B: The "reliable" news outfits have become terrible lackeys for whoever it is that is hand-feeding them the story. ABC running stories about how great Pirates of the Carribean is. USA Today parroting lines about weapons of mass destruction without doing any actual investigation. CNN running company-sponsored fluff pieces about how great Enron is, shortly before it crashes and burns. Fox news reporting anti-war protests as "five or six thousand" people when the official estimates were closer to five or six hundred thousand.
The traditional media outlets have been doing a terrible job, and deserve to lose. We need ways of acquiring news that involves a critical eye. This is why The Daily Show took off like it did: they weren't afraid to call Bull$*&%. We've devolved from muckrakers to yes-men. Bloggers are a return to muckraking at a time when it is sorely needed.
Hear that Reuters? Get off your ass and think critically, or get off the stage!
It could be that those companies that are run by those who undervalue their workers and and mismanage the companies towards the top are doomed to failure.
Or those companies whose management is there for love of the business tend to do better.
Or a company desperately in need of help is likely to dump huge sums of money on acquiring the most expensive CEO they can, in the hope of a turnaround.
And now with downloadable games, anyone can make an Xbox 360 game for less than 50k.
There will always be ridiculously expensive games made. But you don't have to spend 20 million dollars to have a big hit. And you certainly don't have to spend 20 million dollars to have a creative title.
Next gen makes a lot of things easier. If you choose to use that power to hit new highs in terms of expensive graphics capabilities and content generation, then more power to you. But some studios will use that power to make fun and innovative games for less than it would have cost them to make the game on the PS2.
We're already seeing uncreative studios and publishers choking out and dying off. Let's hope this trend continues.
And to be fair, he said "'well those were positive questions', in a vaguely sarcastic tone." He was probably hoping to give a mini-interview to help prop sony up, and found himself defending her against rather agressive negative questioning.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad people are finally moving away from softballing everyone. But I'd think that in that situation, an emotionally driven comment like "well those were positive questions" is completely understandable.
There are valid reasons to be upset with Sony right now. This is not one of them.
Not to contradict you too much, but that "crossover play" has been around unsuccessfully for years. Not only can the Gamecube connect to the DS and the PS2 to the PSP (sort of), but others as well. The Playstation 1 had a portable memory card / player in the form of the Pocketstation. The Dreamcast proved the potential for online gaming. But every Dreamcast memory unit was also a little playable portable console called a VMU, functionality which many people now have forgotten as nothing good came of it. Likewise, the dreamcast featured connectivity with the Neo Geo Pocket.
Considering how many years we've had console-to-handheld connectivity, and how little has come of it, it seems safe to say that the connectivity is a gimmock rather than a useful feature. No great games have come of the union, and not much promise for the future remains.
Perhaps when handhelds incorporate GPS recievers we'll have some interesting connectivity options, but for now the actual functionality remains more of an attempt to sell systems than an attempt to make great games.
Allow me to throw in another nod to the Kensington. I've used all sorts of input devices as a game developer, and I keep coming back to that nice big ball for everyday mousing. It's not as sensitive as a mouse for FPS, and is really not sensitive enough for drawing, but for point-and-click it can't be beat. I have a trackball, mouse, and graphics tablet on my desk, and unless I'm doing fidgety graphics work, I usually find myself reaching for the trackball.
As a bonus to the original poster, the buttons are fully configurable. If it would help to have mouse 1 be the upper right button, or lower left button, it can do that. Or you can heavy-palm the lower right button with the side of your hand, without involving your fingers at all.
Seriously. Get a Smart Joy adapter and a Reload Pedal, and remap the joystick input to mouse click... though you may have to unscrew the top and cut the spring in half for easier clicking, like I did. Alternatively, get a mouse with very large buttons, remove the trackball / tape over the sensor, and leave it on the floor as a secondary mouse. Both sets of clicks will register.
The key to RSI, is to not find one "optimal" solution. Switch keyboards and mice throughout the day. Change your position completely. Walk over and talk to someone about a spec they had written. Put your feet up. Take your feet down. Really, the reason we get RSI is because we do one thing repeatedly. No matter how ergonomic that one sitting position or wrist angle may be, if you stay fixed in that position eventually your ligaments and joints will break down. Change position, take coffee breaks, mouse lefty for a little, turn your body to the side... anything to keep from falling into the trap of the one perfect body position.
