Not many platforms that you can develop for without owning the platform in question. The fact that there aren't tools to do this on the Wii isn't Microsoft's fault; complain to Nintendo (or Sony) if you want a hobbiest game development toolkit that you can use for stuff like this.
The combo of those two things can be had for a lot less than $1000. (In fact, if you already have *any* computer than can run Windows, in terms of its minimum specs, then you should be able to spend under $500.) For that matter, does XNA run under Mono and/or Wine (I know it needs Visual Studio, so probably Wine is a must)? Just a thought.
Most people buy iPods for the hardware (because of marketing, which focuses on the hardware to the complete exclusion of the software in most cases, or through seeing other people using the hardware - they never see them use the software, though). What people think of the hardware (which by and large is good, if a little feature-constrained) determines their buying decisions, not what they think of the software.
You're modded funny, wo I'll assume you are actually making a joke, but just in case anybody like the folks I've spoken to who actually believe the above bit about security are here...
Jailbreak. A vulnerability (actually, a family of them, some of which have been patched) that allows root exploits. One of the worst classes of security vulnerability out there. All the more impressive being that it's on a device that has far more restrictions than any desktop computer, and should be a lot easier to lock down/should have much less attack surface.
Hey, I can't sync my iPod with Windows Media Player! MICROSOFT MONOPOLY ABUSE!
Wow, that's quite a load of bullshit there. The *only* reason iPods can't sync with WMP is that Apple never bothered to write the firmsware for them to do so. WMP will happily sync with just about any removable storage device in the world, including freaking SD cards that have no CPU at all. If Apple had wanted to sync with WMP, it would have been trivial. Hell, if they'd really wanted to, they could even have added support for PlaysForSure DRM (yeah, eww, but they could have - nobody has access to Apple's FairPlay though). The fact that the iPod doesn't sync with WMP is 100% Apple's fault.
Only a small portion of the ashes were aboard. The organization that does these services only uses a little bit, knowing full well that the trip may not succeed.
Features that you may use all the time (I sure do):
Instant search. First and foremost, every modern OS has this. XP drives me nuts for this very reason.
The ability to run as a non-Administrator without tearing your hair out. I ran as a standard user on XP for 3 months, and while technically possible, it was a pain beyond reason - too many things were too hard to elevate when I needed to. I switched to Linux, and only started using Windows again when UAC in Vista made running as a standard user practical.
Previous versions. Recover files you moved off the drive, or deleted permanently, or overwrote with another application, or updated and it broke something - I don't use it often but when I do, it's a godsend
New UI tricks. It's a snap to put two windows up side-by-side, each filling half the screen (just drag each window to the screen's edge). Aero Peek lets me see a window in the background without needing to bring it forward. Stuff like that gets very handy until you just get used to it,a nd not having it feels wrong.
Automatic fetching of drivers from Windows Update. You don't even need to check the manufacturer's site for driver updates anymore.
There's a lot more, but those are the emmediately relevant things that I expect everybody, especially if they're sufficiently tech-savvy to be on Slashdot, will have a use for. The new security features are great (I love the firewall) but the things above are the ones that really got me.
As for people plateauing, not really. It's more a matter that Vista got such a bad rep that people *assumed* it had no features, and never even checked. At least half the "new" features in Win7 that I hear people crowing about were actually present in Vista. Give the OS a try, and I think you'll see for yourself what the excitement is about.
Bwahahahahaha. That's hilarious. Tell me, do you manually verify the MD5 of every tarball you download, before installing? Do you check all your RPM/DEB/Whatever files against several sources, just in case the repository you're using has been compromised? (Yes, this happens - and the repo wasn't hosted on Windows, either.) Do you run without Firefox, Flashplayer, Java, and every other piece of software that has remote code-execution vunlerabilities that are cross-platform executable? (The latest Firefox one is already being exploited, although the specific verison of the exploit that I saw just crashes the browser on Linux - no reason it *couldn't* do something malicious, though. Flash is one of the world's greatest cross-platform security holes available.)
If you're still not convinced, go look at MetaSploit. Check how many of those exploits are intended for Linux (not *most* but certainly a significant number). At least a few of those have been effective against out-of-the-box Ubuntu installs, among other things. You live in a fanboy's fantasy world, sir.
You realize that exporting a registry branch is both very easy, and produces an easily-read plain text file, right? I don't particularly advocate copying registry data from computer to computer simply because it's almost never needed, but sometimes preserving settings is actually worth it. In that case, open regedit, use the Find feature to locate the registry keys the program uses, export them to a.reg file, open in a text editor and diddle as you see fit, copy to new computer, and double-click the file to import again.
