...you can just make a big opt-out off Flash. Apple has restricted your choice, whether you like this interpretation or not. It's like alcohol: I normally describe myself as a non-drinker, but I'm not a fanatic and I will drink a bit in special occasions (the champagne in my own wedding for example - god it would suck to toast with Diet Coke wouldn't it?). In Apple land, you have the Prohibition. I suppose some Americans (the absolutely radical non-drinker types) were happy with that in the 1920's.
Still, like any stable dictatorship, China is able to pursue at least some general, strategic long-term plans. It's the advantage of rulers who don't have to worry that they're leaving the office in a few years, like in democracies where most presidents/governors/mayors won't bother to lay any eggs that will only hatch after their mandate is finished (especially when reelection is not allowed).
As a former Z80 black-belt ninja, I'd say it was easier - except that Z80 didn't have mul/div instructions... but, who needs these? You could write a routine for this (granted: dead slow) but I've written pretty significant programs without ever needing a single "full" mul/div, just hacking around it with a couple shifts, adds or bit ops.
...is this: suppose that we make contact with some alien species, and it just happens that they are overwhelmingly superior to us - a civilization that's thousands of years more advanced and kicks our ass in technology, morals, arts, everything.
Now suppose that this civilization is completely atheist. They are angel-like beings but with no God; they consider religion a trait of pre-historic (in their POV) civilizations. Just like, say, our modern opinion about cannibalism. Their scientists and philosophers have long demolished all pro-religion arguments, finishing this debate in such clear terms that any educated human would understand and find impossible to not agree.
*If* this happens (notice I'm just supposing), religion is in major trouble and the only option for resistance is fanatism.
It was once believed that the sun revolved around the earth. This is still a good approximation, for most purposes here on the ground. It is only when we begin to consider the motion of other planets that it becomes important which is which.
Actually, saying that the Sun orbits Earth is not really wrong even today. The universe doesn't have a fixed reference frame so no body has an absolute position, all 'positions' are just relative to other bodies (including time positions). We still tend to put the Sun in the "center", in coordinate (0,0,0) of the solar system, because that's very useful for local purposes, but it's just as arbitrary as having Earth in the center centuries ago. So, we could very well define as a convention that Earth is permanently fixed in the center of the entire Universe as a convention, and adjust all our calculations for that, and everything would be just fine... some equations could become more complex (a microscopic perturbation in Earth's orbit would translate, due to angular distance, in galaxies billions of years away being "shaked" in faster-than-light speed - still not violating any physics laws) but that would be just complex and ugly, not wrong.
...formed one billion years ago, but originally much more distant from the star. But its orbit was not stable, approaching quickly (in astronomical time) to the star; and we're just lucky to have found it in the final stage of the death spiral. If this is the case, it may even be possible to watch the final spectacle in a timeframe reasonable for human scale (a few thousand years, perhaps centuries, or even less).
Wild speculation of course... but just to be safe, I'm immediately canceling all my plans of space vacations near the Wasp18 system. I never liked wasps anyway.
...as the latest JVMs have a "compressed pointers" option that allows the 64-bit VM to be as memory-efficient as 32-bit. This option limits max heap size to 32Gb, but this should be plenty for even most huge applications, for many years to come.
BTW this optimization is a great advantage of all "managed" languages/VMs; it's just impossible for langs like C/C++. Of course, you've got to actually implement it in a JIT compiler like Java's. But I think even an interpreter could do it. Notice that there is no tradeoff to code speed; although the code needs a couple extra instructions to compress/uncompress pointers at every usage of heap objects, this overhead is greatly reduced/hidden by JIT optimizations. (And for an interpreter, it's certainly just noise in the performance map.) Not to mention that the gains in reduced paging, cache misses and TLB misses will more than compensate for any remaining overheads.
L4 is a microkernel, so it DOES mean that buggy device drivers cannot crash, corrupt, DoS or own the system; because drivers would all run in userland.
Of course, if bugs prevents that some essential driver works at all, the system may becomes unusable anyway. But the kernel is still in control and it can resort to techniques like restarting the driver or, if the driver keeps failing, replacing it by a much simpler, "safe mode" driver so you can use the system even with some reduced functionality or performance.
Who in his right mind starts mixing a binary and a decimal system. 2^10 bytes?
