LOL... I made more than that (twice as much, in fact) in an internship after freshman year! OK, I had a lot of hobbiest experience and more prior work experience than the norm, but even in high school I didn't work for less than $10/hour. Remarkably enough, I never lacked for work when I wanted it. Only one of my employers even negotiated, and one offered me $15 right off (mind you, this was for a short one-off job, not a steady position, so I suppose those rates were low for a consultant... but hell, I was 16!) I'd have needed to be quite desperate after graduation to look at anything less than 60k + benefits. As it turns out, I make considerably more than that.
You can certainly tell, by smell, a strong drink from a weak one. I'm not sure if this is actually an aroma or simply a case of the alcohol fumes having some effect upon reaching your nasal cavity, but it's there.
It may also be per-person. Some of my friends claim they can't even taste alcohol, whereas I not only can readily taste it (and dislike the taste) I can tell a spiked drink by smell (this has not been rigorously tested, but I've never been surprised by an alcoholic drink that I could smell beforehand).
Depends on your definiton of "know." My friends "know" my phone number in that if they have a need for it I tell them, and by now most probably have it in their phone book. However, some of them won't yet, and for them the logical place to look it up is Facebook, because there is/used to be a section for "Contact information" that had things I wanted my friends to have access to. Hell, my phone will use Facebook to populate its address list. This is a useful feature, and it annoys me that Facebook is providing people incentives to not put this info on their profiles.
Mind you, I joined Facebook back when the only way to do so was a.edu email address, so the world was a somewhat different place then. Not to say that I shouldn't have seen this coming eventually, but so far it has been more useful than not to have the ability to find my friends' numbers (and them to find mine) online.
Care to mention any, and I mean litereally even one, place where IE9 is three years behind another browser on HTML5?
I call bullshit. There are some places where the (4 month old) IE9 beta is behind, yes, but not by three years, or even close. There are fewer places where the (2 month old) IE9 platform preview (still beta code) is behind. Two of the issues this article mentions were fixed internally even before the article was posted.
Yes, it would help if MS released builds more than once every 2 months. That doesn't exuse exorbitent claims of 3 years out-of-date.
No, but there's evidence that A) most people do, and B) you are a douche. Seriously, dude, if you don't appreciate the work somebody has done just because they didn't do it for your 10%-or-less-market-share platform, that's fine, but why the snark? Do you feel entitled to use this, for some reason? Did the developer ask anything from you? Have you done anything for them?
For that matter, you probably *could* run it in [Dar]Wine just fine. If you really want it native, why not ask about a native port, or offer your expertise in creating one? Open source doesn't entitle you to a version usable on every platform, but it does entitle you to the code and the right to port it, if you're willing to put up the effort. It's easier to just snark from the sideline, though...
Dear $DEITY, why would you use Safari on OS X, much less Windows? Terrible UI, serious security issues, and all the shit that Apple shoves onto your system when you install any of their software on Windows.
Use Chrome, or even Konqueror, if you need WebKit. Use Firefox if you want a browser that looks exactly like you want and has exactly the features you want, while still being fast and regularly updated. Use Opera if you want stupidly fast and standards-compliant, plus *all* the features. Hell, use IE9 beta if you want fast and generally excellent standards compliance and don't mind pre-release code.
Are you bloody serious? First of all, IE9 Beta already supports the majority of Canvas. This guy found a few things that didn't work right in the build he was using (far from the newest one, FYI). Second, IE9 has been receiving improvements to its compatibility in many areas, including Canvas, during Beta. At least one of the bugs found was known, reported, and fixed a while ago. Third, it *is* still in development (beta, not RC). We (the public) are about due for another preview build drop; the currently available one is 2 months old. Fourth, If MS were to avoid supporting the portions of HTML5 not yet standardized, they wouldn't have anything at all! The whole spec is still in Draft... seriously, read the official spec page linked in the summary. Fifth, while there will undoubtedly be shit flung by developer X whose favorite corner case Y doesn't work right yet, most Canvas sites *just work* in IE9 already. Sixth, MS is already well past the expectations of most web developers. ACID5 (except for the parts that are now redundent and being deprecated), HTML5, CSS3, and very fast JS. All software has bugs, but MS has already largely delivered on its promise to support the same code as other browsers, and it's still in beta!
