So happy all my stuff is in MP3 format, not Apple's proprietary format.
Huh? What proprietary format are you talking about? iTunes' standard audio format is MPEG-4 Part 14, aka ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003. It's supported out-of-the-box by Windows 7 (including streaming) and surely by other operating systems as well.
The only practical difference between Apple's implementation and the ISO standard is that Apple prefers the extension.m4a, whereas the standard states that.mp4 is the only valid extension. All this specifity in file extensions really does is help operating systems sort out whether a given file is an audio-only or multimedia file without having to read the contents. The file contents itself is the same.
"I'm Mayor of the 1st St. Chipotle" vs "I just got a +5 Insightful on this post!" Simple meaningless reward that means something to the user.
Ah, but there's a difference here.... A Foursquare Reward is merely a consequence of pressing a button on your phone when you are in the same place often. Anybody can do this. A Slashdot +5 Insightful is (usually) a sign that you've used your brain to assemble and share a coherent thought, and that others found it interesting enough that they want others to see it, too.
And what would you rather be known for -- Having interesting ideas that get read by thousands of smart people, or being the guy that eats at Taco Bell five times a week? What is more "meaningful"?
I have no sympathy for Microsoft, nor for any other vendor who puts my systems at risk
So then place the blame squarely on the "responsible" Google engineer for putting your systems at risk! This bug has existed in Windows XP for NINE YEARS and presumably was never exploited in all that time, but now, all of a sudden some guy decides that it's vitally important to announce to the world, just a few days after submitting the bug report, that HEY EVERYONE, THERE IS AN EXPLOIT, AND HERE IS HOW YOU USE IT.
Had he kept his mouth shut, your systems would be safer.
It's really pretty simple: Adobe doesn't want to make the investment necessary to make the Flash player efficient, stable, secure, and bloat-free. On the other hand, they want to keep making money selling the Flash development tools.
Excuse me, but.... huh?
I'm going to assume you haven't actually researched this (i.e. "I went to the source and got the full story for myself" research and not just "I read a Slashdot comment once and got angry" research) and are just running at the mouth because you're angry, not because you're right.
Which you aren't.
Here, let me introduce you to a guy. His name is Tinic Uro, and he's one of the people who actually programs Flash. He's an engineer like us, not a marketing droid (or worse, an executive).
Here are three blog entries you should fully familiarise yourself with before making any further comment on what Adobe is doing in terms of improving Flash on OS X.
Flash 10.1 and Core Animation: http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=81 (TL;DR: yes, Flash 10.1 uses Core Animation to accelerate overall Flash graphics performance -- not video specifically -- but you need OS X Snow Leopard and a super-new version of Safari)
Flash 10.1 and timing: http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=82 i>(TL;DR: They rebuilt the timer model in Flash 10.1 to use significantly less memory, however Safari on OS X is less flexible than other browsers when it comes to firing timer events, thus making video playback less smooth)
H.264 hardware acceleration in OS X: http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=89 (TL;DR: Adobe has released a post-10.1 beta version of Flash that supports full and proper video H.264 acceleration on Mac OS X, with the caveat that you have to have 10.6.3 and certain current graphics chips)
The real story is this:
Apple has been well behind Microsoft Windows when it comes to providing third parties with APIs to do hardware acceleration, and to do high-performing timer operations that are necessary to run browser plugins smoothly. I know the Slashdotterie will get all worked up over that assertion, but speaking as someone who's actually written browser plugin code, you'll just have to trust me on this. IE has always had the best timer support, which is one reason why video- or timeline-heavy plugins have always performed better than other platforms. As of OS X 10.6.3 and Safari 5, Apple has pretty much caught up.
- Despite the headline-grabbing statements from Steve Jobs and other executive-types, there are actual hard-working developers at Apple and Adobe who actually collaborated to define a good API for high-performance video access for browser plugins. If Apple wasn't so deliriously secretive, you'd hear a lot more about it. Trouble is.... the only people who are allowed to blog at Apple are people who'll make the company look good and forward-thinking -- like the Webkit team.
The problem with performance isn't 100% Adobe's fault. It can't be. Adobe's engineers aren't stupid -- if there had been an easy solution to good plugin video performance on the Mac all this time, they would've fixed it years ago. Why spend several years intentionally using a bad approach?
Lastly.... despite what the article summary says here on Slashdot, overall Flash performance is quite a bit better in 10.1, especially on OS X. Do your own benchmarking; you'll see for yourself. It's still not as good as it should be, but it's a massive step forward. They know HTML5 is coming... they know they have to make Flash as good as or better than HTML5 or they'll be toast by 2020. They know all this.
This isn't correct. MS Bob was released in 1995; Bill and Melinda met in 1987. She'd just joined Microsoft and was a programmer -- and by all accounts, a pretty good one at that. Plus, she's pretty hot, and she was 23 that year. Wouldn't you scoop up a girl like that, especially back then when women were still really rare in the field?
Microsoft has also released application libraries on top of UMS to make it easier to use in certain languages. C++, for example, has the Concurrency Runtime. More on that here:
GDC and UMS both let an application developer accomplish pretty much the same thing: move all into a single process with enough pre-assigned threads to cover all the cores on a system, and then work is queued up and performed on those threads. The benefit of here is that GCD and UMS applications don't have to context-switch into and out of the kernel a bazillion times in order to do a set of parallelizable tasks.
GDR and UMS+CCR both whittle down the developer's code-writing commitment to a few lines. It's pretty amazing stuff.
BUT....
Neither of these technologies really addresses the underlying system-wide problem: adding more CPU cores to a system doesn't increase performance on a linear scale like increasing the speed of the CPU. Every time you add a core, more and more time gets spent doing resource management instead of actual work. OS kernels invariably have locks on important resources (memory tables, for example), and while these things don't matter at all on a 2 or 4 core system, they're going to be a huge bottleneck on a 200-core system. No general-purpose operating system on the market today... not Windows, not OS X, not even Linux... can provide a liner or near-linear performance improvement as the number of cores increase beyond 16 or so. Not as long as there is any kind of shared resource between those cores.
By the way.... Dave Probert, who is the Microsoft engineer the Slashdot article is discussing, explained UMS in this Channel 9 video over a year ago:
Version numbering is affecting the statistics here, MS doesn't use the same philosophy as Firefox when it comes to versioning. MS never had internet explorer 6.5...but it had internet explorer sp1 and sp2...which are as different from each other as firefox 3 and firefox 3.5. Yet internet explorer 6.0 is displayed as one browser.
Uhhhh, no....
Firefox 3.5 has significantly updated rendering and Javascript engines. HTML5 tags are supported, native Theora and Vorbis decoding is included, ICC profiles, SVG transformations, CSS media support, etc.etc. It's worthy of the version number bump.
Meanwhile, IE 6 SP1 and SP2 were primarily security improvements and UI changes... there are no rendering engine changes.
You can think of IE6 service packs as being similar to Firefox 3.0.x and 3.5.x point releases, where they'll do various bits of work to make the browser more stable and more secure, but not really fundamentally mess with how it interprets pages.