I wanted to write a humorous response, but the answer is simply: yes.
Basically, My Space does all of those sappy things that the internet was supposed to do years ago. The content is all by users. It's all about helping people network with eachother. It appeals to people's vanity as well as their curiosity. It happens to have a great underserved niche (indie bands) that tent pegs it even if they aren't the primary users. It's naughty. It's viral.
Basically, put control in the hands of your users, and let them work for the communal site. Find some underserved niche and add features to support their usage habits. Make sure everyone joins. Don't censor interesting stuff. Be a community builder rather than a content provider.
I have spoken to many people who have made these games, and even they admit they just aren't fun yet.
You have the powerful model, the Everquest model, which caught on here and made someone a lot of money. Now every toothbrush salesman who has 40 million to throw at an MMO wants an Everyquest model game. So they want swordfighting, they want adventure, they want light questing, and they want a bajillion hours of content, updated in 6-month expansion packs. And with World of Warcraft, they want auction houses, even more casual fighting, 30 classes, tens to hundreds of thousands of pieces artwork, vs and solo play, and tons and tons of "crafts" to grind.
They assume that WoW won over Everyquest II by doing more, and therefore demand more of the same from the people producing them.
Thankfully there are some experimental other MMO games out there, creating new genres of play on a shoestring budget with more artistic freedoms. You have to dig for them, but they're worth finding.
1. You're not violating copyright law in the book example because you're not actually copying anything. It might be considered misrepresentation, but not copyright violation.
2. The companies in question don't sell videos, they rent them. That falls under public performance for profit (I believe), which generally has the most stringent protections.
3.1 I still don't know where I fall on this issue. On the one hand, once out of the director's hands the movie no longer belongs to them. The experience now belongs to the people who have had it. The idea of controlling that experience as people see fit (as long as it is adequately documented) seems like it empowers people.
3.2 On the other hand, it is flagrant copyright violation for sake of grown men and women who haven't grown enough to handle the thought of seeing a boob. Keeping their world sanitized will probably only keep them in their child-like state of development. If people only see what they want to see, their views will never evolve or grow.
It had been said for many years that bees to not posess large enough wings to fly, and therefore they don't.
Recently, it was discovered that the bending of the bees' wings helped to create and pull vortecies of air from the base of the wings out to the tips, tripling the effective lift for the same surface area.
My guess is you're quite correct... until we move to a soft-wing design, we're going to have a heck of a time getting advantage to ornithoptor flight. And non-rigid industrial quality materials isn't exactly what our society is known for producing right now.
I think you hit the nail on the head, even if you didn't quite realize it.
The thing that needs improvement most about e-mail is not the visual metaphor, though there are tweaks coming in all the time to the 30 year old interface.
The thing that needs improvement most about e-mail is the fucking spam everywhere. Like Usenet, E-mail has become a torrent of spam. Ask anyone off the street what they hate about their inbox, and they'll say that it's stuffed with penis enlargement advertisements.
I tend to agree with the brother poster, that e-mail will probably not be fixed, but is being replaced by instant messaging with delayed reception and other technologies. The crapflood is to inherent in the system to fix without completely replacing it.
No virus worries, no CDs, no license keys, it'll just work.
No backup, no ownership, no security, no privacy, no upgrading, no DVD player.
Really, when you look at the bulk of what costs money in a cheap desktop system: the monitor, the mobo, HDD, etc, you don't really save that much by putting it on the network. A solid system can be had for under 300 total. Computer-level text is unreadable on anything less than 1080p, the most expensive high-def monitors you can buy, so you'll need a monitor for the forseeable future. You'll also need a CPU capable of handling a flow of incoming data for processing / printing (unless you're sending raw 1080 video, at which point... wow.). You'll need enough HDD space remotely to store everything anyway, along with enough local flash to boot up. And, of course, if your network ever goes down, so does your computer.
Ultimately this saves you maybe 20% overall, due to efficiencies of shared hardware. That hardly seems revolutionary enough on it's own to catch fire. BTW, the late 90's are littered with the bodies of companies who tried to do exactly this. And that was back when desktop computers actually cost something.
And can anybody name a better candidate than Apple?
What, you mean the guys who failed to put a dent in it for the last twenty years?
A better candidate than Apple?
Any candidate one cares to name is immediately not a great candidate to take down Microsoft. The one to take down microsoft will necessarily need to come out of left field. Revolutionary ideas are generally unexpected, and no incremental improvement will be enough to take over the market.
