I reckon it's more likely to be the notably British attribute of responding to polls in ways that end up producing totally meaningless results. This is after all a nation wose government had to recognise Jedi Knights as being a valid religion because so many people claimed to be one during the last national census.
I wonder therefore how the results would have looked if they'd provided "The Flying Spaghetti Monster" as one option in the belief section, and "How much beer a person can drink in five minutes" under what should be taught in schools. It is I think likely that a significant proportion of British people would opt for both of the silly options, thereby proving once and for all that most Brits' answers to questions by pollsters really mean "fuck off and leave me alone, you nosy bastard".
Get her a real puppy. Like the Aibo, they look cute, act cute, and can be trained. Unlike the Aibo, they crap and throw up everywhere. Mopping up crap and puke will give her an incentive for puppy training that she just wouldn't have had with an Aibo.
"Are you saying there are no GUI designers on the market for Java?"
No, I am saying there aren't any good ones that _come with the IDE_. Yes, one can hunt around, and probably find a decent Java UI design tool, but VS already has one, so there is no need to waste time searching for and evaluating them until something decent is found.
"Sounds like man who has never used one. [a Java GUI builder]".
I've used at least half a dozen, and they all left a lot to be desired.
"But like I said designing the GUI is a tiny percentage of writing the app."
Sounds like a man who doesn't build client-side code very often, which would explain your assertion that Java GUI builders are satisfactory.
How much of an application's total programming time is spent on the UI depends entirely on the application. Front-ends to databases for example (a very common sort of application) are little more than UIs, so 90% of their total coding time will be UI-related; by contrast, the database manager that said application interfaces with may have little or no UI code in it. You cannot therefore make a blanket statement about the importance of a good UI builder without knowing what people are expecting to do with it.
"Hell writing the app is a tiny percentage of the total software lifecycle. Maintenance and debugging is where the most effort goes to."
Indeed. But this is something that is at best tangentially related to what is being discussed because it is a project management issue rather than an IDE/framework issue. Both VS /.NET and Eclipse / Java can be used to write un-maintainable crud if a project is poorly managed.
""DOT-NET also has a huge library, and there are tons of open source frameworks and helpers for native Windows API programming.""
"About a tenth of what's available for Java I'd say. That's not scientific of course but yea right about there."
Java has ten times more than anything else because there are at least ten different variants on similar solutions to the same problem. Take for example frameworks for building web applications: in addition to Sun's own stuff, a quick Google search revealed a page with no less than 36 others, all of which do pretty much the same thing, and I doubt it was an exhaustive list. And while choice is indeed good, it can also be extremely bewildering for someone who has to select one as the basis for an application. So yes, there is a lot for Java, but much of it simply (a) does something that a dozen similar things already do, and (b) is present in the.NET framework anyway.
1. Full integration with native Windows technologies without the need for bridges, JNI, etc..NET needs a bridge to interact with non managed code just similar to JNI.
""2. True drag-and-drop programming for both GUI apps and web apps.""
Eclipse does not have it. Like just about every IDE released in the last decade (or more), Eclipse supports plug-ins. Some plug-ins do this (often in conjunction with yet more plug-ins), but with varying degrees of capability and reliability.
""3. WebForms can easily be converted to WinForms and vice-versa.""
"Yup there are similar things for java."
Things available _for_ Java is not the same as things already being in both.NET and the VS IDE. Not everybody wants to pay people to hunt down, evaluate, test, and recommend one of the multitude of things that are available _for_ something when they can get the whole kit and kaboodle in one integrated package.
I have seen two solutions to using RMI applications with SOAP that do not require significant rewrites. One is RMI over IIOP, which is a heavyweight and clumsy system with a number of negative points. The other is a rather good open source library that was written to solve the problems with RMI / IIOP, which it does very well. However, this woul
"they are arguing it's the same as burning a whole stack of "fair use" copies of a CD to CD-R and then leaving them on your doorstep for anyone to take."
You can already be sued for having large numbers of unauthorised physical media copies. They don't have to prove you distributed them to anyone: merely having them is considered proof of the intent to do so. This is I think what the **AAs would consider to be a logical extension of such situations to the Internet, where one does not need multiple physical copies of something to distribute it to thousands of others.
I also agree with your analysis of the "regardless of the legality of the file" part. What they mean by this is that while you may be entitled to copy files from a CD or whatever onto your computer for personal listening purposes under "fair use" provisions, this does not mean that you can then make those files available to others who would not be covered by said fair use provisions. In essence, the situation is similar to that of radio stations: they can copy from physical media to tape or whatever for the purposes of constructing programmes etc. under fair use provisions, but broadcasting the results requires specific licenses without which the station is operating illegally (hence the term "pirate radio").
