Those usually aren't javascript variables, they're control IDs. ASP.NET's default programming model (not the only one), the webforms, are meant for application composition... That is, you make a bunch of UI components that have no clue about the context they'll be running in (including CSS, scripts, IDs, etc), and assemble them together... That means that a control "PasswordRequired" could have the same ID as another textbox or whatever in another part of the page... so the engine autogenerate "unique" IDs based on context, among other things.
It isn't very efficient at all from a user's perspective (works great from the developer's side, at least if composite apps is what you're trying to do... you often see devs that are NOT trying to do that bitch about the IDs, so other asp.net models are emerging to fix this), and it is going to be better architectured in the next version, but for now its there.
I'm not sure, but I think the rules for advertising involve the current social and cultural context. Most people won't think that Axe makes girls throw themselves at you, its a parody, and is fairly obvious. This advertisement however is continually repeating that the iphone is fast fast FAAAAAAAAAAAST, and its new technology, in a world of techno-retards, so it has more chance of hooking morons than Axe does.
Indeed. I personally use cropping. But that really wasn't what I was refering to.
With the totally craptastic signal the cable company sends me (I don't have an HDTV for TV, its for gaming), it looks fairly bad, but if I use the DVD, and stick it on an SDTV, it looks -just fine-. If I stick it on a typical overpriced HDTV, no zooming, no stretching, it looks horrible. Same size, no stretching, no zooming, no cropping. If I stick it in -my- HDTV, which upscales relatively well (which is impressive, since it was cheap), it looks about the same as it does on an SDTV, and it looks fine. If I put it in something that upscales (like a Xbox 360 with HDMI), it looks much better than on an SDTV.
On most HDTVs I've seen, if you watch normal TV (not HD), don't zoom/crop, it still looks really bad, but its really the TV's fault more than the signal.
Only in the United States (and maybe Canada). In Europe you'd be hard pressed to find a DVD in 4:3. Most, if not all, are wide screen.
Its still 4:3, just with bars on top and at the bottom. As far as I know, its not even in 16:9 with bars, its (not always, but usually) is closer to a movie theater's aspect ratio. So sure, its widescreen, but you need to change your TV's settings, since your TV thinks its 4:3 (it doesn't know if the bars are part of it or not). If you're playing a blu ray disk or similar "standard" 720p source, the aspect ratio will be correct for your TV right off the bat. You'll virtually never see a recent movie on DVD in 4:3 without the bars in the US either.
What you've never met isn't people who regretted their childs. That is actually extremely common. What you have never met, is people who, in this polically correct society (and in other society that has similar levels of peer pressure), will admit to it, even to their closest confidents.
Considering your stance on the matter, which you seem to hold pretty dear from the wording you use (and you are fully entitled to it, I'm not saying you're wrong or anything), I doubt anyone would EVER dare tell you that they regretted their child, down's syndrom or not.
To give a different point of view, at the risk of getting flamed to hell and beyond, I really, really despise kids (don't worrie, I'll never have to make my significant other go through an abortion... snip snip and all, thats all taken care of). Like, really, REALLY hate kids. Everyone around me knows my stance on this. Because of this, I had a LOT of mothers and families tell me in secret how they wish they never had their kids. In certain cases, that they didn't even love them, but that they still did what they could so it wouldn't show. None of those were disabled child's families, either. And to make things clear, I don't live in a ghetto, and the people I'm talking about came from all kinds of families, from poor to rich, etc.
Only in Wonderland does all families consider their kids blessings, ESPECIALLY kids with issues. They may not admit it, they may WANT to love them. That doesn't mean they do.
Its "real easy" because most HDTVs make a total mess of SD signals, AND that SD signal often has noise in it. Get a good 480i signal (not a videogame though, that is much easier. Let say a movie) from a digital source, resized to 16:9 the way the Wii does it (since 480i/p isn't naturally widescreen), on a TV that doesn't trash low resolution signals (my cheap Toshiba handles em fine. My step-dad's couple of years old 60 inch panasonic is great too. I've seen some totally overpriced Sony TVs that still trashed it though, so price doesn't matter here), and the difference won't be -nearly- as obvious.
