People look at GPUs for 3D acceleration because that's both the most noticeable improvement vs. software rendering, and because we're still pushing the limits on GPU 3D capability. However, GPUs are also widely used for 2D acceleration, and have been for many years - since before 3D hardware acceleration in conventional PCs was even available. Things that the GPU commonly does to speed 2D up include cursor rendering, font antialiasing, alpha blending, and more. The Direct2D API is just another way to utilize capabilities that are already present in the hardware, and replaces the legacy DirectDraw API which did the same thing. OpenGL has 2D acceleration capabilities as well.
Actually, most tablets, phones, and netbooks have enough GPU to do a decent job of accelerating IE9. I tried it on my tablet - ultra-low voltage core 2 duo at 1.2 GHz, with Intel Integrated 3100 crap for graphics... it wasn't as good of framerates as on my gaming box, but I could certainly get decent performance (30-60 FPS) on the canvas tests. Considering that other browsers currently get around 4-12 in most cases, even on my gaming box, I think that's an acceptable showing for the graphics of a tablet.
You seem badly misinformed as to what ActiveX is. It's a plugin API, serving exactly the same purpose as the Netscape-derived plugin API that Firefox, Opera, and Chrome use. It's a way to run binary code in the browser window. Flash uses an ActiveX control, for example.
Now, the fact that there was a time when the default security on the plugin API was very poor (meaning any website could run any ActiveX that was installed, and many of them weren't properly secured) is undeniable, but come on, IE6 is almost 10 years old... MS will never fully live down its bad products, but that doesn't mean that they won't learn from them. These days, you have to specifically approve ActiveX controls, and installing one takes three different clicks - you don't do it by accident. Hell, I implement a basic but functional Flashblock on IE by simply setting the ActiveX control to not allowed on any page save those I specify, meaning it'll work on Pandora and YouTube, and basically nowhere else unless I decide to add permission for a specific site I visit.
It already does... seriously, it's not like the platform preview is hard to find, or hasn't been discussed in the tech news world lately, or anything like that.
Actually, since Video playback is hardware-accelerated (as with Canvas), it turns out that IE9 handles video streams better than the released browsers that implement it, such as Chrome.
No, but it's inconveniently located for right-handed people on most keyboards; you've got the numpad between it and your mousing hand, and half of the normal keyboard between it and the hand you always leave on the keyboard.
So... why do you use extensions to add your much loved feature if Firefox, but deride IE as though it doesn't offer the same functionality through its own add-ons? I'll grant that the library is smaller, but they exist, there's a centralized location to get them from (open the Add-on manager and click "Get more toolbars and extensions" or just navigate to http://www.ieaddons.com/en/ ), and they seem to provide most if not all of the generally sought-after features. I have ad blocking, mouse gestures, user-agent switching, fast proxy switching, search aliases, user scripts... there's a ton more, for those who want to add more tricks.
The mouse gestures component supports your hold-one-button-click-the-other triggers, too. I typically just use my mouse's 4th and 5th buttons for this, but if you're used to doing it your way, it seems awfully silly to blame the browser rather than just installing the add-in.
Don't forget that you're throwing away not just a third of your voltage, but a third of your power. The current for your electronics still flows through the diodes, and assuming that the current doesn't change despite the diode voltage drop, you're dissipating heat from the diodes equal to the current multiplied by those 0.2V/diode. Not only does that produce heat that can damage things, it also means that your batteries will waste 1/3 of their charge.
The best semiconductors I'm aware of still have a pretty constant voltage drop of roughly 0.5V, while the more common ones have 0.7V per diode or 1.2V per diode (no, I'm not an electrical engineer, there might be better diode materials out there now). Take your average alkaline bettery: 1.5V. Running it through a diode guarantees that you'll lose 1/3 of your voltage right off the bat, and you're more likely to lose 1/2. Then there's rechargable batteries, typically 1.2V. They get away with it because their lower internal resistance means that even with a lower V, V = I*R gives a similar I. However, a diode will knock out a huge portion of that voltage - damn near all of it, if you use Ge for some reason - and that's going to make it awfully tough to power your device. Finally, there's the issue of heat: you're wasting half your battery voltage, but your electronics need the same current at the same voltage as before. However, that same current is also flowing through the diode, and being dissipated at P = I*V. If V_diode = V_device, you've doubled the drain on your batteries, and doubled your heat dissipation. This is a problem...
