Publishing straight to a Linux server from Visual Studio? That's a pretty sweet trick right there. Mono is an excellent project, but I've yet to find an IDE I prefer over Visual Studio (aside from out-of-the-box refactoring capabilities, which are pretty weak).
I'm not sure about nVidia, but ATI has (for a while now) offered "X2" versions of its high-end cards, with two GPUs connected via integrated CrossFire (like SLI). These cards are more expensive, to be sure, but last time I checked the 4870 X2 was the best single card available.
Presumably the 4890 is also available with two GPUs? How about the 275?
I believe the patent terms are the main thing that sets MS-PL apart from other F/OSS licenses. On the other hand, if you *don't* sue the contributors, then you can use their patents (in MS-PL code) royalty-free.
Amazing... you managed to get it EXACTLY backward..NET compiles to native immediately before execution, so it actually runs as fast as any other binary that makes lots of calls to a binary runtime. It can actually apply processor-specific optimizations that may allow a.NET binary to run faster than a binary optimized for generic 386 (or other platform, see below). There's a very short delay as the Just-In-Time compiler converts the intermediate code to machine code, but after the first time this happens the result is cached on your system so it starts instantly.
The Microsoft.NET framework is available in one form or another on a handful of architectures, including Itanium and ARM (Windows Mobile). Counting XNA (which can be used for things other than games) you get XBox 360 as well. For everything else, there's Mono, which works on many different OSes and architectures, and implements.NET libraries and functions from published specifications (sometimes even with Microsoft's assistance).
If you (as a user or contributor) don't violate the license, you have a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license under its licensed patents to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and/or otherwise dispose of its contribution in the software or derivative works of the contribution in the software"
It's the BSD license with one major change: it acknowledges software patents, and provides bi-directional protection from them. Specifically:
* You receive a royalty-free patent license to use anything covered by the MS-PL.
* If anybody sues you over a patent in software covered by the MS-PL, they lose the patent license mentioned above.
* You must retain all patent notices (as well as copyright, attribution, and trademark notices) when you redistribute the software.
* Patents apply to usage, as well as distribution. If you don't distribute, the distribution portion doesn't apply (the GPL is purely about distribution) but if you break the license terms, you lose the royalty-free patent license.
Acknowledging that software patents are unpopular around here, this seems a reasonably fair solution: you can patent stuff in your software, but
* You can't demand royalties from people who comply with the license (users or other contributors).
* If a third party sues you over a patent, they lose permission to use your patents in the software.
I'm not sure about credits, but latinum (which, being a liquid, is typically stored in gold bars for exchange) can not be replicated, and as such is in fact a scarce medium.
The Ferengi, obsessed with acquiring wealth (which can only mean scarce things) are obsessed with it. Since trade with them (or other capitalist societies) is sometimes necessary, the Federation (as a whole, and often individuals within it as well) maintains treasuries of latinum.
At a guess, credits are the internal currency of the Federation, used as compensation for services rendered (i.e. StarFleet officer salaries), or as barter for unusual goods or services (presumably including exchange for latinum). This is all just a guess though; I'm not sure where my latinum trivia knowledge comes from, but I'm fairly sure it's correct.
As a side note, prior to the general temporal neighborhood of TNG, replicators weren't available yet. From Star Trek 4 we know that they weren't using money in the 23rd century, but that's actually a little strange - without replicators, there would have been scarcity of ommodity goods, not just services or unusual goods, so some medium of exchange would be expected even more than in the 24th century.
In terms of stuff to come out on the first of April, I'd rate it somewhat above OMGPonies, but well below GMail. That said, I'm only posting here so I can get an achievement out of it...
Out of curiosity, if what you say is true (Microsoft can't write a secure OS) then how is it that you *are* able to keep your machine safe? I keep my machine clean too, and I don't even take exceptional levels of paranoia... with one exception, I won't run anything downloaded without vetting it very carefully first. Since downloaded malware - trojans, usually - aren't really the OS's fault, and since it's Windows' fault that there's so much malware on the platform, there must be something else...