Very likely, a hardware engineer or a programmer who had to deal with low-level system realities like memory block sizes being always powers of two. You must manipulate memory (and other HW things) in blocks which sizes match physical packaging, to avoid inefficiencies from alignment, memory hierarchies, etc.
And this is reality up to current day. Please come back whining for decimal system when you're using, say, a monitor with 1500x1000 resolution, or a net connection of 10.000.000 bps.
I for one, will continue using Kb = 1024 etc., these politically correct labels like KiB are for idiots.
Some drivers to make Linux work better inside MS's Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization platform? How altruistic...
I'll be more impressed when MS, for example, helps with the SAMBA project. Or at least, doesn't actively screw up with such interop projects from the FOSS community. No GPL code required, just give people decent, up-to-date, open specs; and no patents bullshit.
Or at very least, when MS stops enforcing such patents (see TomTom / FAT32, or again SMB in MS/Novell "agreement").
Check this, 240 languages and counting: http://www.is-research.de/info/vmlanguages/. Now just die of shame.
Of course not all these "languages" are highly relevant. There are abandoned or not well maintained projects, academic stuff, and several extremely niche languages/tools. But I suppose this can be said at least for a few of the.NET entries as well.
Wikipedia's articles have very different quality. You'd think that the articles used some criteria like only including languages which are current / well maintained, but the JVM article it misses such entries like JESS and Drools, both very "alive" and popular for logic/IA and rule-based programming.
(If both steps are sufficiently efficient and the host platform is also x86, the compiled code may even be very similar to the original code.)
Why don't they just do away with the inefficient step of compiling it twice?
Because of the big "if" in my comment. Notice that even when emulating a PC on a PC you don't always get identical ISAs; you may be emulating code compiled for 80386 inside a Core2 Quad CPU, so this recompilation may even improve the code because it's possible to use 64 bit-opcodes, SSE, prefetching, etc. (This is not theoretical; modern JVMs like HotSpot are well known to exploit the very latest ISA features.)
The second reason is that the original code may not be safe, but the emulated/recompiled code is. Any kind of emulation has a side effect of sandboxing. So, JPC allows you to run arbitrary x86 code inside a browser's applet without any stability or security risk.
I don' think Applet deployment is the target for that project; if they are offering this option it's certainly just for quick demo sake. Notice also that the applet would need some serious time to download because (1) the emulator itself is reasonably big, (2) you need a virtual disk image containing the whole OS and apps; even a small FreeDOS distro with a couple of tiny DOS games will weight in a few hundred Kb, although the problem is mostly for first run as the Java PlugIn can cache everything.
As I see it, JPC's main goal is showing off some amazing virtualization technology that they have developed - the emulated x86 code is JIT-compiled by JPC's engine into Java bytecodes, which are in turn JIT-compiled by the JVM to native code, so the net result is full native-to-native translation. (If both steps are sufficiently efficient and the host platform is also x86, the compiled code may even be very similar to the original code.) This remembers of similar systems like Transmeta's Crusoe.
As a secondary goal,. JPC is becoming a pretty nice general-purpose PC emulator, so it's potentially just as useful as other PC emulators like Bochs. If JPC reaches sufficiently close to native performance (I tested it ~1yr ago and it's slashdotted now), and includes sufficient hardware compatibility, it's obviously an advantage to be a Java program, fully portable including UI.
..but I am also old enough so have seen it in the big screen, back in 1982. And I'm not trekkie enough (read, fanatic) so have seen it again and again so I'd remember such trivia.
Look at Sun's new JavaFX Script language. It makes String a value type, not-nullable - you can try to assign null to a Sring variable but the runtime automagically replaces it with "".
IBM pays good lip service to open source, and contributes o some strategic projects (ex Apache Harmony), but their true commitment to open source is much less than that of Sun's. That's what the Linux crowd sometimes fails to understand.
The reason why the Linux crowd swallows IBM's posing of a great FOSS champion is that IBM's contributions are focused on the Linux kernel and Apache projects. Linux zealots are not standing behind IBM's policies with licenses, community or anything; they are just rewarding IBM for "being in their side", i.e. helping to promote Linux and developing stuff that's useful to Linux distros. The same zealots know very well that Sun's FOSS contributions and positioning dwarf IBM's, but Sun is seen as a competitor (Solaris) and doesn't use a license that allows Linux to get cool stuff like a decent filesystem for free.
