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Also this is how Super Mario Bros. 3 works: there is an ASIC instead of the PPU ROM, which is why it is not only quite large

The Memory Management Controller (MMC3) helps make Super Mario Bros. 3 large, but it doesn't quite replace the CHR ROM. It just controls the high address lines (A16-A10) of CHR ROM and the high address lines (A17-A12) of PRG ROM. It's not conceptually different from the MMU used by a modern CPU to translate virtual memory addresses into physical memory addresses. MMC3 also contains a programmable interval timer that generates an IRQ by counting how often the PPU switches between reading sprite tile memory and reading background memory (which happens once per scanline). This timer is mostly used to switch between a game's playfield and its status bar.

but supports both horizontal and vertical scrolling at the same time

And a bunch of games that don't use MMC3 can do 8-way scrolling, such as Solar Jetman and Blaster Master. That's mostly a matter of the design of the game engine and, in some cases, of whether the cartridge has 8 KiB of supplemental work RAM on the CPU side (in addition to the 2 KiB in the NES) to cache a decompressed level map.

with more palettes than normal.

MMC3 does not extend the four background palettes and four sprite palettes, which are internal to the CPU. The closest a mapper can do is shrink the area affected by each palette from the normal 16x16 pixels. MMC5 has an "ExGrafix" mode that shrinks color areas to 8x8, and it was largely used for Koei's war sims but also saw use in Castlevania III and a handful of other games. But by the time developers started to figure out the MMC5's true capability, the TurboGrafx-16, Genesis, and Super NES were out, and game studios had mostly lost interest in the NES.

Sources: MMC3 reverse engineered docs; MMC5 reverse engineered docs; NesCartDB entries for SMB3 and other games

I think that has to do with a really big company up in Redmond, which made a lot of money with a rip-off of another graphics-only operating system and produced code of dubious modularity and unnecessary bloat and complexity. I think their name starts with "M" or something.

Or was it an N?

Nintendo of America is also in Redmond, Washington, and the feature set of the Picture Processing Unit in the Nintendo Entertainment System was heavily inspired by that of the Texas Instruments TMS9928 in the ColecoVision. NES games likewise ballooned up to half a megabyte over the system's life,* compared with the more compact ROM sizes of the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision. I mean seriously, 48K for Tetris ?

* Only three licensed NES games were larger than 512 KiB: Kirby's Adventure, AD&D: Pool of Radiance, and Uncharted Waters.

Here are the instructions I followed to install Ubuntu 16.04 on the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook.
http://bernaerts.dyndns.org/li...

If they're unrelated, why does http://dyndns.org/ redirect to http://dyn.com/?

Because Renesys was acquired by Dyn, do I really have to spell out everything?

Dyndns.org is unrelated to dyn.com

If they're unrelated, why does http://dyndns.org/ redirect to http://dyn.com/? DynDNS is just an obsolete brand name for the same service from the same company, which now refers to itself simply as Dyn.

buy his own damn Bat-RAM.

In fact, that's exactly what Sunsoft did for Batman: Return of the Joker for NES. It comes with 8K of Bat-RAM on top of the 4K built into the NES it runs on.

Found this:

http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawki...

It says that a 3K black hole has a mass of 4x10^22 kg, a bit larger than the Everest-sized black hole.

The Everest-hole hole is extremely hot, 10^8 K, but it's still radiating so slowly that it'll take 10^21 years to evaporate, so it would be more than enough to destroy the earth.

I'm not quite sure how to solve for one that would be hot enough to suck in the earth before evaporating, but I see that a black hole that would last 1 second is a mere 70 million kilograms, with a radius of about a picometer.

To make a planet-eating black hole from an accelerator experiment you need to assume that Hawking ratiation doesn't exist (or is extremely feeble), or those black holes would evaporate instantly before they can accrete any matter. So you would end up with planet-mass black holes orbiting stars.

Even if you turned off Hawking radiation, it would still be hard for a black hole from a particle accelerator to actually eat the planet. Let's say you have an accelerator much more powerful than the LHC, with a center-of-mass energy of 1 PeV. If all that were used to produce a black hole, it would have a mass of 1.8e-21 kg. An electron or proton a single hydrogen radius away from it (which we can use as a typical intermolecular distance in the Earth for simplicity) would feel an acceleration of 1e-11 m/s^2, which is absolutely tiny compared to the electrical forces that govern motion on those scales. A small black hole like that behaves much like a neutrino - it hardly interacts with anything. And it needs to do that to grow. I think we could have lots of these inside the Earth and not even notice (dun-dun-DUUN!).