You could try third-party security software, but most of the third-party software out there seems to be more hindrance than help - antivirus is generally reactive, and Windows Firewall (especially in Vista) is quite a good enough proactive defense. Other (non-security) third-party software is actually an attack vector - everything from Flash player (all the time) to Firefox (no matter how fast they patch known holes, its the unknown ones that get you). Some of them *might* be safer than alternatives (Firefox, again... though it would help if they'd use the Low Integrity sandbox that Vista and up provide).
You can point to all the stuff that runs as Admin on Windows, but that is the fault of users and/or developers. A smart user (who certainly doesn't log in as Admin) can usually even change a few security settings (program writes to its install directory? Make the location user-writable) so that the program will run as a standard user. Still not Microsoft's fault - their software is generally very good about respecting standard users - unless you count the default user created on Windows proior to Vista being an Administrator.
Vulnerabilities in the software that the OS ships with have certainly been a problem in the past, but these days they are less and less so. IE still isn't impermeable, but vulnerabilities have become much rarer, and it's a lot harder to exploit them now with DEP, ASLR, and Low Integrity restrictions. Actually, with the exception of Low Integrity, the same applies to pretty much all Windows-included software.
So... what, exactly, makes Windows security so much Microsoft's fault, aside from the fact that as the most common desktop OS, they also have the most ignorant/idiotic desktop users?
Sorry for replaying to myself, but after digging through the (long, even if you only look at 1.5.0 to 1.6) changelog, I fount the relevant info:
You *can* now password-protect an account, which means you can use your forum account and nobody else can (or you can create a protected non-forum account). However, you can still log in quickly using an unclaimed user name with no password.
Ah, interesting. It does seem to have borrowed heavily - I'd never heard of the other game but from the Wikipedia article it sounds quite similar (and certainly predated Wesnoth). I'd be interested to play it, just for comparison.
I hav trouble believeing that; WC2 is a real-time game with no experience model, long-ranged attacks (all attacks in Wesnoth are against adjacent units), an economic base model (where resources are collected then spent to build things - in Wesnoth, your base is any castle your leader can get on, and your economy is essentially a matter of territory with no regard to the concept of harvesting).
You may be thinking of Glest, a completely different (from Wesnoth) game that has lots in common with WarCraft 2.
I believe Battle for Wesnoth includes at least a few tools for things like level editing and such. There are a considerable number of fan-made campaigns available for download, for example.
That said, Wesnoth does have some very nice non-code work in it, even in 1.4 (can't wait to see the new stuff). The music, for example, is superior to that of many commercial games (in my opinion). There were lots fo graphics but they werent' always very good; an update to those will help people take the game seriously, which can help them think better of open source in general.
Actually, as such things go, Wesnoth is probably the only open-source game I would pay real money (i.e. more than about $5) for, even if it were proprietary. It's fun, challenging, addicting, and much easier for me to play casually than chess (which fills roughly the same niche, though one advantage of Wesnoth is that I can play a team game with friends against another team online). It is certainly not what some people would call a great video game - it doesn't have Crysis-level shiny graphics, World of Warcraft-like immersive gameplay, Halo-like adrenaline-driven twitch thrills, or the superb mix of strategic/tactical skill demand of StarCraft (to name a few games that are well-known for their respective areas of superiority). However, it is fun to play, has a nice set of campaigns (which sound like they've gotten even better), and you can connect to the multiplayer server, find a game, play it and have a good time, and be done in half an hour (easily, if the map isn't huge) which is one of the traditional scourges of turn-based games; many take too damn long.
Give it a shot. It's free, after all - you can even tweak it if you think you can make it better.
Ranking system? I'd love to see this. I've gotten the occasional badly outmatched game (in either direction) online, although most of the time it's been good games all around. An experience system like Battle.Net would be fairly cool, although I wonder what it would take, implementation-wise.
