I'm especially curious about the "given only once" condition. You sound like you're assuming that the poor are automatically too shiftless and irresponsible to remember to come in and get a booster shot in six weeks.
Failure to comply with medication regimes is a major problem in developing nations. It's not because people don't want to, it's because they often can't. For example, it may take them several hours to get to the hospital and back.
In any case, you're focussing on a small part of the statement and missing the big picture. The real issue is that people arguing for increased spending for an HIV vaccine need to present a cost/benefit analysis if they want to argue that that is money well spent.
Of course, Gates has the freedom to decide for himself that he is so much smarter than the market and policymakers and pump billions into an HIV vaccine without a cost/benefit analysis, but without presenting a reasonable cost/benefit analysis, that's a publicity stunt, not useful research funding.
Evil comes in many forms, which form will you take?
Well, we don't have to guess for you: you are evil, and you have just shown us what form you take: that of a cynical war monger. You want to see evil? Look in the mirror.
In my experience, people raised on pointers and low-level tricks rarely succeed at writing decent, clean, efficient code in languages like Java; they have never learned how to, and when their code runs slowly, they tend to blame the language instead of recognizing their own lack of skill.
What, with nothing in the middle [between assembly and Java]?
There isn't anything "in the middle"; Java is already a pretty low-level language as far as languages go. C isn't significantly lower level, it is simply different (and in a bad way).
But I'd teach them something like Ruby,
Ruby is a great language, but it's a very high level language--it's far more high level than Java.
The Nokia E61 has a nicer operating system than the Q, Blackberry, or Treo, it's small, mature, and high quality. (Despite the European web site, you can order it in the US from on-line dealers.)
Because Microsoft must be destroyed! All their employees must be killed, their headquarters in Redmond must be bulldozed, and the earth doused with water blessed by RMS.
It's ironic that you use that kind of language, because that's the language Microsoft's top-level management has used to describe their competitors and open source software, as we have seen during Microsoft's various trials.
No, I don't want Microsoft to be "destroyed". I want them to operate according to fair and competitive business practices. Fortunately, there are some signs recently that Microsoft is changing.
Of course, if you personally happen to work at Microsoft, I think you should get fired: your attitude stinks. It's people like you that keep hurting Microsoft and that endanger the future of all the good people that work at Microsoft.
I'm curious what you think the "conflict of interest" would be in allowing Microsoft to compete in open bidding with other vendors.
Come on, get real. In reality, Microsoft isn't just bidding, they are still controlling the process, and they will still be the sole provider of search on most desktops.
But, to answer your question: where is the conflict of interest if the same vendor provides both the desktop OS and ties to on-line web sites? Simple: the company then has an interest in modifying the desktop OS to make it work better with its own on-line sites. That's not hypothetical, Microsoft has explicitly espoused such strategies in the past.
AIDS is a worldwide problem and in many countries rape is by far the leading cause of AIDS.
Not just rape, but general suppression of women and women's rights. And that is precisely why investing in education, development, public health, and women's rights in those nations is what needs to happen right now.
Maybe you can explain to the millions of people in Africa that all they needed to do was stop by a 7-11 and pick-up some condoms.
Maybe you can explain how you're going to deliver complex drug therapies or vaccine schedules in nations where people can't even get condoms? Vaccines are a gimmick for wealthy nations, an outgrowth of a quick fix mentality. Once you get poor nations to the point where you could deliver a vaccine, HIV infection rates will already have dropped down to US and European levels.
Just because money is spent on one thing does not make it unavailable to a totally different market. [...] Every dollar that Microsoft makes in monopoly profits is money that's not available for Twinkie purchases; therefore Microsoft's monopoly tactics are leading to a healthier America. As you can see that is just dumb, just as dumb as your analogy.
Your analogy is flawed because, while Twinkies are unrelated to economic development, the cost of Microsoft software is very much related to economic development: every modern government and every major business has little choice but to buy Microsoft software in order to participate in the global economy. That's why when Microsoft charges monopolistic prices, it does hurt economic development.