NetApplications tracks browser versions so we can see what rendering engines are available to us as developers. That's why they count FF 3.0 and 3.5 separately, and they why count all releases of IE6 as the same.
From a security point of view, I'm probably going to blackhole all IPv6 into a honeypot now. Think about what this technology does. It allows unsolicited connectivity into your network without audit
Oh come on. You're a professional (right?), you should know better than to say this kind of crap. You know what your problem is? You think NAT is a security mechanism -- it's not. Just because we have spent the last ten-plus years having the Firewall also perform network address translation, doesn't mean the two roles have anything to do with eachother -- they don't. NAT is a workaround for the problem of limited IP address spaces; it says so right in the freakin' abstract of the original NAT RFC (1631), which was published in 1994! Don't assign it responsibilities it wasn't designed to have!
IPv6 can (and should) be firewalled just as IPv4 can (and should). It's always a good idea to have a device between your Internet connection(s) and your in-house systems that makes decisions about whether or not packets going to & from certain IP addresses+ports should be allowed through. But, seriously, who cares if the source or destination address is IPv4 or IPv6?
For some unfathomable reason, MS rates remote code execution as a LOW impact problem for XP.
But that's not what they're doing! There is no remote code execution vulnerability on Windows 2000, XP, or Server 2003. Only Vista and Server 2008 are susceptible to remote code execution. This is a Denial of Service vulnerability on NT 5.x systems, and you have to have the firewall disabled (and, indeed, no stateful hardware firewall at all) in order to be vulnerable.
In short, he says that: - Windows Explorer, Command Prompt, Task Manager, Control Panel applets, other Windows system tools don't count - Many applications that run as system services and present themselves through the notification area (aka system tray) don't count (anti-virus, firewall, little utilities, etc)... - The version he tested doesn't exempt installers, but Microsoft said that they should be - Internet Explorer is NOT exempt, but there is no limit on the number of tabs you can open - If you don't like the three-app limit, there is a built-in way in Windows to upgrade to a higher edition that doesn't have the limitation. You don't have to reinstall Windows or lose your data or anything; it's just an online purchase and a change of product key, and the upgraded features are unlocked with a reboot
So it's not like you're screwed if your computer came with Starter and you need more. But if you don't need more, hey, you just saved some money....
shims just sound like a lame hack. using a shim means you've given up on elegance and respectability
Shims allow Microsoft to fix bugs in Windows without affecting applications. Changing how any API call works, even to fix something that is clearly wrong, can cause major problems, because there could very well be applications out there that rely on the broken behaviour.
I'll give you a practical example. In Windows 7, they fixed the CreateFileEx() API call, which is used to create and open files. Pretty much every application out there uses this API, so changing how it works would be about as dangerous as changing how a core CLI utility on Unix like "sed" or "grep" works and then rolling out the change to production systems around the world.
The bug in Vista (but has existed in Windows for quite some time) is that if you were you request exclusive read access on a file that you do not have full access to, Windows would silently change your lock on that file to "shared read" access. Which is, of course, not what you asked for. There are plenty of other cases in CreateFileEx() where the API call will fail if you ask it to do something your user account doesn't have permission to do. They fixed this in Windows 7, but this is obviously a case where fixing a bug in Windows will cause many applications to crash or not function properly.
In order to provide this bug fix, and therefore make Windows better, they've added in a new (optional) application compatibility manifest that new applications can use that says, "hey, I want the Windows 7 behaviour!", and this CreateFileEx() fix -- as well as a number of other bug fixes -- will be in place for your application. Microsoft is saying that they will also maintain that defined compatibility level through future versions of Windows, too, i.e. on Windows 8, you'll get the Windows 7 API behaviour.
Sure beats having to keep up with KDE's world-breaking changes every few years, don't you think?
There really is no other good way of going about this. An "elegant and respectable" solution would probably involve every software company, ever, fixing every bug in their software, ever, that prevents their application from being compatible with Windows 7. What do you suppose the chances of that happening are? You might as well be a seven-year-old girl asking for a live unicorn for your birthday... you just might have better luck! A lot of software that needs to run on Windows is in-house jobbies written years ago by people who'd just learned the difference between "If" and "While" BASIC statements. It would likely cost a lot of money to scour the whole code-base and fix it... and that's if they even still have the code and can find someone to do the work! (What if the contractor ran off with it and is holding it for random? I've got a friend who's dealing with that very issue right now!!)
Microsoft's solution to this problem is to give IT people the ability to analyze the software they have to run and to apply shims to make it work. Microsoft will even help companies with this, often for no cost at all.
Elegance is nice, but it can be prohibitively expensive. Shims are for the real world.
First of all, the obvious: Microsoft started working on Windows 7 late in 2006, even before Vista was released. Netbooks became popular in 2008. 2007 worldwide sales of Netbook-type machines were less than half a million.
Any self-respecting computer programmer knows what's really going on. When you spend months or years working on a major new release, you're often struggling to get the new stuff working at all. Your managers are pushing you to get the thing out the door; deadlines are looming; adding more people to the team would probably be counterproductive since they'd only slow down the people who need to be 100% focused on finishing things up.
Once you get that x.0 release out the door, you take a vacation, reintroduce yourself to your wife and kids, putter around at work for a while, and then dive back in and make your code faster, cleaner, more reliable, more useful. The x.1 release that follows ends up being the one everyone likes; people say "It's what x.0 should have been!"... Right? That's what happens!
And that's exactly what's happening with Windows 7. This isn't a major "reinvent the wheel" release... it's all about optimization, performance, better user interfaces, and tacking on some new things that have become popular since Vista was released, like proper support for SSD drives, multi-touch, multi-core GPUs, and so on...
It probably hasn't even occurred to them that the programmers ran their random name generator out a long way in advance, registered the domain in the name of some perfectly innocent third party long ago and that they're too late because launch day for downadup is tomorrow since they always kick these things off of the eve of a holiday weekend.
Microsoft has published a complete list (in CSV form) of all the domain names that Conficker will try to contact through June 30, 2009. That's 249 of them a day, for a total of 113,500 domain names.
If you admin Windows desktops, I wouldn't invest too much in your plans for this weekend.
Why? The patch for this vulnerability was released four months ago, and the latest round of Windows Updates (a couple of days ago) include a scan & remove of Conficker.A and Conficker.B. As for the Autorun variant of this attack, Microsoft has published a KB article covering various ways to prevent it. Of course, if you don't have anyone working in your offices over the weekend, nobody's likely to come in and plug in infected USB devices.
Sure, but that precise behaviour happens all over the world in practically every industry. You set a price based on what a local market will bear, not based on a single world-wide price. There's just too much variance in incomes and the cost of doing business, to do it any other way.
Case in point, the United Kingdom -- Brits always complain that everything is more expensive than in the United States, but what they don't appreciate is that they also generally make more money and have lower expenses than a typical American that does the same work.
This has nothing to do with technical restrictions. The problem is that Microsoft needs to be able to sell Windows at a price point that is suitable for nations with lots of poor people.
