I don't really understand how HTML 5 reflects todays needs better when we're in an increasingly web application based world and when HTML 5 is far less suited to applications than XHTML is?
When building applications you need the separation of document structure ((X)HTML markup), presentation (CSS), client side script (Javascript), server-side script (I wont list them all!), data storage (RDBMS usually). Content fills into the structure and is styled by the presentation layer but the problem with HTML 5 is it's advocating mixing the presentation structure and content again into one big mess. It's advocating inconsistent coding throughout the document (see previous comments about how some sections will be divs, others will be pre-defined sections such as footer).
There are plenty of other areas where it's really not suited to web applications or good software development practice in general such as defining a specific format for video and such. What if that format becomes obsolete and a much better codec comes along, do we then make a new HTML spec which could take years again? Do we change the existing spec (specs shouldn't change!) and expect new browser versions? Do we just hold the web back and not bother to update?
Or do we just stick with the line of HTML specs that are by definition eXtensible? That avoid defining specific components so explicitly so that the web can adapt on the fly to handle those changes? Of course HTML5 makes allowances for these things too in a similar way, but if you want to change your video codec you need to change your markup from video tags, whilst in XHTML you just don't use them in the first place.
Issues like this demonstrate why HTML5 just isn't a good spec for application development as it goes against decades of what has been learned through experience to be good practice.
Nokia wasn't happy with the video codec choice and it's not Apple's preferred choice. I doubt Microsoft is happy with it either. How about Adobe whose player is perhaps the most successful through simply being the player people have chosen to use?
They're members, but only because they don't want to be left out altogether - how much of a say they really have is questionable and we've already seen disputes suggesting some are not happy about how things have been decided.
Effectively the spec is being put together regardless of them.
That's not really the fault of Firefox or HTML5, it's the fault of the site, but really I do think HTML5 is indeed a step backwards.
It reduces separation of the content and presentation layers and it increases parsing ambiguity by relaxing standards. Of course, ambiguity is bound to lead to a performance hit too, albeit perhaps rather small so may not really matter. This is really not great news as far as the web is concerned as it's exactly what we've been fighting against for the last decade with reasonable success - the web is certainly more portable and accessible now than it used to be.
From what I've read previously of the HTML5 spec and comments surrounding it the idea is to make HTML development more accessible, but I'm not sure this is the right way to go about things. If we're going to increase the amount of people who can publish on the internet then a better option seems to be to improve the applications for doing this - whether they're web applications (i.e. Wordpress to Twitter to Facebook to MySpace) or whether we simply make better quality WYSIWYG desktop applications. If we do this on a spec that's better built for the real web developers - those who really need clear separation of concerns to ensure their sites are truly enterprise ready then we'll undoubtedly end up with a much better web.
With tags like and so forth added it's meant to increase clarity, but really it doesn't, because ultimately it will never fulfil everyone's needs, someone will want or so on, this means they're back to something like
meaning half your markup is in the div format and half not, or you could just ignore the feature but then effectively you may as well just carry on using XHTML anyway.
Let web developers develop and let users use applications to publish - it's worked so well as many Web 2.0 successes have shown.
Besides that there's also something that stinks about forcing a standard on the web too - open or not. I think I'd rather have market forces decide a standard over a small clique of people who have their own interests and agendas which may not necessarily be the best for the web overall.
Standards should be lightweight, extensible and well defined, I would argued HTML5 is flawed in all of these areas, whereas with XHTML that is much less the case. HTML5 simply makes worse the very reasons we started to move away from HTML to XHTML in the first place.
"Women are still generally paid less in business, don't rise as high"
The problem I notice is a lot of women are still happy to be the ones playing role of parent and so expect to be able to finish early to pick up the kids, drop out of work at the drop of a hat to pick up a sick kid and that sort of thing. The reality is that a lot of families need a parent around and can't afford childcare, and their employers can't provide it and so one of them has to take that role, if females are choosing that role they can't simultaneously expect businesses to treat them equally to the males who aren't playing that parental role and so can concentrate more on the needs of their employer. I have met some women who feel they are entitled to do as well as the men who come in at 7:30am and work until 5:30pm when they role in at 9am having dropped the kids at school and have to leave at 3pm to pick them up, that simply can't be treated as equality as it's really not. That's not to say some businesses can't perhaps allow more flexible working to make the balance fairer of course, so employers still aren't all totally without blame but not every company really can do more.
"I don't see a lot of Women doctors (esp. if you discount paediatrics and OBGYNs)."
That's interesting, in the UK I'd say the amount of doctors female and male is quite balanced from personal experience although maybe the stats say differently? Which country's healthcare system are you referring to, the US?
Of course they do, no one else is allowed to sell systems with it due to Apple's EULA.
How can you suggest someone doesn't know the meaning of the word monopoly and then so blatantly fail to see a perfectly defined monopoly in front of you?
You can argue it's okay for Apple to have a monopoly on their product - I'm not disputing that, but it's still a monopoly however you cut it.
Yes, but those were the things that were predicted and turned out false.
What about the things that simply weren't predicted but are actually mind blowing in what they've brought us when you stop to think about them rather than take them for granted as many do, like, say, computing and the internet?
When humans first managed to get a plane up into the air it was mind blowing, humans could truly fly at last and people at the time realised that, now they take it for granted. I would argue computing as it is now is at least, if not far more of a change and far more of an important change than even flight.
There are plenty of smaller achievements people on the street from that era would be amazed by, what about in-car GPS for example? the fact you can have a device tell you where you need to go based on location data received from satellites?
The problem is a lot of the future concepts we're told to expect are even understood to be quite wild at the time and often come from mere fantacists - look at talk only 10 years ago about AI robots capable of looking and acting exactly like humans, some people now wonder why we haven't got that but anyone who actually knows anything about AI could've told you then and could tell you now we're still decades off that. It's what isn't predicted that's often truly amazing and that people of that era would really be impressed by. There seems little point suggesting we've failed in any way because we've not managed to achieve the dreams of fantacists. The real issue is a fringe few putting rediculous ideas into the heads of the uninformed in the first place. That's not to say those ideas will never be reached, but it is to say they'll almost never be reached in the timeframes they give.
This is why I think the Office 2007 UI is actually a good thing, many hate it but it simply seems to boil down to the fact that it's not what they're used to. The problem is, what they're used to is as you say only as it is for tradition.
The previous style of UI that is so prominent in applications across many platforms, OS' and types - that of your file menus, your toolbars is a decades old design, and it was really one of the first designs dating back to even console applications to an extent. It seems unlikely to me that with improved computing power, greater knowledge and the fact that it's unlikely we got the GUI right the first time around that more work should be done to look at a better way of doing the day to day UI of most applications so that we can start phasing in a much better method.