If you read Jonathan's blog (http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/), there's nothing new in this article. Either Jonathan has perfect memory to repeat entire paragraphs, or the journalist (or some Sun PR folk) just copy&pasted large chuncks of text from recent blog posts.
Applets are dead. No one uses Java from the browser.
Java applets are certainly not popular in recent years, although I wouldn't say dead, and recent improvements (from JDK 6u10+ to JavaFX) stand reasonable chance to resurrect applets (only time will tell). But this whole debate doesn't matter, because if you never visit any page that needs the JRE, you can just not install the JRE - simple, isn't it? And if you ever hit a single site that's interesting to you and uses a Java applet for some useful purpose, then they ain't dead.
You're wrong, because I did only install the JDK and that's what dumped the useless extension into Firefox.
The JDK installer has a option to not install the "public JRE" (public = integrated to Windows / browsers), just turn that off. It's recommended for server boxes where you don't want unnecessary browser plugins of any kind (I won't install even the Acrobat Reader in a server that's exposed to the internet). The installed JDK will still have an embedded jre directory with everything you need to run server-side and even standard client apps like Java IDEs, etc.
Shoving it in your face counts as demanding to me. You mean that it doesn't require registration. Which is true, but it asks.
Well, many installed software does that - pushing the user to the vendor's page. Even the browser itself does it... including addons; every week Firefox tells me that there's a new version of FlashGot or some other addon, and after I say Yes to download, update and restart, Firefox opens a new tab pushing me to the updated addon's page. Perhaps you think that opening a simple Release Notes page is okay, but opening a Registration page is not. That would be BS for me.
Every. Single. Freaking. Update. (We're up to what, 12 on the latest version?)
The true number is MUCH smaller. First, Sun moved from 6u7 to 6u10 (skipping versions 8/9) because 6u10 was a major feature update. Second, not all such versions are pushed through the auto-update channel; I don't know exactly what is Sun's criteria but it seems that only one out of each two or three minor versions are pushed. So, the net number of JRE updates that Sun forces through users with the auto-updater active is pretty small, perhaps 2-3 per year.
[P.S. I'm the poster of the msg you replied to; just for the record as I never post as AC except by accident.]
"The biggest thing Sun did with ZFS is they were good with PR and marketing." - Sour grapes? Not very elegant to say the least.
"Hey, I usually do my presentation slides in PowerPoint." - Now, that revelation should be sufficient reason to keep the Free (as in RMS/FSS) versus OSS schism for another 20 years.;-)
"It turns out the best way to interface with it is with Java." - From my memory it's the first positive thing that Linus says of Java, ever. Perhaps now that OpenJDK offers 100% open source Java, Linux is willing to be kinder on it.
"I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to GNOME." - A couple years ago Linus says GNOME sucks; now, Linus says KDE sucks. We can summarize that as: Linus recognizes that Linux sucks in the desktop - period. The best one can do is moving away from the worst to the second-worst desktop at any given year... In a related note, 2009 is not going to be "year of the Linux desktop".
Win7 is a finger in the eye to these people -- it doesn't even have Classic mode any more.
I hated the new GUI stuff in WinXP and always configured it to pure Classic mode (Win2K UI). With Vista I liked Aero enough that I left it on - partially because the Vista Basic UI was so terrible, I admit - but I kept other settings like the Start Menu and Taskbar as much Classic as I could. But with Win7, I finally liked everything and I'm running it happily with minimal changes from the default settings. The new Taskbar, for one thing, is great. On top of that, even at this beta stage app/HW compatibility looks excellent, memory usage is lower and laptop battery usage better, compared to Vista.
At some point you've got to abandon old cruft, like the Classic UI, to cut the bloat and maintenance and security nightmare that is keeping 10+ year old crap in the system. The tight time to do that is when the new features are overwhelmingly better than the old ones, so few people who've actually tried the new stuff will want to go back. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy (just google me) but credit where it's due: Kudos to you guys for Windows 7... if you don't screw it up in the next months (e.g. no new Vista Capable-like fiasco), you've got a smashing winner in your hands.
Slashdot Mirror
...you can just make a big opt-out off Flash. Apple has restricted your choice, whether you like this interpretation or not. It's like alcohol: I normally describe myself as a non-drinker, but I'm not a fanatic and I will drink a bit in special occasions (the champagne in my own wedding for example - god it would suck to toast with Diet Coke wouldn't it?). In Apple land, you have the Prohibition. I suppose some Americans (the absolutely radical non-drinker types) were happy with that in the 1920's.
