Yea, my school (UF) didn't have a 'you must take an engineering course every semester' requirement, but some classes did have pre-requisite courses so if you missed a semester you could get yourself in to a crunch at the end.
Most people would do their study-abroad as a summer program, take care of some random electives (language and history requirements were the favorites) and then not have 'lost' any time in their yearly progression.
You seem to be jumping to conclusions - or perhaps that was a really weak anti-America troll? Hard to tell on the internet...
I'm going to give sbilstein the benefit of the doubt and assume that he isn't asking 'Are there any schools outside of the US that aren't incompetent', but rather asking the more important question 'There are many universities outside of the US, does anyone have any experience with one that participates in 'study-abroad' programs and has some sort of technical course available?'.
The majority of study-abroad programs that were available when I was still in college were focused on history/language/art. Those were the things that made more sense to study of course - go to France to learn about French history, go to Spain to learn about Spanish art, etc. The only science courses I remember seeing were for biology in Australia. Now this was a decade ago, when most of our information was through pamphlets and presentations on campus so maybe there were some places that did 'technical' stuff but without a huge internet presence it was hard to find.
As was already mentioned, 'scalable' doesn't mean 'already at max scale' it means that they have the ability to increase the size of the cluster easily.
And as far as Top500 goes, you don't need 10k cores to get on the list. Lower on the list (like 450-500) you'll find machines with under a thousand dual-core Xeon 5100 Woodcrests.
Yep, I'd wager you were right about that. Major game release days (like Gears of War and Halo 3) didn't see this type of issue. It is likely that most of the people who flooded online for either of those matchmaking early on already had Live accounts.
The pie charts on the first page, the ones without labels, were clearly -not- labelled deliberately. The text that went along with it was basically "can you guess which one goes with which console, we bet you can!", additional 'non labelled' charts had text including "Take a few moments...then go to the next page for the answers."
If you were to go to the 'next page' you'd see the charts broken out with labels.
Grandparent post was right though. I stopped running seti@home when the BOINC conversion became mandatory. It wasn't a good app, it was painful to deal with. Maybe things are better now, I don't know - I did try BOINC one other time and it was still lame.
Having no clue about how to grow your career sucks. having an HR department that tries to micromanage your career on a 4 month bases sucks too. The fact that Google has 100 employees per manager, projects span groups with no relevance to who you actually work with, etc makes it easy to see how people could get lost. Not everyone has the 'go-getter' personality, or even the 'speak up occasionally' personality necessary to advance themselves in that kind of a place, but they shouldn't be penalized becuase their manager never bothers to talk with them.
I'm not sure why you think a Che poster would be frowned on, it has nothing to do with whether or not you are given a free bean-bag chair... You don't expect free Che posters to be given out do you? When companies give out free posters they tend to be marketing crap or those super lame 'motivational' posters.
There are retards at every company though. They come out of the woodwork in all sorts of discussions - my friend and I joke about keeping a list of all the jerks (people that try to 'ruin it for everyone', people that are so easily offended that it takes a few more email to actually figure out what they were offended by, etc) so that if we ever see them come through an interview loop for a team we're on we can mention to the responsible people that these may not be the type of people we want on the team.
Those responses are not representative of the majority of MS employees, just like responses on the Fake Steve Jobs Blog aren't representative of Apple, or posts on the Mini-MSFT blog are repre...(okay, well maybe I should leave that example off)
I believe when he said "generally in the office between 10 and 6" he meant that that was the window of time that had the most overlap.
It is common for many of these more flexible companies to have 'core hours' during which you are expected to be available for in-person meetings. The downside is you are expected to be in the office during those hours on most days, but the upside is that you are much less likely to have meetings at crappy times. (Like I refuse to have meetings with people at 8am, unless they are -real- emergencies, and the division I work in has a 'no recurring meetings at 5pm or later' policy) 'Core hours' vary from place to place, some could be 10-4, others could tighten it even more to 10:30-3:30, etc.
So, with that in mind, it is likely he meant "Some people work from 6am to 4pm, and some people from from noon to 9pm". 10 and 9 hour days, neither of which are slacker hours really.