Microsoft did actually put a hell of a lot of money and research into the Office 2007 UI and I've found when you bother to give it a chance it really does let you be far more productive. It has some quirks that need sorting out certainly, but for a first iteration of a new UI it's not that bad. That said it's not even really that different, they've effectively just merged the file menu and the toolbars into one, realising there was duplication there, whilst also moving more commonly used features to your fingertips as you work and allowing auto-previewing of pretty much everything simply by hovering over menu options. They also seemed to have made a lot of common tasks that you'd previously have to automate yourself that could take a while to do via macros or just plain brute force into actual features that can be activated at the click of a button.
I think we can go much further than this, do I have an idea what? No, not really. There are suggestions that to improve the UI means improving the input - doing away with the mouse and switch to touch and gesture based methods, but I don't think we need to do anything that drastic. I think really we just need our UIs to be a bit more intelligent and again I think this is what Microsoft has tried to achieve (again, opinions vary on how successfully) - why have buttons sat cluttering a toolbar greyed out when you can't use that feature making it harder to spot the feature you want when you could just do away with them altogether in that context and have the UI better represent what you can actually do?
I'd rather not get into a debate about whether the Office 2007 UI is good or not, but I think it's worth considering the idea that what Microsoft was attempting - making the UI more intelligent, more suitable for the task at hand was a good step, a step that when you consider human distaste of change was quite risky but quite important also. I know other companies have made strides in UI improvements also, but I use Office 2007 as my case study here because Office is probably one of the most used application suites in the world, so a change there has more reprecussions than something perhaps still highly successful but in a smaller market (i.e. the Wii).
It really depends how you define what they have a monopoly on and how broad you stretch it. Presumably by suggesting they don't have a monopoly, you're assuming the market we're talking about is the desktop operating system market, but that's an arbitrary definition as to what exactly they have a monopoly on you've decided yourself.
Apple do have a monopoly on Mac OS X based systems, the fact they develop Mac OS X is neither here nor there as to whether or not it's a monopoly, it's still a monopoly.
Using your arbitrarily defined market to claim Apple doesn't have a monopoly at all, is as incorrect as me saying Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly and using the electronic goods market as the defining market for my comment, because in that market, they don't. You could claim he should've been clear about the market he was talking about, but it's fairly easy to see which market someone is talking about simply by thinking about what markets companies do have monopolies in, although that does require that you look at things objectively which does exclude some people from managing this.
That's what I used to see and believe, but it's just down to the fact more people buy TVs and less people buy monitors at the high end.
Things have changed rapidly at the low end where that's less the case, but the size of monitor that defines the low end is increasing as the technology in general becomes cheaper.
I picked up a 24" Samsung 1920x1200 res monitor for £250 6 months ago, looking for 24" 1080p TVs (which are lower res due to slightly different aspect ratio) and the cheapest I can find a brand new one for at 24" even now is £350 brand new.
You'll often find cheap TVs are end of line too when you walk into stores that sell them. You can pick up a TV quite cheap because they're continuously producing new models, yet monitors largely stay the same so don't hit end of line sales so quickly.
In other words whilst there are cases where you can get an equivalently sized TV cheaper, the chances are there's a catch - either it's end of line and lacks some feature (not the latest HDMI spec, only 720p etc.) or it's simply a large screen you're after and indeed, not many manufacturers even product monitors of those sizes yet, but that will change.
As for having a media centre setup, most people wont know where to begin dealing with a MythTV setup but the Windows Media Centre PCs that've been out for ages are really as painless to setup and use as a DVD player.
The problem with pretty much all Java is faster than C/C++ benchmarks are that they're not fair.
Effectively, C/C++ do exactly what you tell them to do, no more, no less. Java and the JVM however does more than you tell it to (due to garbage collection etc.), some of the things it does in the background greatly improve performance.
The problem we have then, is that comparisons of C/C++ vs. Java performance compare how specific lines of code perform ignoring that C/C++ is doing what it's told but Java is doing more than that to optimize things hence on big operations the optimization pays off.
I am not however disputing your underlying point, that it's silly to write off Java as slow. Although technically I disagree with suggestions that Java is faster than C++ because it's disingenious, I feel there's little point writing more code in C/C++ (i.e. the optimizations Java performance) to get a real albeit negligible speed increase when you can get nearly equivalent performance in far less code with Java and enjoy benefits of portability, generally greater security, and generally less error prone software.
It's a question of balance as always and the reality is the amount of development time required to squeeze the performance of a C/C++ application to levels only negligibly beyond that of a Java application by manually writing the required performance optimizations on top of the code required to be run itself is almost certainly never worth it.
So is C/C++ dead? Well no, ignoring the argument about legacy applications that still need it, there are still a few areas where Java doesn't optimize quite as well as it should and in those cases it may well be worth writing your code in C/C++ and doing the optimization yourself. There's also an argument for in some cases knowing what optimizations are in fact being done, but as the JVM is open source now this argument is fading too. Of course, memory usage is also a different question to performance - if you have limitations here then Java struggles a little more against C/C++ and such.
I don't think even 3% of the US population is Jewish. That would be 9 million people yet there are only 12 million Jews in the world and 5.3million of them are in Israel.
I'm not sure where their disproportionate hold on power stems from though, simply guilt over what happened in World War II perhaps?
Everyone knows the way the Bush administration dealt with Katrina is bad, but I don't think many realise quite how bad. Realistically in turning down Cuba's offer of help American lives were undoubtedly lost and for what? A refusal to reconcile with what is an entirely harmless nation to the US? A dispute that started over half a century ago?
Could you imagine the shit state Europe would be in if France, Britain, the Netherlands etc. still shunned Germany, Italy, Spain and so forth over World War II for that kind of period? It's really quite mindless with no benefits that aren't at very least far outweighed by resolving the issue. It's not as if Cuba has even chosen a path of confrontation by allowing say China or Iran to stick a naval base on it's land since which is more than can be said for the US which has military bases at pretty much all their opponent's doorsteps now.
I can understand the argument with Iran and Syria because they certainly do sponsor terrorism, they do maintain and agressive rhetoric and so there's some justification, but Cuba is really about as much of a threat to the US as Switzerland is.
I'm not sure what Apple could actually sue for. AFAIK reverse engineering for the purpose of producing a compatible product is actually one of the get-out clauses for cracking DRM under the DMCA. Another is educational research I believe.
I'm not sure they're actually doing anything illegal - look at the Psystar case, the best Apple could come up with was breaking the EULA.
"And they're both being outsold by a machine that is so obstinate in being a gaming-only machine that it won't even play a regular CD or DVD even though it has capable hardware. We think of Microsoft as a Windows company and Apple as an iPod company because that's what they're best at. Why would a consumer get stuck with a Zune for convergence's sake when they could buy an iPod and still keep their Windows PC? The only party that benefits is Microsoft."
There are still questions to be asked though regarding the Wii, the PS3 and 360 are competing against each other in the high end do-everything market, if they were not competing and only one existed you could guarantee they sales figures for one would move other from the theoretically non-existent one to the other. You then have to look at the amount of media bought for those systems - the 360 due to it's attach rate coupled with larger profit margin on games, large amount of DLC, the price of XBox live etc. has almost certainly made MS nearly as much money as Nintendo has made with the Wii. Take into account the PS3, it's games, the Bluray discs for it and you begin to realise that although the Wii has done well as a gaming only system, there is still much more money be poured into the wider market by consumers, the issue is merely that it's being competed for which dilutes that.
