Quite the contrary, communism is all about proletarian revolutions, power to the people and elections -- yes, elections. Dictators are getting elected. They are not really democratic elections, everything being directed with fake votes from a privileged minority, mechanical smiles and applauses and all that, but they are elections nonetheless.

However, you should go and learn some systems theory -- just because a trait of a system is not advocated, it doesn't mean that it isn't going to happen, regardless of any precautions you might take. Communism itself is really natural for dictatorships. And it is not only about its predilection for dictatorships; but it contains many flaws as an economic system too, like for example the notion that profits are only generated through surplus labor; not to mention that the working class is becoming more and more obsolete.

Its most important flaw however is that it fails to take into account human nature. People do not want to be equal, they do not want to share property and in general have a strong sense of ownership, not to mention selfishness. What happened instead is that in communist countries the higher you ended up in the political party, the more privileges you had, with corruption going rampant. Hence the phrase: in communism, some people are more equal than others.

Karl Marx used to say that capitalism leads to economic crisis, making them inevitable due to internal flaws. However, communism does not solve that. I lived in an European communist country - when the country had to pay its huge external debts, the austerity measures taken in the 80-ties (that lasted for 10 years) would make today's Greece look heaven-like.

And make no mistake about it, China is communism with a twist, but their biggest source of income are external investors that come to them because of driving forces of capitalism. It also remains to be seen how China will evolve, but evolve they must, trust me ;-)

Android isn't using JVM, it's using Dalvik which is a VM written from scratch that's entirely different from the JVM (it doesn't even use the same bytecode).
The link between Java, the JVM and Dalvik is a bytecode converter, capable of converting already compiled Jars to Dalvik.

And not to burst your bubble further, but Android isn't even using an X Server, the gui manager / toolkit being also written from scratch ... so you can't really rant about how they've used a "free OS" ... it was only the Linux kernel ;)

On the whole, Android isn't even licensed under the GPL, but APL.

So the next time you rag about the virtues of GPL stuff you get for free, take a deep breath and get your facts straight because you're just waisting bandwidth otherwise.

Also, what Miguel does is Miguel's business. He saw some value and wanted that on top of Linux. Maybe he was wrong, but before you criticizes him you first have earn that right ... you see, I don't really think you or any of the freetards in this thread have any meaningful contribution to open-source software.

Yes, but it doesn't cut into my monthly paycheck ... too many of such monthly expenses would mean I won't be able to pay my bills and support my family ... and these, IMHO, are the real problems.

If Google's search engine and Gmail ... came with a paid subscription, then I wouldn't use them ... that's one reason I switched from Yahoo's Mail to Gmail ... since the free version of YMail had serious restrictions, like a really small storage, and no POP3 access.

Sorry, but I consider this to be a good deal ... Google can mine my data all day long, I don't care.

Windows ... the operating system for the dumb and poor.

> Apple basically invented the home computer

That's rich :)

They revolutionized the home computer with a GUI interface model stolen from Xerox, they lowered the price of the hardware (Woz was a wizard after all), but they haven't invented it.

The first home computer intended for consumers was from Altair - aprox. one year before Apple I was released. And the credits for the "home computer" as it is today cannot be attributed to a single individual or company. Far from it.

But then I guess it's fashionable to credit ol' mighty Steve for everything that's shiny.

Because the manufacturer of the related hardware isn't the one that's a threat to Nokia. Apple is.
They are designing the iPhone, they are the ones getting most of the profit.

People are calling Nokia a patent-troll, but Apple deserves this. They have patents on multi-touch gestures and because of that competitors (like Android) can't implement features requiring multi-touch.

Want a free pass? Learn to play nice then.

Dude, I'm really sorry about those poor bastards who died in the second congo war, but come on, is it the same as millions of people dying everywhere on this planet, with forests and cities burnt all over the place, all the world living in constant fear, asking yourself if you're house is going to be hit by a house tonight ... with no place on earth to retreat with your family?

That's the coldest argument I've seen in a while. You want to be part of a war, to fight? Go for it, nothing stops you.

And seriously ... the second world war has over 60 million casualties, of all nations, genders, ages and races. You can't compare that to 4 million, not by a long shot. And that's in a time when the military wasn't so advanced (compared to today's gear, it's not far from bows and arrows). Nuclear weapons aside, the casualties could be in the order of billions ... because even without nuclear weapons, you still have intercontinental missiles, satellites, jet-fighters, bio-chemical weapons and big-ass bombs that can obliterate a small to medium city (with extreme accuracy).

No you can't :) It's in the nature of our profession to be redundant (as it is with other fields of endeavor as well).

If a platform doesn't have redundant libraries, then it's either not popular, or it is tightly controlled.

