What bullshit is this?? Microsoft is setting up stores that sell computers. Microsoft does not manufacture PCs, so who do you think is going to make all that hardware they'll sell?. OEMs (msotly) don't own stores, so how is this going to piss of their partners? Seriously, how the HELL does this hurt the OEMs? It's a retail outlet, selling their stuff. This is a win for them!.
Contrary to what a lot of people thought, Vista loads most XP drivers quite happily - but only for the same architecture (of course). WinXP has almost no x64 drivers, meaning that the hardware support issue for Vista would have been *MUCH* worse than it was.
A lot of people still have CPUs incapable of x64. The original Core series and its accompanying Centrino chips, and the mobile Atom chips (that this whole article is based on, in case you hadn't noticed), are major reasons to keep around a 32-bit version for at least one more release (Win7, not Win8).
Why does this bother you so terribly much, anyhow? Are you also of the opinion that OS X 10.5 (comparable in time to Vista) should have dropped x86 (not to mention PPC, which Apple is dropping with the next release)? I really don't understand your vehemence.
However, do you notice it forgets to mention that Win7 is performing as well as XP while having search, defender and many other 'heavy' features working properly and still performing as well as XP on a very modest CPU and GPU platform.
This is the critical bit. There's a LOT of features that Win7 (and sometimes Vista) has that XP lacks, and some of them (the instant search being a major one for me) are sufficiently useful that I hate using XP on the simple basis that it lacks them. However, more features typically means more performance demands, which netbooks obviously have trouble meeting (you *can* run Vista on a netbook, but I don't recommend it). The fact that Win7 gives you the new features while running smoothly on netbooks is a pretty big deal.
XP is actually *really bad* at accessing the Internet by modern standards.
Shitty firewall. It's better than nothing, but it still sucks.
IPv6 is kind of hacked in, and lacks some features.
It is *terrible* at managing multiple network cards (if you have a WiFI Internet connection and a local-only wired connection, you can't access the Internet. It'll route through the ethernet cord only).
Similar to the above, it fails at sharing a wireless connection over a wired network (handy for places with restrictive or expensive wireless access).
No Protected Mode for Internet Explorer, even if the user chooses to upgrade. It's still the world's most-used browser, and really should run in that sandbox.
Everybody runs as Administrator, because that's the default and it's a pain in the ass to do many things from a standard account. Would you run your web browser as root in Linux?
Really shitty built-in email client. WIndows Mail may *look* like Outlook Express at the superficial level, but is much more powerful (spam filtering, rules, instant search, and lots of other improvements)
That idiotic interface for WiFi passwords (the characters are masked, and you have to enter the key twice. WTF?!?)
Yeah, it still mostly works, but the OS is pushing 8 years old and had some terrible design flaws from the start. Let it die, already.
Full development kits for XBox 360 are a little hard to come by, but I've not heard of them ever rejecting a game that was already developed and previously approved. Better yet, though, XNA (essentially a hobbiest development platform, but one that permits quite a lot of power) is free. There's a fee to distribute through official channels (and they do control those channels) but it's still by far the best option for hobbiest console development.
You forgot possibly the biggest one: YouTube. Without Flash, the iPhone has to go though another API to access YouTube videos. What if Google decided that it wasn't in their best interest to support that access (or specifically changed it to block iPhones/iTouches)?
Yeah, not going to happen. Still, it would be mildly hilarious, and they could do it.
First off, the article specifies far UV. It's closer to X-ray (which goes through all kinds of things) than it is to visible light. Furthermore, the claim that "any material that blocks one of those ranges almost always blocks the others" is silly. Sunglasses and sunscreen are two examples that block UV quite well but are transparent visibly (in fact, glass falls into that category - UV light bulbs use quartz). Water blocks most IR a lot better than it blocks visible light. CO2 (and all other greenhouse gases, including water vapor) pass visible light but block IR, while ozone blocks UV instead.