This is where convergence comes in though, it widens the market yet further, to help make sure there's enough for everyone. One example of expansion into other markets by way of convergence into existing systems is the fact due to Nintendo's success both Microsoft and Sony are taking large steps for the current gen, but most prominently for the next gen to bring a similar experience to Nintendo's offering into their systems.
"We think of Microsoft as a Windows company and Apple as an iPod company because that's what they're best at."
Really? Microsoft's real strength is in it's development tools really, this is where by far it's strongest products are. It's database server, it's office suite and really even it's web server are all far better products than the Windows line too. Desktop OS' most certainly isn't what Microsoft is best at. It's hard to argue that the iPod isn't Apple's biggest success though, but this tells us something - the iPod wasn't always around, so what does that mean? That the products a company excels at can change over time? Well yes, that's pretty much exactly what it tells us so to suggest a company is known for one product because that's what it's best at, and then using that to suggest a company shouldn't bother moving into other product areas has been proven by exactly Apple's success with the iPod, and now the iPhone.
"Why would a consumer get stuck with a Zune for convergence's sake when they could buy an iPod and still keep their Windows PC?"
Because hypothetically speaking when you look at a future whole system the Zune might be better? Say for example the iPod is a better stand-alone music player when you don't use it with any other devices, there's no evidence that just because the Zune is an ever so slightly worse music player it wouldn't become a better overall device when it comes to keeping useful data sync'd between systems automatically and so forth. What if a killer app. comes out to exploit that that makes the Zune alone worth having, or horror of horrors, what if the Zune simply does become a better product than the iPod in future? iTunes on Windows isn't actually a very nice application, it would be quite easy for example to produce a much better application for integrating your desktop with your music player. This is undoubtedly why we have software such as Rockbox - some people feel it can be done better and can be beaten and are willing to go ahead and prove it.
"The only party that benefits is Microsoft."
Really, were you responding to make a point, or simply to troll about Microsoft? It doesn't benefit Microsoft anymore than convergence benefits Apple, Sony and so on. It allows them to expand their markets, and hook people on one product and get them to buy others from the same manufacturer, Apple has almost certainly sold more Macs because people feel it goes better with their iPod or iPhone for example.
Yeah I don't disagree, I didn't want to stray too far off path with the DRM argument, and also the question of whether for example we even want our work and personal lives to be so closely intertwined.
DRM is arguably the single thing holding it back, attempts have been made to produce DRM that allows it but it has indeed been rather weak. I'm guessing we'll see one of two things happen, either DRM will work (to an extent) in their limited environments because they're using custom hardware, or they'll have to accept it needs to go. I agree though, I think it's safe to say continued pushing of DRM will will delay convergence, it will leave the resulting systems imperfect in their operation and transparency and it will certainly delay adoption.
It's ironic that Microsoft, Apple and Sony, 3 of the most prominent DRM backers in the industry are the ones that most need DRM to go away, but yet are the last to embrace that idea whilst Amazon, Play.com and so forth steam ahead with it.
I'm not sure that we'll see gaming spread to multiple devices as much as we'll see multiple devices converge, certainly Sony and Microsoft seem to be trying hard to make their consoles more than just gaming machines, both not only have the ability to play media, but are pushing it quite strongly as a major part of the offering. Both have also filed patents/spoken of the ability to play TV shows in future addons or console iterations.
Many people laugh about the Zune, but although it's not the greatest product I can see where Microsoft is going with it - there's effectively 4 areas for technology in people's lives, office, home computer, home entertainment and on the move. Currently MS doesn't have much of an on the move offering whilst Sony does with the PSP and Nintendo does with the DS, Microsoft has strong offerings in the other 3 areas, so presumably they're just now trying to tie up the last area.
But it's not as simple as tying up the last area, I've been expecting, and we've been seeing a move for a long while towards all these areas interoperating with the end goal being a sort of scenario where say, using Microsoft as an example, you walk close to your future Xbox/PC with your Zune in your pocket and it'll wirelessly pick up your songs and let you play them through that system's sound system instead. Your XBox live arcade games may automatically "jump" onto your Zune so you can play them on the move, your Xbox live friends profile may link with your contact list on your favourite IM program on your PC. Perhaps you could flag a document as important at work and it'll jump home with you via your Zune or via the net so you can continue working from home on it and that sort of thing. Rudimentary attempts at all these things already exist, but the experience isn't tied together well right now, it's not seamless enough.
I think Apple, now realising they're strong in the on the move area, and are doing pretty decently in the home PC market realise that perhaps it's time to make a push into the home entertainment market too.
Effectively, whilst we tend to think of Microsoft as the Windows company, Apple as the iPod company and that sort of thing we'll see a change towards the idea of them all offering solutions that integrate really well between all these areas. I wouldn't be suprised if you could eventually walk into a shop and buy a full offering - a big box with your PC, your console, your mobile device all in it, but with the option to buy/upgrade each individually still.
Companies like Ubisoft need to be looking towards this sort of convergence I think rather than just seeing the arrival of completely separate devices because I think it will deliver unique opportunities. To give an example of what I mean, look at how successful Tamagotchi and clones were, now imagine if you had a virtual pet that would not only live on your device, but could be left at home on your console, or brought to work on your mobile device, and your administrator at work had set a policy to allow entertainment software outside work hours and on lunch times so you could play with it on your work machine during lunch.
I was referring to the fact they collect royalties from radio stations, and then try and collect royalties from people listening to those radio stations at work.
So yes, they do effectively try and license the same thing twice and hence effectively try and get money for nothing. Judging by the £117million in the first 3 months, they seem quite successful at it too.
"Here I have to argue a bit, though. Vim and Emacs aren't "usable", in the sense that a neophyte can come to them and immediately become productive. Rather, they're "usable" in the sense that, like driving stick, it requires time and practices to become used to them, but once you've crested the steep learning curve, they become extremely productive power tools."
That's not really usability though but merely productivity. I don't disagree that keyboard shortcuts and applications based on them (and in fact command line OS' vs. GUI OS' even) can allow you to be far more productive, but they are certainly less usable as usability is really defined as how easily you can use something without such prior knowledge.
One might argue then that they're extreme examples of productivity over usability, but I'm not convinced this is the case, I believe it's possible for an application to be both usable and be great in terms of productivity. Vi and Emacs are the way they are because it's the way they've always been, not because they've undergone studies in usability and been rehashed based on that. They just offer improvements in productivity on the classic design.
