Anyway... orders of magnitude difference? Under some other rules of physics maybe. It would probably be a good idea to compile and time your program, as I did.
It was for a lab many years ago for Data Structures class. We were supposed to time how long it took to sort a 500,000 record array with different sorting techniques, and there was some stuff about big-O notation thrown in for good measure.
I figured I could have a function pointer point to a function that implemented each test - that way I could make my timing code more generic; just pass it in the sorting function to time.
It took upwards of 5 minutes on the n^2 test. That same test took seconds calling it directly. That's a magnitude.
So... rather surprisingly, the cost of these function calls is as close as doesn't matter, to exactly zero.
If the compiler knows the relative address of the function ahead of time, they are really fast.
Try replacing your direct function call with a function pointer instead. Assign the function pointer the address of your function during runtime. It will be many orders of magnitude slower.
Not sure why this is; just something I discovered the hard way.
Catholics (and most of the groups which split from them prior to the Protestant Reformation) aren't fundamentalists. i.e. they don't take the Bible literally, seeing Genesis as symbolic rather than historical. This enables them to reconcile evolution (and other scientific principles) with their faith.
Not all protestants are fundamentalists or evangelicals. Lutherans believe that, too, and the Catholic penchant for critical analysis of Biblical texts was born out of the Protestant Reformation.
I heard Chicago was founded when a bunch of New Yorkers got together and said, "Gee, I'm really loving all of the crime and the traffic, but it's just not cold enough."
I'm think you're pretty silly to assume a glitch in a beta is a conspiracy. Especially considering it's the "send feedback" button in a public beta designed to solicit feedback.
I don't doubt that the send feedback button may not work for you - a.NET bug kept the feedback program for installing for me on the Vista beta, so I had the same problem. (It was a separate application then.) But, it works for me - they're hardly preventing "everyone" from sending feedback.
I signed up for Microsoft Connect, and I still don't see any obvious way to submit bug reports. Maybe I have to be using IE or something.
Use IE8. No idea if Microsoft Connect works with other browsers, but it's part of the Windows 7 we're beta testing. Try WMP, WMC, and those other apps too. When they inevitably crash, give them the error report. Of course, also use Firefox or browser of choice and media player of choice - Microsoft and Mozilla will be interested in feedback.
When I was in Middle School, I bought a Muvo TX FM (I think that's its name) for $30 at Wal Mart. A whopping 256MB MP3 player.
But, it has all of those features. Play by folder and not by ID3 tags (though it even supports scrolling Asian character sets for those!), a graphic equalizer, sleep-off timer, FM tuner and microphone...
I've never purchased another one. It's tiny, functions as a USB drive, and I just sync it with my computer before I leave for work (or now school) every morning. Who cares how "cool" it is if only the earbuds leave your pocket?
We need a world-wide currency, world-wide wages, world-wide costs for raw materials, etc.
Until then, it's always going to be fucked-up.
Wouldn't it be nice if we were all the same, and some world-wide authority to make sure none of us broke that golden rule.
Unless you plan on normalizing climate and remaking Pangaea, things will always have different costs in different countries. Japan will never have herds of free-range cattle; beef will always be more expensive there. Housing will never cost as much in West St. Bumblefuck as it will in Hong Kong. It will never be as expensive to heat your house in Florida as in Canada.
Global inequality and exploitation isn't exactly a good thing, but there has been real progress made over the last 40 years. Your ideas aren't going to help.
Capitalism is by definition ruled by a boom/bust cycle
Capitalism. Noun. An economic system ruled by boom and bust cycles.
Well, not exactly. Not even Wiktionary has that definition. Most people argue that the boom/bust cycle is a result of centralized monetary policy. I'd dig out some articles if I were at home and not on my lunch break.
the bust is bad enough, it can take decades to recover, which is indeed what happened in the great depression.
Depression wasn't just "cyclical downturn crits you for 10." There was another credit crunch during the roaring '20s - people bought everything on credit. Why save up for a radio when you could rent it now for so many dollars a month? Why buy stock outright when you can put 10% down and your broker will give you the rest?
People spent the entirety of their paychecks on what amounts to debt maintenance. A little bump in the great, winding road of economics and suddenly you're wondering if the other 90% will ever appear. Eerily similar to the subprime mortgages today.
A thousand and one posts saying that it's illegal/immoral/impossible to make money from open source software will be along soon.
