I keep hearing that exact sentiment and I don't know if it's really true or not but at the very least there could be another way of looking at it. In the first scenario Apple made a huge mistake when not making a "Windows version" of iPod because that's just plain lost sales! Similarly, Apple makes a huge mistake when not porting iTunes because the bundled Windows software sucks ass and will impact sales of Windows iPods...again, lost sales.
Personally I think they did the right thing (from an Apple POV). You release the product as Mac only. Get a lot of people drooling over it who can't actually use it. Maybe persuade some people to drop PC's for Mac's in the process but in short say, "hey, if you want cool. You have to come to our side".
The margin on the iPod's isn't that great. So they wait until the price of Toshiba HD's comes down in price so that the iPod makes a healthy profit (even when they've reduced the price slightly) and then release it to the PC world.
Volia, they're making all the money on the PC owners snapping up a high profit product and at the same time, inconveniancing them, because they don't own a Mac.
Which brings me to my final point: why are there an endless stream of second-guessers who figure they know that Apple would have made more sales/money if they had done differently?
Apple would have more sales if they'd released the iPod to PC's at the beginning. They made more money this way holding off.
As for second-guessers, they'll always be them - and sometimes they're right too.
And guess what - it's coming soon (RSN;-). Ericsson's P800 is due out early next year (revised date), with all those features - and MPEG4, Java, everything crammable into a 150mhz ARM processor with 16mb memory.
See it. *Actually* used it.
Upsides: Symbian, rock solid, lovely UI, loads of apps, decent web-browser, expandable, cool apps already available for it.
Downsides: The stylus is flimsy plastic that clips to the side, the keyboard presses onto the screen (its a flip) which harks back to the problems of the R380-or-something (in which the buttons wore down and weren't as responsive). There is a camera (which is good) but makes the damn thing rather heavy.
I am not pro-Microsoft (more pro-right tool for the job) but some of these are silly:
"Service Pack 1 for Windows XP itself is not readily accessible to consumers, and thus the mechanism purportedly settling the antitrust case is, by definition, not readily accessible," ProComp wrote in the letter.
Whilst the point about non-IE browsers not being able to access the site is valid, the fact it takes 5.5 hours over a modem is not. It's not Microsofts fault people are using a 56k modem or that it's not under 50k! I'm unsure about the $9.99 for a CD point myself - the proposed settlement didn't mention anything about them having to forcibly give it to anyone and this price is no different to their usual practises.
The third violation, ProComp charges, is that the middleware control is not intuitive and comes with no Help file for understanding how to use it.
So? It does what it's supposed to do. Do you really think they're going to spend money on making it all nice and pretty when end users aren't going to even touch it? They provided the tool and it does the job it says it does - so what if there is no help file?
In the fifth alleged violation, ProComp said the updated Windows XP's My Music folder called up Internet Explorer for online shopping, even after the group had selected Netscape as the default browser and had hidden access to IE.
Call me skeptical, but this could just be an oversight. We all know that Microsofts testing is, ahem, a little erratic. It might not be though, but lets not jump to conclusions.
It is still worth pointing out that this is a proposed settlement. Microsoft haven't actually signed anything yet.
It is important business emails where people have done this that drives me up the wall:
Plz find attached the latest timetable 4 release document. I need u to give me your comments by close of play 2day so that I can send it out 2 the IT department who r going to ensure that it is scheduled in at the nxt available opportunity.
Thnx.
Yes, I once had an email like that. I hate txt'er/l33t speak at the best of times, but important business emails are definately not the place and it took me twice as long as usual to work out what on earth they were going on about.
Does not sound like warchalking cleanly fits the definition of theft to me.
You're right, except that both the Slashdot title and the BBC title are wrong. Quote the BBC:
Now Nokia has joined the chorus of criticism by saying that anyone who sits outside an office and uses a company's wireless network to do their own web surfing is stealing.
"This is theft, plain and simple," wrote Nokia in its advisory.
The company said that anyone using a company's bandwidth without permission is reducing the amount of a valuable resource available to the workers in that organisation.
(emphasis mine)
So actually, what Nokia is saying is that sitting outside a company and using their bandwidth is stealing and not actually the act of warchalking.
No seriously. Writing a program to draw pretty stuff was all well and good, but when you could hit run and actually get that turtle (with the see-through green shell) to start drawing it on a huge sheet of A1 paper...
