Because they are artifically raising prices for their own benefit. Do you approve of gasoline price gouging too? Even though it's not an official emergency (and thus probably legal), the fact is that these people are intentionally harming their fellows by purchasing a fixed-price item, then releasing it to the free market during a time of extreme demand. They aren't doing anything to deserve that money, and they're screwing the people who actually want to buy this product.
Nobody gets hurt.
Except for all the consumers who could each have saved hundreds of dollars each plus shipping time/charges, had they been able to buy it retail. Instead, they must pay the ebay scalpers that rushed in and bought the units 20 at a time.
And Media Center... and Collaboration... and Remote Desktop... IIS... IE... WMP... Defender... Movie Maker... Photo Gallery... Mail... Desktop Search... Sidebar... Calendar... Tablet tools... SideShow...
Plus all the more internal system stuff, like networking tools, SuperFetch, Computer Management, UAC, Windows Desktop Manager, domain support, Volume Shadow Copy, System Restore, improved Firewall, registry, all their stability monitoring and crash reporting, etc.
Lets not forget drivers for many thousands of devices, plus the kernel and all the standard libraries.
I'm actually impressed they managed to compress the Ultimate Edition installer to something as small as it is!
Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer are seperate, so that may help you out. There's also a new 3-finger salute to kill the desktop manager (which restarts automatically) without killing Explorer; this fixes many problems like video driver issues (the WDDM driver will simply restart. Of course, the desktop manager is only running if you're using a WDDM driver). However, I have never had a problem either killing Explorer or bringing it up again, so I'm not sure I can relate. In XP, the only things that totally brought the system down for me were blatantly bad ideas, like ntfsresize on a volume with a hibernated copy or Windows (it actually came out of Hibernate, but slowly spiraled to a BSOD)
Incidentally, if the option "Start Explorer windows in a seperate process" under Folder Options is checked, you won't lose programs just because your desktop hangs.
UAC is good enough to be THE reason to upgrade; anybody who likes to tinker with their systems but doesn't like to be logged in as root/admin knows the pain of using XP. Vista makes it all go away
Volume Shadow Copy (aka Previous Versions) is a superb tool, one I wish was built into every operating system. I've used it to fix everything from files I accidentally overwrote to an introduced problem with IE7 that made it almost unusable (I have Firefox, but actually use IE7 more often in Vista). Also available in Server 2003.
Desktop search (or QuickSearch or whatever they call it) is my most common cause of "Vistalgia" (perhaps this means it's the feature I most want, although it's simply a convenience). I find myself doing things at work like pressing the Winkey, typing 'defe', and wondering why Windows Defender didn't load. I click on the box in the upper left of Outlook and end up searching the help files (rather than mail archive) for 'CSE down update'. I find myself wondering if there's ANY way to easily search the contents of history pages (without even opening the browser) in XP.
Sidebar. It can be hacked into XP, but without the transparency it takes a lot of screen real-estate. I use it for a sticky-note style notepad, at-a-glance feed aggregator, quickie calculator, persistent performance monitor (superb for knowing what programs take all your CPU, or when you have too much open and need to close some stuff to free up memory), alternate timezone clock, and... Sudoku. That's not even all the currently available gadgets, and sooner or later I mgith write a few of my own.
The new driver model (user space, not kernel space) and update system (no longer uses IE) both make tons of sense, and reduce reboots and hard crashes incredibly, even on patches and installs.
Superfetch allows a very significant speed upgrade starting large programs (games, Visual Studio, etc.)
Need more? There's plenty. Try it before you write it off.
The "sick, twisted coupling of Explorer.exe and Internet Explorer" is gone in Vista. I was able to install and use Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 without rebooting, I forget at the moment whether I had to reboot after installing PC-Cillin AV. I have installed / updated drivers for everything from mice and networks to video (WDDM rocks) without rebooting. The only updates that have forced me to reboot are kernel patches.
Of course, 5384 would, on fairly rare occasion (though still too often) crash for no immediately apparent reason (not even a BSOD, of which the only ones I got were faulty drivers for things like the AMD processor). Can't wait to see how RC1 (5600) works... should be done downloading sometime today.
Does XP in fact "automatically defrag"? I've never seen that before, and I have definitely come across machines with atrocious fragmentation. NTFS handles fragmentation much better than FAT did, but it does still cause a performance hit. I think either you have a scheduled defrag, are running OneCare or other scheduled system tuning software, or you've confused Vista and XP.
I'm not sure what the mechanics of EXT3 are (though I like it and use in my Linux box) but the journaling support in Vista's NTFS (backward compatible to earlier NTFS, like EXT3-EXT2) are (finally) complete such that there should be no data loss or corruption for power outage, even during write (older versions of NTFS don't take full advantage of journaling). As for fragmentation, I'm not sure what the deal with it on Linux is, but since Vista does background defrag while idle, I haven't had to run defrag once depite using the same build (5384) for over 3 months, with heavy downloading, installing, etc. I check the volume fragmentation from time to time (at least once a month, like I used to run it), but it's always quite low.
Although this might not be the response you were looking for, Vista really does a fantastic job of seperating kernel from drivers, to the point that even driver fuckups don't bring down the system. You can change or install pretty much any hardware without rebooting or even logging off, I've seen the (beta) video driver crash, and Vista simply re-loads it after a short interval of the display going funny, then blank (note this only wirks with WDDM drivers, legacy drivers still run in the kernel. Of course, those drivers probably aren't beta). Add that it's finally possible to easily run without admin priveleges constantly, and that Vista usesvirtualization, data execute protection, and address space randomization, and you actually have (once all the bugs are worked out) one of the most stable desktop OS's out there. Beta 2 (build 5384) could do pretty much any update other than a kernel patch without rebooting. I'll install RC1 as soon as it finishes downloading...