I'm sure there are lots of other examples; those are just off the top of my head. We can see the narrow band of frequencies that we call visible light specifically because they go through the relevant materials - atmospheric gases and water - quite well, so our eyes evolved for them.
That said, I like the rest of your post (well, I have my concerns about some of the ideas, but I like the thought-provoking aspect). I just wanted to clarify that "close" in the EM spectrum does NOT mean that the transparency and other behavior is consistent across materials or conditions. Heck, any HAM operator has probably experienced cases where a relatively small shift in band (much less than the near multiple of two that visible light spans) will penetrate a material or propagate off off the ionosphere much better.
Very few license agreements regulate what you can do with *other* software (i.e. code that isn't part of the software you just got, but interacts with it via a public API). That's what they mean by "viral," the GPL forces you to use itself on your own code just because your code interacts with your own. It's an intentionally repulsive metaphor; the GPL "infects" any code that touches its "host."
I much prefer the LGPL or other OSS licenses - including copyleft licenses - that don't attempt to regulate what other developers can do with their own code (as opposed to works derived from my code).
Possibly just rednendency. The Mars rovers have shown us that a little design redundency and simple, good engineering can go a really, really long way. It sounds like this moon rover is hoping to follow in their metaphorical footsteps. This seems an excellent approach (one that we should take more often) and I wish it the best of luck!
Win7 is lighter on system resources, to be sure, but the real catch was the OEM bit. OEM Vista installations were uniformly absolute shit. All kinds of pre-installed crap that ran at startup (including things which are practically impossible to cleanly remove, like Norton Internet shitware), some truly retarded default settings (yes, worse than the Microsoft defaults), and poorly-tested replacements for Microsoft binaries (usually functionally the same, but OEM branded and typically shadowing or outright removing the built-in software) made the OS run MUCH worse than a clean install on the same hardware would. Hardware troubles and beta drivers aside, I have not (in almost 3 years since RTM) seen Vista BSOD or otherwise catastrophically fail on a clean install. Yes, it happens on OEM copies. It would might happen if you installed a trojan or something retarded like that. Barring such stupidity, however, Vista is an extremely stable OS that performs quite acceptably on systems with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.8GHz single-core CPU (my initial Vista machine, a laptop over a year old by Vista's RTM).
That said, Win7 is definitely a major improvement in many areas. Vista, especially at RTM, really did have some truly stupid bugs.
Kernel API compatibility. Just like the driver interface for XP (5.1) and 2000 (5.0) is the same (XP supports a few that 2000 doesn't, but not vice-versa), so it is with Win7 (6.1) and Vista (6.0). Among other things, this should greatly help with hardware compatibility issues, since Vista drivers are now extremely widely available.
Built-in transparent full-volume encryption is pretty cool, especially when you can encrypt a flashdrive (on Win7) then still access the contents (with passphrase or other key source) on an older computer running XP or similar.
Strong two-way firewall with good configurability means no more spending time and possibly money on third-party firewalls. That saves system resources too. Vista had this too, and I've seen no sign of it being vulnerable to penetration.
UAC makes running as a standard user a lot easier to deal with (it's a bloody pain on XP, and frankly running as Administrator is just bloody idiotic). Win7 has added more configurability to UAC and made it less in-your-face by default.
Integrated instant search. I simply can't stand to use XP for any length of time due to the simple fact that it lacks this incredibly convenient feature (which every other major OS has as well).
Gadgets. Yep, I use them. Very handy for a lot of things, like Pandora, a simple calculator, or at-a-glance traffic info. Several substantial improvements here compared to Vista.
Automatic driver installations and updates. WinXP's plug-and-play driver collection is horrifically outdated (it's an 8-year-old OS) and a lot of modern hardware requires manually installing drivers. On Win7, those drivers are already present on the system and get installed immediately, or Windows will check online, find your drivers, and download/install them for you (signed and certified binaries only, of course). Win7 will also check for updates to existing drivers, and allow you to download the updates with a single click.