To correct another minor point Microsoft is not funneling money to anyone. Bill Gates is giving money and yes he was the founder of Microsoft but they are not the same thing.
Gates earned that money through Microsoft (and he didn't just earn it, he actively participated in its monopolistic practices). Therefore, the analysis of the causes and effects of Microsoft's profits and the use Gates puts them to is very much valid (and I didn't start the thread anyway).
This is true for adults, but not for the children of people infected with HIV/AIDS. I'm all in favor of personal responsibility and the obvious solution the spread of AIDS does seem to be "stop having sex outside of marriage"
I'm not talking about "personal responsibility", I'm talking about basic reprodutive rights and basic sex education. The problem with HIV isn't one of failing to choose abstinence or safe sex, it's that women in many of the hardest hit countries simply don't have the choice to abstain or pratice safer sex at all, for a variety of social, educational, and economic reasons. Giving them that choice doesn't require any new technology or magic bullets; it is something we can do right now.
but it would still be a fairly massive world-wide problem just in terms of those who already have the disease - especially those who have the disease through no fault of their own.
The fact that you wish that a magic pill makes it all go away doesn't change reality: a vaccine won't cure or help people already infected, a therapeutic vaccine is very unlikely, and we can't even deliver the cheap and effective drugs we already have.
Only education, womens rights, and economic developent are going to bring the AIDS epidemic under control.
Tell me how it is that you can create an economy in a country where over 1/3 of the adult population is already infected with HIV.
Come on, use your head.
The fact that 1/3 of the adult population in some countries is infected, while it is at most a few percent in many other countries, tells you that there are other factors that cause the high HIV infection rates.
Furthermore, the only way these people would be helped is if you could develop a cheap, effective, therapeutic HIV vaccine that needs to be given only once. The chances of that happening are negligible.
The best way of combatting HIV in third world nations is public education, women's rights, public health, and economic development. Doing that would bring down HIV infection rates in the hardest hit countries to western levels.
Oh and if you can figure out how sick and dying people can be good workers and entrepreneurs without medication.
They can't be, and they will never be: almost everybody who is HIV infected will get sick and die from it eventually. With long term drug therapy and excellent medical care, people may be able to live close to a normal lifespan, but economic development is a prerequisite for, not a consequence of, that.
Bill Gates already has the money (whether he got it fairly or not). Would you rather he keep it?
That's an entirely separate question. If he spends billions on vaccine research that leads to no useful results, I suppose it will finance US and European scientists and equipment manufacturers which is probably better than some other ways he could be spending his money. But that doesn't change the fact that pretending that this money is going to help children in the third world is a misrepresentation. Vaccine research is a long-shot and, beyond the generous amounts that are already being spent, an inefficient use of AIDS-related funding.
So you are saying we shouldn't bother to help a child who was born with AIDS just because some people made a poor decision?
No, I'm saying that we should spend our limited resources carefully, so that we can save the maximum number of babies (and adults).
Any baby born today with HIV is very unlikely to benefit from vaccine research. And there is a good chance that no vaccine will ever be developed, or even that if it will be developed, it will still take many decades. That's why we need to allocate our funding carefully.
Putting too much money into vaccine research relative to other efforts means that many babies will die needlessly.
People's lives depend on a cure/vaccine/treatment for HIV/AIDS. People's lives do not depend on the development of software
Except in cases of rape, people can easily avoid getting infected with HIV/AIDS. Abstinence or safe sex cost nothing, and they have the additional benefit of reducing population growth.
You cannot avoid using Microsoft software. Every dollar that Microsoft makes in monopoly profits (i.e., every dollar that Microsoft makes that goes beyond what they would make in an efficient market) is money that's not available for public health, education, or development.
Dollar for dollar, money available for improving the economy and infrastructure of third world nations is going to save more lives than money available for an AIDS vaccine.
