A half decade ago I used to have higher karma posting similiar things about the all evilness of the upcoming Vista and how TPM would make Windows into an appliance and kill Linux etc.
It never materialized and was way overblown here.
MS can't depreciate their older win32 api's. Metro does not work on a regular PC with real world apps, not applets. Many people have older apps they need as well and will refuse to go along. Hell, people on slashdot still use Windows XP! It is an obsolete 10 year old operating system and even slashdotters who used to upgrade very 2-3 years are clinging stronger than ever to it. You think these users who still use 10 year old operating systems will simply go along with this? Hehe
I think MS is doing a store out of convenience as many tablet and phone users do not want to browse the web for apps and prefer to click and download them. Makes sense. But MS marketed themselves as an Enterpise player since the 1990s and can't just ditch these users. MS can't do this even if they wanted and I would not worry about it. If you do not like this then do not use Windows 8 Metro. Andriod is very free and docmented and I am happy they are there for competition.
"I install Yahoo! toolbar for Internet Explorer before anything, its teh shit."
Also browse the internet with IE 6, before any security updates are installed, and without any anti virus protection for security tools and possible trojans on the mission critical server too when you are done with Yahoo Toolbar.
Defragler has a tendency to report 10% fragmentation when the built in one in Windows 7 says 0% fragmented. I hit defrag and it doesn't do anything. Weird
Also in Unix everything is a text file. Not true on Windows which defeats the purpose. What is there to awk, sed and grep? Event log files? Thay are in XML and there is a seperate program anyway.
PowerShell is more powerful for Windows and you can pipe objects which is what Windows uses instead and it has access to.NET.
Samsung is banning the Iphone 5, because Apple banned the Galaxy Tab in all of Europe. The CEO in the article said he didn't want to sue, but felt he had no choice and wont stop until Apple allows the Galaxy to ship in Europe again.... very on topic
ATI has great quality hardware, but lower quality drivers/software. Nvidia it is the opposite.
I switched from Nvidia to ATI for this reason. My ATI 5750 does run Beryl suprising well. I game only on Windows 7 and I doubt performance would be good in Linux, but that can change. If ATI could get good quality drivers for Linux we would be happy to support them. The specs and code open are cryptic and only cover what appears to be a dispatcher which then transmit the code to the different parts of the GPU according to other posters here.
It is not like we are going to compete agaisnt ATI with trade secrets unless one of us has a 1 billion dollar chip fab plant.
Intel opened their speced and it helped them tremendously. Now since ATI has great integration with their bulldozer and Llamo chips new innovations would help sales. We could even improve the drivers to the point where some of the code can be contributed back to their team who develops drivers for Windows.
I have noticed that World of Warcraft runs slower in DirectX 11 vs DirectX 9 which is odd and points to the drivers needing work as Nvidia users get a 20% performance increase. Opening will help.
I agree with both you and Celle. The problem is I find the republican candidates scary and very far to right. Bachman doesn't believe the Earth is more than 5,000 years old and does not grasp basic economics as evident with her views of the federal reserve or how gas can magically become $2.00 a gallon.
I think part of the blame is not Obama but the very hard right refusing to work with him. However, he has had bad staff that I would have fired if I were him by the first summer in office. His political director or team I should say is one of them. Obama likes having 5 people argue rather than having 1 guy as a director to guide him etc.
I personally feel he is in over my head but the opposition is competent but very extreme and can do serious damage because they hold ideology above all else. What a mess. I just may not vote next year.
Icahn really wants a new board and threatened the existing board he would do just that if they didn't fire Yang and quickly sell its assets to Microsoft. He has the dough to get a new board and I wonder if he is wiling to do just that with Yahoo?
I am really surprised it is this hard to find a new board. I wish it were easier to do so as many are useless and should go.
"I firmly believe that starting with Carly HP's stock has been purposed trashed so it could be shorted "
That should be illegal. If the CEO or board did they should go to jail and pay out of pocket for all the losses and sued into an oblivion.... But who am I kidding in this day and age? Too much corporate power corrupting everyone as far as the eye can see.