Fascinating... you realize you're talking about IE8, right? As in, released-in-2009 IE8? This article is about the IE9 beta, which is already out of date at 4 months old. IE9 isn't even in RC yet, nor did this article's author use the most recent preview build
To address your Downsides with respect to IE9:
- I can't speak to the hours your particular site will require, but a lot of things just work in IE9 even if I have to spoof the user-agent to keep it from saying "Nope, can't do IE, go away!"
- IE8's JS isn't JIT compiled. IE9's is, and it's well over 10x as fast as IE8 - in fact, it's faster than Firefox by a non-trivial margin.
- Lots of CSS3 in IE9, and I'm pretty sure this does include border-image.
- Not only is IE9's JS compiled and fast, it uses hardware-accelerated rendering so animations are super-quick (even on crappy Intel graphics, though faster GPUs are even better).
- I really don't see this as a bug; either make sure the server insists on no caching, or use POST.
- The developer tools have been improved a lot compared to IE8 In addition to a better UI and other ease-of-use improvements, it now includes things like a profiler to find slow operations/expensive functions.
IE9 is still in beta, still getting improvements made and incompatibilities removed. Despite that, it's already compatible enough that it will happily run (at good framerate) a NES emulater entirely in JavaScript, HTML5, and especially canvas. That emulator was definitely not written as an IE9 demo, either - it's just compatible with it because IE9 adheres to the standard well enough.
Dude, that may be the usual meaning of beta, but unless you have a hell of a lot closer sources than I do (possible but unlikely) that's an unjustified assertion. It's only two months since the last public Platform Preview build (the beta build is 4 months old, PP builds are usually on a roughly 8 week scedule so another could come out any day). Each PP build has added features. They've continued adding features and fixing incompatibilities well past the beta release. They *probably* won't do that into RC, but what evidence do you have that RC is any time soon?
Why does it only *seem* to happen to Windows users? Because you're viewing the world through an inherent bias. It happens on OS X (botnets created by trojens embedded in pirated versions of iLife and Adobe software have been observed in the wild) and even (rarely) on Linux.
Why does it happen *more often* on Windows? Because malware is a business. Windows has 9x the market share of every other desktop OS combined. That's 9x as much money, assuming equal percentages of idiots install your malware. Why would you intentionally make 10% (or less) as much by targeting a low-market-share platform? The existing malware for other platforms is a case of trivial low-hanging fruit, but even so it doesn't make that much money by comparison to even a relatively small Windows botnet, so most people won't bother.
I've been boycotting Sony since about that time too, and it hasn't been hard at all. Overpriced PCs, underfeatured cameras, idiocies like their unique flash memory storage (they're finally moving to SD/CF, I hear) and so forth. There was a time when they were good, but that's well in the past in my opinion. There have been times when I was mildly tempted, but all it really takes is just skipping over their product listings.
Actually, I think this is already possible. There's a registry setting to specify the program you use for the graphical shell (i.e. what Windows starts after you log on). The default is of course explorer.exe, but it's settable. You could try setting up a Plasma desktop, with the kicker, tray, menu, and so forth. You'd probably still need Windows components for some stuff, like the control panel and management console, but they'd be launched from within KDE, not the other way around.
That said, while KDE provides the most critical stuff - file manager, web browser, media player, archive handling, etc. - I doubt everything is as mature as on *nix (example: Ark used to run, but couldn't open anything except tarballs, when I last tried KDE on Windows). Also, some things are just better done with non-KDE apps, most likely - KOffice may be free and open source, but if you're on Windows anyhow it makes a lot more sense to run MS Office. On the other hand, you do get a lot of stuff that doesn't come with Windows but works perfectly fine on it, like PDF reading (and some editing), a torrent client, a programmer's text editor, IM and IRC clients, and so forth.
I found it worth installing to play with, if not to replace Explorer with.
Try sliding past the edge of the screen, and you'll get a "scrunch" effect that is effectively a not-to-scale resize of everything on screen at once; not super-hard to do fast but non-trivial.
The "flips into place" effect on loading (or leaving, "flips out") the Start page is a lot more than a rotation or [simple] transform of an image. Texture, perhaps; indeed I suspect they use the GPU to do it. Software *can* do that but it acts like a 3D surface.
There a lot of other animations in WP7 as well, which as you say "look neat." There's nothing about them that couldn't be done on recent iPhones or higher-end Android phones, though - the hardware in WP7 is pretty decent but by no means top-end. As for the RAM thing, the Venue Pro appears to have half as much RAM as a typical WP7 device, yet is just as snappy. It sounds like you're trying a little too hard to find something to fault in the phone's UI...