That's actually trivially easy to wire; the batteries are in parallel, not series. This means that you get the same voltage, but more capacity (and also less resistance, which depending on the current draw might or might not have an appreciable affect on the voltage). Removing a battery gives you the same voltage, twice the resistance across the battery compartment (but that's often irrelevant due to the actual resistors used in the circuit), and half the capacity. I'm not saying it's not a nice feature for a mouse to have, just that it's trivial and hardly innovative.
Sure... but it's also one of the best-known cross-platform open source games. Anybody looking to try Linux, and likely to be influenced by the gaming possibilities, has probably already seen Wesnoth on their current platform.
I'm less worried about reinventing the wheel than about people who just do *NOT* understand what they are playing with. My dad loves to tell the story of the guy who put a redim (this was some flavor of BASIC, the equivalent C call is realloc) inside a long and frequently-run for loop, because he didn't know how big the array would need to be but apparently thought that it was more important to not make it too large than it was to avoid the memory manager overhead and serious memory fragmentation of what he was doing. It worked, but damn was it slow...
For my part, I've not seen anything that bad outside of beginning programming students' assignments, but at least they had somebody to tell them that they were doing it wrong, and why, if they didn't figure it out on their own. The self-taught coder doesn't have that. The guys at Zoho might get told that what they are doing is slow, but even if it's explained to them that what they are doing is slow, they won't understand enough to apply that lesson elsewhere. Imagine somebody implementing a sort for a 20-element array, using bubble sort, and being told that insertion sort is much faster. They say ok cool, thanks, look up and implement insertion sort, and their take-away lesson is that insertion sort is the algorithm to use, because it's fast (to any non-CS people here: it's one of the fastest algorithms for small data sets, and horribly slow on large ones because its runtime increases as the square of the element count).
I'm not going to pretend that the theory classes were my favorites, but not only can I determine what algorithm or data structure is best for a given situation (and explain why), I can understand why, even though Java allows you to convery any numeric type to a float (and back again, with acceptable precision in *most* cases), you shouldn't do that with the entire state of a game engine at every time step even though it makes it easier to pack the data into buffer for sending over the network (side note: I hate Java's networking API). Yes, this is a real-world example I saw.
Perhaps most importantly, very few self-taught programmers understand security at all. Very few people natively have a good security mindset - the average layman would describe it as somewhere between paranoid and psychopathic - and even if one has it naturally it takes training. Just because a coder is taught how to, for example, avoid SQL injection attacks (this is very easy, but the techniques shown in nearly every "try it yourself" example are vulnerable, and so are an awful lot of production websites) a lot of people would still miss how to protect against XSS, a superficially similar attack that works quote differently and requires different countermeasures.
A few of these are actually decent games - Wesnoth is well-designed and a lot of fun, as is Scorch3d even if it's not nearly so original - but there are a couple of major failings of that list. First of all, there's none of the big-name games, the ones that would be expected by any PC gamer looking to switch operating systems. Second, none of the games that I recognize are specific to Linux, meaning that they are not, in and of themselves, a reason to switch (at best, they are a reason not to avoid switching). Third, the list excludes a couple of very popular genres, like MMORPG (there actually are some for Linux) or even RPGs in general (plenty of those, and if usually not terribly "pretty" they are some of the best-designed Linux games out there). I realize that a LiveDVD has limited space and that games tend to be expensive in terms of install footprint, but they seem to have selected many of the "flashy" games instead of the quality ones. It's also worth pointing out that by including Wine they could add a ton of titles to that list, including some very popular Windows titles, assuming they could get redistribution rights.
I see the sentiment of your last statement pretty often, on Slashdot and elsewhere. The simple, and (hopefully) obvious answer is "Ethics", or possibly "Morality" or, if you must be beat about the head over it, "Legality". You are not, personally or as society at large, entitled to video entertainment free of charge. It is easier for me to walk into somebody's office and take a bunch of hardware than it is for me to go buy it, and it'll already have a bunch of software on it too, so I'd probably get a better product. That doesn't make it right.