One important question (relevant to the previous) is that you mention credentials; does the 1.6 multiplayer server require an actual login? I have an alias I typically use on the 1.4 server, but there's no actual authentication that I'm aware of. The last 1.5 build I tried flat-out didn't work in multiplayer, so I haven't been testing the new stuff.
Finally, kudos to the team; Wesnoth is a great game, good for casual play for a few minutes at a time (even on majorly underpowered hardware) or for a fun multiplayer match with friends over the 'net. I can't wait to try out the new version, and keep up the good work!
Battle for Wesnoth is a great game, not least of all because it actually has fairly original gameplay (it's not a clone of some other game), but one thing I'd like to take the time tpo mention in particular is that it compliles not only across different operating systems, but also different architectures. PowerPC, for example - not many games still under development on that platform (console aside). It's even available for the Nokia N800/810 (ARM) and probably other PDA/SMartPhone devices - and being turn-based with a very simple interface (mildly more complex than chess) it's quite playable on them too.
It's one of the great advantages of open-source development: anybody can port it to whatever they want!
A couple small points: You can actually create a user profile outside of the standard location once your system is installed - no need to do it at install time. There's a single registry key that controls the folder where new accounts go; setting it, then creating a brand new account and logging into it, will put the profile in the new location.
Alternatively, it is possible to change the location of an existing profile if you're determined enough. It's a bitch, though - definitely not recommended. I've found it MUCH easier to install, create a throw-away/backup account at install time, use it to set the location for new accounts to another drive, and then create your *real* account on that drive.
Finally, while BitLocker is definitely complex on Vista, Win7 includes much better UI and more options for key protection. On my beta Win7 tablet, it's literally a matter of right-click on a drive, select "Turn on BitLocker" from the context menu, select protectors I want to use (say, a passphrase plus I need to have a specific USB device attached - no TPM needed, and all user-configurable), and let it do its thing for a little while.
As a side note, Win7 BitLocker can also encrypt removable drives - very handy if you need to move sensitive data in physical media, and it includes a tool allowing you to decrypt them on older versions of Windows.
Up to XP, the insecure hash was used. On Vista and above (probably Server 2003 as well, don't know) it is disabled by default.
nteresting side note: Unless Group Poilcy was set up to enable this, even an Administrator can not unlock a non-Administrator's encrypted files/folders. The encryption is tied to a hash of the user's password, and while an Admin can force any user (including another Admin) to change their password, doing so will render the encrypted data unrecoverable unless you have the key from some other source.
Of course, if all you want is the games + DVR + streaming from computer, the XBox 360 has all that - use Media Center on the PC for the DVR functionality, and use the 360 as a Media Center Extender for the streaming. Really the only thing that the PS3 can do in media experience that the XBox 360 can't is Blu-Ray, and if Microsoft wanted to they could release an add-on for that too.
Umm... those things have what, 500MHz processors? There is no audio codec in the world that is beyond that level of software capability. Hell, at the resolution they run at, I doubt there's any video codec which is either (encoding is another story, though even then I suspect it's easily possible). The Nokia n800 has a higher-res screen and a slightly slower processor, but it can play any audio or video format I ever found. It can also use Flash - I've used it for Pandora.com and occasionally YouTube (via YouTube.com - the iPhone app is great but it *ONLY* works on YouTube, as opposed to, say, Hulu).
Redmond's roads are actually in quite nice shape, quality-wise. The issue is that a section of the SR-520 highway (which connects Microsoft Seattle as well as to much of Redmond and parts of Bellevue) is already as wide as it can realistically be - the exit ramps are three lanes wide, the overpasses are six(!!), and there's not much space on either side - nonetheless experiences MAJOR congestion. Since a large portion of this overpass bridges' traffic is MS employees getting to and from work or between parts of campus, it would significantly relieve congestion in the area if the freeway overpass could be used for its intended purpose (handling people getting on/off the freeway), while MS employees and others who work in the area could take the direct bridge instead.
