Like locking it to the set-top box HD wouldn't be equally hard and/or equally invasive to your rights? What about when your kids, in the other room, wants to watch the movie? Move the box around or... *shugger* transmit it over a LAN? (If that's allowed, won't they "need" DRM to "protect" it?)
OTOH, I would imagine there are more servers running terminal services (essentially the same). Hopefully, that's generally through VPN or with source address restrictions in place.
Well, Remote Desktop creates new instances of the Win32 subsystem and the kernel objects (like file system and registry mount points, named pipes, the list goes on). Also, I guess that the actual translation of keyboard and mouse events from the TCP/IP stream to input to Win32K is done through a kernel module.
Not to forget the authentication. There's some stuff in creating/destroying sessions that affects the kernel, to some degree. So, no, I wouldn't expect the TCP/IP stack itself. Maybe keyboard/mouse input, as that's allowed to access a GUI login box, before being authenticated. Or even just flood the GINA with input that would be impossible to by just hammering a hardware keyboard. (That would make it a problem that would also affect Windows running in a virtualization environment or another, although if that could ever be considered safe is of course a matter of taste and perspective.)
Any source for the statement that Avalon is delayed? After all, that's the kind of bits that they actually let you try, now, on XP/2003, and it kind of works. (Not like WinFS, which they never finishes. Regarding the command shell Monad, I guess they just don't see the priority in getting into the client version, as it's mostly intended as a server administration tool, anyway. That lots of geek users would like it in the client, from release, doesn't really matter...)
That's a quite remarkable emulation feat. I wonder if this is on x64 with the added registers or if it's just plain x86. I imagine that the added registers in x64 (or whatever you want to call it without using an AMD or Intel moniker), combined with less restricted usage combinations, would make emulating the PowerPC ISA well easier.
I'm too lazy to google here, but two possible types of super atoms would be fullerenes with a (metal) atom inside, where the complete structure gets atom-like properties, or maybe creating atoms out of higher level quark-based particles in the nucleus and higher-level leptons on the outside. The first one is realistic, the other one would probably be realistic at a point where we also can create anti-matter for battery-like energy storage.
There actually are separate streams in NTFS and something called "compound documents" (I think) that every Office file uses. In those, you can have several different files and there are general OLE APIs for manipulating them. In some of the W2K betas, it was even mapped directly to the NTFS streams. They retracted the file system mapping as a default setting, as too many tools manipulating the files simply didn't understand that there was more to it than the single normal data stream.
The point in leaving that document format now is that it was (/is) hell to handle if you don't want to use the existing APIs. Zip and XML are widespread, so you will at least be able to access the separate included files, parse and transform them, on "any" platform.
Yeah, they bump the system requirements up a bit each time. Another thing I've noticed in Word 2003 is better crash recovery. Of course, it would be better if it didn't crash at all. On the positive side, there are also improvements in things like having a document open on another machine, while you disconnect from the network.
If you develop custom apps, you might like their current XML export capabilities. It might simplify report generation in a MS-only environment.
So, is it worth it? I wouldn't say so. I notice some new features, I happen to like most of them, but Office XP compared to Office 2000 felt like much less improvement than WinXP to Win2000 (and we all know how much/little that is). On the other hand, I'm generally working in Word and Excel. I think Outlook's evolved more (it's not the same thing as Outlook Express, you know), especially regarding security. Also, when I do need to crank out slides in PowerPoint, I try to make sure that I have a recent version around, since I'm much more comfortable with the UI for entering personal notes together with the slides there. But, on the whole, it's mostly details...
Via a browser, they could mean "without plugin" in a browser. That is what would make it different from current InfoPath forms. (InfoPath is an Office component.) The point would be easy integration with Office documents, while maintaining a simple and general client side.
If it requires Office installed, then I of course agree with you.
If you allow user accounts to post comments and or new blog entries, it does. It surprises me that the general URL published in the article is https, though. If you enter http instead, simple reading is fully possible. Maybe a devious plan from the article writer to DoS attack the MS blog server by everyone using https... An offence far worse than wardriving!