Some areas of the FOSS world are looking seriously at improving usability, IIRC GIMP has in the past couple of years taken this seriously which is a great step forward. Of course, if the classic way of doing things in a particular app. whose roots dates back decades need to be refactored to improve usability then there's bound to be resistance to change or will to develop a replacement in the OSS community because they're happy with the way things are and the way things work. This is why I'm not sure FOSS really wants to go truly mainstream in general because it will take a lot of sacrifice - developers are going to have to change or replace what they've always been used to to make way for mainstream acceptance. The question the FOSS community has to ask itself is whether it's important to keep developing what they themselves like, or whether they're willing to make the sacrifice to truly go mainstream which certainly will require an attitude change towards greater acceptance of usability. Of course you then get the question of accessibility, even the HTML5 spec seems to be shunning this despite accessibility being given great focus on the web in the last decade, realistically usability is only the first step, followed by accessibility but again they're steps that must be taken if FOSS is to truly displace Microsoft.
It's nigh on impossible to live the moral live without living in a cave.
No doubt the PC you posted that message on will end up in a nigerian scrap yard polluting the toxic components into the land rivers and sea in that area.
Living a moral life does not mean you get to pick and choose what morals you follow, doing that means you're just choosing a different set of morals that are and aren't important to you than someone else without actually making you any more of a good person.
Unless you sew your own clothes rather than purchase those in shops that have almost certianly come from sweat shops, unless you forego use of a vehicle filled up with fuel from the large fuel giants that pollute and even make species extinct, unless you have never wasted a drop of food in your life whilst children are starving in ethiopia, unless you've never consumed a product whose leftovers end up in a tip seeping pollutants into the earth and riverways used by humans, unless you've never consumed a newspaper or other publication from one of the controlling media groups such as Murdoch's, unless you can claim to have never done any of those things, you cannot possibly suggest that you are a more moral person than anyone else.
So there's the problem, when people are more than happy to support companies that have caused species of plant or animal to go extinct (from big oil, to wood/paper product firms) as a matter of their daily lives, I do not think taking a moral stance against Microsoft, which has actually been far more philanthropic than the likes of Apple and many other tech. companies ever have is really high on anyone's agenda.
Ironically, being more productive and hence less stressed is almost certainly going to net the majority of average joes working their day to day lives a much better night's sleep than pretending they've actually made a difference by not supporting Microsoft whilst guzzling gallons of fuel on their commute to and from work each week.
...is how they mentioned the PRS is a non-profit organisation.
A non-profit organisation netting £117 million in just the first 3 months of this year, during the depth of a recession? Either their staff are rather overpaid or someone's making a profit even if it isn't the PRS itself. No guesses as to who exactly might be making that profit! £117 million for effectively doing nothing, for charging people to listen to the music they've already paid for, to play the radio the radio station has already paid royalties for. Most businesses in the world could only dream of making £117 million in a year, let alone for doing pretty much nothing other than sending out a few invoices. No wonder they're willing to drop the price to 0.085p, they're already making £117 million for doing nothing, why not make another few 10s of millions of pounds for charging the likes of YouTube and Pandora to do your job of advertising for you?
As usual the music cartel is hiding behind shell companies/organisations like the RIAA, the IFPI and the PRS, to try and sheild their companies from the bad reputation they know full well their extortion branches would otherwise give them if they were to do everything direct.
The problem is people fall for it and it works, I've seen many people defend stuff like the PS3 or Sony's Bluray offerings like James Bond releases whilst simultaneous ranting about how much they hate the RIAA/IFPI or whatever. The same goes for the likes of the other music companies. People need to either learn to boycott all their companies and organisations or accept that they're supporting them - there's no point refusing to buy say Sony music CDs for example and then going out and giving them money by spending it on their Bluray offerings or TVs instead. If you really want to make a difference and sting the people behind these organisations then simply boycotting one product in their large range isn't enough.
I'm not saying they shouldn't make money from their offerings when Google and Pandora profit from ad revenue and such, but to make it sound like they're doing a favour that they're dropping it this low when they already net hundreds of millions of pounds a year even during periods of recession for doing nothing? Are we supposed to be grateful or something?
You suggest that vi is usable, and then suggest that just because I can't use it doesn't mean it isn't usable. Truly usable software does not require any amount of training, prior knowledge or particularly high levels of skill, realistically you shouldn't even need documentation. If you truly believe vi can be used by someone who has never used it before without any reference, help or anything like that then you're lost so deeply in your zealotry that you're undoubtedly doing more harm than good to the free software movement because your view of software is so far removed from the view of software which people expect that you are no help whatsoever in getting the word out there for FOSS.
A good way to understand usability is that with usable software it should be clear how to perform a specific task through nothing more than seeing the interface. If your application is entirely keyboard shortcut driven then, it fails badly at usability, unless there is clear information on screen at which point it is somewhat usable, but there is almost certainly a better way of doing it. I am not against keyboard shortcuts, they are great for power users and help productivity when you know what they are, but in something as complex as a high end IDE you cannot keyboard shortcut everything without keyboard shortcuts simply getting out of hand.
In terms of general productivity, the most obvious factor is that VS has the best intellisense implementation out there and it only gets better when you're using the likes of C# with inline XML documentation. But really, from the debugger through to libraries and language features such as LINQ, Microsoft's development suite has so much to offer in terms of productivity. Rather than try and run through every individual productivity feature in VS though wasting my time reiterating what's already out there if you bother to look for yourself, I'll assume you can use Google and move on.
"With the wealth of alternatives available (let's not leave out Eclipse, since it seems pretty popular too, as well as Free), I can see no reason to tolerate the moral bankruptcy of the factors of Visual Studio. But you don't want to talk about _that_."
Again, no one really cares how corrupt Microsoft is when it comes to making money themselves. The moral aspect of using Microsoft software is no big deal for most people when you compare to the moral aspect of other every day vendors from your fuel vendors for your car, to your sweat shop made iPods and clothes, Microsoft is in the grand scheme of things, guilty of far less evils than many other companies whose products we consume every single day. Presumably then, if immoral companies are such a big issue for you you've never fuelled your car, never bought branded clothing or gadgets and have never eaten at a fast food chain? If you cannot honestly answer yes to that, then you're a hypocrit.
"I'll agree that the Imperial "Tools" are da bomb. Not being a beginner, however, "Beginner Friendly" is not what I want."
Not being a beginner at what exactly? Certainly a lack of understanding about software usability suggests you're severely lacking in some of the more important concepts of software development. Perhaps you mean you're just good at churning out code which is only a small part of software development? In the real world, companies need to do more than just churn out code though, they need full product life cycle from requirements gathering, to design, to implementation, to testing, to deployment and of course maintenance. Microsoft offers a full blown tool chain to handle all of that in a single package, that's quite attractive and it's something the FOSS world needs to work seriously hard towards to offer an alternative. Eclipse is certainly the best attempt at this so far, but it's still not quite there.
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I don't really understand how HTML 5 reflects todays needs better when we're in an increasingly web application based world and when HTML 5 is far less suited to applications than XHTML is?
When building applications you need the separation of document structure ((X)HTML markup), presentation (CSS), client side script (Javascript), server-side script (I wont list them all!), data storage (RDBMS usually). Content fills into the structure and is styled by the presentation layer but the problem with HTML 5 is it's advocating mixing the presentation structure and content again into one big mess. It's advocating inconsistent coding throughout the document (see previous comments about how some sections will be divs, others will be pre-defined sections such as footer).
