That's a pretty all-inclusive title, it apparently also addresses me. But I won't be 'getting ready for C# 4.0' and I think that I'm within my rights to say so and to explain why.
Maybe you don't like my reasons. Maybe you think I 'hate' microsoft (I don't, actually I think some of their products are pretty good, notably excel and visual studio, but I can't stand 'word', 'outlook' and 'clippy'). But I think they as a corporation still have to show they understand that they've done some things wrong in the past and until they change their ways (and deal better with the virus plague on their machines), and convince me that they mean it I will not be switching back, even though that probably would save me a bunch of headaches when communicating with customers that still think attachments in proprietary formats are a valid means of communication (it is to them all their buddies are using microsoft, I'm the odd one out).
I remember IBM handing out little flashlights on a trade show a few years ago, they were labelled 'we've seen the light'. It took them being beaten within another 3 years of their lives to finally 'get it', if not IBM could have easily gone the way of SUN and SGI. Microsoft still hasn't reached that phase.
I wish microsoft and all those that support them the very best, meanwhile I'll be playing over here with other, almost equally shiny toys.
I ignored the title and read the actual content (you generally need to tell me to RTFT, not RTFA :) ). I see what you mean now.
About the virus plague -- yes, I was hit by Blaster on XP too, but MS seems to have really started getting security around 2003. The only explanation for your product having more malware than your nearest competitor's, even though your product is objectively more secure, is that the amount of malware is a function of market share.
I agree with you about the downsides of using proprietary formats. However, the power of a general-purpose computing platform like Windows, Mac OS X or Linux is that you can choose to lock or not lock yourself exactly as much as you want to, so I consider it a non-issue. Given that the platform gives you the freedom to not lock yourself into it, to my mind technical specifics and personal preferences for tools become the deciding factor. I really like the Visual Studio debugger and C# as a language.
> I ignored the title and read the actual content (you generally need to tell me to RTFT, not RTFA :) ). I see what you mean now.
np.
> is that the amount of malware is a function of market share.
I've heard that a lot, but it may very well just be bad design. By the time another platform displaces windows we'll know.
Whether it was 'objectively more secure' I don't know.
The number of exploits that have been found over the years is alarming, I don't think that the various unix based desktop systems are that vulnerable.
One argument why I think that is true is that if the number of windows hosts is 100x as large as the nearest competitor (and it's not, it's much less) then the 'niche' of the competitor is large enough that for a few of the entities targeting windows and getting only a small share of the machines because of inter-viral warfare (and that's pretty much the norm) the competitor is actually 'low hanging fruit'.
Assuming of course that the platform is equally easy to exploit.
The fact that we're not seeing something like that to me suggests that there really is a real difference between the various platforms in exploitability.
The title says "Get Ready for C# 4.0".
That's a pretty all-inclusive title, it apparently also addresses me. But I won't be 'getting ready for C# 4.0' and I think that I'm within my rights to say so and to explain why.
Maybe you don't like my reasons. Maybe you think I 'hate' microsoft (I don't, actually I think some of their products are pretty good, notably excel and visual studio, but I can't stand 'word', 'outlook' and 'clippy'). But I think they as a corporation still have to show they understand that they've done some things wrong in the past and until they change their ways (and deal better with the virus plague on their machines), and convince me that they mean it I will not be switching back, even though that probably would save me a bunch of headaches when communicating with customers that still think attachments in proprietary formats are a valid means of communication (it is to them all their buddies are using microsoft, I'm the odd one out).
I remember IBM handing out little flashlights on a trade show a few years ago, they were labelled 'we've seen the light'. It took them being beaten within another 3 years of their lives to finally 'get it', if not IBM could have easily gone the way of SUN and SGI. Microsoft still hasn't reached that phase.
I wish microsoft and all those that support them the very best, meanwhile I'll be playing over here with other, almost equally shiny toys.