Shorting for those who do not understand what it means is basically selling somehting you do not even have. You then buy it later and then transfer it over. If the price goes down in 24 hours then you sold what you didn't have for less than when you buy and therefore skim the trim.
Shorting started when people sold fur coats then didn't own and waited for the shipment to come through.
Perhaps this is why HFC or Flash trading is so popular. They can quickly sell a stock they don't own and buy it when it losses value a few micro seconds later and skim the tiny.001 cent profits in mass volume? I dunno...
James Carville, who was Clinton's right hand man just wrote advice to Obama, on how to look more compentent. His advise was to do lots of firings to appear in charge and for them to be scapegoats.
It works for past presidents like Reagan, Clinton, and Bush Jr. Surely, the board did this for the same reason to appear like they are doing their jobs etc. Many in upper management reading this can relate to newer guys coming and firing people in order to appear all scary and powerful to their new employer.
Most of the smart people who pay attention can see right through this.
"No, it just has really lousy CPU throttling. (Ba-dum, tssh.)"
Of course Inferno (plan 9) is 25 years old. Inferno is a 10 - 15 year old newer version of it.... oh wait people here still use XP which is also 10 years old so nevermind.
Good GPUs are essential in this day and age! Your own experience is a testimony to that.
Many integrated... correction... all integrated graphics ARE CRAP. They are bandwidth starved and even if the chip runs faster enough the lag/latency is insane trying to load large textures fast in video.
The arm had integrated video inside the CPU much like the newer AMD chips that just came out.
AMD's Fusion/Bulldozer chips are awesome in the fact that the GPU is integrated and shares the same memory controller as the CPU. Not as fast as a dedicated card card but as fast as a Nvidia 7600GTX can run games and 720P video easily a tablet or notebook.
These next generation CPUs and Arms will run the video fine as smooth hardware accelerated scrolling is sweet with IE 10 and Metro. Can't say much good about IE other than it is the best scrolling and visual experience.
Many new.COMs on a shoe string budget are opening there because of no sales taxes and other breaks. Texas is nice too, but the legislature keeps flirting with the idea of implementing an internet sales tax which scares many businesses. I strongly prefer to live in Texas vs Oklahoma, but any sales tax can quickly throw you out of business as it is an unfair disadvantage over someone else who can sell things cheaper.
California is a bad place for a startup due to its unfriendly business atmosphere, which is why companies there are laying off so many workers. I am surprised how the.com revolution even got started there? Maybe those were the days before Wall Street and cost accountants cared about profitability and taxes?
Web workers takes care of this and launches things in different processes. The only browser that doesn't support it is IE, but that will change with Windows 8 next spring.
Actually Microsoft is doing a 180 since IE 8 due to losing marketshare and the threat of HTML 5 and the IPad.
IE 9 is a decent browser. It truly has caught up and supports SVG, HTML 5 canvas elements, hardware acceleration, CSS 3 (even animations), xhtml (about damn time), and so on. You no longer need the horrible hacks to get anything done in it like tricking it to read xhtml when it does not support it.
Windows 8 supports Web Workers with IE 10 and according www.html5test.com its HTML 5 is on par with Chrome and Firefox making it a lead browser. The only reason it did not get a perfect score is the lack of WebGL due to security issues, but IE 9/10 support CSS 3D.
If the Windows 8 Pad/Tablet takes off you can bet mass adodption of web workers. Also Microsoft is switching now from a 2.5 year to a 1 year release browser cycle. In 5 years IE 14 will be out. It will be a very different place than where we were with IE 6 for 7 years.
Even if you want to scoff at my comment and NEVER use IE this is great news. It means webmasters can finally use things like webworkers and advanced designs in their pages as IE 7 always held them back. It is great at work too if you are stuck with IE. IE 9/10 is at least modern and finally doesn't suck even if it is not the best.