Yeah, because using simple stuff like publicly documented API additions in GDI is tying. It's damn easy to write XP code and find "hey, this API seems fun, I'll try it out as I don't need, I don't even WANT this to run under 2000".
XP is the 2000 kernel trimmed and fixed up. One of the most significant changes was the work to speed up boot time, which involved lots of kernel tweakings, as most of the time is naturally spent in kernel mode, or polling/probing hardware.
There is very little reason to use 2K pro if you have XP Pro available. You'll have to configure XP to get it to be 2000-like, but it does a great job of emulating it.
Windows 2000 is 5.0, and now 5.5 years old. It's a quite venerable age for a piece of software. Also, some hot fixes will continue to be available for those who have a reason to stay there until 2010.
I'm sad to see 2000 go, but XP is the natural successor. It's not like they would have asked you to ditch NT 4 for Me, or something...
I hate to break this to you, but you don't practice some kind of silent dialog with your fingers to get them to write, either. Imagine that you had to concentrate hard on each letter you wanted to type to the machine. With some luck, those could be identified. Getting up to speed would be quite similar to how you get up to speed in any motoric process, and since there would be no need for actual conduction to peripheric nerves or any actual mechanic movement going on, I would imagine that this could be plenty fast...
At first, I would maybe think that fast touch typists could be converted to eventually just think about their existing writing patterns. After getting used to it, one would be able to increase the speed.
The biggest pro of this approach is of course that the signal itself will be discrete and that there's lots of existing software to handle it. It's just a way to replace the physical interface, the keyboard, not the type of interaction that's going on.
98 (and 98SE and Me in increasing degree, for more device types) adopted the WDM driver model, which was sort-of compatible with future Win2000 drivers in many ways. They basically chose a subset of the NT kernel calls, changed the resource allocation of the driver model to make it plug-n-pray and threw in a mini-NT-kernel emulation layer in '98.
THAT was a real feat, actually getting kernel code compatibility between what was still very different systems.
I would also imagine that many high-level user APIs (common dialogs and controls) were more a part of shell/IE and because of this were just different builds for 9x and NT. (Native unicode or not by a compiler definition, I'd guess, to take an important example.)
It's actually called "This Computer" (Den här datorn) in Swedish. My Documents, when that was introduced, is literally translated, though. On the other hand, that makes more sense.
BTW, "Program Files" defaults to "Program", which makes it blatantly obvious to tell which programs will read the registry setting and those that:
a) Hard-code "c:\program files" and
b) don't enclose that string in quotes in some command lines (hint: it will try to access the c:\program folder instead in most circumstances)
It's probably not a matter of RAM, but of address space. The card needs an address below 2^32 (with this controller). If the motherboard actually won't support remapping the RAM, in turn, to even higher addresses, there will be a conflict and some of the physical address space will be "covered" by the aperture. In the 2 GB case, there's plenty of physical address space for things like that, and so no lost memory.
Saying that a cancer doesn't evolve is not completely true. A "successful" tumor includes several different properties. Those tumors that fail to spread, by, for example, being caught by the immune system, won't survive. Many current treatments are so crude that it's unlikely to see resistance development, but just like bacteria, in one specific individual, can develop resistance to antibiotics, a cancer might learn to cope with chemotherapy. This can also be compared to the situation where a HIV positive person's "personal" virus strain develops resistance and workarounds for the current drugs, the prime reason for why you always try to use a cocktail combination to keep the virus down.
Most cancers won't develop anything like this, but if we start to use "smarter" treatments, tagging them to specific over-expressed receptor sites on their membranes, for example, I wouldn't be surprised if we'll also have to deal with the issues of cell lines that mutate to lack those receptors.