Take Thailand for instance -- it was actually that country's government that approached Microsoft back in 2003 and said, "please help us get computers to our poor people", and XP Starter Edition was created as a result. A lot of people in Thailand can't even begin to dream of the kind of power we take for granted with a modern Macbook, Latitude or Thinkpad. If they're lucky, they'll be able to get their hands on something of a 2000 or 2001 vintage. These aren't power-users with multi-megabit broadband and iPhones... these are people who want to do utterly basic things with a computer.
What would happen if Microsoft were to start selling Vista Starter Edition for 1,000 baht**? That's about $30 USD right now, which goes a long way in upcountry Thailand (you can eat very well there for 50 baht a day). People may be willing to pay that, but they wouldn't be willing to pay 3,000 baht** for Vista Home Basic, especially if they don't actually have a computer that can take advantage of all the extra features and ability to run more apps.
So, then, you wonder why they don't just offer Vista Home Premium in Thailand for 1,000 baht, so that it more closely reflects the price point vs. average income that you'd see it at in Western countries? The problem, of course, is that you'd end up getting a whole pile of shady operators who'd buy up legit copies of an uncrippled Vista Starter in Thailand, apply the English user interface pack to it, then sell them in the United States for a fraction of what Microsoft is asking for Vista Home Basic, and they'd make a big profit, and Microsoft would lose the sale.
That's why Microsoft makes Starter Edition both very cheap by Western standards, but generally unpalatable for that market, which (as we see here on Slashdot) balks at these kinds of restrictions.
Finally, I suspect this whole thing about using Windows 7 Starter Edition on Netbooks in first-world countries is bupkiss. By the time Windows 7 comes out towards the end of the year, Netbooks will have evolved enough in power and storage that they should be able to run Windows 7 Home Premium without any difficulty.
I had to call out one particular mod on his discussion page and on the Jonathan Ive page, because he considered my changing of the iMac's introduction from 1997 to 1998 "vandalism" (a change I had to make FIVE times), and it was FINALLY changed.
Where does it say that the changing of information was on the Johnathan Ive article? It says that the "mod" was called out on his discussion page and on the Jonathan Ive page. The call out was apparently there, not the original changing of dates. Unless I'm reading it horribly wrong, that's what the sentence says.
He used the phrase "Jonathan Ive page", of which there are two: the article itself, which contains absolutely no evidence of a dispute over the date of the iMac's introduction... and the article's talk page, which contains absolutely no evidence of a dispute over the date of the iMac's introduction. So why mention Ive at all? I've worked extensively on Wikipedia in the last three years, and have never, ever been witness to such a discussion being completely removed from the encyclopedia. Only 29 users have this capability (as of now; far fewer have had it in the past), several of whom are actually paid employees of Wikimedia, and none of them participate in the development of Apple-related articles. I can assure you that as an experienced "outsider" on Wikipedia (ie. I've no interest in being part of the "in crowd" there), the folks with the ability to remove arbitrary edits from article histories aren't going to be bothered with something as utterly trivial as what is being claimed here.
Now, for your interest, let's dig a little more. This "AtariKee" person did kick up a bit of a stink in August 2005 over an old-school Atari game called "Battlefield", where he did indeed have his edits reverted, once, as "apparent vandalism", but AtariKee did make a rather unusual and surprising claim in his edits that would require a source, then proceeded to argue about it, then apologised afterwards. The person he described as a "mod" was just another editor, named 2mcm, who has never been an administrator on Wikipedia. AtariKee has made no other edits using his named account on Wikipedia. (All this is a matter of public record, of course...)
I'm mentioning this because I've noticed in various forums (especially Slashdot) a pattern of gross exaggeration and misrepresentation of what actually happens at Wikipedia. This is happening everywhere, of course -- people say that Linux isn't "ready for the desktop", when we all plainly know that it is. People say that Barack Obama is a Muslim, when we all plainly know that he isn't. People say that Wikipedia's "mods" control all the content, when you can go look for yourself and plainly see that it isn't. People aren't interested in the simple, boring truth. I like to call it the John C. Dvorak Syndrome -- talk a load of shit loudly and authoritatively enough, and people will believe you know what you're talking about, even if it's plainly obvious to the clued-in that you don't.
I had to call out one particular mod on his discussion page and on the Jonathan Ive page, because he considered my changing of the iMac's introduction from 1997 to 1998 "vandalism" (a change I had to make FIVE times), and it was FINALLY changed.
You know... you/say/ that here in a Slashdot comment, and have been rewarded a (5, Insightful) for it, but there's a bit of a fact shortage. The complete history of changes to the Jonathan Ive article, as well as the article's talk page (and its history) are publicly viewable to the world, and the events you described did not occur. At no time has the Jonathan Ive article claimed that the iMac was introduced in 1997 -- the fact that it was introduced in 1998 was added to the article in June 2005 and has remained there, uncontested, ever since. I'm not just some random person telling you this, either -- I've been monitoring the article on my watch list for two and a half years, and I would have noticed (and put a stop to) any sort of edit war over this.
So, AtariKee, my question to you is this: Are you intentionally lying for the sake of discrediting something you don't like, or are you merely confused about what you were doing on Wikipedia?
Also, there are no "mods" on Wikipedia. There are Administrators, but they don't moderate content except in very unusual circumstances -- that's everybody's collective responsibility.
For some interesting historical context, read the Wikipedia article on Jacobson v. United States. This goes back to the 1980s when the USPS tried to lure people into purchasing child porn through mailings, in some cases many times over the course of years.
[i](silly thought - did you consider recruiting someone without the skills, then training them?)[/i]
Bad idea.... BAD IDEA.
Our company did this last year. We needed someone who could step into a web application role; the technologies were ASP.NET 2.0, MS-SQL 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. We hired someone (as a favour, not based on best-person-for-the-job merits) that had web application development experience using Java, Oracle and who-knows-what as an editor.
The company spent [b]almost $50,000 worth of salary[/b] while this guy went from complete fucking ineptness, to near-complete ineptness, to argumentative ineptness, to mere inetpness, to... oh, hey, you know how to edit an ASPX file now, good for you!! This was NINE MONTHS after he was hired.
Fifteen months in, he's still learning, and treating our software product like a research project, as opposed to something we need to ship updates to every few months. It's brutal.
I appreciate that developers need to be able to continually learn on the job, but [b]hiring someone with no skill will cost you money and give you no benefit[/b]. Don't do it. There are plenty of places out there where you can go to take lessons and write exams to help you become skilled at something, before you go get a job. That comes first. If you don't have money, chances are fairly good that your government will help you pay for it.....
Joel Spolsky has written what I consider to be the definitive guide for hiring good developers: The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing. Any software developer who is thinking about switching jobs, and anyone who finds themselves in a position of having to interview developers, should read it.
When installing Windows, I make a partition specifically for the swap file and temp files. That way they don't add to the fragmentation mess of the OS partition. Whoah now, hang on a minute there. You're seriously misinformed.
First of all, it's called the page file, not the swap file. This isn't Unix and this isn't Windows 3.x. If you're going to pretend to know something about this aspect of Windows, you'd do well to at least use the correct name.