It's bad for humanity. Was it not spelled out in sufficient detail in my analogy? Allow me to rephrase: Having to support two completely independant standards is expensive on all levels, be it OpenGL/DirectX, mythical Ford SUV-fuel/regular gasoline, Firewire/USB 2.0, compactflash/smartmedia/memorystick/SD, DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW, Syquest/Bernoulli/iomega, or what have you. In the end, you and I pay for these varied corporate games.
In a competitive market-place you're always going to find different implementations of the same thing.
You're right, there is no purpose. But if one thing has the market place then it doesn't generally foster the competitive spirit to put that product forward (ie. company sitting on their laurels).
Generally, in the end, the better product wins.
I understand your gripe, but life doesn't work that way and never will. The quicker you realise that and get used to it, the less frustrated you'll be.
It would appear that Taco doesn't read postings on Slashdot, even the ones modded +5.
Anyway, here is it again for Taco:
Put this in your.procmailrc file:
:0 B * Content-Disposition: attachment * name=.*\.(com|exe|pif|scr|bat|lnk|shf|vbs) { # Stick it somewhere :0 B: /dev/null }
Of course, this is a bit drastic by throwing every file that ends in that type into the bin, so you may want to replace it with something like/home/username/mail/viruses
Finally (and this bit is especially for Taco) you will probably need to have a.forward file with the following in it:
|/usr/bin/procmail
Once you've done that, then finally we'll never heard again from you how many viruses a day you can get.
I can videotape HBO all day long, then I can take that videotape and copy it 90 billion times. or I can record HBO with my Tv capture card and thne copy that Divx 90 bajillion times..
Unless I'm wrong (i'm in the UK, so might easily be), the only time you'd actually not be able to record HBO is if your video recorder or TV Capture Card acted upon the copy restriction bit being set.
In other words, the original poster might not be wrong. HBO may be sending the copy restriction bit with its programming, it's just that your capture devices are ignoring it because they don't know what to do with it.
Some day (if we're not careful), all recorders and TV cards will understand what this bit means, and act on it...
When I install Linux, and it comes to anything to do with filesystems, I just go with whatever default it gives me.
I suspect I'm not exactly alone.
So... what compelling reason is there for me to use any other filesystem? Being more stable or better with data loss is nice, but considering I've only ever had this problem once, doesn't mean that i'll leap up and down going "oo oo! got to have blahFS!" any time soon.
To give you an example, FAT16 to FAT32 was the fact you could have larger partitions. FAT32 to NTFS was because of permissions and security.
But whatever we have now (can't remember, i barely look) to XFS? What *compelling* absolutely-must-have reason do I have to go change from whatever my installer suggests putting on for me?
Or should I just stick with what the installer suggests from now until eternity?
Argh! Sometimes its really obvious that people who write comments like this have never deployed programs, don't think about users or perversly like using a sledgehammer to break a nut.
For the record, I recommend using Perl2exe and avoid installing the Perl runtimes!
I've used Perl2exe for, admitidally smaller programs, and it works great. Check out the options, you can either compile into one large exe, or use one (yes, one) additional dll and reduce the size of the program considerably.
So basically, you have the best of both worlds. If it's only ever going to be one application, do a full binary and deal with the size. If there could be one or more, then consider using the dll.
Yes, there are 2 downsides, one is the size of the application - but compaired to the size and hassle of installing the whole Perl distribution for every machine, it's a no-brainer.
The other being the ability to edit the code. Well if there are individuals out there who need to edit it, they'll have the perl runtimes and you can just give them the source. But giving normal users carte blanche to edit the code is asking for hundreds of support calls.
If options are needed code them in rather than get them to edit the source.
Personally I think a combined DVD player, console and Tivo in one would be a killer. I seriously don't fancy paying out for three items of kit and having three boxes sitting underneath the television.
But, this isn't really Tivo functionality. Hell, I doubt I'd need all the stuff Tivo has, but recording, time stretching, on screen programming and on screen television guides are pretty much a must.
In what way is Direct3D better than OpenGL? Is it providing a more streamlined interface to the hardware? Is it easier to program? That it is merely different?
[snipped incoherant rant]
Umm, what on earth are you going on about? I'm not talking about whether Direct3D or OpenGL is better or not.
The point is, on slashdot, buying another company and using their product seems to be considered something that only Microsoft would do, rare and very bad.
When in fact it's a very common thing and often done because it makes more sense than developing something in house from scratch.
It's worse than that. MS didn't even create DirectX -- they purchased Rendermorphics in 1997 to acquire the technology that developed into DirectX
What is it with this opinion that it's bad if you've bought another company that does something you want but better?