Uno on Live is a more civilized game? More mature maybe, but more civilized no. As one of the first camera-enabled Live games, and a slower paced (compared to an FPS) game it quickly became a pool of nudity. And unfortunately not the "hot grits" kind, but the "dude, wtf!??!" kind.
Some meetings can be productive. It really depends on what the topic is, and who is attending.
I know several people who simply can't comprehend discussions in email. It is very frusterating when I end up having to go to a meeting with them where I say the same very simply thing that I had typed several times, and suddenly they 'get it'. "Wow, great meeting, really glad we had this!" is what they say, while I'm thinking about strangling them. Is that a productive meeting? Yes and no. It is not productive becuase I have to waste time going to it, but it is productive because I don't have to waste time replying to their emails.
Recently I've been in a number of meetings where people get together to discuss feedback (that had already been posted for people to view) in person. These were effective at figuring out how all the different pieces of feedback worked together, some people deciding that others had better points, some people realizing that they were trying to make the same point as someone else but presenting it differently, etc. These are effective because there has been some amount of preparation.
And for general 'brainstorming' or 'planning' meetings, these can be effective in person too. You have everyone in the same room at the same time, and focused on the same thing. Lots of stuff lends itself to being dealt with in a rapid, focused manner rather than via a more haphazard email discussion.
I've been to more than my fair share of pointless meetings though. I have no problem walking out luckily.
Those are all excellent tips that I wish more telecommuters would follow. A couple comments...
2) Dedicated phone line
This is good for more than just the 'professional' voicemail message. It allows you to seperate your work and personal lives more effectively. If people are calling your home phone all the time for work, the line gets blurred. The only people at work who know my home phone number are the HR people since it is listed as one of my emergency numbers. My coworkers have my cell phone number as the 'non office' number if they need to get in touch with me - this also lets me turn the ringer off if I need to.
3) Software licenses and developing on the side
You have to be pretty careful here. Lots of companies have rules about anything you develop on company time being their property (or at least giving them right to first purchase). I'm not sure how that would apply to a telecommuter - what is 'company time' when you don't have set hours and your home / work computers are the same.
Also, the actualy license to the software you need to pay attention too. If the company provides the software (or reimburses your expense) it would be considered company property, and some companies also have rules about using company property to do personal work. If they own it, then you are also technically supposed to give it back (and delete from your computer) if your employment ends, and that would be a hassle if you were working on personal stuff when you quit.
A jerk company could also require you to turn over your hard drive immediately if they reimbursed you for an extra hard drive. If you happened to have personal stuff on there that would be quite the pain too.
Telecommuting does not work for programmers in any sort of team environment, which either is or should be most jobs.
That is a pretty sweeping generalization. Just because you are on a team does not mean that you need to be in constant communication with the other people on the team.
Development is not a solo effort,
I agree with that statement, but...
you need to talk to the users,
Developers do not need to talk to users every day. Actually no one on a development team (testers, program managers, etc) needs to do that. There are times when people need to talk to customers, especially when gathering feedback on the program, but that is not a daily thing. It also does not need to be an in-person thing. We have customers around the world, and while we do fly to visit them every now and then, we don't fly over weekly.
the analysts,
Not sure what you mean be 'analysts' so I'll skip this one
the other coders,
If the project is so poorly spec'd that developers can't code up their parts without constant face-to-face meetings with the other developers than there is something wrong with the specs.
the testers,
Testers should be skilled enough to file bug reports that are coherent. If screenshots are needed, paste them in; if log files are needed, paste them in; if actual access to the machine is needed, provide a telnet/debugger/vnc/whatever connection.
there's a whole design process.
Yes, a whole design process that should absolutely not require constant dialogs between every single person on the team (and the customers you mentioned!)
Before you call BS on me, let me just say that I've worked in all those situations. We have developers in 3 time zones, testers in 2, customers in a dozen. I've filed bugs, with repros/screenshots/logs/etc, for developers that I've never met. This isn't rocket science - it isn't the easiest thing in the world, but nothing worth doing ever is.
On the infrastructure side, you really have to be on site for a lot of things (correct me if I am wrong.)