Second, and far more importantly -- You do not get fragmentation in the page file unless the page file is resized, and the only time the page file gets resized is when you consume ALL your physical memory, and ALL the memory in the page file. On a system with 1 GB of memory (which will be given a 1.5GB page file), you will have 2.5 GB of memory that you have to fill up first. Windows XP & later will display a pop-up balloon when this happen.
Fragmentation NEVER HAPPENS OTHERWISE. Why is this such a major concern to you?
Third, separate logical partitions for the page file is a bad idea because it significantly lowers the performance of paging operations. Regardless of whether you use all the physical memory in your machine or not, the page file is utilised to store data that hasn't been used recently, thus freeing more physicla memory for cacheing stuff that is used more often. Performance suffers because now the disk heads have to move further into the disk in order to get the page file. On a freshly-installed Windows system, the page file gets placed near the beginning of the disk (in the fastest portion), close to the operating system files that are likely candidates for ongoing file operations.
Consider that Mac OS X doesn't use a separate partition for its swap files, either.
Speaking of which, why does Windows still use a variable sized swap file? I lock it down to 2x RAM or 4GB. Fourth, this is a bad idea because you are almost certainly not going to want to use a system that is so heavily loaded that you will need to use up to 300% of your total system memory. It's bad enough when you're running 20% over physical, isn't it? Now you're just wasting vast amounts of hard drive space for no particularly good reason.
And how about moving IE's temp files somewhere else? Okay, you can still set permissions on the folder, but get it out of the user's profile. Why? Is there a sound technical reason for this? The IE temporary files (and indeed the user's general-purpose temp directory) is in a disposable area of the profile directory structure... it isn't part of the "roaming" profile.
I spend 15 extra minutes just getting the directories and swap arranged correctly every time I set up someone's Windows machine. You're wasting their time and yours doing the wrong thing. Stop that and you'll be happier.
If you want to really understand how Windows works, do yourself a big favour and go pick up a copy of Windows Internals by Russinovich and Solomon. Yeah, that's the same Russinovich who discovered the Sony rootkit a couple of years ago, so, chances are he knows what he's talking about.
You get over it. That's what you do. If you're too chickenshit to even open up a chequing or credit account that you wouldn't even use save for the occasional transaction that must be done using a verifiable electronic method, you are not going to make it very far in this world. You won't ever be able to get a place you can call your own; you will have difficulties getting some kinds of jobs if you don't have a demonstrable credit history; you won't be able to get a variety of services. Sure, you can go to the local Western Union and constantly have to make money orders for everything, but then you'd constantly have to carry hundreds if not thousands of dollars around with you (how safe is that?) and you have to pay out of your own pocket every time. Plus, to most people, you won't look like you've got your shit together if you're constantly paying for everything with money orders. People that you want most to trust you, won't.
And how the heck do you plan on saving money? Put it in a shoebox under your bed? What if your place burns down in a fire, or what if someone breaks in and steals it? Insurance companies won't replace lost or stolen cash. If your credit card or bank card gets stolen and used for fraud, you almost certainly will get your money back -- that's the beauty of little electronic footprints and camera footage.
Actually, no, it's not a nightmare -- it's a good thing for developers. The problem is that Microsoft has a naming issue... (you don't say!)
In Microsoft parlance, a "Program Manager" isn't a person who works in the "management" sense of the business or people. They have other people for that. Program Managers are responsible for writing technical specifications, co-ordinating development activities (e.g. who works on what piece), and making sure the developers are clear of distractions to get their job done. They're the ones that have to deal with finding out what the business requirements are and translating that into development activity.
Let's take a step back from the Microsoft thing for a bit, and think about how you would approach building a team of, say, eight people to develop a piece of software. Would you want eight developers and nothing else? Of course not... you'd want at least one person in there who will run interference between the developers and the people who want the job done, be it the people bankrolling the development, or the customers you're writing the software for. Right? You'd probably want another person focused on writing test cases and documentation, the code that the developers are pushing out is of high quality. You'd probably want one person who takes responsibility for architecture, including researching into options that are available for libraries, database backends, and that sort of thing. They could then distill and filter things down so that the people writing the code don't have to do all that research and architecture work themselves. They could write code, but maybe it'd only be prototypes. Maybe you have one person whose sole responsibility is getting graphical assets and localization together so you can produce the product in ten languages. One person might be tasked full-time to user interface development (e.g. the person who writes all the HTML and CSS).
See how this works yet?
Our team of eight people is already down to three developers. But the cool part is that those three developers will be able to do what they are best at: writing code. They won't be constantly distracted from this to deal with boring ancilliary issues like whether the Spanish translation is accurate, or whether the business requirements are being met.
I'm calling bullshit on your post. Let's dig in.
As a Word user since 1986, who knows the program pretty well , I must agree that the ribbon is a jumbled mess with important stuff deeply hidden. It was a big disappointment. It took me quite a while to find even the undo command. The Undo command is directly beside the Save command, on the tool bar. It's always visible. The icons look exactly the same as in Word 2003. The only difference is that, unlike Word 2003 where by default it was buried in a mess of unrelated icons and commands (between paste and insert hyperlink, below the Window menu, above the Bold/Italic/Underline icons), it's given more prominence.
Oh, and if you've been using Word since 1986, you should know by now that Undo is Ctrl-Z, just like it is in every other Windows, Linux, and Mac application (s/Ctrl/Command/). You shouldn't ever have to use a mouse to undo or redo something.
Next!
Inserting a footnote now requires a whole series of mouse clicks as far as I can tell. Press Alt+S, F, and start typing your footnote. It's two mouse extremely obvious clicks (References, Insert Footnote) if you really need to go to your mouse to do it.
Next!
Go try something relatively obscure like turning on line numbering in a document and changing the style of the line numbers. It's a lot easier to do line numbering in 2007 than it is in 2003. In 2003, you had to go digging into the File menu -> Page Setup -> Layout tab -> click Line Numbers -> and click the Add Line Numbering checkbox. In Word 2007, you click the Page Layout tab, click Line Numbers, and choose from the drop-down list that appears how you want the line numbers to work. Easy peasy.
As for changing the style of line numbers, it's basically the same in Word 2003 and 2007: Set it up using the style palette. In both versions, by default, the "Line Number" style won't be shown in the palette until you are using line numbers. If you're planning on changing styles, you really ought to know how to use the style palette.
Next!
Damned, though, if I can see any really new major features that make it worthwhile. Here's a partial list:
One of the less obvious new features that's actually a really huge improvement, is the "Building Blocks" system. You can create and re-use "things"; for example, you can create a specific format, layout, and text content for a presentation of your company's mission statement, or maybe it's just a set of paragraphs you use over and over between a lot of documents. You can get a sense of how this works by going to the Insert menu and playing around with the Text Box and Quick Parts features.
I write user interface design documents as part of my professional work, and this one feature alone has saved me hours of time, and my documents look better to boot. Word 2007 has already paid for itself several times over.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a wonderful little piece of trivia about Solar Realms Elite:
The author of SRE, Amit Patel, went on to work at Google, and is one of two people credited with devising their "Don't Be Evil" motto.