I have a Dell Latitude CPX laptop from nearly 10 years ago. It still runs just fine. During the 3.5 years that it spent on a blue-water sailboat in the tropics, subjected to heat, humidity, and salty air, I occasionally had to perform minor repairs - cleaning the contacts of the keyboard's less-used keys, mostly - but it boots and runs, and in fact has more battery life than some laptops 30% its age.
Dell's consumer line has never been that good, in my memory, but their business products are, or at least used to be, fantastic.
One of the features of Flash 10.1 is that it supports video hardware decoding. This is available today. Flash also does offer a lot of other things that, at present, there's no real equivalent of in HTML5, although it might be possible to create some of them with some effort.
As far as I know, only the preview versions of IE9 are known to use hardware acceleration. However, it is possible that other browsers also use it for video, at least, and I was simply unaware.
* Note that this post does not in any way endorse the continued existence of Flashplayer; it merely attempts to correct misinformation.
Citation please? While it's not that I won't believe you, this does seem a little odd... Firefox because it is, as you say, open, and IE because Microsoft already has a media playback engine built into their OS, and uses pluggable codecs...
On a side note, the latest IE9 pre-beta preview apparently supports the HTML5 video tag. It looks like MS is really competing on the browser capability front this time around - a good thing to see, for sure.
Actually, Safari 3 (Mac or Windows) might be more secure than IE6... and might not. Short of Adobe's flash plugin for Mac, which is typically run inside Safari but can't really be considered the same thing, I know of no other piece of Mac software that so many security holes - be they patched vulnerabilities, exploits revealed in competitions, or attacks in the wild - have been found in. The Windows version didn't fare any better at all, for that matter.
No, although allowing XP (where the default user, and therefore the default permissions for the browser, as Administrator-level) is pretty dumb if that was their goal. Not that I'm suggesting they should block XP outright (and even if your User Agent string contains OS identification, it could be spoofed and they'd be none the wiser) but permitting not just XP, but XP using it's original, 10-year-old web browser does seem a little... stupid, if security is a goal at all.
Seriously, this is a worthwhile point. Maemo (OS on the N900) *IS* Linux, not a fancy face on top of it that takes away your control. The default user is not root, but you can become root. The package manager software is setuid root, but you can fix that if you want to make it impossible to install apps without entering a password.
I've seen absolutely no indication whatsoever of anything that backs up your claims (in fact, the game you mention came out before the 360 S, and the Wikipedia article on the topic doesn't contain any instances of the word "Slim"). Older revisions of the 360 are more prone to overheating, don't have built-in WiFi, and may have different ports - for example, the oldest models lack an HDMI port - but their CPUs and GPUs execute the same code at the same speed, they have the same amount of RAM, and they run the same OS* as the new Slim model. Kinect works just fine on older consoles. The new console may look different, but it runs exactly the same games.
* I'm assuming you keep your console's OS up to date, typically done via the Internet but I believe it's possible with a DVD as well. Unless you've modded your console, the update process is completely trivial. If you *have* modded it, they *you* are the one with the XBox 365 (or perhaps 355), not "Microcrap" (as you so very maturely refer to the company whose product you chose to purchase).
The ironic thing from my perspective is that Google's own services (ads and analytics) are among the worst offenders for making web pages slow down, in my experience...
Retaining a WinCE core doesn't mean that much, considering how much they've upgraded that kernel for WinPhone7. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing particularly good to say about either WinCE (as seen in WinMo phones) or WinPhone7, but I'm not going to go hunting for extra reasons to bash it either. A lot of the old restrictions that made WinCE suck are gone now, like the incredibly low per-process memory space, and it seems to do fairly well running devices like the ZuneHD (I don't have one, but I've played with a few and they appear to be quite solid devices with no obvious OS flaws; pity about the rendering engine, though).
Windows Mobile and Windows Phone are completely different at the UI level. I mean, literally, as far as I can tell they may have thrown away everything above the WinCE kernel and core level. I'm not saying that excuses the lack of useful and important features, but it does explain why they might not have had time to implement them (because they were working on other stuff, and would have had to re-implement them from scratch) and makes the "But WinMo6 did it!" argument rather irrelevant.
