Isn't that what Visual Studio Tools for Office does? I've never really looked into it much, but my understanding was that it was a.NET replacement for writing Office apps with VBA.
I didn't know vaporware meant "software/hardware that has a delayed release date" or "software that will probably be made but hasn't been announced yet." I don't understand how you can mention Diablo III in a vaporware list and not mention Starcraft: Ghost.
While I agree that Diablo III doesn't belong on the list since it hasn't been announced, I don't think that Starcraft: Ghost does, either. I seem to recall Blizzard officially shelving/canceling it a year or two ago, so they have no plans to ship it. To me, that means it isn't vaporware since Blizzard officially said, "no, we're never going to ship this".
That's because Vista has the equivalent of Windows Desktop Search installed by default. This only applies to XP and 2003 (and maybe 2000, not sure if it can run on that OS or not), since they don't have WDS unless you installed it yourself.
My problem is that in order to spawn a child process with more rights than my own, I must use ShellExecute(). However, I was relying on a feature of CreateProcess() that ShellExecute() lacks.
I don't mind rewriting code that relied on the user being an admin. I do mind rewriting code where it looks like I'm doing everything correctly, yet it doesn't work.
If "Documents and Settings" was hardcoded in an application and now doesn't exist that screws the pooch.
While technically "Documents and Settings" doesn't exist anymore (user profiles are in C:\Users, which is amazingly easy type given typical MS paths), they put a (hidden) link at C:\Documents and Settings that points to C:\Users so that programs of this nature won't break. Whether they should have done that or not is another topic.
In response to the GP, basically anything that is security related could potentially need to be rewritten. A lot of this stems from the fact that, by default in XP all users were Admins (yes, not secure...but that is how it is/was). In Vista, even if you are an Admin you don't have full admin rights without jumping through hoops.
For example, the application that I work on sometimes needs to spawn a child process that requires full admin privileges (the app itself can run as a normal user). In previous versions, we were calling CreateProcess() to start it, and redirecting standard output to retrieve the results of the child process. However, for whatever reason, you can't use CreateProcess() to start a child process with higher rights than the original process - that doesn't trigger the consent (Allow or Deny) dialog. You need to use ShellExecute() for this, which (helpfully) doesn't allow you to redirect standard output.
This is just one example of the many small, annoying "features" we had to work around in order to correctly work on Vista.
One of the top requirements from IT customers was for "the most secure release of Windows you can humanly make," said Ballmer. "We have had better security, we have had fewer vulnerabilities, fewer issues with Windows Vista in its first six months than any OS that preceded it.
Doesn't this mean that the next version of Windows will be less secure than Vista?;)
While you may be correct, the examples you give aren't good ones. Both Firefly and SG1 were canceled by the network without giving the writers sufficient time to properly end their stories. The movies were their attempts at giving the story a meaningful ending, instead of leaving the fans hanging forever.
You can always by the family pack, which for Tiger costs $200 (a single user upgrade costs $130) and gets you 5 licenses. That's really a pretty good deal.
Yeah, I agree. Funny how they don't mention how much crappier crafting is now vs. before the first "upgrade". I also like how in the next patch, there are player run events...which I remember participating in two years ago.
introducing generic programming in a simpler, safer way than C++ templates and, unlike generics in C#, maintaining backwards (and forwards) compatibility with existing Java code."
And C# 2.0 maintained compatibility with existing C# 1.0 code (you still have access to the old containers) while actually giving significant performance benefits where Java is only syntax sugar that still produces the same old slow code.
What I'm assuming that he meant is that Java 5 is byte-code compatible with the previous version. You can take an app built with Java 5 and run it on a machine with Java 1.4.2 installed, and it will run.
This is not the approach taken with C# - if you run an app built with C# 2.0 on a machine with 1.1 installed, you'll get an error message saying that it can't read the assembly, since the internal format has changed between the two versions.
Speaking of which, I haven't played my Druid in a while, is Moonkin Form still a 31-point talent in Balance? I know some things got moved around when 2.0 went live...