These are very much things that "most users" will find superior to XP. The hardware requirements are undeniably higher, but you can get computers for under $400 that are quite capable of running Win7, and mid-to-high-end new machines have more RAM than a 32-bit OS can utilize anyhow.
I don't know about TechNet, but for MSDN subscriptions, the license to the software does NOT expire when the subscription does. In other words, even if you don't renew, any software you downloaded during the subscription period will still work, and the product keys will still be valid.
Besides, I have two computers (my main machine and a lightweight tablet for classes or meetings) that I need to keep up-to-date. If I didn't have an MSDN subscription (interns get some pretty sweet stuff) the TechNet subscription would be a pretty awesome deal.
They aren't built-in, but there are plenty of programs to do "virtual desktops' on Windows. The one I like most (solid, nice features, sufficiently lightweight, and open source) calls itself Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager: http://www.codeplex.com/vdm
Warning: rant ahead. For the TL;DR folks: HP repair may destroy your hard drive during an unrelated service job, use somebody like RE PC instead.
HP *insisted* that I send the hard drive in my laptop last time I had to get it repaired (and stupidly elected for the fastest service - the manufacturer - over somebody reputable I could talk to). Fortunately it was a dual-HDD laptop, and I'd long since moved my entire profile onto the second drive. I removed the second drive and put it in an external enclosure (which allowed me to continue working while the computer was in the shop) and, after checking that the HDD was explicitly outside the bounds of the repair order (HP claimed they needed it just to make sure the computer would boot up) sent in the machine.
I got it back 4 days later - faster even than the estimate their tech support people had given me - to find the drive had been removed and replaced with one containing only an OEM image. The old drive was perfectly readable (the fault was in the GPU; you could still boot the computer but couldn't see anything) and they didn't even give any explanation. Nor did they ship the old drive back to me - they claimed it had been destroyed. Maybe it had (and I don't care *that* much, there was no sensitive info on it since I kept everything on the second disk) but it was still astonishingly unprofessional of them. The best part was that their rep tried to convince me with a claim that had it been a car repair, I wouldn't really have expected them to ask me about every little thing that needed fixing, and give me all the old broken parts back, right? (In Washington state, at least, auto repair shops are required by law to do exactly that.)
On the plus side, I contested the repair charge (told them I wouldn't pay, they charged my card anyhow) on the grounds of breach of repair contract, and Wells Fargo/Visa backed me up. $400 repair for no out-of-pocket. On the minus side, that ultra-fast 4 day repair required 7 days of additional work on my own time to re-integrate the user profile and reinstall all the software (no, I don't make image backups of my system drive).
I learned a damn valuable lesson, though. What's more, in the process of contesting the charge, I also learned that RE PC techs follow what I consider to be proper professional repair practices. Good place, that one, even if their initial estimate was 3 days longer than HP's.
Viral doesn't always mean bad; it's simply a way to describe a behavior. Microsoft could ahve chosen a word with less negative connotations, but the descritpion itself is apt. The "viral" part of the GPL is the bit about how software that links with GPL code, even if that software is from another source and just uses an API, must also be licensed GPL (i.e. the GPL "virally infects" everything that touches its "host"). LGPL doesn't contain this clause, nor do most other open source licenses.
I doubt MS will ever release any new code under a license with a "viral" clause like that. Adding features to other software that already use that license is another matter, since the software as a whole isn't theirs to begin with. In any case, they would have had to open-source the changes even if Moodle used a license like the Mozilla license or LGPL.
Windows Live web services are web services not inswtant messenger components. Just about every browser in the world can sign into the various Windows Live web services, you need SSL and cookie support, and not much else. What you can do once you're signed in depends on the browser, but Firefox handles most of the services just fine.
The irony being that PDF is a Turing-incomplete variation of the (Turiong-complete) PostScript language. So what does Adobe do? "Hey guys, lets embed a *completely different* Turing-complete language in our document specification!"
