Being an employee of a major corporation, I'd offer a different theory. I've watched us go from no-Macs to maybe 100 Macs in the past quarter. It has nothing to do "I have a Mac at home". It has everything to do with iOS development. iPhones and iPads are now supported devices in the enterprise. We can now receive our corporate email on iOS devices, where previously this was restricted to BlackBerry devices.

As a result, internal corporate applications are being developed in iOS. The iPad in particular is attractive as a business tool. Carrying one to a corporate meeting is as easy as carrying a notebook, and the company doesn't even have to pay for the hardware because many people already bring their own to work.

Since Apple has created a situation where you can only develop for iOS on OSX, voila, we have a large number of OSX machines by necessity.

linux prevailed, firefox prevailed

Both were built as an alternative to a dominate proprietary product owned by an onerous, tight-fisted corporate entity. The same could be said for Open Office, XMPP, Apache HTTP, Android, and a variety of products that "prevailed". Thus, they had a groundswell of community support.

The difference here is, Java is a GPL product. A number of alternative languages built on the JVM have cropped up, but they are competing with "free" (the freedom and beer variety). I've yet to see any do much "killing" of Java. Scala, Groovy, and Clojure are all popular in their own right, but haven't made a dent on the enormous Java community. Further, most of them depend heavily on an inherent ability to utilize the S2JDK.

I find this to be much ado about nothing.

I personally think this is all about tethering. The telcos are charging an obscene $20 - $30 to use the bandwidth you already paid for. And a lot of people want to tether, even the average Joe who normally doesn't know the first thing about ROMs and bootloaders.

The telcos are aware that rooted phones can tether for free. I know several people who are completely non-technical who have rooted Android to tether for free. There is significant money on the table. Money that most of us feel is raping and pillaging, but money none the less.

You've given a reasonable case against Motorola. Who do you recommend (for Android)? Who has a good track record of delivering what they promise? Perhaps more importantly, who has a good track record of supporting updates for phones that are no longer being sold?

I have a Motorola Droid, and I've had no problem because I've just rooted it and installed my own upgrades. My bigger concern with Motorola is their trend of attempting to DRM lock the bootloader to prevent rooting. They make it harder for us to support ourselves when they no longer do it sufficiently. The Bionic looks like a great device, but they are apparently locking it pretty heavily, making it very unattractive for me.

I think it quite likely has slowed down piracy. I used to download pirated movies many years ago. But as I've grown older and gained a house, cars, stock funds and 401ks, and meanwhile watched many people get sued over piracy, I've definitely changed my ways. I've come to realize that $15 for a DVD, or better yet $8.99/month for Netflix streaming, isn't worth worrying about versus potentially losing my house by getting sued into bankruptcy. Perhaps the risk is minor, but it's still a risk, and the lawsuits are what made that risk real in my mind. Granted this is anecdotal, but I would bet I'm not alone.

The point of enforcement is to decrease the amount, not eliminate the criminal element. There will always be criminals willing to break the law Prosecuting people who contribute to Anonymous will have the same effect of making some people think twice about joining a DDOS network, just like I think twice about accessing copyrighted material on a P2P network.

Because you often need specific configuration for hardware, not *just* the network. For instance, a wifi device may connect to the same network but requires an essid and encryption key. Further, two devices sometimes connect to the same network for performance reasons.

Mac address is the preferable identifier, in my opinion. "Slot" is a terrible identifier for desktops due to USB network devices, but is probably okay for servers (who uses USB networking on a server?). But Fedora is intended for use in both, so this just doesn't make much sense to me.

If we are going to be green and morbid, we might as well go all the way. The real green way to dispose of bodies is to mulch them. Humans are rich with nutrients, and mulching takes less energy than incineration. Our public parks would benefit greatly with grandma feeding the dogwoods.