If the TV has a proper upscaler (or if you have an external one), the difference really becomes minimal unless the HD source is 1080P on a high quality 60 inch TV
It is still important. I can most definately tell if what I'm watching is from a crappy VHS or from a DVD. That was obvious the first time I ever saw a movie on DVD. Walked in a room, saw people watching a DVD movie, and was like "Wow....so thats a DVD movie eh?". An HD source vs an SD source (to be fair, I'm talking about a movie or TV show... other kinds of content will be easier) gets a lot trickier.
I remember last time I brought my Xbox 360 to a family member's place. All of their TV's HDMI connectors were taken (which is what I normally use), so I brought the component cables (which can do 720p just fine). Since I had never used component, the console went back to default: 4:3, 480 lines. After playing a few hours, I started noticing something weird.... the ratio (the game i was playing didn't make it totally obvious like most would). So I went in the config to set it back to 16:9, when I noticed... 480 resolution? The hell? Switched it back up to 720p... There was a difference, but it wasn't all that obvious (no, it wasn't one of those 520p games that they upscale).
I'm sure I'm not the majority and that most people would have been able to tell much faster, but point still stands though: for a large amount of people its fairly irrelevent if you give them HD for a month or a year. As long as there's no artefact in the picture (like VHS), how many pixels you pump in Sex in the City won't matter.
I'd be more interested in a comparison between upscaled SD and HD. That is, an upscaled DVD (even the Xbox 360 upscale would do...no need to go fancy), vs a 720p source. I bet that 18% would become much, much higher... I have 2 TV of exactly the same size and resolution, and I tried putting them side by side... aside for the annoying 4:3 ratio that most DVDs are in, Its freakishly hard to tell the difference on anything below 40-45 inches (at a reasonable distance... of course its easy if you have your face in the TV).
The biggest reason SD "looks so awful about seeing HD" is because the built in upscalers of most HDTV is completly horrible, and make SD sources look faaaaaar worse than they should.
He's actually starting to have trouble communicating, as the movements he used for it back then (blinking I think?) are starting to become harder. He's still productive, but not as much as he used to, and probably not for very long.
No, they can't. Everyone will do everything they can to stop them, they'll have long periods of trauma and depressions, if they miss they'll be put in a psychiatric hospital, and it may make things worse.
In this world, killing yourself is potentially harder than killing someone else.
Really now, its the way society is moving? No, not really. The way I'm seeing it (and you see so many articles on slashdot bitching about it, and rightly so), is that there is a small minority of people breaking the rules and screwing it for everyone else... until pissy purists (who could not just politely ask, or did so but got shoved a new one) bitch and whine until things like "all cellphones are banned at a theater" or "smoking 10 feet from a bus shelter is a civil offence" (which actually happened where I live) comes into play, and make things even worse.
THAT is the way society is moving. And I don't know about you, but I don't think its a good thing.
That said, "joining in on the rulebreaking" is rediculous... lets take the above example again... if -EVERYONE- used cells freely in theaters... well, there would be no point in going to the theater anymore... net loss. If it was an extremely large portion of people (let say, with the piracy subject), you'd have a point, but for things that a minority does (but spoils it for everyone), I'll pass, thanks. I do enjoy the hypocrisy though... "Can you blame people for being offended and insulted when you take liberties that are not yours to take". You mean, like breaking commonly accepted rules?:)
I agree. The issue with a lot of rules (especially rules that aren't laws, such as the ones mentionned above) is that they aren't enforced, and people don't seem to care about enforcing them. If there's a HUGE "No cellphone" sign in the theater, and someone is talking their ass off in front of me during a movie, and I politely (seriously) ask them to be a little more quiet (not even stop!), I get told to fuck off. If there's a no smoking sign in the bus stop's shelter and someone is smoking, and I ask them to take 2 steps outside of it (on a sunny day!), I'll also get told to mind my own business. And with all of these, if I tell the people in CHARGE of enforcing those rules, they'll ignore me.
