Florian,

It's not an anti-trust situation because the situation you describe is exactly the same as Apple's whole business model which has been upheld with legal precedent. You say IBM doesn't want to make z/OS available for use on non-IBM hardware - that is the same argument Pystar tried with Apple not wanting to make OS X available for use on non-Apple hardware. The courts expediently slapped Pystar down and confirmed that business model is perfectly OK.

The emulator is an entirely different issue. Anyone is free to clean room backwards engineer an emulator for the purposes of interoperability - that is allowed under the fair use doctrine. However, they cannot use any copyrighted or patented technology that IBM created in order to do so. IBM is under no obligation to assist them in creating or maintaining their emulator. IBM is perfectly in the right to demand legal review of the emulator if they feel that it violates any of their IP. As this can only be done in a court of law through legal discovery, it is not unreasonable to expect that the group behind the emulator would receive the typical legal paperwork (demands) that initiate the process.

Any company is free to compete in the mainframe market by offering their own hardware and software solution. If they can't convince customers to switch to their platform from IBM's that is just capitalism at work.

That's a weak argument and irrelevant. All software is subject to security issues. The Linux platform has just as many security issues as Windows, Apple, Symbian, Adobe, Java, etc... The fault (in this specific case, which is what was being commented on) is with the content developer and the distributor that fails to check the content they are distributing for security vulnerabilities.

Why is that Adobe's fault that the Yahoo! ad service allowed an insecure Flash ad be published to their network? By default, Flash content scripting access defaults to "same domain" only. The equivalent argument would be that Microsoft is at fault for viruses because virus writers choose to attack their systems. I'm no fan of Flash ads, but let's put the blame where it actually belongs.

There is nothing new about a device designed to lock you in to one provider's content platform. See Nintendo Gameboy, Sony PSP, etc...

+5 Exactly what I thought when I read the headline...

Sovereignty isn't a right. A country is only as sovereign as their political, economic, and military power enables them to be. If Google's actions puts a crack in the Great Wall, so be it. However, I don't think Google is bringing down China any time soon.

Then you'd be a fool who doesn't think profit is a motivation for a salesman lying about the usefulness of their product by blasting another's product to make theirs look good.

"...commercial DMS Clarity Suite..." indicates they have a commercial product they are advertising for, though I haven't been able to dig up any info on it or their clients that use it.

cfwtracker.exe is a 100 KB application that uses 102.4 MB of memory. Someone's program that uses over 100 times its program size in memory consumption probably shouldn't be blasting anyone about memory bloat.

Currently my Windows 7 system with 4 GB of memory only consumes 1.75 GB of memory with 6 different applications open and lots of multi-tasking going on.

Perhaps most of the people on XPnet are running netbooks with 2 GB of RAM? Then perhaps the guy could have a point. However, most Windows 7 ready computers are spec'd with 4 GB of memory, so clearly Microsoft envisions most people will have at least that much memory in their Windows 7 system and this 100% use of memory rant is just hype and damn lies.

What's your point? So that gives Microsoft .NET technologies a grand total of 1,487 jobs. Most data services for Flex based development are based on Java technologies so you can add the Flex job numbers to the Java numbers for 3,471 total - a 3 - 1 margin. Silverlight is pretty much an afterthought for Microsoft and will die out soon enough. Flex is a much faster growing community because its development can all be done with free open source tools.

Even taking that into consideration though, you still have an almost 3-1 percentage of Java jobs to .NET jobs. The numbers are consistent across all job engines as well. So while the totals may be irrelevant, the percentage of demand is not. Plus Java is used for most of the popular data messaging services for Flex applications, so you can add Flex jobs to the Java numbers as well which bring you to almost a 4-1 advantage over .NET.

Well according to Dice.com... "Java" has about 3,203 job opportunities... and "C#" and "VB" combined have about 1,066 job opportunities... I would say Java isn't anywhere close to dying anytime soon and is still very popular with businesses willing to hire. As an aside, Flex has about 268 job opportunities which is roughly equal to 25% of the number of Microsoft based development jobs. With the turn from traditional desktop application programming to web-based applications, I'm left to wonder whether Microsoft will catch up with the demand of Java developers before Flex grows to overtake the demand for Microsoft developers?

The college "life experience" is pretty over-rated if you are already married, have a house, and a career. You have to pick the right tools to get the job done. If the job is to get an degree or learn about a subject, college is a tool to get that done. Who is to say that a physical school is any better at doing that than an online school if job is accomplished?

All online schools that offer a degree program have to be accredited by the same institutions that accredit physical schools. They all have to follow the same standards. My school, Kaplan University, is accredited by the same organisation as the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan. If the accreditation is good enough for them, should it not be so for Kaplan?

I might not always agree with the way Kaplan's curriculum is structured in order to comply with the accreditation standards (it certainly isn't creative with the number of papers I have to write), but it can be challenging and the coverage of the programming topics we cover is extensive. At the very least they teach you to think constructively and to be organised - the two most important things you learn in college.

Wait a couple to a few weeks. The white box resellers are getting their hands on new ultra thin and light notebooks from Intel that are similar in design to the MacBook Air, but priced between netbooks and mainstream notebooks - approx. $800 - $1000. They weigh as much as netbooks, have a 13.3" LED LCD display, and come with a new low-power dual-core processor. My supplier told me they should be in stock Monday.

...or the typical Union employee...

Agreed. I would go so far as to say, do you want to end up like TJX? Granted the main avenue to them getting hacked was their weak wireless network, but they also had servers running in "Administrator mode" with blank passwords. I don't know of any Linux server operating system that let's you do that out of the box, but I do know Microsoft Windows servers let you do that. (Windows 2003 SP2 and Windows Server 2008 probably don't now, but TJX most likely didn't have those back in 2005 when they got hacked.)