Vista has a few things I could live without (like UAC and mandatory driver signing, both of which I have disabled), but it also has some features that I really miss if I have to use someone's XP box.
Window redraw lag is gone when using Aero. This never bugged me too much in XP but now that I've lived without it for so long I tend to notice it a lot.
Per-application volume controls.
Hit my keyboard's start button, start typing the name of an application and hit enter to launch the app.
Being able to show and sort by several file properties, directly in explorer.
Rename a file in explorer, and hit tab to start renaming the next file in the list.
Simple, integrated searching.
And for the programmer in me:
Transactional NTFS/Registry. Being able to use begin/commit/rollback and be guaranteed ACIDic operation is incredibly sexy.
Task Dialogs. Having a standard configurable dialog is much better than having to roll your own or worse use unintuitive message boxes. About freakin' time.
If anyone remembers this game, it is by far the worst that I've ever played. I think I got it free with a sound card. Basically, you race semis. Only thing is, your opponent never leaves the finish line, and you go right through bridges and other things you're supposed to race over.
I couldn't believe how much it felt like an alpha build so I went online thinking it was just my PC. Unfortunately, I found out everyone else experienced the same stuff:)
What about Miranda? It starts out minimal, supports all the regular IM service, and lets you extend it as far as you want with addons (there are many to choose from).
Mission crticial? It's a set-top box for christ sake. This is all about reducing complexity for them, so they only support one thing, and have one feature-set to worry about upgrading.
Having a seperate password for 50+ websites is not realistic when you plan to memorize them all. I use KeePass to have very random 16+ char passwords (that I do not bother to remember) for every place I visit, and one master password to access the database.
How do they calculate this "twice as much" number? I find it hard to believe they meant Windows and *nix - both have well designed APIs for super-scalable software and I seriously doubt either one could perform so significantly well over the other. More likely they compared some premade framework that had poor code for Windows, or something entirely different like ASP and Perl.
I never defined object. If you would like clarification, they _are_ objects you pass around. Everything is an instance of a.NET class. Doing "ls | get-member" lets me know it is giving me back DirectoryInfo and FileInfo objects, complete with all the properties and methods you could ask for.
you might notice that | symbol there lets ya chain stuff.
I'm not claiming Powershell was the first to invent the pipe - god no. I just meant to point out that *finally* Windows has something on equal ground to *nix.
ls| sed -e 's/^d/b/'|mailx -s "oh no!" phrosty
And if you used Powershell, you wouldn't have to do any text processing. That's all I was pointing out with that (poor) example. That and the above, that you can finally pipe crap together.
Unless MS rewrites all of their other commands to accept STDIN/OUT, Monad will never surpass the shells. The power of the shells isnt' their programming flexibility, it's their ability to incorporate all the other UNIX tools and commands via pipes to do what you want.
You'll be happy to know one of the major points of Powershell is the ability to pipe objects through all of their various commands. It's nice to finally have a usable shell, but god damn it is overdue.
I'd be interested to know why people are modding my post down:) Is the suggestion that a Windows shell might finally equal bash flamebait now? Or maybe I didn't list enough of Powershell's faults - I should have just left out the complements to it to appease the anti-Microsoft folks. If someone who has actually used Powershell beyond what cmd.exe can already do would like to rebut something I said, please do! *ducks*
Wake me up when *nix gets an object-oriented (rather than text-oriented) shell. Because that is what makes Powershell so unique. Yes, it has plenty of builtin functions to make tasks easier, but the real advantage is that everything you pass between commands is an object.
You don't have to worry about interpreting text output - you just access whatever data you want directly. Many of the commands are easily chainable into something like "ls | select fullname,length | sort name | format-list | out-printer".
Powershell is very powerful. Much more so than cmd.exe. I don't have significant enough experience with bash to compare the two but I would not be surprised to learn Powershell equals if not beats bash at the shell game. I wouldn't say it is ready to replace any of the scripting languages just yet.
I have been using it for a while now and the single (semi-major) problem I can find is memory usage. It is a hog at best, and at worst when you are using it semi-heavily it can easily chew up 1GB of memory. That's even with giving the GC something to work with, ie unsetting $vars when you are done with their data.
I hope by "appropriate" they mean if a building is on fire and one of the escape routes like a stairwell is on fire, it will redirect them to a safer place.