It depends. As you say, in your role you sometimes have to go fix someones desktop, but that isn't always the case. We've got several decently sized computer labs, and depending on which person on the 'infrastructure team' you are talking about would change if they can work at home or not. Planning a big install (figuring out what parts to buy, figuring out how to space them out, figuring out how much power is needed, how to rack them, etc) doesn't require being on-site. Doing the actual racking of course does. Once a lab is set up you have some things that you need to be there for (if you need to swap out a drive, or do hardware-level troubleshooting) but other stuff that you don't necessarily need to physically be there. Our labs have these KVMs that work over IP (not sure what brand) so you can do a lot of stuff remotely, we even have some hardware that lets you reboot a frozen machine remotely.
There are days when our main lab guy spends more time driving to all the different buildings than he does doing actual repairs though...
Actually, my understanding is that most companies won't let you telecommute if your main reason for doing it is to stay home with your kids.
Microsoft, in general, is pretty good about letting people work from home. Many jobs do not require constant meetings, or in-person discussions on a daily basis.
However, there are some teams at Microsoft that have their heads shoved pretty deep up their butts. Mandating that people be at work, regardless of if they have meetings or not, but then granting exceptions to people that have children. If the management in these team is worried that hte -adults- on the team are not going to be 'focusing on their work' when they are at home, but then allow someone who has a child to work from home they should get their heads examined. Providing preferential treatment to people with kids is simply not fair. There is no doubt in my mind that the people who request to work from home becuase they have children are -spending time with the kids-! I seriously doubt that they are locking their kid in a crate so that they can do their work uninterrupted.
A hotfix is not 'fussier to install', that makes no sense. 'Hotfix' simply means a patch that is released to fix a specific issue, rather than something like a 'Service Pack' or a security rollup or whatever - both of which are created out of a bunch of hotfixes.
If what you mean is "a hotfix that you have to get from PSS or the Download Center is more difficult to install than a hotfix that is released through Windows Update" then that would be a different sentence. The bar to release something via Windows Update / Microsoft Update is much higher as far as the number of impacted people go - though I would think that the horrible file speeds in Vista would warrant a WU post! (Oh, and all fixes posted to WU are also available through PSS and the Download Center as manually downloadable hotfixes in case you are a system administrator and want to push them out to machines you control, etc)
That line does nothing to add to the value of the description, it seems much more like a 'troll' line than anything.
I've got a whole handful of names registered at NameCheap.com. I've recommended them to several people.
I've never had any trouble with them, and they have all the features I need to manage a combination of domains with DNS run by them, a domain with DNS run by someone else, and domain urls that are just forwarders to other urls.
Bandwidth is cheap as dirt. Even a small handful of paid employees would quickly outstrip bandwidth costs. Is that really their main expense? Woah. Tell me what city you live in, and I'll open up a web hosting center, and a corporate offsite backup datacenter - I'll be a billionaire!
One of the problems with people saying 'hire more people' is they only look at it as a single number (I'm not saying you didn't realize this, but I see it often) - hire 5 people on to a 5 person team and you are twice as fast. That's not how it works, hiring more people only solves certain types of problems. For complex systems (software applications, operating systems, hardware, whatever) there is considerable ramp-up time for new hires. There are only so many people that have experience working on the system, and while general 'computer science' or 'electrical engineering' knowledge is a necessary tool, it isn't the only thing necessary to contribute to a project.
Microsoft can develop XP service packs and Vista on different teams at the same time. There is a 'Sustained Engineering' team that owns a product once it has released - so they own service packs, hotfixes, security patches, etc. The problem is that the two teams (the core team that makes the new one, and the SE team that maintains the old one) are staffed differently. The core team is, by necessity, must bigger. It has a much larger dev/test/pm count because making a 'new things' means you have to touch a lot more stuff than 'maintaining' something. (well, optimally!) Also, the type of developer needed to maintain existing code is different than the type of developer needed to come up with new ways to do stuff. The maintainer needs to be able to fix bugs in existing code, sometimes come up with new subroutines. The person coming up with new stuff needs to... come up with new stuff.
Now, the problem with something like XP SP2 is that it was partially maintenance, and partially new stuff. Their are a huge number of changes in it - and some of them are not at all minor. To do this work the core PM team wrote specs for new features, the core dev team wrote new features, and the core test team came up with new tests and automation to verify the thing worked. During that time they were unable to work on Vista.