But there is a definate difference between allowing an application on a personal machine / network, and a corporate (or in my case academic) network.
I always find corporate networks overblock to the detriment of its users. Need to run SSH to get an informaiton packet from a remote computer? Sorry, only Admins can SSH. Need to FTP files from your home server where you were doing some work over the weekend? Sorry, no ftp. Need to use AOL instant messenger to harvest viruses? Of course AOL is OK, the president uses it, right?
The fact of the matter is you don't know what software your users will need to run. My work environment is heavily AIM centric (don't ask). Sometimes you need to SSH. Sometimes you need to torrent a linux iso. Sometimes you need to write a custom Autohotkey script. Sometimes you need to VPN into a supplier's remote network.
Users aren't idiots. Protect them as best you can while allowing them to do what they need to do. Don't be one of those people who keeps saying that "X, Y, and Z only are allowed." Sometimes I just need to chat with a colleague who is only on MSN, and don't have the time to beg an administrator to allow legitimate but unexpected network usage.
*=I'm guessing that was the Games Division's fault.
That turned out to be all of Microsoft's "home" division, which included the Xbox as well as... wait for it... MSN. Microsoft had earlier said they were going to dip into their warchest to do a massive 1 billion dollar blitz to pull MSN out of the dumps. If it's the same year I'm thinking of, that was the year Halo 2 was released. By most people's estimations the Xbox had a probably profitable if not simply less lossy year. So it is quite plausible that the major losses from Microsoft that year came from fruitlessly advertising a dial-up service that nobody uses anymore, along with a search engine that was desperately in need of a revamp. And any other secret iLoo projects they may have canned, development of the X360, etc.
The actual behavior in question here really isn't "Did Microsoft break european antitrust laws" but rather "Did Microsoft disobey the european courts." Sorry if I didn't make that clearer in my post.
Their "fine" for their illegal activities was that they had to open their protocols and level the playing field... basically saying "stop doing that". Their "fine" for disobeying the first court's ruling was 1.4 billion dollars.
Never disobey a court ruling without extremely sturdy legal ground. They really hate that.
Well, I guess parking and speeding tickets should be based on how much money you have, too. That's how some countries do it, but do you really want to get fined $30,000 for parking at a hydrant?
If you have a car, and you park at a hydrant, you'll get a ticket. If you refuse to pay the ticket, you'll get a summons. If you refuse to accept the court's ruling, you'll get a fine. If you refuse to pay your fine, you'll get a bigger fine. If you refuse the bigger fine, you'll get your car reposessed.
Gartner estimates Microsoft's warchest at 38 billion. 1.4 billion is nothing to sneeze about, but in perspective it's also nothing they can't pay.
Now, the greater likelyhood is that they'll spend 100 million on good lawyers who will tie up the EU ruling for as long as possible, while shifting responsibilities away from Microsoft Europe to a new subsidiary wholly owned by Microsoft USA, then declare Microsoft Europe bankrupt and liquidate one or two token offices.
I'm curious as to where 1.4 billion will go. In a national budget, it isn't a tremendous amount of money, but I can hear the hands reaching out already. Or they'll just give 1.4 billion in licenses to schools.
Special folders don't exist on the second drive. Only the real folders do. So your desktop folder is still in a folder on the drive, you just have to know where to look. In this case, that's Drive:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop. The virtual folder itself ceases to be where you expect it to be, as Windows is not searching your secondary drive for them, but it continues to be where it is.
If you want to know where a folder really is on the drive, just do a search for a file you think is in the drive.
In terms of Folders, Windows adds the contents of the folders together. If instead of being meticulous about your upgrade, you simply copy over your entire "Documents and Settings" folder, all of the contents of the folders that were virtual before will be added to the new folders that are virtual now. This works better if you keep usernames the same between machines. Nothing should break. I'd recommend against directly copying your program folders or windows folders, but nothing from there would work anyway.
I've done upgrades like this before, direct drive-to-drive through the intermediary OS. It really is the fastest way to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
A: Slashdot is a Blog
B: The "reliable" news outfits have become terrible lackeys for whoever it is that is hand-feeding them the story. ABC running stories about how great Pirates of the Carribean is. USA Today parroting lines about weapons of mass destruction without doing any actual investigation. CNN running company-sponsored fluff pieces about how great Enron is, shortly before it crashes and burns. Fox news reporting anti-war protests as "five or six thousand" people when the official estimates were closer to five or six hundred thousand.