All the rest of the stuff about them trying to stop people from distributing their own original content is yet another case of Slashdot tin-foil hat syndrome. Suing for breech of copyright is something that the copyright holder has to do, and if that copyright holder is not a member of the **AA, then the **AA cannot sue anyone. This situation still exists in countries where copyright violations are criminal offenses: there has to be a complaint to proceed with a prosecution, and any recording industry representatives would be making said complaint _on behalf_ of the copyright holder. If the copyright belongs to you, the simple expedient of saying "I don't wish to press charges against myself" will both result in them being dropped, and any future recording industry complaints being treated less seriously by the authorities.
Copyright laws are, when push comes to shove, a lot like trespass laws. The owner of a property has the right to refuse entry to anyone they choose with the exception of those with statutory exemptions, and can invoke trespass laws if the prohibited person persists in entering. However, they do not have the right to refuse entry to someone else's property unless the owner of that property allows them to (e.g. asking your neighbour to watch over your house while you are on vacation). They may be able to get somebody arrested for entering property that they do not own, but any charges will be dropped if the actual owner wishes it.
"It has many advantages. A better more productive IDE is just one."
Better is subjective. And in what way are Java IDEs more productive? Certainly not for building GUI apps, for example.
"There is also the huge library, tons of open source frameworks and helpers"
DOT-NET also has a huge library, and there are tons of open source frameworks and helpers for native Windows API programming.
"a sane GUI programming paradigm"
Which is not well leveraged by any tools. Java GUI builders are still primitive compared with what was available in VB 1.0 and Delphi 1.0, and editing said GUIs once any builders you can find have finished with them can be painful and error-prone.
I will now list some of the advantages that VS with.NET (I use.NET as a comparison because it is more comparable with Java than for example Visual C++ using the WinAPI) has over Java for Windows-only projects. C# is assumed, again because it is comparable to Java:
1. Full integration with native Windows technologies without the need for bridges, JNI, etc. 2. True drag-and-drop programming for both GUI apps and web apps. 3. WebForms can easily be converted to WinForms and vice-versa. 4. Completely transparent SOAP via.NET remoting. 5. Supports the latest Windows technologies the moment they appear. 6. Provides in-built mechanisms for directly accessing Windows APIs, external libraries written in C, C++, etc. 7. Mixed language projects can be managed and debugged from within the same IDE. 8. IDE can build and test Windows Installer Files. 9. Everything required is available from a single source, which greatly simplifies the process of ensuring that the entire development system is kept up to date. 10. Build, test, and deploy Compact Framework apps for mobile devices from within the IDE.
The above are a few things I thought of immediately -- there are others. Note that I am something of a Java fan, and have been working with it virtually since it appeared, but this means I am also more than aware of its flaws, most of which derive from the fact that (like Windows) it grew organically from an initially simple foundation instead of being designed..NET on the other hand was produced by a company which had already written Java implementations, frameworks, and IDEs, and therefore had the advantage of hindsight when building.NET, so it has a more holistic "feel" than Java's collection of what were once disparate, add-in technologies that progressively get folded in to J2EE. Of course,.NET also has many flaws, the primary one being that it is from Microsoft, but when combined with VS, it can do many of the things that J2EE is capable of in a simpler and more consistent way.
"That can't be it because eclipse and intellij (as well as delphi, jdeveloper, jbuilder etc) all run on windows."
I said dominant IDE, not only IDE. Eclipse and IntelliJ are aimed at Java programmers, which MS isn't really interested in anymore. Yes, you can use Eclipse for other languages, but "can use" and "is being widely used" are not the same thing at all. Delphi has been losing market share for years, largely due to Borland's own mismanagement (I know this because I have been programming in Delphi since version 1 appeared); JDeveloper is Java again; and the same for JBuilder (which is all but dead as a separate IDE).
The only product from your list which is in any way comparable to current versions of Visual Studio is Delphi, which like VS, includes tools for building both native Windows applications and.NET stuff, and has a true drag-and-drop programming environment. All the others a Java tools, and most of them are mainly aimed at those writing server-side code using struts, EJBs, etc., with at best rudimentary support for GUI clients.
"THe real reason is zealotry."
It is a reason, but not the only one. There are many others.
"MS shops only use MS products and MS languages."
Not all shops are pure MS shops, however. And a lot of non-pure shops use VS for their Windows programming.
"They don't do honest evaluations of what is out there and choose the best product. They think that no matter what the problem is the MS tool is the only one suitable."
There used to be a time when I would have unreservedly recommended Delphi over VS for Windows programming, but that that time has passed. I've watched Borland release a succession of buggy, overpriced products and treat their customers like shit for too many years to have any enthusiasm left for them or their tools, so what's realistically left? Java has no real advantages for Windows programmers unless want its cross-platform capabilities (most don't), so where are the better tools for people to evaluate?
I'm also impressed by the valiant way they stood up to the Chinese government's demands that they censor search results until they'd had time to write some marketing spin telling us all why implementing an enforced censorship policy is not in fact evil. Not all companies would have gone that extra mile to protect peoples' rights: MS and Yahoo for example caved without even thinking about such an illuminating press release, let alone actually writing one.