Even if you included Hawking radiation but somehow only turned it on after the black hole had consumed the planet, you still wouldn't get rid of the planet-mass black hole, as a hole of that size evaporates extremely slowly, and would have a life time of more than 5e50 years.

Planet-mass black holes could be detected via gravitational microlensing. Planets are regularly detected this way. But it may be hard to distinguish those black holes from planets. As far as I know we can't exclude a population of these in orbit around a fraction of the stars in the milky way. The accretion events, when the planets are eaten, would probably be quite bright, and might be visible as mini-supernovas.

What about this story makes you think Hawking radiation doesn't exist? We can't be completely sure it exists because we don't have any observations of it, but there are compelling theoretical reasons to believe it should exist. But for non-tiny black holes, it is extremely faint, so faint that we have no hope of observing it. For example, the supermassive black hole in the center of the milky way would be expected to radiate 3.6e-48 W. That's 1 with 50 zeros behind it times weaker than a light bulb!

Easy enough. Get any recent phone that's supported by Cyanogenmod. Install Cyanogenmod. Then install Debian (or similar). This can be accomplished as a dual boot or as a chroot inside Android.

Or as neither.
I like Sven-Ola's debian kit which takes advantage of the (mostly) disjoint directory structure of Android and Debian (or rather LSB) to run Debian and Android in the same root. The benefit over chroot is that you can plug in a USB drive, SD card, etc. and instantly have access in /Removable/Foo for both Android and Debian apps, as well as the ability to use Debian programs (e.g. text editor) in the Android hierarchy. You can get the same functionality with enough bind mounts, but debian-kit makes it a lot simpler IMO.

I'd also recommend zshaolin for those looking for a friendly *n*x environment without installing a whole distribution, or if they don't have and can't/won't get root access.

Flowers By Irene

That sounds like a fire hazard, not to mention a source of dust - do people really put wooden shelves in their datacenters?

The autoignition temperature for generic cheapo plywood is somewhere on the order of 300 degrees C. If you went with pine, which is still pretty cheap, it goes up to 427 degrees C.

How hot do you think computers run?

It's not normal operation that would concern me with wooden rack shelves, but failures like this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/26/exploding_computer_vs_reg_reader/
http://ronaldlan.dyndns.org/index.php
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/inadequate-deceptive-product-labeling,536.html

One bad power supply could set the whole cabinet on fire -- and perhaps worse, set off the server room fire suppression system.

Blocking 443 wouldn't help either, you'd have to block ports 1..65535

How many web URLs that include an explicit port number do you see in your daily web surfing? How many such URLs does an average home user see? I'm a geek, and only one web site that I visit routinely includes an explicit port number. Otherwise, the browser will assume 80 for HTTP or 443 for HTTPS.

It came with a game I bought. Installed the disc, and it demanded to install Steam.

So I'll assume you learned about the game through word of mouth and took the bus to a retail store to buy the boxed game. Are you sure Steam doesn't communicate on port 80 or 443 when activating or patching a game?

I was in four [online communities] before Marc Andreeson decided to have a bash at this thing called Mosaic.

As an online user prior to the Internet's opening to the public, you are an edge case. Mosaic started in the fourth quarter of 1992. NSFNET wasn't open to users outside universities and the military until 1992, when the U.S. Congress passed the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act that turned NSFNET into the Internet. Before then, the only online communities open to the public were local BBSes and the big national BBSes such as Prodigy, GEnie, AOL, and CompuServe. Please prepend the following to each of my previous replies to you: "For the vast majority of home users..."

This gets you most of the way there; check it out, it's good stuff...

Debian Kit for Android http://sven-ola.dyndns.org/repo/debian-kit-en.html

I saw the questions section, but I found very little in the way of proof. There is no picture of a test cart's PCB to verify against, and the in article they refer to verify this claim has nothing more than front facing picture and a passing mention of the cart. Do you have a verifiable Zelda test cart PCB picture to compare against?

Someone on the NintendoAge forum who owns a yellow Zelda test cart said that it has the same PCB as the production cart.