Graphite is pretty flammable stuff. CO2 is the only byproduct of burning pure carbon in air. I don't know about engine soot (gasoline and oil contain a fair amount of stuff that isn't carbon) but I'd guess that a laser powerful enough to ignite gasoline fast enough for an internal combustion engine could keep its lens clean of a little carbon.
Even if it requires a binary plugin, just run the 32-bit version of the browser. Please don't tell me they expect to install a god-damn driver through a web interface!
Why in the world use Ventrilo + an IM client? First, Vent servers need to be set up, the free ones are limited, etc. Second, Vent has built-in chat, but it's kind of week. Third, and most importantly, why not just use something like Skype for the communication? Free (of charge), fully cross-platform, excellent voice calls, and built-in IM capability. Also supports conferencing, if this is important.
Thank you for clearing that up. A genetic condition could still be a problem; if the clone parent had a genetic condition that hadn't manifested yet, all the puppies will have it too. That's relatively unlikely though.
By the way, you have the most ironic signature imaginable for this thread.
You can actually do it on Windows. MSHTML.dll (the Trident rendering engine) is the default rendering engine on Windows, but it can be replaced - pretty sure it's just a registry key. Of course, anything that relies on it actually being Trident will break - Steam on Wine is good (although not perfect) but there are other, much more painful examples - but it's theoretically possible.
Wine implemented the Gecko "IE" feature because they needed *some* rendering engine, but they're working on a proper MSHTML implementation.
If you'd actually looked at the behavior, you'd see that it tells you the changes that will be made by the "Express Settings" option. You also must explicitly select that option before continuing - the dialog box's "Next" button is disabled until you choose Express or Custom settings. If you cancel the dialog, no settings are changed (meaning a lot of the new features in IE8 don't do anything, since it will use the settings from your old version). This is actually behavior that a lot of other installers should emulate, not that we should complain about.
That said, if the user had previously selected another default browser and had turned off the option to have IE check whether it is default at start, then the "Express Settings" probably shouldn't assume that the user has changed his or her mind.
I thought the subscription was only if you wanted to *publish* the game. Testing it on your own hardware is, I believe, free.
Even if it's not, $100 is a small barrier compared to the cost of a development kit for the other consoles. The PS3 has Linux, yes, but you can't even use the GPU. XNA is much less restricted than that.
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What bullshit is this?? Microsoft is setting up stores that sell computers. Microsoft does not manufacture PCs, so who do you think is going to make all that hardware they'll sell?. OEMs (msotly) don't own stores, so how is this going to piss of their partners? Seriously, how the HELL does this hurt the OEMs? It's a retail outlet, selling their stuff. This is a win for them!.
Contrary to what a lot of people thought, Vista loads most XP drivers quite happily - but only for the same architecture (of course). WinXP has almost no x64 drivers, meaning that the hardware support issue for Vista would have been *MUCH* worse than it was.
A lot of people still have CPUs incapable of x64. The original Core series and its accompanying Centrino chips, and the mobile Atom chips (that this whole article is based on, in case you hadn't noticed), are major reasons to keep around a 32-bit version for at least one more release (Win7, not Win8).
Why does this bother you so terribly much, anyhow? Are you also of the opinion that OS X 10.5 (comparable in time to Vista) should have dropped x86 (not to mention PPC, which Apple is dropping with the next release)? I really don't understand your vehemence.
However, do you notice it forgets to mention that Win7 is performing as well as XP while having search, defender and many other 'heavy' features working properly and still performing as well as XP on a very modest CPU and GPU platform.
This is the critical bit. There's a LOT of features that Win7 (and sometimes Vista) has that XP lacks, and some of them (the instant search being a major one for me) are sufficiently useful that I hate using XP on the simple basis that it lacks them. However, more features typically means more performance demands, which netbooks obviously have trouble meeting (you *can* run Vista on a netbook, but I don't recommend it). The fact that Win7 gives you the new features while running smoothly on netbooks is a pretty big deal.