Michael Moore has stated that he has no objection to people downloading F9/11 for personal use. He may have many faults, but this is a refreshing change from the attitudes of most commercial film makers.
"some poor old lady probably lost her house because she couldn't afford the property taxes to pay for your adolescent warm fuzzy"
That poor old lady would have lost her home irrespective of whether libraries were being funded or not. Tax levels are usually based on what whoever is levying them thinks they can get away with charging -- public services are used as a justification for making people pay taxes rather than being the reason for it. This is why tax cuts never seem to be accompanied by wage cuts or compulsory redundancies for the people who are in charge.
"The liars at microsoft don't have a single leg to stand upon,"
They have several very powerful ones, each with $ signs tattooed on it. These lead to a big pair of buttocks which also have $ signs printed on them, ripe for kissing by corrupt politicos (i.e. most of them).
"He states it plainly that MS uses its legislative influence to try to derail any plans that would decrease the overall revenue stream of MS."
Unfortunately, with the corruption level of politicians in general (and I am not referring to US politicians in particular here, because they are no worse than most, and a lot better than some), it would be newsworthy if an entity with Microsoft's vast wealth _wasn't_ buying legislative influence. As things stand however, this is definitely a case of "move on, nothing to see here".
That together with how long something is in use. Some bugs don't get discovered until certain sets of initially divergent factors converge, e.g. the buffer overflow problems in certain bits of widely deployed software (and I am not pointing the finger at MS in particular here), some of which only became apparent to user communities and programmers after they'd already been exploited.
"IF we are buying the license, then we should have the ability to sell the license to someone else."
Why should this be the case? You pay for a driving license, and are not allowed to sell it to someone else. You pay for credit cards and are not allowed to sell them to someone else. You pay for a meal that you eat, and cannot re-sell it. You pay for a holiday, and cannot re-sell it. There are many things in life that we pay sometimes large amounts for and cannot re-sell.
"Look, if you purchase a car, and your car company expects you to pay insurance to protect your car, but suddenly the state tries to claim that they actually own your car and that you only can purchase a license to drive it, and to top it off you don't even own the license, I'm sorry but thats just robbery."
People are aware of the terms of the license before they buy. It is therefore more like paying to use a car you already know is owned by the state, and then moaning about the fact that it is owned by the state.
"If you pay for a license but don't gain any rights, if you buy an ipod and purchase the music, but somehow you don't have the right to resell the music, then what are you purchasing?"
You are paying for precisely what you agreed to when you made the purchase. Caveat emptor: if you don't like the terms, then spend your money on something else. iPods can be fed all the music they can hold without having to buy _anything_ from the iTunes store, and there are plenty of alternative music players as well.
"When the time comes where we have to buy licenses to breathe air and drink water, and some company comes along and strips you of your license, well I guess you'll just die."
You already pay for drinking water, and are probably paying for clean, breathable air (not that you're guaranteed to get it!).
"It's one thing to allow the traditional recording industries to exist, by buying their music on ipod, but its another to give them the right to strip you of ownership"
You have never owned _anything_ except the media that copyrighted materials reside on. When you buy a book, you own the paper it is printed on and the ink used to print it, period. When you buy a DVD or CD, you own the plastic disk. The information they contain is not yours, and never was yours, and the media that you do own tell you this. Furthermore, they tell you that they are _licensed_ for domestic use, and then list a whole bunch of things you cannot do with them. Thus, you can sell the paper and ink or the plastic disk, but only if _any copies made from them by you are destroyed_, once again emphasising the fact that you own the medium, not what is on it; by selling or otherwise passing the medium on to another, you also pass all rights to them, and cannot therefore legally read, view, or listen to any content that they contain.
With stuff bought from the iTunes store, there is no physical medium to own, so you are _only_ buying the right to watch or listen to some content, as has always been the case with content distributed on physical media. And because there is no physical medium that you own, _there is nothing you can legally sell_, because you cannot transfer the license to use content without the media that the content came on when you bought it. The iPod and content situation thus is a lot like the the one that pertains to TV hard-disk recordings of pay-per-view cable and satellite channels: you are allowed to watch that recording, but you cannot sell it to someone else along with the recording device that contains it. The iPod is yours, but what's contained on the iPod isn't, and cannot therefore be sold without the express permission of the copyright holder.
"If they refuse to sit at the table, then Apple and consumers will eventually replace them with companies who do respect the right to sell Ipods on Ebay"
Apple won't as long as Jobs is in charge. He used to own Pixar, and is now Disney's biggest shareholder, so he's running an electronics company with an entrenched media interest, j
"music, in quality and quantity, will not change in the least."
Just like blogs have left us saturated in top quality literature and journalism, and the Creative Commons is chock full of artwork and music that puts the stuff those greedy money-grubbing professionals do to shame. With the torrents being so full of home videos and songs recorded with GarageBand, it's a wonder there's any bandwidth left for ripped-off commercial movies and music!
And those scratches and the dent in one corner are there because this is a special designer iPod that ships with a "worn" look, just like those jeans that are sold with faded denim and strategically-placed tears.