People here on Slashdot seem to make it out that it's a bad thing if you don't start on a project from scratch and work at it. Maybe so, but sometimes the maths just don't add up and it makes more sense to purchase another company that's doing what you want (but generally in a better way). You get the technology and the expertise.
It's fairly common practise in the IT world, not just by Microsoft.
This is RedHat's way of making Linux more appealing to the end user. Good for them
Indeed, because if the desktop is more appealing then more people will use it and if more people use it then companies will start to consider it a viable market for software (applications and drivers) and when there is greater support for Linux then more people will move to it because it has the applications they want and so on and so on...
Microsoft are already doing Linux a favour with their licence changes, but that doesn't mean that we should expect people that are brave enough to change to come to the Linux side (at the moment, I'd say they're more likely to go to Apple, as they have consistency and ease of use down to a tee)
I have to say, it does look very nice and I (being in the "lets have one desktop and do it right for the sake of consistency and adoption" camp) will definately be installing it when it is released.
If you've got some substantive criticism of my document, please mail me or post it. But criticism of something you only imagine the document to be is something I, for one, can do without.
I started a long email about it, but decided against sending it. If you're going to label me as a troll then I stick you firmly in the "la la la not going to listen to you" camp so it wouldn't make any point anyway.
However for a free 2p's worth: I suggest you strip all personal opinion out and back it up with hard facts. And ditch the ONE link you have saying Word is rubbish because the facts on that are not only opinion but badly argued and rather silly (This Ford is rubbish, because there is too many buttons on the dashboard that might mean that people spend too much time with them, rather than driving -- it sounds dumb right? Now look at his reason for Word being rubbish).
Also, try a few suggestions. Now you've told us that Word is rubbish, you need some credible solutions/suggestions backed up with facts.
Otherwise it's no surprise to me that you're getting very little response. Trying to persuade people to move away from something they are comfortable with is difficult.
If you implement any of my suggestions, then I wish you all the best. If you stick your fingers in your ears, call me a troll and sing "la la" at the top of your voice then it would be no surprise to me if your cruisade failed miserably.
Finally, having used LaTeX for several years writing up dissertations, I can attest now that I'd have far rather use Word, it's faster, easier, more user-friendly and the output is almost as good. Given a choice between spending hours over pixel perfect positioning & formatting and not quite pixel perfect but substantially more time to do what I want to do - then there isn't much of a choice.
(and yes, I've even had the delights of hand writting Postscript - which was "interesting")
Yet another reason why MS Word is not a document exchange format. That rant is also avaible in other formats
I stopped reading when I hit this:
Word produces probably the worst output and is the slowest and most tedious to work in of any document preparation system I've seen in the past 15 years. I find it remarkable that when people are presented a choice between a structural mark-up system (what you mean is what get) versus a visual mark-up system (what you see is all you get) people opt for the latter. For more on this point see section 5.2.
This is all personal opinion. Having used other document markup formats (yes, even writing Postscript by hand - we did it at university) I complete disagree with the comment "the worst output and is the slowest and most tedious to work in of any document preparation system".
If he'd stuck to the facts and stopped throwing in personal opinion it would have been more credible - but to make a comment like that and advocate Latex (for gods sake, Latex over Word - are you kidding?), sorry, but no.
Every VB programmer I met, who only knew VB and no other language had problems understanding basic concepts like data structures (lists, trees, etc..) and even things like user defined types, classes, passing by reference vs. value, etc. One guy who had been a Visual Basic programmer for many years (his words not mine) did not even know what hexadecimal numbers were, yet this same guy was a "Senior Developer".
I can point you to a senior C developer who didn't know how to implement a linked list.
Your example is simply an extreme. There are plenty of developers of any language out there that are clueless to even the most basic concepts.
Don't knock a language based on a couple of clueless people, otherwise you'll end up knocking every other language whilst you're at it.
It'll probably not be answered here, but I'll give it a go. I've just got a copy of Mozilla 1.1 from a workmate and installed it.
It's nice, however I'd far rather than when a new window is opened, it is put in a new tab rather than firing up a new window. CrazyBrowser does this and it's great!
Finally, is there any way (a la CrazyBrowser again) that I can set up a "Group" of bookmarks, so with one click I can open 7 or 8 pages in tabs all at once?
These two features alone (including the pop-up blocker) keep me with CrazyBrowser. If Moz can't do them (and I'm sure it can) then it would be a shame because I'd end up probably sticking with what I have.
