You think that's bad, try Kings Quest 5, the last version offered on floppy disk. Shit's ridiculous, and then one of the floppies goes bad.

Amazing, I wonder what advertising platform paid for the Internet before this generation of marketers declared themselves essential to pay for the Internet? I can host a website for $4.99 a month, buy a Linux VM for $20 a month. Plenty of content is made by people not paid by your advertising dollars. Advertisers, we don't need you, don't test us.

Spoiler, for those of you who haven't read the books, stop reading here.

This isn't going to work. There will not be a significant number of people who purchase this Mozilla phone. Mozilla phone will have less sales than Zune.

No offense, but it seems like your understanding of the Supremacy Clause is somewhat lacking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause

This isn't just in theory, look what happened to Qwest when they dared to disagree.

I find it funny that nobody brings up Launchpad on OSX. Not that OSX forces Launchpad on you, but it is similar in that it's essentially a full screen start menu with an app-like interface on a desktop OS.

or aliens or robots from the future... whatever, fuck you! You'll watch it anyway.

People who believe that their "personal information" isn't being sold are just being ignorant. These are probably the same people who believe that ALL the money they deposit is sitting in the vault at the bank.

How can that be true? If Steve Jobs is living tissue over metal endoskeleton, he should last 120 years with his existing power cell...

How about the same thing the factory worker does when he's replaced by automation or his job is outsourced to cheaper labor markets. Survive. Adapt. Why is it so unthinkable that highly educated people would be put out of work by progress, instead of simply the low wage laborers?

"This article is based on a prerelease version of the .NET Framework 2.0"

Can I recommend that you find a slightly newer source?

"Mono can't run .NET apps."

Wow, that's funny. I must be on acid, because I thought I just compiled a .NET app in Visual Studio, copied it to Linux, and literally ran the Portable Executable file (.EXE) with Mono.

"Probably you would have to code in a subset of Mono, this coupled with the fact that Mono will always play catch up to .NET means that developing cross-platform apps in Mono will always place severe restrictions on you."

Let's see how true this is:

http://mono-project.com/Compatibility

So here's what's missing:

CodeContracts - API complete, partial tooling
EntityFrameworks - Not available.
Server-side OData - Depends on Entity Framework.
WCF - silverlight 2.0 subset completed
WPF - no plans to implement
WF - Will implement WF 4 instead on future versions of Mono.
System.Management - does not map to Linux
System.EnterpriseServices - deprecated

So other than the above Microsoft specific technology plus Entity Framework (use NHibernate instead), the entire C# 4.0, .NET 4.0, and ASP.NET 4.0 platforms are supported. Oh, and what really matters is ISO/IEC 23271:2006 and ISO/IEC 23270:2006... you know the ISO standards that Mono implements.

So basically, your entire point against Mono as a multi-platform solution for ISO standards based .NET development is bullshit. The few libraries that are limited on Mono aren't that critical for applications, web, or backend development. WinForms is supported, ASP.NET is supported, and services (as console apps) are supported.

Yeah those Mono license fees are expensive. Almost wiped out my company with those fees. It's not like they have .NET 2 through .NET 4 implemented in Mono for free, which you can run on Linux or Windows. Idiot.

Are you serious? We abandoned C++ Builder for Visual Studio and C# .NET and every other developer meeting we're praising the flying spaghetti monster that we did. The massive reduction in defects and the massive improvement in productivity were huge for our team. C++ Builder is great for breaking compatibility with every release (we owned literally every version up to XE), the IDE and/or compiler crashing at random intervals or producing broken code that itself crashes at random intervals. Plus you're serious about real code when you're talking about writing software that's based on the VCL?

Oh and by the way, a base class library that requires you to *new* every BCL object but doesn't have garbage collection, simply begs for access violations and memory leaks. Simply idiotic. You couldn't pay us to switch back.

As a bonus, we can compile our .NET binaries to native code with one drop down box selection, rather than code that pushes all of our data through a Delphi interface and back and beats the hell out of a shitty heap implementation. At least they switched to a 3rd party C++ STL implementation rather than their own buggy garbage.

Microsoft hasn't abandoned DOS or Win16???? Have you tried running a DOS program or a Windows 3.x program in Windows 7? I think you'll find that your information is more than a little out of date.

And NT was a complete and total abandonment of the Windows 9x codebase. The entire OS was rewritten from scratch in C, an entire NT API exists under the hood that powers that OS, and then the Win32 API/ABI was added as a compatibility layer on top of that OS. As was their POSIX and OS/2 compatibility layer.

I know you probably can't be bothered to validate what you're saying before you say it, but perhaps a little bit of Google is in order before you spout off? Or try running a DOS app. Or something. Or let the grown ups talk.