"If you want a current example, it is illegal to create a program to interoperate with the iPod."
It is not. There are many programs that legally interoperate with iPods: the illegality would lie in bypassing Apple's FairPlay DRM to make unprotected copies, and FairPlay is only present in stuff bought from the iTunes store. This is exactly the same situation that applies to Microsoft's various DRM-encumbered codecs.
"why are they always one to two years behind eclipse and intelliJ in features"
Because they can afford to be. Microsoft have the dominant IDE for the dominant OS, so they can just sit back and let others do all the R&D, confident in the fact that they can steal any good ideas a few years down the road. Customers and reviewers will lap it up like good little kitties, and the Internet will be full of blogs and whatever telling the world about the latest "innovations" in VS.
Eclipse and similar aren't a threat to MS in any shape or form, because Microsoft's programming tools are primarily a mechanism for ensuring that there are lots of applications written for Windows which cannot easily be ported to other platforms. As with the much smaller Apple, MS could easily afford to give their tools way to whoever wants them, and they have in fact started doing so with their low-end offerings -- their primary income sources lie elsewhere, and developers are one way of ensuring that those other income streams remain lucrative.
It is smaller, tool-centric companies like Borland that are suffering, because they are being squeezed between MS on the one hand, and increasingly good free, open source tools on the other. There used to be a fair number of companies successfully selling compilers, frameworks, IDEs and whatever for Windows development, but most have either disappeared or gone on to other markets, just as those who sold desktop database products did when MS Access took their markets away. The days when selling tools was profitable enough to sustain global players of any size have gone, at least on Windows, and probably everywhere else, too.
Yet another inappropriate car analogy applied to software. To add spice, I will add another set of inappropriate car analogies:
Ocelots are like cars that hunt small animals, clim trees, shit all over the place, and fuck other cars of the opposite sex.
Stomachs are like cars. You put fuel in them, and fart fumes.
Radio waves are like cars with no doors. They're there, but you can't use them to drive your kids to McDonalds.
Oceans are like cars. You can get in them, and use them to move around.
I think we need a new variant on Godwin's law which says that anyone who is guilty of car analogies in a discussion about software has their backside whacked with a large stick until they promise not to do it again.
"Now, ActiveX was the best possible at the time... JavaScript was hardly a gleam in Sun's eye"
Nothing in that phrase is correct. Firstly, JavaScript was developed by Netscape, not Sun. Secondly, it is older than browser-hosted Active-X, having been introduced in Netscape 2 in 1995, while ActiveX first appeared in IE 3 in 1996.
This means that ActiveX was not the best possible at the time. It was instead an attempt to destroy Netscape's "browser as an OS-neutral platform" strategy by tying rich web-based content to Windows. Netscape threw down the gauntlet by telling the world that browsers would make operating systems irrelevant, and MS responded, first by giving their browseraway for free, and later by making both the browser and its rich content capabilities part of their OS. It was thus Netscape that became irrelevant to Windows users, i.e. most of the people who were using personal computers.
"China can make good products, but the popular stuff in the big-box stores is pretty shit."
It would be shit irrespective of who was making it. "Cheapest product of its type" and "best product of its type" are only mutually inclusive when "only product of its type" is also true.
"It's a shame it's almost impossible to prevent stuff like this from happening without screwing the little guy who actually builds something novel and new and has his work actually stolen by someone else.@
It could be done quite simply by insisting that all patent applications be accompanied by a working prototype that demonstrably embodies what is being patented. Most of those little guys already have one, as do the bigger companies who actually produce stuff. Groups of lawyers who exist to build portfolios of submarine patents on the other hand do not, and while they could actually pay someone to develop such a prototype, doing so would run the very real risk of the paid developer patenting it before them.
Of course, the above would not eliminate things like the infamous on-click patent, but it would remove one of the major nasties from the current system by ensuring that patents were granted for inventions (albeit sometimes controversial ones), not documents describing things that do not exist.
If that's what Apple are really doing, then they can stick their Intel Macs where the sun doesn't shine. I have a Rev 1 iMac G5 that was my first Apple purchase, and I've been very pleased with it, so I previously wouldn't have hesitated to buy another Apple offering in the future. This will however change in an instant if they start pulling DRM crap that prevents me from using a computer _I buy and own_ in any way I want.
Because nobody has had any Intel Macs to play around with for very long, I'll heed the old adage and assume that this is incompetence rather than malice for the moment. I will however be watching these and other porting efforts with interest over the coming weeks. If it eventually turns out to be DRM, and there's no workaround for it, then it's likely that Apple will lose a lot more customer than just me.
Slashdot Mirror
I reckon it's more likely to be the notably British attribute of responding to polls in ways that end up producing totally meaningless results. This is after all a nation wose government had to recognise Jedi Knights as being a valid religion because so many people claimed to be one during the last national census.