So happy all my stuff is in MP3 format, not Apple's proprietary format.
Huh? What proprietary format are you talking about? iTunes' standard audio format is MPEG-4 Part 14, aka ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003. It's supported out-of-the-box by Windows 7 (including streaming) and surely by other operating systems as well.
The only practical difference between Apple's implementation and the ISO standard is that Apple prefers the extension .m4a, whereas the standard states that .mp4 is the only valid extension. All this specifity in file extensions really does is help operating systems sort out whether a given file is an audio-only or multimedia file without having to read the contents. The file contents itself is the same.
"I'm Mayor of the 1st St. Chipotle" vs "I just got a +5 Insightful on this post!" Simple meaningless reward that means something to the user.
Ah, but there's a difference here .... A Foursquare Reward is merely a consequence of pressing a button on your phone when you are in the same place often. Anybody can do this. A Slashdot +5 Insightful is (usually) a sign that you've used your brain to assemble and share a coherent thought, and that others found it interesting enough that they want others to see it, too.
And what would you rather be known for -- Having interesting ideas that get read by thousands of smart people, or being the guy that eats at Taco Bell five times a week? What is more "meaningful"?
I have no sympathy for Microsoft, nor for any other vendor who puts my systems at risk
So then place the blame squarely on the "responsible" Google engineer for putting your systems at risk! This bug has existed in Windows XP for NINE YEARS and presumably was never exploited in all that time, but now, all of a sudden some guy decides that it's vitally important to announce to the world, just a few days after submitting the bug report, that HEY EVERYONE, THERE IS AN EXPLOIT, AND HERE IS HOW YOU USE IT.
Had he kept his mouth shut, your systems would be safer.
It's really pretty simple: Adobe doesn't want to make the investment necessary to make the Flash player efficient, stable, secure, and bloat-free. On the other hand, they want to keep making money selling the Flash development tools.
Excuse me, but.... huh?
I'm going to assume you haven't actually researched this (i.e. "I went to the source and got the full story for myself" research and not just "I read a Slashdot comment once and got angry" research) and are just running at the mouth because you're angry, not because you're right.
Which you aren't.
Here, let me introduce you to a guy. His name is Tinic Uro, and he's one of the people who actually programs Flash. He's an engineer like us, not a marketing droid (or worse, an executive).
Here are three blog entries you should fully familiarise yourself with before making any further comment on what Adobe is doing in terms of improving Flash on OS X.
Flash 10.1 and Core Animation:
http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=81
(TL;DR: yes, Flash 10.1 uses Core Animation to accelerate overall Flash graphics performance -- not video specifically -- but you need OS X Snow Leopard and a super-new version of Safari)
Flash 10.1 and timing:
http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=82
i>(TL;DR: They rebuilt the timer model in Flash 10.1 to use significantly less memory, however Safari on OS X is less flexible than other browsers when it comes to firing timer events, thus making video playback less smooth)
H.264 hardware acceleration in OS X:
http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=89
(TL;DR: Adobe has released a post-10.1 beta version of Flash that supports full and proper video H.264 acceleration on Mac OS X, with the caveat that you have to have 10.6.3 and certain current graphics chips)
The real story is this:
Apple has been well behind Microsoft Windows when it comes to providing third parties with APIs to do hardware acceleration, and to do high-performing timer operations that are necessary to run browser plugins smoothly. I know the Slashdotterie will get all worked up over that assertion, but speaking as someone who's actually written browser plugin code, you'll just have to trust me on this. IE has always had the best timer support, which is one reason why video- or timeline-heavy plugins have always performed better than other platforms. As of OS X 10.6.3 and Safari 5, Apple has pretty much caught up.
- Despite the headline-grabbing statements from Steve Jobs and other executive-types, there are actual hard-working developers at Apple and Adobe who actually collaborated to define a good API for high-performance video access for browser plugins. If Apple wasn't so deliriously secretive, you'd hear a lot more about it. Trouble is.... the only people who are allowed to blog at Apple are people who'll make the company look good and forward-thinking -- like the Webkit team.
The problem with performance isn't 100% Adobe's fault. It can't be. Adobe's engineers aren't stupid -- if there had been an easy solution to good plugin video performance on the Mac all this time, they would've fixed it years ago. Why spend several years intentionally using a bad approach?
Lastly.... despite what the article summary says here on Slashdot, overall Flash performance is quite a bit better in 10.1, especially on OS X. Do your own benchmarking; you'll see for yourself. It's still not as good as it should be, but it's a massive step forward. They know HTML5 is coming... they know they have to make Flash as good as or better than HTML5 or they'll be toast by 2020. They know all this.
Unless you want to compile native 64-bit binaries. In that case, Visual Studio Express Edition won't be sufficient.
Download the free Windows SDK 7.1, and you can compile 64-bit native Windows binaries all day.
How did she meet Bill?
She was Unit Manager for Microsoft Bob...
This isn't correct. MS Bob was released in 1995; Bill and Melinda met in 1987. She'd just joined Microsoft and was a programmer -- and by all accounts, a pretty good one at that. Plus, she's pretty hot, and she was 23 that year. Wouldn't you scoop up a girl like that, especially back then when women were still really rare in the field?
The Microsoft Windows equivalent of Grand Central Dispatch is called User-Mode Scheduling, and is included with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd627187(VS.85).aspx
Microsoft has also released application libraries on top of UMS to make it easier to use in certain languages. C++, for example, has the Concurrency Runtime. More on that here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd504870(VS.100).aspx
GDC and UMS both let an application developer accomplish pretty much the same thing: move all into a single process with enough pre-assigned threads to cover all the cores on a system, and then work is queued up and performed on those threads. The benefit of here is that GCD and UMS applications don't have to context-switch into and out of the kernel a bazillion times in order to do a set of parallelizable tasks.
GDR and UMS+CCR both whittle down the developer's code-writing commitment to a few lines. It's pretty amazing stuff.
BUT....
Neither of these technologies really addresses the underlying system-wide problem: adding more CPU cores to a system doesn't increase performance on a linear scale like increasing the speed of the CPU. Every time you add a core, more and more time gets spent doing resource management instead of actual work. OS kernels invariably have locks on important resources (memory tables, for example), and while these things don't matter at all on a 2 or 4 core system, they're going to be a huge bottleneck on a 200-core system. No general-purpose operating system on the market today... not Windows, not OS X, not even Linux... can provide a liner or near-linear performance improvement as the number of cores increase beyond 16 or so. Not as long as there is any kind of shared resource between those cores.
By the way.... Dave Probert, who is the Microsoft engineer the Slashdot article is discussing, explained UMS in this Channel 9 video over a year ago:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Dave-Probert-Inside-Windows-7-User-Mode-Scheduler-UMS/
Version numbering is affecting the statistics here, MS doesn't use the same philosophy as Firefox when it comes to versioning.
MS never had internet explorer 6.5...but it had internet explorer sp1 and sp2...which are as different from each other as firefox 3 and firefox 3.5. Yet internet explorer 6.0 is displayed as one browser.
Uhhhh, no....