"That's really not true. According to Netflix, the reason for the price hike has nothing to do with licensing fees. Which makes me wonder what precisely it is that they're needing the money for."
Or Net Neutrality laws allowing mega telecoms to double dip. My hunch is AT&T and Verizon did the same thing it did to Netflix as it did to Google, "Pay us double or we will deprioritize your packets and ruin streaming for your customers!"
Netflix had to raise rates to pay for this. Isn't corruption lovely and buying off politicians lovely?
Does anyone have any links as I would like to prove this in order to put Net Neutrality back into law? This is a serious problem and of course Netflix is a service that can't be deprioritized one bit as it streams compared to other sites that would just load longer.
So if this happened to one CA who got compromised what makes you think others will now disclose they were hacked?
If it happens again to someone else they sure as hell wont announce it as any CEO will want to keep his job more than protect the web. If anything this could make the web less safe
"I don't get it, what does this have to do with the lack of patents, trademarks or copyright? Why would a retailer listen to your opinion of what should be sold, or Amazon raise prices on something just because you tell them? Without those things they can set up their own production.
"
Easy. As a CEO of Walmart you need assurances that products will sell. You sell your shelf space illegally at a premium where every producer pays you whether the product sells or not and they take the loss if it doesn't. That way you make money either way.
A cool new product is here. One guy owns it and the other guy has marketing power to threaten you and he can produce it cheaper and buy all that shelf space. Who are you going to listen too? The guy with the money wins and yes you will kick the other guy out as Megacorp is such a big customer.
Ask any of the 25 other cola brands CEOs that failed? Pepsi or Coke is there because of these practices.
If you have a patent you can't do that. Sure you can hire an army of lawyers. But all it takes is a single judge to throw an injunction and put a stop to your operating costing you BIG bucks. More than the cost of a patent lawyer to fight. In that case it is easier to settle for a few for each new product or make the product for the other guy for a few years. Huge patent chests exists mostly in software. You can't patent a customer opening a door to your shop. The idiot courts can say patent a click to yoru website in comparison. Software parents and phone patents are kind of seperate things that are abnormal compared to everything else.
I would add that.NET has much better multiple language support as Scala and Jython are not mature as Lambda is going to be added in Java 8 officially. Iron Python is python for.NET and I believe more languages too have.NET support. That makes it sweet as anyone with a different language can share code as one executable with.NET. Some people were hoping gnome shell 3 would be.NET based a few years ago on Mono as it would help multiple language support and finally give C# apis so it is not so tied to Microsoft. Too risk and never happened.
Also a plus with C# is less lines of code compared to Java. Half the code to do the same things was an early strength touted by Microsoft. That is one of Java's weaknesses if you ever make a complex website.
"probably, but the point is i have the most to gain in the short term by wiping out IP laws, society be damned..."
Devils Advocate here. Lets say you invent the next big thing and have a working model that costs your life savings and are ready to produce. Now lets also say I am the CEO of MegaCorp.
I see your product and immediately imitate it. I have factories in China that can produce it cheaper than what you can do here in a local wharehouse with only a few workers on an assembly line. I then call all the retailers to ban your product so you can't sell it and then tell Amazon.com to raise the prices sky high on your products so you lose money and my imitation will always be cheaper.... now explain what short term gains you will get?
I just caused a divorce, a loss of your home, credit rating, and life and then bought a yatch based on your idea. Good job... coming from my 4th vacation home in Jamaca.
As the saying goes never play poker with a millionaire. There are evil people out there who want to take advantage of you and care only about their own egos by having a bigger number in their bank account. Patent reform I agree is needed. But IP laws and patents are for you and your idea. If megacorp wants your product you now have the power for me to pay you to make it. It seems Apple does not want to collect royalities and is just beintg an asshole. But generally companies and competitors give each other licensing agreements and these laws protect them from being exploited.
I downloaded the images yesterday but couldn't get them to run on a flash drive or burn with a DVD +R.
