recently anyway, because the main means of sustenance was manufacturing.
That is changing now, but that doesn't mean that IP is necessary for developing countries to progress, as Schwartz believes.
Both China and India, unlike the US and Europe, have to deal with a large portion of their populations being in the primary and secondary industries, where innovation is unlikely.
IP law will only maintain the status quo, with the West providing the innovations (due to the relatively high level of education and number of people in tertiary industries), and China and India providing the cheap labor to produce the goods.
India's disregard for pharmaceutical patents has enabled India's doctors and pharmaceutical companies to provide cheaper alternatives to health care. This is so successful that Americans and Europeans are flocking there to get quality medical care at a cheaper rate. India's disregard for patents has progressed the medical industry there by decades.
Unfortunately, patents are now gaining acceptance in India and China, to a certain degree.
It's partially due to Western pressure however, as both Western governments and Western companies are requesting intellectual property protection, which is something both India and China are gladly giving, as they face the risk of losing investment. Case in point: Apple forced an Indian site to give up hosting PlayFair, IIRC, even though India didn't have any DMCA-like laws which criminalized the use or creation of something like PlayFair.
As for Sun, I guess, as the saying goes, no publicity is bad publicity.
Perhaps more interestingly, Sun is trying to ally itself with the open-source community by going up against one of its pillars, the GPL. And this is right after squabbling with RedHat.
Schwartz desperately needs a copy of Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people."
Economies and nations need intellectual property (IP) to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Interesting. The world's hottest economy right now is China, which has a poor record when it comes to IP. Other emerging nations, such as India, Indonesia and Brazil also have poor IP records.
No, IP is not needed to pull nations up. It would be nice, but it's clearly not a requirement.
I know there is a group of developers who will continue to maintain Seamonkey. I happen to be one of them.
However, my point was that ignoring loyal users is not the sole domain of non-free software vendors, as the OP seemed to imply. Even though open-source developers can continue to develop a product after it is no longer supported, it still doesn't make it right.
Rather than marketshare, software vendors, both open- and closed-source, should be focusing on their loyal customers/users. However, they are managed by business school graduates, to whom, profit is everything.
Although it may be offtopic, but non-free software vendors aren't the only ones dropping support for popular products and disappointing their loyal users. Mozilla recently did that with Seamonkey, so that they could focus on Firefox.
User loyalty means nothing anymore. It's all about the bottom-line.
And yet many users respond to long 419 scams and 30-word emails about enlarging penises. As the saying goes, "size doesn't matter; it's what you do with it that does."
Right. In any other industry. But Symbian is in the same industry - software. They, both Symbian and its competitors, don't have to make it that extra bit secure, because they can patch it later on.
People are used to their software having flaws. People are not going to ask Symbian or the phone manufacturers to change their phones because of a virus, just as those same people don't ask Dell or HP to change their PCs for them when they get hit by the latest adware from Golden Palace.
Knowing all that, I, too, would release a marginally insecure product to get marketshare. It's not right, but I can understand.
Perhaps they decided the extra time and effort required to make it that much more secure wasn't worth the wait. Decisions such as these are based more on marketing and business than IT and security.
I'm sure we'd all love to have super-secure devices and software. But that takes time. And competitors whose products are not as secure would steal your market-share. Do you think users are going to wait months to use a product with similar functionality but that is 10% more secure?
Neither did I. It's about the bottomline. Plain and simple.
I wonder if this is a result of viruses being "pussified" or as a result of improved security for the platforms.
It's a good thing viruses aren't that powerful anymore. It'd be nice to see viruses having EULAs.
It depends. If the malware authors get their hands on the patches before the vast majority of users do, and manage to figure out what was patched, you would theoretically see an upsurge in the number of exploits, assuming that the vulnerability which was patched was exploitable.
With the slow move towards 3G services, it is a given that exploits will rise, and malware will spread faster.
I, for one, will stick with 2.xG services and phones, because all I really want is a phone.
Perhaps, but it's not a good strategy. They did it recently with forcing people to upgrade to MSN6.
If they continue forcing users to upgrade all the time, they would lose users to other services, like Jabber, ICQ, AOL and YahooIM, due to frustration.
ICQ's networks still work with older versions of the client. I'm currently using 2003b.
How are they going to block a codec? Perhaps they could fudge the codec a bit, but that would break compatibility with MSN Messenger 6, frustrating their own customers. In any case, the differences in assembly code between MSN7 and MSN6 would be seen quite quickly, and the revelant changes could be made to libmimic.
Perhaps they could ban non-MSN clients, but that hasn't worked too well in the past.
I don't think MSN would try something like that. After all, they're all about interoperability right?
The panel was formed to save government agencies the time and trouble of running open tenders. It was also formed to provide Linux-based services.
Yes, perhaps this may lock out smaller companies or organizations, but it does promote open source usage by making it simpler to get.
The main goal, as I see it, is to break the Microsoft stranglehold. If it requires the use of larger companies at the expense of smaller ones, so be it. If Linux captures a large share of the market, through these designated companies, then smaller players can come in and compete directly based on technical merit.
If Ubuntu is better than SuSE is, let it compete against SuSE. But Ubuntu doesn't have much chance to compete against the might of Microsoft without the help of Novell, IBM and others.
Sylvester Stallone?
has an informative article outlining the value of several of the IT security certifications. Read it here
to see get the real facts from MS for once.