Result? People ask for more laws, or for draconian measures, like the grandparent.
Silverlight is more targeted at making functional apps than pretty apps. While it has the functionalities and the tools to do the same things you'd do in Flash, the base functionalities are to make apps similar to what you'd see on the desktop. So its not a huge loss.
Depends: games like Fallout 3 have minimal DRM with the ONLY purpose being to prevent "impulsive" piracy. That is, pumping out 5 copies of the game for all your friends simply because its as simple as copying the CD.
To pirate the game, you have to actually "try", as easy as it can be. For that, DRM is successful. Any efforts beyond that (like what EA does a lot), is futile.
They're talking about the DST -modification-, which is relatively recent and WAS to save energy. Or well, it was the excuse when it was sold to people. What it really does is help business (potentially).
I'll agree with the anonymous coward here. While it may not be as simple as drag and drop... if I take a picture on the web, right click => Copy, go in my document, right click -> paste... bang! the picture appears! MAGIC! Also, you may want to stop comparing an 7 years old version of Windows with the latest version of an operating system that didn't even exist until early the year that that particular version of Windows came out.
You don't need to care where your images are anymore (and if you DO want to care, they're usually in C:\users\username...none of that documents and settings bullshit anymore). From a non-technical user's point of view, they're just in "Pictures" (the default explorer view will not show you the actual paths anymore unless you go in Computer).
Oh oh oh, and for moving it around... let see! Well, by default it behaves just like any text (which is probably what you want 99% of the time). Want to put in somewhere else... well, let see! Hmm, that looks hard... the bar at the top (which automatically shows up if I click on the picture) has suggestions with relatively big images to ask me where I want to put it...select ANY of them, and then I can drag & drop it anywhere I want! OUF! That was tough!
Something tells me you're still using obsolete versions of Windows software... WinXP and Office 2003 were unbearable when they CAME OUT, nevermind today...
It actually doesn't. Its an application like any other that can be killed, move, restarted, or even removed. Some versions of Windows Server can even run without it installed at all. And I thought you meant IE since you brought Netscape up in your post.
The very definition of an OEM implies that you're packaging the product and providing support... If I make an application that uses PostgreSQL, sell it, and the user has an issue with the database, they'll call me. Thats just...normal. Dell and HP do the same, just with hardware and software together. Thats also why if you buy an OEM version of Windows (or virtually any software), and you have issues, you can't call Microsoft, because YOU are support. If you buy a boxed copy at Bestbuy though, then you have support.
This is indeed the best advice. No framework will ever meet 100% of requirements. So you either use extensible frameworks, or have a facade that allow you to pipe logic either through the framework, or through custom code, as needed, allowing 90%+ to go through the framework, and the last 10% to go through whatever you wish.
A lot of ORMs (I'm not as familiar as I wish I was with Hibernate) will allow you to use the standard dynamic SQL generation, AND to do stored procedure wrapping and projections... With that, you seriously can do pretty much "anything", except for using the very very latest features of the very very latest version of your RDBMS of choice, such as unsupported datatypes. For the 2-3 queries in the entire app that ends up in that situation, you simply have a custom data manipulation layer (small, not very heavily architected), and both that and the framework just sit behind whatever abstraction facade one may have...
I also agree with the other part of the advice.... Spring not being powerful/flexible enough? When you have what is basically a "meta-meta-meta-meta-extensible framework" (which is basically what Spring is), its hard to see that something could possibly need features that cannot even be met using all of Spring's extension mechanisms...
