"Precedent" implies this is the first time something like this happened. The trend is quite clear: don't depend on anything offered by Google for your business, as Google will just take it away at a whim. It's one thing to use their service opportunistically: this week they're the best choice, but we could use someone else next week. But to build your business around a Google service shows you're really not paying attention.

Complicated how? It's the simplest way to manage lightweight containers at scale. It's not about what happens on any one machine (that's a well-solved problem), it's about fleet management in a way that decouples the hardware from the needs or the software, without the overhead of a full OS per container. I don't think it adds much value at the scale of a few machines, maybe not even at a few dozen machines.

It's designed to solve a deployment problem, not a security problem. People really like VMs for managing deployments - everything together in one image, no conflicts to resolve, very easy. Images can be shared internally or in an open-source way. Docker gives you that with far less overhead, so if you have a lot of very small "servers", you can cram them together in a VM (just like with jails), but without the security of VMs or jails.

For a single server, jails just seem better, but for managing a fleet, especially in the cloud, Docker has the infrastructure built.

Sites where you can buy the special green markers for the edges of CDs? And directional speaker cables? Are your interconnects "danceable"? Maybe you didn't pay enough.

Oh, I agree, if you're just doing simple stuff where you just have some web form that "looks like" the backend storage, without complex logic in between, and no scale concerns, there's little enough difference. You're barely writing any business logic in the first place, so any tool will do, and Java has better frameworks.

In a sense, Java frameworks are a great programming language where they make sense, but they're only tangentially related to Java. Solving complex problems with the raw language, however, is where Java is constantly irritating compared to C#.

Yes, exactly, that's the problem. The language is so flawed that most of it is written by automation in the IDE. Why not have a language that's what you type in the IDE instead. C# finally, recently, got the idea right with properties that don't need backing fields: no more getters and setters, except where you're doing something more trivial, a great example of boilerplate reduction. List comprehensions that replace for loops with a single line are another great example.

Removing the boilerplate lets you read just the business logic when maintaining the code. The more business logic that fits on one screen, the more maintainable the code.

Wait, what? Lower demand to you means higher prices? Maybe a bit less 420, dave.

Xamarin's whole model is making the GUI layer cross platform (I've only just started, so I may be buying the hype, but that's the point of it). QT is the same - you write against their presentation abstraction, and they present something platform-appropriate on each platform. That said, you may want a differently-behaving UI on tablet vs desktop, but even there a sufficiently clever presentation layer could make that work as well.

LYNQ is not a cutting edge feature in C# - it's been there many years, and I've maintained very lambda-heavy code.that was already years old. Nothing fancy, it's just so much damn simpler to process lists that way than a foreach loop. Java 8 is still cutting edge, I guess, sadly enough, but Java 8 "streams" add enough boilerplate to list processing that they don't seem worth using over foreach loops - and that's pretty sad.

I often find it takes my three times as many lines of code in Java as in C#, for identical semantics. Lombok helps fix a lot of that, but Java+Lombok is almost a different programming language to read and learn.

My application running on my server is a fairly small target for black-hats, unless I'm writing bank software or something, exploits specific to my server are low-reward.

But JVM exploits are freaking golden. Every website everywhere that runs java becomes your target if you have a viable JVM exploit (well, everyone who runs Oracle Java, but that's nearly all of them). I'm sure it's worth millions to find one.

Yes, C# has the same issue, but IT departments are really very practiced at Windows Update, and MS is really very practiced at the work on their side. Oracle spent at least a year denying they needed to roll out frequent JVM fixes, and the large software corp I was working at at that time was similarly blithely unconcerned about potential risks. Everyone seems to get it now, and maybe the 2 will converge in terms of update tooling, but it's sure been an uphill battle for Oracle. Native languages don't have this problem.

Oh, it would totally be worth it. Especially with a large board displaying the weight, and comical cartoon animal animations accompanying the values. But sadly, we no longer have "shame" in America.

Wow. Just wow. "I know X, so there's no reason the world needs not-X". All Turing-equivalent languages can do the same job, but Java does that job with about 3x the boilerplate of C# (otherwise they're fairly similar, as Java has finally caught up with every other real language in adding list comprehensions). The lack of proper generics/templates in Java is still a daily pain in my ass, however, as is the simple inability to do List<int>

I understand a preference for the familiar, but when 2 languages are as similar as C# and Java, and one is just better implemented, it seems weird to form an emotional attachment to the other. (Unless this is all really MS-hatred, in which case fine, Win95 killed my pappy, whatever.)

Java is .. not very good. I've alternated between Java and C# professionally over the past 8 years or so, and while they used to be quite similar, C# is worlds ahead now (thanks, Oracle!).

Check out Xamarin. "With a C# shared codebase, developers can use Xamarin tools to write native iOS, Android, and Windows apps with native user interfaces and share code across multiple platforms. Xamarin has over 1 million developers in more than 120 countries around the world as of May 2015."

There's a reason this is MS's last, best hope for C#. If the Xamarin stuff is bundled free with Visual Studio 2015's free version (as has been promised, but we'll see), it will be something special. If it were anyone but MS, I'd say right now this was going to be a huge win, but it's such a big change in attitude for MS - well, we'll see.

This is why the one hope for C# is MS's partnership with Xamarin (but I think it's a good one). C# as a cross-platform alternative to Java would be all sorts of wonderful - but I won't believe it until it actually plays out that way. If a year from now there were no gotchas, I can really write an app* in C#, test it on my desktop, then sideload it into an Android and an iThing and get appropriate interfaces, and no surprises have happened with licensing? Well, that's a bright future for C# IMO.

It also doesn't hurt C# that Unity have become the "gateway drug" for game devs, giving another cross-platform venue for C# for those who choose it (it has hurt the Steam store, but that's another story).

*cue the "app" troll

Well, democracy is just a collection of clowns who can't even agree on which clown car to use, but in a dictatorship it is all the fault of the dictator.