The traditional media outlets have been doing a terrible job, and deserve to lose. We need ways of acquiring news that involves a critical eye. This is why The Daily Show took off like it did: they weren't afraid to call Bull$*&%. We've devolved from muckrakers to yes-men. Bloggers are a return to muckraking at a time when it is sorely needed.
Hear that Reuters? Get off your ass and think critically, or get off the stage!
Darn it... Now my evil plan actually will be foiled by a 5-year-old.
It could be that those companies that are run by those who undervalue their workers and and mismanage the companies towards the top are doomed to failure.
Or those companies whose management is there for love of the business tend to do better.
Or a company desperately in need of help is likely to dump huge sums of money on acquiring the most expensive CEO they can, in the hope of a turnaround.
And now with downloadable games, anyone can make an Xbox 360 game for less than 50k.
There will always be ridiculously expensive games made. But you don't have to spend 20 million dollars to have a big hit. And you certainly don't have to spend 20 million dollars to have a creative title.
Next gen makes a lot of things easier. If you choose to use that power to hit new highs in terms of expensive graphics capabilities and content generation, then more power to you. But some studios will use that power to make fun and innovative games for less than it would have cost them to make the game on the PS2.
We're already seeing uncreative studios and publishers choking out and dying off. Let's hope this trend continues.
And in this case, the writer(s) probably thought they were inventing a new phrase.
Come now. The word you're looking for is "blogger." You can only stretch the term "writer" so far.
And to be fair, he said "'well those were positive questions', in a vaguely sarcastic tone." He was probably hoping to give a mini-interview to help prop sony up, and found himself defending her against rather agressive negative questioning.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad people are finally moving away from softballing everyone. But I'd think that in that situation, an emotionally driven comment like "well those were positive questions" is completely understandable.
There are valid reasons to be upset with Sony right now. This is not one of them.
Not to contradict you too much, but that "crossover play" has been around unsuccessfully for years. Not only can the Gamecube connect to the DS and the PS2 to the PSP (sort of), but others as well. The Playstation 1 had a portable memory card / player in the form of the Pocketstation. The Dreamcast proved the potential for online gaming. But every Dreamcast memory unit was also a little playable portable console called a VMU, functionality which many people now have forgotten as nothing good came of it. Likewise, the dreamcast featured connectivity with the Neo Geo Pocket.
Considering how many years we've had console-to-handheld connectivity, and how little has come of it, it seems safe to say that the connectivity is a gimmock rather than a useful feature. No great games have come of the union, and not much promise for the future remains.
Perhaps when handhelds incorporate GPS recievers we'll have some interesting connectivity options, but for now the actual functionality remains more of an attempt to sell systems than an attempt to make great games.
Allow me to throw in another nod to the Kensington. I've used all sorts of input devices as a game developer, and I keep coming back to that nice big ball for everyday mousing. It's not as sensitive as a mouse for FPS, and is really not sensitive enough for drawing, but for point-and-click it can't be beat. I have a trackball, mouse, and graphics tablet on my desk, and unless I'm doing fidgety graphics work, I usually find myself reaching for the trackball.
As a bonus to the original poster, the buttons are fully configurable. If it would help to have mouse 1 be the upper right button, or lower left button, it can do that. Or you can heavy-palm the lower right button with the side of your hand, without involving your fingers at all.
Use your feet to click your mouse.
Seriously. Get a Smart Joy adapter and a Reload Pedal, and remap the joystick input to mouse click... though you may have to unscrew the top and cut the spring in half for easier clicking, like I did. Alternatively, get a mouse with very large buttons, remove the trackball / tape over the sensor, and leave it on the floor as a secondary mouse. Both sets of clicks will register.
The key to RSI, is to not find one "optimal" solution. Switch keyboards and mice throughout the day. Change your position completely. Walk over and talk to someone about a spec they had written. Put your feet up. Take your feet down. Really, the reason we get RSI is because we do one thing repeatedly. No matter how ergonomic that one sitting position or wrist angle may be, if you stay fixed in that position eventually your ligaments and joints will break down. Change position, take coffee breaks, mouse lefty for a little, turn your body to the side... anything to keep from falling into the trap of the one perfect body position.