You can see a photo of the production Zelda PCB here.

The moron (and you) is conflating open source and piracy... which is moronic.

Open source and piracy have a common characteristic: Not paying. That makes the idea that there might be correlation not moronic.

Seriously? To try make you realize how moronic that "correlation", even if existing, I'd like to say that there is the same exact correlation in stealing stuff from someones house and taking a piece of tech your friend would throw away but since you asked he gives it to you for free: Not paying.

Realize now? Doesn't matter - and I mean that the correlation or existence of it doesn't matter at all. It has nothing to do with nothing on the subject it's supposed to have a lot to do with.

But in the phone market, quite different from the computer market, there is another connection: There is an open source OS that makes piracy easy, and a closed source OS that makes piracy hard. Of course pirates will choose the OS that makes piracy easy, which just happens to be the open source OS.

History repeats itself - like ebook readers, mp3 players, etc. there are and have been locked down with DRM only content as well as more open and DRM free platforms. The future will tell if this too will end up with locked down systems being made more open and less locked and restricted, even if not fully open. And with MP3 players, there were propaganda accuses against manufacturers that allowed MP3 and other formats without copy protections / DRM crippleware systems to be used on their players and especially against internet stores selling non DRM crippled media files for not just "making piracy easy" (as in not making the system locked and highly restricted with no regards for legitimate users rights being tampered [and in fact outright abused - ie. trying to achieve system where if user want's to use a song in their MP3 player when jogging and on one or more devices at home he'd have to buy a "song for device X" multiple times, not "buy a song and have it" and where copying song you bought to 2nd device would be stealing] with the claim that it's critical for preventing piracy destroying Big Media starving artists incomes.
Vendor lock-in and locked walled garden models are also close friends - and artificial crippling to achieve vendor lock-in, such as: word processor X that gains market from Wordperfect and has the benefit of being able to load and save also in Wordperfect's format, which helps them eventually gain equal market share with WP - all fair competition - but after they reach a share sufficiently larger than WP to dare taking minor risk they release new version still with support to open WP files but saving in WP format has been removed - and having paid for rights to use WP's patented format, and having patented their format which they implied they would be glad if WP used their patented format they now officially state that WP is using their IP (which they didn't officially give WP a permission for), forcing WP to drop format X... this resulting to people switching from WP to X faster, and finally opening WP files will be removed also.
Or a real life example of worst kind of artificial crippling of software: Windows 3.x, officially stating MS-DOS as supported OS and designed for it, but perfectly capable, without any extra work done to achieve that, of running on any competing DOS system, including the technically superior DR-DOS which supported multi-tasking - task switching, which froze other applications in the background, to be exact, but it did this in 16-bit real mode with regular DOS applications, not needing programs to be designed for multitasking, while even Windows 3.x could run multiple DOS applications only on 386+ 32-bit mode and in 16-bit mode even Windows applications had to be written to release CPU for Windows that then called next program in line instead of proper pre

If I were to vote for the language that is the hardest to understand when read out loud (whether by machine or human), my vote would not go to perl, but lisp.

I'd vote for APL (the FFT example is illuminating). At least Lisp constructs are pronounceable, this is not. Then again, a one-liner for Conways' game of life is impressive. APL was one of the first two computer languages I learned, and it remains one of my favorites.

Never thought of that - that would have saved me no end of grief.

But I did have a Winky Board - a little circuit board to go between the ZX81 and the cassette player, presumably to improve reliability of loads and saves. For all I know it just made a couple LEDs blink.

I had both a ZX81 and a TS1000. (and the TS1500 printer.) One of the computers couldn't use the memory expansion pack, and the other one couldn't use the cassette deck. And me with a stack of tapes of games that required 16K memory...