Windows XP is a hideously outdated OS. Windows XP only runs on x86 chips; smartphones use ARM (Windows 8 will run on ARM, Windows 7 and before do not). Windows XP has absolutely no capability to be used on a phone. Windows XP is not intended for use on a touchscreen (no multitouch, tiny things to click, etc.) Windows XP is not very well suited to mobile devices (power consumption too high, resume from sleep takes too long, etc.). There's a lot more to system requirements than CPU clock speed. There's a lot more to selecting a suitable OS for a platform than "is it fast enough". There's a lot more things I could mention here...
Until later this month, yes it lacks copy/paste. This has actually already been done (as a feature) for some time; it's been demoed a few times and I'm told it's available to people on the WP7 team at MS, but it's not widely deployed just yet.
As for your comment on the interface, I'm curious what computer graphics knowledge you have that makes you think "solid colors, simple text" with advanced animations (such as the ones that happen when you enter or leave the Start screen) are easier to do than the iOS or Android "grid of static icons" with simple translation animation. Leaving aside things like the People, Pictures, Games, and Me tiles (which tend to be both colorful and actively animating), the decision to use mostly static boxes is pretty obviously just an aesthetic one to avoid a cluttered appearance. Computers, including smartphones, are many years past the point where a complex picture is non-trivially more expensive to display than a simple white icon on a solid background.
Live Tiles use the cellular radio by preference over WiFi, on the assumption that Push Notifications *should* go through if at all possible, and the cellular radio lets you maintain a persistent connection better than WiFi (which might not even have Internet access at all). Push notifications will apparently fall back to WiFi if they lose cellular connection, but they won't switch over automatically.
I disagree with this design - I think that every time you join a WiFi network the phone should probe it for ability to use Push Notifications, and switch off the cellular radio channel if it connects via WiFi. Every time it loses WiFi it should re-establish Push Notifications via cellular radio. This design may well use a little more battery life, and probably causes intermittent losses of push functionality for a second or two as it changes connections, but it would limit cellular data usage. At the very least, this would be a good thing to have as an option. I (and pretty much everybody else I know with a smartphone, those poor schmucks who bought new iPhones aside) have unlimited data, so I'm perfectly happy prioritizing making sure the notification goes through as fast as it can. Some other people might disagree though.
Wait, people even still use Nero, much less pay for it?!? Wow... last I checked (admittedly years ago) K3B was strictly better, and included with KDE for free. You can of course install it separately too, though it'll need QT and some other KDE dependencies.
I'm not sure whether those concerns were ever addressed, but Wine implements just enough of the Windows kernel APIs to make the more common DRM schemes work. I'm not sure how it fares on the newest stuff - though it works fine with Steam, which is about as much DRM as I'll tolerate on a game these days - but Securom and so forth were specifically made to work.
I wonder if they're going to attempt to incorporate Wine code (assuming that licensing is made compatible)? The most recent versions of Wine are honestly just *better* at playing Windows games than Cedega is! Cedega had some advantages - convenience and commercial backing (CodeWeavers, the backing for Wine, usually seemed more interested in business apps). However, if you were willing to use Wine, you could actually game a lot better on it than on Cedega.
I'm reminded of EVE Online. They released a Linux version of their client, which was just a Windows version wrapped in Cedega. It was an immense download, and while it worked, the advanced graphics options were disabled - Cedega didn't support them. Most of us just continued using Wine, which aside from a few glitches and a more complicated setup was better in almost every way. CCP (makers of EVE) eventually discontinued the Linux client, saying that the game ran so well on Wine that there was no reason to pay Cedega for their version (the client was free to players; presumeably CCP was eating the cost of the Cedega license). At the time of discontinuation, Cedega still didn't support the advanced graphics options, but Wine did - and the glitches were all but gone.
I believe the successor to the touch pro 2, keyboard-wise, is the Htc pro 7. It's a Windows Phone 7 device, which means that interoperability with Linux isn't a huge priority, but it has a lovely 5 row keyboard and 800x480 display. The bad news is that its not available yet (coming to Sprint in the US, some time after the CDMA update for WP7).
14. ASLR, which provides much better protection against exploits. The majority of exploits on Win7 were on old DLLs that didn't use ASLR, but going forward that won't be an option.
15. Aero Snap, the ability to tile windows side-by-side made fast, intuitive, and dead easy. Anytime I find myself using an older OS I'm always ending up with windows placed half-off the screen and wondering why they didn't snap.
