Because they chose to obey the law. MS broke the law with illegal conracts, signed a consent agreement back in 95 to stop, then broke that consent agreement.
This is about criminal wrongdoing. A mountain of evidence convicted them, and the conviction was upheld by friendly Supreme Court and Appeals Courts.
You had me going up until you said there were more Java jobs out there then C++. I have a seriously difficulty accepting this one.
Please, don't take my word for it. Check Monster.com, or any of them. I wouldn't ever ask you to take *my* word for it.
From what I've seen for myself, there is a problem with Java and speed.
Again, I won't ask you to take my word for it.
Microsoft Themselves Uses Java applets for their online offerings.
Tens of thousands use Java applets all day every day, and don't find them slow. Go there and play 'Spades', 'Chess', 'Hearts', or a few dozen others.
Yahoo's chat program 'Messenger' is another fine example.
Or one of these thousands of applets might be a better example.
Please do not take my word for it. Evaluate it for yourself.
Java is 'slow' like a Ford Taurus is 'slow'. Java isn't the fastest language around. It is only capable of around a million calculations a second. It is not ready to make hard-core 3d games, or any software that has to number crunch something millions of times.
But it's perfect for all home software uses. And it is the dominant choice for new development, by far. And besides -- the power in todays machines pretty much makes speed of execution moot. If today's Java is slow, it's still faster on today's machines than C++ was on a Pentium I. Why wasn't that 'too slow'?
It's the hottest thing in corporate IT, but it needs a high-speed connection to really come into it's own. So consumers won't see what we're using in corps until high-speed internet access penetrates the market.
But tis only a matter of time.
Tens of thousands use Java applets all day every day, and don't find them slow. Go there and play 'Spades', 'Chess', 'Hearts', or a few dozen others.
Oh, don't get me started on Yahoo's Chess applet. I have used that one, and I've lost track of how many times I've lost games because the applet crashed.
As for Java applets in general, I don't really think that applets is where Java wants to be heading for the future. If Java wants to do well as a language, it has got to be capable of taking some of the market that C++ and VB currently have.
And as far as evaluating some Java applets myself, I have. I am currently evaluating some applets used for web report generation.
It is, to put it mildly, pretty useless. Takes far, far too long to do simple queries that even MS Access (ACCESS!!!!) can handle in a few seconds. And as far as I can knew, it's not because of the way it was written.
I'm not the only guy who's saying this. And I find it odd that Linux supporters who constantly bash MS for going on the attack for any slight against their product, no matter so small, can't accept a little criticism when it comes to Java.