What is this, a very condescending programmer who specializes in faster factorial functions? ;-)
Still, like any stable dictatorship, China is able to pursue at least some general, strategic long-term plans. It's the advantage of rulers who don't have to worry that they're leaving the office in a few years, like in democracies where most presidents/governors/mayors won't bother to lay any eggs that will only hatch after their mandate is finished (especially when reelection is not allowed).
As a former Z80 black-belt ninja, I'd say it was easier - except that Z80 didn't have mul/div instructions... but, who needs these? You could write a routine for this (granted: dead slow) but I've written pretty significant programs without ever needing a single "full" mul/div, just hacking around it with a couple shifts, adds or bit ops.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Nov-09.html
...is this: suppose that we make contact with some alien species, and it just happens that they are overwhelmingly superior to us - a civilization that's thousands of years more advanced and kicks our ass in technology, morals, arts, everything.
Now suppose that this civilization is completely atheist. They are angel-like beings but with no God; they consider religion a trait of pre-historic (in their POV) civilizations. Just like, say, our modern opinion about cannibalism. Their scientists and philosophers have long demolished all pro-religion arguments, finishing this debate in such clear terms that any educated human would understand and find impossible to not agree.
*If* this happens (notice I'm just supposing), religion is in major trouble and the only option for resistance is fanatism.
It was once believed that the sun revolved around the earth. This is still a good approximation, for most purposes here on the ground. It is only when we begin to consider the motion of other planets that it becomes important which is which.
Actually, saying that the Sun orbits Earth is not really wrong even today. The universe doesn't have a fixed reference frame so no body has an absolute position, all 'positions' are just relative to other bodies (including time positions). We still tend to put the Sun in the "center", in coordinate (0,0,0) of the solar system, because that's very useful for local purposes, but it's just as arbitrary as having Earth in the center centuries ago. So, we could very well define as a convention that Earth is permanently fixed in the center of the entire Universe as a convention, and adjust all our calculations for that, and everything would be just fine... some equations could become more complex (a microscopic perturbation in Earth's orbit would translate, due to angular distance, in galaxies billions of years away being "shaked" in faster-than-light speed - still not violating any physics laws) but that would be just complex and ugly, not wrong.
...formed one billion years ago, but originally much more distant from the star. But its orbit was not stable, approaching quickly (in astronomical time) to the star; and we're just lucky to have found it in the final stage of the death spiral. If this is the case, it may even be possible to watch the final spectacle in a timeframe reasonable for human scale (a few thousand years, perhaps centuries, or even less).
Wild speculation of course... but just to be safe, I'm immediately canceling all my plans of space vacations near the Wasp18 system. I never liked wasps anyway.
...as the latest JVMs have a "compressed pointers" option that allows the 64-bit VM to be as memory-efficient as 32-bit. This option limits max heap size to 32Gb, but this should be plenty for even most huge applications, for many years to come.
BTW this optimization is a great advantage of all "managed" languages/VMs; it's just impossible for langs like C/C++. Of course, you've got to actually implement it in a JIT compiler like Java's. But I think even an interpreter could do it. Notice that there is no tradeoff to code speed; although the code needs a couple extra instructions to compress/uncompress pointers at every usage of heap objects, this overhead is greatly reduced/hidden by JIT optimizations. (And for an interpreter, it's certainly just noise in the performance map.) Not to mention that the gains in reduced paging, cache misses and TLB misses will more than compensate for any remaining overheads.
L4 is a microkernel, so it DOES mean that buggy device drivers cannot crash, corrupt, DoS or own the system; because drivers would all run in userland.
Of course, if bugs prevents that some essential driver works at all, the system may becomes unusable anyway. But the kernel is still in control and it can resort to techniques like restarting the driver or, if the driver keeps failing, replacing it by a much simpler, "safe mode" driver so you can use the system even with some reduced functionality or performance.
Who in his right mind starts mixing a binary and a decimal system. 2^10 bytes?
Very likely, a hardware engineer or a programmer who had to deal with low-level system realities like memory block sizes being always powers of two. You must manipulate memory (and other HW things) in blocks which sizes match physical packaging, to avoid inefficiencies from alignment, memory hierarchies, etc.