So, I think, overall, when Microsoft uses its monopoly profits to take money out of the economy and funnel it into the development of projects designed to make Gates look better, you're getting the worst of both worlds: money becomes unavailable for productive uses, and it is funnelled into projects that make Gates look good but are not particularly rational.
First of all, "mass customization" has been a meme for a while, but I think it's a bit premature to call the area "burgeoning". Most people still buy mass produced goods at Walmart, and customization of their computer consists of baby picture wallpaper and stains on the keyboard.
Second, Spore may be the most flashy and well-executed variety of computer game that permits user customization or attempts to do things with evolution, but it is far from the first. And to be commercially successful and appeal to a mass audience, it has to make compromises in terms of constraining gameplay and guiding the player. But regardless of how good Spore ultimately will be, what it will do is spawn more experimentation in this area, and that's probably going to lead to many more interesting games.
The article addressed this point by mentioning that the definitions of high and low level language are a moving target.
No, it's not. I was there for most of the evolution of C, since the K&R days. C has always been considered a "low level language". Nor are the problems with it news. Strange as it may be to believe, there were decent and efficient high level languages in the 70's and 80's.
C caught on because it shipped free with UNIX, because it was easy to write compilers for it, because Microsoft adopted it, and because a "full" compiler for it fit on the PDP-11 and happened to generate OK code for that machine.
If you're going to go with the jargon as it's most often used nowadays (which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do), then C would certainly be about as low as you can get without manipulating individual registers - i.e., without being assembly language.
If you bother to read the C language specs, you'll see that the C language guarantees very little of the things you may think of when you say that "C is low level". ANSI C implementations can legitimately prevent you from doing any kind of low-level pointer manipulation or bit access; they can garbage collect and ignore "free" if they like. And there have been implementations like that. What you think of as "low level" is a particularly common set of implementation choices, not a part of the C language.
However, to be fair, Microsoft should not be prohibited from being one of those bidders
Yes, they should be, since they have a conflict of interest. Conflicts of interest often mean that we forbid individuals or companies from doing things that are perfectly alright for other companies to do. Forbidding certain actions because of conflict of interest is not ideal, but it is still more fair than the alternative.
Ideally, Microsoft should break up; that's the only way in which we would get back a truly competitive market. And then these issues won't arise anymore.
Looking at source code will not preclude your from working on something else in the future. That idiotic lie needs to finally die.
No, what needs to die is the idiotic lie that you can look at source code with impunity.
Many source licenses and even documentation licenses from companies like Microsoft and Sun include explicit restrictions on what you can do after you have looked at the source code.
Unless a source license explicitly disclaims any restrictions on what you can do afterwards, you run a huge risk by looking at the source code. A few of Microsoft's shared source licenses do, but not all of them. Even with such disclaimers, you still need to be careful.
It would be a good thing if they were learning both, but getting used to programming in nothing but Java is almost certainly worse than getting used to programming in nothing but C++.
I disagree. C and C++ warp people's minds. The fact that C and C++ have been useful only means that they have been able to do even more damage.
In contrast to C and C++'s design flaws, Java's design flaws are self-correcting because they actually get in the way of getting work done. That's why it's OK when people grow up with Java; they'll start looking for something better on their own.
We are better off if C and C++ aren't taught anymore. Teach people assembly language instead of C, and then teach them a decent high level language.
Oh? Which of my two statements do you disagree with? That Java is awful, or that people are learning something other than C/C++ when they're learning Java?
When you respond to something, at least take a second to read it, and respond to what people said, not what you thought they said.
hey released the.Net Framework source code (called ROTOR) under the same license (Shared Source). Though you can't use it commercially, it actually compiles on multiple platforms. Good for students and guys working on alternate implementations, though you cant lift code from it. They also started a new code sharing community called CodePlex.
Unlike, say, Stallman, I have no problem with closed source software; I think closed source software will fail in the long run, but I also think it is perfectly legitimate for companies to attempt to make closed source software their business model.