I would say that somebody there seems a little too caught up in replicating even the mistakes of Apple's launch. As you point out, Apple did catch shit for those mistakes - it might not have cost the device its success, but it did cost them plenty of customers - and while they eventually added Copy/Paste, I'm still not buying any device which is effectively a handheld computer, but which lacks the ability to run more than one interactive application simultaneously.
I suppose that means I probably won't be buying a WinPhone7 device, either. In a way, this is disappointing - I was hoping to have more choice when the time came to upgrade my phone, choice is always good and I have no inherent objection to buying Microsoft products as long as they don't suck - but lacking such features pretty much means it sucks, regardless of what else it has, and that means I won't be buying one.
Home Internet connections in north America (I'm in the US, but it's the same in Canada) almost never have bandwidth caps, although Comcast will put on a soft cap (throttling) past 20GB or some such. 3G connections are typically soft-capped at 5GB. Don't know about Europe, but Aus and NZ are the only places that I've ever heard *everybody* has bandwidth caps.
Part of writing serious malware, the sort that uses shellcodes and relies upon particular calling conventions and memory layouts, is very platform-specific. That kind of thing has to be learned anew for every platform one wants to target, often including different architectures of a given OS.
Trojans, on the other hand, are literally nothing other than programs that the user doesn't realize he is installing. They may attempt to hide themselves using platform-specific tricks, but at the end of the day, it's a program written like any other. OS X may emphasize Objective-C and de-emphasize its UNIX underpinnings for many things, but at the end of the day it uses a POSIX API very similar to the one found in Linux.
Hell, I've written software for the POSIX subsystem of NT on x86, and successfully ported it to Linux on ARM, with fewer than one #ifdef per KLOC. I strongly suspect that OS X is a lot closer to Linux than SUA (Microsoft's NT Subsystem for UNIX Applications) is to Linux, yet it wasn't hard at all. It wasn't malware, but if I'd wanted to I could have invisibly slipped it into an installer for some other program and then it would have been a trojan.
Slashdot Mirror
People look at GPUs for 3D acceleration because that's both the most noticeable improvement vs. software rendering, and because we're still pushing the limits on GPU 3D capability. However, GPUs are also widely used for 2D acceleration, and have been for many years - since before 3D hardware acceleration in conventional PCs was even available. Things that the GPU commonly does to speed 2D up include cursor rendering, font antialiasing, alpha blending, and more. The Direct2D API is just another way to utilize capabilities that are already present in the hardware, and replaces the legacy DirectDraw API which did the same thing. OpenGL has 2D acceleration capabilities as well.
Actually, most tablets, phones, and netbooks have enough GPU to do a decent job of accelerating IE9. I tried it on my tablet - ultra-low voltage core 2 duo at 1.2 GHz, with Intel Integrated 3100 crap for graphics... it wasn't as good of framerates as on my gaming box, but I could certainly get decent performance (30-60 FPS) on the canvas tests. Considering that other browsers currently get around 4-12 in most cases, even on my gaming box, I think that's an acceptable showing for the graphics of a tablet.
You seem badly misinformed as to what ActiveX is. It's a plugin API, serving exactly the same purpose as the Netscape-derived plugin API that Firefox, Opera, and Chrome use. It's a way to run binary code in the browser window. Flash uses an ActiveX control, for example.
Now, the fact that there was a time when the default security on the plugin API was very poor (meaning any website could run any ActiveX that was installed, and many of them weren't properly secured) is undeniable, but come on, IE6 is almost 10 years old... MS will never fully live down its bad products, but that doesn't mean that they won't learn from them. These days, you have to specifically approve ActiveX controls, and installing one takes three different clicks - you don't do it by accident. Hell, I implement a basic but functional Flashblock on IE by simply setting the ActiveX control to not allowed on any page save those I specify, meaning it'll work on Pandora and YouTube, and basically nowhere else unless I decide to add permission for a specific site I visit.
It already does... seriously, it's not like the platform preview is hard to find, or hasn't been discussed in the tech news world lately, or anything like that.