Season 1, Heroes... I forget which episode, sadly. Zack is showing Claire the article about her parents' death. It's brief, no more than a second or so, but if you look closely it's definitely Konqueror (in KDE 3). I thought that a very nice touch, even if it doesn't really mean anything unless you know to look.
JavaScript aside, IE8 *does* have (nearly) the same level of standard support as other browsers. It passes Acid2, and renders Acid3 correctly* (the parts which it passes - the rest fails). In terms of HTML/CSS support, it's pretty well up there. No HTML 5 yet, or much CSS 3, but they have a lot more than they used to and, more importantly, it conforms to spec.
* Actually, some time just before RC1 some change was made that caused a regression on Acid3 rendering - it's now spaced too much vertically. Don't know why, it used to be correct.
Actually, the standard user will have the tools to block this kind of thing. IE8 has a built-in filter which detects things like multiple sites attempting to access the same cookie. When the number of sites sharing an item (such as a tracking cookie, or remote script such as used by an ad server) exceeds a threshold, it starts blocking access to that item. It's configurable, but that is the design idea. In the pre-release version on Win7, it's not enabled by default except in InPrivate Mode, but can be enabled bu clicking a button on the status bar.
Now, I would much prefer a window manager that could "lock" windows into some sort of tiled zone, so I can expand two windows to fill half my screen each
This is one of my favorite Win7 features, actually. Click and drag a window's titlebar up to the top of the screen, it will maximize. Drag it to the side, and it will resize to fill exactly that half of the screen. Drag the lower edge down to the taskbar, and it will resize vertically to span top to bottom on the display. The kicker: it will return to original size if you drag it off the top of the screen, or otherwise instruct it to restore. I find myself trying to do this on other OSes and being bothered when it doesn't work - it's convenient, intuitive, and well-implemented.
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Publishing straight to a Linux server from Visual Studio? That's a pretty sweet trick right there. Mono is an excellent project, but I've yet to find an IDE I prefer over Visual Studio (aside from out-of-the-box refactoring capabilities, which are pretty weak).
I'm not sure about nVidia, but ATI has (for a while now) offered "X2" versions of its high-end cards, with two GPUs connected via integrated CrossFire (like SLI). These cards are more expensive, to be sure, but last time I checked the 4870 X2 was the best single card available.
Presumably the 4890 is also available with two GPUs? How about the 275?
I believe the patent terms are the main thing that sets MS-PL apart from other F/OSS licenses. On the other hand, if you *don't* sue the contributors, then you can use their patents (in MS-PL code) royalty-free.
Amazing... you managed to get it EXACTLY backward. .NET compiles to native immediately before execution, so it actually runs as fast as any other binary that makes lots of calls to a binary runtime. It can actually apply processor-specific optimizations that may allow a .NET binary to run faster than a binary optimized for generic 386 (or other platform, see below). There's a very short delay as the Just-In-Time compiler converts the intermediate code to machine code, but after the first time this happens the result is cached on your system so it starts instantly.
The Microsoft .NET framework is available in one form or another on a handful of architectures, including Itanium and ARM (Windows Mobile). Counting XNA (which can be used for things other than games) you get XBox 360 as well. For everything else, there's Mono, which works on many different OSes and architectures, and implements .NET libraries and functions from published specifications (sometimes even with Microsoft's assistance).
In short: yes. Read the license.
If you (as a user or contributor) don't violate the license, you have a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license under its licensed patents to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and/or otherwise dispose of its contribution in the software or derivative works of the contribution in the software"
It's the BSD license with one major change: it acknowledges software patents, and provides bi-directional protection from them. Specifically:
* You receive a royalty-free patent license to use anything covered by the MS-PL.
* If anybody sues you over a patent in software covered by the MS-PL, they lose the patent license mentioned above.
* You must retain all patent notices (as well as copyright, attribution, and trademark notices) when you redistribute the software.