Are you fucking serious? A "well-designed" app NEVER tries to write into its install directory except suring patches. Data file that will need updating, user data, configuration options, logfiles, and everything else of that nature belong in the "Application Data" folder (%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local on Vista/Win7).
If you don't do this, than you either have to run the program as Administrator all the time, or you need to lower the security on the install folder so that it's user-writable. Either one is both stupid from a security viewpoint, and offers the potential to really screw things up. Also, what about if you have multiple user accounts on your system, and they have different application settings? Another good reason to store the data in a per-user (and user-writable) location.
It was developers doing dumb shit like this (counting on users *always* running as Administrator) that caused the majority of "My program won't run under Vista" complaints. It's a practice that should have died out with Win9x.
To take a couple points from your "c)" list: I'm curious what you consider "proper rights management" to be, that Windows lacks. UAC is essentially sudo with the Administrators group equivalent to UNIX's wheel group. Love or hate this, it's not like Windows didn't already have much more fine-grained permissions than *nix. Vista has much more than just some "security updates" in terms of things like address space layout randomization (ASLR) and low-integrity processes (IE's Protected Mode being an example). These are protections that no prior version of Windows, nor any version of Linux that I'm aware of, posesses. Memory management matters, and it's still not a fully solved problem. XP follows the terribly legacy approach of assuming that systems have low RAM and that swap is slow, so it will pre-emptively swap background apps out to ensure that the foreground app always has enough RAM available. This is great if you have little RAM and don't switch tasks much (or leave a task running in the background). However, XP will do this even on systems which actually have plenty of RAM, and it makes switching to a long-backgrounded task take ages. It also means that XP is shockingly dependent upon its pagefile. Vista has substantial improvements in this area, and while the base OS may need about 512MB of RAM (about 6X what XP uses), new computers these days frequently ship with at least 4GB of RAM (8x the 512MB that was common at the equivalent point after XP's release). Networking is also quite important. XP is just plain bad at looking up other computers on a network, and completley miserable at managing multiple network cards together (trying to do absolutely retarded things like connect to the Internet via the first connected card, even if it's the second one that has the external connection). Then there's IPv6, which is very hacked-in with XP and only supports a limited portion of the new protocol's potential.
I take it you've never looked at administration of a large Windows network, or if you have you've only looked at clients up to XP. Vista added a lot of Active Driectory controls, and Win7 has added more. That's more automation, so less that IT must do manually.
Also, malware infection rate per machine is much lower with Vista (a trend that will probably continue for Win7) than it is with XP. This can save companies an immense amount of money.
No firewall, no DEP, no ASLR, no instant search, no BitLocker, not-as-good EFS, no WDDM, no Volume Shadow Copy, no System Restore, very poor plug-and-play support by modern standards (no automatic downloading of drivers), no x64, no ip6, no...
Yeah, that's a *REAL* upgrade from my current systems, for sure! The only box I still have with Win2k is one that came with Win98, and I'm consdiering switching that one to Linux. My current primary machines run Win7, which is not almost a decade out of date.
Seriously, I can understand your beef with the things you listed (although W2K actually *DOES* have DRM in Windows Media Player, where is is exactly as intrusive as the DRM in Vista) but none of those things have been the least bit of a problem for the vast majority of Windows users (seriously, activation takes a couple of seconds, and unless you manage to screw things up badly enough to require re-activating more than 5 times for a given OS version, you don't even need to call in for it... I've never had to). Also, while I've never heard of the "explicitly allows Microsoft access to your hard drive" clause, it's a bit odd considering that they ship a drive encryption tool that the company can not actually break...
It probably means you have security features that Windows XP (what far too many people still mean when they say "Windows"... it's a fucking 8-year-old OS, stop using it as representative of the whole) lacks. Just like the way that this IE exploit doesn't work correctly on Vista/Server 2008/Win7 either... but nobody bothers to mention that because it works on an OS so outdated it doesn't even have a built-in instant search.
Actually, the Zune can stream music. The 3.0 firmware allows connecting to wireless access points and accessing the online store, including some very limited streaming, via the Internet. There's no reason they couldn't expand this - I'd love a Pandora client for the thing - but the SDK doesn't allow third-party developers to use this functionality yet. That said, I can totally see MS making this available to Zune user whenever they happen to be near a WAP. Given their excellent track record thus far on back-porting firmware updates, it'll probably even be available on my 2nd-gen flash-based Zune.
iPod Touch supports streaming too, but that (and probably the ZuneHD) are better classed as PDAs than as PMPs.
