Personally I find C# to be very nice to work with. It has a lot of static and dynamic goodness, and the .NET libraries provide a lot of stuff to create high quality code.
However, software patents and closed sourceness put me off and drove me to dart and Java. Too bad Microsoft is becoming a patent troll. You may have the coolest stuff, but if you start to sue me/my clients (indirectly) it's over soon.
Duplication is inherent to CSS. Hence SASS and LESS. I see more merit in optional typing, where typing (the code itself) is the documentation. We can have static code checking that way, too.
BoF (Dutch EFF equivalent) won't teamup with any political entity as to keep their neutral stance. They won't be able to be viewed as neutral when they make comparisons between political parties as seen from a digital civil rights perspective. For example, the made a comparison chart how privacy is handled by the various parties (we have about 10 relevant parties here in NL). That being said, they did kept a close watch on PPNL's movements.
After the election failure of the Dutch Pirate Party in june 2010, slowly but steadily parliament members are starting to make sense. The GreenLeft (GroenLinks) and democrats (D66) have the most pro-internet civil rights stances. That a D66 parliament member states no ACTA secrecy can exist confirms this.
Some statements from other more conservative parties (like CDA (Christian), VVD (classical conservative)) even smell to very, very, very small babysteps in understanding civil rights on the net. Still, too much idiocy comes from them (VVD actively supporting dutch equivalent of MPAA, CDA supporting censorship). But I do notice a slow movement towards understanding the net, and how civil rights should be protected on the net.
In the sales world, this is called "fear of loss". You pressure the client to buy because they might loose an opportunity. Example: "This offer is only valid today!".
I'm not arguing to suddenly put irrelevant info onto WP. The high standard can still be achieved, the level of detail is just higher. Turing might get its own set of pages, while my kindergarten teacher maybe gets a few lines.
Everyone should have a wikipedia page. Notability and value of information however should be clear: Turing's page should clearly be different then the page of my teacher in kindergarten. How? I don't know. We can go much finer in granularity. To be successfully usable, developments are needed to cope with the finer grained information (like having ~10M pages of teachers of kindergartens).
> Cool story, bro. Most people these days either use the browser that comes with the OS, or install the one they want.
This does not refute in an way that MS quit the EEE game. Merely, you seem to troll me ("Cool story, bro.").
> Really? Did you forget that Oracle started a lawsuit against Google for the usage of Java within Android? Or how about Apple's lawsuit against Samsung for the look and feel of the Galaxy Tablet? How about i4i's lawsuit against Microsoft?
Exactly, a few big fish and some smaller pure trolls. I am not aware of industrywide patent enforcement. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of IT companies, who don't pursue software patents let alone enforce if they have.
> [Citation needed]
I am not aware of industrywide patentfights regarding software patents. Telecom companies do battle each other ferociously over patents, which are not necessarily for software (from what I read, not relatively many software patents are involved).
> From Wikipedia: The C# language definition and the CLI are standardized under ISO and Ecma standards that provide reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing protection from patent claims.
That previous attempts failed does not mean they quit trying. IE9/10 does show some goodwill, but also shows the are still in the EEE game. Take for example the hardware accelerated canvas: Several (non-MS) websites had "optimized for IE" marketing campaigns. Such optimization is nonsense when using standards. Also, MS publicly stated WebGL has security problems because of direct access to the shaders. However, they forget to mention Silverlight has the exact same problem.
> In addition, Microsoft's actions against Android, while despicable, are hardly different than what most other tech companies are doing,
Eh, no. It's true more patent trolls exist, but not many companies in the industry try to enforce software patents.
About C#: Microsoft has stated several times that open is not the same as patent-free. They did so in context of Linux/Android, but also in the context of .net. Also, anaylis exist where C# tech is tied to patents.
The article is laughable. Microsoft itself is an important reason to develop Dart to begin with. MS has EEE'd html/js/css with IE 5.5 and up, and developed .NET to offer a competitive (proprietary) platform. We can't use C# although it's open, because MS is acting as a patent troll.
It's not about taste, but about readability, a part of usability. Why act like a technologist while flushing about 50 years of usability knowledge (Helvetica is from late 50s) down the drain? Heterospaced fonts with significant contrast are used widely for good reasons. Ignoring these harms credibility of the writer severely, at least for me personally.
However, software patents and closed sourceness put me off and drove me to dart and Java. Too bad Microsoft is becoming a patent troll. You may have the coolest stuff, but if you start to sue me/my clients (indirectly) it's over soon.