Ah,

It meant I didn't have to bother learning VB in order to write ASP Pages, and it looked a lot closer to the PHP, C and Java I was used to writing.

In terms of numerical computation? Probably. In terms of actual useful web applications, Node.js meets or beats compiled Java in the benchmarks that I've seen, even with the Java Code using esoteric and not commonly used behaviours like Non-Blocking IO: http://www.subbu.org/blog/2011/03/nodejs-vs-play-for-front-end-apps

V8 is actually really damn fast.

Shipping is the only feature that is an absolute must have for any application. The rest is just chrome.

To be fair (ish) QNX on the Playbook isn't really ready for prime time yet. It's better to wait until they've got those bugs ironed out before they risk their phone platform on it.

Now, why QNX on the Playbook is so bad, that's another question altogether. Maybe RIM thinks Apple has a patent on well designed UIs and APIs, and aren't risking a patent battle.

This is english... all our words are a foreign language.

For me it's merely a price discussion: I can get a WiFi only version for $499, and never pay anything more again. Or I can buy a WiFi/3G version, for $529, and spend $30-50/month every month for two years until the contract expires. Total price differential of $750-1230 to have internet access in the few places that don't offer free wifi these days? I think I'll take the WiFi only version, thanks.

Oh, I can understand the idea perfectly... It'll take me a few hours after work on Tuesday, and $1000 of hardware to put this together, or I can spend 4 hours in a meeting with IT to explain my requirements, give them a few thousand dollars in exploratory budget, and two weeks later they'll come back to me with a spec for something similar to what I asked for, then I can give them a few thousand more dollars in implementation budget, and a month or two later they'll stand up a system that does about 90% of what I asked for.

As an IT person, I understand the desire to have everything locked down and under IT control, but at the same time, we stab ourself in the eye when we retaliate for this kind of behavior. Instead, regard this as a working prototype, and push for this functionality to be adopted and subsumed into IT.

Ah, the old IT conundrum: If I ask IT to do it, it'll take several months and tens of thousands of dollars in budget to implement. If I hack it together myself, it'll take a few hours, and a $1000 investment in hardware. But then comes maintenance, and repair, and so forth and so on.

In the end, you're going to need to hand over control of the system to IT, whether that means having them build a new box for you that does the same as the one you built, or handing them over root control of the system you built, if they're familiar with the components of the BSD/LDAP/CalDAV beast you've hacked together. Basically what you've built for them is a Proof of Concept system, or a Prototype, which they'll need to take over eventually, because you're not going to in the business long term of supporting this tool.

You've apparently never seen the Aussie film "Undead"...

Ah, you're right, I was thinking GTK+ and Qt being skinned to look nearly equivalent.

Still though, the differences are almost entirely cosmetic. Why bother fighting about it?

*sigh* who cares? Most distros toss skins on top of them that make them indistinguishable anyhow.

A fictional character from Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged"?

Sure... That's what some of the Flash->HTML5 converters are doing (though they're going through the intermediary of AS3 bytecode). The thing is that the Flex class library directly inherits from the Flash class library, so re-implementing on another platform would require a ground-up reimplementation of the entire windowing library on any existing stack (Java, .Net, etc...) So it's not really feasible to "port" Flex to another language/platform (though SIlverlight is a reasonable knockoff on the .Net stack).

Flex is just a set of Libraries and an XML syntax for ActionScript bytecode. In other words, Flex is built on top of Flash, so it can't really outlive Flash.

Really? When I looked into starting iOS Development, it looked like it would cost me at least $799 to pick up the development environment, since it only came pre-packaged with custom hardware and an operating system. Although, at least their $799 package works with my existing monitor and keyboard.