In contrast, I think "shared source" is sleazy and evil: it's an attempt to entangle students and users in proprietary software licenses and to get people to work for Microsoft for free. Sun has tried to do the same thing with their "community licenses".
If someone offers you source code, don't look at it unless it comes under a genuine open source license; anything else is too risky.
Well, the current generation of programmers is being educated in Java. Java itself is pretty awful, but at least people are getting used to programming in something other than C/C++.
It's pointless to try and reason with these people: the idea that C and C++ are "efficient" has become an article of faith. This problem will only solve itself the way all such problems solve themselves: the generations brought up on C and C++ need to die out, and they need to get replaced by a new generation of people brought up with more rationally designed languages. We're going to be stuck with C and C++ as mainstream languages, and all the bloat and inefficiency that that entails, for at least another two decades.
You haven't wisened up, you are still making the same mistake: you are assuming that the big, established player will be able to maintain their position.
Once a market becomes dominated by a few big players, it stops being innovative. Look at the kind of services we would have gotten if AOL and Compuserve had continued to dominate on-line services. Or look at what Microsoft has done to the PC industry.
Fortunately, the gaming industry won't stay this way: with graphics hardware and tool prices coming down, more and more people will be able to enter the industry again, and there is little reason why a single company should be able to dominate it, like Microsoft did with operating systems. Xbox 360 and PS/3 are just speedbumps.
They released free products (player and server). It's actually their move to try and drive MS out.
Well, what do you suggest they'd do instead? They are competing with a convicted monopolist that acquired Virtual PC. Should they hang around and wait for Microsoft to move first?
If you decide something should be free, they have every right, regardless of position, to answer that with a similar free product.
Sorry, your naive ideas about "having every right" don't apply; a court might well require Microsoft to stay out of entire markets or product lines.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm especially curious about the "given only once" condition. You sound like you're assuming that the poor are automatically too shiftless and irresponsible to remember to come in and get a booster shot in six weeks.
Failure to comply with medication regimes is a major problem in developing nations. It's not because people don't want to, it's because they often can't. For example, it may take them several hours to get to the hospital and back.
In any case, you're focussing on a small part of the statement and missing the big picture. The real issue is that people arguing for increased spending for an HIV vaccine need to present a cost/benefit analysis if they want to argue that that is money well spent.
Of course, Gates has the freedom to decide for himself that he is so much smarter than the market and policymakers and pump billions into an HIV vaccine without a cost/benefit analysis, but without presenting a reasonable cost/benefit analysis, that's a publicity stunt, not useful research funding.
Evil comes in many forms, which form will you take?
Well, we don't have to guess for you: you are evil, and you have just shown us what form you take: that of a cynical war monger. You want to see evil? Look in the mirror.
It wouldn't take much to go from C++ to Java,
In my experience, people raised on pointers and low-level tricks rarely succeed at writing decent, clean, efficient code in languages like Java; they have never learned how to, and when their code runs slowly, they tend to blame the language instead of recognizing their own lack of skill.
What, with nothing in the middle [between assembly and Java]?
There isn't anything "in the middle"; Java is already a pretty low-level language as far as languages go. C isn't significantly lower level, it is simply different (and in a bad way).
But I'd teach them something like Ruby,
Ruby is a great language, but it's a very high level language--it's far more high level than Java.
The Nokia E61 has a nicer operating system than the Q, Blackberry, or Treo, it's small, mature, and high quality. (Despite the European web site, you can order it in the US from on-line dealers.)
Because Microsoft must be destroyed! All their employees must be killed, their headquarters in Redmond must be bulldozed, and the earth doused with water blessed by RMS.
It's ironic that you use that kind of language, because that's the language Microsoft's top-level management has used to describe their competitors and open source software, as we have seen during Microsoft's various trials.
No, I don't want Microsoft to be "destroyed". I want them to operate according to fair and competitive business practices. Fortunately, there are some signs recently that Microsoft is changing.