Care to name a desktop OS that you cannot crash, without being root/admin, without writing any code or using any 3rd-party software, in under 2 minutes work? I haven't yet found one, though it takes more work on Windows than most other OS's (admittedly due to the limitations of the Windows command line, something I normally curse).
Considering that, can you possibly expect the OS to be able to handle any compiled (or scripted) software, making all kind of complex demands on the system? Frankly, Windows XP (and hopefully Vista, the new build is downloading as I type) is the least likely to crash the entire OS of any of the main desktop OS's (including Linux); it will happily kill the process for you, but generally recovers completely, or at the worst allows a safe reboot.
Jeez, RTFA, or even the full summary (posted by others).
The point of his work was to see if it was true, as he had read, the the CLR didn't do well with dynamic languages. As he started work, he found it was quite the opposite - faster than C-based Python - and decided to write a full CLR implementation of Pythong (IronPython). MS invited him to work with their.NET team, to resolve issues he was running into, and he decided to join the team.
Mono, at least the version I run on SUSE 10 (which uses Mono for some of its own code) has WinForms support. I haven't tried it yet; all my Mono code has been CLI, but it may even be possible to run Windows.NET GUI apps directly in Mono.
I would disagree slightly with a few of your points...
build a small desktop app... should probably use VB (He won't be able to build a gui faster with any other tool).
C# (or probably any language you can use with Visual Studio) can develop GUI's with the same level of effort... the only difference is in the procedural code and event handlers; the IDE writes all the GUI code for you. At that point it comes down to "Which VS language are you fastest/most productive/most familiar with?"
distributed client/server app involving tens of thousands of classes coded by dozens of people, reliable object transfer/messaging, reliable easy access to various forms of communications (Sockets, etc), the ability to run on Unix... your only rational choice is Java.
I'm not denying that Java is a reasonable choice for tis scenario; it is very readable and extremely portable. What most people don't realize is that the CLR (C# in particular) is nearly as portable to all the OS's you mentioned (okay, MacOS support takes a little work on deployment, but it runs perfectly on Linux and some Unixes... SUSE 10, for example, uses Mono for several integral programs.) C# also gives more control than Java (options for explicit memory management, function variables, etc.) and, unless you're using a JIT instead of the JVM, will often execute faster.
Oh, and speaking of "distributed client/server app involving tens of thousands of classes coded by dozens of people, reliable object transfer/messaging, and reliable easy access to various forms of communications" have you by any chance heard of a MMOG called of EVE-Online which, using "a special stackless version of Python" recently broke 30,000 concurrent users on one server?
Oh please... write some bloody ASP.NET, then whine if it doesn't work. ASP.NET 1.1 required a work-around (read: 1 line of code added to each page) for it to recognize Firefox as a high-level browser, but it would feed it basic HTML happily even without. ASP.NET 2.0 renders perfectly in Firefox, no workarounds needed, with advanced tags and properties, superb JavaScript support, and compliant (if not the full set of) CSS. I tested it using the W3C validation tools and it passed near perfectly.
I've written a couple of aspx pages that work in Firefox but actually render brokenly in IE6... would have been a great laugh if it wasn't such a PITA to fix!
Close, but I think you're slightly off. I use C# by preference (though I'm still learning it) and VB.NET at work (required; migrating from VB6 was enough of a headache, practically nobody here speaks a non-VB language). I have so far seen about the same productivity, though C# tends to *click* better in my mind.
Regarding differences, however, I don't think VB.NET (or possibly any language other than C#/Managed C++) allows explicit stack allocation, pointer manipulation, etc. For high-level stuff this is USUALLY not needed, and for low-level you probably wouldn't be using the CLR anyhow, but VB.NET is still behind C# (from what I've read, C# and the CLR were basically built for eachother, and C# is the purest and most complete expression of what the framework can handle).
Also, while you can do a lot by just changing keywords around, VB.NET contains some legacy mechanisms (there are two ways to cast bool to int, one of which produces -1 for True and one that produces 1, for backwards compatibility). Furthermore, since VB still has no really good conditional statement (IIf is a built-in function, and returns only a generic object, which is a pain and tends to need casting... oh, and the cast syntax is annoying) code tends to be longer, requiring either more lines or lots of horizontal viewing area. Their For loops are also partially crippled (no way to do things like for (current = head; current != null && !(current.value.equals(searchItem)); current = current.next)
which, while a debatable coding practice, can reduce LOCs considerably and is preferred by some programmers in any case, just as some like for (;;)
which I hate... and which is not possibly either in VB. This is a hassle for them even if I think they ought to use while (true)
like the rest of us.) VB also uses = as both assignment operator and equality tester (to the point that you must use.referenceEquals() if you want to check for the same object, rather than a clone, as opposed to the style of ==) means you can't cleanly do things like if ( (current = current.next) == null)
or other little shortcuts that people are used to. VB doesn't require Delegates as explicitly, although you *might* be able to (so far I've gotten by with sloppier methods of raising/handling events, etc.) which can be a convenience (it took me a while to figure out how to trigger events in C#) but is also a crutch (inline functions, etc. can be handy tools that most VB programmers will never see).
In short, VB.NET is MS taking their "easy introduction to programming" language and pushing it into a powerful, full-featured runtime. They had to cut corners to do this, and it requires a fancier version of the CLR (this is why VB.NET on Mono is still incomplete, despite there being a compiler already; C# on Mono is pretty much fully.NET 2.0 compliant). VB isn't the only language that has required such; J# for example (despite being, syntactically, a near-perfect subset of C#) also requires extensions to the base CLR (on second thought, this may be for support of the Java package/namespace... it might work if written using only mscorlib).
