Kinda. It wasn't impossible to write cross platform browser stuff in the late 1990s, when most corporations started this whole "We'll standardize on browser X" policy making, but it required a discipline that had most developers throwing their hands up in the air in disgust.

Unfortunately the situation in the late 1990s was:

- The major browsers were incompatible.
- IE4+ was the most standard. Yes, really. Those versions had a relatively complete implementation of CSS.
- IE came preinstalled with the standard operating system of that time.

That was it. That was why corporations went with it. It's why they adopted the monoculture in the first place. If Netscape had been a little quicker with Mozilla, or been more enthusiastic about CSS in Netscape 4.x, and if CSS had been a little more complete, things might have been different.

Well, Apple is running a modified OS X on its iDevices, and Android is Linux based. Now, before you state the obvious: in both cases, the primary userland, that is, the userland that you're interacting with right now, is a stripped down power-optimized version.

And that's true of Windows 8.1 if you use the Metro UI too. Yes, OK, the desktop stuff is there, it's on "disk", ready to be swapped into memory if you want to run it, but it's not actually active in any serious way, it's waiting for a mouse click that isn't coming. Start your task manager now if you don't believe me, and take a look at the CPU usage of, say, Explorer (explorer.exe). 0%? That's because you're not doing anything with it. You're reading this web page.

I'm guessing that if I were running one of those "Ubuntu under Android" things that you can get for Android (I've never tried them as every device I've had had some kind of hardware issue preventing it from being likely to work, and the descriptions have always suggested they suck anyway...) I'd also see next to no increase in power usage, after starting it but not actually launching any X11 applications, despite that literally being an entire desktop operating system running on a phone, with all the components being in place.

So there really aren't any power implications when it comes to Microsoft shipping a full version of Windows for power saving devices, as long as - and they do - Microsoft includes a power efficient UI (Metro) for the tasks you'll be using the device for.

The only real reason for Microsoft not to ship their desktop OS on phones is that it takes up way too much disk space. As in "That 32G you get with an HP Stream 8 sounds sweet, but actually Windows takes up about around 20G of it, so get ready to buy an SD card straight away."

That really is it. I'm using that very device. Battery life is pretty ordinary for a tablet. I've seen much worse.

What if your preconceived position is unbiased?

I know it's unlikely, but it's entirely possible the Senator researched the facts and drew his conclusion based upon those facts.

I personally think the STEM shortage H1B thing is more complex, but the view he's expressed isn't unusual from those looking at the facts. The very fact tech companies insist H1-Bs are the right approach, rather than a slight relaxation of green card standards, suggests the motivation here is cheap slave labor, not attracting talent.

Basically to increase page impressions, which means sweet advertising dollars. Essentially you take something that's a known quantity in terms of clickbait, in this case "Google is going to start a mobile phone company!", add some details that seem slightly plausable - it'd be awkward starting from scratch, and they'd obviously not get into bed with Verizon or AT&T as both are too large to allow themselves to be influenced, so you pick the two struggling operators instead, and BANG you end up on the front pages of numerous news aggregators, your links are retweeted wildly, and you get that sweet, sweet advertising cash.

Oh, wait, you meant "Why would Google..."? They wouldn't. The story is ridiculous. Sprint and T-Mo don't even use the same network technology with the exception of LTE, and the latter is suffering from a lack of widely supported standards in key areas.

What's kinda funny about that is that, as I understand it, they're only replacing Metro IE, with the desktop IE staying the same. The Metro IE is, of course, actually a very nice (tablet) browser, much nicer than the tablet versions of Chrome or Safari.

So they're changing it.

I believe the only "whole new thing" they have in development is a replacement for the shell around IE, not Trident. Not that it's impossible they're working on a new engine anyway, but that isn't what's been announced.

This is ultimately the problem with linux. There is no defined platforms anywhere. Software that wants to use anything can't ever guarantee that it will be there.

Linux is a kernel. It doesn't have a video codec API, and (hopefully, khttpd suggests it's possible) never will.