Actually, since Video playback is hardware-accelerated (as with Canvas), it turns out that IE9 handles video streams better than the released browsers that implement it, such as Chrome.
No, but it's inconveniently located for right-handed people on most keyboards; you've got the numpad between it and your mousing hand, and half of the normal keyboard between it and the hand you always leave on the keyboard.
So... why do you use extensions to add your much loved feature if Firefox, but deride IE as though it doesn't offer the same functionality through its own add-ons? I'll grant that the library is smaller, but they exist, there's a centralized location to get them from (open the Add-on manager and click "Get more toolbars and extensions" or just navigate to http://www.ieaddons.com/en/ ), and they seem to provide most if not all of the generally sought-after features. I have ad blocking, mouse gestures, user-agent switching, fast proxy switching, search aliases, user scripts... there's a ton more, for those who want to add more tricks.
The mouse gestures component supports your hold-one-button-click-the-other triggers, too. I typically just use my mouse's 4th and 5th buttons for this, but if you're used to doing it your way, it seems awfully silly to blame the browser rather than just installing the add-in.
Don't forget that you're throwing away not just a third of your voltage, but a third of your power. The current for your electronics still flows through the diodes, and assuming that the current doesn't change despite the diode voltage drop, you're dissipating heat from the diodes equal to the current multiplied by those 0.2V/diode. Not only does that produce heat that can damage things, it also means that your batteries will waste 1/3 of their charge.
The best semiconductors I'm aware of still have a pretty constant voltage drop of roughly 0.5V, while the more common ones have 0.7V per diode or 1.2V per diode (no, I'm not an electrical engineer, there might be better diode materials out there now). Take your average alkaline bettery: 1.5V. Running it through a diode guarantees that you'll lose 1/3 of your voltage right off the bat, and you're more likely to lose 1/2. Then there's rechargable batteries, typically 1.2V. They get away with it because their lower internal resistance means that even with a lower V, V = I*R gives a similar I. However, a diode will knock out a huge portion of that voltage - damn near all of it, if you use Ge for some reason - and that's going to make it awfully tough to power your device. Finally, there's the issue of heat: you're wasting half your battery voltage, but your electronics need the same current at the same voltage as before. However, that same current is also flowing through the diode, and being dissipated at P = I*V. If V_diode = V_device, you've doubled the drain on your batteries, and doubled your heat dissipation. This is a problem...
That's actually trivially easy to wire; the batteries are in parallel, not series. This means that you get the same voltage, but more capacity (and also less resistance, which depending on the current draw might or might not have an appreciable affect on the voltage). Removing a battery gives you the same voltage, twice the resistance across the battery compartment (but that's often irrelevant due to the actual resistors used in the circuit), and half the capacity. I'm not saying it's not a nice feature for a mouse to have, just that it's trivial and hardly innovative.
Sure... but it's also one of the best-known cross-platform open source games. Anybody looking to try Linux, and likely to be influenced by the gaming possibilities, has probably already seen Wesnoth on their current platform.
I'm less worried about reinventing the wheel than about people who just do *NOT* understand what they are playing with. My dad loves to tell the story of the guy who put a redim (this was some flavor of BASIC, the equivalent C call is realloc) inside a long and frequently-run for loop, because he didn't know how big the array would need to be but apparently thought that it was more important to not make it too large than it was to avoid the memory manager overhead and serious memory fragmentation of what he was doing. It worked, but damn was it slow...
For my part, I've not seen anything that bad outside of beginning programming students' assignments, but at least they had somebody to tell them that they were doing it wrong, and why, if they didn't figure it out on their own. The self-taught coder doesn't have that. The guys at Zoho might get told that what they are doing is slow, but even if it's explained to them that what they are doing is slow, they won't understand enough to apply that lesson elsewhere. Imagine somebody implementing a sort for a 20-element array, using bubble sort, and being told that insertion sort is much faster. They say ok cool, thanks, look up and implement insertion sort, and their take-away lesson is that insertion sort is the algorithm to use, because it's fast (to any non-CS people here: it's one of the fastest algorithms for small data sets, and horribly slow on large ones because its runtime increases as the square of the element count).