There are plenty of other areas where it's really not suited to web applications or good software development practice in general such as defining a specific format for video and such. What if that format becomes obsolete and a much better codec comes along, do we then make a new HTML spec which could take years again? Do we change the existing spec (specs shouldn't change!) and expect new browser versions? Do we just hold the web back and not bother to update?
Or do we just stick with the line of HTML specs that are by definition eXtensible? That avoid defining specific components so explicitly so that the web can adapt on the fly to handle those changes? Of course HTML5 makes allowances for these things too in a similar way, but if you want to change your video codec you need to change your markup from video tags, whilst in XHTML you just don't use them in the first place.
Issues like this demonstrate why HTML5 just isn't a good spec for application development as it goes against decades of what has been learned through experience to be good practice.
Yes but are they getting a say?
Nokia wasn't happy with the video codec choice and it's not Apple's preferred choice. I doubt Microsoft is happy with it either. How about Adobe whose player is perhaps the most successful through simply being the player people have chosen to use?
They're members, but only because they don't want to be left out altogether - how much of a say they really have is questionable and we've already seen disputes suggesting some are not happy about how things have been decided.
Effectively the spec is being put together regardless of them.
That's not really the fault of Firefox or HTML5, it's the fault of the site, but really I do think HTML5 is indeed a step backwards.
It reduces separation of the content and presentation layers and it increases parsing ambiguity by relaxing standards. Of course, ambiguity is bound to lead to a performance hit too, albeit perhaps rather small so may not really matter. This is really not great news as far as the web is concerned as it's exactly what we've been fighting against for the last decade with reasonable success - the web is certainly more portable and accessible now than it used to be.
From what I've read previously of the HTML5 spec and comments surrounding it the idea is to make HTML development more accessible, but I'm not sure this is the right way to go about things. If we're going to increase the amount of people who can publish on the internet then a better option seems to be to improve the applications for doing this - whether they're web applications (i.e. Wordpress to Twitter to Facebook to MySpace) or whether we simply make better quality WYSIWYG desktop applications. If we do this on a spec that's better built for the real web developers - those who really need clear separation of concerns to ensure their sites are truly enterprise ready then we'll undoubtedly end up with a much better web.
With tags like and so forth added it's meant to increase clarity, but really it doesn't, because ultimately it will never fulfil everyone's needs, someone will want or so on, this means they're back to something like
meaning half your markup is in the div format and half not, or you could just ignore the feature but then effectively you may as well just carry on using XHTML anyway.
Let web developers develop and let users use applications to publish - it's worked so well as many Web 2.0 successes have shown.
Besides that there's also something that stinks about forcing a standard on the web too - open or not. I think I'd rather have market forces decide a standard over a small clique of people who have their own interests and agendas which may not necessarily be the best for the web overall.
Standards should be lightweight, extensible and well defined, I would argued HTML5 is flawed in all of these areas, whereas with XHTML that is much less the case. HTML5 simply makes worse the very reasons we started to move away from HTML to XHTML in the first place.
"Women are still generally paid less in business, don't rise as high"
The problem I notice is a lot of women are still happy to be the ones playing role of parent and so expect to be able to finish early to pick up the kids, drop out of work at the drop of a hat to pick up a sick kid and that sort of thing. The reality is that a lot of families need a parent around and can't afford childcare, and their employers can't provide it and so one of them has to take that role, if females are choosing that role they can't simultaneously expect businesses to treat them equally to the males who aren't playing that parental role and so can concentrate more on the needs of their employer. I have met some women who feel they are entitled to do as well as the men who come in at 7:30am and work until 5:30pm when they role in at 9am having dropped the kids at school and have to leave at 3pm to pick them up, that simply can't be treated as equality as it's really not. That's not to say some businesses can't perhaps allow more flexible working to make the balance fairer of course, so employers still aren't all totally without blame but not every company really can do more.
"I don't see a lot of Women doctors (esp. if you discount paediatrics and OBGYNs)."
That's interesting, in the UK I'd say the amount of doctors female and male is quite balanced from personal experience although maybe the stats say differently? Which country's healthcare system are you referring to, the US?
Of course they do, no one else is allowed to sell systems with it due to Apple's EULA.
How can you suggest someone doesn't know the meaning of the word monopoly and then so blatantly fail to see a perfectly defined monopoly in front of you?
You can argue it's okay for Apple to have a monopoly on their product - I'm not disputing that, but it's still a monopoly however you cut it.
Yes, but those were the things that were predicted and turned out false.
What about the things that simply weren't predicted but are actually mind blowing in what they've brought us when you stop to think about them rather than take them for granted as many do, like, say, computing and the internet?
When humans first managed to get a plane up into the air it was mind blowing, humans could truly fly at last and people at the time realised that, now they take it for granted. I would argue computing as it is now is at least, if not far more of a change and far more of an important change than even flight.
There are plenty of smaller achievements people on the street from that era would be amazed by, what about in-car GPS for example? the fact you can have a device tell you where you need to go based on location data received from satellites?
The problem is a lot of the future concepts we're told to expect are even understood to be quite wild at the time and often come from mere fantacists - look at talk only 10 years ago about AI robots capable of looking and acting exactly like humans, some people now wonder why we haven't got that but anyone who actually knows anything about AI could've told you then and could tell you now we're still decades off that. It's what isn't predicted that's often truly amazing and that people of that era would really be impressed by. There seems little point suggesting we've failed in any way because we've not managed to achieve the dreams of fantacists. The real issue is a fringe few putting rediculous ideas into the heads of the uninformed in the first place. That's not to say those ideas will never be reached, but it is to say they'll almost never be reached in the timeframes they give.
This is why I think the Office 2007 UI is actually a good thing, many hate it but it simply seems to boil down to the fact that it's not what they're used to. The problem is, what they're used to is as you say only as it is for tradition.
The previous style of UI that is so prominent in applications across many platforms, OS' and types - that of your file menus, your toolbars is a decades old design, and it was really one of the first designs dating back to even console applications to an extent. It seems unlikely to me that with improved computing power, greater knowledge and the fact that it's unlikely we got the GUI right the first time around that more work should be done to look at a better way of doing the day to day UI of most applications so that we can start phasing in a much better method.
Microsoft did actually put a hell of a lot of money and research into the Office 2007 UI and I've found when you bother to give it a chance it really does let you be far more productive. It has some quirks that need sorting out certainly, but for a first iteration of a new UI it's not that bad. That said it's not even really that different, they've effectively just merged the file menu and the toolbars into one, realising there was duplication there, whilst also moving more commonly used features to your fingertips as you work and allowing auto-previewing of pretty much everything simply by hovering over menu options. They also seemed to have made a lot of common tasks that you'd previously have to automate yourself that could take a while to do via macros or just plain brute force into actual features that can be activated at the click of a button.