Server 2003 SP2 is being done by the SE team, so while the core team is working on Longhorn Server - that is how it is supposed to work. (there is collaboration at individual levels of course, for example SE devs asking core devs why certain things were done in the original code, and core testers asking SE testers if the new tests that are being developed are appropriate for sustained testing).
WinFS is not a filesystem, it's a database. Man, it is about time someone said that.
A file system is a way for a computer to organize a bunch of data in a manner that makes that data easy to find and access after it is stored. It has methods for reading / writing (updating) existing data, a way to store meta data about the data, and ways to make different pieces of data be related to others (folders, links, streams, etc).
That is -completely- different from a database! A database is a way for a computer to organize a bunch of data in a manner that makes that data easy to find and access after it is stored. It has methods for reading / writing (updating) existing data, a way to store meta data about the data, and ways to make different pieces of data be rela... Oh... wait... crap...
When you typed "also called 'Vista RC2' by some people", that may have been a typo, but I'll clarify here for others.
Microsoft tries to use 'RC' the same way many other development companies do - 'release candidate' for a particular product. (some teams have a little trouble realizing that an RC is not just 'an extra beta' it seems). RC2 would be the 2nd such release candidate. In my opinion having a few (less than 4) is fine, and having two is perfectly reasonable. You release your release candidate, thinking you are done based on all the feedback you would have received on your betas, but then a customer finds some issue that they believe should be a ship blocker. If it is that important you fix it, and you throw out another release candidate - hopefully you only iterate once, if you have to iterate a dozen times you should probably rethink whether or not you are actually done with betas!
The use of the term 'R2' came with a Server 2003 add-on pack, with an incredibly unimaginative name. It wasn't a 'service pack' (it didn't fix bugs in the core server 2003 product), and it wasn't a 'roll-up' (it was not a collection of previously released hotfixes/qfes). It added several new, optional, features and I guess they didn't want to call it a 'feature pack' or an 'option pack' (both terms which seem to have a cloud over them)
So, if there was going to be some new set of things, like a file system, delivered for vista it would more likely be called 'Vista R2' than 'Vista RC2':) (now, would Microsoft release a new file system outside of a core operating system release? That seems dubious - a support nightmare could easily spring out of that.)
note, I have no idea if there is a Vista R2 or not, I'm just talking about terminology
If you have yet to pay any attention to the main quest, then you are really missing out. Completing the main quest was not my goal, but it was fun. It added some depth to the story that the side quests did not add, simply because most of the side quests were not part of a larger story that you could watch unfold.
I've 'beaten' the game (as in completed the main quest, all the faction quests, the deadric quests, plundered all the dungeons, and as far as I know I've found all the side quests - I'll need to print a full quest list off the internet to verify, I think I've talked to everyone), and completed all the downloadable content for the 360 with the exception of the most recent one. In my opinion the main quest line did not always contain the most fun (as in challenging or as in amusing) quests, those were scattered around between faction quests and some of the chance encounters with normal countryfolk. And I did deliberately postpone a couple parts of the main quest so that I wouldn't alter the world I was enjoying, but I am glad that I did them.
But really my point was, that I do not think that any game with a bunch of specific 'winnable' events, or an arcing central story of the specific type Oblivion has is a 'sandbox'. If it was a game with extremely high level themes, then maybe I'd consider it a sandbox - but while a theme may direct to do certain things (rule a peaceful kingdom, would imply rise to ruler and stop a war), it isn't quite so stair-stepped.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, my school (UF) didn't have a 'you must take an engineering course every semester' requirement, but some classes did have pre-requisite courses so if you missed a semester you could get yourself in to a crunch at the end.
Most people would do their study-abroad as a summer program, take care of some random electives (language and history requirements were the favorites) and then not have 'lost' any time in their yearly progression.
You seem to be jumping to conclusions - or perhaps that was a really weak anti-America troll? Hard to tell on the internet...
I'm going to give sbilstein the benefit of the doubt and assume that he isn't asking 'Are there any schools outside of the US that aren't incompetent', but rather asking the more important question 'There are many universities outside of the US, does anyone have any experience with one that participates in 'study-abroad' programs and has some sort of technical course available?'.