How hard is it to run explorer? I do not mind one mouse button click to get to desktop. IS the Windows 7 desktop as usable? For your use of wikipedia, according to the videos you can drag the edge of IE and use another app like Word (metro version).
Since you can't use your fingers MS has enabled right mouse button click to do these things. Let me know how it is.
The MSIL output is loaded with calls to win32 and COM/DCOM..NET was designed for Java initially. When talks with Sun failed C# was made to run only on Windows and use the.NET API instead.
In essence it was made to quickly be a defacto.NET language tied with Visual Studio. Sure you can use Mono C# but what is the point of not using.NET? The reason why C# apps can't be recompiled on Linux are simply winforms by their very nature are abstraction layers of Com/DCOM. Add then threading and networking and it probably has more ties to things like NDIS and VMS/NT style threads and other nasties. You have to emulate Windows to get anything done.
Sure the spec is free and I think Moto (can't remember exact name) was made for FreeBSD that was an acutal C# compiler but it did not create MSIL or use.NET.
If free software advocates are serious they need to invent an alternative to.NET and some tools to make it competive before Mono can be taken seriously as a cross platform tool. Reinventing.NET and Winforms is a losing battle that will make many programmers switch to Windows and stay there for development costs.
You know it is frustrating because if Java looses so does Linux and Windows wins and becomes more entrenched. Php is the only choice left and web servers are the only servers left running Unix as Windows is eating up everything else in site.
I like to daydream what an alternative universe is like if the DOJ got their way and split MS into 3 companies 12 years ago. C# and.NET are really great and if they existed on Linux the world would be a better place. If they were split my guess is today we would have larger Linux marketshare with many more.NET apis by the communities around the world.
But we just got to accept what we have. MS might be losing the client thanks to IPhones, tabelts, and multiple browsers, but they are eating Linux still on the server and pretty soon will monopolize it and raise prices insanely high. Many PHBs are cheering them on still too.
Slashdot Mirror
A half decade ago I used to have higher karma posting similiar things about the all evilness of the upcoming Vista and how TPM would make Windows into an appliance and kill Linux etc.
It never materialized and was way overblown here.
MS can't depreciate their older win32 api's. Metro does not work on a regular PC with real world apps, not applets. Many people have older apps they need as well and will refuse to go along. Hell, people on slashdot still use Windows XP! It is an obsolete 10 year old operating system and even slashdotters who used to upgrade very 2-3 years are clinging stronger than ever to it. You think these users who still use 10 year old operating systems will simply go along with this? Hehe
I think MS is doing a store out of convenience as many tablet and phone users do not want to browse the web for apps and prefer to click and download them. Makes sense. But MS marketed themselves as an Enterpise player since the 1990s and can't just ditch these users. MS can't do this even if they wanted and I would not worry about it. If you do not like this then do not use Windows 8 Metro. Andriod is very free and docmented and I am happy they are there for competition.
"I install Yahoo! toolbar for Internet Explorer before anything, its teh shit."
Also browse the internet with IE 6, before any security updates are installed, and without any anti virus protection for security tools and possible trojans on the mission critical server too when you are done with Yahoo Toolbar.
Defragler has a tendency to report 10% fragmentation when the built in one in Windows 7 says 0% fragmented. I hit defrag and it doesn't do anything. Weird
Also in Unix everything is a text file. Not true on Windows which defeats the purpose. What is there to awk, sed and grep? Event log files? Thay are in XML and there is a seperate program anyway.
PowerShell is more powerful for Windows and you can pipe objects which is what Windows uses instead and it has access to .NET.
Samsung is banning the Iphone 5, because Apple banned the Galaxy Tab in all of Europe. The CEO in the article said he didn't want to sue, but felt he had no choice and wont stop until Apple allows the Galaxy to ship in Europe again. ... very on topic
ATI has great quality hardware, but lower quality drivers/software. Nvidia it is the opposite.