TO be fair, WC3's interludes (game-rendered cutscenes), while a great application of their 3D engine, are arguably inferior to the video quality of the original WC2 intro (let alone SC). That said, Blizzard, even though they have always produced spectacular in-game videos, makes their (incredible amounts of) money off gameplay... I still play WC1 on occasion, and aside from its minimally-animated intro video and mission start/end scenes it has no video... and even those minimal-quality (designed, I believe, for 320x240 resolution) videos doubled the installation footprint. Of course, compression has come a LONG way since then (WC3's videos are, I believe, perhaps 1/4 of the total install size) but the point remains that games, especially those designed for really good graphics systems (consoles and gaming PCs) can look good enough to satisfy the hordes without resorting to GBs of pre-rendered video. Consider EVE Online as well; it's a 3-year-old game on a 5(?)-year-old engine, and except for a gorgeous intro movie I have yet to see anything pre-rendered. The whole game, however, looks video-quality, even on my relatively weak ATI Mobility Radeon 200M... so much so that it makes me wonder if modern machines don't have the power to do almost ALL video rendering in real-time.
The whole EVE installation file (downloadable) would fit on one CD, and it's playable on dial-up (not that I would) which means ALL that video quality, including intro movie, fits into 700MB + DirectX 9b. I can't wait to see what it will look like in the DX10 engine supposedly under development...
Actually, animals in frontier sci-fi is a common theme. They are (relatively) cheap, self-repairing, self-replicating, can be bred as a business, don't need to have very high technology everywhere (which fits very well into the "outer rim world" phenomenon of Firefly), and may be more economic to "operate" on a world with lots of grass, etc. but relatively little refined fuel/highly machined parts/whatever. Consider the episode Ariel; flying cars, cleaning robots, computer consoles on every street corner... and no animals. Then consider Jaynestown, where indentured laborers are used to dig clay because they are essentially free, while the overlords live in fancy houses that have technology to prevent ships from taking off if they don't want them to. Or Heart of Gold, where women resort to prostitution because they can't afford anything better, but the local crime lord has hovercraft and handheld beam weapons that can burn through almost anything.
As for "If people can afford a cheap spaceship, they can certainly afford a cheap vehicle" what makes you think Mal couldn't? I'm sure he could have bought himself far more than the hovermule he used in the movie. However, he is obviously from, if not a core world, at least one of the less extreme rim worlds; the weapons used in the war are proof of that. The cheapness of Serenity is fitting with the pay a soldier receives, the fact that it flies at all is fitting with the fact that he was in a war, with some success, against a culture with the kind of technology you see on the core worlds.
How many people do you think can afford ships even that good? Consider the boy in the pilot episode sitting on a bunch of crates of chickens for sale... Consider the superstitious tribal village that kidnapped Simon; they can't even afford relatively trivial medicine, but they can swap some grains they grew for a piglet from some farmer's sow's litter. A horse is probably an expensive thing by their standards, but it's the sort of thing a rural economy can support easily. A spacecraft, or even hovercraft, though? Not bloody likely.
Returning to the clothes issue, real cowboy clothes were mostly a practical matter. Denim is durable and long-lasting, leather is plentiful on the frontier, wide-brimmed hats keep the sun out of your eyes and help prevent sunburn, bandanas have any number of uses, etc. The conecpt of similar clothes appearing on the "new" frontier isn't unlikely at all. Consdier lso that the languages which have survived are (American) English and Chinese, and seeing pieces of American frontier culture on the rim seems reasonable. "Cheap African clothing, or cheap desert nomad clothing" is impractical because they aren't IN the desert, and they don't seem to have antelope to kill for furs (assuming you meant bush clothing). As for the mix of clothing, take a good look at the people in the larger frontier towns... you'll see every sort. As for the drawl, I didn't notice it on many characters, but where they did have it, is it really so very unlikely? Relativley uneducated people living a "slow" (active, but not frantic) lifestyle may well adopt a slow, drawn-out speech.
On of (in my opinion) the coolest things about Firefly is just how good the story universe is. When you consider just how big planets are, just how many are in this system (that's about the only thing that bothers me with regard to realism), just how far apart they are, and the fact that as best I can tell nobody has FTL travel... it's entirely believable that the widely scattered outer worlds should be neglected almost to the level of 1800 Earth frontier. Compare the most advaned cities in the first world, where nobody would dream of using a horse, to the mostly isolated African and South American tribes, where they lack the capability to make cloth. The variety of settings in Firefly really impressed me.
The Mono Project (open-source.NET, works on most operating systems) can use ASP.NET pages. You can either use a plug-in for Apache, or XPS, a "lightweight and simple webserver written in C#."
Parent is talking about using Expression suite for HTML/CSS editing. As with frontPage, it isn't intended to write dynamic pages. Unlike FrontPage, you CAN write dynamic pages with it, but the primary purpose is for creating and editing static pages. This doesn't involve any C#, VB.NET, or any other functional language except JavaScript. If you want to add tags for other active server languages, you can probably do that just fine, then use Eclipse or Vim or your favorite other editor to write your server code (complete with syntax highlighting).
Speaking of highlighting, there is far more that that to Expression. You can select a DOCTYPE, and it will offer the tags, properties, etc. that are supported. If you enter deprecated tags/parameters, or use elements outside the current doctype, it warns you. Basically, it can validate your web page as you write it. It also has autocompletion, etc. It will help build stylesheets, or inline style parameters, and they are even (oh shock and horror) W3C compliant. (I tested them, both using Opera and Firefox, and by submitting for W3C Validation online using Markup Validation and CSS Validation). I don't know if it has any CSS3 support, and I highly doubt it covers all of CSS2, but it isn't *only* IE6 compliant... although it does some IE6 workarounds for you, which makes web programming more convenient, at least.
WHAT?!? I have no idea how this reached +5, but... you clearly haven't done both Frontpage and ASP.NET. Frontpage's idea of machine-generated code is immense, unreadable blocks of JavaScript to do things like make buttons change color on mouseover. ASP.NET is all about dynamic pages; on static pages, it does fairly except try to dumb down the code for outdated browsers. Whether dumbed down or not, it is remarkably elegant for auto-generated code. I haven't used Expressions enough to give you a full list of the ways it differs from Frontpage, but it supports all browsers that I've tried it on.
