But we also agree on the value of a dollar. A concept since it is granted a temporary (waiting to see a temporary recording of anything say from the Motown period on) monopoly has an arbitrary, as defined by the seller value. My song is worth $100 a copy because I say it is. Yours is worth $1 because you chose to sell it for that. The market gets to decide what volume of each to buy but other artists are still banned from making copies for a ridiculously long period of time (effectively anything you hear in your lifetime that the artist wasn't dead at the time you heard it you won't live long enough to make your own version). Society isn't benefited because the person controlling the copyright gets to decide how it is distributed, if they decide 8 track delivered by donkey that is how it will be.

Money is different because not everyone is allowed to make a copy so there is a (relatively, short of opening up the printing press) finite supply. It is also more tightly tied to real objects, like food. Food takes a significant amount of effort to grow and prepare. How much does a download of a song cost? Its value is tied not to the cost/effort of production but due to the producer's ability to enforce their monopoly on the work. An artist's gifts are relatively rare and so they deserve to be well compensated for the work they do but does that mean that their grandkids should be too? There should be a temporal proximity to the effort/when the good goes to market and the financial reward. Having a good idea whether as an engineer or a singer in your 20's shouldn't keep paying you when your 70: it does society a disservice to give those capable of greatness a propetual fountain of money which means they can retire and bang models in the Bahamas for the rest of their lives rather than use their rare talents. If you want to make the money last you should earn your money and invest it, or keep coming up with ideas/products, not have a checque show up every month or whatever paying you for that great idea of long ago.

Exactly. There are only so many cord combinations, ways of saying "baby baby baby, I love you" etc. Copyright is kind of ridiculous with its duration. Okay you have a right to make a living of things you create. But should your grandkids? Should you be able to milk an idea in your 20's for your retirement? How does that help you be more creative? In my mind a limited window to make money forces you to continue to create new works. 3-5 years as suggested sounds about right. You get a chance to get some wealth off your smash hits and then the cash cow goes away till you do something else worthwhile (in a commercial sense, if artists/the industry really cared about worthwhile in a cultural sense they wouldn't want to make copyrights so long that they are handed down to your grandkids).

Well if could just end up being like using the Apple stack: you can support many OSs but you'll have to run a PC in order to have a good time doing so. I'm fine with that. I earn well more in a day than a license of windows costs. I don't see why professional developers should hesitate to use whatever tool they think best. For hobbist/people that can't get someone to pay them to do development: well lots of free alternatives exist.

System.IO is released and it is pretty tied to the platform. Problem with WPF/XAML designers: they can't decide on a schema and stick to it. WPF desktop, silverlight and Modern apps all have a slightly different way of doing a lot of things. Just when I start to wrap my head around data/command binding and such I try something different and it doesn't work the same way. Hopefully the push for universal apps will force one standard to win since more people will be in the porting business.

Yes ... sort of I think. Ex: System.IO is just wrappers around COM calls to Win32 apis as far as I know. On Mac yes you could use the compiler but you'd have to include the mono or whatever version of System.IO which might insist on changing API signatures in subtle ways to be more "mac like" and mean you have to learn everything from scratch. Not only that but a lot of .Net developers (myself included) have been spoiled so much with tooling that we really have to think about it if we try to write a compile script from scratch, especially if you are doing some things complicated in the process like pre-build, code contract rewrites etc.

You might (I hope) be surprised. They did after all release the new office for iOS and Android first. The problem is probably that VS is such a margin cash cow: enterprise products that people actually pay $2k for a pop vs windows which most people who care either acquire with a new computer (for about $40 OEM license) or "acquire" by other means.

As I said: I'd like to be surprised with it. But if not: there is still other IDEs that can handle C#/.Net source code. The more the platform matches the mindset of the types that insist on using open source IDEs the more love those IDEs will get and features will catch up hopefully.

I'm pretty sure the BCL is open, ASP, entity framework etc. In core you have Linq, the IO, serialization and task parrellel library all of which IMO are the "I wonder how they did that" parts of the platform. That is the vast majority of my use of the language.