I wonder therefore how the results would have looked if they'd provided "The Flying Spaghetti Monster" as one option in the belief section, and "How much beer a person can drink in five minutes" under what should be taught in schools. It is I think likely that a significant proportion of British people would opt for both of the silly options, thereby proving once and for all that most Brits' answers to questions by pollsters really mean "fuck off and leave me alone, you nosy bastard".
Get her a real puppy. Like the Aibo, they look cute, act cute, and can be trained. Unlike the Aibo, they crap and throw up everywhere. Mopping up crap and puke will give her an incentive for puppy training that she just wouldn't have had with an Aibo.
"Are you saying there are no GUI designers on the market for Java?"
.NET and Eclipse / Java can be used to write un-maintainable crud if a project is poorly managed.
.NET framework anyway.
.NET needs a bridge to interact with non managed code just similar to JNI.
.NET and the VS IDE.
.NET remoting.""
No, I am saying there aren't any good ones that _come with the IDE_. Yes, one can hunt around, and probably find a decent Java UI design tool, but VS already has one, so there is no need to waste time searching for and evaluating them until something decent is found.
"Sounds like man who has never used one. [a Java GUI builder]".
I've used at least half a dozen, and they all left a lot to be desired.
"But like I said designing the GUI is a tiny percentage of writing the app."
Sounds like a man who doesn't build client-side code very often, which would explain your assertion that Java GUI builders are satisfactory.
How much of an application's total programming time is spent on the UI depends entirely on the application. Front-ends to databases for example (a very common sort of application) are little more than UIs, so 90% of their total coding time will be UI-related; by contrast, the database manager that said application interfaces with may have little or no UI code in it. You cannot therefore make a blanket statement about the importance of a good UI builder without knowing what people are expecting to do with it.
"Hell writing the app is a tiny percentage of the total software lifecycle. Maintenance and debugging is where the most effort goes to."
Indeed. But this is something that is at best tangentially related to what is being discussed because it is a project management issue rather than an IDE/framework issue. Both VS /
""DOT-NET also has a huge library, and there are tons of open source frameworks and helpers for native Windows API programming.""
"About a tenth of what's available for Java I'd say. That's not scientific of course but yea right about there."
Java has ten times more than anything else because there are at least ten different variants on similar solutions to the same problem. Take for example frameworks for building web applications: in addition to Sun's own stuff, a quick Google search revealed a page with no less than 36 others, all of which do pretty much the same thing, and I doubt it was an exhaustive list. And while choice is indeed good, it can also be extremely bewildering for someone who has to select one as the basis for an application. So yes, there is a lot for Java, but much of it simply (a) does something that a dozen similar things already do, and (b) is present in the
1. Full integration with native Windows technologies without the need for bridges, JNI, etc.
""2. True drag-and-drop programming for both GUI apps and web apps.""
Eclipse does not have it. Like just about every IDE released in the last decade (or more), Eclipse supports plug-ins. Some plug-ins do this (often in conjunction with yet more plug-ins), but with varying degrees of capability and reliability.
""3. WebForms can easily be converted to WinForms and vice-versa.""
"Yup there are similar things for java."
Things available _for_ Java is not the same as things already being in both
Not everybody wants to pay people to hunt down, evaluate, test, and recommend one of the
multitude of things that are available _for_ something when they can get the whole kit and
kaboodle in one integrated package.
""4. Completely transparent SOAP via
"Yup"
I have seen two solutions to using RMI applications with SOAP that do not require significant rewrites. One is RMI over IIOP, which is a heavyweight and clumsy system with a number of negative points. The other is a rather good open source library that was written to solve the problems with RMI / IIOP, which it does very well. However, this woul
"they are arguing it's the same as burning a whole stack of "fair use" copies of a CD to CD-R and then leaving them on your doorstep for anyone to take."
You can already be sued for having large numbers of unauthorised physical media copies. They don't have to prove you distributed them to anyone: merely having them is considered proof of the intent to do so. This is I think what the **AAs would consider to be a logical extension of such situations to the Internet, where one does not need multiple physical copies of something to distribute it to thousands of others.
I also agree with your analysis of the "regardless of the legality of the file" part. What they mean by this is that while you may be entitled to copy files from a CD or whatever onto your computer for personal listening purposes under "fair use" provisions, this does not mean that you can then make those files available to others who would not be covered by said fair use provisions. In essence, the situation is similar to that of radio stations: they can copy from physical media to tape or whatever for the purposes of constructing programmes etc. under fair use provisions, but broadcasting the results requires specific licenses without which the station is operating illegally (hence the term "pirate radio").
All the rest of the stuff about them trying to stop people from distributing their own original content is yet another case of Slashdot tin-foil hat syndrome. Suing for breech of copyright is something that the copyright holder has to do, and if that copyright holder is not a member of the **AA, then the **AA cannot sue anyone. This situation still exists in countries where copyright violations are criminal offenses: there has to be a complaint to proceed with a prosecution, and any recording industry representatives would be making said complaint _on behalf_ of the copyright holder. If the copyright belongs to you, the simple expedient of saying "I don't wish to press charges against myself" will both result in them being dropped, and any future recording industry complaints being treated less seriously by the authorities.