.NET 1.1 wouldn't recognize many browesrs outside the IE family (and some old Netscape versions) so you had to explicitly tell it Firefox, etc. were modern browsers..NET 2.0 (used by Expressions) has excellent support for standards-compliant code and auto-detects most browsers; I have yet to see it render incorrectly in Firefox, or disasterously fail W3C Validation (at least, the versions it sends Opera usually pass, or have one trivial error that renders correctly even in Standards mode anyhow). For that matter, since it actually uses DTDs, it's already well ahead of Frontpage.
I write ASP.NET at work. Last year, using Visual Studio 2003 (.NET 1.1) I had to put in explicit checks for Firefox, and tell it to use the highest level of standards compliance available, or the pages looked like shit. We use Visual Studio 2005 now (which includes Visual Web Dev, and uses.NET 2.0, same as Expression), and I have found that it works beatifully in Firefox without any work-arounds. Yes, it even occasionally breaks IE6. The really funny thing was writing a page that rendered correctly in Firefox 1.5, but incorrectly (and almost identically) in IE6 and... Opera 9. Dead serious. I checked, and all three were using identical source. I ran it through W3C validation and it passed (DTD XHTML Transitional).
Of course, all this would have been even funnier if it hadn't required changing so much code, going over deadline, etc. To this day I'm not sure what was broken; it had something to do with multiple tables being declared adjacently. The only way to fix it was make the whole thing one big table; an interesting task as the "blocks" that had to be inserted in table rows came in several different flavors.
By your argument, you're credit card info, social security number, date of birth, home address, IP address, username(s), password(s), encryption key(s), emails (and addresses), photos, documents, "confidential" information, and anything else that is stored on your computer or can be represented numerically is, in effect, public domain. I have a great interest in these numbers, and since you don't "own" them, I have as much right to them as you do.
In case you're going to present some ridiculous argument, such as that I would undoubtedly use those numbers for illegal and malicious purposes, consider that I could (as a goodwill gesture to the businesses involved) send copies of this info to every malware writer, spammer, phisher, and company that profits from it. Since the numbers are not my property any more than they are yours, I cannot be held responsible for their use. Nonetheless, I have done nothing illegal as there is no law (AFAIK) against sending numbers to corporations or private individuals. You could charge them, or even me, with identity theft, but you would lose; your online identity consists of numbers (well, Binary digITS) and thus cannot be owned. What isn't owned can't be stolen, so there's no case for theft.
Of course, if your objection is that the woman was intentionally making these numbers available, whereas you are attmepting to hide "yours", I remind you that they are already available. Every single value entered in your computer is intentially placed in a storage device capable of being remotely accessed. Every time you file taxes, open or close a bank account, or buy something with plastic, you're giving out these numbers. You may trust that the people or devices which receive them will keep "your" numbers private, but to that person or device, you are simply a source of numbers. Although you may not choose to give the numbers to me (just like that woman probably wouldn't specifically upload files to the computers of ), as you have no ownership of the numbers, you cannot dictate what anybody else does with them. Thus, even if you refuse to give me the numbers I want, you can't stop me from using them should I acquire them anyhow, nor can you stop anybody else from giving them to me.
Please... don't tell me you honestly believe what you posted. I like to think my species is smarter than that.
P.S. Apologies for the assumtion of US citizenship. Adapt the category of numbers that I have requested as appropriate for your situation.
I got my license at 18, not 16 (yes, in the US) and even though I had NO American driving record, I saved a considerable amount of cash. Premiums are higher for 16-year-old than for 18-year-olds, period. Some companies may differ on this, but as the parent post said, statistics show 16 and 17 year old drivers are relatively likely to have accidents. My personal gues is that it's an issue of maturity... I know there are times I was temped to race other cars (not drags, just don't let them pass me) and similar dumb stunts when I was younger. I was also more likely to be distracted. As the subject says, you learn through mistakes... but you never have the chance to learn anything from a fatal one. Driving is a huge responsibility, and I have no issues whatsoever with my parents knowing if I'm going over 70 (actually, I don't care if they know I'm going over 20, but we have a pretty good relationship).
Now that I think of it, my iRiver T30 DID come with a CD... amazing what you never notice when you connect the USB port, Windows loads the driver, asks me if I want to open Explorer to browse or WMP to sync, and doesn't even require me to explicitly unmount it before disconnecting. (I'm guessing it uses write-through, so no caching. Don't try unplugging during a write/sync, but it seemed to have no problems with unexpected unmounting.)
I just bought an iRiver T30. It's tiny and light; much of its weight is the replacable AAA battery (up to 24 hours per charge). One reason to choose iRiver: Ogg Vorbis support. I don't think it does FLAC, but might (I don't have any files to test it) and it should support WMA Lossless. Don't know about AAC or M4A. Many iRiver players have FM tuners too.
I also like the audio quality, not that I'm any kind of audiophile. Pretty good equalizer options, including SRS WOW support and user-customizable EQ. I have not yet tested its microphone (built in audio recording, automatically compressed to MP3 I think) but that's another nice feature.
Cost me $38 for 1GB. No SD expansion port, but it works as a simple USB device (like most DAPs). WMP is an easy way to organize, make playlists, and sync (well, WMP11 is) but completely unneeded. I haven't hooked it up to my Linux box yet (JUST got it) but I would be very surprised if I couldn't copy audio on and off. Windows identifies its partition as standard FAT 16.
Such an environment would totally suck. Fortunately, it is all but guaranteed to never happen. Even if Microsoft got into making computers themselves (arguably already have) there will always be 3rd-party companies that refuse to restrict people that way. Anti-trust laws alone (never mind customer desire for choices, which shows no sign of going away) make anything like requiring every computer to exclusively run MS software ridiculous.