I know this isn't exactly the same thing, but there is something like that for encrypted filesystems: http://cube.dyndns.org/~rsnel/scubed/

The story behind Truecrypt bothers me: http://www.privacylover.com/encryption/analysis-is-there-a-backdoor-in-truecrypt-is-truecrypt-a-cia-honeypot/

Check out scubed, a much more simple and modular solution: http://cube.dyndns.org/~rsnel/scubed/

amusing to see how http://dyndns.org/ has changed over the years; in 1999 complaining on the front page about the programmer leaving and taking all his code with him to a completely anonymous, plasticky "professional" look in 2011 and all the slow changes in between,

I agree with you it shouldn't be there. Correct me if I am wrong on this point but TiVo was most likely forced to use DRM in their files in order to use allow the legal use of cable cards in their DVR. Fortunately not many channels are flagged for copy prevention. As far as the ease of copying TiVo desktop and Desktop Plus allows someone to download from the TiVo unit and then convert it to video that is playable on an iPod, iPhone, several blackberry devices, Palm Pre, Zune, PSP, and several other devices. As far as burning them onto a video DVD or Blu-Ray it does take a few additional steps. Start off with either TiVo desktop, TiVo PLaylist, Galleon, or any web browser to download the video or videos, using either Tivo Decode or Directshow Dump to remove the wrapper, then use any DVD/Blu Ray authoring software out there as long as it supports MPEG2.

While it is rather easy not everyone would be able to perform such acts. Then again, those who have little or no technical skill probably were not able to set the clock on a VCR, or copy a simple file on a computer. No matter how easy you make something there is always going to be quite a few people who will not simply get it.

Full text of the letters to the editor regarding Dr. Tai's paper, and her response, all of which are entertaining reading, are available here.

See http://www.dyndns.org for getting around dynamic IPs from your ISP.

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, The Thread That Cost Someone $42.5 Million Dollars:

Page 1.
Page 2 (John posts as "Doghead" on this page).
Page 4.
Greg Smith's threat/post.

Mirror - Page 1
Mirror - Page 2
Mirror - Page 4
Mirror - Greg's Threat

If there are any other pages I missed that got picked up in the cache, post them here.

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, The Thread That Cost Someone $42.5 Million Dollars:

Page 1.
Page 2 (John posts as "Doghead" on this page).
Page 4.
Greg Smith's threat/post.

Mirror - Page 1
Mirror - Page 2
Mirror - Page 4
Mirror - Greg's Threat

If there are any other pages I missed that got picked up in the cache, post them here.

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, The Thread That Cost Someone $42.5 Million Dollars:

Page 1.
Page 2 (John posts as "Doghead" on this page).
Page 4.
Greg Smith's threat/post.

Mirror - Page 1
Mirror - Page 2
Mirror - Page 4
Mirror - Greg's Threat

If there are any other pages I missed that got picked up in the cache, post them here.

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, The Thread That Cost Someone $42.5 Million Dollars:

Page 1.
Page 2 (John posts as "Doghead" on this page).
Page 4.
Greg Smith's threat/post.

Mirror - Page 1
Mirror - Page 2
Mirror - Page 4
Mirror - Greg's Threat

If there are any other pages I missed that got picked up in the cache, post them here.

Opera Unite.

Granted, it's still in the alpha stage, but if your router supports UPnP Unite will ask you if you want to have your public ip-address pointing at its webserver. And there is nothing that prevents you from using something like dyndns.org to accomplish your goals:

Like this guy from Opera software did

To be fair to Fox News, I don't think there's anything wrong with providing people with information so they can make their own decisions

I put up a website to track some of this data, including XML data. Making sure people are spreading rational, accurate information about this situation is the best thing we can do right now. It's not as though geeks normally choose to sit around in ignorance because knowledge can be dangerous

To be fair to Fox News, I don't think there's anything wrong with providing people with information so they can make their own decisions

I put up a website to track some of this data, including XML data. Making sure people are spreading rational, accurate information about this situation is the best thing we can do right now. It's not as though geeks normally choose to sit around in ignorance because knowledge can be dangerous

http://www.dyndns.org/ and http://http//httpd.apache.org/. Well, it works for me.

...take a lot of frames using a cheap webcam [wildimaging.co.uk] and stack them together, weeding out the bad ones as you go.

You might be interested to have a look at some software called ALE, which can be used to do this more or less automatically; you give it a sequence of frames and it'll synthesize a superresolution image combing data from every frame.

(You can also use it to generate panoramic images from video pans --- it automatically locates, rotates and transforms every frame correctly, figuring everything out for itself!)

The only problem with it is that it's really slow, so you'll probably want as big a computer as you can humanly manage.

One day I should try taking some simple digital camera footage of the moon and running it through ALE just to see what happens...