I haven't played my druid in a while either, but I am pretty sure that it is. I don't recall what the Balance 41-point talent is off hand, though.
Even if they knew with absolute certainty what you had, returning your stuff would be a bad idea. This means they have to track it to whoever has it now, and undo all the transactions that were a result of your account being hacked -- but that could be a fairly large butterfly effect, and could result in a major disruption of all kinds of people who were only very loosely connected to the theft of your items.
In general, this isn't an issue. Most of the gear worth having is either bind on equip (you can't trade/sell the item to a player once you have worn it) or bind on pick up (you can't trade/sell the item to a player once you have looted it from the mob). For both of these, your only options are to wear the item, keep it in your bank/inventory, or sell it to an NPC vendor.
For most of the cases of hacked accounts from people I know, their gear is either sold to NPCs vendors (and then the gold sent to another toon, possibly a gold farmer), or they make the toon learn enchanting and disenchant their gear into shards (which can be used to enchant other items), which can then be sold on the auction house, or sent to another account.
Over the last few months, a few people in my guild had their accounts hacked, and their toons had none of their gear left when they were able to log back in. They eventually did get most/all of their gear back (sometimes it took a few weeks), but they did lose all of the enchants on their gear. Still, gear without enchants is better than no gear at all.
I haven't played with Google Calendar enough, but would it be a workable replacement for the Outlook calendar? i.e. Can you schedule meetings with a simple invite rather than telling everyone to put it on their calendar? Can other users see your unavailable periods when scheduling?
While Outlook does have more features than Google Calendar, IMO it is a pretty good replacement. My wife and I use Google Calendar for scheduling doctor appointments, family events, etc. so that way they show up on both of our calendars automatically, without us both having to add the event manually.
As for free/busy information, yes you can see that as well. I believe when you set up an event you can set its visibility - anyone can see anything, only that you are busy, etc.
One thing Outlook does better than Google Calendar is in recurring events. Google Calendar only gives you a few options (once a week, once a month, every day, etc.) while with Outlook you can pretty much set up an event to occur at whatever interval you want (or pretty close to it).
One other "bug" I'd love to see fixed under Linux and OS X would be to fix the form controls. As it is, on any version of Windows they look native. Under Linux and OS X, though, all controls look like copies of the controls in Windows 95. Camino under OS X has native-looking controls, so it can't be too difficult to fix.
While I can't speak for the Linux version, I am pretty sure that this will be fixed on OS X in Firefox 3. I almost went with Camino over Firefox due to this (and other parts where it integrates better with OS X), however given that extensions and search providers don't work with Camino, that was just too much of a deal breaker for me.
I will second this. The one concern I had when I bought my MacBook last summer was if I would be able to cope without the Run dialog. Thankfully, Quicksilver has filled that need nicely - so nicely, in fact, that I miss a lot of its features that aren't present in the Run dialog on Windows.
When Star Wars: Galaxies first came out it was more of a sandbox game and I absolutely loved it.
I totally agree. I still miss the crafting system that was in place in the original game - I haven't heard of anything that has come close to that, yet.
My distaste for 40 man raids aside, I have very little I can gripe about EXCEPT the f___ing collectable card game garnering in-game rewards. It's bad enough that it exists in any capacity, but for Christ, leave me out of it, and stop nickel-and-diming these kids whom you KNOW are spending a lot of money on this CCG. The insult to it all is having to stare at that awesome baby hippogryph every time I visit Booty Bay. Of course it has no benefit beyond cosmetics, but come on. It's both awesome and unattainable without luck or significant dollar investment. I heard $200 for a code on eBay?
My wife actually just bought the card for the hippogryph off of eBay for about $5. When she originally looked for it, it was $30 (I think...or maybe more like $100-200? I don't recall), which is more than she wanted to spend on it, but she kept at it and eventually found a good deal on one.
In addition, I don't think that Firefox 2 was pushed out via Firefox's update mechanism, at least for Firefox 1.5 users. I had to go and download it myself (as did a coworker).
Only one N64 game (although maybe thats because thats the only N64 game that actually WORKS right now...)