Let's just start with IANAL, and I live and work in Washington state (laws may be different where you work).
We have "at will" employment, and unless a contract explicitly stipulates otherwise, either empolyee or employer may terminate employment at any time. *HOWEVER* if they terminate your employment for the specific reason that you refused to partake in a criminal act, then you can in fact sue them for it. It would be a civil case (although there may also be a criminal case for them issuing the order in the first place) but you should ahve a pretty good chance nonetheless.
That said, if they ordered you to only wear inside-out t-shirts while at work, and you refused, they could fire you for that with no repercussions at all.
I had no idea at all that there was a dedicated tablet that far back, never mind that there was OS supprt for it. That's back in the era when computers didn't even neccessarily have *mice* and Windows was almost entirely 16-bit.
Tablet computers have actually beguin taking off a lot more now. I see them at university and work all the time. Heck, I have one myself, and am extremely happy with it. Hardware has finally reached the point where such a minimal system still has acceptible performance, and software (most of it Windows-based; tablet support in Linux is still pretty rudimentary) has come a LONG way. Running Win7, the tablet can decode handwriting that I would ahve trouble reading myself, and the pen flicks are a very fast and intuitive interface.
I think the main difference is cost. The cheapest brand-new tablets I've ever seen were still over $700, and very, very few are under $1000.
Not a good parallel. Google is new to the OS business, and their core lies far from operating systems or even desktop applications (altyhough they have a reasonable amount of experience there). Microsoft has been making multiple operating systems longer than Google has even existed. They also waited quite a while after creating their first OS line before starting another.
Some of them are, yes. Microsoft has made a Moonlight codec pack available however, in much the same way that the "Core Fonts for the Web" (including many now-standard fonts like Arial) were distributed.
You realize you can hide the ribbon, right? Double-click on the active tab. Single-click a tab to make it reappear until you click an option (like a menu) or double-click to make it reappear permanently (until you double-click again). WTF do you mean, it "changes"? If you click on a picture, sure, a picture tab will appear on the ribbon... but the rest of the ribbon is still there, rigth where it was. Part of me bemoans the loss of customizability on principle, the rest of me accepts that I never changed more than one or two things and that the new interface is better... and besides, the menu wasn't customizable. The toolbars were, but the ribbon is meant to replace both toolbar and menu. In any case, there is still a fully user-configurable toolbar, called the Quick Access bar, above the ribbon.
Outlook has had threaded conversations since *at least* 2003, maybe further back (that was when I first looked for the feature). The main differences in 2010 are twofold: messages that are part of the same conversation but spread across multiple folders are shown together (including your sent messages when viewing a thread in your inbox, for example), and redundent messages (ones where the response incorporates the original message, making the original redundent) are hidden by default (they can be shown if you please) which helps prevent one long thread from filling up the whole screen and being difficult to navigate between cranches of.
Unsigned numeric types. Delegates. Structs (stack-allocated complex data types that are passed by value). LINQ. The option of explicit memory management. No stupid restrictions like only one public class per file. Partial classes. Operator overloading (not always good, but occasionally just damn sensible). There's plenty more...
You can pretty much run a find-replace over Java and get legitimate C#. The reverse is not true. C# >= Java.
The *only* weak point? When did Java get anything that works at all like a function pointer (delegates)? When did it get unsigned integer types (uint16/32/64)? When did it get stack-allocated pass-by-reference data types (structs)?
Then there's all the unsafe stuff that C# supports and Java doesn't, although in my years with both languages I've very rarely felt a need for any of that, and never actually used it. Would amke porting C/C++ to C# a lot easier than porting to Java, though... Let's not forget LINQ though, that's actually well-worth mentioning. Any equivalent in Java yet?
See, that's the thing - NCSoft may not make *all* the rules (that would be no fun) but it is up to them to keep the game balanced. If this guy can literally send anybody he wants to face rotob death squads whenever he feels like it (and there's no counter... which seems odd, surely others can do it to him in turn), the game is just broken. That *IS* NCSoft's fault, sorry. It would be like using an aimbot in a FPS, only the aimbot is built into the game and its use is permitted on PvP servers.
The game itself is broken, then. Why the hell can you teleport somebody like that in that case?
I actually still find the other player's responses interesting. Instead of trying to use the same (obviously highly effective) tactic against this guy, or forming groups so that he can't do it to thim without dying as well, they're sitting back and whining, name-calling, and sending RL threats (easily enough to get you permabanned in most games).