Of course, if you personally happen to work at Microsoft, I think you should get fired: your attitude stinks. It's people like you that keep hurting Microsoft and that endanger the future of all the good people that work at Microsoft.
I'm curious what you think the "conflict of interest" would be in allowing Microsoft to compete in open bidding with other vendors.
Come on, get real. In reality, Microsoft isn't just bidding, they are still controlling the process, and they will still be the sole provider of search on most desktops.
But, to answer your question: where is the conflict of interest if the same vendor provides both the desktop OS and ties to on-line web sites? Simple: the company then has an interest in modifying the desktop OS to make it work better with its own on-line sites. That's not hypothetical, Microsoft has explicitly espoused such strategies in the past.
AIDS is a worldwide problem and in many countries rape is by far the leading cause of AIDS.
Not just rape, but general suppression of women and women's rights. And that is precisely why investing in education, development, public health, and women's rights in those nations is what needs to happen right now.
Maybe you can explain to the millions of people in Africa that all they needed to do was stop by a 7-11 and pick-up some condoms.
Maybe you can explain how you're going to deliver complex drug therapies or vaccine schedules in nations where people can't even get condoms? Vaccines are a gimmick for wealthy nations, an outgrowth of a quick fix mentality. Once you get poor nations to the point where you could deliver a vaccine, HIV infection rates will already have dropped down to US and European levels.
Just because money is spent on one thing does not make it unavailable to a totally different market. [...] Every dollar that Microsoft makes in monopoly profits is money that's not available for Twinkie purchases; therefore Microsoft's monopoly tactics are leading to a healthier America. As you can see that is just dumb, just as dumb as your analogy.
Your analogy is flawed because, while Twinkies are unrelated to economic development, the cost of Microsoft software is very much related to economic development: every modern government and every major business has little choice but to buy Microsoft software in order to participate in the global economy. That's why when Microsoft charges monopolistic prices, it does hurt economic development.
To correct another minor point Microsoft is not funneling money to anyone. Bill Gates is giving money and yes he was the founder of Microsoft but they are not the same thing.
Gates earned that money through Microsoft (and he didn't just earn it, he actively participated in its monopolistic practices). Therefore, the analysis of the causes and effects of Microsoft's profits and the use Gates puts them to is very much valid (and I didn't start the thread anyway).
If I had meant "trend", I would have said so.
I said "meme" because that's what I meant.
This is true for adults, but not for the children of people infected with HIV/AIDS. I'm all in favor of personal responsibility and the obvious solution the spread of AIDS does seem to be "stop having sex outside of marriage"
I'm not talking about "personal responsibility", I'm talking about basic reprodutive rights and basic sex education. The problem with HIV isn't one of failing to choose abstinence or safe sex, it's that women in many of the hardest hit countries simply don't have the choice to abstain or pratice safer sex at all, for a variety of social, educational, and economic reasons. Giving them that choice doesn't require any new technology or magic bullets; it is something we can do right now.
but it would still be a fairly massive world-wide problem just in terms of those who already have the disease - especially those who have the disease through no fault of their own.
The fact that you wish that a magic pill makes it all go away doesn't change reality: a vaccine won't cure or help people already infected, a therapeutic vaccine is very unlikely, and we can't even deliver the cheap and effective drugs we already have.
Only education, womens rights, and economic developent are going to bring the AIDS epidemic under control.
Tell me how it is that you can create an economy in a country where over 1/3 of the adult population is already infected with HIV.
Come on, use your head.
The fact that 1/3 of the adult population in some countries is infected, while it is at most a few percent in many other countries, tells you that there are other factors that cause the high HIV infection rates.
Furthermore, the only way these people would be helped is if you could develop a cheap, effective, therapeutic HIV vaccine that needs to be given only once. The chances of that happening are negligible.