The biggest thing would be if they ported enough that VS ran on any platform. For those that do it I'm sure it would be nice to have the choice of using VS when doing iOS development (they could still force you to build on a mac but kind of ridiculous if they force you to use XCode too).

One that implements the published specification for the platform/language? Just like MS got burnt trying to knock off java with J++ if you make a C# like languages that is broken from the standard in fundamental ways they'll come after you.

I agree post secondary can be a waste for many maybe most people. There is a reason why people say I'm crazy smart for example, and pretty much by definition if I'm doing it that means the majority of people probably can't. The assumption that everyone has a right to go to university and that that will magically roll back the clock to the 60's when only a couple countries mattered is silly. That said there are a lot of skilled(ish) jobs that require some education to do (mechanics, plumbing, electrical, etc). Good trade schools and apprenticeships could go a long way. Instead you end up with "job creators" that only create jobs for their kids (we should ban any company from having the name "and sons" in its title) rather than a meritocracy where apprenticeships/entry into the industry is based on talent.

That's just it. Local government pays for things like schools, police, fire etc things that clearly a company needs to attract and protect people. Companies lobby like hell to allow them to build an office, get property tax exceptions, discounted power etc etc but ask them to pay for some of the infrastructure and services that their existence cause and they'll fight like hell.

external drive: permanently attached. It is where my "acquired" media lives. Store shelf: it is a matter of magnitude. Likely HDD at store is turned over at least once a year. Typical retail you need to turn your inventory over 3-4 times a year at least. But long term archival storage for enterprise: 10yr +. With that long of a duration you need something like LTO that really, really tries for backwards compatibility. Try to get an IDE (or earlier) connection on your new server.

Not only that: HDDs spindles seeze up after a while if not spinning from what I've heard (lubricant drying out in the barings?). Tape: designed to sit idle for 99.99% of their life.

The cost of the tape drive is the killer. You need to have enough data that you can amortize the cost over many tapes, but given the fairly limited drive slots available on very expensive disk arrays + the cost of the FC ports on the network switches etc etc life becomes much easier quickly having a robot and 4 tape drives attached to the file server vs 2000 disks in say 100 disk arrays (meaning probably 4 network switches, 200 gbics at about $100-500 a pop etc).

I'm pretty sure VS must be using a real tab character when you are using tabs not spaces. When I turn show white space on it shows tabs with the -> symbol and spaces with a dot: the editor knows when I added two spaces and when I added a tab (which may or may not be set to = 2 spaces). It also knows this when opening up a diff of someone elses files so it isn't that it is remembering keystroke history magically or anything. Anyways, at least for VS it isn't "magically doing multiple backspaces for me" it actually knows that the character pressed was a tab not a space in the first place.

My suspicion is the earlier commentor is using an editor developed in the 70's and assuming that that is how all of them work.

Not a citation but a bit of an explanation why the earlier authors comment on the Big Mac index deserves consideration. Differential pricing. For example: I live in Canada, we pay more for pretty much every good then the US even for goods made in Canada. In economics one of the factors is called price elasticity of demand. It varies with product (luxury, stable), availablity of substitutes but also by culture/country. Canada and europe generally have fairly low price elasticities (a comparable change in price has a smaller effect on demand than in the US) so that means companies gouge us because the optimal price/demand tradeoff lands at a higher price. A Toyota Camry made in Cambridge Ontario will sell for more there than if you buy it across the border in Detriot, even before taxes. Why: because they can.

The problem holds for the Big Mac index. Sure a Ukrainian developer can buy a lot of Big Macs with their salary but is that because they earn more, or McDonalds is taking a smaller margin to try to gain market share, government subsidizes of favorable exchange rates are lowering the cost of ingredients, or culturally Ukrainians aren't as big on fast food or have better substitutes? Who knows. But just having a single number you can't account for other factors.

Might be with your editor but this isn't a universal truth.