* Patents apply to usage, as well as distribution. If you don't distribute, the distribution portion doesn't apply (the GPL is purely about distribution) but if you break the license terms, you lose the royalty-free patent license.
Acknowledging that software patents are unpopular around here, this seems a reasonably fair solution: you can patent stuff in your software, but
* You can't demand royalties from people who comply with the license (users or other contributors).
* If a third party sues you over a patent, they lose permission to use your patents in the software.
I'm not sure about credits, but latinum (which, being a liquid, is typically stored in gold bars for exchange) can not be replicated, and as such is in fact a scarce medium.
The Ferengi, obsessed with acquiring wealth (which can only mean scarce things) are obsessed with it. Since trade with them (or other capitalist societies) is sometimes necessary, the Federation (as a whole, and often individuals within it as well) maintains treasuries of latinum.
At a guess, credits are the internal currency of the Federation, used as compensation for services rendered (i.e. StarFleet officer salaries), or as barter for unusual goods or services (presumably including exchange for latinum). This is all just a guess though; I'm not sure where my latinum trivia knowledge comes from, but I'm fairly sure it's correct.
As a side note, prior to the general temporal neighborhood of TNG, replicators weren't available yet. From Star Trek 4 we know that they weren't using money in the 23rd century, but that's actually a little strange - without replicators, there would have been scarcity of ommodity goods, not just services or unusual goods, so some medium of exchange would be expected even more than in the 24th century.
In terms of stuff to come out on the first of April, I'd rate it somewhat above OMGPonies, but well below GMail. That said, I'm only posting here so I can get an achievement out of it...
Out of curiosity, if what you say is true (Microsoft can't write a secure OS) then how is it that you *are* able to keep your machine safe? I keep my machine clean too, and I don't even take exceptional levels of paranoia... with one exception, I won't run anything downloaded without vetting it very carefully first. Since downloaded malware - trojans, usually - aren't really the OS's fault, and since it's Windows' fault that there's so much malware on the platform, there must be something else...
You could try third-party security software, but most of the third-party software out there seems to be more hindrance than help - antivirus is generally reactive, and Windows Firewall (especially in Vista) is quite a good enough proactive defense. Other (non-security) third-party software is actually an attack vector - everything from Flash player (all the time) to Firefox (no matter how fast they patch known holes, its the unknown ones that get you). Some of them *might* be safer than alternatives (Firefox, again... though it would help if they'd use the Low Integrity sandbox that Vista and up provide).
You can point to all the stuff that runs as Admin on Windows, but that is the fault of users and/or developers. A smart user (who certainly doesn't log in as Admin) can usually even change a few security settings (program writes to its install directory? Make the location user-writable) so that the program will run as a standard user. Still not Microsoft's fault - their software is generally very good about respecting standard users - unless you count the default user created on Windows proior to Vista being an Administrator.
Vulnerabilities in the software that the OS ships with have certainly been a problem in the past, but these days they are less and less so. IE still isn't impermeable, but vulnerabilities have become much rarer, and it's a lot harder to exploit them now with DEP, ASLR, and Low Integrity restrictions. Actually, with the exception of Low Integrity, the same applies to pretty much all Windows-included software.
So... what, exactly, makes Windows security so much Microsoft's fault, aside from the fact that as the most common desktop OS, they also have the most ignorant/idiotic desktop users?
Sorry for replaying to myself, but after digging through the (long, even if you only look at 1.5.0 to 1.6) changelog, I fount the relevant info:
You *can* now password-protect an account, which means you can use your forum account and nobody else can (or you can create a protected non-forum account). However, you can still log in quickly using an unclaimed user name with no password.
Ah, interesting. It does seem to have borrowed heavily - I'd never heard of the other game but from the Wikipedia article it sounds quite similar (and certainly predated Wesnoth). I'd be interested to play it, just for comparison.
Bleh. Clone or not, it's still a good game.