They'll be followed shortly after by sevaral thousand more complaining that all corporations are evil and should be banned.
In turn those will be followed by several million arguing that google are/aren't evil, or disputing the subtle nuances between doing evil and being evil.
In other words: normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. The tuna salad is off, by the way.
I think you need a call to rand(), a switch statement, and some additional function calls like sleep_in_sun(), eat(), shit(), scratch_aimlessly_at_litter(), tear_through_the_house_for_no_apparent_reason(), etc.
It's C. The cough_up_hairball() function has undocumented side effects, including all of he aforementioned.
Additionally, after 0, the i register underflows when compiled with a particular gcc switch, setting the carry flag and incrementing a pointer in another register. This modifies the LSB of a pointer to an entry in a 256-entry lookup-table that is randomly populated with function pointers which also call those functions. After UNSIGNED_INT_MAX NOPs, the loop starts again.
Now, in C++, he could have just overloaded the "<<" operator to do all of that.
I'd imagine one of the reasons is the whole "every tab is a process" model they used.
Windows and UNIX handle interprocess communication very differently. (Although Windows *can* do POSIX, it's not the easiest way.)
I haven't had extensive experience writing software for either, outside of an Operating Systems course I took last semester. But, Windows seems to have less overhead when context switching, and definitely makes it easier to lock and share memory than UNIX does. (At least than the old version of Solaris we developed on. There is no such thing as a compatible UNIX!)
So, I'm guessing that it's getting their multiprocess engine running on Linux. Then, it looks like the front-end is all Win32, so they'd have to port that to your favorite Window manager. (I don't envy them that.) Then, Google uses the same settings Internet Explorer does - you open Google's configuration, you'll get IE's. I imagine that this kind of code reuse makes sense, but it's another thing they'll have to rewrite.
(Then again, why rewrite your own settings and presentation engine on every OS if at least one OS will handle most of it for you?)
Actually, they did provide a public beta for Windows Vista. I was pretty excited to get the next version of Windows to "beta test" before it was released. The whole "oooh new and shiny" factor.
But, the nice thing about the "resource intensive" API is that it actually uses your video card. Running Vista on a repurposed workstation at work, Aero without glass performs better than the software-only "classic" mode. (Though, this is anecdotal. The machine has 768 MB of RAM and an older Pentium 4.)
The funny thing is Vista tries to put the hardware you have to use. Have 8 GB of RAM? It'll use the unallocated memory to cache programs. Have a discrete graphics card? It'll be virtualized and time slices doled out to applications. Have System Idle Process running at 99% 'cuz your CPU is bored? It'll index files, or defrag your disk (if your disk is also idle.)
But, using hardware that would otherwise be idle is "resource intensive." It's a matter of perspective.
you've never seen someone with norton or mcafee installed now have you ?
Which virus scanner you choose and how you have it scheduled to run is hardly an operating system problem.
But, I do know people that insist on having their virus scanner running in the background, 24/7, scheduling up scans even while they play games. Funny thing about dual- and quad-cores is that you wouldn't even notice, bar the sudden disk activity, that anything was happening.
Wonderful thing about modern operating systems and advanced SATA drives is unparalleled disk scheduling (no pun intended). Also, even cheap laptops have multiple cores.
I'm a bit young to have first-hand experience writing DOS games, but I've talked with a few people who have. Writing DOS games was a pain because you had to write your own drivers for everything. That's why older installers card whether you had an SB16 or a Roland something-or-other or Disney's craptacular card - DOS provided no support.
Programming drivers is hard; most people bought a driver package from someone to include with their game. That drove up the cost of games somewhat.
Complete hardware independence is why DirectX - software pipeline takes over if they *don't* have a SB16, rather than crashing back to a command prompt.
Besides, Windows generally does a good enough job of not "running things in the background" during a game. DirectX locks your graphics card and your sound card; your game has exclusive control over that. If you check your performance logs, you generally won't find much CPU% being gobbled up your non-game process.
And really, this is a big reason PC gaming sucks compared to the consoles
I wonder what you broke, then. My friend has it running on a Macbook Pro (which I can guarantee you doesn't have a 15,000 rpm drive!) and it's pretty damn snappy.
Assuming you're not just trolling ("Vista sucks so I installed Linux and it's better"), I'll post a batch file I use at work. It solves most any windows update-related problem. I kept adding to it as I encountered more and more strangely broken computers, and as of now it works fairly well.