Copyright laws are, when push comes to shove, a lot like trespass laws. The owner of a property has the right to refuse entry to anyone they choose with the exception of those with statutory exemptions, and can invoke trespass laws if the prohibited person persists in entering. However, they do not have the right to refuse entry to someone else's property unless the owner of that property allows them to (e.g. asking your neighbour to watch over your house while you are on vacation). They may be able to get somebody arrested for entering property that they do not own, but any charges will be dropped if the actual owner wishes it.
"It has many advantages. A better more productive IDE is just one."
.NET (I use .NET as a comparison because it is more comparable with Java than for example Visual C++ using the WinAPI) has over Java for Windows-only projects. C# is assumed, again because it is comparable to Java:
.NET remoting.
.NET on the other hand was produced by a company which had already written Java implementations, frameworks, and IDEs, and therefore had the advantage of hindsight when building .NET, so it has a more holistic "feel" than Java's collection of what were once disparate, add-in technologies that progressively get folded in to J2EE. Of course, .NET also has many flaws, the primary one being that it is from Microsoft, but when combined with VS, it can do many of the things that J2EE is capable of in a simpler and more consistent way.
Better is subjective. And in what way are Java IDEs more productive? Certainly not for building GUI apps, for example.
"There is also the huge library, tons of open source frameworks and helpers"
DOT-NET also has a huge library, and there are tons of open source frameworks and helpers for native Windows API programming.
"a sane GUI programming paradigm"
Which is not well leveraged by any tools. Java GUI builders are still primitive compared with what was available in VB 1.0 and Delphi 1.0, and editing said GUIs once any builders you can find have finished with them can be painful and error-prone.
I will now list some of the advantages that VS with
1. Full integration with native Windows technologies without the need for bridges, JNI, etc.
2. True drag-and-drop programming for both GUI apps and web apps.
3. WebForms can easily be converted to WinForms and vice-versa.
4. Completely transparent SOAP via
5. Supports the latest Windows technologies the moment they appear.
6. Provides in-built mechanisms for directly accessing Windows APIs, external libraries
written in C, C++, etc.
7. Mixed language projects can be managed and debugged from within the same IDE.
8. IDE can build and test Windows Installer Files.
9. Everything required is available from a single source, which greatly simplifies the process of ensuring that the entire development system is kept up to date.
10. Build, test, and deploy Compact Framework apps for mobile devices from within the IDE.
The above are a few things I thought of immediately -- there are others. Note that I am something of a Java fan, and have been working with it virtually since it appeared, but this means I am also more than aware of its flaws, most of which derive from the fact that (like Windows) it grew organically from an initially simple foundation instead of being designed.
"That can't be it because eclipse and intellij (as well as delphi, jdeveloper, jbuilder etc) all run on windows."
.NET stuff, and has a true drag-and-drop programming environment. All the others a Java tools, and most of them are mainly aimed at those writing server-side code using struts, EJBs, etc., with at best rudimentary support for GUI clients.
I said dominant IDE, not only IDE. Eclipse and IntelliJ are aimed at Java programmers, which MS isn't really interested in anymore. Yes, you can use Eclipse for other languages, but "can use" and "is being widely used" are not the same thing at all. Delphi has been losing market share for years, largely due to Borland's own mismanagement (I know this because I have been programming in Delphi since version 1 appeared); JDeveloper is Java again; and the same for JBuilder (which is all but dead as a separate IDE).
The only product from your list which is in any way comparable to current versions of Visual Studio is Delphi, which like VS, includes tools for building both native Windows applications and
"THe real reason is zealotry."
It is a reason, but not the only one. There are many others.
"MS shops only use MS products and MS languages."
Not all shops are pure MS shops, however. And a lot of non-pure shops use VS for their Windows programming.
"They don't do honest evaluations of what is out there and choose the best product. They think that no matter what the problem is the MS tool is the only one suitable."
There used to be a time when I would have unreservedly recommended Delphi over VS for Windows programming, but that that time has passed. I've watched Borland release a succession of buggy, overpriced products and treat their customers like shit for too many years to have any enthusiasm left for them or their tools, so what's realistically left? Java has no real advantages for Windows programmers unless want its cross-platform capabilities (most don't), so where are the better tools for people to evaluate?
I'm also impressed by the valiant way they stood up to the Chinese government's demands that they censor search results until they'd had time to write some marketing spin telling us all why implementing an enforced censorship policy is not in fact evil. Not all companies would have gone that extra mile to protect peoples' rights: MS and Yahoo for example caved without even thinking about such an illuminating press release, let alone actually writing one.
Michael Moore has stated that he has no objection to people downloading F9/11 for personal use. He may have many faults, but this is a refreshing change from the attitudes of most commercial film makers.