The majority of study-abroad programs that were available when I was still in college were focused on history/language/art. Those were the things that made more sense to study of course - go to France to learn about French history, go to Spain to learn about Spanish art, etc. The only science courses I remember seeing were for biology in Australia. Now this was a decade ago, when most of our information was through pamphlets and presentations on campus so maybe there were some places that did 'technical' stuff but without a huge internet presence it was hard to find.
As was already mentioned, 'scalable' doesn't mean 'already at max scale' it means that they have the ability to increase the size of the cluster easily. And as far as Top500 goes, you don't need 10k cores to get on the list. Lower on the list (like 450-500) you'll find machines with under a thousand dual-core Xeon 5100 Woodcrests.
Yep, I'd wager you were right about that. Major game release days (like Gears of War and Halo 3) didn't see this type of issue. It is likely that most of the people who flooded online for either of those matchmaking early on already had Live accounts.
The pie charts on the first page, the ones without labels, were clearly -not- labelled deliberately. The text that went along with it was basically "can you guess which one goes with which console, we bet you can!", additional 'non labelled' charts had text including "Take a few moments...then go to the next page for the answers." If you were to go to the 'next page' you'd see the charts broken out with labels.
Grandparent post was right though. I stopped running seti@home when the BOINC conversion became mandatory. It wasn't a good app, it was painful to deal with. Maybe things are better now, I don't know - I did try BOINC one other time and it was still lame.
Having no clue about how to grow your career sucks. having an HR department that tries to micromanage your career on a 4 month bases sucks too. The fact that Google has 100 employees per manager, projects span groups with no relevance to who you actually work with, etc makes it easy to see how people could get lost. Not everyone has the 'go-getter' personality, or even the 'speak up occasionally' personality necessary to advance themselves in that kind of a place, but they shouldn't be penalized becuase their manager never bothers to talk with them.
I'm not sure why you think a Che poster would be frowned on, it has nothing to do with whether or not you are given a free bean-bag chair... You don't expect free Che posters to be given out do you? When companies give out free posters they tend to be marketing crap or those super lame 'motivational' posters.
There are retards at every company though. They come out of the woodwork in all sorts of discussions - my friend and I joke about keeping a list of all the jerks (people that try to 'ruin it for everyone', people that are so easily offended that it takes a few more email to actually figure out what they were offended by, etc) so that if we ever see them come through an interview loop for a team we're on we can mention to the responsible people that these may not be the type of people we want on the team.
Those responses are not representative of the majority of MS employees, just like responses on the Fake Steve Jobs Blog aren't representative of Apple, or posts on the Mini-MSFT blog are repre...(okay, well maybe I should leave that example off)
I believe when he said "generally in the office between 10 and 6" he meant that that was the window of time that had the most overlap. It is common for many of these more flexible companies to have 'core hours' during which you are expected to be available for in-person meetings. The downside is you are expected to be in the office during those hours on most days, but the upside is that you are much less likely to have meetings at crappy times. (Like I refuse to have meetings with people at 8am, unless they are -real- emergencies, and the division I work in has a 'no recurring meetings at 5pm or later' policy) 'Core hours' vary from place to place, some could be 10-4, others could tighten it even more to 10:30-3:30, etc. So, with that in mind, it is likely he meant "Some people work from 6am to 4pm, and some people from from noon to 9pm". 10 and 9 hour days, neither of which are slacker hours really.
Uno on Live is a more civilized game? More mature maybe, but more civilized no. As one of the first camera-enabled Live games, and a slower paced (compared to an FPS) game it quickly became a pool of nudity. And unfortunately not the "hot grits" kind, but the "dude, wtf!??!" kind.
Some meetings can be productive. It really depends on what the topic is, and who is attending. I know several people who simply can't comprehend discussions in email. It is very frusterating when I end up having to go to a meeting with them where I say the same very simply thing that I had typed several times, and suddenly they 'get it'. "Wow, great meeting, really glad we had this!" is what they say, while I'm thinking about strangling them. Is that a productive meeting? Yes and no. It is not productive becuase I have to waste time going to it, but it is productive because I don't have to waste time replying to their emails. Recently I've been in a number of meetings where people get together to discuss feedback (that had already been posted for people to view) in person. These were effective at figuring out how all the different pieces of feedback worked together, some people deciding that others had better points, some people realizing that they were trying to make the same point as someone else but presenting it differently, etc. These are effective because there has been some amount of preparation. And for general 'brainstorming' or 'planning' meetings, these can be effective in person too. You have everyone in the same room at the same time, and focused on the same thing. Lots of stuff lends itself to being dealt with in a rapid, focused manner rather than via a more haphazard email discussion. I've been to more than my fair share of pointless meetings though. I have no problem walking out luckily.