Not true. x264 improves on 1-pass encoding, but there are plenty of ways to improve quality that require 2 passes (or a much larger buffer) to work properly.

The difference between direct spacial and temporal will be trivial. As explained here http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-143904.html by Dark Shikari, an active x264 dev, 2-pass encoding is no more efficient than crf.

"CRF, 1pass, and 2pass all use the same bit distribution algorithm. 2-pass tries to approximate CRF by using the information from the first pass to decide on a constant quality factor. 1-pass tries to approximate CRF by guessing a quality factor over time and varying it to reach the target bitrate."

Here http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=134545 he says "2pass is not measurably better than CRF, in general."

The idea that multiple passes increases quality is left over from the time of mpeg-4 part 2 and part 4 encoders where this was the case.

As for the sliceless multi-threading used by x264 there should be no significant quality loss unless the number of threads exceeds video_width/mvrange, so it depends on what you mean by a large number of threads and what you consider a reasonable mvrange to be. If you are unhappy with this limitation look at how x264farm works: http://omion.dyndns.org/x264farm/x264farm.html. It splits a video at scene-cuts and allows the scenes to be encoded in parallel as mentioned earlier. And yes it does work with multi-pass encoding.

I've put together some docs on creating a standalone Safari 4: http://vasi.dyndns.org:3128/svn/SafariBeta/ . It runs exactly like the beta, only it does not replace the system's WebKit library and does not replace Safari 3. So you can continue to use the old Safari, and your applications will not use the new WebKit (and potentially break because of it).

It also has a tiny patch allowing the use of an auxiliary preferences file. This lets you disable incompatible InputManager hacks for Safari 4 only, while Safari 3 will still use them.

A couple of responses to miscellaneous comments in this thread:

- Following the "Looking for Safari 3" link will just end up overwriting Safari 4 and its WebKit. Congratulations, you've reverted back to where you were before! But you still can't run Safari 3 and Safari 4 side-by-side.

- Seriously, WebKit nightlies include WebKit inside their bundle, and other apps therefore don't see the new WebKit. This works. It is a standard technique on OS X, do not be surprised.

- It is indeed a good thing that the Safari 4 beta upgrades the WebKit library, things really need to be tested before Safari 4 final is released and millions of users have their apps break. However, there's no excuse for Apple not providing a standalone Safari 3 so we can test in both versions. Also, this public beta is quite different from the last semi-private developer release of Safari 4--Apple really should have provided the beta as a dev release first, so folks could fix their WebKit-using apps.

Screencap within

Some of my favorite "gui interface using visual basic" moments:
The Bourne Ultimatum. When I was watching this film in the theater, I actually laughed at this:
Scanning for viruses... on Linux?
The CIA use Norton.

Those look a lot like Linux desktop icons... and yet Norton Internet Security 2006 is running. LOL. (Apparently, Norton were promoting the movie, so that was probably some odd product placement thing. But really, the CIA using Norton...

I also noticed this on an episode of CBS's drama NCIS: SETI@home on NCIS.

Most TV shows want their computers to look "cool", rather than realistic, when a computer is used for something important, like tracing the location of a murderer through his cell phone. Plus, most people wouldn't realize they're doing something like tracing a cell phone on a CLI based OS...

I have noticed on CBS's TV show Numb3rs, that they often use lines of source code, and even Mathematica code, to do stuff.

Some of my favorite "gui interface using visual basic" moments:
The Bourne Ultimatum. When I was watching this film in the theater, I actually laughed at this:
Scanning for viruses... on Linux?
The CIA use Norton.

Those look a lot like Linux desktop icons... and yet Norton Internet Security 2006 is running. LOL. (Apparently, Norton were promoting the movie, so that was probably some odd product placement thing. But really, the CIA using Norton...

I also noticed this on an episode of CBS's drama NCIS: SETI@home on NCIS.

Most TV shows want their computers to look "cool", rather than realistic, when a computer is used for something important, like tracing the location of a murderer through his cell phone. Plus, most people wouldn't realize they're doing something like tracing a cell phone on a CLI based OS...

I have noticed on CBS's TV show Numb3rs, that they often use lines of source code, and even Mathematica code, to do stuff.

Some of my favorite "gui interface using visual basic" moments:
The Bourne Ultimatum. When I was watching this film in the theater, I actually laughed at this:
Scanning for viruses... on Linux?
The CIA use Norton.