"some poor old lady probably lost her house because she couldn't afford the property taxes to pay for your adolescent warm fuzzy"
That poor old lady would have lost her home irrespective of whether libraries were being funded or not. Tax levels are usually based on what whoever is levying them thinks they can get away with charging -- public services are used as a justification for making people pay taxes rather than being the reason for it. This is why tax cuts never seem to be accompanied by wage cuts or compulsory redundancies for the people who are in charge.
"The liars at microsoft don't have a single leg to stand upon,"
They have several very powerful ones, each with $ signs tattooed on it. These lead to a big pair of buttocks which also have $ signs printed on them, ripe for kissing by corrupt politicos (i.e. most of them).
"He states it plainly that MS uses its legislative influence to try to derail any plans that would decrease the overall revenue stream of MS."
Unfortunately, with the corruption level of politicians in general (and I am not referring to US politicians in particular here, because they are no worse than most, and a lot better than some), it would be newsworthy if an entity with Microsoft's vast wealth _wasn't_ buying legislative influence. As things stand however, this is definitely a case of "move on, nothing to see here".
That together with how long something is in use. Some bugs don't get discovered until certain sets of initially divergent factors converge, e.g. the buffer overflow problems in certain bits of widely deployed software (and I am not pointing the finger at MS in particular here), some of which only became apparent to user communities and programmers after they'd already been exploited.
"IF we are buying the license, then we should have the ability to sell the license to someone else."
Why should this be the case? You pay for a driving license, and are not allowed to sell it to someone else. You pay for credit cards and are not allowed to sell them to someone else. You pay for a meal that you eat, and cannot re-sell it. You pay for a holiday, and cannot re-sell it. There are many things in life that we pay sometimes large amounts for and cannot re-sell.
"Look, if you purchase a car, and your car company expects you to pay insurance to protect your car, but suddenly the state tries to claim that they actually own your car and that you only can purchase a license to drive it, and to top it off you don't even own the license, I'm sorry but thats just robbery."
People are aware of the terms of the license before they buy. It is therefore more like paying to use a car you already know is owned by the state, and then moaning about the fact that it is owned by the state.
"If you pay for a license but don't gain any rights, if you buy an ipod and purchase the music, but somehow you don't have the right to resell the music, then what are you purchasing?"
You are paying for precisely what you agreed to when you made the purchase. Caveat emptor: if you don't like the terms, then spend your money on something else. iPods can be fed all the music they can hold without having to buy _anything_ from the iTunes store, and there are plenty of alternative music players as well.
"When the time comes where we have to buy licenses to breathe air and drink water, and some company comes along and strips you of your license, well I guess you'll just die."
You already pay for drinking water, and are probably paying for clean, breathable air (not that you're guaranteed to get it!).
"It's one thing to allow the traditional recording industries to exist, by buying their music on ipod, but its another to give them the right to strip you of ownership"
You have never owned _anything_ except the media that copyrighted materials reside on. When you buy a book, you own the paper it is printed on and the ink used to print it, period. When you buy a DVD or CD, you own the plastic disk. The information they contain is not yours, and never was yours, and the media that you do own tell you this. Furthermore, they tell you that they are _licensed_ for domestic use, and then list a whole bunch of things you cannot do with them. Thus, you can sell the paper and ink or the plastic disk, but only if _any copies made from them by you are destroyed_, once again emphasising the fact that you own the medium, not what is on it; by selling or otherwise passing the medium on to another, you also pass all rights to them, and cannot therefore legally read, view, or listen to any content that they contain.
With stuff bought from the iTunes store, there is no physical medium to own, so you are _only_ buying the right to watch or listen to some content, as has always been the case with content distributed on physical media. And because there is no physical medium that you own, _there is nothing you can legally sell_, because you cannot transfer the license to use content without the media that the content came on when you bought it. The iPod and content situation thus is a lot like the the one that pertains to TV hard-disk recordings of pay-per-view cable and satellite channels: you are allowed to watch that recording, but you cannot sell it to someone else along with the recording device that contains it. The iPod is yours, but what's contained on the iPod isn't, and cannot therefore be sold without the express permission of the copyright holder.
"If they refuse to sit at the table, then Apple and consumers will eventually replace them with companies who do respect the right to sell Ipods on Ebay"
Apple won't as long as Jobs is in charge. He used to own Pixar, and is now Disney's biggest shareholder, so he's running an electronics company with an entrenched media interest, j
"music, in quality and quantity, will not change in the least."
Just like blogs have left us saturated in top quality literature and journalism, and the Creative Commons is chock full of artwork and music that puts the stuff those greedy money-grubbing professionals do to shame. With the torrents being so full of home videos and songs recorded with GarageBand, it's a wonder there's any bandwidth left for ripped-off commercial movies and music!
And those scratches and the dent in one corner are there because this is a special designer iPod that ships with a "worn" look, just like those jeans that are sold with faded denim and strategically-placed tears.
"If you want a current example, it is illegal to create a program to interoperate with the iPod."