You're right, though the grandparent's point still makes sense: If you're thinking something like Netflix, then ok, a 100 gb cap is nuts. But in general? Until recently I had a -20- gig plan (Canada), and usually a would go through a month on less than 10 gigs... Thats using the internet heavily on 4 computers. Just, no netflix, no torrents, and not too many legit software downloads (like MSDN or Xbox Live Marketplace demos). I eventually upgraded to a 100 gb plan because with the things in parenthesis, I'd often get between 15 and 20 gigs, and going over was cost prohibitive (plus the 100 gig plan was a decent bit faster, so it was worth it somewhat). Now I don't even need to look, there's no way im going over 100 gigs without torrents or download (legit or not) HD movies, which I don't.
Streaming full movies aside, its VERY uncommon for someone to push 50 gigs a month legitimately. For those who DO, there should be some kind of special plan, since its a "special" use case (for now...it won't always be so, I realise that).
You wouldn't write Office in.NET for similar reasons you wouldn't write Half-Life 3 in.NET. Right tool for the right job. Massive applications with thousands of hooks to native librairies, drivers, low level I/O (well, low level anything), and that needs to run on low end consumer hardware, all at once, isn't exactly the thing you'd use.NET for...
Plus, they'd need to rewrite Office as a whole, which is probably a bad idea, even if the resulting software was better. In the same way, you won't write a browser rendering engine in it.
Most anything else though? They definately do. I'm looking at my Windows Home Server right now. The management application is an MFC + RDP shell, but all of the actual work is done via.NET. The SQL Server business intelligence stuff uses.NET APIs under the hood (not the engine itself though, for obvious reasons). Most of MS' web sites by now are in.NET.
You don't see them do more of it because they are in the process of converting to it. Bit by bit, can't rewrite all that code in a day:) They're not done converting all of their teams to Team Foundation Server yet either. One thing at a time.
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Those usually aren't javascript variables, they're control IDs. ASP.NET's default programming model (not the only one), the webforms, are meant for application composition... That is, you make a bunch of UI components that have no clue about the context they'll be running in (including CSS, scripts, IDs, etc), and assemble them together... That means that a control "PasswordRequired" could have the same ID as another textbox or whatever in another part of the page... so the engine autogenerate "unique" IDs based on context, among other things.
It isn't very efficient at all from a user's perspective (works great from the developer's side, at least if composite apps is what you're trying to do... you often see devs that are NOT trying to do that bitch about the IDs, so other asp.net models are emerging to fix this), and it is going to be better architectured in the next version, but for now its there.
I'm not sure, but I think the rules for advertising involve the current social and cultural context. Most people won't think that Axe makes girls throw themselves at you, its a parody, and is fairly obvious. This advertisement however is continually repeating that the iphone is fast fast FAAAAAAAAAAAST, and its new technology, in a world of techno-retards, so it has more chance of hooking morons than Axe does.
Indeed. I personally use cropping. But that really wasn't what I was refering to.
With the totally craptastic signal the cable company sends me (I don't have an HDTV for TV, its for gaming), it looks fairly bad, but if I use the DVD, and stick it on an SDTV, it looks -just fine-. If I stick it on a typical overpriced HDTV, no zooming, no stretching, it looks horrible. Same size, no stretching, no zooming, no cropping. If I stick it in -my- HDTV, which upscales relatively well (which is impressive, since it was cheap), it looks about the same as it does on an SDTV, and it looks fine. If I put it in something that upscales (like a Xbox 360 with HDMI), it looks much better than on an SDTV.
On most HDTVs I've seen, if you watch normal TV (not HD), don't zoom/crop, it still looks really bad, but its really the TV's fault more than the signal.
Its still 4:3, just with bars on top and at the bottom. As far as I know, its not even in 16:9 with bars, its (not always, but usually) is closer to a movie theater's aspect ratio. So sure, its widescreen, but you need to change your TV's settings, since your TV thinks its 4:3 (it doesn't know if the bars are part of it or not). If you're playing a blu ray disk or similar "standard" 720p source, the aspect ratio will be correct for your TV right off the bat. You'll virtually never see a recent movie on DVD in 4:3 without the bars in the US either.