Unfortunately I normally get about 3k/sec from the download site:o(
Re:hope mono gets it right...
on
KDE Adopting Mono
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
KDE is also going to suffer from a similar rash of programmers like windows VB programmers who thing that dragging and dropping an application together makes them every bit as valuable as someone who can lovingly craft inline assembler into their C routines for speed and keep an eye on memory utilization.
If a VB programmer has "dragged and dropped" an application together that I need and I can afford, then I fail to see what makes them any less valuable than the C and inline assembler programmers who haven't done such a thing.
There are plenty of good and useful VB applications out there, same as there are plenty of crap and bloated C and inline assembler applications out there.
Rather than mainly scoring applications based on the language they were written in, you should give priority to the task they perform. Personally (as a user) I don't give a toss what language something is written in, if it works and does the job.
I'll admit I haven't downloaded Mozilla, for one main reason - I don't have the bandwidth to do so (56k modem? Eta 22 hours!) so maybe this question will be really easy to answer - or not:
Is there some sort of preferences manager that deals with all the options this new functionality is bringing about? The reason I ask is that whilst type ahead find looks and sounds rather nice, I don't think that adding a line of text to a flat text file is exactly the most user-friendly way of doing things. Especially not in a Windows world anyway.
On a side note, it's like when NS7 is mentioned without the pop up ad filter and you invariably get the posting that says "edit this file, add this line, remove this comment and it's done!". Might be easy to us, but probably not to those people that we'd like to encourage to use something apart from IE.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I think they did the right thing (from an Apple POV). You release the product as Mac only. Get a lot of people drooling over it who can't actually use it. Maybe persuade some people to drop PC's for Mac's in the process but in short say, "hey, if you want cool. You have to come to our side".
The margin on the iPod's isn't that great. So they wait until the price of Toshiba HD's comes down in price so that the iPod makes a healthy profit (even when they've reduced the price slightly) and then release it to the PC world.
Volia, they're making all the money on the PC owners snapping up a high profit product and at the same time, inconveniancing them, because they don't own a Mac.
Which brings me to my final point: why are there an endless stream of second-guessers who figure they know that Apple would have made more sales/money if they had done differently?
Apple would have more sales if they'd released the iPod to PC's at the beginning. They made more money this way holding off.
As for second-guessers, they'll always be them - and sometimes they're right too.
See it. *Actually* used it.
Upsides: Symbian, rock solid, lovely UI, loads of apps, decent web-browser, expandable, cool apps already available for it.
Downsides: The stylus is flimsy plastic that clips to the side, the keyboard presses onto the screen (its a flip) which harks back to the problems of the R380-or-something (in which the buttons wore down and weren't as responsive). There is a camera (which is good) but makes the damn thing rather heavy.
"Service Pack 1 for Windows XP itself is not readily accessible to consumers, and thus the mechanism purportedly settling the antitrust case is, by definition, not readily accessible," ProComp wrote in the letter.
Whilst the point about non-IE browsers not being able to access the site is valid, the fact it takes 5.5 hours over a modem is not. It's not Microsofts fault people are using a 56k modem or that it's not under 50k! I'm unsure about the $9.99 for a CD point myself - the proposed settlement didn't mention anything about them having to forcibly give it to anyone and this price is no different to their usual practises.
The third violation, ProComp charges, is that the middleware control is not intuitive and comes with no Help file for understanding how to use it.
So? It does what it's supposed to do. Do you really think they're going to spend money on making it all nice and pretty when end users aren't going to even touch it? They provided the tool and it does the job it says it does - so what if there is no help file?
In the fifth alleged violation, ProComp said the updated Windows XP's My Music folder called up Internet Explorer for online shopping, even after the group had selected Netscape as the default browser and had hidden access to IE.
Call me skeptical, but this could just be an oversight. We all know that Microsofts testing is, ahem, a little erratic. It might not be though, but lets not jump to conclusions.
It is still worth pointing out that this is a proposed settlement. Microsoft haven't actually signed anything yet.
Yes, I once had an email like that. I hate txt'er/l33t speak at the best of times, but important business emails are definately not the place and it took me twice as long as usual to work out what on earth they were going on about.
You're right, except that both the Slashdot title and the BBC title are wrong. Quote the BBC:
(emphasis mine)
So actually, what Nokia is saying is that sitting outside a company and using their bandwidth is stealing and not actually the act of warchalking.