Firefox 3.5 has significantly updated rendering and Javascript engines. HTML5 tags are supported, native Theora and Vorbis decoding is included, ICC profiles, SVG transformations, CSS media support, etc.etc. It's worthy of the version number bump.
Meanwhile, IE 6 SP1 and SP2 were primarily security improvements and UI changes... there are no rendering engine changes.
You can think of IE6 service packs as being similar to Firefox 3.0.x and 3.5.x point releases, where they'll do various bits of work to make the browser more stable and more secure, but not really fundamentally mess with how it interprets pages.
NetApplications tracks browser versions so we can see what rendering engines are available to us as developers. That's why they count FF 3.0 and 3.5 separately, and they why count all releases of IE6 as the same.
From a security point of view, I'm probably going to blackhole all IPv6 into a honeypot now. Think about what this technology does. It allows unsolicited connectivity into your network without audit
Oh come on. You're a professional (right?), you should know better than to say this kind of crap. You know what your problem is? You think NAT is a security mechanism -- it's not. Just because we have spent the last ten-plus years having the Firewall also perform network address translation, doesn't mean the two roles have anything to do with eachother -- they don't. NAT is a workaround for the problem of limited IP address spaces; it says so right in the freakin' abstract of the original NAT RFC (1631), which was published in 1994! Don't assign it responsibilities it wasn't designed to have!
IPv6 can (and should) be firewalled just as IPv4 can (and should). It's always a good idea to have a device between your Internet connection(s) and your in-house systems that makes decisions about whether or not packets going to & from certain IP addresses+ports should be allowed through. But, seriously, who cares if the source or destination address is IPv4 or IPv6?
For some unfathomable reason, MS rates remote code execution as a LOW impact problem for XP.
But that's not what they're doing! There is no remote code execution vulnerability on Windows 2000, XP, or Server 2003. Only Vista and Server 2008 are susceptible to remote code execution. This is a Denial of Service vulnerability on NT 5.x systems, and you have to have the firewall disabled (and, indeed, no stateful hardware firewall at all) in order to be vulnerable.
The details are here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms09-048.mspx
It's fine to criticise Microsoft for not releasing a patch for XP, but let's at least get the facts about the vulnerability straight, first, yeah?
Ed Bott did a bunch of research on what the Windows 7 three application limit really means:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=844
In short, he says that: ...
- Windows Explorer, Command Prompt, Task Manager, Control Panel applets, other Windows system tools don't count
- Many applications that run as system services and present themselves through the notification area (aka system tray) don't count (anti-virus, firewall, little utilities, etc)
- The version he tested doesn't exempt installers, but Microsoft said that they should be
- Internet Explorer is NOT exempt, but there is no limit on the number of tabs you can open
- If you don't like the three-app limit, there is a built-in way in Windows to upgrade to a higher edition that doesn't have the limitation. You don't have to reinstall Windows or lose your data or anything; it's just an online purchase and a change of product key, and the upgraded features are unlocked with a reboot
So it's not like you're screwed if your computer came with Starter and you need more. But if you don't need more, hey, you just saved some money....
shims just sound like a lame hack. using a shim means you've given up on elegance and respectability
Shims allow Microsoft to fix bugs in Windows without affecting applications. Changing how any API call works, even to fix something that is clearly wrong, can cause major problems, because there could very well be applications out there that rely on the broken behaviour.
I'll give you a practical example. In Windows 7, they fixed the CreateFileEx() API call, which is used to create and open files. Pretty much every application out there uses this API, so changing how it works would be about as dangerous as changing how a core CLI utility on Unix like "sed" or "grep" works and then rolling out the change to production systems around the world.
The bug in Vista (but has existed in Windows for quite some time) is that if you were you request exclusive read access on a file that you do not have full access to, Windows would silently change your lock on that file to "shared read" access. Which is, of course, not what you asked for. There are plenty of other cases in CreateFileEx() where the API call will fail if you ask it to do something your user account doesn't have permission to do. They fixed this in Windows 7, but this is obviously a case where fixing a bug in Windows will cause many applications to crash or not function properly.
In order to provide this bug fix, and therefore make Windows better, they've added in a new (optional) application compatibility manifest that new applications can use that says, "hey, I want the Windows 7 behaviour!", and this CreateFileEx() fix -- as well as a number of other bug fixes -- will be in place for your application. Microsoft is saying that they will also maintain that defined compatibility level through future versions of Windows, too, i.e. on Windows 8, you'll get the Windows 7 API behaviour.
Sure beats having to keep up with KDE's world-breaking changes every few years, don't you think?
There really is no other good way of going about this. An "elegant and respectable" solution would probably involve every software company, ever, fixing every bug in their software, ever, that prevents their application from being compatible with Windows 7. What do you suppose the chances of that happening are? You might as well be a seven-year-old girl asking for a live unicorn for your birthday... you just might have better luck! A lot of software that needs to run on Windows is in-house jobbies written years ago by people who'd just learned the difference between "If" and "While" BASIC statements. It would likely cost a lot of money to scour the whole code-base and fix it... and that's if they even still have the code and can find someone to do the work! (What if the contractor ran off with it and is holding it for random? I've got a friend who's dealing with that very issue right now!!)
Microsoft's solution to this problem is to give IT people the ability to analyze the software they have to run and to apply shims to make it work. Microsoft will even help companies with this, often for no cost at all.
Elegance is nice, but it can be prohibitively expensive. Shims are for the real world.
Short answer -- No.
First of all, the obvious: Microsoft started working on Windows 7 late in 2006, even before Vista was released. Netbooks became popular in 2008. 2007 worldwide sales of Netbook-type machines were less than half a million.
Any self-respecting computer programmer knows what's really going on. When you spend months or years working on a major new release, you're often struggling to get the new stuff working at all. Your managers are pushing you to get the thing out the door; deadlines are looming; adding more people to the team would probably be counterproductive since they'd only slow down the people who need to be 100% focused on finishing things up.
Once you get that x.0 release out the door, you take a vacation, reintroduce yourself to your wife and kids, putter around at work for a while, and then dive back in and make your code faster, cleaner, more reliable, more useful. The x.1 release that follows ends up being the one everyone likes; people say "It's what x.0 should have been!" ... Right? That's what happens!
And that's exactly what's happening with Windows 7. This isn't a major "reinvent the wheel" release... it's all about optimization, performance, better user interfaces, and tacking on some new things that have become popular since Vista was released, like proper support for SSD drives, multi-touch, multi-core GPUs, and so on...
It probably hasn't even occurred to them that the programmers ran their random name generator out a long way in advance, registered the domain in the name of some perfectly innocent third party long ago and that they're too late because launch day for downadup is tomorrow since they always kick these things off of the eve of a holiday weekend.
Microsoft has published a complete list (in CSV form) of all the domain names that Conficker will try to contact through June 30, 2009. That's 249 of them a day, for a total of 113,500 domain names.
http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2009/02/12/conficker-domain-information.aspx
If you admin Windows desktops, I wouldn't invest too much in your plans for this weekend.