Furthermore, these GPL restrictions won't help you a bit if that insane day should come. MS uses no GPL code, certainly they wouldn't use any under GPLv3, so since new computers now only run MS software, the FSF is simply ignored until it becomes a group of diehards who prefer GNU tools over hundreds of GHz processors and GBs of RAM.
If you think that the GPLv3 would prevent your Trusted Computing nightmare, you're as delusional as if you think it will ever happen.
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Except for all the consumers who could each have saved hundreds of dollars each plus shipping time/charges, had they been able to buy it retail. Instead, they must pay the ebay scalpers that rushed in and bought the units 20 at a time.
And Media Center... and Collaboration... and Remote Desktop... IIS... IE... WMP... Defender... Movie Maker... Photo Gallery... Mail... Desktop Search... Sidebar... Calendar... Tablet tools... SideShow...
Plus all the more internal system stuff, like networking tools, SuperFetch, Computer Management, UAC, Windows Desktop Manager, domain support, Volume Shadow Copy, System Restore, improved Firewall, registry, all their stability monitoring and crash reporting, etc.
Lets not forget drivers for many thousands of devices, plus the kernel and all the standard libraries.
I'm actually impressed they managed to compress the Ultimate Edition installer to something as small as it is!
Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer are seperate, so that may help you out. There's also a new 3-finger salute to kill the desktop manager (which restarts automatically) without killing Explorer; this fixes many problems like video driver issues (the WDDM driver will simply restart. Of course, the desktop manager is only running if you're using a WDDM driver). However, I have never had a problem either killing Explorer or bringing it up again, so I'm not sure I can relate. In XP, the only things that totally brought the system down for me were blatantly bad ideas, like ntfsresize on a volume with a hibernated copy or Windows (it actually came out of Hibernate, but slowly spiraled to a BSOD)
Incidentally, if the option "Start Explorer windows in a seperate process" under Folder Options is checked, you won't lose programs just because your desktop hangs.
- UAC is good enough to be THE reason to upgrade; anybody who likes to tinker with their systems but doesn't like to be logged in as root/admin knows the pain of using XP. Vista makes it all go away
- Volume Shadow Copy (aka Previous Versions) is a superb tool, one I wish was built into every operating system. I've used it to fix everything from files I accidentally overwrote to an introduced problem with IE7 that made it almost unusable (I have Firefox, but actually use IE7 more often in Vista). Also available in Server 2003.
- Desktop search (or QuickSearch or whatever they call it) is my most common cause of "Vistalgia" (perhaps this means it's the feature I most want, although it's simply a convenience). I find myself doing things at work like pressing the Winkey, typing 'defe', and wondering why Windows Defender didn't load. I click on the box in the upper left of Outlook and end up searching the help files (rather than mail archive) for 'CSE down update'. I find myself wondering if there's ANY way to easily search the contents of history pages (without even opening the browser) in XP.
- Sidebar. It can be hacked into XP, but without the transparency it takes a lot of screen real-estate. I use it for a sticky-note style notepad, at-a-glance feed aggregator, quickie calculator, persistent performance monitor (superb for knowing what programs take all your CPU, or when you have too much open and need to close some stuff to free up memory), alternate timezone clock, and... Sudoku. That's not even all the currently available gadgets, and sooner or later I mgith write a few of my own.
- The new driver model (user space, not kernel space) and update system (no longer uses IE) both make tons of sense, and reduce reboots and hard crashes incredibly, even on patches and installs.
- Superfetch allows a very significant speed upgrade starting large programs (games, Visual Studio, etc.)
Need more? There's plenty. Try it before you write it off.The "sick, twisted coupling of Explorer.exe and Internet Explorer" is gone in Vista. I was able to install and use Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 without rebooting, I forget at the moment whether I had to reboot after installing PC-Cillin AV. I have installed / updated drivers for everything from mice and networks to video (WDDM rocks) without rebooting. The only updates that have forced me to reboot are kernel patches.
Of course, 5384 would, on fairly rare occasion (though still too often) crash for no immediately apparent reason (not even a BSOD, of which the only ones I got were faulty drivers for things like the AMD processor). Can't wait to see how RC1 (5600) works... should be done downloading sometime today.
Does XP in fact "automatically defrag"? I've never seen that before, and I have definitely come across machines with atrocious fragmentation. NTFS handles fragmentation much better than FAT did, but it does still cause a performance hit. I think either you have a scheduled defrag, are running OneCare or other scheduled system tuning software, or you've confused Vista and XP.
I'm not sure what the mechanics of EXT3 are (though I like it and use in my Linux box) but the journaling support in Vista's NTFS (backward compatible to earlier NTFS, like EXT3-EXT2) are (finally) complete such that there should be no data loss or corruption for power outage, even during write (older versions of NTFS don't take full advantage of journaling). As for fragmentation, I'm not sure what the deal with it on Linux is, but since Vista does background defrag while idle, I haven't had to run defrag once depite using the same build (5384) for over 3 months, with heavy downloading, installing, etc. I check the volume fragmentation from time to time (at least once a month, like I used to run it), but it's always quite low.
Although this might not be the response you were looking for, Vista really does a fantastic job of seperating kernel from drivers, to the point that even driver fuckups don't bring down the system. You can change or install pretty much any hardware without rebooting or even logging off, I've seen the (beta) video driver crash, and Vista simply re-loads it after a short interval of the display going funny, then blank (note this only wirks with WDDM drivers, legacy drivers still run in the kernel. Of course, those drivers probably aren't beta). Add that it's finally possible to easily run without admin priveleges constantly, and that Vista usesvirtualization, data execute protection, and address space randomization, and you actually have (once all the bugs are worked out) one of the most stable desktop OS's out there. Beta 2 (build 5384) could do pretty much any update other than a kernel patch without rebooting. I'll install RC1 as soon as it finishes downloading...
Care to name a desktop OS that you cannot crash, without being root/admin, without writing any code or using any 3rd-party software, in under 2 minutes work? I haven't yet found one, though it takes more work on Windows than most other OS's (admittedly due to the limitations of the Windows command line, something I normally curse).