I switched from Nvidia to ATI for this reason. My ATI 5750 does run Beryl suprising well. I game only on Windows 7 and I doubt performance would be good in Linux, but that can change. If ATI could get good quality drivers for Linux we would be happy to support them. The specs and code open are cryptic and only cover what appears to be a dispatcher which then transmit the code to the different parts of the GPU according to other posters here.
It is not like we are going to compete agaisnt ATI with trade secrets unless one of us has a 1 billion dollar chip fab plant.
Intel opened their speced and it helped them tremendously. Now since ATI has great integration with their bulldozer and Llamo chips new innovations would help sales. We could even improve the drivers to the point where some of the code can be contributed back to their team who develops drivers for Windows.
I have noticed that World of Warcraft runs slower in DirectX 11 vs DirectX 9 which is odd and points to the drivers needing work as Nvidia users get a 20% performance increase. Opening will help.
I agree with both you and Celle. The problem is I find the republican candidates scary and very far to right. Bachman doesn't believe the Earth is more than 5,000 years old and does not grasp basic economics as evident with her views of the federal reserve or how gas can magically become $2.00 a gallon.
I think part of the blame is not Obama but the very hard right refusing to work with him. However, he has had bad staff that I would have fired if I were him by the first summer in office. His political director or team I should say is one of them. Obama likes having 5 people argue rather than having 1 guy as a director to guide him etc.
I personally feel he is in over my head but the opposition is competent but very extreme and can do serious damage because they hold ideology above all else. What a mess. I just may not vote next year.
Icahn really wants a new board and threatened the existing board he would do just that if they didn't fire Yang and quickly sell its assets to Microsoft. He has the dough to get a new board and I wonder if he is wiling to do just that with Yahoo?
I am really surprised it is this hard to find a new board. I wish it were easier to do so as many are useless and should go.
"I firmly believe that starting with Carly HP's stock has been purposed trashed so it could be shorted "
That should be illegal. If the CEO or board did they should go to jail and pay out of pocket for all the losses and sued into an oblivion. ... But who am I kidding in this day and age? Too much corporate power corrupting everyone as far as the eye can see.
Shorting for those who do not understand what it means is basically selling somehting you do not even have. You then buy it later and then transfer it over. If the price goes down in 24 hours then you sold what you didn't have for less than when you buy and therefore skim the trim.
Shorting started when people sold fur coats then didn't own and waited for the shipment to come through.
Perhaps this is why HFC or Flash trading is so popular. They can quickly sell a stock they don't own and buy it when it losses value a few micro seconds later and skim the tiny .001 cent profits in mass volume? I dunno ...
James Carville, who was Clinton's right hand man just wrote advice to Obama, on how to look more compentent. His advise was to do lots of firings to appear in charge and for them to be scapegoats.
It works for past presidents like Reagan, Clinton, and Bush Jr. Surely, the board did this for the same reason to appear like they are doing their jobs etc. Many in upper management reading this can relate to newer guys coming and firing people in order to appear all scary and powerful to their new employer.
Most of the smart people who pay attention can see right through this.
"No, it just has really lousy CPU throttling. (Ba-dum, tssh.)"
Of course Inferno (plan 9) is 25 years old. Inferno is a 10 - 15 year old newer version of it. ... oh wait people here still use XP which is also 10 years old so nevermind.
I.T. doesn't make money. Bankers do!
Cut the cost centers! ... and give the savings to the shareholders.
Good GPUs are essential in this day and age! Your own experience is a testimony to that.
Many integrated ... correction ... all integrated graphics ARE CRAP. They are bandwidth starved and even if the chip runs faster enough the lag/latency is insane trying to load large textures fast in video.
The arm had integrated video inside the CPU much like the newer AMD chips that just came out.
AMD's Fusion/Bulldozer chips are awesome in the fact that the GPU is integrated and shares the same memory controller as the CPU. Not as fast as a dedicated card card but as fast as a Nvidia 7600GTX can run games and 720P video easily a tablet or notebook.
These next generation CPUs and Arms will run the video fine as smooth hardware accelerated scrolling is sweet with IE 10 and Metro. Can't say much good about IE other than it is the best scrolling and visual experience.