I would be surprised if this was the case. After all, both Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask have been previously released for the GameCube. And since the Wii has similar/same hardware as the GameCube, I'm sure at least those two games are working fine.
Of course, if anyone has those games for the GameCube, there is no reason for them to buy them again on the VC.
I don't think that they are trying to provide commentary on the current situation in Iraq. From what I can recall of the podcasts from the first two episodes, Ron Moore stated that they weren't trying to make to compare the US in Iraq to the Cylons on New Caprica - not conciously, anyway.
Granted, the Iraq situation is in the news here in the US a lot, so it is quite possible that the writers did so without realizing it.
The quality is good, and the price is right. If iTunes would just carry Stargate and stop making us wait 2 weeks, I'd cancel my cable.
Admittedly I haven't checked in a while, but last time I checked BSG episodes were available the day after they aired (and I think I've heard of this for other shows, too). Since iTunes started carrying Stargate and Atlantis, I just assumed that it was the same policy for these (and all of their shows, really).
While my wife watches enough TV to make our cable bill worthwhile (plus, not all of the shows that she watches are on iTunes), if it was just me I would definitely consider ditching cable TV and only getting my TV from iTunes.
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You make it sound like that was actually hard to do....
Isn't that what Visual Studio Tools for Office does? I've never really looked into it much, but my understanding was that it was a .NET replacement for writing Office apps with VBA.
While I agree that Diablo III doesn't belong on the list since it hasn't been announced, I don't think that Starcraft: Ghost does, either. I seem to recall Blizzard officially shelving/canceling it a year or two ago, so they have no plans to ship it. To me, that means it isn't vaporware since Blizzard officially said, "no, we're never going to ship this".
That's because Vista has the equivalent of Windows Desktop Search installed by default. This only applies to XP and 2003 (and maybe 2000, not sure if it can run on that OS or not), since they don't have WDS unless you installed it yourself.
My problem is that in order to spawn a child process with more rights than my own, I must use ShellExecute(). However, I was relying on a feature of CreateProcess() that ShellExecute() lacks.
I don't mind rewriting code that relied on the user being an admin. I do mind rewriting code where it looks like I'm doing everything correctly, yet it doesn't work.
While technically "Documents and Settings" doesn't exist anymore (user profiles are in C:\Users, which is amazingly easy type given typical MS paths), they put a (hidden) link at C:\Documents and Settings that points to C:\Users so that programs of this nature won't break. Whether they should have done that or not is another topic.
In response to the GP, basically anything that is security related could potentially need to be rewritten. A lot of this stems from the fact that, by default in XP all users were Admins (yes, not secure...but that is how it is/was). In Vista, even if you are an Admin you don't have full admin rights without jumping through hoops.
For example, the application that I work on sometimes needs to spawn a child process that requires full admin privileges (the app itself can run as a normal user). In previous versions, we were calling CreateProcess() to start it, and redirecting standard output to retrieve the results of the child process. However, for whatever reason, you can't use CreateProcess() to start a child process with higher rights than the original process - that doesn't trigger the consent (Allow or Deny) dialog. You need to use ShellExecute() for this, which (helpfully) doesn't allow you to redirect standard output.
This is just one example of the many small, annoying "features" we had to work around in order to correctly work on Vista.
Doesn't this mean that the next version of Windows will be less secure than Vista?
While you may be correct, the examples you give aren't good ones. Both Firefly and SG1 were canceled by the network without giving the writers sufficient time to properly end their stories. The movies were their attempts at giving the story a meaningful ending, instead of leaving the fans hanging forever.
You can always by the family pack, which for Tiger costs $200 (a single user upgrade costs $130) and gets you 5 licenses. That's really a pretty good deal.
Yeah, I agree. Funny how they don't mention how much crappier crafting is now vs. before the first "upgrade". I also like how in the next patch, there are player run events...which I remember participating in two years ago.
You can do this in Firefox, too. Just bookmark slashdot.org, and set the keyword to "/.".