The best way of combatting HIV in third world nations is public education, women's rights, public health, and economic development. Doing that would bring down HIV infection rates in the hardest hit countries to western levels.
Oh and if you can figure out how sick and dying people can be good workers and entrepreneurs without medication.
They can't be, and they will never be: almost everybody who is HIV infected will get sick and die from it eventually. With long term drug therapy and excellent medical care, people may be able to live close to a normal lifespan, but economic development is a prerequisite for, not a consequence of, that.
Bill Gates already has the money (whether he got it fairly or not). Would you rather he keep it?
That's an entirely separate question. If he spends billions on vaccine research that leads to no useful results, I suppose it will finance US and European scientists and equipment manufacturers which is probably better than some other ways he could be spending his money. But that doesn't change the fact that pretending that this money is going to help children in the third world is a misrepresentation. Vaccine research is a long-shot and, beyond the generous amounts that are already being spent, an inefficient use of AIDS-related funding.
So you are saying we shouldn't bother to help a child who was born with AIDS just because some people made a poor decision?
No, I'm saying that we should spend our limited resources carefully, so that we can save the maximum number of babies (and adults).
Any baby born today with HIV is very unlikely to benefit from vaccine research. And there is a good chance that no vaccine will ever be developed, or even that if it will be developed, it will still take many decades. That's why we need to allocate our funding carefully.
Putting too much money into vaccine research relative to other efforts means that many babies will die needlessly.
People's lives depend on a cure/vaccine/treatment for HIV/AIDS. People's lives do not depend on the development of software
Except in cases of rape, people can easily avoid getting infected with HIV/AIDS. Abstinence or safe sex cost nothing, and they have the additional benefit of reducing population growth.
You cannot avoid using Microsoft software. Every dollar that Microsoft makes in monopoly profits (i.e., every dollar that Microsoft makes that goes beyond what they would make in an efficient market) is money that's not available for public health, education, or development.
Dollar for dollar, money available for improving the economy and infrastructure of third world nations is going to save more lives than money available for an AIDS vaccine.
So, I think, overall, when Microsoft uses its monopoly profits to take money out of the economy and funnel it into the development of projects designed to make Gates look better, you're getting the worst of both worlds: money becomes unavailable for productive uses, and it is funnelled into projects that make Gates look good but are not particularly rational.
First of all, "mass customization" has been a meme for a while, but I think it's a bit premature to call the area "burgeoning". Most people still buy mass produced goods at Walmart, and customization of their computer consists of baby picture wallpaper and stains on the keyboard.
Second, Spore may be the most flashy and well-executed variety of computer game that permits user customization or attempts to do things with evolution, but it is far from the first. And to be commercially successful and appeal to a mass audience, it has to make compromises in terms of constraining gameplay and guiding the player. But regardless of how good Spore ultimately will be, what it will do is spawn more experimentation in this area, and that's probably going to lead to many more interesting games.
The article addressed this point by mentioning that the definitions of high and low level language are a moving target.
No, it's not. I was there for most of the evolution of C, since the K&R days. C has always been considered a "low level language". Nor are the problems with it news. Strange as it may be to believe, there were decent and efficient high level languages in the 70's and 80's.
C caught on because it shipped free with UNIX, because it was easy to write compilers for it, because Microsoft adopted it, and because a "full" compiler for it fit on the PDP-11 and happened to generate OK code for that machine.
If you're going to go with the jargon as it's most often used nowadays (which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do), then C would certainly be about as low as you can get without manipulating individual registers - i.e., without being assembly language.
If you bother to read the C language specs, you'll see that the C language guarantees very little of the things you may think of when you say that "C is low level". ANSI C implementations can legitimately prevent you from doing any kind of low-level pointer manipulation or bit access; they can garbage collect and ignore "free" if they like. And there have been implementations like that. What you think of as "low level" is a particularly common set of implementation choices, not a part of the C language.
Corn is indeed a poor source for ethanol, but you can make ethanol from just about any plant material.