Considering that, can you possibly expect the OS to be able to handle any compiled (or scripted) software, making all kind of complex demands on the system? Frankly, Windows XP (and hopefully Vista, the new build is downloading as I type) is the least likely to crash the entire OS of any of the main desktop OS's (including Linux); it will happily kill the process for you, but generally recovers completely, or at the worst allows a safe reboot.
Jeez, RTFA, or even the full summary (posted by others).
.NET team, to resolve issues he was running into, and he decided to join the team.
The point of his work was to see if it was true, as he had read, the the CLR didn't do well with dynamic languages. As he started work, he found it was quite the opposite - faster than C-based Python - and decided to write a full CLR implementation of Pythong (IronPython). MS invited him to work with their
Mono, at least the version I run on SUSE 10 (which uses Mono for some of its own code) has WinForms support. I haven't tried it yet; all my Mono code has been CLI, but it may even be possible to run Windows .NET GUI apps directly in Mono.
C# (or probably any language you can use with Visual Studio) can develop GUI's with the same level of effort... the only difference is in the procedural code and event handlers; the IDE writes all the GUI code for you. At that point it comes down to "Which VS language are you fastest/most productive/most familiar with?"
I'm not denying that Java is a reasonable choice for tis scenario; it is very readable and extremely portable. What most people don't realize is that the CLR (C# in particular) is nearly as portable to all the OS's you mentioned (okay, MacOS support takes a little work on deployment, but it runs perfectly on Linux and some Unixes... SUSE 10, for example, uses Mono for several integral programs.) C# also gives more control than Java (options for explicit memory management, function variables, etc.) and, unless you're using a JIT instead of the JVM, will often execute faster.
Oh, and speaking of "distributed client/server app involving tens of thousands of classes coded by dozens of people, reliable object transfer/messaging, and reliable easy access to various forms of communications" have you by any chance heard of a MMOG called of EVE-Online which, using "a special stackless version of Python" recently broke 30,000 concurrent users on one server?
Oh please... write some bloody ASP.NET, then whine if it doesn't work. ASP.NET 1.1 required a work-around (read: 1 line of code added to each page) for it to recognize Firefox as a high-level browser, but it would feed it basic HTML happily even without. ASP.NET 2.0 renders perfectly in Firefox, no workarounds needed, with advanced tags and properties, superb JavaScript support, and compliant (if not the full set of) CSS. I tested it using the W3C validation tools and it passed near perfectly.
I've written a couple of aspx pages that work in Firefox but actually render brokenly in IE6... would have been a great laugh if it wasn't such a PITA to fix!
Close, but I think you're slightly off. I use C# by preference (though I'm still learning it) and VB.NET at work (required; migrating from VB6 was enough of a headache, practically nobody here speaks a non-VB language). I have so far seen about the same productivity, though C# tends to *click* better in my mind.
.referenceEquals() if you want to check for the same object, rather than a clone, as opposed to the style of ==) means you can't cleanly do things like
.NET 2.0 compliant). VB isn't the only language that has required such; J# for example (despite being, syntactically, a near-perfect subset of C#) also requires extensions to the base CLR (on second thought, this may be for support of the Java package/namespace... it might work if written using only mscorlib).
Regarding differences, however, I don't think VB.NET (or possibly any language other than C#/Managed C++) allows explicit stack allocation, pointer manipulation, etc. For high-level stuff this is USUALLY not needed, and for low-level you probably wouldn't be using the CLR anyhow, but VB.NET is still behind C# (from what I've read, C# and the CLR were basically built for eachother, and C# is the purest and most complete expression of what the framework can handle).
Also, while you can do a lot by just changing keywords around, VB.NET contains some legacy mechanisms (there are two ways to cast bool to int, one of which produces -1 for True and one that produces 1, for backwards compatibility). Furthermore, since VB still has no really good conditional statement (IIf is a built-in function, and returns only a generic object, which is a pain and tends to need casting... oh, and the cast syntax is annoying) code tends to be longer, requiring either more lines or lots of horizontal viewing area. Their For loops are also partially crippled (no way to do things like
for (current = head; current != null && !(current.value.equals(searchItem)); current = current.next)
which, while a debatable coding practice, can reduce LOCs considerably and is preferred by some programmers in any case, just as some like
for (;;)
which I hate... and which is not possibly either in VB. This is a hassle for them even if I think they ought to use
while (true)
like the rest of us.) VB also uses = as both assignment operator and equality tester (to the point that you must use
if ( (current = current.next) == null)
or other little shortcuts that people are used to. VB doesn't require Delegates as explicitly, although you *might* be able to (so far I've gotten by with sloppier methods of raising/handling events, etc.) which can be a convenience (it took me a while to figure out how to trigger events in C#) but is also a crutch (inline functions, etc. can be handy tools that most VB programmers will never see).
In short, VB.NET is MS taking their "easy introduction to programming" language and pushing it into a powerful, full-featured runtime. They had to cut corners to do this, and it requires a fancier version of the CLR (this is why VB.NET on Mono is still incomplete, despite there being a compiler already; C# on Mono is pretty much fully
TO be fair, WC3's interludes (game-rendered cutscenes), while a great application of their 3D engine, are arguably inferior to the video quality of the original WC2 intro (let alone SC). That said, Blizzard, even though they have always produced spectacular in-game videos, makes their (incredible amounts of) money off gameplay... I still play WC1 on occasion, and aside from its minimally-animated intro video and mission start/end scenes it has no video... and even those minimal-quality (designed, I believe, for 320x240 resolution) videos doubled the installation footprint. Of course, compression has come a LONG way since then (WC3's videos are, I believe, perhaps 1/4 of the total install size) but the point remains that games, especially those designed for really good graphics systems (consoles and gaming PCs) can look good enough to satisfy the hordes without resorting to GBs of pre-rendered video. Consider EVE Online as well; it's a 3-year-old game on a 5(?)-year-old engine, and except for a gorgeous intro movie I have yet to see anything pre-rendered. The whole game, however, looks video-quality, even on my relatively weak ATI Mobility Radeon 200M... so much so that it makes me wonder if modern machines don't have the power to do almost ALL video rendering in real-time.