What I'm assuming that he meant is that Java 5 is byte-code compatible with the previous version. You can take an app built with Java 5 and run it on a machine with Java 1.4.2 installed, and it will run.
This is not the approach taken with C# - if you run an app built with C# 2.0 on a machine with 1.1 installed, you'll get an error message saying that it can't read the assembly, since the internal format has changed between the two versions.
I haven't played my druid in a while either, but I am pretty sure that it is. I don't recall what the Balance 41-point talent is off hand, though.
In general, this isn't an issue. Most of the gear worth having is either bind on equip (you can't trade/sell the item to a player once you have worn it) or bind on pick up (you can't trade/sell the item to a player once you have looted it from the mob). For both of these, your only options are to wear the item, keep it in your bank/inventory, or sell it to an NPC vendor.
For most of the cases of hacked accounts from people I know, their gear is either sold to NPCs vendors (and then the gold sent to another toon, possibly a gold farmer), or they make the toon learn enchanting and disenchant their gear into shards (which can be used to enchant other items), which can then be sold on the auction house, or sent to another account.
Over the last few months, a few people in my guild had their accounts hacked, and their toons had none of their gear left when they were able to log back in. They eventually did get most/all of their gear back (sometimes it took a few weeks), but they did lose all of the enchants on their gear. Still, gear without enchants is better than no gear at all.
While Outlook does have more features than Google Calendar, IMO it is a pretty good replacement. My wife and I use Google Calendar for scheduling doctor appointments, family events, etc. so that way they show up on both of our calendars automatically, without us both having to add the event manually.
As for free/busy information, yes you can see that as well. I believe when you set up an event you can set its visibility - anyone can see anything, only that you are busy, etc.
One thing Outlook does better than Google Calendar is in recurring events. Google Calendar only gives you a few options (once a week, once a month, every day, etc.) while with Outlook you can pretty much set up an event to occur at whatever interval you want (or pretty close to it).
While I can't speak for the Linux version, I am pretty sure that this will be fixed on OS X in Firefox 3. I almost went with Camino over Firefox due to this (and other parts where it integrates better with OS X), however given that extensions and search providers don't work with Camino, that was just too much of a deal breaker for me.
Monad was actually released last fall for Windows XP under the new name "Windows PowerShell". You can download it at here.
I will second this. The one concern I had when I bought my MacBook last summer was if I would be able to cope without the Run dialog. Thankfully, Quicksilver has filled that need nicely - so nicely, in fact, that I miss a lot of its features that aren't present in the Run dialog on Windows.
I totally agree. I still miss the crafting system that was in place in the original game - I haven't heard of anything that has come close to that, yet.
My wife actually just bought the card for the hippogryph off of eBay for about $5. When she originally looked for it, it was $30 (I think...or maybe more like $100-200? I don't recall), which is more than she wanted to spend on it, but she kept at it and eventually found a good deal on one.
In addition, I don't think that Firefox 2 was pushed out via Firefox's update mechanism, at least for Firefox 1.5 users. I had to go and download it myself (as did a coworker).
I would be surprised if this was the case. After all, both Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask have been previously released for the GameCube. And since the Wii has similar/same hardware as the GameCube, I'm sure at least those two games are working fine.
Of course, if anyone has those games for the GameCube, there is no reason for them to buy them again on the VC.
I don't think that they are trying to provide commentary on the current situation in Iraq. From what I can recall of the podcasts from the first two episodes, Ron Moore stated that they weren't trying to make to compare the US in Iraq to the Cylons on New Caprica - not conciously, anyway.
Granted, the Iraq situation is in the news here in the US a lot, so it is quite possible that the writers did so without realizing it.
Admittedly I haven't checked in a while, but last time I checked BSG episodes were available the day after they aired (and I think I've heard of this for other shows, too). Since iTunes started carrying Stargate and Atlantis, I just assumed that it was the same policy for these (and all of their shows, really).
While my wife watches enough TV to make our cable bill worthwhile (plus, not all of the shows that she watches are on iTunes), if it was just me I would definitely consider ditching cable TV and only getting my TV from iTunes.