Hey, remember that Pegasus was in the last Season of TNG - 93/94 (right?). It's more like ten than twenty years ago. What that has done to the appearance of Riker, on the other hand, is irrelevant. I think that he looks much more out of character in TNG season 1:-)
1. Genesis wasn't meant as a weapon. It was meant as terraforming put on speed.
In the way it was realized, it would not only destroy all existing life, but also make the planet completely unusable in the future (because it didn't work). It would be a very non-Federation thing to use. Also, we can't be sure what really happened. Obviously, it wasn't generally known that David Marcus had to use "protomatter" to "solve certain problems" (and create others), as Saavik, on the mission to investigate the results of Genesis didn't know about it. David, who was killed, nor his mother, who was leading in the project, were keen on the weapon potential.
The warp drive finding was put down into the story. For over a season of TNG we heard about "warp 5" and "in this emergency, you're allowed to exceed protective warp speed limits". In Voyager, they put in a line in the first season about the engines constantly remodulating themselves, to avoid the effects. It could even make a little sense, if you drive evenly on the road instead of following the existing tracks exactly, it will last much longer.
One important thing to note is that Star Trek seems to indicate that the human obsession of going around to new places all the time is quite specific. Many of the omnipotent species you mention stayed quite alone in their place. (Q excluded.) That makes it a bit easier to accept.
OTOH, don't expect consistency. That's not a requirement. They only need to do enough to make it "feel" like it is consistent and not completely contradict all previous episodes all the time. Hey, that could give a clue to why so many hated Enterprise....
What hosts file are you talking about? The one for static name resolution? You can NOT add implicit sub-domain mapping to that one without breaking stuff, stuff and other stuff. It's simply non-standard. Using it as a way to block sites with a loopback address or something else is just a crude hack.
No, the Earth magnetic spin is a non-quantum effect, that is, the explanation is probably modelled by classical mechanics, just assuming that certain things are surrounded by magnetic fields. This is quite different, there's a single particle that you can get to enter different energy configurations by exposing it to energy. It's more related to nuclear-magnetic spin excitation, which is employed in magnetic radiology and also in "pure" NMR chemical applications, than the planet magnet.
In addition, gravity is not related to particle spin and magnetism. Oh, well, at least not any more than we already knew, that gravity is a bastard among forces that wrecks just about any perfectly good unifying theory in one way or another.
Now, let me walk out onto the "imagine things and make physicists laugh at you" plank (especially before I RTFA) -- I've wondered a little, in the NMR case, if it would be possible to induce nuclear fission or at least some kind of nuclear decay through heavy RF excitation of nuclei. It seems slightly reasonable that the added energy would make crossing the barrier between temporary stability and decay a little lower. Now, why you would prefer this over bombarding the stuff with neutrons, well, that's another matter...
Yeah, just like the transistor and the IC took 30 years from invention to commercial impact. It's like being an inventor that's 6 years older than before and now waiting for his Nobel prize, it may arrive tomorrow, or next year, in thirty years, or never. For the Nobel prize case, though, you might expect the actual prize to be handed over in December, in Sweden. Not generally so with corporate success.
Demanding that IE should support XPIs is like saying Linux has to support Win32, natively. They are dependent on the object model of the browser itself. To imitate it would mean imitating more or less all of Gecko.
It would also mean that you expect Firefox to support the IE Google toolbar, in a binary compatible manner (on Windows), and every other, let's say, less reputable BHO (Browser Helper Object, the main IE method of extension of the UI itself). Gator may ring some bells for you.
My own favorite personal BHO played Black Jack 'til it won in an online sweepstake for a magazine. Unfortunately, the first time, it wasn't ready for what the "you've won" page would look like, so it just closed it down, before I could stop it. Damn...
They have already mentioned that PNG alpha support is in there, and hinted at CSS changes. But the PNG support is a fact, so they can't write new blog pieces about the PNG support until everyone here has read about it...
Slashdot Mirror
That's where ethanol kicks in, again, as a carrier :-)
Like locking it to the set-top box HD wouldn't be equally hard and/or equally invasive to your rights? What about when your kids, in the other room, wants to watch the movie? Move the box around or... *shugger* transmit it over a LAN? (If that's allowed, won't they "need" DRM to "protect" it?)
