Shouldn't have fed the trolls.

Ad hominem and non sequitur.

"A really shiny Best Buy?" You're kidding, right?

This is a company that makes consumer electronics and computers. It built and maintains two operating systems, including its own browsers, email clients, etc. It contributes to a number of open source projects, and maintains its own C compiler toolchain (which it also open sourced), an IDE. It also maintains a relationship with a certified team of developers, and maintains an ecosystem of online content, including music, movies, books, etc.

Oh yeah, and it also has retail stores, which have by far the best consumer experience of any electronics store.

I can't believe this got modded up +5.

Why would Apple alienate their professional customers, including developers? They're the ones who, along with graphic artists, movie editors, radiologists, etc, who pay top dollar for the most expensive Macs?

If developers can't install Apps like Eclipse, Mac Ports, various command-line tools, etc, then they'll switch platforms. Apple can't afford to lose those sales.

Besides, many game developers don't distribute on the Mac App Store, including EA and Blizzard (and Steam still runs separate from the App Store), not to mention Microsoft and Adobe. Just how can Apple afford to lose Office and Photoshop, among other high profile non-App Store apps?

It doesn't matter if there are more devices running Android because Apple is more profitable than any of them.

Also, Apple sells more iPhones than each of the Android licensees.

Comparing an operating system (Android) to a company (Apple) is really disingenuous.

All those Java developers who brought their MacBook Pros to JavaOne, between 1/4 and 1/3 of them depending on who you talk to, probably disagree with you.

Doesn't matter. The submitter stated it as a fact. The article doesn't make much of a case for it either.

I won't say that OS X has a perfect security record, but Windows historical has an abominable security record. Things are much better now, but I still read about vulnerabilities in Windows 7 and IE, and Microsoft still patches very frequently after 0-day exploits come out.

Besides, the techrepublic link you posted still says that OS X's security architecture is much stronger than Windows and only really makes a case for saying that Apple's secrecy and slow patching are the problem, in addition to applications like Safari. Granted, Safari is distributed with OS X, but saying that the OS itself is insecure is very different from saying that individual applications are to blame.

Still, it's really an incredible claim to say that any OS can be more insecure than Windows. The reason Windows will always have security problems is the legacy baggage, including old APIs and developer expectations of users having administrator rights out of the box. A complete rewrite of Windows and elimination of any expectations of backward compatibility will be needed to address the fundamental security flaws in Windows' architecture.

"For as much as Mac OS X has a reputation for being safer than Windows, security researchers won't hesitate to point out that the opposite is, in fact, true."

Have any quotes or links to back that up, Mr. Submitter?

And I've yet to ready a coherent reply to that question.

I don't know what Oracle's going to do with Netbeans but it's too early to say based on dropping Ruby on Rails support (not, AFAIK, the Ruby language). If Oracle doesn't want to keep every feature under the sun (no pun intended) in Netbeans, then I can't say that's a bad decision on their part. If they start charging for Netbeans and/or intentionally crippling the free version, that will be when it's time to cry foul. I don't count dropping a discretionary feature as RoR support as "crippling".

There's conflicting information out there:

They say it's just RoR:

  http://netbeans.org/community/news/show/1507.html

They say it's the Ruby language too:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/01/ruby-dropped-in-netbeans-7

Who's right?

He may figure that the Oracle lawsuit won't go so well, and either paying Oracle off or being forced to join OpenJDK won't do wonders for the Android business plan.

Google fragmented the Java platform because they were too cheap to pay Sun. That's the bottom line. There are now two incompatible Java specs instead of one (I'm not talking about competing implementations of the same spec like IBM JDK, etc). What Google did is terrible for Java because it's no longer write once run anywhere.

And if you don't think Google violated Oracle's VM patents, then you're deluding yourself.

I really don't understand this bias against Oracle.

If any other company was the victim of a GPL violation, for whatever reason and whereever the code was distributed, Slashdot would cry foul. I guess as long as it's done to Oracle, it's OK.

It doesn't matter if you distribute the code as part of a product that makes money or if you use it internally. If you slap an Apache license header on GPL code, you're violating the GPL. Copyright law doesn't require you to make money in order to infringe. Why do you think the RIAA is going after P2P users and getting massive settlements?

Why give Google the opportunity to work around those patents? Also, Sun took years to open source Java, yet Google open sourced VP8 in months, indicating to me that Google was sloppy and didn't do their due diligence.

MPEG-LA indemnifies users for the patents they own, not for patents outside their patent pool, which is way more than Google is offering to do.

More hoops to jump through.

I'm going to get modded down as a troll again for saying this (even though every one of my posts on this topic has been sincere, and labelled "troll" by reactionary Slashdotters), but Google doesn't own any of the content outside of users' home videos. The RIAA, MPAA, and gave studios produce most of the content that people are interested in, and that comprises more than 10 minute clips, and they're not going to re-encode in WebM. Even Apple couldn't bring those companies to their knees so what makes you think Google will?