This process isnt some big evil conspiracy by the evil rich white men.

It's a fundamental phenomenon in (more or less) free market economies.

If a field makes more than the others, and anyone can enter, then people will continue to enter and drive down the price until there is no more inherent benefit to that field compared to others.

It doesnt require black-clad robber barons oppressing the weak for this to happen, it'll happen all by itself.

I think you miss the point of a free market economy. Competition pushes all prices down.

Technology, innovation, and better processes improve productivity, which pushes prices down even farther.

This is what we want, and also utterly inevitable.

The end-result (which will probably require a fairly painful transition point) is when the bulk of the consumer goods are produced for nothing or close to nothing. As this happens, the work moves to creative roles and services.

Do we really want people doing sweat shop manufacturing work? Or do we want them doing creative and innovative work?

This should never have been modded up.

Let me put it in a different way:

What the CEO actually means is that American employees arent willing to: 1. Work 8 hours in an 8-hour day, they want 1.5 hours for lunch and want to spend 2-3 hours per day reading slashdot and the web. 2. Be willing to accept that they dont know everything there is to know, and they arent the best developer thats ever been invented, and actually learn from people who are much, much better at this than they are. 3. Understand that in a real business, not all the work is 'fun' and not all products released are perfectly coded. Sometimes you have to make compromises for valid business reasons, so that we can all keep getting paid.

In short, a great deal of American workers are: 1. Lazy, 2. Arrogant, and 3. Unrealistic and Ignorant.

Not all mind, you but many. At least with alot of foreign workers, they're actually willing to put their heads down, and learn and actually work hard, and get things done, and be part of the business, and not just think that their little corner of the universe is more important than everyone else's.

Unfortunately, your comment here is very close to the mark.

I think part of the problem isnt the education, its the culture. If all you do growing up is watch MTV Cribs and dream about being Bill Gates or Larry Ellison (God help you if so), then you arent very suitable for spending the first 5-10 years out of college being taught how to be an 'average' programmer.

You know, I enjoyed most of your post, but found this section really lacking.

You seem to be suggesting that you should hire the inferior person, if he's a native of the country you happen to be born in (or are a current resident of), over the superior person who is not a member of the same group.

How is this reasonable? If you do this, then you're just short-changing your company, and putting everyone's paychecks at risk. Thats one of the things that people who havent run a business dont get. The pressure and obligation to keep the business solvent and growing so that everyone gets to keep their jobs and keep getting paid, is quite intense.

Hiring inferior (but American) staffers over superior (but foreign) folks doesnt help anyone, least of all your countrymen. It just creates another marginal business that probably wont last, and will then drive up the unemployment rate.

You pick the best people you can afford, and you ignore things like nationality, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual preference (assuming the person can fit in with the group). And thats it.

Have you ever even tried to use an x64 windows version? None of what you're talking about exists. 32-bit apps run fine in x64 windows. This is being posted from Vista x64 Business on an HP Compaq 8710w, using 32-bit opera. Works just fine.

MS Office is 32-bit, works just fine. I run VS2008, Oracle Enterprise x86, Eclipse, Tomcat, Apache, MySQL, Rails/Mongrel, and a million other 32-bit apps, they all work fine.

In addition, I have a dozen win2003 x64 servers in the field (they're still a minority) that work just fine with 32-bit apps. Most of them run IIS in 32-bit mode because some app they require includes only 32-bit components.

I think someone may have given you bad information about x64 windows that you took for gospel.

And generally, you dont have to buy x64 windows as a separate product. Most corporate targeted systems that support x64 (like my hp laptop) shipped with both x86 and x64 Vista discs, and driver discs for both. Every server I've ever bought that came with an MS operating system also had that.

'ever changing ribbon'?? What does that even mean?

I know of no applications where the ribbon 'changes'.

It's amazing how much ignorance there is on /., and how well that ignorance gets modded up.

There are many perpetual licenses in the MS world.

OEM and Retail, for starters, which covers probably 99% of consumers and small businesses.

For education and large orgs, there is volume licensing. These also tend to be of the yearly subscription variety, but they also have 'buy out' options to stop paying a subscription and pay for the perpetual license.

Please go at least do minimal research here before posting. It's one thing to say that the MS licensing system is ridiculously over-complicated and hard to use (which is true), you dont need to go making random untrue-crap up.

Care to explain this statement? It doesnt seem to make any sense.

Do some research. At the time Windows was very young, they tried a number of config storage systems, and the binary db was the only one they found that was fast and small enough for the computers of the time.

It was a solution for the situation of the time, and like many things MS, thats now locked into the de-facto standard forever.

This is not to suggest that windows Registry is a great solution, but the answer to 'WTF?' is clear.

Thats garbage and you know it.

Do you go to addons.mozilla.org for your flash plugin for FF? What about for your JRE plugin? How about PDF?

Addons.mozilla.org is for extensions to FF, not system-wide plugins. The .NET ClickOnce is clearly an example of the latter.