No seriously. Writing a program to draw pretty stuff was all well and good, but when you could hit run and actually get that turtle (with the see-through green shell) to start drawing it on a huge sheet of A1 paper ...
Now that was seriously cool.
In a competitive market-place you're always going to find different implementations of the same thing.
You're right, there is no purpose. But if one thing has the market place then it doesn't generally foster the competitive spirit to put that product forward (ie. company sitting on their laurels).
Generally, in the end, the better product wins.
I understand your gripe, but life doesn't work that way and never will. The quicker you realise that and get used to it, the less frustrated you'll be.
Anyway, here is it again for Taco:
Put this in your .procmailrc file:
Of course, this is a bit drastic by throwing every file that ends in that type into the bin, so you may want to replace it with something like /home/username/mail/viruses
Finally (and this bit is especially for Taco) you will probably need to have a .forward file with the following in it:
Once you've done that, then finally we'll never heard again from you how many viruses a day you can get.
I can videotape HBO all day long, then I can take that videotape and copy it 90 billion times. or I can record HBO with my Tv capture card and thne copy that Divx 90 bajillion times..
Unless I'm wrong (i'm in the UK, so might easily be), the only time you'd actually not be able to record HBO is if your video recorder or TV Capture Card acted upon the copy restriction bit being set.
In other words, the original poster might not be wrong. HBO may be sending the copy restriction bit with its programming, it's just that your capture devices are ignoring it because they don't know what to do with it.
Some day (if we're not careful), all recorders and TV cards will understand what this bit means, and act on it ...
When I install Linux, and it comes to anything to do with filesystems, I just go with whatever default it gives me.
I suspect I'm not exactly alone.
So ... what compelling reason is there for me to use any other filesystem? Being more stable or better with data loss is nice, but considering I've only ever had this problem once, doesn't mean that i'll leap up and down going "oo oo! got to have blahFS!" any time soon.
To give you an example, FAT16 to FAT32 was the fact you could have larger partitions. FAT32 to NTFS was because of permissions and security.
But whatever we have now (can't remember, i barely look) to XFS? What *compelling* absolutely-must-have reason do I have to go change from whatever my installer suggests putting on for me?
Or should I just stick with what the installer suggests from now until eternity?
For the record, I recommend using Perl2exe and avoid installing the Perl runtimes!
I've used Perl2exe for, admitidally smaller programs, and it works great. Check out the options, you can either compile into one large exe, or use one (yes, one) additional dll and reduce the size of the program considerably.
So basically, you have the best of both worlds. If it's only ever going to be one application, do a full binary and deal with the size. If there could be one or more, then consider using the dll.
Yes, there are 2 downsides, one is the size of the application - but compaired to the size and hassle of installing the whole Perl distribution for every machine, it's a no-brainer.
The other being the ability to edit the code. Well if there are individuals out there who need to edit it, they'll have the perl runtimes and you can just give them the source. But giving normal users carte blanche to edit the code is asking for hundreds of support calls.
If options are needed code them in rather than get them to edit the source.
Because not everyone wants to have a PC in the same room as your television.
Most non-geeks I know have their PC in a seperate room.
Personally I think a combined DVD player, console and Tivo in one would be a killer. I seriously don't fancy paying out for three items of kit and having three boxes sitting underneath the television.
But, this isn't really Tivo functionality. Hell, I doubt I'd need all the stuff Tivo has, but recording, time stretching, on screen programming and on screen television guides are pretty much a must.
I'll watch the space.
[snipped incoherant rant]
Umm, what on earth are you going on about? I'm not talking about whether Direct3D or OpenGL is better or not.
The point is, on slashdot, buying another company and using their product seems to be considered something that only Microsoft would do, rare and very bad.
When in fact it's a very common thing and often done because it makes more sense than developing something in house from scratch.
What is it with this opinion that it's bad if you've bought another company that does something you want but better?
People here on Slashdot seem to make it out that it's a bad thing if you don't start on a project from scratch and work at it. Maybe so, but sometimes the maths just don't add up and it makes more sense to purchase another company that's doing what you want (but generally in a better way). You get the technology and the expertise.
It's fairly common practise in the IT world, not just by Microsoft.
Indeed, because if the desktop is more appealing then more people will use it and if more people use it then companies will start to consider it a viable market for software (applications and drivers) and when there is greater support for Linux then more people will move to it because it has the applications they want and so on and so on ...