And this is reality up to current day. Please come back whining for decimal system when you're using, say, a monitor with 1500x1000 resolution, or a net connection of 10.000.000 bps.
I for one, will continue using Kb = 1024 etc., these politically correct labels like KiB are for idiots.
Here, I fixed that for you. And this one is NOT a myth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code, http://www.ddj.com/windows/184409070?pgno=4
...from TFA: "That documentation must be kept "in confidence" and "under non-disclosure" by PFIF and Samba. "
Not what I'd consider openness yet; not by a LONG shot.
Some drivers to make Linux work better inside MS's Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization platform? How altruistic...
I'll be more impressed when MS, for example, helps with the SAMBA project. Or at least, doesn't actively screw up with such interop projects from the FOSS community. No GPL code required, just give people decent, up-to-date, open specs; and no patents bullshit.
Or at very least, when MS stops enforcing such patents (see TomTom / FAT32, or again SMB in MS/Novell "agreement").
Check this, 240 languages and counting: http://www.is-research.de/info/vmlanguages/. Now just die of shame.
Of course not all these "languages" are highly relevant. There are abandoned or not well maintained projects, academic stuff, and several extremely niche languages/tools. But I suppose this can be said at least for a few of the .NET entries as well.
Wikipedia's articles have very different quality. You'd think that the articles used some criteria like only including languages which are current / well maintained, but the JVM article it misses such entries like JESS and Drools, both very "alive" and popular for logic/IA and rule-based programming.
(If both steps are sufficiently efficient and the host platform is also x86, the compiled code may even be very similar to the original code.)
Why don't they just do away with the inefficient step of compiling it twice?
Because of the big "if" in my comment. Notice that even when emulating a PC on a PC you don't always get identical ISAs; you may be emulating code compiled for 80386 inside a Core2 Quad CPU, so this recompilation may even improve the code because it's possible to use 64 bit-opcodes, SSE, prefetching, etc. (This is not theoretical; modern JVMs like HotSpot are well known to exploit the very latest ISA features.)
The second reason is that the original code may not be safe, but the emulated/recompiled code is. Any kind of emulation has a side effect of sandboxing. So, JPC allows you to run arbitrary x86 code inside a browser's applet without any stability or security risk.
I don' think Applet deployment is the target for that project; if they are offering this option it's certainly just for quick demo sake. Notice also that the applet would need some serious time to download because (1) the emulator itself is reasonably big, (2) you need a virtual disk image containing the whole OS and apps; even a small FreeDOS distro with a couple of tiny DOS games will weight in a few hundred Kb, although the problem is mostly for first run as the Java PlugIn can cache everything.
As I see it, JPC's main goal is showing off some amazing virtualization technology that they have developed - the emulated x86 code is JIT-compiled by JPC's engine into Java bytecodes, which are in turn JIT-compiled by the JVM to native code, so the net result is full native-to-native translation. (If both steps are sufficiently efficient and the host platform is also x86, the compiled code may even be very similar to the original code.) This remembers of similar systems like Transmeta's Crusoe.
As a secondary goal,. JPC is becoming a pretty nice general-purpose PC emulator, so it's potentially just as useful as other PC emulators like Bochs. If JPC reaches sufficiently close to native performance (I tested it ~1yr ago and it's slashdotted now), and includes sufficient hardware compatibility, it's obviously an advantage to be a Java program, fully portable including UI.
...that insists pushing bigger clock speeds. I fully expect IBM to promote liquid Nitrogen cooling in another couple years.
..but I am also old enough so have seen it in the big screen, back in 1982. And I'm not trekkie enough (read, fanatic) so have seen it again and again so I'd remember such trivia.
Look at Sun's new JavaFX Script language. It makes String a value type, not-nullable - you can try to assign null to a Sring variable but the runtime automagically replaces it with "".
IBM pays good lip service to open source, and contributes o some strategic projects (ex Apache Harmony), but their true commitment to open source is much less than that of Sun's. That's what the Linux crowd sometimes fails to understand.
The reason why the Linux crowd swallows IBM's posing of a great FOSS champion is that IBM's contributions are focused on the Linux kernel and Apache projects. Linux zealots are not standing behind IBM's policies with licenses, community or anything; they are just rewarding IBM for "being in their side", i.e. helping to promote Linux and developing stuff that's useful to Linux distros. The same zealots know very well that Sun's FOSS contributions and positioning dwarf IBM's, but Sun is seen as a competitor (Solaris) and doesn't use a license that allows Linux to get cool stuff like a decent filesystem for free.
