Your "guess" is anything but "educated". Why don't you take about 30 seconds on Google to "educate" yourself before spewing yet more uninformed tripe onto this site. It's people like you that make this site such a chore to wade through in search of the rare informed, intelligent opinion. You really think MS spent 4 years and several million $ on design and implementation of.NET and overlooked something this basic? And if you think.NET is just a carbon copy of Java, you have even less of a clue than I thought. Try reading up on the security, versioning, and deployment features of.NET - Java doesn't even come close.
Plus.NET supports "OS features" (application isolation, capability-based security) better than any of the languages he discusses..NET (i.e. the CLR) really does provide something close to a "virtual OS". E.g., you have AppDomains, which are the analog of OS processes and provide application isolation, and have GetData/SetData methods which are the equivalent of environment variables in an OS process. And of course the CLR has its own threads (which don't necessarily map directly onto OS threads), and memory manager (really not essentially different from Java in this respect). The security model is capability-based all the way; a method and all its callers must have the appropriate permissions to perform any potentially dangerous operation.
Yes, Win2K *theoretically* supports mount points. When I was young and foolish I thought I'd set up my Win2K box just like a Unix box, with just one drive letter and all other filesystems mounted within that single-rooted hierarchy. Well, this worked great at first, except that the partition corresponding to c: was only about 2G and filled up rather quickly. This wasn't in itself a problem, as I was reserving it for strictly OS-related stuff. But every app I tried to install would inform me that I had no more drive space, even though the actual filesystem mounted at the install path had plenty. I soon decided it wasn't worth the hassle and reverted to the stupid MS-DOS "drive letter for every device" cruft. The bottom line is that implementing a low-level feature like mount points is useless if applications and higher-level parts of the OS don't know how to deal with it. Pretty much the same applies to NTFS hard links - they seem to be an afterthought (possibly just for the sake of the POSIX subsystem).
Actually, I was forced to use MS Word to write C code a couple of summers ago (for an open-source project), when I was unemployed and had no computer available except the terminals at the local library. I'd drive 6 hours to my parents' place every couple weeks to compile the code on their old 486 I had installed Linux on. I've never been able to use Word since without flashbacks of that horror...
If you meant to imply that reductio ad absurdum is a fallacy, it's not. As a matter of fact, it's used in a LOT of math proofs (assume the negation of what you're trying to prove, and show that it leads to a contradiction).
In other news, MS recently announced a new language "B#", which takes the "unsafe" features of C# still further, while doing away with any pretense of object-orientation. Sources inside the company who've seen B# sample code say it looks remarkably similar to another well-known programming language, but would not say which...
Here's an excerpt from an article a few clicks away from that story:
C# is also expected to support IL, a method of development that permits developers to access code dumped in the garbage collector, without wasting time moving it back into the main development environment. A set of workarounds currently exists to permit access to dumped code, but implementing them soaks up developers' valuable time.
I had some issues with UltraEdit and Unicode files as well. Its default behavior is to autodetect UTF-8 files and display them as UTF-16 little-endian, byte-order marker and all. (The rationale is to allow editing of UTF-8 files by hand.) I found this behavior extremely confusing (I thought the Unicode conversion routines I was testing were at fault), so I emailed the developer. His response was prompt, courteous, and helpful. I just had to go into Advanced->Configuration, disable "Autodetect UTF-8", and everything was fine.
You might want to check out Blind Guardian's "Nightfall in Middle-Earth" (based on the Silmarillion). The metal take on Tolkien might put some people off, but it's become one of my favorite albums.
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Your "guess" is anything but "educated". Why don't you take about 30 seconds on Google to "educate" yourself before spewing yet more uninformed tripe onto this site. It's people like you that make this site such a chore to wade through in search of the rare informed, intelligent opinion. You really think MS spent 4 years and several million $ on design and implementation of .NET and overlooked something this basic? And if you think .NET is just a carbon copy of Java, you have even less of a clue than I thought. Try reading up on the security, versioning, and deployment features of .NET - Java doesn't even come close.
Plus .NET supports "OS features" (application isolation, capability-based security) better than any of the languages he discusses. .NET (i.e. the CLR) really does provide something close to a "virtual OS". E.g., you have AppDomains, which are the analog of OS processes and provide application isolation, and have GetData/SetData methods which are the equivalent of environment variables in an OS process. And of course the CLR has its own threads (which don't necessarily map directly onto OS threads), and memory manager (really not essentially different from Java in this respect). The security model is capability-based all the way; a method and all its callers must have the appropriate permissions to perform any potentially dangerous operation.
If you meant to imply that reductio ad absurdum is a fallacy, it's not. As a matter of fact, it's used in a LOT of math proofs (assume the negation of what you're trying to prove, and show that it leads to a contradiction).
No, they now use Source Depot (completely command-line based [but Perl module and tons of GUI's available], VERY fast).
In other news, MS recently announced a new language "B#", which takes the "unsafe" features of C# still further, while doing away with any pretense of object-orientation. Sources inside the company who've seen B# sample code say it looks remarkably similar to another well-known programming language, but would not say which...
Here's an excerpt from an article a few clicks away from that story:
C# is also expected to support IL, a method of development that permits developers to access code dumped in the garbage collector, without wasting time moving it back into the main development environment. A set of workarounds currently exists to permit access to dumped code, but implementing them soaks up developers' valuable time.
WTF???
I had some issues with UltraEdit and Unicode files as well. Its default behavior is to autodetect UTF-8 files and display them as UTF-16 little-endian, byte-order marker and all. (The rationale is to allow editing of UTF-8 files by hand.) I found this behavior extremely confusing (I thought the Unicode conversion routines I was testing were at fault), so I emailed the developer. His response was prompt, courteous, and helpful. I just had to go into Advanced->Configuration, disable "Autodetect UTF-8", and everything was fine.
You might want to check out Blind Guardian's "Nightfall in Middle-Earth" (based on the Silmarillion). The metal take on Tolkien might put some people off, but it's become one of my favorite albums.