Mind you, I've no interest in actually playing this game - the way you describe it, the designers must be absolutely retarded to actually permit this strategy - but I do find it interesting, from a societal point of view, that these people would choose to play a game wherin these tactics are possible, but get so very upset (as opposed to simply playing along, either by countering him somehow or replying in kind) when they are used.
Slashdot Mirror
Not many platforms that you can develop for without owning the platform in question. The fact that there aren't tools to do this on the Wii isn't Microsoft's fault; complain to Nintendo (or Sony) if you want a hobbiest game development toolkit that you can use for stuff like this.
The combo of those two things can be had for a lot less than $1000. (In fact, if you already have *any* computer than can run Windows, in terms of its minimum specs, then you should be able to spend under $500.) For that matter, does XNA run under Mono and/or Wine (I know it needs Visual Studio, so probably Wine is a must)? Just a thought.
Most people buy iPods for the hardware (because of marketing, which focuses on the hardware to the complete exclusion of the software in most cases, or through seeing other people using the hardware - they never see them use the software, though). What people think of the hardware (which by and large is good, if a little feature-constrained) determines their buying decisions, not what they think of the software.
You're modded funny, wo I'll assume you are actually making a joke, but just in case anybody like the folks I've spoken to who actually believe the above bit about security are here...
Jailbreak. A vulnerability (actually, a family of them, some of which have been patched) that allows root exploits. One of the worst classes of security vulnerability out there. All the more impressive being that it's on a device that has far more restrictions than any desktop computer, and should be a lot easier to lock down/should have much less attack surface.
Hey, I can't sync my iPod with Windows Media Player! MICROSOFT MONOPOLY ABUSE!
Wow, that's quite a load of bullshit there. The *only* reason iPods can't sync with WMP is that Apple never bothered to write the firmsware for them to do so. WMP will happily sync with just about any removable storage device in the world, including freaking SD cards that have no CPU at all. If Apple had wanted to sync with WMP, it would have been trivial. Hell, if they'd really wanted to, they could even have added support for PlaysForSure DRM (yeah, eww, but they could have - nobody has access to Apple's FairPlay though). The fact that the iPod doesn't sync with WMP is 100% Apple's fault.
Only a small portion of the ashes were aboard. The organization that does these services only uses a little bit, knowing full well that the trip may not succeed.
Features that you may use all the time (I sure do):
There's a lot more, but those are the emmediately relevant things that I expect everybody, especially if they're sufficiently tech-savvy to be on Slashdot, will have a use for. The new security features are great (I love the firewall) but the things above are the ones that really got me.
As for people plateauing, not really. It's more a matter that Vista got such a bad rep that people *assumed* it had no features, and never even checked. At least half the "new" features in Win7 that I hear people crowing about were actually present in Vista. Give the OS a try, and I think you'll see for yourself what the excitement is about.
Bwahahahahaha. That's hilarious. Tell me, do you manually verify the MD5 of every tarball you download, before installing? Do you check all your RPM/DEB/Whatever files against several sources, just in case the repository you're using has been compromised? (Yes, this happens - and the repo wasn't hosted on Windows, either.) Do you run without Firefox, Flashplayer, Java, and every other piece of software that has remote code-execution vunlerabilities that are cross-platform executable? (The latest Firefox one is already being exploited, although the specific verison of the exploit that I saw just crashes the browser on Linux - no reason it *couldn't* do something malicious, though. Flash is one of the world's greatest cross-platform security holes available.)
If you're still not convinced, go look at MetaSploit. Check how many of those exploits are intended for Linux (not *most* but certainly a significant number). At least a few of those have been effective against out-of-the-box Ubuntu installs, among other things. You live in a fanboy's fantasy world, sir.
You realize that exporting a registry branch is both very easy, and produces an easily-read plain text file, right? I don't particularly advocate copying registry data from computer to computer simply because it's almost never needed, but sometimes preserving settings is actually worth it. In that case, open regedit, use the Find feature to locate the registry keys the program uses, export them to a .reg file, open in a text editor and diddle as you see fit, copy to new computer, and double-click the file to import again.
Really, it's not that hard.
Are you fucking serious? A "well-designed" app NEVER tries to write into its install directory except suring patches. Data file that will need updating, user data, configuration options, logfiles, and everything else of that nature belong in the "Application Data" folder (%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local on Vista/Win7).