XP is actually *really bad* at accessing the Internet by modern standards.
Yeah, it still mostly works, but the OS is pushing 8 years old and had some terrible design flaws from the start. Let it die, already.
Full development kits for XBox 360 are a little hard to come by, but I've not heard of them ever rejecting a game that was already developed and previously approved. Better yet, though, XNA (essentially a hobbiest development platform, but one that permits quite a lot of power) is free. There's a fee to distribute through official channels (and they do control those channels) but it's still by far the best option for hobbiest console development.
You forgot possibly the biggest one: YouTube. Without Flash, the iPhone has to go though another API to access YouTube videos. What if Google decided that it wasn't in their best interest to support that access (or specifically changed it to block iPhones/iTouches)?
Yeah, not going to happen. Still, it would be mildly hilarious, and they could do it.
First off, the article specifies far UV. It's closer to X-ray (which goes through all kinds of things) than it is to visible light. Furthermore, the claim that "any material that blocks one of those ranges almost always blocks the others" is silly. Sunglasses and sunscreen are two examples that block UV quite well but are transparent visibly (in fact, glass falls into that category - UV light bulbs use quartz). Water blocks most IR a lot better than it blocks visible light. CO2 (and all other greenhouse gases, including water vapor) pass visible light but block IR, while ozone blocks UV instead.
I'm sure there are lots of other examples; those are just off the top of my head. We can see the narrow band of frequencies that we call visible light specifically because they go through the relevant materials - atmospheric gases and water - quite well, so our eyes evolved for them.
That said, I like the rest of your post (well, I have my concerns about some of the ideas, but I like the thought-provoking aspect). I just wanted to clarify that "close" in the EM spectrum does NOT mean that the transparency and other behavior is consistent across materials or conditions. Heck, any HAM operator has probably experienced cases where a relatively small shift in band (much less than the near multiple of two that visible light spans) will penetrate a material or propagate off off the ionosphere much better.
Very few license agreements regulate what you can do with *other* software (i.e. code that isn't part of the software you just got, but interacts with it via a public API). That's what they mean by "viral," the GPL forces you to use itself on your own code just because your code interacts with your own. It's an intentionally repulsive metaphor; the GPL "infects" any code that touches its "host."
I much prefer the LGPL or other OSS licenses - including copyleft licenses - that don't attempt to regulate what other developers can do with their own code (as opposed to works derived from my code).
Possibly just rednendency. The Mars rovers have shown us that a little design redundency and simple, good engineering can go a really, really long way. It sounds like this moon rover is hoping to follow in their metaphorical footsteps. This seems an excellent approach (one that we should take more often) and I wish it the best of luck!
Win7 is lighter on system resources, to be sure, but the real catch was the OEM bit. OEM Vista installations were uniformly absolute shit. All kinds of pre-installed crap that ran at startup (including things which are practically impossible to cleanly remove, like Norton Internet shitware), some truly retarded default settings (yes, worse than the Microsoft defaults), and poorly-tested replacements for Microsoft binaries (usually functionally the same, but OEM branded and typically shadowing or outright removing the built-in software) made the OS run MUCH worse than a clean install on the same hardware would. Hardware troubles and beta drivers aside, I have not (in almost 3 years since RTM) seen Vista BSOD or otherwise catastrophically fail on a clean install. Yes, it happens on OEM copies. It would might happen if you installed a trojan or something retarded like that. Barring such stupidity, however, Vista is an extremely stable OS that performs quite acceptably on systems with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.8GHz single-core CPU (my initial Vista machine, a laptop over a year old by Vista's RTM).
That said, Win7 is definitely a major improvement in many areas. Vista, especially at RTM, really did have some truly stupid bugs.
