simple answer... no. And groovy is easier to read and code.

Thank you for an (rare) intelligent response and an even more rare modding up one. I for one am intrigued in DART as well because i always wanted a compilable replacement to Javascript so my code wasn't constantly needing to be downloaded and compiled on the fly or was cached for everyone to view and copy. My only bitch is that I effectively have to rebuild chrome in order to try and run DART and do anything with it.

Having played with it, it is very similar to Java's Groovy in alot of ways but the compilation of DART is so much of a pain that it will probably turn off alot of people until it gets built into Chrome. And the sooner the better.

Yeah their response on marijuana was just a blanket statement on ALL drugs stating about an addictive nature and drug rehabilitation; ok then, when are we going to rehabilitate our president for the time he smoked in college or all the senators when they hit the bong at the frat house? When are they all going to be rehabilitated? How about the voting public that never commits crimes to support their marijuana habit... when are they getting rehabilitated? Because, excuse the pun but this seems like a smoke screen. Marijuana is about as addictive as beer and about as harmful but can actual have medical purposes such as helping with anxiety or appetite in cancer patients (or the odd case of glaucoma). Making some sort of blanket stament on drug addiction does not really apply when having a discussion/discourse on marijuana as very few people have to go to Betty Ford for marijuana addiction screwing up their lives or causing them to sell everything they own to get their next ounce of marijuana. Its just a bullshit response So how about we have a REAL discussion and talk about the REAL reason why... its the same reason you dont want gays to marry because you dont have the balls to make the change. You dont have the courage to commit. You know it doesnt make sense, you all went to college and hit the bong as senators and congressman but now you feel free to be hypocrites when even your constituency knows its harmless.

So what is it going to take to get a serious response especially from someone who smoked and became president??

I jumped onto Macs several years back because they were a nice platform for Java development but over the years I learned alot fo shortcomings that MAC has if you are a Java dev, open source advocate and just as a laptop in general: 1) 8 GB memory limit. This is what they tell you. This is what they support. This is their max in all their software... supposedly. You can look REALLY hard and find places that you can get upgrades to 16GB but if you are doing any VM'ing, graphics and/or heavy processing, 8GB's maxes out quick. And just to tell you how quickly, my wife actually got a new Macbook pro 2 weeks ago with 8GB of memory and it used 5GB with only a web browser open 2) not configurable. You can't change the battery and you can BARELY change the memory. They are working on fixing it so you cant even do that without bringing it in; they are switching to custom screws that no one sells screw drivers for and if you use existing screw drivers, you will strip the screws and make it so you can't fix or change out parts if they are broken. 3) HEAT!!! New mac book pro? 170 degrees in your lap when playing a youtube movie. 4) You dont own your media. Mac wants to index all your media, keep track of it, hunt it down and then make sure it doesn't work with anything if it doesn't recognize it. This isn't 100% true but they are dancing with media companies in that general direction and don't give a crap about consumers. 5) developers/open sources can go get screwed. Apple will gladly kick you off their app store and steal your ideas. Hell, they'll gladly kick you off the app store for arbitrary reasons. They have decided to tell Java developers to go get screwed. Macports breaks happily on updates and upgrades. So if you are in IT or are a software developer, get a machine that allows you to do software development and just create a Hackintosh as a VM. But if you are a consumer that wants to consume, go grab a Macbook so you can look cool with all your hipster friends before you go out for drinks; I'll be home programming.

Yes I too miss Zune. I have been looking for an expensive way to hold down papers, fill my pocket and weight down mousies that I throw into the lake who can't pay their mafia debts. Now that Microsoft has bowed out of this lucrative market, who else is going to come forward to fill this HUGE markets demands???

Because the host os requires memory as does each guest. For what you are talking about above, you need a bare minimum of 8GB and it wouldn't run that well. Its rare that you need all them open at the same time.

They should melt down all those lead figurines and then get those obsessive nerds to handpaint it with those tiny brushes.

gee I dunno, only that the web drives everything nowadays? did you ever think of that? That web applications are what power everything? Hence why HTML5 and JS are the new focus. Its not like Microsoft just picked two languages blindly from a friggin hat. Think about it.

No ... just that if you want them to work on iPhone and Android and the other 45% of the web market that Microsoft can't run ActiveX and it's other proprietariness in, HTML5/JS is the way to go.

In other words, 'we don't dominate anymore so we need to use open tools... deal with it'

The fortune 500 does not represent the market as a whole; they are sluggish and slow moving whn adopting technology while the rest of the world moves much quicker. They are actually a very poor indicator of technology adoption. It's like measuring the military for technology adoption; we'd all still be on mainframes according to those statistics (which alot of fortune 500's still are oddly enough).

Net Applications bases their numbers on Fortune 500 companies (or something like that) so its REALLY slanted. IE actually already is well below 50%. It was also shown that while people were forced to use IE in the workplace, the second they left work, IE stats dropped dramatically as people started surfing at home on their personal computers.

In all seriousness, between lockin and the inability to own my media I purchased, I'm debating going completely back to a Linux laptop and just VM'ing the others I need. Apple hates Java, Windows hates everything that wasn't created (or owned) by Microsoft and everyone is trying to do venor lockin now... even UBUNTU!!! I'm just going to install Debian and tell everyone else to get bent. This is beginning to piss me off.

Well thats the point isn't it? A mediocre programmer can become more adequate if they are put within a good environment with good development process and good management to follow through on their responsibilities.

You can use mediocre programmers if you have (and enforce) good development process and train them in best practices. Being able to build code that is easy for the programmer to read (and others to read), separation of sql/html,css,js/ etc into their respective parts of the MVC/ORM pattern, consistent inline documentation, consistent comments on code checkins, etc., following the same rules for writing code (development docs)

A good development process can alleviate many of the problems with having to do all that testing as you test because you have a bad development process wherein you are unable to easily have the developer look at his comments, his documentation and his clearly written code and go 'oh thats the issue'

Not saying this will ELIMINATE the need for testing but this reduces the need for at least 30-50% of it if everyone is properly trained in a good development process and it is enforced.

that and banging your head on your keyboard until the world makes sense again.