16. Built-in multi-touch support. Although the base OS makes relatively little use of it (you can use it to zoom and various things), apps can take advantage of this feature. Not very useful to those without tablets, but if you have a tablet there's no reason to run anything older than Win7.
17. Much better video driver model. A video driver crash no longer causes a kernel panic, because the driver isn't in the kernel. Additionally, you can swap drivers in and out in seconds, without rebooting.
18. Instant search of everything. I never use the All Programs menu anymore, and I don't mind doing full-text searches for a specific mail or document (try this on XP, if you're really bored).
19. Jump Lists, while arguably part of "decent taskbar," deserve mention themselves - quickly open a recent document, a Steam game, etc. or run a common task with quick-and-easy UI.
20. VHD booting, which isn't intended for home users but is great for people testing drivers or testing software on multiple OS configurations, on native hardware.
21. Built-in ability to burn disk images. A small but handy feature that's long overdue.
22. Ability to control per-application volume with independent sliders. Very handy when one app is always too noisy, or you want to quickly mute certain apps without quitting entirely.
23. Bi-directional firewall. Although the default is to allow all outgoing traffic, you can use it to prevent certain apps from phonong home, or be extra secure by configuring it as a whitelist.
24. More helpful dialog boxes, such as the file overwrite or "this file is locked [by application X]" ones.
25. Volume Shadow Copies, typically known as the "Previous Versions" feature, allowing you to recover deleted or overwritten files or directories.
26. Superfetch, which pre-loads applications into RAM when (based on usage history) you're likely to run them soon. Makes launching a big app (games, Visual Studio, whatever you use) much faster than on XP.
27. Highly customizable power options, such as controlling how much the CPU speed will scale when plugged in vs. on battery, and whether to maximize WiFi capability or save power.
28. Hybrid sleep mode, where the computer enters suspend (for fast wakeup) but also writes out the hiberfile (in case of power loss, or for rapidly dropping to hibernation). 28a. Resuming from sleep or hibernate is *MUCH* faster on Win7 than on older versions, especially if you have a multi-core system (improved parallelism).
OK, I think that's long enough... I hadn't meant to write so much but it wasn't hard (especially as the user of a tablet PC) to come up with plenty of items. Hell, there's lots more little things, like the default path to user profiles not having spaces in it, that are nice. XP is a pain to use, and has been for years - I find myself doing things like opening the Start menu (with the Windows key) and typing, and instead of doing a search some random thing that started with a letter I hit happens instead.
For the record, the following items apply to Vista as well as Win7 (the others are new, or at least much better, in 7): 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 14, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28.
I get the joke you're trying to make, but it's worth pointing out that this was not only done long ago, it was done using a relatively unknown capability of NT - the POSIX subsystem that allows apps written for Unix-like operating systems to run unmodified (aside from a recompile) on NT. It was actually one of the first major uses of this subsystem, since at the time there was no way to move Hotmail onto Win32 without re-writing it.
Wow, you are a case study in the combination of people who are self-centered, loud-mouthed, and don't know a thing about computer science (or probably about software engineering). Quite interesting.
Maybe the Win7 problem you're having is actually your fault, have you thought of that? I've directly used over 100 Win7 machines, and worked indirectly with thousands of them (and their users) and remarkably enough nobody else has mentioned this problem. The closest is that sometimes pinned items lose their icons, and that was back in beta. Is it a common issue mentioned online? Is there any particular thing that everybody who experiences it has in common, like it's an OEM installation from Dell or they use a particular antivirus? Or do you just have a messed-up installation and a need to rant?
I'm going to give you the benefit of a doubt, and guess that you're an experienced software developer who is routinely assigned to fix bugs in various area, and you're simply naive about how the rest of the world works. It seems more likely that you have only the vaguest idea what the source code for a project the size of Windows looks like (based on your ridiculous "good idea") though. Pro tip: the MSR folks aren't code monkeys. They're computer scientists, in the scientific sense of the term. Many of them probably do write some code on a daily basis, but that's certainly not true of them all. In fact, many probably never work directly with code at all - they focus on things ranging from improved abstract data structures to new ways to interact with a computer to algorithms for Go. Fixing application bugs isn't their job, or even figuring out enough of the problem space to understand what causes the bug, what else will be impacted by changing that cause, or how to fix it without causing more bugs.
