Testing is "easier" in the sense that developing in PHP is easier. It doesn't require as much skill or knowledge to accomplish *something*, but just because the minimum bar for "success" is lower doesn't mean you're doing it right. In other words, "testing" isn't easy; bad testing is easy. Good testing actually requires a fair bit of development itself, but it's a different kind of development; try writing a really good distributed load tester or fuzzing framework some time.
Depends... security test brings down quite "big bucks" and I come from a more "typical" test background. However, it's definitely a bit of a niche job market (security test, I mean). More niche than it should be, but that's what keeps the demand (and salaries) high.
Type 1 diabetes (also called IDDM - the ID stands for Insulin-Dependent, for the benefit of those unfamiliar) can be less of a problem on an extremely low-carb diet - that is, if you needed to survive as long as possible without insulin, if you could drink a ton of water and eat nothing with carbs in it and you might survive for 1-2 months - but in the end your body does need glucose, does produce it from food, and if it can't absorb it (because it doesn't have insulin) you will die.
That's actually the thing that concerns me about this treatment. A very good friend of mine with IDDM has been forced to take insane risks with her blood sugar because she didn't have a job that provided health insurance, but she worked part time at a couple jobs (this is right out of college) and thus made just enough money to not be eligible for the various aid programs. She could no longer afford the injection kits for her pump (they have to be replaced frequently) and could barely afford the insulin itself on top of her other living expenses. Diabetes is a real bitch of an expense if you don't have insurance...
This almost exactly mirrors my experience. I just don't *use* Metro stuff for anything except a couple of apps that I snap to the side of the Desktop (Skype, mostly) and a few full-screen games (except that most of the games I play aren't in the Windows store at all...)
Like you, I find the Search change to be literally the most annoying thing about the OS. Not the Start screen, or the fact that it's what you boot to (I don't give a damn about that screen, or the menu it replaced; either is visible for only a few ms before I start typing the thing I want to run). I do appreciate that the number of visible items in each "category" is no longer capped at 5 or whatever, but they need to find a middle ground between that and not showing the other categories at all (also, it's typically faster for me to refine my search than to switch category).
With that said, you can still search for things like "devmgmt.msc" (Device Management) and they will show up in the default list. You do need to type the full filename, though.
Not surprising. The difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero is that the former is based on the New Coke flavor, while the latter was specifically to produce a diet cola for people who dislike Diet Coke (which is plenty of people - if I wanted it to taste like Pepsi, I'd drink Diet Pepsi).
Or the Tibetans... oh wait, there aren't really any Tibetans anymore. OK, how about the Nepalese, who share a border with the part of China that was once Tibet, and who the Chinese have built a large modern road (with bridges capable of supporting tanks) to their border?
China's grip on their part of the world is growing slowly, not (mostly) in the crushing impact of military combat that people see on TV, but in the slow subjugation of the nearby countries' economies and military potential, until there really isn't anything left to fight when they move in.
Funny and concerning, all at once. If some really good games *do* come of this, I don't want them to end up dropped on the floor unplayable as soon as Google decides they don't care anymore or aren't making enough money at it.
[Heroes Of] Might And Magic series, at least the earlier set of them, were pretty big. A-list, perhaps not (although it depends what you go for; a serious first-person shooter gamer will have no reason to know this company, but to a turn-based strategy gamer they were a pretty big deal) but very successful for a time, and (IMO the more important point) developer of a number of games that are still popular now, over a decade later.
Lucasfilm is pretty obviously a big deal, even if not around anymore; the produced a number of very popular games.
Besides, I'd really rather have somebody who made good games than somebody who made big money. Whever the hell keeps churning out the Madden series? Waste of developer resources.
Compatibility Mode only swaps out the user agent string and the rendering engine. It doesn't change anything else, such as browser security settings. For example, if the site is using SSL 2.0 only, then no modern browser will allow a connection to it (2.0 being rather broken). However, an old enough browser might still allow 2.0, which is a setting independent of the rendering engine.
there is no federal law concerning marriage at all
How about the US federal tax code? Close enough? A couple "married filing jointly" receive federal tax benefits not available to the unmarried... or to those who are married but the federal court refuses to recognize it. Try gelling a married gay couple that "there is no federal law concerning marriage at all" on April 15th and see how far that gets you.
Yeah... marriage has *always* been a legal thing (specifically, it usually falls under property laws, from archaic laws which effectively or literally defined the wife as the property of the husband up to the modern versions where it determines things like next of kin). It just used to be that laws were created by the religious leaders of the community. However, if you look back into the very earliest experiments with freedom (or at least tolerance) of religion and secular laws, they all still speak of marriage. As long as there have been governments, marriage has never *not* been a government thing.
Considering that they themselves keep releasing Win32 and.NET apps... yeah, that's not happening. They might like it if it could - the sandbox that WinRT is designed to accommodate breaks most Win32 apps, so almost nobody bothers to sandbox their software (some web browsers and Adobe Reader are the only things that come to mind) but given that an RT app can't even launch another program directly... yean, not happening.
What you heard is correct. The full Win32 API is supported, as are most of the modern Windows libraries. Some of the older libs are missing - older versions of DirectX, for example - but most things are there, or can be made available.
There is a list (with links) of ported and known-to-work programs and libraries here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=36534446 Note that many.NET programs work just fine without even recompiling, as the default way to compile.NET programs produces an architecture-independent intermediate language (Common Intermediate Language or CIL, formerly called MSIL). However, that only works if they don't require anything that was deprecated and removed in.NET 4.0; Windows RT doesn't have any older versions of.NET than 4.0.