I wouldnt describe my point of view as 'optimism' and I dont have opinions about corporations. What really gets my goat in these conversations is how much people get emotionally tied up in these things, and hugely anthropomorphize companies.

I dont see MS in a rosy light, I dont see it in any light at all. I've been dealing with them in a computing environment for 15+ years. I find them to be fairly predictable, even in their less-than-well-thought-out moves (like this one). Sometimes they act in a useful manner, sometimes in an aggravating manner. What I dont get is why anyone thinks they're any different than any other business.

But mostly, on a topic like this, its just because its so damn pointless.

Yes, they made a bad choice of packaging. The rest of it all is generally a 'good thing' for the vast, vast, majority of their customers. I would bet that on the order of 95% of their customers would prefer NOT to have to take any specific action (other than approval of the update in WSUS or their package manager) to get this functionality. Many, many businesses wanted this. For a long time.

But then you get some of the slashdotters, who dont have a freaking clue what they're talking about. Dont know how FF plugins/extensions work. Dont know what .NET is, or what ClickOnce is. Have never had to distribute an update to an extant piece of software used by large numbers of customers in their lives. And yet, despite their gargantuan ignorance, they come on here and talk about how the sky is falling because of this.

It's mostly the rank ignorance of most of the posters, thinking that OMG M$ hacked Firefox! and that sort of emotional and uninformed garbage.

Furthermore, anyone who has worked in a large organization in a position of responsibility can understand how some of these things happen. Nearly all large corporations are somewhat dysfunctional, and its extremely hard to make sure that every single one of your employees always acts perfectly, not only for the majority of your customers, but for the rabid but vocal minority, who will start bonfires and froth at the mouth if you make the slightest mistake, even with the best of intentions.

Lastly, to get back to the matter at hand, all someone has to do is use their common sense here. There is no motive or incentive to do this for MS. There's no secret benefit, and in fact, its only very recently in their history that they did provide interop software like this, to make their stuff work on other platforms (in this case, the browser being the platform).

But a common sense test says to any rational person that there wasnt a malicious intent here, because there's no gain! Despite the promiscuous mob memes that float around here, there really isnt a viral nature to technologies like .NET, where MS somehow magically gains if they can slip the software into other platforms. In fact, given how many people have been clamoring for ClickOnce on other browser, and how long they've been asking for this, this was a rare good-move by MS to give their customers what they asked for. The only downside was they made a mistake in distribution that blew up in their faces (at least did so for the tiny, tiny percentage of people who would get upset over this).

That's not how it works.

Go look at business class machines from Dell.com right now.

The price for Vista Business and Vista Busines w/ XP Pro Downgrade are the same.

There is no such a thing as a non-authorized extension. The very concept doesnt even make sense. If you have the rights to install a machine wide plugin to FF then either your machine is busted, or its authorized.

On your second item, FF does PRECISELY that. The next time after this install that you started FF, it popped up a window that said this plugin was installed. You either explicitly turned off this behavior or you didnt read it and just clicked ok.

Lastly, FF does provide a trivial way to disable it. You click the disable button.

You're barking up the wrong tree here man.

ClickOnce is not ActiveX. Not even remotely or anything like it.

Nothing downloaded via ClickOnce is 'installed'. It's a per-user thing and it runs in a sandbox.

The .net sandbox, which has a hugely better security record than the JRE.

They added this to FF because of huge, massive, user demand for it. Lots of corporate apps are done in .NET and deployed over ClickOnce.

Similarly, lots of companies dont use IE, so if they want ClickOnce to work through FF, they want an official build.

These really aren't the droids you're looking for.

Dont you just love it when people get self-righteous about something that they're dead wrong about?

The reality is that the JRE DOES use a plugin.

In fact, if you took 8 seconds to look in the plugins of your FF, you'd see that Java did install one (or probably more) plugins to work within FF.

No, it doesnt. What you're describing is how the OS Shell handles what applications to launch with what file types.

Having browsers very explicitly NOT do that was a major step forward in security, done many many years ago.

You're overblowing this by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Some points to keep in mind, for this to have happened to you:

1. You already made a conscious choice to install that version of .NET.

2. That version of .NET installed the plugin in IE.

3. You made a choice to install the update, or you allow auto updates.

4. The first time you restarted firefox after this, you had to ignore the popup that tells you that this new plugin was installed. And you had to choose NOT to disable it (which works just fine, only 'uninstall' was blocked).

This was a very minor thing. Most people that installed .NET 3+ expected ClickOnce to work on all browsers. Why wouldnt it? Adding this to the other popular browser, which huge numbers of people have been asking for for years, is not that big of a deal.

It wasnt a silent install, it didnt use any nefarious techniques, it didnt bypass FF's plugin mechanism (despite the general ignorance of /.'ers on how the two types of plugins work on FF), and it is trivial to disable.

The only arguable thing here is that they should have shipped it as a standalone patch. This is arguable, but fairly minor.

And its only arguable by people who also chose to uninstall/disable Flash, JRE, and PDF plugins as well, as those are all full of holes and have a long history of security issues. The .NET sandbox, on the other hand, has a nearly flawless security history.