What you've never met isn't people who regretted their childs. That is actually extremely common. What you have never met, is people who, in this polically correct society (and in other society that has similar levels of peer pressure), will admit to it, even to their closest confidents.
Considering your stance on the matter, which you seem to hold pretty dear from the wording you use (and you are fully entitled to it, I'm not saying you're wrong or anything), I doubt anyone would EVER dare tell you that they regretted their child, down's syndrom or not.
To give a different point of view, at the risk of getting flamed to hell and beyond, I really, really despise kids (don't worrie, I'll never have to make my significant other go through an abortion... snip snip and all, thats all taken care of). Like, really, REALLY hate kids. Everyone around me knows my stance on this. Because of this, I had a LOT of mothers and families tell me in secret how they wish they never had their kids. In certain cases, that they didn't even love them, but that they still did what they could so it wouldn't show. None of those were disabled child's families, either. And to make things clear, I don't live in a ghetto, and the people I'm talking about came from all kinds of families, from poor to rich, etc.
Only in Wonderland does all families consider their kids blessings, ESPECIALLY kids with issues. They may not admit it, they may WANT to love them. That doesn't mean they do.
Its "real easy" because most HDTVs make a total mess of SD signals, AND that SD signal often has noise in it. Get a good 480i signal (not a videogame though, that is much easier. Let say a movie) from a digital source, resized to 16:9 the way the Wii does it (since 480i/p isn't naturally widescreen), on a TV that doesn't trash low resolution signals (my cheap Toshiba handles em fine. My step-dad's couple of years old 60 inch panasonic is great too. I've seen some totally overpriced Sony TVs that still trashed it though, so price doesn't matter here), and the difference won't be -nearly- as obvious.
If the TV has a proper upscaler (or if you have an external one), the difference really becomes minimal unless the HD source is 1080P on a high quality 60 inch TV
It is still important. I can most definately tell if what I'm watching is from a crappy VHS or from a DVD. That was obvious the first time I ever saw a movie on DVD. Walked in a room, saw people watching a DVD movie, and was like "Wow....so thats a DVD movie eh?". An HD source vs an SD source (to be fair, I'm talking about a movie or TV show... other kinds of content will be easier) gets a lot trickier.
I remember last time I brought my Xbox 360 to a family member's place. All of their TV's HDMI connectors were taken (which is what I normally use), so I brought the component cables (which can do 720p just fine). Since I had never used component, the console went back to default: 4:3, 480 lines. After playing a few hours, I started noticing something weird.... the ratio (the game i was playing didn't make it totally obvious like most would). So I went in the config to set it back to 16:9, when I noticed... 480 resolution? The hell? Switched it back up to 720p... There was a difference, but it wasn't all that obvious (no, it wasn't one of those 520p games that they upscale).
I'm sure I'm not the majority and that most people would have been able to tell much faster, but point still stands though: for a large amount of people its fairly irrelevent if you give them HD for a month or a year. As long as there's no artefact in the picture (like VHS), how many pixels you pump in Sex in the City won't matter.
I'd be more interested in a comparison between upscaled SD and HD. That is, an upscaled DVD (even the Xbox 360 upscale would do...no need to go fancy), vs a 720p source. I bet that 18% would become much, much higher... I have 2 TV of exactly the same size and resolution, and I tried putting them side by side... aside for the annoying 4:3 ratio that most DVDs are in, Its freakishly hard to tell the difference on anything below 40-45 inches (at a reasonable distance... of course its easy if you have your face in the TV).
The biggest reason SD "looks so awful about seeing HD" is because the built in upscalers of most HDTV is completly horrible, and make SD sources look faaaaaar worse than they should.