@echo off
echo Starting Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)... net start bits
Click the links I provided to see exactly what batshit crazy faithy government Huckabee has actually been working on his whole career. That is, if you prefer facts to faithy propaganda.
Funny... but most of those links are to the dailykos...
Re:Chiropractic treatment worked for me
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 1
I absolutely agree that Chiropractors can do a world of good, if you get a good one. There are a lot of "new age" ones that are all about "the spine is the magical center of your body that causes everything to go wrong if it's not perfectly shaped like the S curve in a Mazda commercial zoom zoom zoom!"
I started getting tingling in my hands and fingers, and my wrists hurt all the time. I was worried that I was getting carpal tunnel. My parents dragged me to one, and he took X-Rays, and told me I had what he called a "double crush" - nerves in my wrists were getting pinched, as well as nerves in my neck and shoulders.
Getting a really bad kind of carpal tunnel bugged me. I'm a compsci major and a pianist, you see.
He cracked my neck and my back and magically, all the tingling went away after two weeks. I had been enduring it at work for two months before that.
I also got an inch taller. But, make sure you get a "good one" - spinal adjustments are something some doctors are trained to do as well, and actually seem to work for some things. Overpriced vitamin pills do not.
If you can't transfer shares of ownership, or transferring them is prohibitively expensive, then those shares of next to zero value.
Also, believe it or not, shares of ownership are a perfectly legitimate, and generally a very good way of raising financial capital you otherwise wouldn't have access to.
I really hope you don't keep your money in a bank, either. You may be shocked or otherwise disappointed should you learn how one of those works.
The reason US Companies didn't choose to manufacture this technology domestically is because Wall Street only cares about projects that turn a profit in 4 months
I wonder where people get this idea that "Wall Street" is one monolithic individual, who is good friends with Mr. Corporation, and neither of their optometrists have prescribed them lenses to see more than 5 seconds into the future. There are plenty of rational people in business, because otherwise it is harder to stay in business longer than 4 months.
But, your 5% "consumption tax on all stock transactions" intrigues me. Is this like a poorly implemented "capital gains tax?" And would taxing the main way companies get capital for expansion and R&D cause more research to happen, or less of it?
I am also not a financial expert, but I can see a bunch of reasons why financial paper exists.
Maybe they're like payday loans for corporations. You have a long-term contract due, but not 'till the end of the month, and you want to keep your employees in the meantime. (I'm guessing this isn't as likely; only corporations with outstanding credit ratings can actually have any success in issuing corporate paper.)
Maybe it's a way of getting a loan without going through a bank or issuing stock. Say you want to build a new factory with payroll rather than actually pay your employees; maybe you're assuming the factory will pay off the interest on the corporate paper and then some.
The biggest thing at the end of the Wikipedia article you read is that, whatever the reason the money is needed, it's cheaper than getting it from a bank. If a corporation is big enough and has good enough credit, they can issue corporate paper, at a lower interest rate, instead of paying interest to a bank.
So, that one, at least, wasn't invented by bankers just to secure their own employment. Maybe somebody who actually knows something about this (a banker, maybe?) could enlighten me.
IE exports a COM object, which lets developers add HTML rendering to an application with one line of code. So, that's one reason why they don't want you uninstalling it - HTML rendering is something a lot of Windows applications are expecting the OS to export.
The closest it came to "welded to the kernel" was Active Desktop where the Windows shell used it to render a web page on your desktop. I think it was also used if you had an HTML background for folders, too. Not sure what happened to it in XP or Vista.
About the only things that count as kernel-welded in Windows land are device drivers and services, of which IE is neither.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why you should leave everything in the hands of untrained civilians and profit-driven shareholders. It just makes so much more sense that way.
Compare the balance sheet of any bank to the balance sheet of the government.
Guns allow a great deal more of accounting abstraction.
Anyway... orders of magnitude difference? Under some other rules of physics maybe. It would probably be a good idea to compile and time your program, as I did.
It was for a lab many years ago for Data Structures class. We were supposed to time how long it took to sort a 500,000 record array with different sorting techniques, and there was some stuff about big-O notation thrown in for good measure.
I figured I could have a function pointer point to a function that implemented each test - that way I could make my timing code more generic; just pass it in the sorting function to time.