That said, there's lots of people who are hired to do exactly that. Have you sent them a bug report with a clear description and repro steps? Heck, have you sent one at all, or even tried? There are actually channels to do so, in case you're wondering.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL... I made more than that (twice as much, in fact) in an internship after freshman year! OK, I had a lot of hobbiest experience and more prior work experience than the norm, but even in high school I didn't work for less than $10/hour. Remarkably enough, I never lacked for work when I wanted it. Only one of my employers even negotiated, and one offered me $15 right off (mind you, this was for a short one-off job, not a steady position, so I suppose those rates were low for a consultant... but hell, I was 16!) I'd have needed to be quite desperate after graduation to look at anything less than 60k + benefits. As it turns out, I make considerably more than that.
You can certainly tell, by smell, a strong drink from a weak one. I'm not sure if this is actually an aroma or simply a case of the alcohol fumes having some effect upon reaching your nasal cavity, but it's there.
It may also be per-person. Some of my friends claim they can't even taste alcohol, whereas I not only can readily taste it (and dislike the taste) I can tell a spiked drink by smell (this has not been rigorously tested, but I've never been surprised by an alcoholic drink that I could smell beforehand).
Depends on your definiton of "know." My friends "know" my phone number in that if they have a need for it I tell them, and by now most probably have it in their phone book. However, some of them won't yet, and for them the logical place to look it up is Facebook, because there is/used to be a section for "Contact information" that had things I wanted my friends to have access to. Hell, my phone will use Facebook to populate its address list. This is a useful feature, and it annoys me that Facebook is providing people incentives to not put this info on their profiles.
Mind you, I joined Facebook back when the only way to do so was a .edu email address, so the world was a somewhat different place then. Not to say that I shouldn't have seen this coming eventually, but so far it has been more useful than not to have the ability to find my friends' numbers (and them to find mine) online.
Care to mention any, and I mean litereally even one, place where IE9 is three years behind another browser on HTML5?
I call bullshit. There are some places where the (4 month old) IE9 beta is behind, yes, but not by three years, or even close. There are fewer places where the (2 month old) IE9 platform preview (still beta code) is behind. Two of the issues this article mentions were fixed internally even before the article was posted.
Yes, it would help if MS released builds more than once every 2 months. That doesn't exuse exorbitent claims of 3 years out-of-date.
No, but there's evidence that A) most people do, and B) you are a douche. Seriously, dude, if you don't appreciate the work somebody has done just because they didn't do it for your 10%-or-less-market-share platform, that's fine, but why the snark? Do you feel entitled to use this, for some reason? Did the developer ask anything from you? Have you done anything for them?
For that matter, you probably *could* run it in [Dar]Wine just fine. If you really want it native, why not ask about a native port, or offer your expertise in creating one? Open source doesn't entitle you to a version usable on every platform, but it does entitle you to the code and the right to port it, if you're willing to put up the effort. It's easier to just snark from the sideline, though...
Dear $DEITY, why would you use Safari on OS X, much less Windows? Terrible UI, serious security issues, and all the shit that Apple shoves onto your system when you install any of their software on Windows.
Use Chrome, or even Konqueror, if you need WebKit.
Use Firefox if you want a browser that looks exactly like you want and has exactly the features you want, while still being fast and regularly updated.
Use Opera if you want stupidly fast and standards-compliant, plus *all* the features.
Hell, use IE9 beta if you want fast and generally excellent standards compliance and don't mind pre-release code.
Are you bloody serious?
First of all, IE9 Beta already supports the majority of Canvas. This guy found a few things that didn't work right in the build he was using (far from the newest one, FYI).
Second, IE9 has been receiving improvements to its compatibility in many areas, including Canvas, during Beta. At least one of the bugs found was known, reported, and fixed a while ago.
Third, it *is* still in development (beta, not RC). We (the public) are about due for another preview build drop; the currently available one is 2 months old.
Fourth, If MS were to avoid supporting the portions of HTML5 not yet standardized, they wouldn't have anything at all! The whole spec is still in Draft... seriously, read the official spec page linked in the summary.
Fifth, while there will undoubtedly be shit flung by developer X whose favorite corner case Y doesn't work right yet, most Canvas sites *just work* in IE9 already.
Sixth, MS is already well past the expectations of most web developers. ACID5 (except for the parts that are now redundent and being deprecated), HTML5, CSS3, and very fast JS. All software has bugs, but MS has already largely delivered on its promise to support the same code as other browsers, and it's still in beta!
Fascinating... you realize you're talking about IE8, right? As in, released-in-2009 IE8? This article is about the IE9 beta, which is already out of date at 4 months old. IE9 isn't even in RC yet, nor did this article's author use the most recent preview build
To address your Downsides with respect to IE9:
- I can't speak to the hours your particular site will require, but a lot of things just work in IE9 even if I have to spoof the user-agent to keep it from saying "Nope, can't do IE, go away!"