Many new .COMs on a shoe string budget are opening there because of no sales taxes and other breaks. Texas is nice too, but the legislature keeps flirting with the idea of implementing an internet sales tax which scares many businesses. I strongly prefer to live in Texas vs Oklahoma, but any sales tax can quickly throw you out of business as it is an unfair disadvantage over someone else who can sell things cheaper.
California is a bad place for a startup due to its unfriendly business atmosphere, which is why companies there are laying off so many workers. I am surprised how the .com revolution even got started there? Maybe those were the days before Wall Street and cost accountants cared about profitability and taxes?
Web workers takes care of this and launches things in different processes. The only browser that doesn't support it is IE, but that will change with Windows 8 next spring.
It can take care of this without Intel's code
Actually Microsoft is doing a 180 since IE 8 due to losing marketshare and the threat of HTML 5 and the IPad.
IE 9 is a decent browser. It truly has caught up and supports SVG, HTML 5 canvas elements, hardware acceleration, CSS 3 (even animations), xhtml (about damn time), and so on. You no longer need the horrible hacks to get anything done in it like tricking it to read xhtml when it does not support it.
Windows 8 supports Web Workers with IE 10 and according www.html5test.com its HTML 5 is on par with Chrome and Firefox making it a lead browser. The only reason it did not get a perfect score is the lack of WebGL due to security issues, but IE 9/10 support CSS 3D.
If the Windows 8 Pad/Tablet takes off you can bet mass adodption of web workers. Also Microsoft is switching now from a 2.5 year to a 1 year release browser cycle. In 5 years IE 14 will be out. It will be a very different place than where we were with IE 6 for 7 years.
Even if you want to scoff at my comment and NEVER use IE this is great news. It means webmasters can finally use things like webworkers and advanced designs in their pages as IE 7 always held them back. It is great at work too if you are stuck with IE. IE 9/10 is at least modern and finally doesn't suck even if it is not the best.
"That's really not true. According to Netflix, the reason for the price hike has nothing to do with licensing fees. Which makes me wonder what precisely it is that they're needing the money for."
Or Net Neutrality laws allowing mega telecoms to double dip. My hunch is AT&T and Verizon did the same thing it did to Netflix as it did to Google, "Pay us double or we will deprioritize your packets and ruin streaming for your customers!"
Netflix had to raise rates to pay for this. Isn't corruption lovely and buying off politicians lovely?
Does anyone have any links as I would like to prove this in order to put Net Neutrality back into law? This is a serious problem and of course Netflix is a service that can't be deprioritized one bit as it streams compared to other sites that would just load longer.
So if this happened to one CA who got compromised what makes you think others will now disclose they were hacked?
If it happens again to someone else they sure as hell wont announce it as any CEO will want to keep his job more than protect the web. If anything this could make the web less safe
"I don't get it, what does this have to do with the lack of patents, trademarks or copyright? Why would a retailer listen to your opinion of what should be sold, or Amazon raise prices on something just because you tell them? Without those things they can set up their own production.
"
Easy. As a CEO of Walmart you need assurances that products will sell. You sell your shelf space illegally at a premium where every producer pays you whether the product sells or not and they take the loss if it doesn't. That way you make money either way.
A cool new product is here. One guy owns it and the other guy has marketing power to threaten you and he can produce it cheaper and buy all that shelf space. Who are you going to listen too? The guy with the money wins and yes you will kick the other guy out as Megacorp is such a big customer.
Ask any of the 25 other cola brands CEOs that failed? Pepsi or Coke is there because of these practices.
If you have a patent you can't do that. Sure you can hire an army of lawyers. But all it takes is a single judge to throw an injunction and put a stop to your operating costing you BIG bucks. More than the cost of a patent lawyer to fight. In that case it is easier to settle for a few for each new product or make the product for the other guy for a few years. Huge patent chests exists mostly in software. You can't patent a customer opening a door to your shop. The idiot courts can say patent a click to yoru website in comparison. Software parents and phone patents are kind of seperate things that are abnormal compared to everything else.