I hav trouble believeing that; WC2 is a real-time game with no experience model, long-ranged attacks (all attacks in Wesnoth are against adjacent units), an economic base model (where resources are collected then spent to build things - in Wesnoth, your base is any castle your leader can get on, and your economy is essentially a matter of territory with no regard to the concept of harvesting).
You may be thinking of Glest, a completely different (from Wesnoth) game that has lots in common with WarCraft 2.
I believe Battle for Wesnoth includes at least a few tools for things like level editing and such. There are a considerable number of fan-made campaigns available for download, for example.
That said, Wesnoth does have some very nice non-code work in it, even in 1.4 (can't wait to see the new stuff). The music, for example, is superior to that of many commercial games (in my opinion). There were lots fo graphics but they werent' always very good; an update to those will help people take the game seriously, which can help them think better of open source in general.
Actually, as such things go, Wesnoth is probably the only open-source game I would pay real money (i.e. more than about $5) for, even if it were proprietary. It's fun, challenging, addicting, and much easier for me to play casually than chess (which fills roughly the same niche, though one advantage of Wesnoth is that I can play a team game with friends against another team online). It is certainly not what some people would call a great video game - it doesn't have Crysis-level shiny graphics, World of Warcraft-like immersive gameplay, Halo-like adrenaline-driven twitch thrills, or the superb mix of strategic/tactical skill demand of StarCraft (to name a few games that are well-known for their respective areas of superiority). However, it is fun to play, has a nice set of campaigns (which sound like they've gotten even better), and you can connect to the multiplayer server, find a game, play it and have a good time, and be done in half an hour (easily, if the map isn't huge) which is one of the traditional scourges of turn-based games; many take too damn long.
Give it a shot. It's free, after all - you can even tweak it if you think you can make it better.
Ranking system? I'd love to see this. I've gotten the occasional badly outmatched game (in either direction) online, although most of the time it's been good games all around. An experience system like Battle.Net would be fairly cool, although I wonder what it would take, implementation-wise.
One important question (relevant to the previous) is that you mention credentials; does the 1.6 multiplayer server require an actual login? I have an alias I typically use on the 1.4 server, but there's no actual authentication that I'm aware of. The last 1.5 build I tried flat-out didn't work in multiplayer, so I haven't been testing the new stuff.
Finally, kudos to the team; Wesnoth is a great game, good for casual play for a few minutes at a time (even on majorly underpowered hardware) or for a fun multiplayer match with friends over the 'net. I can't wait to try out the new version, and keep up the good work!
Battle for Wesnoth is a great game, not least of all because it actually has fairly original gameplay (it's not a clone of some other game), but one thing I'd like to take the time tpo mention in particular is that it compliles not only across different operating systems, but also different architectures. PowerPC, for example - not many games still under development on that platform (console aside). It's even available for the Nokia N800/810 (ARM) and probably other PDA/SMartPhone devices - and being turn-based with a very simple interface (mildly more complex than chess) it's quite playable on them too.
It's one of the great advantages of open-source development: anybody can port it to whatever they want!
Very good post, thank you.
A couple small points:
You can actually create a user profile outside of the standard location once your system is installed - no need to do it at install time. There's a single registry key that controls the folder where new accounts go; setting it, then creating a brand new account and logging into it, will put the profile in the new location.
Alternatively, it is possible to change the location of an existing profile if you're determined enough. It's a bitch, though - definitely not recommended. I've found it MUCH easier to install, create a throw-away/backup account at install time, use it to set the location for new accounts to another drive, and then create your *real* account on that drive.
Finally, while BitLocker is definitely complex on Vista, Win7 includes much better UI and more options for key protection. On my beta Win7 tablet, it's literally a matter of right-click on a drive, select "Turn on BitLocker" from the context menu, select protectors I want to use (say, a passphrase plus I need to have a specific USB device attached - no TPM needed, and all user-configurable), and let it do its thing for a little while.