Those are all excellent tips that I wish more telecommuters would follow. A couple comments... 2) Dedicated phone line This is good for more than just the 'professional' voicemail message. It allows you to seperate your work and personal lives more effectively. If people are calling your home phone all the time for work, the line gets blurred. The only people at work who know my home phone number are the HR people since it is listed as one of my emergency numbers. My coworkers have my cell phone number as the 'non office' number if they need to get in touch with me - this also lets me turn the ringer off if I need to. 3) Software licenses and developing on the side You have to be pretty careful here. Lots of companies have rules about anything you develop on company time being their property (or at least giving them right to first purchase). I'm not sure how that would apply to a telecommuter - what is 'company time' when you don't have set hours and your home / work computers are the same. Also, the actualy license to the software you need to pay attention too. If the company provides the software (or reimburses your expense) it would be considered company property, and some companies also have rules about using company property to do personal work. If they own it, then you are also technically supposed to give it back (and delete from your computer) if your employment ends, and that would be a hassle if you were working on personal stuff when you quit. A jerk company could also require you to turn over your hard drive immediately if they reimbursed you for an extra hard drive. If you happened to have personal stuff on there that would be quite the pain too.
Microsoft, in general, is pretty good about letting people work from home. Many jobs do not require constant meetings, or in-person discussions on a daily basis.
However, there are some teams at Microsoft that have their heads shoved pretty deep up their butts. Mandating that people be at work, regardless of if they have meetings or not, but then granting exceptions to people that have children. If the management in these team is worried that hte -adults- on the team are not going to be 'focusing on their work' when they are at home, but then allow someone who has a child to work from home they should get their heads examined. Providing preferential treatment to people with kids is simply not fair. There is no doubt in my mind that the people who request to work from home becuase they have children are -spending time with the kids-! I seriously doubt that they are locking their kid in a crate so that they can do their work uninterrupted.
The person that submitted this article+headline was clearly full of hot Vespine gas
A hotfix is not 'fussier to install', that makes no sense. 'Hotfix' simply means a patch that is released to fix a specific issue, rather than something like a 'Service Pack' or a security rollup or whatever - both of which are created out of a bunch of hotfixes.
If what you mean is "a hotfix that you have to get from PSS or the Download Center is more difficult to install than a hotfix that is released through Windows Update" then that would be a different sentence. The bar to release something via Windows Update / Microsoft Update is much higher as far as the number of impacted people go - though I would think that the horrible file speeds in Vista would warrant a WU post! (Oh, and all fixes posted to WU are also available through PSS and the Download Center as manually downloadable hotfixes in case you are a system administrator and want to push them out to machines you control, etc)
That line does nothing to add to the value of the description, it seems much more like a 'troll' line than anything.
I've got a whole handful of names registered at NameCheap.com. I've recommended them to several people.
I've never had any trouble with them, and they have all the features I need to manage a combination of domains with DNS run by them, a domain with DNS run by someone else, and domain urls that are just forwarders to other urls.
One of the problems with people saying 'hire more people' is they only look at it as a single number (I'm not saying you didn't realize this, but I see it often) - hire 5 people on to a 5 person team and you are twice as fast. That's not how it works, hiring more people only solves certain types of problems. For complex systems (software applications, operating systems, hardware, whatever) there is considerable ramp-up time for new hires. There are only so many people that have experience working on the system, and while general 'computer science' or 'electrical engineering' knowledge is a necessary tool, it isn't the only thing necessary to contribute to a project.
Microsoft can develop XP service packs and Vista on different teams at the same time. There is a 'Sustained Engineering' team that owns a product once it has released - so they own service packs, hotfixes, security patches, etc.