OTOH, I would imagine there are more servers running terminal services (essentially the same). Hopefully, that's generally through VPN or with source address restrictions in place.
Not to forget the authentication. There's some stuff in creating/destroying sessions that affects the kernel, to some degree. So, no, I wouldn't expect the TCP/IP stack itself. Maybe keyboard/mouse input, as that's allowed to access a GUI login box, before being authenticated. Or even just flood the GINA with input that would be impossible to by just hammering a hardware keyboard. (That would make it a problem that would also affect Windows running in a virtualization environment or another, although if that could ever be considered safe is of course a matter of taste and perspective.)
Any source for the statement that Avalon is delayed? After all, that's the kind of bits that they actually let you try, now, on XP/2003, and it kind of works. (Not like WinFS, which they never finishes. Regarding the command shell Monad, I guess they just don't see the priority in getting into the client version, as it's mostly intended as a server administration tool, anyway. That lots of geek users would like it in the client, from release, doesn't really matter...)
That's a quite remarkable emulation feat. I wonder if this is on x64 with the added registers or if it's just plain x86. I imagine that the added registers in x64 (or whatever you want to call it without using an AMD or Intel moniker), combined with less restricted usage combinations, would make emulating the PowerPC ISA well easier.
I'm too lazy to google here, but two possible types of super atoms would be fullerenes with a (metal) atom inside, where the complete structure gets atom-like properties, or maybe creating atoms out of higher level quark-based particles in the nucleus and higher-level leptons on the outside. The first one is realistic, the other one would probably be realistic at a point where we also can create anti-matter for battery-like energy storage.
The point in leaving that document format now is that it was (/is) hell to handle if you don't want to use the existing APIs. Zip and XML are widespread, so you will at least be able to access the separate included files, parse and transform them, on "any" platform.
If you develop custom apps, you might like their current XML export capabilities. It might simplify report generation in a MS-only environment.
So, is it worth it? I wouldn't say so. I notice some new features, I happen to like most of them, but Office XP compared to Office 2000 felt like much less improvement than WinXP to Win2000 (and we all know how much/little that is). On the other hand, I'm generally working in Word and Excel. I think Outlook's evolved more (it's not the same thing as Outlook Express, you know), especially regarding security. Also, when I do need to crank out slides in PowerPoint, I try to make sure that I have a recent version around, since I'm much more comfortable with the UI for entering personal notes together with the slides there. But, on the whole, it's mostly details...
If it requires Office installed, then I of course agree with you.
If you allow user accounts to post comments and or new blog entries, it does. It surprises me that the general URL published in the article is https, though. If you enter http instead, simple reading is fully possible. Maybe a devious plan from the article writer to DoS attack the MS blog server by everyone using https... An offence far worse than wardriving!
Yeah, because using simple stuff like publicly documented API additions in GDI is tying. It's damn easy to write XP code and find "hey, this API seems fun, I'll try it out as I don't need, I don't even WANT this to run under 2000".
There is very little reason to use 2K pro if you have XP Pro available. You'll have to configure XP to get it to be 2000-like, but it does a great job of emulating it.
Windows 2000 is 5.0, and now 5.5 years old. It's a quite venerable age for a piece of software. Also, some hot fixes will continue to be available for those who have a reason to stay there until 2010.
I'm sad to see 2000 go, but XP is the natural successor. It's not like they would have asked you to ditch NT 4 for Me, or something...
At first, I would maybe think that fast touch typists could be converted to eventually just think about their existing writing patterns. After getting used to it, one would be able to increase the speed.
The biggest pro of this approach is of course that the signal itself will be discrete and that there's lots of existing software to handle it. It's just a way to replace the physical interface, the keyboard, not the type of interaction that's going on.
THAT was a real feat, actually getting kernel code compatibility between what was still very different systems.
I would also imagine that many high-level user APIs (common dialogs and controls) were more a part of shell/IE and because of this were just different builds for 9x and NT. (Native unicode or not by a compiler definition, I'd guess, to take an important example.)