It took upwards of 5 minutes on the n^2 test. That same test took seconds calling it directly. That's a magnitude.
So... rather surprisingly, the cost of these function calls is as close as doesn't matter, to exactly zero.
If the compiler knows the relative address of the function ahead of time, they are really fast.
Try replacing your direct function call with a function pointer instead. Assign the function pointer the address of your function during runtime. It will be many orders of magnitude slower.
Not sure why this is; just something I discovered the hard way.
Catholics (and most of the groups which split from them prior to the Protestant Reformation) aren't fundamentalists. i.e. they don't take the Bible literally, seeing Genesis as symbolic rather than historical. This enables them to reconcile evolution (and other scientific principles) with their faith.
Not all protestants are fundamentalists or evangelicals. Lutherans believe that, too, and the Catholic penchant for critical analysis of Biblical texts was born out of the Protestant Reformation.
Disclaimer: I am a Lutheran ^_^
I guess you've never heard of Chicago.
I heard Chicago was founded when a bunch of New Yorkers got together and said, "Gee, I'm really loving all of the crime and the traffic, but it's just not cold enough."
I'm think you're pretty silly to assume a glitch in a beta is a conspiracy. Especially considering it's the "send feedback" button in a public beta designed to solicit feedback.
I don't doubt that the send feedback button may not work for you - a .NET bug kept the feedback program for installing for me on the Vista beta, so I had the same problem. (It was a separate application then.) But, it works for me - they're hardly preventing "everyone" from sending feedback.
I signed up for Microsoft Connect, and I still don't see any obvious way to submit bug reports. Maybe I have to be using IE or something.
Use IE8. No idea if Microsoft Connect works with other browsers, but it's part of the Windows 7 we're beta testing. Try WMP, WMC, and those other apps too. When they inevitably crash, give them the error report. Of course, also use Firefox or browser of choice and media player of choice - Microsoft and Mozilla will be interested in feedback.
When I was in Middle School, I bought a Muvo TX FM (I think that's its name) for $30 at Wal Mart. A whopping 256MB MP3 player.
But, it has all of those features. Play by folder and not by ID3 tags (though it even supports scrolling Asian character sets for those!), a graphic equalizer, sleep-off timer, FM tuner and microphone...
I've never purchased another one. It's tiny, functions as a USB drive, and I just sync it with my computer before I leave for work (or now school) every morning. Who cares how "cool" it is if only the earbuds leave your pocket?
We need a world-wide currency, world-wide wages, world-wide costs for raw materials, etc. Until then, it's always going to be fucked-up.
Wouldn't it be nice if we were all the same, and some world-wide authority to make sure none of us broke that golden rule.
Unless you plan on normalizing climate and remaking Pangaea, things will always have different costs in different countries. Japan will never have herds of free-range cattle; beef will always be more expensive there. Housing will never cost as much in West St. Bumblefuck as it will in Hong Kong. It will never be as expensive to heat your house in Florida as in Canada.
Global inequality and exploitation isn't exactly a good thing, but there has been real progress made over the last 40 years. Your ideas aren't going to help.
Capitalism is by definition ruled by a boom/bust cycle
Capitalism. Noun. An economic system ruled by boom and bust cycles.
Well, not exactly. Not even Wiktionary has that definition. Most people argue that the boom/bust cycle is a result of centralized monetary policy. I'd dig out some articles if I were at home and not on my lunch break.
the bust is bad enough, it can take decades to recover, which is indeed what happened in the great depression.
Depression wasn't just "cyclical downturn crits you for 10." There was another credit crunch during the roaring '20s - people bought everything on credit. Why save up for a radio when you could rent it now for so many dollars a month? Why buy stock outright when you can put 10% down and your broker will give you the rest?
People spent the entirety of their paychecks on what amounts to debt maintenance. A little bump in the great, winding road of economics and suddenly you're wondering if the other 90% will ever appear. Eerily similar to the subprime mortgages today.
A thousand and one posts saying that it's illegal/immoral/impossible to make money from open source software will be along soon. They'll be followed shortly after by sevaral thousand more complaining that all corporations are evil and should be banned. In turn those will be followed by several million arguing that google are/aren't evil, or disputing the subtle nuances between doing evil and being evil. In other words: normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. The tuna salad is off, by the way.
Wow! The Readers Digest version of Slashdot!