Kernel API compatibility. Just like the driver interface for XP (5.1) and 2000 (5.0) is the same (XP supports a few that 2000 doesn't, but not vice-versa), so it is with Win7 (6.1) and Vista (6.0). Among other things, this should greatly help with hardware compatibility issues, since Vista drivers are now extremely widely available.
Built-in transparent full-volume encryption is pretty cool, especially when you can encrypt a flashdrive (on Win7) then still access the contents (with passphrase or other key source) on an older computer running XP or similar.
Strong two-way firewall with good configurability means no more spending time and possibly money on third-party firewalls. That saves system resources too. Vista had this too, and I've seen no sign of it being vulnerable to penetration.
UAC makes running as a standard user a lot easier to deal with (it's a bloody pain on XP, and frankly running as Administrator is just bloody idiotic). Win7 has added more configurability to UAC and made it less in-your-face by default.
Integrated instant search. I simply can't stand to use XP for any length of time due to the simple fact that it lacks this incredibly convenient feature (which every other major OS has as well).
Gadgets. Yep, I use them. Very handy for a lot of things, like Pandora, a simple calculator, or at-a-glance traffic info. Several substantial improvements here compared to Vista.
Automatic driver installations and updates. WinXP's plug-and-play driver collection is horrifically outdated (it's an 8-year-old OS) and a lot of modern hardware requires manually installing drivers. On Win7, those drivers are already present on the system and get installed immediately, or Windows will check online, find your drivers, and download/install them for you (signed and certified binaries only, of course). Win7 will also check for updates to existing drivers, and allow you to download the updates with a single click.
These are very much things that "most users" will find superior to XP. The hardware requirements are undeniably higher, but you can get computers for under $400 that are quite capable of running Win7, and mid-to-high-end new machines have more RAM than a 32-bit OS can utilize anyhow.
I don't know about TechNet, but for MSDN subscriptions, the license to the software does NOT expire when the subscription does. In other words, even if you don't renew, any software you downloaded during the subscription period will still work, and the product keys will still be valid.
Besides, I have two computers (my main machine and a lightweight tablet for classes or meetings) that I need to keep up-to-date. If I didn't have an MSDN subscription (interns get some pretty sweet stuff) the TechNet subscription would be a pretty awesome deal.
They aren't built-in, but there are plenty of programs to do "virtual desktops' on Windows. The one I like most (solid, nice features, sufficiently lightweight, and open source) calls itself Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager:
http://www.codeplex.com/vdm
Warning: rant ahead. For the TL;DR folks: HP repair may destroy your hard drive during an unrelated service job, use somebody like RE PC instead.
HP *insisted* that I send the hard drive in my laptop last time I had to get it repaired (and stupidly elected for the fastest service - the manufacturer - over somebody reputable I could talk to). Fortunately it was a dual-HDD laptop, and I'd long since moved my entire profile onto the second drive. I removed the second drive and put it in an external enclosure (which allowed me to continue working while the computer was in the shop) and, after checking that the HDD was explicitly outside the bounds of the repair order (HP claimed they needed it just to make sure the computer would boot up) sent in the machine.
I got it back 4 days later - faster even than the estimate their tech support people had given me - to find the drive had been removed and replaced with one containing only an OEM image. The old drive was perfectly readable (the fault was in the GPU; you could still boot the computer but couldn't see anything) and they didn't even give any explanation. Nor did they ship the old drive back to me - they claimed it had been destroyed. Maybe it had (and I don't care *that* much, there was no sensitive info on it since I kept everything on the second disk) but it was still astonishingly unprofessional of them. The best part was that their rep tried to convince me with a claim that had it been a car repair, I wouldn't really have expected them to ask me about every little thing that needed fixing, and give me all the old broken parts back, right? (In Washington state, at least, auto repair shops are required by law to do exactly that.)
On the plus side, I contested the repair charge (told them I wouldn't pay, they charged my card anyhow) on the grounds of breach of repair contract, and Wells Fargo/Visa backed me up. $400 repair for no out-of-pocket.