- IE8's JS isn't JIT compiled. IE9's is, and it's well over 10x as fast as IE8 - in fact, it's faster than Firefox by a non-trivial margin.
- Lots of CSS3 in IE9, and I'm pretty sure this does include border-image.
- Not only is IE9's JS compiled and fast, it uses hardware-accelerated rendering so animations are super-quick (even on crappy Intel graphics, though faster GPUs are even better).
- I really don't see this as a bug; either make sure the server insists on no caching, or use POST.
- The developer tools have been improved a lot compared to IE8 In addition to a better UI and other ease-of-use improvements, it now includes things like a profiler to find slow operations/expensive functions.
IE9 is still in beta, still getting improvements made and incompatibilities removed. Despite that, it's already compatible enough that it will happily run (at good framerate) a NES emulater entirely in JavaScript, HTML5, and especially canvas. That emulator was definitely not written as an IE9 demo, either - it's just compatible with it because IE9 adheres to the standard well enough.
Dude, that may be the usual meaning of beta, but unless you have a hell of a lot closer sources than I do (possible but unlikely) that's an unjustified assertion. It's only two months since the last public Platform Preview build (the beta build is 4 months old, PP builds are usually on a roughly 8 week scedule so another could come out any day). Each PP build has added features. They've continued adding features and fixing incompatibilities well past the beta release. They *probably* won't do that into RC, but what evidence do you have that RC is any time soon?
Why does it only *seem* to happen to Windows users? Because you're viewing the world through an inherent bias. It happens on OS X (botnets created by trojens embedded in pirated versions of iLife and Adobe software have been observed in the wild) and even (rarely) on Linux.
Why does it happen *more often* on Windows? Because malware is a business. Windows has 9x the market share of every other desktop OS combined. That's 9x as much money, assuming equal percentages of idiots install your malware. Why would you intentionally make 10% (or less) as much by targeting a low-market-share platform? The existing malware for other platforms is a case of trivial low-hanging fruit, but even so it doesn't make that much money by comparison to even a relatively small Windows botnet, so most people won't bother.
Not quite sure what your complaint is; Windows has text DPI settings and the more recent versions enforce their use pretty well.
I've been boycotting Sony since about that time too, and it hasn't been hard at all. Overpriced PCs, underfeatured cameras, idiocies like their unique flash memory storage (they're finally moving to SD/CF, I hear) and so forth. There was a time when they were good, but that's well in the past in my opinion. There have been times when I was mildly tempted, but all it really takes is just skipping over their product listings.
Actually, I think this is already possible. There's a registry setting to specify the program you use for the graphical shell (i.e. what Windows starts after you log on). The default is of course explorer.exe, but it's settable. You could try setting up a Plasma desktop, with the kicker, tray, menu, and so forth. You'd probably still need Windows components for some stuff, like the control panel and management console, but they'd be launched from within KDE, not the other way around.
That said, while KDE provides the most critical stuff - file manager, web browser, media player, archive handling, etc. - I doubt everything is as mature as on *nix (example: Ark used to run, but couldn't open anything except tarballs, when I last tried KDE on Windows). Also, some things are just better done with non-KDE apps, most likely - KOffice may be free and open source, but if you're on Windows anyhow it makes a lot more sense to run MS Office. On the other hand, you do get a lot of stuff that doesn't come with Windows but works perfectly fine on it, like PDF reading (and some editing), a torrent client, a programmer's text editor, IM and IRC clients, and so forth.
I found it worth installing to play with, if not to replace Explorer with.
Try sliding past the edge of the screen, and you'll get a "scrunch" effect that is effectively a not-to-scale resize of everything on screen at once; not super-hard to do fast but non-trivial.
The "flips into place" effect on loading (or leaving, "flips out") the Start page is a lot more than a rotation or [simple] transform of an image. Texture, perhaps; indeed I suspect they use the GPU to do it. Software *can* do that but it acts like a 3D surface.
There a lot of other animations in WP7 as well, which as you say "look neat." There's nothing about them that couldn't be done on recent iPhones or higher-end Android phones, though - the hardware in WP7 is pretty decent but by no means top-end. As for the RAM thing, the Venue Pro appears to have half as much RAM as a typical WP7 device, yet is just as snappy. It sounds like you're trying a little too hard to find something to fault in the phone's UI...