Microsoft are already doing Linux a favour with their licence changes, but that doesn't mean that we should expect people that are brave enough to change to come to the Linux side (at the moment, I'd say they're more likely to go to Apple, as they have consistency and ease of use down to a tee)
I have to say, it does look very nice and I (being in the "lets have one desktop and do it right for the sake of consistency and adoption" camp) will definately be installing it when it is released.
I started a long email about it, but decided against sending it. If you're going to label me as a troll then I stick you firmly in the "la la la not going to listen to you" camp so it wouldn't make any point anyway.
However for a free 2p's worth: I suggest you strip all personal opinion out and back it up with hard facts. And ditch the ONE link you have saying Word is rubbish because the facts on that are not only opinion but badly argued and rather silly (This Ford is rubbish, because there is too many buttons on the dashboard that might mean that people spend too much time with them, rather than driving -- it sounds dumb right? Now look at his reason for Word being rubbish).
Also, try a few suggestions. Now you've told us that Word is rubbish, you need some credible solutions/suggestions backed up with facts.
Otherwise it's no surprise to me that you're getting very little response. Trying to persuade people to move away from something they are comfortable with is difficult.
If you implement any of my suggestions, then I wish you all the best. If you stick your fingers in your ears, call me a troll and sing "la la" at the top of your voice then it would be no surprise to me if your cruisade failed miserably.
Finally, having used LaTeX for several years writing up dissertations, I can attest now that I'd have far rather use Word, it's faster, easier, more user-friendly and the output is almost as good. Given a choice between spending hours over pixel perfect positioning & formatting and not quite pixel perfect but substantially more time to do what I want to do - then there isn't much of a choice.
(and yes, I've even had the delights of hand writting Postscript - which was "interesting")
I stopped reading when I hit this:
Word produces probably the worst output and is the slowest and most tedious to work in of any document preparation system I've seen in the past 15 years. I find it remarkable that when people are presented a choice between a structural mark-up system (what you mean is what get) versus a visual mark-up system (what you see is all you get) people opt for the latter. For more on this point see section 5.2.
This is all personal opinion. Having used other document markup formats (yes, even writing Postscript by hand - we did it at university) I complete disagree with the comment "the worst output and is the slowest and most tedious to work in of any document preparation system".
If he'd stuck to the facts and stopped throwing in personal opinion it would have been more credible - but to make a comment like that and advocate Latex (for gods sake, Latex over Word - are you kidding?), sorry, but no.
Open tabs instead of windows for->
Middle-click or control-click of links in a Web page.
Thanks for this. The problem with this is that if a hyperlink has a target of _BLANK then it still opens in a new window rather than a new tab.
Whilst this is a sort of solution, it means I need to know if the link is going to open a new window (and then click accordingly) before I open it.
I can point you to a senior C developer who didn't know how to implement a linked list.
Your example is simply an extreme. There are plenty of developers of any language out there that are clueless to even the most basic concepts.
Don't knock a language based on a couple of clueless people, otherwise you'll end up knocking every other language whilst you're at it.
It's nice, however I'd far rather than when a new window is opened, it is put in a new tab rather than firing up a new window. CrazyBrowser does this and it's great!
Finally, is there any way (a la CrazyBrowser again) that I can set up a "Group" of bookmarks, so with one click I can open 7 or 8 pages in tabs all at once?
These two features alone (including the pop-up blocker) keep me with CrazyBrowser. If Moz can't do them (and I'm sure it can) then it would be a shame because I'd end up probably sticking with what I have.
Unfortunately I normally get about 3k/sec from the download site :o(
If a VB programmer has "dragged and dropped" an application together that I need and I can afford, then I fail to see what makes them any less valuable than the C and inline assembler programmers who haven't done such a thing.
There are plenty of good and useful VB applications out there, same as there are plenty of crap and bloated C and inline assembler applications out there.
Rather than mainly scoring applications based on the language they were written in, you should give priority to the task they perform. Personally (as a user) I don't give a toss what language something is written in, if it works and does the job.
Is there some sort of preferences manager that deals with all the options this new functionality is bringing about? The reason I ask is that whilst type ahead find looks and sounds rather nice, I don't think that adding a line of text to a flat text file is exactly the most user-friendly way of doing things. Especially not in a Windows world anyway.
On a side note, it's like when NS7 is mentioned without the pop up ad filter and you invariably get the posting that says "edit this file, add this line, remove this comment and it's done!". Might be easy to us, but probably not to those people that we'd like to encourage to use something apart from IE.