He's actually starting to have trouble communicating, as the movements he used for it back then (blinking I think?) are starting to become harder. He's still productive, but not as much as he used to, and probably not for very long.
No, they can't. Everyone will do everything they can to stop them, they'll have long periods of trauma and depressions, if they miss they'll be put in a psychiatric hospital, and it may make things worse.
In this world, killing yourself is potentially harder than killing someone else.
Really now, its the way society is moving? No, not really. The way I'm seeing it (and you see so many articles on slashdot bitching about it, and rightly so), is that there is a small minority of people breaking the rules and screwing it for everyone else... until pissy purists (who could not just politely ask, or did so but got shoved a new one) bitch and whine until things like "all cellphones are banned at a theater" or "smoking 10 feet from a bus shelter is a civil offence" (which actually happened where I live) comes into play, and make things even worse.
THAT is the way society is moving. And I don't know about you, but I don't think its a good thing.
That said, "joining in on the rulebreaking" is rediculous... lets take the above example again... if -EVERYONE- used cells freely in theaters... well, there would be no point in going to the theater anymore... net loss. If it was an extremely large portion of people (let say, with the piracy subject), you'd have a point, but for things that a minority does (but spoils it for everyone), I'll pass, thanks. I do enjoy the hypocrisy though... "Can you blame people for being offended and insulted when you take liberties that are not yours to take". You mean, like breaking commonly accepted rules? :)
I wasn't talking about personal experience :) I'm talking "in general", that is how things are in the western world.
I agree. The issue with a lot of rules (especially rules that aren't laws, such as the ones mentionned above) is that they aren't enforced, and people don't seem to care about enforcing them. If there's a HUGE "No cellphone" sign in the theater, and someone is talking their ass off in front of me during a movie, and I politely (seriously) ask them to be a little more quiet (not even stop!), I get told to fuck off. If there's a no smoking sign in the bus stop's shelter and someone is smoking, and I ask them to take 2 steps outside of it (on a sunny day!), I'll also get told to mind my own business. And with all of these, if I tell the people in CHARGE of enforcing those rules, they'll ignore me.
Result? People ask for more laws, or for draconian measures, like the grandparent.
Silverlight is more targeted at making functional apps than pretty apps. While it has the functionalities and the tools to do the same things you'd do in Flash, the base functionalities are to make apps similar to what you'd see on the desktop. So its not a huge loss.
Depends: games like Fallout 3 have minimal DRM with the ONLY purpose being to prevent "impulsive" piracy. That is, pumping out 5 copies of the game for all your friends simply because its as simple as copying the CD.
To pirate the game, you have to actually "try", as easy as it can be. For that, DRM is successful. Any efforts beyond that (like what EA does a lot), is futile.
They're talking about the DST -modification-, which is relatively recent and WAS to save energy. Or well, it was the excuse when it was sold to people. What it really does is help business (potentially).
I'll agree with the anonymous coward here. While it may not be as simple as drag and drop... if I take a picture on the web, right click => Copy, go in my document, right click -> paste... bang! the picture appears! MAGIC! Also, you may want to stop comparing an 7 years old version of Windows with the latest version of an operating system that didn't even exist until early the year that that particular version of Windows came out.
You don't need to care where your images are anymore (and if you DO want to care, they're usually in C:\users\username...none of that documents and settings bullshit anymore). From a non-technical user's point of view, they're just in "Pictures" (the default explorer view will not show you the actual paths anymore unless you go in Computer).
Oh oh oh, and for moving it around... let see! Well, by default it behaves just like any text (which is probably what you want 99% of the time). Want to put in somewhere else... well, let see! Hmm, that looks hard... the bar at the top (which automatically shows up if I click on the picture) has suggestions with relatively big images to ask me where I want to put it...select ANY of them, and then I can drag & drop it anywhere I want! OUF! That was tough!
Something tells me you're still using obsolete versions of Windows software... WinXP and Office 2003 were unbearable when they CAME OUT, nevermind today...