As a side note, Win7 BitLocker can also encrypt removable drives - very handy if you need to move sensitive data in physical media, and it includes a tool allowing you to decrypt them on older versions of Windows.
Up to XP, the insecure hash was used. On Vista and above (probably Server 2003 as well, don't know) it is disabled by default.
nteresting side note: Unless Group Poilcy was set up to enable this, even an Administrator can not unlock a non-Administrator's encrypted files/folders. The encryption is tied to a hash of the user's password, and while an Admin can force any user (including another Admin) to change their password, doing so will render the encrypted data unrecoverable unless you have the key from some other source.
Of course, if all you want is the games + DVR + streaming from computer, the XBox 360 has all that - use Media Center on the PC for the DVR functionality, and use the 360 as a Media Center Extender for the streaming. Really the only thing that the PS3 can do in media experience that the XBox 360 can't is Blu-Ray, and if Microsoft wanted to they could release an add-on for that too.
or are simply beyond the hardware
Umm... those things have what, 500MHz processors? There is no audio codec in the world that is beyond that level of software capability. Hell, at the resolution they run at, I doubt there's any video codec which is either (encoding is another story, though even then I suspect it's easily possible). The Nokia n800 has a higher-res screen and a slightly slower processor, but it can play any audio or video format I ever found. It can also use Flash - I've used it for Pandora.com and occasionally YouTube (via YouTube.com - the iPhone app is great but it *ONLY* works on YouTube, as opposed to, say, Hulu).
Redmond's roads are actually in quite nice shape, quality-wise. The issue is that a section of the SR-520 highway (which connects Microsoft Seattle as well as to much of Redmond and parts of Bellevue) is already as wide as it can realistically be - the exit ramps are three lanes wide, the overpasses are six(!!), and there's not much space on either side - nonetheless experiences MAJOR congestion. Since a large portion of this overpass bridges' traffic is MS employees getting to and from work or between parts of campus, it would significantly relieve congestion in the area if the freeway overpass could be used for its intended purpose (handling people getting on/off the freeway), while MS employees and others who work in the area could take the direct bridge instead.
Haha, I finally get to post this!
Season 1, Heroes... I forget which episode, sadly. Zack is showing Claire the article about her parents' death. It's brief, no more than a second or so, but if you look closely it's definitely Konqueror (in KDE 3). I thought that a very nice touch, even if it doesn't really mean anything unless you know to look.
JavaScript aside, IE8 *does* have (nearly) the same level of standard support as other browsers. It passes Acid2, and renders Acid3 correctly* (the parts which it passes - the rest fails). In terms of HTML/CSS support, it's pretty well up there. No HTML 5 yet, or much CSS 3, but they have a lot more than they used to and, more importantly, it conforms to spec.
* Actually, some time just before RC1 some change was made that caused a regression on Acid3 rendering - it's now spaced too much vertically. Don't know why, it used to be correct.
Actually, the standard user will have the tools to block this kind of thing. IE8 has a built-in filter which detects things like multiple sites attempting to access the same cookie. When the number of sites sharing an item (such as a tracking cookie, or remote script such as used by an ad server) exceeds a threshold, it starts blocking access to that item. It's configurable, but that is the design idea. In the pre-release version on Win7, it's not enabled by default except in InPrivate Mode, but can be enabled bu clicking a button on the status bar.
Now, I would much prefer a window manager that could "lock" windows into some sort of tiled zone, so I can expand two windows to fill half my screen each
This is one of my favorite Win7 features, actually. Click and drag a window's titlebar up to the top of the screen, it will maximize. Drag it to the side, and it will resize to fill exactly that half of the screen. Drag the lower edge down to the taskbar, and it will resize vertically to span top to bottom on the display. The kicker: it will return to original size if you drag it off the top of the screen, or otherwise instruct it to restore. I find myself trying to do this on other OSes and being bothered when it doesn't work - it's convenient, intuitive, and well-implemented.