However, to be fair, Microsoft should not be prohibited from being one of those bidders
Yes, they should be, since they have a conflict of interest. Conflicts of interest often mean that we forbid individuals or companies from doing things that are perfectly alright for other companies to do. Forbidding certain actions because of conflict of interest is not ideal, but it is still more fair than the alternative.
Ideally, Microsoft should break up; that's the only way in which we would get back a truly competitive market. And then these issues won't arise anymore.
Looking at source code will not preclude your from working on something else in the future. That idiotic lie needs to finally die.
No, what needs to die is the idiotic lie that you can look at source code with impunity.
Many source licenses and even documentation licenses from companies like Microsoft and Sun include explicit restrictions on what you can do after you have looked at the source code.
Unless a source license explicitly disclaims any restrictions on what you can do afterwards, you run a huge risk by looking at the source code. A few of Microsoft's shared source licenses do, but not all of them. Even with such disclaimers, you still need to be careful.
It would be a good thing if they were learning both, but getting used to programming in nothing but Java is almost certainly worse than getting used to programming in nothing but C++.
I disagree. C and C++ warp people's minds. The fact that C and C++ have been useful only means that they have been able to do even more damage.
In contrast to C and C++'s design flaws, Java's design flaws are self-correcting because they actually get in the way of getting work done. That's why it's OK when people grow up with Java; they'll start looking for something better on their own.
We are better off if C and C++ aren't taught anymore. Teach people assembly language instead of C, and then teach them a decent high level language.
Oh, hell no.
Oh? Which of my two statements do you disagree with? That Java is awful, or that people are learning something other than C/C++ when they're learning Java?
When you respond to something, at least take a second to read it, and respond to what people said, not what you thought they said.
hey released the .Net Framework source code (called ROTOR) under the same license (Shared Source). Though you can't use it commercially, it actually compiles on multiple platforms. Good for students and guys working on alternate implementations, though you cant lift code from it. They also started a new code sharing community called CodePlex.
Unlike, say, Stallman, I have no problem with closed source software; I think closed source software will fail in the long run, but I also think it is perfectly legitimate for companies to attempt to make closed source software their business model.
In contrast, I think "shared source" is sleazy and evil: it's an attempt to entangle students and users in proprietary software licenses and to get people to work for Microsoft for free. Sun has tried to do the same thing with their "community licenses".
If someone offers you source code, don't look at it unless it comes under a genuine open source license; anything else is too risky.
Well, the current generation of programmers is being educated in Java. Java itself is pretty awful, but at least people are getting used to programming in something other than C/C++.
It's pointless to try and reason with these people: the idea that C and C++ are "efficient" has become an article of faith. This problem will only solve itself the way all such problems solve themselves: the generations brought up on C and C++ need to die out, and they need to get replaced by a new generation of people brought up with more rationally designed languages. We're going to be stuck with C and C++ as mainstream languages, and all the bloat and inefficiency that that entails, for at least another two decades.
You haven't wisened up, you are still making the same mistake: you are assuming that the big, established player will be able to maintain their position.
Once a market becomes dominated by a few big players, it stops being innovative. Look at the kind of services we would have gotten if AOL and Compuserve had continued to dominate on-line services. Or look at what Microsoft has done to the PC industry.
Fortunately, the gaming industry won't stay this way: with graphics hardware and tool prices coming down, more and more people will be able to enter the industry again, and there is little reason why a single company should be able to dominate it, like Microsoft did with operating systems. Xbox 360 and PS/3 are just speedbumps.
They released free products (player and server). It's actually their move to try and drive MS out.
Well, what do you suggest they'd do instead? They are competing with a convicted monopolist that acquired Virtual PC. Should they hang around and wait for Microsoft to move first?
If you decide something should be free, they have every right, regardless of position, to answer that with a similar free product.
Sorry, your naive ideas about "having every right" don't apply; a court might well require Microsoft to stay out of entire markets or product lines.