I'm not going to pretend that the theory classes were my favorites, but not only can I determine what algorithm or data structure is best for a given situation (and explain why), I can understand why, even though Java allows you to convery any numeric type to a float (and back again, with acceptable precision in *most* cases), you shouldn't do that with the entire state of a game engine at every time step even though it makes it easier to pack the data into buffer for sending over the network (side note: I hate Java's networking API). Yes, this is a real-world example I saw.
Perhaps most importantly, very few self-taught programmers understand security at all. Very few people natively have a good security mindset - the average layman would describe it as somewhere between paranoid and psychopathic - and even if one has it naturally it takes training. Just because a coder is taught how to, for example, avoid SQL injection attacks (this is very easy, but the techniques shown in nearly every "try it yourself" example are vulnerable, and so are an awful lot of production websites) a lot of people would still miss how to protect against XSS, a superficially similar attack that works quote differently and requires different countermeasures.
A few of these are actually decent games - Wesnoth is well-designed and a lot of fun, as is Scorch3d even if it's not nearly so original - but there are a couple of major failings of that list. First of all, there's none of the big-name games, the ones that would be expected by any PC gamer looking to switch operating systems. Second, none of the games that I recognize are specific to Linux, meaning that they are not, in and of themselves, a reason to switch (at best, they are a reason not to avoid switching). Third, the list excludes a couple of very popular genres, like MMORPG (there actually are some for Linux) or even RPGs in general (plenty of those, and if usually not terribly "pretty" they are some of the best-designed Linux games out there). I realize that a LiveDVD has limited space and that games tend to be expensive in terms of install footprint, but they seem to have selected many of the "flashy" games instead of the quality ones. It's also worth pointing out that by including Wine they could add a ton of titles to that list, including some very popular Windows titles, assuming they could get redistribution rights.
I see the sentiment of your last statement pretty often, on Slashdot and elsewhere. The simple, and (hopefully) obvious answer is "Ethics", or possibly "Morality" or, if you must be beat about the head over it, "Legality". You are not, personally or as society at large, entitled to video entertainment free of charge. It is easier for me to walk into somebody's office and take a bunch of hardware than it is for me to go buy it, and it'll already have a bunch of software on it too, so I'd probably get a better product. That doesn't make it right.
I have a Dell Latitude CPX laptop from nearly 10 years ago. It still runs just fine. During the 3.5 years that it spent on a blue-water sailboat in the tropics, subjected to heat, humidity, and salty air, I occasionally had to perform minor repairs - cleaning the contacts of the keyboard's less-used keys, mostly - but it boots and runs, and in fact has more battery life than some laptops 30% its age.
Dell's consumer line has never been that good, in my memory, but their business products are, or at least used to be, fantastic.
One of the features of Flash 10.1 is that it supports video hardware decoding. This is available today. Flash also does offer a lot of other things that, at present, there's no real equivalent of in HTML5, although it might be possible to create some of them with some effort.
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/features/
As far as I know, only the preview versions of IE9 are known to use hardware acceleration. However, it is possible that other browsers also use it for video, at least, and I was simply unaware.
* Note that this post does not in any way endorse the continued existence of Flashplayer; it merely attempts to correct misinformation.
Citation please? While it's not that I won't believe you, this does seem a little odd... Firefox because it is, as you say, open, and IE because Microsoft already has a media playback engine built into their OS, and uses pluggable codecs...
On a side note, the latest IE9 pre-beta preview apparently supports the HTML5 video tag. It looks like MS is really competing on the browser capability front this time around - a good thing to see, for sure.
Actually, Safari 3 (Mac or Windows) might be more secure than IE6... and might not. Short of Adobe's flash plugin for Mac, which is typically run inside Safari but can't really be considered the same thing, I know of no other piece of Mac software that so many security holes - be they patched vulnerabilities, exploits revealed in competitions, or attacks in the wild - have been found in. The Windows version didn't fare any better at all, for that matter.
No, although allowing XP (where the default user, and therefore the default permissions for the browser, as Administrator-level) is pretty dumb if that was their goal. Not that I'm suggesting they should block XP outright (and even if your User Agent string contains OS identification, it could be spoofed and they'd be none the wiser) but permitting not just XP, but XP using it's original, 10-year-old web browser does seem a little... stupid, if security is a goal at all.