The whole EVE installation file (downloadable) would fit on one CD, and it's playable on dial-up (not that I would) which means ALL that video quality, including intro movie, fits into 700MB + DirectX 9b. I can't wait to see what it will look like in the DX10 engine supposedly under development...
Actually, animals in frontier sci-fi is a common theme. They are (relatively) cheap, self-repairing, self-replicating, can be bred as a business, don't need to have very high technology everywhere (which fits very well into the "outer rim world" phenomenon of Firefly), and may be more economic to "operate" on a world with lots of grass, etc. but relatively little refined fuel/highly machined parts/whatever. Consider the episode Ariel; flying cars, cleaning robots, computer consoles on every street corner... and no animals. Then consider Jaynestown, where indentured laborers are used to dig clay because they are essentially free, while the overlords live in fancy houses that have technology to prevent ships from taking off if they don't want them to. Or Heart of Gold, where women resort to prostitution because they can't afford anything better, but the local crime lord has hovercraft and handheld beam weapons that can burn through almost anything.
As for "If people can afford a cheap spaceship, they can certainly afford a cheap vehicle" what makes you think Mal couldn't? I'm sure he could have bought himself far more than the hovermule he used in the movie. However, he is obviously from, if not a core world, at least one of the less extreme rim worlds; the weapons used in the war are proof of that. The cheapness of Serenity is fitting with the pay a soldier receives, the fact that it flies at all is fitting with the fact that he was in a war, with some success, against a culture with the kind of technology you see on the core worlds.
How many people do you think can afford ships even that good? Consider the boy in the pilot episode sitting on a bunch of crates of chickens for sale... Consider the superstitious tribal village that kidnapped Simon; they can't even afford relatively trivial medicine, but they can swap some grains they grew for a piglet from some farmer's sow's litter. A horse is probably an expensive thing by their standards, but it's the sort of thing a rural economy can support easily. A spacecraft, or even hovercraft, though? Not bloody likely.
Returning to the clothes issue, real cowboy clothes were mostly a practical matter. Denim is durable and long-lasting, leather is plentiful on the frontier, wide-brimmed hats keep the sun out of your eyes and help prevent sunburn, bandanas have any number of uses, etc. The conecpt of similar clothes appearing on the "new" frontier isn't unlikely at all. Consdier lso that the languages which have survived are (American) English and Chinese, and seeing pieces of American frontier culture on the rim seems reasonable. "Cheap African clothing, or cheap desert nomad clothing" is impractical because they aren't IN the desert, and they don't seem to have antelope to kill for furs (assuming you meant bush clothing). As for the mix of clothing, take a good look at the people in the larger frontier towns... you'll see every sort. As for the drawl, I didn't notice it on many characters, but where they did have it, is it really so very unlikely? Relativley uneducated people living a "slow" (active, but not frantic) lifestyle may well adopt a slow, drawn-out speech.
On of (in my opinion) the coolest things about Firefly is just how good the story universe is. When you consider just how big planets are, just how many are in this system (that's about the only thing that bothers me with regard to realism), just how far apart they are, and the fact that as best I can tell nobody has FTL travel... it's entirely believable that the widely scattered outer worlds should be neglected almost to the level of 1800 Earth frontier. Compare the most advaned cities in the first world, where nobody would dream of using a horse, to the mostly isolated African and South American tribes, where they lack the capability to make cloth. The variety of settings in Firefly really impressed me.
The Mono Project (open-source .NET, works on most operating systems) can use ASP.NET pages. You can either use a plug-in for Apache, or XPS, a "lightweight and simple webserver written in C#."
You REALLY didn't read the parent post, did you?
Parent is talking about using Expression suite for HTML/CSS editing. As with frontPage, it isn't intended to write dynamic pages. Unlike FrontPage, you CAN write dynamic pages with it, but the primary purpose is for creating and editing static pages. This doesn't involve any C#, VB.NET, or any other functional language except JavaScript. If you want to add tags for other active server languages, you can probably do that just fine, then use Eclipse or Vim or your favorite other editor to write your server code (complete with syntax highlighting).
Speaking of highlighting, there is far more that that to Expression. You can select a DOCTYPE, and it will offer the tags, properties, etc. that are supported. If you enter deprecated tags/parameters, or use elements outside the current doctype, it warns you. Basically, it can validate your web page as you write it. It also has autocompletion, etc. It will help build stylesheets, or inline style parameters, and they are even (oh shock and horror) W3C compliant. (I tested them, both using Opera and Firefox, and by submitting for W3C Validation online using Markup Validation and CSS Validation). I don't know if it has any CSS3 support, and I highly doubt it covers all of CSS2, but it isn't *only* IE6 compliant... although it does some IE6 workarounds for you, which makes web programming more convenient, at least.
WHAT?!? I have no idea how this reached +5, but... you clearly haven't done both Frontpage and ASP.NET. Frontpage's idea of machine-generated code is immense, unreadable blocks of JavaScript to do things like make buttons change color on mouseover. ASP.NET is all about dynamic pages; on static pages, it does fairly except try to dumb down the code for outdated browsers. Whether dumbed down or not, it is remarkably elegant for auto-generated code. I haven't used Expressions enough to give you a full list of the ways it differs from Frontpage, but it supports all browsers that I've tried it on.
.NET 1.1 wouldn't recognize many browesrs outside the IE family (and some old Netscape versions) so you had to explicitly tell it Firefox, etc. were modern browsers. .NET 2.0 (used by Expressions) has excellent support for standards-compliant code and auto-detects most browsers; I have yet to see it render incorrectly in Firefox, or disasterously fail W3C Validation (at least, the versions it sends Opera usually pass, or have one trivial error that renders correctly even in Standards mode anyhow). For that matter, since it actually uses DTDs, it's already well ahead of Frontpage.