Windows XP is a hideously outdated OS.
Windows XP only runs on x86 chips; smartphones use ARM (Windows 8 will run on ARM, Windows 7 and before do not).
Windows XP has absolutely no capability to be used on a phone.
Windows XP is not intended for use on a touchscreen (no multitouch, tiny things to click, etc.)
Windows XP is not very well suited to mobile devices (power consumption too high, resume from sleep takes too long, etc.).
There's a lot more to system requirements than CPU clock speed.
There's a lot more to selecting a suitable OS for a platform than "is it fast enough".
There's a lot more things I could mention here...
Until later this month, yes it lacks copy/paste. This has actually already been done (as a feature) for some time; it's been demoed a few times and I'm told it's available to people on the WP7 team at MS, but it's not widely deployed just yet.
As for your comment on the interface, I'm curious what computer graphics knowledge you have that makes you think "solid colors, simple text" with advanced animations (such as the ones that happen when you enter or leave the Start screen) are easier to do than the iOS or Android "grid of static icons" with simple translation animation. Leaving aside things like the People, Pictures, Games, and Me tiles (which tend to be both colorful and actively animating), the decision to use mostly static boxes is pretty obviously just an aesthetic one to avoid a cluttered appearance. Computers, including smartphones, are many years past the point where a complex picture is non-trivially more expensive to display than a simple white icon on a solid background.
Live Tiles use the cellular radio by preference over WiFi, on the assumption that Push Notifications *should* go through if at all possible, and the cellular radio lets you maintain a persistent connection better than WiFi (which might not even have Internet access at all). Push notifications will apparently fall back to WiFi if they lose cellular connection, but they won't switch over automatically.
I disagree with this design - I think that every time you join a WiFi network the phone should probe it for ability to use Push Notifications, and switch off the cellular radio channel if it connects via WiFi. Every time it loses WiFi it should re-establish Push Notifications via cellular radio. This design may well use a little more battery life, and probably causes intermittent losses of push functionality for a second or two as it changes connections, but it would limit cellular data usage. At the very least, this would be a good thing to have as an option. I (and pretty much everybody else I know with a smartphone, those poor schmucks who bought new iPhones aside) have unlimited data, so I'm perfectly happy prioritizing making sure the notification goes through as fast as it can. Some other people might disagree though.
Wait, people even still use Nero, much less pay for it?!? Wow... last I checked (admittedly years ago) K3B was strictly better, and included with KDE for free. You can of course install it separately too, though it'll need QT and some other KDE dependencies.
I'm not sure whether those concerns were ever addressed, but Wine implements just enough of the Windows kernel APIs to make the more common DRM schemes work. I'm not sure how it fares on the newest stuff - though it works fine with Steam, which is about as much DRM as I'll tolerate on a game these days - but Securom and so forth were specifically made to work.
I wonder if they're going to attempt to incorporate Wine code (assuming that licensing is made compatible)? The most recent versions of Wine are honestly just *better* at playing Windows games than Cedega is! Cedega had some advantages - convenience and commercial backing (CodeWeavers, the backing for Wine, usually seemed more interested in business apps). However, if you were willing to use Wine, you could actually game a lot better on it than on Cedega.
I'm reminded of EVE Online. They released a Linux version of their client, which was just a Windows version wrapped in Cedega. It was an immense download, and while it worked, the advanced graphics options were disabled - Cedega didn't support them. Most of us just continued using Wine, which aside from a few glitches and a more complicated setup was better in almost every way. CCP (makers of EVE) eventually discontinued the Linux client, saying that the game ran so well on Wine that there was no reason to pay Cedega for their version (the client was free to players; presumeably CCP was eating the cost of the Cedega license). At the time of discontinuation, Cedega still didn't support the advanced graphics options, but Wine did - and the glitches were all but gone.
I believe the successor to the touch pro 2, keyboard-wise, is the Htc pro 7. It's a Windows Phone 7 device, which means that interoperability with Linux isn't a huge priority, but it has a lovely 5 row keyboard and 800x480 display. The bad news is that its not available yet (coming to Sprint in the US, some time after the CDMA update for WP7).
A few more:
14. ASLR, which provides much better protection against exploits. The majority of exploits on Win7 were on old DLLs that didn't use ASLR, but going forward that won't be an option.
15. Aero Snap, the ability to tile windows side-by-side made fast, intuitive, and dead easy. Anytime I find myself using an older OS I'm always ending up with windows placed half-off the screen and wondering why they didn't snap.