I think we can go much further than this, do I have an idea what? No, not really. There are suggestions that to improve the UI means improving the input - doing away with the mouse and switch to touch and gesture based methods, but I don't think we need to do anything that drastic. I think really we just need our UIs to be a bit more intelligent and again I think this is what Microsoft has tried to achieve (again, opinions vary on how successfully) - why have buttons sat cluttering a toolbar greyed out when you can't use that feature making it harder to spot the feature you want when you could just do away with them altogether in that context and have the UI better represent what you can actually do?
I'd rather not get into a debate about whether the Office 2007 UI is good or not, but I think it's worth considering the idea that what Microsoft was attempting - making the UI more intelligent, more suitable for the task at hand was a good step, a step that when you consider human distaste of change was quite risky but quite important also. I know other companies have made strides in UI improvements also, but I use Office 2007 as my case study here because Office is probably one of the most used application suites in the world, so a change there has more reprecussions than something perhaps still highly successful but in a smaller market (i.e. the Wii).
It was also an important period for atmospheric nuclear tests (which can cause effects such as auroras) and space programs.
It really depends how you define what they have a monopoly on and how broad you stretch it. Presumably by suggesting they don't have a monopoly, you're assuming the market we're talking about is the desktop operating system market, but that's an arbitrary definition as to what exactly they have a monopoly on you've decided yourself.
Apple do have a monopoly on Mac OS X based systems, the fact they develop Mac OS X is neither here nor there as to whether or not it's a monopoly, it's still a monopoly.
Using your arbitrarily defined market to claim Apple doesn't have a monopoly at all, is as incorrect as me saying Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly and using the electronic goods market as the defining market for my comment, because in that market, they don't. You could claim he should've been clear about the market he was talking about, but it's fairly easy to see which market someone is talking about simply by thinking about what markets companies do have monopolies in, although that does require that you look at things objectively which does exclude some people from managing this.
That's what I used to see and believe, but it's just down to the fact more people buy TVs and less people buy monitors at the high end.
Things have changed rapidly at the low end where that's less the case, but the size of monitor that defines the low end is increasing as the technology in general becomes cheaper.
I picked up a 24" Samsung 1920x1200 res monitor for £250 6 months ago, looking for 24" 1080p TVs (which are lower res due to slightly different aspect ratio) and the cheapest I can find a brand new one for at 24" even now is £350 brand new.
You'll often find cheap TVs are end of line too when you walk into stores that sell them. You can pick up a TV quite cheap because they're continuously producing new models, yet monitors largely stay the same so don't hit end of line sales so quickly.
In other words whilst there are cases where you can get an equivalently sized TV cheaper, the chances are there's a catch - either it's end of line and lacks some feature (not the latest HDMI spec, only 720p etc.) or it's simply a large screen you're after and indeed, not many manufacturers even product monitors of those sizes yet, but that will change.
As for having a media centre setup, most people wont know where to begin dealing with a MythTV setup but the Windows Media Centre PCs that've been out for ages are really as painless to setup and use as a DVD player.
The problem with pretty much all Java is faster than C/C++ benchmarks are that they're not fair.
Effectively, C/C++ do exactly what you tell them to do, no more, no less. Java and the JVM however does more than you tell it to (due to garbage collection etc.), some of the things it does in the background greatly improve performance.
The problem we have then, is that comparisons of C/C++ vs. Java performance compare how specific lines of code perform ignoring that C/C++ is doing what it's told but Java is doing more than that to optimize things hence on big operations the optimization pays off.
I am not however disputing your underlying point, that it's silly to write off Java as slow. Although technically I disagree with suggestions that Java is faster than C++ because it's disingenious, I feel there's little point writing more code in C/C++ (i.e. the optimizations Java performance) to get a real albeit negligible speed increase when you can get nearly equivalent performance in far less code with Java and enjoy benefits of portability, generally greater security, and generally less error prone software.
It's a question of balance as always and the reality is the amount of development time required to squeeze the performance of a C/C++ application to levels only negligibly beyond that of a Java application by manually writing the required performance optimizations on top of the code required to be run itself is almost certainly never worth it.
So is C/C++ dead? Well no, ignoring the argument about legacy applications that still need it, there are still a few areas where Java doesn't optimize quite as well as it should and in those cases it may well be worth writing your code in C/C++ and doing the optimization yourself. There's also an argument for in some cases knowing what optimizations are in fact being done, but as the JVM is open source now this argument is fading too. Of course, memory usage is also a different question to performance - if you have limitations here then Java struggles a little more against C/C++ and such.
I don't think even 3% of the US population is Jewish. That would be 9 million people yet there are only 12 million Jews in the world and 5.3million of them are in Israel.
I'm not sure where their disproportionate hold on power stems from though, simply guilt over what happened in World War II perhaps?
Oh it's much worse than that. You might find this list, particularly the Cuba entry interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_response_to_Hurricane_Katrina
Everyone knows the way the Bush administration dealt with Katrina is bad, but I don't think many realise quite how bad. Realistically in turning down Cuba's offer of help American lives were undoubtedly lost and for what? A refusal to reconcile with what is an entirely harmless nation to the US? A dispute that started over half a century ago?
Could you imagine the shit state Europe would be in if France, Britain, the Netherlands etc. still shunned Germany, Italy, Spain and so forth over World War II for that kind of period? It's really quite mindless with no benefits that aren't at very least far outweighed by resolving the issue. It's not as if Cuba has even chosen a path of confrontation by allowing say China or Iran to stick a naval base on it's land since which is more than can be said for the US which has military bases at pretty much all their opponent's doorsteps now.
I can understand the argument with Iran and Syria because they certainly do sponsor terrorism, they do maintain and agressive rhetoric and so there's some justification, but Cuba is really about as much of a threat to the US as Switzerland is.
The difference is Palm is a billion dollar company whilst Psystar was a startup.
Palm has enough to see lawsuits through.
I'm not sure what Apple could actually sue for. AFAIK reverse engineering for the purpose of producing a compatible product is actually one of the get-out clauses for cracking DRM under the DMCA. Another is educational research I believe.
I'm not sure they're actually doing anything illegal - look at the Psystar case, the best Apple could come up with was breaking the EULA.
"And they're both being outsold by a machine that is so obstinate in being a gaming-only machine that it won't even play a regular CD or DVD even though it has capable hardware. We think of Microsoft as a Windows company and Apple as an iPod company because that's what they're best at. Why would a consumer get stuck with a Zune for convergence's sake when they could buy an iPod and still keep their Windows PC? The only party that benefits is Microsoft."
There are still questions to be asked though regarding the Wii, the PS3 and 360 are competing against each other in the high end do-everything market, if they were not competing and only one existed you could guarantee they sales figures for one would move other from the theoretically non-existent one to the other. You then have to look at the amount of media bought for those systems - the 360 due to it's attach rate coupled with larger profit margin on games, large amount of DLC, the price of XBox live etc. has almost certainly made MS nearly as much money as Nintendo has made with the Wii. Take into account the PS3, it's games, the Bluray discs for it and you begin to realise that although the Wii has done well as a gaming only system, there is still much more money be poured into the wider market by consumers, the issue is merely that it's being competed for which dilutes that.