Why? The patch for this vulnerability was released four months ago, and the latest round of Windows Updates (a couple of days ago) include a scan & remove of Conficker.A and Conficker.B. As for the Autorun variant of this attack, Microsoft has published a KB article covering various ways to prevent it. Of course, if you don't have anyone working in your offices over the weekend, nobody's likely to come in and plug in infected USB devices.
Sure, but that precise behaviour happens all over the world in practically every industry. You set a price based on what a local market will bear, not based on a single world-wide price. There's just too much variance in incomes and the cost of doing business, to do it any other way.
Case in point, the United Kingdom -- Brits always complain that everything is more expensive than in the United States, but what they don't appreciate is that they also generally make more money and have lower expenses than a typical American that does the same work.
This has nothing to do with technical restrictions. The problem is that Microsoft needs to be able to sell Windows at a price point that is suitable for nations with lots of poor people.
Take Thailand for instance -- it was actually that country's government that approached Microsoft back in 2003 and said, "please help us get computers to our poor people", and XP Starter Edition was created as a result. A lot of people in Thailand can't even begin to dream of the kind of power we take for granted with a modern Macbook, Latitude or Thinkpad. If they're lucky, they'll be able to get their hands on something of a 2000 or 2001 vintage. These aren't power-users with multi-megabit broadband and iPhones... these are people who want to do utterly basic things with a computer.
What would happen if Microsoft were to start selling Vista Starter Edition for 1,000 baht**? That's about $30 USD right now, which goes a long way in upcountry Thailand (you can eat very well there for 50 baht a day). People may be willing to pay that, but they wouldn't be willing to pay 3,000 baht** for Vista Home Basic, especially if they don't actually have a computer that can take advantage of all the extra features and ability to run more apps.
So, then, you wonder why they don't just offer Vista Home Premium in Thailand for 1,000 baht, so that it more closely reflects the price point vs. average income that you'd see it at in Western countries? The problem, of course, is that you'd end up getting a whole pile of shady operators who'd buy up legit copies of an uncrippled Vista Starter in Thailand, apply the English user interface pack to it, then sell them in the United States for a fraction of what Microsoft is asking for Vista Home Basic, and they'd make a big profit, and Microsoft would lose the sale.
That's why Microsoft makes Starter Edition both very cheap by Western standards, but generally unpalatable for that market, which (as we see here on Slashdot) balks at these kinds of restrictions.
Finally, I suspect this whole thing about using Windows 7 Starter Edition on Netbooks in first-world countries is bupkiss. By the time Windows 7 comes out towards the end of the year, Netbooks will have evolved enough in power and storage that they should be able to run Windows 7 Home Premium without any difficulty.
(** these are the actual prices)
Read the sentence again.
I had to call out one particular mod on his discussion page and on the Jonathan Ive page, because he considered my changing of the iMac's introduction from 1997 to 1998 "vandalism" (a change I had to make FIVE times), and it was FINALLY changed.
Where does it say that the changing of information was on the Johnathan Ive article? It says that the "mod" was called out on his discussion page and on the Jonathan Ive page. The call out was apparently there, not the original changing of dates. Unless I'm reading it horribly wrong, that's what the sentence says.
He used the phrase "Jonathan Ive page", of which there are two: the article itself, which contains absolutely no evidence of a dispute over the date of the iMac's introduction... and the article's talk page, which contains absolutely no evidence of a dispute over the date of the iMac's introduction. So why mention Ive at all? I've worked extensively on Wikipedia in the last three years, and have never, ever been witness to such a discussion being completely removed from the encyclopedia. Only 29 users have this capability (as of now; far fewer have had it in the past), several of whom are actually paid employees of Wikimedia, and none of them participate in the development of Apple-related articles. I can assure you that as an experienced "outsider" on Wikipedia (ie. I've no interest in being part of the "in crowd" there), the folks with the ability to remove arbitrary edits from article histories aren't going to be bothered with something as utterly trivial as what is being claimed here.
Now, for your interest, let's dig a little more. This "AtariKee" person did kick up a bit of a stink in August 2005 over an old-school Atari game called "Battlefield", where he did indeed have his edits reverted, once, as "apparent vandalism", but AtariKee did make a rather unusual and surprising claim in his edits that would require a source, then proceeded to argue about it, then apologised afterwards. The person he described as a "mod" was just another editor, named 2mcm, who has never been an administrator on Wikipedia. AtariKee has made no other edits using his named account on Wikipedia. (All this is a matter of public record, of course...)
I'm mentioning this because I've noticed in various forums (especially Slashdot) a pattern of gross exaggeration and misrepresentation of what actually happens at Wikipedia. This is happening everywhere, of course -- people say that Linux isn't "ready for the desktop", when we all plainly know that it is. People say that Barack Obama is a Muslim, when we all plainly know that he isn't. People say that Wikipedia's "mods" control all the content, when you can go look for yourself and plainly see that it isn't. People aren't interested in the simple, boring truth. I like to call it the John C. Dvorak Syndrome -- talk a load of shit loudly and authoritatively enough, and people will believe you know what you're talking about, even if it's plainly obvious to the clued-in that you don't.
I had to call out one particular mod on his discussion page and on the Jonathan Ive page, because he considered my changing of the iMac's introduction from 1997 to 1998 "vandalism" (a change I had to make FIVE times), and it was FINALLY changed.
You know... you /say/ that here in a Slashdot comment, and have been rewarded a (5, Insightful) for it, but there's a bit of a fact shortage. The complete history of changes to the Jonathan Ive article, as well as the article's talk page (and its history) are publicly viewable to the world, and the events you described did not occur. At no time has the Jonathan Ive article claimed that the iMac was introduced in 1997 -- the fact that it was introduced in 1998 was added to the article in June 2005 and has remained there, uncontested, ever since. I'm not just some random person telling you this, either -- I've been monitoring the article on my watch list for two and a half years, and I would have noticed (and put a stop to) any sort of edit war over this.
So, AtariKee, my question to you is this: Are you intentionally lying for the sake of discrediting something you don't like, or are you merely confused about what you were doing on Wikipedia?
Also, there are no "mods" on Wikipedia. There are Administrators, but they don't moderate content except in very unusual circumstances -- that's everybody's collective responsibility.
For some interesting historical context, read the Wikipedia article on Jacobson v. United States. This goes back to the 1980s when the USPS tried to lure people into purchasing child porn through mailings, in some cases many times over the course of years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._United_States
[i](silly thought - did you consider recruiting someone without the skills, then training them?)[/i]
....
Bad idea.... BAD IDEA.
Our company did this last year. We needed someone who could step into a web application role; the technologies were ASP.NET 2.0, MS-SQL 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. We hired someone (as a favour, not based on best-person-for-the-job merits) that had web application development experience using Java, Oracle and who-knows-what as an editor.
The company spent [b]almost $50,000 worth of salary[/b] while this guy went from complete fucking ineptness, to near-complete ineptness, to argumentative ineptness, to mere inetpness, to... oh, hey, you know how to edit an ASPX file now, good for you!! This was NINE MONTHS after he was hired.
Fifteen months in, he's still learning, and treating our software product like a research project, as opposed to something we need to ship updates to every few months. It's brutal.