When I was in school, I was discussing the game Rampage with a few friends. One of them had never played this game before, so I was explaining it for him. I said something along the lines of "You run through a city, eating people and blowing up buildings". A teacher managed to overhear "blow up the building" out of that sentence, and hopped on her Jump to Conclusions mat the next day when I was escorted to the dean's office by some cops.
After a long frustrating week of being questioned, it blew over. I can only imagine what it would have been like if it had occured after Colombine or in recent years.
I'm betting that there is another reason DX10 is only for Vista: performance. With DX9 and OpenGL, you can run games on XP and Vista, and compare them to see Vista is slower. With DX10 you can't compare anymore, so people forget Vista is slower.
Is the lack of good font control. Lack of kerning is one thing. Another is you can't have font sizes for each individual fallback font - fonts can vary in size so much that you have to write for the most common font or risk throwing the design for everyone else.
From a developer's perspective, it all depends on who you want to have the most freedom with your code.
With GPL you give freedom to the community - anything using GPL code will always be GPL.
With BSD you give freedom to the developer - they can use your code almost any way they want. Closed source devs can modify and distribute binaries as much as they want without giving anything back to the community.
LGPL is like a mix of the two. The single developer can use thier own license so long as they only link to the LGPL code. Any modifications to the LGPL code are under LGPL, so some things are still given back to the community.
introducing generic programming in a simpler, safer way than C++ templates and, unlike generics in C#, maintaining backwards (and forwards) compatibility with existing Java code."
*prepares to be modded troll*
People need to stop comparing Java/C# generics to C++ templates - they take similar syntax, but they aren't the same thing. I'm not sure how one can even be safer than the other.
And C# 2.0 maintained compatibility with existing C# 1.0 code (you still have access to the old containers) while actually giving significant performance benefits where Java is only syntax sugar that still produces the same old slow code.
instead of sharing files, divide them into 16KB chunks and share those, to help work around files that get renamed or trivially altered (eg a website tagging their url to all the files you upload).
College is there for four things: a) to further prepare you for a professional working life. b) to give hands-on training with hardware you couldn't afford at home. c) for people who can't learn as well on their own. d) breaking into a career that heavily depends on diplomas.
Ask your cousin if he needs any of this, and he'll know his answer. D is definately a hurdle for programming jobs, but it fades as you gain experience to vouch for your skills.
Slashdot Mirror
Vista has a few things I could live without (like UAC and mandatory driver signing, both of which I have disabled), but it also has some features that I really miss if I have to use someone's XP box.
And for the programmer in me:
Ah yes, thankyou! that's the game.
If anyone remembers this game, it is by far the worst that I've ever played. I think I got it free with a sound card. Basically, you race semis. Only thing is, your opponent never leaves the finish line, and you go right through bridges and other things you're supposed to race over.
I couldn't believe how much it felt like an alpha build so I went online thinking it was just my PC. Unfortunately, I found out everyone else experienced the same stuff :)
What about Miranda? It starts out minimal, supports all the regular IM service, and lets you extend it as far as you want with addons (there are many to choose from).
Wow.. that is hands down the funniest goatse reference I've seen on slashdot. props to you.
How viable are these for sticking into a SFF PC, to be used as a small media center capable of playing h264. That's what I want to know :)
"sporty" of them.
Mission crticial? It's a set-top box for christ sake. This is all about reducing complexity for them, so they only support one thing, and have one feature-set to worry about upgrading.
Having a seperate password for 50+ websites is not realistic when you plan to memorize them all. I use KeePass to have very random 16+ char passwords (that I do not bother to remember) for every place I visit, and one master password to access the database.
How do they calculate this "twice as much" number? I find it hard to believe they meant Windows and *nix - both have well designed APIs for super-scalable software and I seriously doubt either one could perform so significantly well over the other. More likely they compared some premade framework that had poor code for Windows, or something entirely different like ASP and Perl.
I never defined object. If you would like clarification, they _are_ objects you pass around. Everything is an instance of a .NET class. Doing "ls | get-member" lets me know it is giving me back DirectoryInfo and FileInfo objects, complete with all the properties and methods you could ask for.
you might notice that | symbol there lets ya chain stuff.I'm not claiming Powershell was the first to invent the pipe - god no. I just meant to point out that *finally* Windows has something on equal ground to *nix.
ls| sed -e 's/^d/b/'|mailx -s "oh no!" phrostyAnd if you used Powershell, you wouldn't have to do any text processing. That's all I was pointing out with that (poor) example. That and the above, that you can finally pipe crap together.