This is where convergence comes in though, it widens the market yet further, to help make sure there's enough for everyone. One example of expansion into other markets by way of convergence into existing systems is the fact due to Nintendo's success both Microsoft and Sony are taking large steps for the current gen, but most prominently for the next gen to bring a similar experience to Nintendo's offering into their systems.
"We think of Microsoft as a Windows company and Apple as an iPod company because that's what they're best at."
Really? Microsoft's real strength is in it's development tools really, this is where by far it's strongest products are. It's database server, it's office suite and really even it's web server are all far better products than the Windows line too. Desktop OS' most certainly isn't what Microsoft is best at. It's hard to argue that the iPod isn't Apple's biggest success though, but this tells us something - the iPod wasn't always around, so what does that mean? That the products a company excels at can change over time? Well yes, that's pretty much exactly what it tells us so to suggest a company is known for one product because that's what it's best at, and then using that to suggest a company shouldn't bother moving into other product areas has been proven by exactly Apple's success with the iPod, and now the iPhone.
"Why would a consumer get stuck with a Zune for convergence's sake when they could buy an iPod and still keep their Windows PC?"
Because hypothetically speaking when you look at a future whole system the Zune might be better? Say for example the iPod is a better stand-alone music player when you don't use it with any other devices, there's no evidence that just because the Zune is an ever so slightly worse music player it wouldn't become a better overall device when it comes to keeping useful data sync'd between systems automatically and so forth. What if a killer app. comes out to exploit that that makes the Zune alone worth having, or horror of horrors, what if the Zune simply does become a better product than the iPod in future? iTunes on Windows isn't actually a very nice application, it would be quite easy for example to produce a much better application for integrating your desktop with your music player. This is undoubtedly why we have software such as Rockbox - some people feel it can be done better and can be beaten and are willing to go ahead and prove it.
"The only party that benefits is Microsoft."
Really, were you responding to make a point, or simply to troll about Microsoft? It doesn't benefit Microsoft anymore than convergence benefits Apple, Sony and so on. It allows them to expand their markets, and hook people on one product and get them to buy others from the same manufacturer, Apple has almost certainly sold more Macs because people feel it goes better with their iPod or iPhone for example.
Yeah I don't disagree, I didn't want to stray too far off path with the DRM argument, and also the question of whether for example we even want our work and personal lives to be so closely intertwined.
DRM is arguably the single thing holding it back, attempts have been made to produce DRM that allows it but it has indeed been rather weak. I'm guessing we'll see one of two things happen, either DRM will work (to an extent) in their limited environments because they're using custom hardware, or they'll have to accept it needs to go. I agree though, I think it's safe to say continued pushing of DRM will will delay convergence, it will leave the resulting systems imperfect in their operation and transparency and it will certainly delay adoption.
It's ironic that Microsoft, Apple and Sony, 3 of the most prominent DRM backers in the industry are the ones that most need DRM to go away, but yet are the last to embrace that idea whilst Amazon, Play.com and so forth steam ahead with it.
I'm not sure that we'll see gaming spread to multiple devices as much as we'll see multiple devices converge, certainly Sony and Microsoft seem to be trying hard to make their consoles more than just gaming machines, both not only have the ability to play media, but are pushing it quite strongly as a major part of the offering. Both have also filed patents/spoken of the ability to play TV shows in future addons or console iterations.
Many people laugh about the Zune, but although it's not the greatest product I can see where Microsoft is going with it - there's effectively 4 areas for technology in people's lives, office, home computer, home entertainment and on the move. Currently MS doesn't have much of an on the move offering whilst Sony does with the PSP and Nintendo does with the DS, Microsoft has strong offerings in the other 3 areas, so presumably they're just now trying to tie up the last area.
But it's not as simple as tying up the last area, I've been expecting, and we've been seeing a move for a long while towards all these areas interoperating with the end goal being a sort of scenario where say, using Microsoft as an example, you walk close to your future Xbox/PC with your Zune in your pocket and it'll wirelessly pick up your songs and let you play them through that system's sound system instead. Your XBox live arcade games may automatically "jump" onto your Zune so you can play them on the move, your Xbox live friends profile may link with your contact list on your favourite IM program on your PC. Perhaps you could flag a document as important at work and it'll jump home with you via your Zune or via the net so you can continue working from home on it and that sort of thing. Rudimentary attempts at all these things already exist, but the experience isn't tied together well right now, it's not seamless enough.
I think Apple, now realising they're strong in the on the move area, and are doing pretty decently in the home PC market realise that perhaps it's time to make a push into the home entertainment market too.
Effectively, whilst we tend to think of Microsoft as the Windows company, Apple as the iPod company and that sort of thing we'll see a change towards the idea of them all offering solutions that integrate really well between all these areas. I wouldn't be suprised if you could eventually walk into a shop and buy a full offering - a big box with your PC, your console, your mobile device all in it, but with the option to buy/upgrade each individually still.
Companies like Ubisoft need to be looking towards this sort of convergence I think rather than just seeing the arrival of completely separate devices because I think it will deliver unique opportunities. To give an example of what I mean, look at how successful Tamagotchi and clones were, now imagine if you had a virtual pet that would not only live on your device, but could be left at home on your console, or brought to work on your mobile device, and your administrator at work had set a policy to allow entertainment software outside work hours and on lunch times so you could play with it on your work machine during lunch.
I was referring to the fact they collect royalties from radio stations, and then try and collect royalties from people listening to those radio stations at work.
So yes, they do effectively try and license the same thing twice and hence effectively try and get money for nothing. Judging by the £117million in the first 3 months, they seem quite successful at it too.
"Here I have to argue a bit, though. Vim and Emacs aren't "usable", in the sense that a neophyte can come to them and immediately become productive. Rather, they're "usable" in the sense that, like driving stick, it requires time and practices to become used to them, but once you've crested the steep learning curve, they become extremely productive power tools."
That's not really usability though but merely productivity. I don't disagree that keyboard shortcuts and applications based on them (and in fact command line OS' vs. GUI OS' even) can allow you to be far more productive, but they are certainly less usable as usability is really defined as how easily you can use something without such prior knowledge.
One might argue then that they're extreme examples of productivity over usability, but I'm not convinced this is the case, I believe it's possible for an application to be both usable and be great in terms of productivity. Vi and Emacs are the way they are because it's the way they've always been, not because they've undergone studies in usability and been rehashed based on that. They just offer improvements in productivity on the classic design.