BTW, "Program Files" defaults to "Program", which makes it blatantly obvious to tell which programs will read the registry setting and those that:
a) Hard-code "c:\program files" and b) don't enclose that string in quotes in some command lines (hint: it will try to access the c:\program folder instead in most circumstances)
It's probably not a matter of RAM, but of address space. The card needs an address below 2^32 (with this controller). If the motherboard actually won't support remapping the RAM, in turn, to even higher addresses, there will be a conflict and some of the physical address space will be "covered" by the aperture. In the 2 GB case, there's plenty of physical address space for things like that, and so no lost memory.
Most cancers won't develop anything like this, but if we start to use "smarter" treatments, tagging them to specific over-expressed receptor sites on their membranes, for example, I wouldn't be surprised if we'll also have to deal with the issues of cell lines that mutate to lack those receptors.
Hey, remember that Pegasus was in the last Season of TNG - 93/94 (right?). It's more like ten than twenty years ago. What that has done to the appearance of Riker, on the other hand, is irrelevant. I think that he looks much more out of character in TNG season 1 :-)
In the way it was realized, it would not only destroy all existing life, but also make the planet completely unusable in the future (because it didn't work). It would be a very non-Federation thing to use. Also, we can't be sure what really happened. Obviously, it wasn't generally known that David Marcus had to use "protomatter" to "solve certain problems" (and create others), as Saavik, on the mission to investigate the results of Genesis didn't know about it. David, who was killed, nor his mother, who was leading in the project, were keen on the weapon potential.
The warp drive finding was put down into the story. For over a season of TNG we heard about "warp 5" and "in this emergency, you're allowed to exceed protective warp speed limits". In Voyager, they put in a line in the first season about the engines constantly remodulating themselves, to avoid the effects. It could even make a little sense, if you drive evenly on the road instead of following the existing tracks exactly, it will last much longer.
One important thing to note is that Star Trek seems to indicate that the human obsession of going around to new places all the time is quite specific. Many of the omnipotent species you mention stayed quite alone in their place. (Q excluded.) That makes it a bit easier to accept.
OTOH, don't expect consistency. That's not a requirement. They only need to do enough to make it "feel" like it is consistent and not completely contradict all previous episodes all the time. Hey, that could give a clue to why so many hated Enterprise....
What hosts file are you talking about? The one for static name resolution? You can NOT add implicit sub-domain mapping to that one without breaking stuff, stuff and other stuff. It's simply non-standard. Using it as a way to block sites with a loopback address or something else is just a crude hack.
In addition, gravity is not related to particle spin and magnetism. Oh, well, at least not any more than we already knew, that gravity is a bastard among forces that wrecks just about any perfectly good unifying theory in one way or another.
Now, let me walk out onto the "imagine things and make physicists laugh at you" plank (especially before I RTFA) -- I've wondered a little, in the NMR case, if it would be possible to induce nuclear fission or at least some kind of nuclear decay through heavy RF excitation of nuclei. It seems slightly reasonable that the added energy would make crossing the barrier between temporary stability and decay a little lower. Now, why you would prefer this over bombarding the stuff with neutrons, well, that's another matter...
Yeah, just like the transistor and the IC took 30 years from invention to commercial impact. It's like being an inventor that's 6 years older than before and now waiting for his Nobel prize, it may arrive tomorrow, or next year, in thirty years, or never. For the Nobel prize case, though, you might expect the actual prize to be handed over in December, in Sweden. Not generally so with corporate success.
It would also mean that you expect Firefox to support the IE Google toolbar, in a binary compatible manner (on Windows), and every other, let's say, less reputable BHO (Browser Helper Object, the main IE method of extension of the UI itself). Gator may ring some bells for you.
My own favorite personal BHO played Black Jack 'til it won in an online sweepstake for a magazine. Unfortunately, the first time, it wasn't ready for what the "you've won" page would look like, so it just closed it down, before I could stop it. Damn...
They have already mentioned that PNG alpha support is in there, and hinted at CSS changes. But the PNG support is a fact, so they can't write new blog pieces about the PNG support until everyone here has read about it...