On the minus side, that ultra-fast 4 day repair required 7 days of additional work on my own time to re-integrate the user profile and reinstall all the software (no, I don't make image backups of my system drive).
I learned a damn valuable lesson, though.
What's more, in the process of contesting the charge, I also learned that RE PC techs follow what I consider to be proper professional repair practices. Good place, that one, even if their initial estimate was 3 days longer than HP's.
Viral doesn't always mean bad; it's simply a way to describe a behavior. Microsoft could ahve chosen a word with less negative connotations, but the descritpion itself is apt. The "viral" part of the GPL is the bit about how software that links with GPL code, even if that software is from another source and just uses an API, must also be licensed GPL (i.e. the GPL "virally infects" everything that touches its "host"). LGPL doesn't contain this clause, nor do most other open source licenses.
I doubt MS will ever release any new code under a license with a "viral" clause like that. Adding features to other software that already use that license is another matter, since the software as a whole isn't theirs to begin with. In any case, they would have had to open-source the changes even if Moodle used a license like the Mozilla license or LGPL.
Windows Live web services are web services not inswtant messenger components. Just about every browser in the world can sign into the various Windows Live web services, you need SSL and cookie support, and not much else. What you can do once you're signed in depends on the browser, but Firefox handles most of the services just fine.
The irony being that PDF is a Turing- in complete variation of the (Turiong-complete) PostScript language. So what does Adobe do?
"Hey guys, lets embed a *completely different* Turing-complete language in our document specification!"
Graphite is pretty flammable stuff. CO2 is the only byproduct of burning pure carbon in air. I don't know about engine soot (gasoline and oil contain a fair amount of stuff that isn't carbon) but I'd guess that a laser powerful enough to ignite gasoline fast enough for an internal combustion engine could keep its lens clean of a little carbon.
"only on 32 bit machines" What... the FUCK?
Even if it requires a binary plugin, just run the 32-bit version of the browser. Please don't tell me they expect to install a god-damn driver through a web interface!
Why in the world use Ventrilo + an IM client? First, Vent servers need to be set up, the free ones are limited, etc. Second, Vent has built-in chat, but it's kind of week. Third, and most importantly, why not just use something like Skype for the communication? Free (of charge), fully cross-platform, excellent voice calls, and built-in IM capability. Also supports conferencing, if this is important.
Thank you for clearing that up. A genetic condition could still be a problem; if the clone parent had a genetic condition that hadn't manifested yet, all the puppies will have it too. That's relatively unlikely though.
By the way, you have the most ironic signature imaginable for this thread.
You can actually do it on Windows. MSHTML.dll (the Trident rendering engine) is the default rendering engine on Windows, but it can be replaced - pretty sure it's just a registry key. Of course, anything that relies on it actually being Trident will break - Steam on Wine is good (although not perfect) but there are other, much more painful examples - but it's theoretically possible.
Wine implemented the Gecko "IE" feature because they needed *some* rendering engine, but they're working on a proper MSHTML implementation.
If you'd actually looked at the behavior, you'd see that it tells you the changes that will be made by the "Express Settings" option. You also must explicitly select that option before continuing - the dialog box's "Next" button is disabled until you choose Express or Custom settings. If you cancel the dialog, no settings are changed (meaning a lot of the new features in IE8 don't do anything, since it will use the settings from your old version). This is actually behavior that a lot of other installers should emulate, not that we should complain about.
That said, if the user had previously selected another default browser and had turned off the option to have IE check whether it is default at start, then the "Express Settings" probably shouldn't assume that the user has changed his or her mind.
I thought the subscription was only if you wanted to *publish* the game. Testing it on your own hardware is, I believe, free.
Even if it's not, $100 is a small barrier compared to the cost of a development kit for the other consoles. The PS3 has Linux, yes, but you can't even use the GPU. XNA is much less restricted than that.