Those look a lot like Linux desktop icons... and yet Norton Internet Security 2006 is running. LOL. (Apparently, Norton were promoting the movie, so that was probably some odd product placement thing. But really, the CIA using Norton...

I also noticed this on an episode of CBS's drama NCIS: SETI@home on NCIS.

Most TV shows want their computers to look "cool", rather than realistic, when a computer is used for something important, like tracing the location of a murderer through his cell phone. Plus, most people wouldn't realize they're doing something like tracing a cell phone on a CLI based OS...

I have noticed on CBS's TV show Numb3rs, that they often use lines of source code, and even Mathematica code, to do stuff.

Yes, except as others have pointed out it would be a D'deridex class Warbird, backbone of the Romulan fleet throughout the TNG and DS9 era.

The idea is sound, the engineering... troublesome. To get a useful power yield out of a black hole by Hawking radiation, it would have to be very, very small indeed. A hole with a 1GW luminosity would have a radius of about 9E-16 metres, rather smaller than an atomic nucleus, and a temperature of 2E11 Kelvin, as hot as a supernova. It would mass 6E11kg, or about twice as much as every human being on earth. A difficult thing to handle! (Calculator at http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/ for black hole parameters. Order of magnitude comparisons of length, mass and temperature taken from Wikipedia.)

However, for such a black hole you wouldn't need to worry about feeding it: it would have a life expectancy of some 550 billion years. That's a good thing, because getting a matter beam carrying enough mass for high power applications, confined so narrowly and aimed so precisely, is going to be yet another monumentally tricky task. A black hole with a one-minute life expectancy would yield about 100,000 Mt / second. Yes, that's megatons. As in hydrogen bombs. Feeding such a beast its matter fuel, at a rate sufficient to supply such terrific luminosity, in the face of that furious blast, and never dropping the supply for as much as a minute... well, maybe the Time Lords or the Xeelee could manage it, but that's about all.

http://mikehibbett.dyndns.org/

Visitor 301 - that seems kinda small, maybe it was just rebooted?

Any idiot ( even you ) could do a simple stack in much less than 11KB. It just depends on how much functionality you want to drop.

I've an IPv4 webserver running here:

http://mikehibbett.dyndns.org/

that's running* a Microchip stack on a PIC micrcontroller in about 16KB of code. I bet I could get that down to less than 1KB if I knock much of the functionality out. Want to have a bet on it?

* it's running now. Not sure what a slashdotting would do to it.

It was definitely 'shopped, but I did manage to find a real instance of this happening. It was in Central Park, NY, weird...
Here's a screenshot:
http://05lan.dyndns.org/public/centralpark.JPG

This one is definitely not photoshopped.

Game! is also completely DRM free, and has very modest system requirements!

There are self contained WiFi and Ethernet webcams (Most have a mini web server built in). That, a router and a Dynamic IP Name Service ( http://www.dyndns.org/ ) will finish off the bill. Many routers have built in support for some Dynamic IP Name Services. You set the router to forward Port 80 (Or whatever port the webcam ues) to the IP address of the webcam. Then you just point the computer at the URL and you are seeing still images or streaming video. Most Webcams even support a password system so only those who you want to have access will. No dedicated computer, software, or anything like that.

With all the talk of running one's own OpenID provider, why not run it on your own machine behind a DynDNS or similar provider and use PAM to authenticate against /etc/shadow?

I will say the J-word once again. May the Emperor forgive me.

Try writing this: http://dimiter.dyndns.org/sqema/index.jsp in anything *but* Java, and make it faster. Then we'll talk again.

To everyone bashing Vista, install SP1 first, please. It's not in the automatic updates, so you will actually have to google for it and install it manually. It fixed the file copying problem and if you revert to the 2000 theme, it works as well as 2000 used to work (if you apply a few tweaks).

If you want to bash Vista for something, bash it for removing the NTDVM and Win16 support from the 64-bit version, the weird versioning and language support, or maybe the lack of 100% backwards compatibility - bash it for something that's actually true, not pre-SP1 performance (which was abysmal, but HAS BEEN FIXED).

Here's a list of perf tweaks I've thrown together: http://dimiter.dyndns.org/Vista%20Optimization%20Guidelines.html

http://auricle.dyndns.org/ALE/