If you don't do this, than you either have to run the program as Administrator all the time, or you need to lower the security on the install folder so that it's user-writable. Either one is both stupid from a security viewpoint, and offers the potential to really screw things up. Also, what about if you have multiple user accounts on your system, and they have different application settings? Another good reason to store the data in a per-user (and user-writable) location.
It was developers doing dumb shit like this (counting on users *always* running as Administrator) that caused the majority of "My program won't run under Vista" complaints. It's a practice that should have died out with Win9x.
To take a couple points from your "c)" list:
I'm curious what you consider "proper rights management" to be, that Windows lacks. UAC is essentially sudo with the Administrators group equivalent to UNIX's wheel group. Love or hate this, it's not like Windows didn't already have much more fine-grained permissions than *nix.
Vista has much more than just some "security updates" in terms of things like address space layout randomization (ASLR) and low-integrity processes (IE's Protected Mode being an example). These are protections that no prior version of Windows, nor any version of Linux that I'm aware of, posesses.
Memory management matters, and it's still not a fully solved problem. XP follows the terribly legacy approach of assuming that systems have low RAM and that swap is slow, so it will pre-emptively swap background apps out to ensure that the foreground app always has enough RAM available. This is great if you have little RAM and don't switch tasks much (or leave a task running in the background). However, XP will do this even on systems which actually have plenty of RAM, and it makes switching to a long-backgrounded task take ages. It also means that XP is shockingly dependent upon its pagefile. Vista has substantial improvements in this area, and while the base OS may need about 512MB of RAM (about 6X what XP uses), new computers these days frequently ship with at least 4GB of RAM (8x the 512MB that was common at the equivalent point after XP's release).
Networking is also quite important. XP is just plain bad at looking up other computers on a network, and completley miserable at managing multiple network cards together (trying to do absolutely retarded things like connect to the Internet via the first connected card, even if it's the second one that has the external connection). Then there's IPv6, which is very hacked-in with XP and only supports a limited portion of the new protocol's potential.
I take it you've never looked at administration of a large Windows network, or if you have you've only looked at clients up to XP. Vista added a lot of Active Driectory controls, and Win7 has added more. That's more automation, so less that IT must do manually.
Also, malware infection rate per machine is much lower with Vista (a trend that will probably continue for Win7) than it is with XP. This can save companies an immense amount of money.
No firewall, no DEP, no ASLR, no instant search, no BitLocker, not-as-good EFS, no WDDM, no Volume Shadow Copy, no System Restore, very poor plug-and-play support by modern standards (no automatic downloading of drivers), no x64, no ip6, no...
Yeah, that's a *REAL* upgrade from my current systems, for sure! The only box I still have with Win2k is one that came with Win98, and I'm consdiering switching that one to Linux. My current primary machines run Win7, which is not almost a decade out of date.
Seriously, I can understand your beef with the things you listed (although W2K actually *DOES* have DRM in Windows Media Player, where is is exactly as intrusive as the DRM in Vista) but none of those things have been the least bit of a problem for the vast majority of Windows users (seriously, activation takes a couple of seconds, and unless you manage to screw things up badly enough to require re-activating more than 5 times for a given OS version, you don't even need to call in for it... I've never had to). Also, while I've never heard of the "explicitly allows Microsoft access to your hard drive" clause, it's a bit odd considering that they ship a drive encryption tool that the company can not actually break...
It probably means you have security features that Windows XP (what far too many people still mean when they say "Windows"... it's a fucking 8-year-old OS, stop using it as representative of the whole) lacks. Just like the way that this IE exploit doesn't work correctly on Vista/Server 2008/Win7 either... but nobody bothers to mention that because it works on an OS so outdated it doesn't even have a built-in instant search.
Actually, the Zune can stream music. The 3.0 firmware allows connecting to wireless access points and accessing the online store, including some very limited streaming, via the Internet. There's no reason they couldn't expand this - I'd love a Pandora client for the thing - but the SDK doesn't allow third-party developers to use this functionality yet. That said, I can totally see MS making this available to Zune user whenever they happen to be near a WAP. Given their excellent track record thus far on back-porting firmware updates, it'll probably even be available on my 2nd-gen flash-based Zune.
iPod Touch supports streaming too, but that (and probably the ZuneHD) are better classed as PDAs than as PMPs.
Let's just start with IANAL, and I live and work in Washington state (laws may be different where you work).
We have "at will" employment, and unless a contract explicitly stipulates otherwise, either empolyee or employer may terminate employment at any time. *HOWEVER* if they terminate your employment for the specific reason that you refused to partake in a criminal act, then you can in fact sue them for it. It would be a civil case (although there may also be a criminal case for them issuing the order in the first place) but you should ahve a pretty good chance nonetheless.