The problem is that the two teams (the core team that makes the new one, and the SE team that maintains the old one) are staffed differently. The core team is, by necessity, must bigger. It has a much larger dev/test/pm count because making a 'new things' means you have to touch a lot more stuff than 'maintaining' something. (well, optimally!) Also, the type of developer needed to maintain existing code is different than the type of developer needed to come up with new ways to do stuff. The maintainer needs to be able to fix bugs in existing code, sometimes come up with new subroutines. The person coming up with new stuff needs to... come up with new stuff.
Now, the problem with something like XP SP2 is that it was partially maintenance, and partially new stuff. Their are a huge number of changes in it - and some of them are not at all minor. To do this work the core PM team wrote specs for new features, the core dev team wrote new features, and the core test team came up with new tests and automation to verify the thing worked. During that time they were unable to work on Vista.
Server 2003 SP2 is being done by the SE team, so while the core team is working on Longhorn Server - that is how it is supposed to work. (there is collaboration at individual levels of course, for example SE devs asking core devs why certain things were done in the original code, and core testers asking SE testers if the new tests that are being developed are appropriate for sustained testing).
A file system is a way for a computer to organize a bunch of data in a manner that makes that data easy to find and access after it is stored. It has methods for reading / writing (updating) existing data, a way to store meta data about the data, and ways to make different pieces of data be related to others (folders, links, streams, etc).
That is -completely- different from a database! A database is a way for a computer to organize a bunch of data in a manner that makes that data easy to find and access after it is stored. It has methods for reading / writing (updating) existing data, a way to store meta data about the data, and ways to make different pieces of data be rela... Oh... wait... crap...
When you typed "also called 'Vista RC2' by some people", that may have been a typo, but I'll clarify here for others.
:) (now, would Microsoft release a new file system outside of a core operating system release? That seems dubious - a support nightmare could easily spring out of that.)
Microsoft tries to use 'RC' the same way many other development companies do - 'release candidate' for a particular product. (some teams have a little trouble realizing that an RC is not just 'an extra beta' it seems). RC2 would be the 2nd such release candidate. In my opinion having a few (less than 4) is fine, and having two is perfectly reasonable. You release your release candidate, thinking you are done based on all the feedback you would have received on your betas, but then a customer finds some issue that they believe should be a ship blocker. If it is that important you fix it, and you throw out another release candidate - hopefully you only iterate once, if you have to iterate a dozen times you should probably rethink whether or not you are actually done with betas!
The use of the term 'R2' came with a Server 2003 add-on pack, with an incredibly unimaginative name. It wasn't a 'service pack' (it didn't fix bugs in the core server 2003 product), and it wasn't a 'roll-up' (it was not a collection of previously released hotfixes/qfes). It added several new, optional, features and I guess they didn't want to call it a 'feature pack' or an 'option pack' (both terms which seem to have a cloud over them)
So, if there was going to be some new set of things, like a file system, delivered for vista it would more likely be called 'Vista R2' than 'Vista RC2'
note, I have no idea if there is a Vista R2 or not, I'm just talking about terminology
If you have yet to pay any attention to the main quest, then you are really missing out. Completing the main quest was not my goal, but it was fun. It added some depth to the story that the side quests did not add, simply because most of the side quests were not part of a larger story that you could watch unfold.
I've 'beaten' the game (as in completed the main quest, all the faction quests, the deadric quests, plundered all the dungeons, and as far as I know I've found all the side quests - I'll need to print a full quest list off the internet to verify, I think I've talked to everyone), and completed all the downloadable content for the 360 with the exception of the most recent one. In my opinion the main quest line did not always contain the most fun (as in challenging or as in amusing) quests, those were scattered around between faction quests and some of the chance encounters with normal countryfolk. And I did deliberately postpone a couple parts of the main quest so that I wouldn't alter the world I was enjoying, but I am glad that I did them.
But really my point was, that I do not think that any game with a bunch of specific 'winnable' events, or an arcing central story of the specific type Oblivion has is a 'sandbox'. If it was a game with extremely high level themes, then maybe I'd consider it a sandbox - but while a theme may direct to do certain things (rule a peaceful kingdom, would imply rise to ruler and stop a war), it isn't quite so stair-stepped.