I'm saying this not to be an ass, but to point out that people don't write video software for kernels. They do it for operating systems. Debian is an operating system. Ubuntu is an operating system. Mint is an operating system. Android is an operating system.

Those do, actually, have predictable support frameworks installed.

What's more, you don't even have to aim at those systems. You can just aim at commonly supported standardized infrastructure such as GNOME, and let the caretakers of the distributions install the software you need for you.

Now you can, if you want, complain that "Oh no, I want my software to run on all the Linuxes", but it's not like anyone's out there complaining that Mac OS X is berefit of video editing software because that Mach kernel it uses doesn't come with a predictable set of video encoding APIs, and have you tried to write a video editor that works on both Darwin AND Mac OS X?

Different issue, but it's ultimately one of those times you recognize you're more likely to be under surveillance simply because you're doing something very similar to what a large number of other people are doing that's illegal. Not even necessarily a majority, but a large enough sub group that you'll be watched.

Think in terms of walking through the red light district in your local city at night, or getting groceries from a convenience store you know is a front for a drug dealing syndicate.

No idea. I've seen attempts to clone many Google apps by third parties, though usually, with some exceptions (Hyper, a third party YouTube client, seems better than the Android YouTube app by a mile), they're pretty dreadful. I gave up looking for decent versions after a while. But Google themselves, producing supported apps that aren't going to break when their APIs do, are ignoring the platform completely.

I can kinda get by with some stuff being missing: for example, I already have Google Voice set up to forward me messages to email. On the other hand, the W8.1 Calendar app seems unaware that Google accounts can have multiple calendars associated with them, and I really don't even know where to begin fixing that (it's not showing anything for anything other than the default calendar.)

That's not what's meant by VPN in this context.

For reasons I've never been entirely clear on, a lot of commercial proxy servers market themselves as "VPN providers", I'm guessing they offer connectivity via one of the common VPN protocols, but they resemble your office VPN the same way a legitimate business resembles a "Legitimate business".

Speaking as a new Windows 8.1 Tablet user, having used Android for more than half a decade, I'm realizing pretty quickly that apps actually are something that makes "touch computer" usage much, much, much easier and more efficient.

8.1 has relatively poor app support. As an example, yes, you can use the Microsoft version of the mail app, but it's no GMail, and the GMail website isn't as touch friendly as it could be and using it means eschewing notifications. Google has avoided producing any apps at all for Windows 8.x's tablet mode.

This isn't to say a webapp utopia couldn't be produced, but it'd take a lot of work on the part of web developers, who have difficulty enough producing responsive websites, and have barely begun to scratch the surface of the persistence APIs and other APIs intended to make this a reality - and, of course, those APIs are hardly complete as they are...

Right. Basically ever since someone noticed that women are excluded from certain professions there's never been any attempt to determine whether this is because they're not qualified or interested due to some biological reason. Nobody has ever addressed that issue. It has never been the subject of numerous research programs. The question of whether women are underrepresented in, say, the building profession has always been treated exactly the same way as the question of whether women are underrepresented in the sciences.

Thank you for being the first person in the world to notice this. I expect you to make your report to the Committee of Very Serious Scientists as soon as practically possible so they can end this unnecessary attempts to address diversity issues.

I agree there, especially if you are coming from the purgatory of VB6 or .NET line-of-business apps, and there are good frameworks out there.

The original poster does want to know about traditional client-server, and there is a Python business application framework that is a closer fit: Tryton

It is not web centric and has a GTK based client, although there is integration with Flask for web based applications (the Nereid module) and a big push on for a full fledged web client alternative to the GTK client (plans are to give it a "material design" look and leverage all the best tools and practices etc).

It has a very extensive API so if the provided front ends do not suit your needs you can make a front end tailored specifically to your needs and leverage Tryton for the model, business rules, workflows and such. The database of choice is PostgreSQL, though you can implement SQLite or MySQL I think. ERPNEXT I think is limited (or was when I last looked) to MySQL and seemed to lack in documentation and testing, but it might be simpler if you can live with web front ends.

Hope this helps...