I write ASP.NET at work. Last year, using Visual Studio 2003 (.NET 1.1) I had to put in explicit checks for Firefox, and tell it to use the highest level of standards compliance available, or the pages looked like shit. We use Visual Studio 2005 now (which includes Visual Web Dev, and uses .NET 2.0, same as Expression), and I have found that it works beatifully in Firefox without any work-arounds. Yes, it even occasionally breaks IE6. The really funny thing was writing a page that rendered correctly in Firefox 1.5, but incorrectly (and almost identically) in IE6 and... Opera 9. Dead serious. I checked, and all three were using identical source. I ran it through W3C validation and it passed (DTD XHTML Transitional).
Of course, all this would have been even funnier if it hadn't required changing so much code, going over deadline, etc. To this day I'm not sure what was broken; it had something to do with multiple tables being declared adjacently. The only way to fix it was make the whole thing one big table; an interesting task as the "blocks" that had to be inserted in table rows came in several different flavors.
Bull shit!
By your argument, you're credit card info, social security number, date of birth, home address, IP address, username(s), password(s), encryption key(s), emails (and addresses), photos, documents, "confidential" information, and anything else that is stored on your computer or can be represented numerically is, in effect, public domain. I have a great interest in these numbers, and since you don't "own" them, I have as much right to them as you do.
In case you're going to present some ridiculous argument, such as that I would undoubtedly use those numbers for illegal and malicious purposes, consider that I could (as a goodwill gesture to the businesses involved) send copies of this info to every malware writer, spammer, phisher, and company that profits from it. Since the numbers are not my property any more than they are yours, I cannot be held responsible for their use. Nonetheless, I have done nothing illegal as there is no law (AFAIK) against sending numbers to corporations or private individuals. You could charge them, or even me, with identity theft, but you would lose; your online identity consists of numbers (well, Binary digITS) and thus cannot be owned. What isn't owned can't be stolen, so there's no case for theft.
Of course, if your objection is that the woman was intentionally making these numbers available, whereas you are attmepting to hide "yours", I remind you that they are already available. Every single value entered in your computer is intentially placed in a storage device capable of being remotely accessed. Every time you file taxes, open or close a bank account, or buy something with plastic, you're giving out these numbers. You may trust that the people or devices which receive them will keep "your" numbers private, but to that person or device, you are simply a source of numbers. Although you may not choose to give the numbers to me (just like that woman probably wouldn't specifically upload files to the computers of ), as you have no ownership of the numbers, you cannot dictate what anybody else does with them. Thus, even if you refuse to give me the numbers I want, you can't stop me from using them should I acquire them anyhow, nor can you stop anybody else from giving them to me.
Please... don't tell me you honestly believe what you posted. I like to think my species is smarter than that.
P.S. Apologies for the assumtion of US citizenship. Adapt the category of numbers that I have requested as appropriate for your situation.
I got my license at 18, not 16 (yes, in the US) and even though I had NO American driving record, I saved a considerable amount of cash. Premiums are higher for 16-year-old than for 18-year-olds, period. Some companies may differ on this, but as the parent post said, statistics show 16 and 17 year old drivers are relatively likely to have accidents. My personal gues is that it's an issue of maturity... I know there are times I was temped to race other cars (not drags, just don't let them pass me) and similar dumb stunts when I was younger. I was also more likely to be distracted. As the subject says, you learn through mistakes... but you never have the chance to learn anything from a fatal one. Driving is a huge responsibility, and I have no issues whatsoever with my parents knowing if I'm going over 70 (actually, I don't care if they know I'm going over 20, but we have a pretty good relationship).
Now that I think of it, my iRiver T30 DID come with a CD... amazing what you never notice when you connect the USB port, Windows loads the driver, asks me if I want to open Explorer to browse or WMP to sync, and doesn't even require me to explicitly unmount it before disconnecting. (I'm guessing it uses write-through, so no caching. Don't try unplugging during a write/sync, but it seemed to have no problems with unexpected unmounting.)
I just bought an iRiver T30. It's tiny and light; much of its weight is the replacable AAA battery (up to 24 hours per charge). One reason to choose iRiver: Ogg Vorbis support. I don't think it does FLAC, but might (I don't have any files to test it) and it should support WMA Lossless. Don't know about AAC or M4A. Many iRiver players have FM tuners too.
I also like the audio quality, not that I'm any kind of audiophile. Pretty good equalizer options, including SRS WOW support and user-customizable EQ. I have not yet tested its microphone (built in audio recording, automatically compressed to MP3 I think) but that's another nice feature.
Cost me $38 for 1GB. No SD expansion port, but it works as a simple USB device (like most DAPs). WMP is an easy way to organize, make playlists, and sync (well, WMP11 is) but completely unneeded. I haven't hooked it up to my Linux box yet (JUST got it) but I would be very surprised if I couldn't copy audio on and off. Windows identifies its partition as standard FAT 16.
Yes and no.
Such an environment would totally suck. Fortunately, it is all but guaranteed to never happen. Even if Microsoft got into making computers themselves (arguably already have) there will always be 3rd-party companies that refuse to restrict people that way. Anti-trust laws alone (never mind customer desire for choices, which shows no sign of going away) make anything like requiring every computer to exclusively run MS software ridiculous.
Furthermore, these GPL restrictions won't help you a bit if that insane day should come. MS uses no GPL code, certainly they wouldn't use any under GPLv3, so since new computers now only run MS software, the FSF is simply ignored until it becomes a group of diehards who prefer GNU tools over hundreds of GHz processors and GBs of RAM.
If you think that the GPLv3 would prevent your Trusted Computing nightmare, you're as delusional as if you think it will ever happen.