You'll be happy to know one of the major points of Powershell is the ability to pipe objects through all of their various commands. It's nice to finally have a usable shell, but god damn it is overdue.
I'd be interested to know why people are modding my post down :) Is the suggestion that a Windows shell might finally equal bash flamebait now? Or maybe I didn't list enough of Powershell's faults - I should have just left out the complements to it to appease the anti-Microsoft folks. If someone who has actually used Powershell beyond what cmd.exe can already do would like to rebut something I said, please do! *ducks*
Wake me up when *nix gets an object-oriented (rather than text-oriented) shell. Because that is what makes Powershell so unique. Yes, it has plenty of builtin functions to make tasks easier, but the real advantage is that everything you pass between commands is an object.
You don't have to worry about interpreting text output - you just access whatever data you want directly. Many of the commands are easily chainable into something like "ls | select fullname,length | sort name | format-list | out-printer".
Powershell is very powerful. Much more so than cmd.exe. I don't have significant enough experience with bash to compare the two but I would not be surprised to learn Powershell equals if not beats bash at the shell game. I wouldn't say it is ready to replace any of the scripting languages just yet.
I have been using it for a while now and the single (semi-major) problem I can find is memory usage. It is a hog at best, and at worst when you are using it semi-heavily it can easily chew up 1GB of memory. That's even with giving the GC something to work with, ie unsetting $vars when you are done with their data.
I hope by "appropriate" they mean if a building is on fire and one of the escape routes like a stairwell is on fire, it will redirect them to a safer place.
When I was in school, I was discussing the game Rampage with a few friends. One of them had never played this game before, so I was explaining it for him. I said something along the lines of "You run through a city, eating people and blowing up buildings". A teacher managed to overhear "blow up the building" out of that sentence, and hopped on her Jump to Conclusions mat the next day when I was escorted to the dean's office by some cops.
After a long frustrating week of being questioned, it blew over. I can only imagine what it would have been like if it had occured after Colombine or in recent years.
I'm betting that there is another reason DX10 is only for Vista: performance. With DX9 and OpenGL, you can run games on XP and Vista, and compare them to see Vista is slower. With DX10 you can't compare anymore, so people forget Vista is slower.
It would be a shame if after what, 4 or 5 years? of being in the lead, AMD loses focus and stops making fast CPUs.
The last thing we need is for Intel to have no real competitors. Innovation would slow and prices would hike up.
You can call SetThreadExecutionState() periodically to disable automatic sleeping. It does not prevent manual sleeping though.
Is the lack of good font control. Lack of kerning is one thing. Another is you can't have font sizes for each individual fallback font - fonts can vary in size so much that you have to write for the most common font or risk throwing the design for everyone else.
From a developer's perspective, it all depends on who you want to have the most freedom with your code.
With GPL you give freedom to the community - anything using GPL code will always be GPL.
With BSD you give freedom to the developer - they can use your code almost any way they want. Closed source devs can modify and distribute binaries as much as they want without giving anything back to the community.
LGPL is like a mix of the two. The single developer can use thier own license so long as they only link to the LGPL code. Any modifications to the LGPL code are under LGPL, so some things are still given back to the community.
*prepares to be modded troll*
People need to stop comparing Java/C# generics to C++ templates - they take similar syntax, but they aren't the same thing. I'm not sure how one can even be safer than the other.
And C# 2.0 maintained compatibility with existing C# 1.0 code (you still have access to the old containers) while actually giving significant performance benefits where Java is only syntax sugar that still produces the same old slow code.
instead of sharing files, divide them into 16KB chunks and share those, to help work around files that get renamed or trivially altered (eg a website tagging their url to all the files you upload).
The flag to set default behavior was disabled in RTM and iirc RC2. You can set it, but it has no effect.
College is there for four things:
a) to further prepare you for a professional working life.
b) to give hands-on training with hardware you couldn't afford at home.
c) for people who can't learn as well on their own.
d) breaking into a career that heavily depends on diplomas.
Ask your cousin if he needs any of this, and he'll know his answer. D is definately a hurdle for programming jobs, but it fades as you gain experience to vouch for your skills.