WPA2 is AES instead of TKIP, and that hasn't been cracked yet. Once that is, then we're in trouble, since AES is used eeeeeeeeeeeeeeverywhere....
It used to use the same rendering engine a long time ago. Now, it does not (thus why things like Active Desktop don't work).
It actually doesn't. Its an application like any other that can be killed, move, restarted, or even removed. Some versions of Windows Server can even run without it installed at all. And I thought you meant IE since you brought Netscape up in your post.
If by Explorer you mean Internet Explorer... its really NOT the shell of the system anymore.
The very definition of an OEM implies that you're packaging the product and providing support... If I make an application that uses PostgreSQL, sell it, and the user has an issue with the database, they'll call me. Thats just...normal. Dell and HP do the same, just with hardware and software together. Thats also why if you buy an OEM version of Windows (or virtually any software), and you have issues, you can't call Microsoft, because YOU are support. If you buy a boxed copy at Bestbuy though, then you have support.
This is indeed the best advice. No framework will ever meet 100% of requirements. So you either use extensible frameworks, or have a facade that allow you to pipe logic either through the framework, or through custom code, as needed, allowing 90%+ to go through the framework, and the last 10% to go through whatever you wish.
A lot of ORMs (I'm not as familiar as I wish I was with Hibernate) will allow you to use the standard dynamic SQL generation, AND to do stored procedure wrapping and projections... With that, you seriously can do pretty much "anything", except for using the very very latest features of the very very latest version of your RDBMS of choice, such as unsupported datatypes. For the 2-3 queries in the entire app that ends up in that situation, you simply have a custom data manipulation layer (small, not very heavily architected), and both that and the framework just sit behind whatever abstraction facade one may have...
I also agree with the other part of the advice.... Spring not being powerful/flexible enough? When you have what is basically a "meta-meta-meta-meta-extensible framework" (which is basically what Spring is), its hard to see that something could possibly need features that cannot even be met using all of Spring's extension mechanisms...
You're right, though the grandparent's point still makes sense: If you're thinking something like Netflix, then ok, a 100 gb cap is nuts. But in general? Until recently I had a -20- gig plan (Canada), and usually a would go through a month on less than 10 gigs... Thats using the internet heavily on 4 computers. Just, no netflix, no torrents, and not too many legit software downloads (like MSDN or Xbox Live Marketplace demos). I eventually upgraded to a 100 gb plan because with the things in parenthesis, I'd often get between 15 and 20 gigs, and going over was cost prohibitive (plus the 100 gig plan was a decent bit faster, so it was worth it somewhat). Now I don't even need to look, there's no way im going over 100 gigs without torrents or download (legit or not) HD movies, which I don't.
Streaming full movies aside, its VERY uncommon for someone to push 50 gigs a month legitimately. For those who DO, there should be some kind of special plan, since its a "special" use case (for now...it won't always be so, I realise that).
You wouldn't write Office in .NET for similar reasons you wouldn't write Half-Life 3 in .NET. Right tool for the right job. Massive applications with thousands of hooks to native librairies, drivers, low level I/O (well, low level anything), and that needs to run on low end consumer hardware, all at once, isn't exactly the thing you'd use .NET for...
Plus, they'd need to rewrite Office as a whole, which is probably a bad idea, even if the resulting software was better. In the same way, you won't write a browser rendering engine in it.
Most anything else though? They definately do. I'm looking at my Windows Home Server right now. The management application is an MFC + RDP shell, but all of the actual work is done via .NET. The SQL Server business intelligence stuff uses .NET APIs under the hood (not the engine itself though, for obvious reasons). Most of MS' web sites by now are in .NET.
You don't see them do more of it because they are in the process of converting to it. Bit by bit, can't rewrite all that code in a day :) They're not done converting all of their teams to Team Foundation Server yet either. One thing at a time.