Very good summary.
I would add that .NET has much better multiple language support as Scala and Jython are not mature as Lambda is going to be added in Java 8 officially. Iron Python is python for .NET and I believe more languages too have .NET support. That makes it sweet as anyone with a different language can share code as one executable with .NET. Some people were hoping gnome shell 3 would be .NET based a few years ago on Mono as it would help multiple language support and finally give C# apis so it is not so tied to Microsoft. Too risk and never happened.
Also a plus with C# is less lines of code compared to Java. Half the code to do the same things was an early strength touted by Microsoft. That is one of Java's weaknesses if you ever make a complex website.
"probably, but the point is i have the most to gain in the short term by wiping out IP laws, society be damned..."
Devils Advocate here. Lets say you invent the next big thing and have a working model that costs your life savings and are ready to produce. Now lets also say I am the CEO of MegaCorp.
I see your product and immediately imitate it. I have factories in China that can produce it cheaper than what you can do here in a local wharehouse with only a few workers on an assembly line. I then call all the retailers to ban your product so you can't sell it and then tell Amazon.com to raise the prices sky high on your products so you lose money and my imitation will always be cheaper. ... now explain what short term gains you will get?
I just caused a divorce, a loss of your home, credit rating, and life and then bought a yatch based on your idea. Good job ... coming from my 4th vacation home in Jamaca.
As the saying goes never play poker with a millionaire. There are evil people out there who want to take advantage of you and care only about their own egos by having a bigger number in their bank account. Patent reform I agree is needed. But IP laws and patents are for you and your idea. If megacorp wants your product you now have the power for me to pay you to make it. It seems Apple does not want to collect royalities and is just beintg an asshole. But generally companies and competitors give each other licensing agreements and these laws protect them from being exploited.
I downloaded the images yesterday but couldn't get them to run on a flash drive or burn with a DVD +R.
How hard is it to run explorer? I do not mind one mouse button click to get to desktop. IS the Windows 7 desktop as usable? For your use of wikipedia, according to the videos you can drag the edge of IE and use another app like Word (metro version).
Since you can't use your fingers MS has enabled right mouse button click to do these things. Let me know how it is.
Ars Technica did a review of Windows 8 by using explorer.exe and tried to use it as a regular PC running Word. Results are mentioned here
The MSIL output is loaded with calls to win32 and COM/DCOM. .NET was designed for Java initially. When talks with Sun failed C# was made to run only on Windows and use the .NET API instead.
In essence it was made to quickly be a defacto .NET language tied with Visual Studio. Sure you can use Mono C# but what is the point of not using .NET? The reason why C# apps can't be recompiled on Linux are simply winforms by their very nature are abstraction layers of Com/DCOM. Add then threading and networking and it probably has more ties to things like NDIS and VMS/NT style threads and other nasties. You have to emulate Windows to get anything done.
Sure the spec is free and I think Moto (can't remember exact name) was made for FreeBSD that was an acutal C# compiler but it did not create MSIL or use .NET.
If free software advocates are serious they need to invent an alternative to .NET and some tools to make it competive before Mono can be taken seriously as a cross platform tool. Reinventing .NET and Winforms is a losing battle that will make many programmers switch to Windows and stay there for development costs.
You know it is frustrating because if Java looses so does Linux and Windows wins and becomes more entrenched. Php is the only choice left and web servers are the only servers left running Unix as Windows is eating up everything else in site.
I like to daydream what an alternative universe is like if the DOJ got their way and split MS into 3 companies 12 years ago. C# and .NET are really great and if they existed on Linux the world would be a better place. If they were split my guess is today we would have larger Linux marketshare with many more .NET apis by the communities around the world.
But we just got to accept what we have. MS might be losing the client thanks to IPhones, tabelts, and multiple browsers, but they are eating Linux still on the server and pretty soon will monopolize it and raise prices insanely high. Many PHBs are cheering them on still too.