That's all, the rest is hypocrisy.
If you read Jonathan's blog (http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/), there's nothing new in this article. Either Jonathan has perfect memory to repeat entire paragraphs, or the journalist (or some Sun PR folk) just copy&pasted large chuncks of text from recent blog posts.
Applets are dead. No one uses Java from the browser.
Java applets are certainly not popular in recent years, although I wouldn't say dead, and recent improvements (from JDK 6u10+ to JavaFX) stand reasonable chance to resurrect applets (only time will tell). But this whole debate doesn't matter, because if you never visit any page that needs the JRE, you can just not install the JRE - simple, isn't it? And if you ever hit a single site that's interesting to you and uses a Java applet for some useful purpose, then they ain't dead.
You're wrong, because I did only install the JDK and that's what dumped the useless extension into Firefox.
The JDK installer has a option to not install the "public JRE" (public = integrated to Windows / browsers), just turn that off. It's recommended for server boxes where you don't want unnecessary browser plugins of any kind (I won't install even the Acrobat Reader in a server that's exposed to the internet). The installed JDK will still have an embedded jre directory with everything you need to run server-side and even standard client apps like Java IDEs, etc.
Shoving it in your face counts as demanding to me. You mean that it doesn't require registration. Which is true, but it asks.
Well, many installed software does that - pushing the user to the vendor's page. Even the browser itself does it... including addons; every week Firefox tells me that there's a new version of FlashGot or some other addon, and after I say Yes to download, update and restart, Firefox opens a new tab pushing me to the updated addon's page. Perhaps you think that opening a simple Release Notes page is okay, but opening a Registration page is not. That would be BS for me.
Every. Single. Freaking. Update. (We're up to what, 12 on the latest version?)
The true number is MUCH smaller. First, Sun moved from 6u7 to 6u10 (skipping versions 8/9) because 6u10 was a major feature update. Second, not all such versions are pushed through the auto-update channel; I don't know exactly what is Sun's criteria but it seems that only one out of each two or three minor versions are pushed. So, the net number of JRE updates that Sun forces through users with the auto-updater active is pretty small, perhaps 2-3 per year.
[P.S. I'm the poster of the msg you replied to; just for the record as I never post as AC except by accident.]
"The biggest thing Sun did with ZFS is they were good with PR and marketing." - Sour grapes? Not very elegant to say the least.
"Hey, I usually do my presentation slides in PowerPoint." - Now, that revelation should be sufficient reason to keep the Free (as in RMS/FSS) versus OSS schism for another 20 years. ;-)
"It turns out the best way to interface with it is with Java." - From my memory it's the first positive thing that Linus says of Java, ever. Perhaps now that OpenJDK offers 100% open source Java, Linux is willing to be kinder on it.
"I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to GNOME." - A couple years ago Linus says GNOME sucks; now, Linus says KDE sucks. We can summarize that as: Linus recognizes that Linux sucks in the desktop - period. The best one can do is moving away from the worst to the second-worst desktop at any given year... In a related note, 2009 is not going to be "year of the Linux desktop".
Win7 is a finger in the eye to these people -- it doesn't even have Classic mode any more.
I hated the new GUI stuff in WinXP and always configured it to pure Classic mode (Win2K UI). With Vista I liked Aero enough that I left it on - partially because the Vista Basic UI was so terrible, I admit - but I kept other settings like the Start Menu and Taskbar as much Classic as I could. But with Win7, I finally liked everything and I'm running it happily with minimal changes from the default settings. The new Taskbar, for one thing, is great. On top of that, even at this beta stage app/HW compatibility looks excellent, memory usage is lower and laptop battery usage better, compared to Vista.
At some point you've got to abandon old cruft, like the Classic UI, to cut the bloat and maintenance and security nightmare that is keeping 10+ year old crap in the system. The tight time to do that is when the new features are overwhelmingly better than the old ones, so few people who've actually tried the new stuff will want to go back. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy (just google me) but credit where it's due: Kudos to you guys for Windows 7... if you don't screw it up in the next months (e.g. no new Vista Capable-like fiasco), you've got a smashing winner in your hands.