I wanted to write a humorous response, but the answer is simply: yes.
Basically, My Space does all of those sappy things that the internet was supposed to do years ago. The content is all by users. It's all about helping people network with eachother. It appeals to people's vanity as well as their curiosity. It happens to have a great underserved niche (indie bands) that tent pegs it even if they aren't the primary users. It's naughty. It's viral.
Basically, put control in the hands of your users, and let them work for the communal site. Find some underserved niche and add features to support their usage habits. Make sure everyone joins. Don't censor interesting stuff. Be a community builder rather than a content provider.
Let them build it, and they will come.
I have spoken to many people who have made these games, and even they admit they just aren't fun yet.
You have the powerful model, the Everquest model, which caught on here and made someone a lot of money. Now every toothbrush salesman who has 40 million to throw at an MMO wants an Everyquest model game. So they want swordfighting, they want adventure, they want light questing, and they want a bajillion hours of content, updated in 6-month expansion packs. And with World of Warcraft, they want auction houses, even more casual fighting, 30 classes, tens to hundreds of thousands of pieces artwork, vs and solo play, and tons and tons of "crafts" to grind.
They assume that WoW won over Everyquest II by doing more, and therefore demand more of the same from the people producing them.
Thankfully there are some experimental other MMO games out there, creating new genres of play on a shoestring budget with more artistic freedoms. You have to dig for them, but they're worth finding.
1. You're not violating copyright law in the book example because you're not actually copying anything. It might be considered misrepresentation, but not copyright violation.
2. The companies in question don't sell videos, they rent them. That falls under public performance for profit (I believe), which generally has the most stringent protections.
3.1 I still don't know where I fall on this issue. On the one hand, once out of the director's hands the movie no longer belongs to them. The experience now belongs to the people who have had it. The idea of controlling that experience as people see fit (as long as it is adequately documented) seems like it empowers people.
3.2 On the other hand, it is flagrant copyright violation for sake of grown men and women who haven't grown enough to handle the thought of seeing a boob. Keeping their world sanitized will probably only keep them in their child-like state of development. If people only see what they want to see, their views will never evolve or grow.
It had been said for many years that bees to not posess large enough wings to fly, and therefore they don't.
Recently, it was discovered that the bending of the bees' wings helped to create and pull vortecies of air from the base of the wings out to the tips, tripling the effective lift for the same surface area.
My guess is you're quite correct... until we move to a soft-wing design, we're going to have a heck of a time getting advantage to ornithoptor flight. And non-rigid industrial quality materials isn't exactly what our society is known for producing right now.
I think you hit the nail on the head, even if you didn't quite realize it.
The thing that needs improvement most about e-mail is not the visual metaphor, though there are tweaks coming in all the time to the 30 year old interface.
The thing that needs improvement most about e-mail is the fucking spam everywhere. Like Usenet, E-mail has become a torrent of spam. Ask anyone off the street what they hate about their inbox, and they'll say that it's stuffed with penis enlargement advertisements.
I tend to agree with the brother poster, that e-mail will probably not be fixed, but is being replaced by instant messaging with delayed reception and other technologies. The crapflood is to inherent in the system to fix without completely replacing it.
Judging by the english coming out of japan, a simplification would be a good thing.
No virus worries, no CDs, no license keys, it'll just work.
No backup, no ownership, no security, no privacy, no upgrading, no DVD player.
Really, when you look at the bulk of what costs money in a cheap desktop system: the monitor, the mobo, HDD, etc, you don't really save that much by putting it on the network. A solid system can be had for under 300 total. Computer-level text is unreadable on anything less than 1080p, the most expensive high-def monitors you can buy, so you'll need a monitor for the forseeable future. You'll also need a CPU capable of handling a flow of incoming data for processing / printing (unless you're sending raw 1080 video, at which point... wow.). You'll need enough HDD space remotely to store everything anyway, along with enough local flash to boot up. And, of course, if your network ever goes down, so does your computer.
Ultimately this saves you maybe 20% overall, due to efficiencies of shared hardware. That hardly seems revolutionary enough on it's own to catch fire. BTW, the late 90's are littered with the bodies of companies who tried to do exactly this. And that was back when desktop computers actually cost something.
And can anybody name a better candidate than Apple?
What, you mean the guys who failed to put a dent in it for the last twenty years?
A better candidate than Apple?