I think you need a call to rand(), a switch statement, and some additional function calls like sleep_in_sun(), eat(), shit(), scratch_aimlessly_at_litter(), tear_through_the_house_for_no_apparent_reason(), etc.
It's C. The cough_up_hairball() function has undocumented side effects, including all of he aforementioned.
Additionally, after 0, the i register underflows when compiled with a particular gcc switch, setting the carry flag and incrementing a pointer in another register. This modifies the LSB of a pointer to an entry in a 256-entry lookup-table that is randomly populated with function pointers which also call those functions. After UNSIGNED_INT_MAX NOPs, the loop starts again.
Now, in C++, he could have just overloaded the "<<" operator to do all of that.
I'd imagine one of the reasons is the whole "every tab is a process" model they used.
Windows and UNIX handle interprocess communication very differently. (Although Windows *can* do POSIX, it's not the easiest way.)
I haven't had extensive experience writing software for either, outside of an Operating Systems course I took last semester. But, Windows seems to have less overhead when context switching, and definitely makes it easier to lock and share memory than UNIX does. (At least than the old version of Solaris we developed on. There is no such thing as a compatible UNIX!)
So, I'm guessing that it's getting their multiprocess engine running on Linux. Then, it looks like the front-end is all Win32, so they'd have to port that to your favorite Window manager. (I don't envy them that.) Then, Google uses the same settings Internet Explorer does - you open Google's configuration, you'll get IE's. I imagine that this kind of code reuse makes sense, but it's another thing they'll have to rewrite.
(Then again, why rewrite your own settings and presentation engine on every OS if at least one OS will handle most of it for you?)
Vista is smart enough not to spin up your disks constantly or do CPU-intensive busywork while on battery.
Then again, so is Windows 2000 and most flavors of Linux.
Are the pundits so brain dead that they don't know the difference between an OS and a UI? A taskbar is not an OS.
Probably. Then again, a lot of Slashdot seems to confuse the terms operating system, kernel, shell, GUI, scheduler, etc.
Actually, they did provide a public beta for Windows Vista. I was pretty excited to get the next version of Windows to "beta test" before it was released. The whole "oooh new and shiny" factor.
But, the nice thing about the "resource intensive" API is that it actually uses your video card. Running Vista on a repurposed workstation at work, Aero without glass performs better than the software-only "classic" mode. (Though, this is anecdotal. The machine has 768 MB of RAM and an older Pentium 4.)
The funny thing is Vista tries to put the hardware you have to use. Have 8 GB of RAM? It'll use the unallocated memory to cache programs. Have a discrete graphics card? It'll be virtualized and time slices doled out to applications. Have System Idle Process running at 99% 'cuz your CPU is bored? It'll index files, or defrag your disk (if your disk is also idle.)
But, using hardware that would otherwise be idle is "resource intensive." It's a matter of perspective.
+1 rambling for me? I'd settle for a cookie.
you've never seen someone with norton or mcafee installed now have you ?
Which virus scanner you choose and how you have it scheduled to run is hardly an operating system problem.
But, I do know people that insist on having their virus scanner running in the background, 24/7, scheduling up scans even while they play games. Funny thing about dual- and quad-cores is that you wouldn't even notice, bar the sudden disk activity, that anything was happening.
Wonderful thing about modern operating systems and advanced SATA drives is unparalleled disk scheduling (no pun intended). Also, even cheap laptops have multiple cores.
I'm a bit young to have first-hand experience writing DOS games, but I've talked with a few people who have. Writing DOS games was a pain because you had to write your own drivers for everything. That's why older installers card whether you had an SB16 or a Roland something-or-other or Disney's craptacular card - DOS provided no support.
Programming drivers is hard; most people bought a driver package from someone to include with their game. That drove up the cost of games somewhat.
Complete hardware independence is why DirectX - software pipeline takes over if they *don't* have a SB16, rather than crashing back to a command prompt.
Besides, Windows generally does a good enough job of not "running things in the background" during a game. DirectX locks your graphics card and your sound card; your game has exclusive control over that. If you check your performance logs, you generally won't find much CPU% being gobbled up your non-game process.
And really, this is a big reason PC gaming sucks compared to the consoles
GTFO v.v
I wonder what you broke, then. My friend has it running on a Macbook Pro (which I can guarantee you doesn't have a 15,000 rpm drive!) and it's pretty damn snappy.