AOT compiling has nothing to do with having a runtime or a garbage-collector. AOT refers to code being translated directly in machine code, instead of an intermediate byte-code language. When you're using an intermediate language you can do neat tricks like generating and manipulating the code at runtime, and that's why JIT-ing is disallowed.

For a garbage collector to run, you have to keep some state at runtime, like a global count of the number of references an object has or local counts of references (on each object) to construct a graph of objects that are still in use, but that's not code evaluation at runtime.

There will be disadvantages of Mono on top of the iPhone though. Because JIT-ing and eval-ing are forbidden, you can't use libraries that rely on runtime bytecode manipulation.

I doubt they'd have a problem of approval. There are already games developed with Unity3D (http://unity3d.com/), which is a toolkit for iPhone games running on top of Mono.

Using C# may not be much better, but learning yet another programming language, that's just another variant of C, with its own libraries and ways of handling events and with its own tools ... gets really tiresome sometimes. And learning is only half the battle, you'd also have to rewrite all those code-snippets and utilities you've grown quite fond of.

Yes but crappy applications come along with increased popularity.

The quality is high on the iTunes Store compared to the crappy Java apps we are used to, but that's only because the iPhone has been a luxury for people with money (and the hardware specs are also higher than your average Java-enabled phone). But now that it's growing in popularity you can already see how the average quality is going down fast.

Your argument is also the same elitist bullshit "raise the bar to entry to raise the quality" -type I've heard countless times before. Well, guess what, the people in PHP/Basic/Delphi/Java communities (although I hate them all) have given birth to some of the best applications around (being more results-oriented, rather then being clever).

Linux may represent a single digit in their desktop marketshare, but on mobile phones the market share of Linux is a double-digit.

And on servers ... the majority of online services (especially the successful ones) are hosted on Linux/BSD servers. Big companies that have an online revenue, like Yahoo, Google and Amazon, are using Linux/BSD. The majority of online startups are built on top of Linux/BSD. And although Microsoft has a strong presence in companies intranets (thanks to Exchange/Office mostly), it's a big blow to their credibility having the online success stories not being based on their products.

I wouldn't underestimate Linux/BSD if I were in their shoes, and I don't think they are. You can't beat a zero-price tag, and while some people say Windows is easier to administer (beating a dead horse on ROI), that's not my experience. YMMV

I know you're being sarcastic, but what about Loki Games?

Yeah, but you have to miss just one of those deletes, and boom, you've got yourself a memory leak.

Not everything is in Qt. And when you'll want to import other libraries in your code, then you've got yourself a shiny new string library to convert back and forth to QString, and a shiny new hashmap that you'll convert back and fort to QDict.

When measuring performance, the standard deviation is more important than the average.
The JVM may have lots of performance, but it boots up slowly, it warms up slowly, and when the garbage collector kicks in the world gets frozen.

The CLR may not have such a fancy VM, but its main language (C#) is more efficient on current hardware (structs are allocated on the stack, methods are non-virtual by default), while being better designed.

This implies that explicit code an 8 year old can read is somehow better. That's not always the case.

One way to tackle complexity is to build layers of abstractions. For a positive example you only need to look at mathematics ... imagine all the theories in analysis, probabilities, statistics, formal languages ... being described and demonstrated in the language of an 8 year old.

And another thing ... in every other profession, simple and abstract is almost always equivalent to concise. Except software engineering, a view shared especially by Java programmers that got burnt with C++. Well, maybe you shouldn't use Java either, since it does weird things to objects that aren't referenced anymore. C++ is a lot more explicit in this regard.

F# is an Ocaml clone, and I saw a lot of Ocaml libraries being ported to F#. It also has good VS integration and good tools.
Axum is a language with actor-based concurrency, much like Erlang. It's still experimental, but I've played with it, and it's already solid.

And then there's the DLR which is a framework of optimizations for new languages and a MOP making dynamic languages interop better ... meaning you'll be able to directly instantiate objects written in IronPython from IronRuby or from C# (using "dynamic").

I know of an open-source effort for Java, similar to the DLR, but if it doesn't get adopted as a standard among language designers, then it's all in vain.

Also, .NET has had from day one better integration with C/C++. If I'll have to use JNI again, I'll probably kill myself.

You misunderstood LINQ. It is a generic framework for doing interrogations on any kind of collections. Being able to query databases and XML objects is just a side-effect of its design.

And it's really useful too. If you look at any piece of code you wrote, chances are you're looking for some kind of object in some kind of connection or data store. Linq gives you type-safety, a C# syntax for queries (with C# methods and types) and a unified language for interrogations on structured data (instead of having to use SQL (specific to your rdbms), XPath and iterate through arrays, all in the same method ... it does joins on too), and it can be extended to any type of data-store, like CouchDB and HBase.

This seems to me that you're just sorrow because the grapes are out of reach.