16. Built-in multi-touch support. Although the base OS makes relatively little use of it (you can use it to zoom and various things), apps can take advantage of this feature. Not very useful to those without tablets, but if you have a tablet there's no reason to run anything older than Win7.
17. Much better video driver model. A video driver crash no longer causes a kernel panic, because the driver isn't in the kernel. Additionally, you can swap drivers in and out in seconds, without rebooting.
18. Instant search of everything. I never use the All Programs menu anymore, and I don't mind doing full-text searches for a specific mail or document (try this on XP, if you're really bored).
19. Jump Lists, while arguably part of "decent taskbar," deserve mention themselves - quickly open a recent document, a Steam game, etc. or run a common task with quick-and-easy UI.
20. VHD booting, which isn't intended for home users but is great for people testing drivers or testing software on multiple OS configurations, on native hardware.
21. Built-in ability to burn disk images. A small but handy feature that's long overdue.
22. Ability to control per-application volume with independent sliders. Very handy when one app is always too noisy, or you want to quickly mute certain apps without quitting entirely.
23. Bi-directional firewall. Although the default is to allow all outgoing traffic, you can use it to prevent certain apps from phonong home, or be extra secure by configuring it as a whitelist.
24. More helpful dialog boxes, such as the file overwrite or "this file is locked [by application X]" ones.
25. Volume Shadow Copies, typically known as the "Previous Versions" feature, allowing you to recover deleted or overwritten files or directories.
26. Superfetch, which pre-loads applications into RAM when (based on usage history) you're likely to run them soon. Makes launching a big app (games, Visual Studio, whatever you use) much faster than on XP.
27. Highly customizable power options, such as controlling how much the CPU speed will scale when plugged in vs. on battery, and whether to maximize WiFi capability or save power.
28. Hybrid sleep mode, where the computer enters suspend (for fast wakeup) but also writes out the hiberfile (in case of power loss, or for rapidly dropping to hibernation).
28a. Resuming from sleep or hibernate is *MUCH* faster on Win7 than on older versions, especially if you have a multi-core system (improved parallelism).
OK, I think that's long enough... I hadn't meant to write so much but it wasn't hard (especially as the user of a tablet PC) to come up with plenty of items. Hell, there's lots more little things, like the default path to user profiles not having spaces in it, that are nice. XP is a pain to use, and has been for years - I find myself doing things like opening the Start menu (with the Windows key) and typing, and instead of doing a search some random thing that started with a letter I hit happens instead.
For the record, the following items apply to Vista as well as Win7 (the others are new, or at least much better, in 7): 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 14, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28.
I get the joke you're trying to make, but it's worth pointing out that this was not only done long ago, it was done using a relatively unknown capability of NT - the POSIX subsystem that allows apps written for Unix-like operating systems to run unmodified (aside from a recompile) on NT. It was actually one of the first major uses of this subsystem, since at the time there was no way to move Hotmail onto Win32 without re-writing it.
Wow, you are a case study in the combination of people who are self-centered, loud-mouthed, and don't know a thing about computer science (or probably about software engineering). Quite interesting.
Maybe the Win7 problem you're having is actually your fault, have you thought of that? I've directly used over 100 Win7 machines, and worked indirectly with thousands of them (and their users) and remarkably enough nobody else has mentioned this problem. The closest is that sometimes pinned items lose their icons, and that was back in beta. Is it a common issue mentioned online? Is there any particular thing that everybody who experiences it has in common, like it's an OEM installation from Dell or they use a particular antivirus? Or do you just have a messed-up installation and a need to rant?
I'm going to give you the benefit of a doubt, and guess that you're an experienced software developer who is routinely assigned to fix bugs in various area, and you're simply naive about how the rest of the world works. It seems more likely that you have only the vaguest idea what the source code for a project the size of Windows looks like (based on your ridiculous "good idea") though. Pro tip: the MSR folks aren't code monkeys. They're computer scientists, in the scientific sense of the term. Many of them probably do write some code on a daily basis, but that's certainly not true of them all. In fact, many probably never work directly with code at all - they focus on things ranging from improved abstract data structures to new ways to interact with a computer to algorithms for Go. Fixing application bugs isn't their job, or even figuring out enough of the problem space to understand what causes the bug, what else will be impacted by changing that cause, or how to fix it without causing more bugs.
That said, there's lots of people who are hired to do exactly that. Have you sent them a bug report with a clear description and repro steps? Heck, have you sent one at all, or even tried? There are actually channels to do so, in case you're wondering.