Any candidate one cares to name is immediately not a great candidate to take down Microsoft. The one to take down microsoft will necessarily need to come out of left field. Revolutionary ideas are generally unexpected, and no incremental improvement will be enough to take over the market.
But there is a definate difference between allowing an application on a personal machine / network, and a corporate (or in my case academic) network.
I always find corporate networks overblock to the detriment of its users. Need to run SSH to get an informaiton packet from a remote computer? Sorry, only Admins can SSH. Need to FTP files from your home server where you were doing some work over the weekend? Sorry, no ftp. Need to use AOL instant messenger to harvest viruses? Of course AOL is OK, the president uses it, right?
The fact of the matter is you don't know what software your users will need to run. My work environment is heavily AIM centric (don't ask). Sometimes you need to SSH. Sometimes you need to torrent a linux iso. Sometimes you need to write a custom Autohotkey script. Sometimes you need to VPN into a supplier's remote network.
Users aren't idiots. Protect them as best you can while allowing them to do what they need to do. Don't be one of those people who keeps saying that "X, Y, and Z only are allowed." Sometimes I just need to chat with a colleague who is only on MSN, and don't have the time to beg an administrator to allow legitimate but unexpected network usage.
*=I'm guessing that was the Games Division's fault.
That turned out to be all of Microsoft's "home" division, which included the Xbox as well as... wait for it... MSN. Microsoft had earlier said they were going to dip into their warchest to do a massive 1 billion dollar blitz to pull MSN out of the dumps. If it's the same year I'm thinking of, that was the year Halo 2 was released. By most people's estimations the Xbox had a probably profitable if not simply less lossy year. So it is quite plausible that the major losses from Microsoft that year came from fruitlessly advertising a dial-up service that nobody uses anymore, along with a search engine that was desperately in need of a revamp. And any other secret iLoo projects they may have canned, development of the X360, etc.
The actual behavior in question here really isn't "Did Microsoft break european antitrust laws" but rather "Did Microsoft disobey the european courts." Sorry if I didn't make that clearer in my post.
Their "fine" for their illegal activities was that they had to open their protocols and level the playing field... basically saying "stop doing that". Their "fine" for disobeying the first court's ruling was 1.4 billion dollars.
Never disobey a court ruling without extremely sturdy legal ground. They really hate that.
Well, I guess parking and speeding tickets should be based on how much money you have, too. That's how some countries do it, but do you really want to get fined $30,000 for parking at a hydrant?
If you have a car, and you park at a hydrant, you'll get a ticket. If you refuse to pay the ticket, you'll get a summons. If you refuse to accept the court's ruling, you'll get a fine. If you refuse to pay your fine, you'll get a bigger fine. If you refuse the bigger fine, you'll get your car reposessed.
That can quickly add up to 30,000 dollars.
Gartner estimates Microsoft's warchest at 38 billion. 1.4 billion is nothing to sneeze about, but in perspective it's also nothing they can't pay.
Now, the greater likelyhood is that they'll spend 100 million on good lawyers who will tie up the EU ruling for as long as possible, while shifting responsibilities away from Microsoft Europe to a new subsidiary wholly owned by Microsoft USA, then declare Microsoft Europe bankrupt and liquidate one or two token offices.
I'm curious as to where 1.4 billion will go. In a national budget, it isn't a tremendous amount of money, but I can hear the hands reaching out already. Or they'll just give 1.4 billion in licenses to schools.
If I'm remembering Windows 95 correctly, it pretty much already does.
Or they could be trying to do some sort of distributed search thingie which requires large amounts of communication between disparate systems.
Special folders don't exist on the second drive. Only the real folders do. So your desktop folder is still in a folder on the drive, you just have to know where to look. In this case, that's Drive:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop. The virtual folder itself ceases to be where you expect it to be, as Windows is not searching your secondary drive for them, but it continues to be where it is.
If you want to know where a folder really is on the drive, just do a search for a file you think is in the drive.
In terms of Folders, Windows adds the contents of the folders together. If instead of being meticulous about your upgrade, you simply copy over your entire "Documents and Settings" folder, all of the contents of the folders that were virtual before will be added to the new folders that are virtual now. This works better if you keep usernames the same between machines. Nothing should break. I'd recommend against directly copying your program folders or windows folders, but nothing from there would work anyway.
I've done upgrades like this before, direct drive-to-drive through the intermediary OS. It really is the fastest way to do it.