That said, if they ordered you to only wear inside-out t-shirts while at work, and you refused, they could fire you for that with no repercussions at all.
... WOW! Cool stuff.
I had no idea at all that there was a dedicated tablet that far back, never mind that there was OS supprt for it. That's back in the era when computers didn't even neccessarily have *mice* and Windows was almost entirely 16-bit.
Tablet computers have actually beguin taking off a lot more now. I see them at university and work all the time. Heck, I have one myself, and am extremely happy with it. Hardware has finally reached the point where such a minimal system still has acceptible performance, and software (most of it Windows-based; tablet support in Linux is still pretty rudimentary) has come a LONG way. Running Win7, the tablet can decode handwriting that I would ahve trouble reading myself, and the pen flicks are a very fast and intuitive interface.
I think the main difference is cost. The cheapest brand-new tablets I've ever seen were still over $700, and very, very few are under $1000.
Not a good parallel. Google is new to the OS business, and their core lies far from operating systems or even desktop applications (altyhough they have a reasonable amount of experience there). Microsoft has been making multiple operating systems longer than Google has even existed. They also waited quite a while after creating their first OS line before starting another.
Some of them are, yes. Microsoft has made a Moonlight codec pack available however, in much the same way that the "Core Fonts for the Web" (including many now-standard fonts like Arial) were distributed.
You realize you can hide the ribbon, right? Double-click on the active tab. Single-click a tab to make it reappear until you click an option (like a menu) or double-click to make it reappear permanently (until you double-click again).
WTF do you mean, it "changes"? If you click on a picture, sure, a picture tab will appear on the ribbon... but the rest of the ribbon is still there, rigth where it was.
Part of me bemoans the loss of customizability on principle, the rest of me accepts that I never changed more than one or two things and that the new interface is better... and besides, the menu wasn't customizable. The toolbars were, but the ribbon is meant to replace both toolbar and menu. In any case, there is still a fully user-configurable toolbar, called the Quick Access bar, above the ribbon.
Outlook has had threaded conversations since *at least* 2003, maybe further back (that was when I first looked for the feature). The main differences in 2010 are twofold: messages that are part of the same conversation but spread across multiple folders are shown together (including your sent messages when viewing a thread in your inbox, for example), and redundent messages (ones where the response incorporates the original message, making the original redundent) are hidden by default (they can be shown if you please) which helps prevent one long thread from filling up the whole screen and being difficult to navigate between cranches of.
Unsigned numeric types. Delegates. Structs (stack-allocated complex data types that are passed by value). LINQ. The option of explicit memory management. No stupid restrictions like only one public class per file. Partial classes. Operator overloading (not always good, but occasionally just damn sensible). There's plenty more...
You can pretty much run a find-replace over Java and get legitimate C#. The reverse is not true. C# >= Java.
The *only* weak point? When did Java get anything that works at all like a function pointer (delegates)? When did it get unsigned integer types (uint16/32/64)? When did it get stack-allocated pass-by-reference data types (structs)?
Then there's all the unsafe stuff that C# supports and Java doesn't, although in my years with both languages I've very rarely felt a need for any of that, and never actually used it. Would amke porting C/C++ to C# a lot easier than porting to Java, though... Let's not forget LINQ though, that's actually well-worth mentioning. Any equivalent in Java yet?
See, that's the thing - NCSoft may not make *all* the rules (that would be no fun) but it is up to them to keep the game balanced. If this guy can literally send anybody he wants to face rotob death squads whenever he feels like it (and there's no counter... which seems odd, surely others can do it to him in turn), the game is just broken. That *IS* NCSoft's fault, sorry. It would be like using an aimbot in a FPS, only the aimbot is built into the game and its use is permitted on PvP servers.
The game itself is broken, then. Why the hell can you teleport somebody like that in that case?
I actually still find the other player's responses interesting. Instead of trying to use the same (obviously highly effective) tactic against this guy, or forming groups so that he can't do it to thim without dying as well, they're sitting back and whining, name-calling, and sending RL threats (easily enough to get you permabanned in most games).
Mind you, I've no interest in actually playing this game - the way you describe it, the designers must be absolutely retarded to actually permit this strategy - but I do find it interesting, from a societal point of view, that these people would choose to play a game wherin these tactics are possible, but get so very upset (as opposed to simply playing along, either by countering him somehow or replying in kind) when they are used.