Seriously, this is a worthwhile point. Maemo (OS on the N900) *IS* Linux, not a fancy face on top of it that takes away your control. The default user is not root, but you can become root. The package manager software is setuid root, but you can fix that if you want to make it impossible to install apps without entering a password.
I've seen absolutely no indication whatsoever of anything that backs up your claims (in fact, the game you mention came out before the 360 S, and the Wikipedia article on the topic doesn't contain any instances of the word "Slim"). Older revisions of the 360 are more prone to overheating, don't have built-in WiFi, and may have different ports - for example, the oldest models lack an HDMI port - but their CPUs and GPUs execute the same code at the same speed, they have the same amount of RAM, and they run the same OS* as the new Slim model. Kinect works just fine on older consoles. The new console may look different, but it runs exactly the same games.
* I'm assuming you keep your console's OS up to date, typically done via the Internet but I believe it's possible with a DVD as well. Unless you've modded your console, the update process is completely trivial. If you *have* modded it, they *you* are the one with the XBox 365 (or perhaps 355), not "Microcrap" (as you so very maturely refer to the company whose product you chose to purchase).
The ironic thing from my perspective is that Google's own services (ads and analytics) are among the worst offenders for making web pages slow down, in my experience...
Retaining a WinCE core doesn't mean that much, considering how much they've upgraded that kernel for WinPhone7. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing particularly good to say about either WinCE (as seen in WinMo phones) or WinPhone7, but I'm not going to go hunting for extra reasons to bash it either. A lot of the old restrictions that made WinCE suck are gone now, like the incredibly low per-process memory space, and it seems to do fairly well running devices like the ZuneHD (I don't have one, but I've played with a few and they appear to be quite solid devices with no obvious OS flaws; pity about the rendering engine, though).
Windows Mobile and Windows Phone are completely different at the UI level. I mean, literally, as far as I can tell they may have thrown away everything above the WinCE kernel and core level. I'm not saying that excuses the lack of useful and important features, but it does explain why they might not have had time to implement them (because they were working on other stuff, and would have had to re-implement them from scratch) and makes the "But WinMo6 did it!" argument rather irrelevant.
I would say that somebody there seems a little too caught up in replicating even the mistakes of Apple's launch. As you point out, Apple did catch shit for those mistakes - it might not have cost the device its success, but it did cost them plenty of customers - and while they eventually added Copy/Paste, I'm still not buying any device which is effectively a handheld computer, but which lacks the ability to run more than one interactive application simultaneously.
I suppose that means I probably won't be buying a WinPhone7 device, either. In a way, this is disappointing - I was hoping to have more choice when the time came to upgrade my phone, choice is always good and I have no inherent objection to buying Microsoft products as long as they don't suck - but lacking such features pretty much means it sucks, regardless of what else it has, and that means I won't be buying one.
Home Internet connections in north America (I'm in the US, but it's the same in Canada) almost never have bandwidth caps, although Comcast will put on a soft cap (throttling) past 20GB or some such. 3G connections are typically soft-capped at 5GB. Don't know about Europe, but Aus and NZ are the only places that I've ever heard *everybody* has bandwidth caps.
Part of writing serious malware, the sort that uses shellcodes and relies upon particular calling conventions and memory layouts, is very platform-specific. That kind of thing has to be learned anew for every platform one wants to target, often including different architectures of a given OS.
Trojans, on the other hand, are literally nothing other than programs that the user doesn't realize he is installing. They may attempt to hide themselves using platform-specific tricks, but at the end of the day, it's a program written like any other. OS X may emphasize Objective-C and de-emphasize its UNIX underpinnings for many things, but at the end of the day it uses a POSIX API very similar to the one found in Linux.
Hell, I've written software for the POSIX subsystem of NT on x86, and successfully ported it to Linux on ARM, with fewer than one #ifdef per KLOC. I strongly suspect that OS X is a lot closer to Linux than SUA (Microsoft's NT Subsystem for UNIX Applications) is to Linux, yet it wasn't hard at all. It wasn't malware, but if I'd wanted to I could have invisibly slipped it into an installer for some other program and then it would have been a trojan.