Some areas of the FOSS world are looking seriously at improving usability, IIRC GIMP has in the past couple of years taken this seriously which is a great step forward. Of course, if the classic way of doing things in a particular app. whose roots dates back decades need to be refactored to improve usability then there's bound to be resistance to change or will to develop a replacement in the OSS community because they're happy with the way things are and the way things work. This is why I'm not sure FOSS really wants to go truly mainstream in general because it will take a lot of sacrifice - developers are going to have to change or replace what they've always been used to to make way for mainstream acceptance. The question the FOSS community has to ask itself is whether it's important to keep developing what they themselves like, or whether they're willing to make the sacrifice to truly go mainstream which certainly will require an attitude change towards greater acceptance of usability. Of course you then get the question of accessibility, even the HTML5 spec seems to be shunning this despite accessibility being given great focus on the web in the last decade, realistically usability is only the first step, followed by accessibility but again they're steps that must be taken if FOSS is to truly displace Microsoft.
And they are almost certainly hypocrits.
It's nigh on impossible to live the moral live without living in a cave.
No doubt the PC you posted that message on will end up in a nigerian scrap yard polluting the toxic components into the land rivers and sea in that area.
Living a moral life does not mean you get to pick and choose what morals you follow, doing that means you're just choosing a different set of morals that are and aren't important to you than someone else without actually making you any more of a good person.
Unless you sew your own clothes rather than purchase those in shops that have almost certianly come from sweat shops, unless you forego use of a vehicle filled up with fuel from the large fuel giants that pollute and even make species extinct, unless you have never wasted a drop of food in your life whilst children are starving in ethiopia, unless you've never consumed a product whose leftovers end up in a tip seeping pollutants into the earth and riverways used by humans, unless you've never consumed a newspaper or other publication from one of the controlling media groups such as Murdoch's, unless you can claim to have never done any of those things, you cannot possibly suggest that you are a more moral person than anyone else.
So there's the problem, when people are more than happy to support companies that have caused species of plant or animal to go extinct (from big oil, to wood/paper product firms) as a matter of their daily lives, I do not think taking a moral stance against Microsoft, which has actually been far more philanthropic than the likes of Apple and many other tech. companies ever have is really high on anyone's agenda.
Ironically, being more productive and hence less stressed is almost certainly going to net the majority of average joes working their day to day lives a much better night's sleep than pretending they've actually made a difference by not supporting Microsoft whilst guzzling gallons of fuel on their commute to and from work each week.
...is how they mentioned the PRS is a non-profit organisation.
A non-profit organisation netting £117 million in just the first 3 months of this year, during the depth of a recession? Either their staff are rather overpaid or someone's making a profit even if it isn't the PRS itself. No guesses as to who exactly might be making that profit! £117 million for effectively doing nothing, for charging people to listen to the music they've already paid for, to play the radio the radio station has already paid royalties for. Most businesses in the world could only dream of making £117 million in a year, let alone for doing pretty much nothing other than sending out a few invoices. No wonder they're willing to drop the price to 0.085p, they're already making £117 million for doing nothing, why not make another few 10s of millions of pounds for charging the likes of YouTube and Pandora to do your job of advertising for you?
As usual the music cartel is hiding behind shell companies/organisations like the RIAA, the IFPI and the PRS, to try and sheild their companies from the bad reputation they know full well their extortion branches would otherwise give them if they were to do everything direct.
The problem is people fall for it and it works, I've seen many people defend stuff like the PS3 or Sony's Bluray offerings like James Bond releases whilst simultaneous ranting about how much they hate the RIAA/IFPI or whatever. The same goes for the likes of the other music companies. People need to either learn to boycott all their companies and organisations or accept that they're supporting them - there's no point refusing to buy say Sony music CDs for example and then going out and giving them money by spending it on their Bluray offerings or TVs instead. If you really want to make a difference and sting the people behind these organisations then simply boycotting one product in their large range isn't enough.
I'm not saying they shouldn't make money from their offerings when Google and Pandora profit from ad revenue and such, but to make it sound like they're doing a favour that they're dropping it this low when they already net hundreds of millions of pounds a year even during periods of recession for doing nothing? Are we supposed to be grateful or something?
"Well then why don't you just explain it to us?"
You suggest that vi is usable, and then suggest that just because I can't use it doesn't mean it isn't usable. Truly usable software does not require any amount of training, prior knowledge or particularly high levels of skill, realistically you shouldn't even need documentation. If you truly believe vi can be used by someone who has never used it before without any reference, help or anything like that then you're lost so deeply in your zealotry that you're undoubtedly doing more harm than good to the free software movement because your view of software is so far removed from the view of software which people expect that you are no help whatsoever in getting the word out there for FOSS.
A good way to understand usability is that with usable software it should be clear how to perform a specific task through nothing more than seeing the interface. If your application is entirely keyboard shortcut driven then, it fails badly at usability, unless there is clear information on screen at which point it is somewhat usable, but there is almost certainly a better way of doing it. I am not against keyboard shortcuts, they are great for power users and help productivity when you know what they are, but in something as complex as a high end IDE you cannot keyboard shortcut everything without keyboard shortcuts simply getting out of hand.
In terms of general productivity, the most obvious factor is that VS has the best intellisense implementation out there and it only gets better when you're using the likes of C# with inline XML documentation. But really, from the debugger through to libraries and language features such as LINQ, Microsoft's development suite has so much to offer in terms of productivity. Rather than try and run through every individual productivity feature in VS though wasting my time reiterating what's already out there if you bother to look for yourself, I'll assume you can use Google and move on.
"With the wealth of alternatives available (let's not leave out Eclipse, since it seems pretty popular too, as well as Free), I can see no reason to tolerate the moral bankruptcy of the factors of Visual Studio. But you don't want to talk about _that_."
Again, no one really cares how corrupt Microsoft is when it comes to making money themselves. The moral aspect of using Microsoft software is no big deal for most people when you compare to the moral aspect of other every day vendors from your fuel vendors for your car, to your sweat shop made iPods and clothes, Microsoft is in the grand scheme of things, guilty of far less evils than many other companies whose products we consume every single day. Presumably then, if immoral companies are such a big issue for you you've never fuelled your car, never bought branded clothing or gadgets and have never eaten at a fast food chain? If you cannot honestly answer yes to that, then you're a hypocrit.
"I'll agree that the Imperial "Tools" are da bomb. Not being a beginner, however, "Beginner Friendly" is not what I want."
Not being a beginner at what exactly? Certainly a lack of understanding about software usability suggests you're severely lacking in some of the more important concepts of software development. Perhaps you mean you're just good at churning out code which is only a small part of software development? In the real world, companies need to do more than just churn out code though, they need full product life cycle from requirements gathering, to design, to implementation, to testing, to deployment and of course maintenance. Microsoft offers a full blown tool chain to handle all of that in a single package, that's quite attractive and it's something the FOSS world needs to work seriously hard towards to offer an alternative. Eclipse is certainly the best attempt at this so far, but it's still not quite there.
"and if you think that emacs, and all those vi variants for that matter, aren't usable and productive just because _you_ can't work them"
And therein lies the problem, you apparently don't even understand what the term usability actually means.
The difference is those religions had millions of followers.
Scientology has 50,000.
Or to put it in context, if Iraq had been a Scientologist nation, their religion could've been whiped out about 15 times over since 2003.