It is not. There are many programs that legally interoperate with iPods: the illegality would lie in bypassing Apple's FairPlay DRM to make unprotected copies, and FairPlay is only present in stuff bought from the iTunes store. This is exactly the same situation that applies to Microsoft's various DRM-encumbered codecs.
"why are they always one to two years behind eclipse and intelliJ in features"
Because they can afford to be. Microsoft have the dominant IDE for the dominant OS, so they can just sit back and let others do all the R&D, confident in the fact that they can steal any good ideas a few years down the road. Customers and reviewers will lap it up like good little kitties, and the Internet will be full of blogs and whatever telling the world about the latest "innovations" in VS.
Eclipse and similar aren't a threat to MS in any shape or form, because Microsoft's programming tools are primarily a mechanism for ensuring that there are lots of applications written for Windows which cannot easily be ported to other platforms. As with the much smaller Apple, MS could easily afford to give their tools way to whoever wants them, and they have in fact started doing so with their low-end offerings -- their primary income sources lie elsewhere, and developers are one way of ensuring that those other income streams remain lucrative.
It is smaller, tool-centric companies like Borland that are suffering, because they are being squeezed between MS on the one hand, and increasingly good free, open source tools on the other. There used to be a fair number of companies successfully selling compilers, frameworks, IDEs and whatever for Windows development, but most have either disappeared or gone on to other markets, just as those who sold desktop database products did when MS Access took their markets away. The days when selling tools was profitable enough to sustain global players of any size have gone, at least on Windows, and probably everywhere else, too.
"will it work on none windows / none IE browsers"
No, just the ~90% of personal computers and laptops that run Windows and IE.
Yet another inappropriate car analogy applied to software. To add spice, I will add another
set of inappropriate car analogies:
Ocelots are like cars that hunt small animals, clim trees, shit all over the place, and fuck other cars of the opposite sex.
Stomachs are like cars. You put fuel in them, and fart fumes.
Radio waves are like cars with no doors. They're there, but you can't use them to drive your kids to McDonalds.
Oceans are like cars. You can get in them, and use them to move around.
I think we need a new variant on Godwin's law which says that anyone who is guilty of car analogies in a discussion about software has their backside whacked with a large stick until they promise not to do it again.
"Admittedly, the CLR hasn't yet been as widely adopted as Internet Explorer, so there still may be bugs in the underlying technology".
How widely adopted something is does not have any relationship to the number of bugs in it.
"Now, ActiveX was the best possible at the time... JavaScript was hardly a gleam in Sun's eye"
Nothing in that phrase is correct. Firstly, JavaScript was developed by Netscape, not Sun. Secondly, it is older than browser-hosted Active-X, having been introduced in Netscape 2 in 1995, while ActiveX first appeared in IE 3 in 1996.
This means that ActiveX was not the best possible at the time. It was instead an attempt to destroy Netscape's "browser as an OS-neutral platform" strategy by tying rich web-based content to Windows. Netscape threw down the gauntlet by telling the world that browsers would make operating systems irrelevant, and MS responded, first by giving their browseraway for free, and later by making both the browser and its rich content capabilities part of their OS. It was thus Netscape that became irrelevant to Windows users, i.e. most of the people who were using personal computers.
"China can make good products, but the popular stuff in the big-box stores is pretty shit."
It would be shit irrespective of who was making it. "Cheapest product of its type" and "best product
of its type" are only mutually inclusive when "only product of its type" is also true.
There is no prosecution in British libel cases because they are civil law, not criminal
law. Civil cases have a plaintiff, not a prosecutor.
"It's a shame it's almost impossible to prevent stuff like this from happening without screwing the little guy who actually builds something novel and new and has his work actually stolen by someone else.@
It could be done quite simply by insisting that all patent applications be accompanied by
a working prototype that demonstrably embodies what is being patented. Most
of those little guys already have one, as do the bigger companies who actually produce
stuff. Groups of lawyers who exist to build portfolios of submarine patents on the other
hand do not, and while they could actually pay someone to develop such a prototype,
doing so would run the very real risk of the paid developer patenting it before them.
Of course, the above would not eliminate things like the infamous on-click patent, but
it would remove one of the major nasties from the current system by ensuring that
patents were granted for inventions (albeit sometimes controversial ones), not
documents describing things that do not exist.
If that's what Apple are really doing, then they can stick their Intel Macs where the sun
doesn't shine. I have a Rev 1 iMac G5 that was my first Apple purchase, and I've been
very pleased with it, so I previously wouldn't have hesitated to buy another Apple offering
in the future. This will however change in an instant if they start pulling DRM crap that
prevents me from using a computer _I buy and own_ in any way I want.
Because nobody has had any Intel Macs to play around with for very long, I'll heed the
old adage and assume that this is incompetence rather than malice for the moment. I
will however be watching these and other porting efforts with interest over the coming
weeks. If it eventually turns out to be DRM, and there's no workaround for it, then it's
likely that Apple will lose a lot more customer than just me.