Assuming you're not just trolling ("Vista sucks so I installed Linux and it's better"), I'll post a batch file I use at work. It solves most any windows update-related problem. I kept adding to it as I encountered more and more strangely broken computers, and as of now it works fairly well.
/s /q C:\windows\SoftwareDistribution
@echo off
echo Starting Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)...
net start bits
echo Registering DLLs...
REGSVR32 WUAUENG.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAUENG1.DLL
REGSVR32 ATL.DLL
REGSVR32 WUCLTUI.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS2.DLL
REGSVR32 WUWEB.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAPI.DLL
echo Killing Windows Automatic Updater Service...
net stop wuauserv
echo Destroying Update Cache...
rmdir
echo Re-enabling Windows Automatic Updater Service...
net start wuauserv
echo Magic!
Click the links I provided to see exactly what batshit crazy faithy government Huckabee has actually been working on his whole career. That is, if you prefer facts to faithy propaganda.
Funny... but most of those links are to the dailykos...
I absolutely agree that Chiropractors can do a world of good, if you get a good one. There are a lot of "new age" ones that are all about "the spine is the magical center of your body that causes everything to go wrong if it's not perfectly shaped like the S curve in a Mazda commercial zoom zoom zoom!"
I started getting tingling in my hands and fingers, and my wrists hurt all the time. I was worried that I was getting carpal tunnel. My parents dragged me to one, and he took X-Rays, and told me I had what he called a "double crush" - nerves in my wrists were getting pinched, as well as nerves in my neck and shoulders.
Getting a really bad kind of carpal tunnel bugged me. I'm a compsci major and a pianist, you see.
He cracked my neck and my back and magically, all the tingling went away after two weeks. I had been enduring it at work for two months before that.
I also got an inch taller. But, make sure you get a "good one" - spinal adjustments are something some doctors are trained to do as well, and actually seem to work for some things. Overpriced vitamin pills do not.
If you can't transfer shares of ownership, or transferring them is prohibitively expensive, then those shares of next to zero value.
Also, believe it or not, shares of ownership are a perfectly legitimate, and generally a very good way of raising financial capital you otherwise wouldn't have access to.
I really hope you don't keep your money in a bank, either. You may be shocked or otherwise disappointed should you learn how one of those works.
The reason US Companies didn't choose to manufacture this technology domestically is because Wall Street only cares about projects that turn a profit in 4 months
I wonder where people get this idea that "Wall Street" is one monolithic individual, who is good friends with Mr. Corporation, and neither of their optometrists have prescribed them lenses to see more than 5 seconds into the future. There are plenty of rational people in business, because otherwise it is harder to stay in business longer than 4 months.
But, your 5% "consumption tax on all stock transactions" intrigues me. Is this like a poorly implemented "capital gains tax?" And would taxing the main way companies get capital for expansion and R&D cause more research to happen, or less of it?
I am also not a financial expert, but I can see a bunch of reasons why financial paper exists.
Maybe they're like payday loans for corporations. You have a long-term contract due, but not 'till the end of the month, and you want to keep your employees in the meantime. (I'm guessing this isn't as likely; only corporations with outstanding credit ratings can actually have any success in issuing corporate paper.)
Maybe it's a way of getting a loan without going through a bank or issuing stock. Say you want to build a new factory with payroll rather than actually pay your employees; maybe you're assuming the factory will pay off the interest on the corporate paper and then some.
The biggest thing at the end of the Wikipedia article you read is that, whatever the reason the money is needed, it's cheaper than getting it from a bank. If a corporation is big enough and has good enough credit, they can issue corporate paper, at a lower interest rate, instead of paying interest to a bank.
So, that one, at least, wasn't invented by bankers just to secure their own employment. Maybe somebody who actually knows something about this (a banker, maybe?) could enlighten me.
IE never was "welded to the kernel."
IE exports a COM object, which lets developers add HTML rendering to an application with one line of code. So, that's one reason why they don't want you uninstalling it - HTML rendering is something a lot of Windows applications are expecting the OS to export.
The closest it came to "welded to the kernel" was Active Desktop where the Windows shell used it to render a web page on your desktop. I think it was also used if you had an HTML background for folders, too. Not sure what happened to it in XP or Vista.
About the only things that count as kernel-welded in Windows land are device drivers and services, of which IE is neither.