By your analysis, the largest single group contributing to Linux is actually the "people working for a company" group, with 81.8%.

In almost every case this is only true because we tend to look only to the CPU clock for comparisons. We see a "900 MHz netbook" and say its simple hardware.

But along with this 900MHz CPU there is a hyper threading bus, DDR2 memory, and even that very small 4GB hard disk that can sustain at least 50MB/s easily. It is MUCH faster than a 900MHz desktop you had back then.

You are right, I don't know why people are still talking about this. C# was copied from java, as it was from delphi and c++. This is even officially documented in pages, video interviews, books... Just as java was copied from c++, that came from C...

It is impressive that people still don't realize that any thing that are created today will borrow only the good features from things created yesterday, discarding the bad ones. C++ was no different, Java was no different, C# was no different, and if Sun/Oracle decides to create a new java from scratch today, they will surely copy a lot features from .NET and C#.

You are obviously talking a lot of shit there. I can't give numbers about issue #1, but from experience they are at least equivalent for general use. And its not like if anyone couldn't just open 2 apps in their desktop and compare. Java may be faster here, slower there and vice versa. But you certainly won't find any huge differences in the runtime that makes one seem useless next to the other.

Now, about issues #2 and #3, you are probably smoking something.

What kind of hidden conversions or text substitutions you are talking about? As any language, there are *features* that change the behavior in some way. There are no hidden conversions, there are documented implicit and explicit casts, there is marshalling for interoperability with other platforms that are completely configurable. Any language has this kind of thing to some degree, even java. Also, NET itself have no notion of macros, because macros are a compiler feature, not a runtime one. C# for instance doesn't know what is a macro, it simply has some basic pre-compiler, but nothing like C. It seems you don't understand or don't care about learning how the language works, even though all the reference, compilers and SDK is freely available online. The fact that you can't understand a feature that any VB programmer understands really tells me you shouldn't be spreading shit about it.

As for saying that java has the advantage of having more useful languages than .NET, you must be out of your mind. Simply going from the standard languages that .NET supports out of the box (C#, VB.NET, C++, F#) you have 4x more languages than Java, and they are certainly useful. If you count the other languages that people have created or ported to the CLI, you can even count Java.

You are just a java fanboy that will defend any feature that java implements, and bash any other that java doesn't have, until the day it is implemented. You are no different from the fanboys that love LINQ or extension methods.

The fact is, Java has a lot of benefits over .NET, like *supported* multi-platform runtime from the official vendor, more libraries due to more time in the market, a more open community, etc. You could simply have used them in your argument instead of saying a lot of nonsense shit about stuff you don't want to understand.

Only illegal copies cost $5. You could say also that they cost nothing if I download them from pirate bay. And if you're from Brazil too, you know legal copies of PS2 games here cost a lot more than that. Zeebo is going after a different market, offering legal copies costing $12.

But IMHO, I don't think the poor kids here are looking for the type of games this console is going to have (like Quake, Sonic, etc). I see this working for parents buying this for young kids, but in general, once kids grow up to the age of 12-14, they will ask for newer consoles, newer games.

The problem is that there is no isolated place in the world today. Wanting the latest is not a luxury that only 1st world countries have anymore. Information travels very fast nowadays, and products appear here almost at the same time they appear in USA or Europe. Poor kids on the street here in Brazil may not have anything to eat, but they surely know that a PS3 exists, they see a Wii or Xbox360 demos on stores as they pass by.

So, the fact is that that poor kids/parents will surely prefer to buy a not so old PS2 in the black market free of taxes for $150 or less than buying a legal version of Zeebo with 15 year old games for about the same price.

So, yes, I see this console working for a specific market, but I don't see it as any revolution like being the most popular console ever.

having just moved to an early version of Ubuntu 9.10 on my main testing-stuff laptop; it's frustrating

The first alpha of 9.10 was released a couple days ago with new kernel, new gcc, lots of new libraries... you should not be surprised things don't work well yet. Jaunty seems pretty stable to me. Minor issues with my intel video card, but works fine for all my daily work.

So, what is the difference between this and silverlight? Both are a copy of flash that won't get any wide usage anytime soon and none of them run on linux...