I appreciate that developers need to be able to continually learn on the job, but [b]hiring someone with no skill will cost you money and give you no benefit[/b]. Don't do it. There are plenty of places out there where you can go to take lessons and write exams to help you become skilled at something, before you go get a job. That comes first. If you don't have money, chances are fairly good that your government will help you pay for it.
Joel Spolsky has written what I consider to be the definitive guide for hiring good developers: The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing. Any software developer who is thinking about switching jobs, and anyone who finds themselves in a position of having to interview developers, should read it.
First of all, it's called the page file, not the swap file. This isn't Unix and this isn't Windows 3.x. If you're going to pretend to know something about this aspect of Windows, you'd do well to at least use the correct name.
Second, and far more importantly -- You do not get fragmentation in the page file unless the page file is resized, and the only time the page file gets resized is when you consume ALL your physical memory, and ALL the memory in the page file. On a system with 1 GB of memory (which will be given a 1.5GB page file), you will have 2.5 GB of memory that you have to fill up first. Windows XP & later will display a pop-up balloon when this happen.
Fragmentation NEVER HAPPENS OTHERWISE. Why is this such a major concern to you?
Third, separate logical partitions for the page file is a bad idea because it significantly lowers the performance of paging operations. Regardless of whether you use all the physical memory in your machine or not, the page file is utilised to store data that hasn't been used recently, thus freeing more physicla memory for cacheing stuff that is used more often. Performance suffers because now the disk heads have to move further into the disk in order to get the page file. On a freshly-installed Windows system, the page file gets placed near the beginning of the disk (in the fastest portion), close to the operating system files that are likely candidates for ongoing file operations.
Consider that Mac OS X doesn't use a separate partition for its swap files, either. Speaking of which, why does Windows still use a variable sized swap file? I lock it down to 2x RAM or 4GB. Fourth, this is a bad idea because you are almost certainly not going to want to use a system that is so heavily loaded that you will need to use up to 300% of your total system memory. It's bad enough when you're running 20% over physical, isn't it? Now you're just wasting vast amounts of hard drive space for no particularly good reason. And how about moving IE's temp files somewhere else? Okay, you can still set permissions on the folder, but get it out of the user's profile. Why? Is there a sound technical reason for this? The IE temporary files (and indeed the user's general-purpose temp directory) is in a disposable area of the profile directory structure... it isn't part of the "roaming" profile. I spend 15 extra minutes just getting the directories and swap arranged correctly every time I set up someone's Windows machine. You're wasting their time and yours doing the wrong thing. Stop that and you'll be happier.
If you want to really understand how Windows works, do yourself a big favour and go pick up a copy of Windows Internals by Russinovich and Solomon. Yeah, that's the same Russinovich who discovered the Sony rootkit a couple of years ago, so, chances are he knows what he's talking about.
You get over it. That's what you do. If you're too chickenshit to even open up a chequing or credit account that you wouldn't even use save for the occasional transaction that must be done using a verifiable electronic method, you are not going to make it very far in this world. You won't ever be able to get a place you can call your own; you will have difficulties getting some kinds of jobs if you don't have a demonstrable credit history; you won't be able to get a variety of services. Sure, you can go to the local Western Union and constantly have to make money orders for everything, but then you'd constantly have to carry hundreds if not thousands of dollars around with you (how safe is that?) and you have to pay out of your own pocket every time. Plus, to most people, you won't look like you've got your shit together if you're constantly paying for everything with money orders. People that you want most to trust you, won't.
And how the heck do you plan on saving money? Put it in a shoebox under your bed? What if your place burns down in a fire, or what if someone breaks in and steals it? Insurance companies won't replace lost or stolen cash. If your credit card or bank card gets stolen and used for fraud, you almost certainly will get your money back -- that's the beauty of little electronic footprints and camera footage.
Actually, no, it's not a nightmare -- it's a good thing for developers. The problem is that Microsoft has a naming issue... (you don't say!)
In Microsoft parlance, a "Program Manager" isn't a person who works in the "management" sense of the business or people. They have other people for that. Program Managers are responsible for writing technical specifications, co-ordinating development activities (e.g. who works on what piece), and making sure the developers are clear of distractions to get their job done. They're the ones that have to deal with finding out what the business requirements are and translating that into development activity.
Let's take a step back from the Microsoft thing for a bit, and think about how you would approach building a team of, say, eight people to develop a piece of software. Would you want eight developers and nothing else? Of course not... you'd want at least one person in there who will run interference between the developers and the people who want the job done, be it the people bankrolling the development, or the customers you're writing the software for. Right? You'd probably want another person focused on writing test cases and documentation, the code that the developers are pushing out is of high quality. You'd probably want one person who takes responsibility for architecture, including researching into options that are available for libraries, database backends, and that sort of thing. They could then distill and filter things down so that the people writing the code don't have to do all that research and architecture work themselves. They could write code, but maybe it'd only be prototypes. Maybe you have one person whose sole responsibility is getting graphical assets and localization together so you can produce the product in ten languages. One person might be tasked full-time to user interface development (e.g. the person who writes all the HTML and CSS).
See how this works yet?
Our team of eight people is already down to three developers. But the cool part is that those three developers will be able to do what they are best at: writing code. They won't be constantly distracted from this to deal with boring ancilliary issues like whether the Spanish translation is accurate, or whether the business requirements are being met.
Sounds like a developer's dream job, doesn't it?
Oh, and if you've been using Word since 1986, you should know by now that Undo is Ctrl-Z, just like it is in every other Windows, Linux, and Mac application (s/Ctrl/Command/). You shouldn't ever have to use a mouse to undo or redo something.
Next! Inserting a footnote now requires a whole series of mouse clicks as far as I can tell. Press Alt+S, F, and start typing your footnote. It's two mouse extremely obvious clicks (References, Insert Footnote) if you really need to go to your mouse to do it.
Next! Go try something relatively obscure like turning on line numbering in a document and changing the style of the line numbers. It's a lot easier to do line numbering in 2007 than it is in 2003. In 2003, you had to go digging into the File menu -> Page Setup -> Layout tab -> click Line Numbers -> and click the Add Line Numbering checkbox. In Word 2007, you click the Page Layout tab, click Line Numbers, and choose from the drop-down list that appears how you want the line numbers to work. Easy peasy.
As for changing the style of line numbers, it's basically the same in Word 2003 and 2007: Set it up using the style palette. In both versions, by default, the "Line Number" style won't be shown in the palette until you are using line numbers. If you're planning on changing styles, you really ought to know how to use the style palette.
Next! Damned, though, if I can see any really new major features that make it worthwhile. Here's a partial list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_200
One of the less obvious new features that's actually a really huge improvement, is the "Building Blocks" system. You can create and re-use "things"; for example, you can create a specific format, layout, and text content for a presentation of your company's mission statement, or maybe it's just a set of paragraphs you use over and over between a lot of documents. You can get a sense of how this works by going to the Insert menu and playing around with the Text Box and Quick Parts features.
I write user interface design documents as part of my professional work, and this one feature alone has saved me hours of time, and my documents look better to boot. Word 2007 has already paid for itself several times over.