I'm not suggesting that us bringing our own personal computer into work is the right solution. I'm recommending that IT policy makers look at options that don't make life on a corporate desktop so unbearable that we all want to bring in our own computers. If you chose alternatives that weren't so security challenged that they require you to neuter them, then we wouldn't want to bring in our own computers in the first place. Who really wants to lug a computer back and forth every day? Not me. But I'll take it over the current standard corporate desktop which is nearly unusable.

I didn't say I could only be innovative on OSX/Linux. I can't be *as* innovative on a machine that is completely neutered, and unresponsive. Unfortunately, this is always the case with Windows in a corporate environment due to the policies and software that is put on it to keep it safe.

Safety for Windows in a corporate environment comes at a cost that is so high as to greatly diminish the value of the computer.

My home computer runs Linux, and many of us run Linux or OSX, particularly in technology companies. Our computers aren't malware and virus infected. Using them is not going to hurt "your network". The fact that you call it "your network" alone should give us pause.

Corporate asset managers like you are the very reason why large companies are painful to be an innovative developer at. You are the reason why startups with 10 developers often have an advantage over gigantic companies with thousands of developers. You think that your safety blanket of Windows XP with a mountain of scanner software churning cycles, a ten year old IE 6 browser, and policies that neuter the OS significantly to disallow the computer to be used by anyone for anything, is the ONLY WAY. Running an alternative desktop that starts out secure is unacceptable because you read a CIO Mag article 5 years ago that told you the TCO is higher.

Sorry to go on a tirade, but it's just very frustrating.

It doesn't work that way. The control word is always already known. The non-control word that you are helping to OCR never factors into your success or failure. For the non-control word, anything will get by, and there has to be consistent consensus before it is considered "solved" for OCR purposes.

Really? You mean on the Mac it isn't required to set up an IPhone or IPad that have no business relying on a desktop machine? You mean it isn't required I sync with it just to get Podcasts onto a device that already has internet connectivity? You mean on Mac it doesn't have a proprietary, signed procedure for syncing music to IPhone/IPod Touch/IPad, that makes it completely impossible to develop competing software without breaking the DMCA?

Sure the "ITunes experience" doesn't suck as hard on the Mac as it does on other platforms, but it still sucks. As GP says it's malware, only I would elaborate and say its malware that malicious to an entire industry.

Now that's a load of crap. I won't run Windows at any cost because it's not worth any cost to me. I am more productive in Linux, I enjoy customizing my experience, and I don't like having to run 3 heavyweight scanner software to keep my system free of virus, spyware, and malware. It's a better experience for me, so why should I waste time keeping a Windows install patched and safe?

And for the record, I do happily pay for games that run on Linux, and don't pirate software/music/video like my Windows using friends.

I think UT3 is dead because its not very popular on Windows, so why waste the effort?

The games that promised to go open source from the previous Humble Bundle did follow through. From the humble site:

As of 5/11/10, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture pledge to go open source.

Announcements and source code links:
Aquaria goes open source.
Lugara goes open source.
Gish goes open source.
Penumbra goes open source.

Really? I hear this Android fragmentation concern all the time, and I wonder if those expelling this opinion were actually around for the last 30 years. For the entire history of PC computing, software makers routinely came out with brand new software that required the very latest cutting edge hardware. At first you had color games when people had only B&W. Then software required more than the 640k of memory most computers had. Then 16 color graphics when people only had 4-color monitors. Then new video cards came out frequently, and you either had the latest or you were getting 5 frames per second. Computers went from 16 bit to 32 bit, and this impacted all software. Operating systems began allowing you to run more than one app at a time, as long as you had hardware sufficient to support it. I could go on all day.

But the main take away is, it has worked out pretty well for PCs.

The good news is, most entire smartphones cost between USD $0 and $200. Which is much less than the cost of a single video card was ten years ago, when I was changing mine out annually.

If you want your software to run across a variety of hardware, it's going to take work. That's just life in software development. But let's stop assuming that everything written for Android absolutely must work on all phones. The Android market lets you control what devices your app is available to. Which by itself gives you the ability to avoid incompatibility issues in ways we could never dream of with PCs.