I'm not a billionaire, but I love my life and death/ageing is one of the few real problems I have.
I'd rather have billionaires thinking like me and investing their money in solving real problems than buying yachts and marrying/divorcing every year.
I know I'll get my ... kicked for this comment, but anyway.
The iPhone experience is not sterile at all. It comes with a browser and there is no restriction for the websites you can open. Google ('the web is the computer') should be the ones to best understand this.
Since when is controlling the quality and security of the content at a marketplace that you operate equal to limiting people's freedoms?
If I own a grocery shop and refuse to sell someone's rotten tomatoes does it make me necessary evil?
Not letting people charge 0.99$ for balloons in swimwear using your own infrastructure has nothing to do with their freedom of speech. They can always create a web page and show it to the world.
Sounds like you've never lived in a communist country; where the government decides there shall be one and only one marketplace for a certain set of goods/services.
You are severally missing the point of the problem with Apple's App Store. It has absolutely nothing to do with what they will or will not allow in their store and what developers must do to get their apps published. It has nothing to do with Apple deciding 30% is the price of admission.
It has everything to do with Apple ensuring there can be only one market. This is the antithesis of a free market.
I dont think there's an issue with controlling the quality and security of the content at a marketplace. Its an issue that its the _only_ marketplace that they're controlling.
There are porn sites that have started supporting H.264, possibly in order to cater to the iPhone users, although I have no data to back up that assumption.
Learn both. Seriously. Pick a good book about algorithms or data structures, open Visual Studio and Eclipse, load the Java and .NET docs in your browser, maybe pick some introductory books on both and start coding the examples. It might take a little longer to start, but it will pay out tremendously in the end.
I've been doing this with Scheme and Erlang using SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) and it has definitely helped me understand better both the languages and the material.
In your case you have two very similar platforms, object-oriented, garbage collected, with a very similar syntax. The big strengths for both are their libraries and their VMs, learning them in parallel makes lots of sense.
As the other guys said it all depends from your situation and what you are trying to do.
One thing to maybe look at is Erlang and related technologies Mnesia, Yaws etc.
This is a comparison of Apache vs. Yaws under heavy load:
http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html
That chart is pretty misleading - it's basically comparing OS threads to event-based processing, which is really likely to be a win for the event-based system. It's also several years old at this point. Erlang is neat, but to be really, really fast, he probably wants to be working in C. Who knows though... the 'specs' are awfully vague. Erlang might be an interesting choice for some kinds of apps of this kind.
It is not misleading as this is explained in the comments section bellow the chart. Anyway it was just a suggestion for a possible direction to look at.
Maybe not 'misleading' but dubious. I mean, if you want to compare how many threads an OS can handle before it dies vs how many connections it can handle via an event-based system, I think the results are fairly well known at this point. It's not really highlighting anything great about Erlang or Yaws, nor pointing out any particular defect of Apache.
What an useless rant! It would have been better if you told us about all the great things you did about the water, the hunger, the pollution, the world peace etc.
I usually ignore critique from people who are not a personal example of what they are preaching. So would you please tell us how you put your money/brain/lifestyle where your mouth is or else just SHUT UP!
Oh and by the way entrepreneurs are people who try to create a profitable business. It might save the world or it might produce toilet paper, but if it's not making money, they can't be called entrepreneurs. So if you want them to solve any problem you consider important, don't ask them to give away money, tell them how to make more money by solving it.