As for the rest, yes, you can recompile apps just fine. Most of what we have are open-source apps for Windows that were already being built using Visual Studio, although there are a few surprises in there; for example, you can get an official RT build of (G)Vim from ftp.vim.org. Some stuff has been too difficult to port thus far, though (there's a project to port Chromium, but it's going very slowly). There is a thread with instructions on how to set up Visual Studio 2012 (older versions won't work) for compiling RT desktop apps; it's pretty simple (change one line in a config file, then add the "ARM" platform in the place where you usually target "Win32" or "x64"). More info: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2096820
There are actually also some projects specifically targeting RT. Some are simple utilities and tweaker tools to just make life a bit easier, but the really big impressive one is an x86 emulation (well, dynamic recompilation) compatibility layer for running "normal" Windows apps on Windows RT. The performance obviously suffers, and many libraries don't work yet so there are only a relative handful of apps known to work with the current beta version (mostly but not entirely games), but it's under active development and new builds with improved performance, compatibility, and features are released about every couple weeks. Project thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2095934
How do you make something less dangerous than approximately the noise of popping a blown-up paper bag and a streamer of smoke? This was an explosive only in the sense that a pop-bottle rocket is a "missile" - technically true, but you'd have to be gripping it with both hands to get any meaningful injury out of it.
Your items 1 and 2 are not explanations, and arguably #1 is even false (they have to do with each other in that the DA in question was the same person, an explanation for whose behavior we are seeking). #3 is true, although as a general rule we prosecute people who use "firearms" (even though BB guns are not technically firearms, they resemble them and are used for essentially the same purpose) to kill somebody regardless of them being on school property or not so it's a pretty weak argument for why one kid should get the book thrown at them and the other not. #4 is stretching the truth a bit. It's true that Kiera (the black girl) was intentionally mixing chemicals, but it's also true that Skyler Richardson (the white boy) was intentionally cocking a weapon, pointing it at his brother's head, and pulling the trigger. Kiera considered it an experiment, with an interest in what would happen (a small "bang" and a stream of smoke), while Skyler thought the gun was unloaded (no BB; this obviously wasn't the case). Neither one intended any harm, of course, but of the two of them the kid who was intentionally shooting a gun at his brother's head strikes me as the one who should have been less surprised by the direct consequence. #5 is true, of course, but school shootings and such aren't that far in the past either. The "bomb" in question is less impressive than many firecrackers, although it produces more smoke. Meanwhile, even bringing a toy gun that can't shoot anything at all to school is technically grounds for expulsion and arrest (admittedly, I'm not from Florida and don't know if the law is different there), but apparently actually shooting somebody with one is OK so long as you didn't know it was loaded? Don't bother pointing out that BB guns aren't *supposed* to kill people; you'd just about have needed to swallow Kiera's experiment to be hurt by it.
I'll grant you that there is no proof that the differences in prosecution are racially motivated, but you've failed to convince me that they aren't. Which of the differences above do *you* think is the most likely reason?
Win8 has full kernel debugging (including "rewrite in memory" capability). Windows RT does not, but that didn't stop people from overwriting a kernel value in memory (how the "jailbreak" for RT devices works). You can also install your own drivers on Win8 (or on RT post-"Jailbreak" if you can find a copy of the RT DDK). I don't see any sign of either of those features going away for Win8; a disgusting number of software products require drivers for DRM, for example.
The Skype app is good enough I haven't bothered to install a standalone one. The only others I use much are games. Pretty much all of the other "utility" apps are crap, and only a few of the apps offer any meaningful advantage over using the relevant site in a web browser.
"Free" money? Those apps didn't write themselves. Nor is it free to provide the services that the apps rely upon. Do you expect that your so-called "real job" would come with a paycheck as compensation for the work, or would you say anybody who expects that just wants "free money" as well?
I can understand the hatred of in-app ads, although in the real world most people are less upset by ads than by the concept of actually *paying* for the software they use. You went a bit off the deep end when you went on your rant about developers of ad-supported apps, though. Nobody is entitled to successful business or anything like that, but the user you quoted has a perfectly legitimate concern: through no fault of their own, the monetization strategy they were using fell through. Would you tell somebody to "get a real job [with job security and pensions]" if they complained about suddenly being part of a massive layoff?
It was also broken months ago; my RT device unlocks that restriction automatically upon bootup (company bought me one as a research target) which is how I'm able to get away with so little use of Metro.
Would you rather pay for your apps? Most apps that I've looked at (admittedly this is very few; I find Metro to be largely useless) seem to have both paid (typically $1-$5) "Pro" versions and also free (ad-supported) versions. Sometimes the ad-supported version is simply the trial version of the paid app, other times it is listed as a separate app. The user has choices.
Where have you heard that? Considering that Win8 is fully functional as a general-purpose OS (and indeed adds many distinctly non-tablet features, such as Client Hyper-V, the Win+X / right-click-on-Start menu, Windows To Go, improvements to Task Manager, and so on), and that Windows "Blue" (which may or may not be Win9) is probably (based on the leaked early builds) adding back the ability to display the Start button at all times and to boot straight to the desktop, I'm not sure how much less ground it could lose on the general purpose front...
Findstr is surprisingly close to grep. It's a new set of arcane command line switches to learn, of course, and even if its regex syntax is identical to grep's (unlikely, though I've never done a proper comparison), you have to deal with the oddities of CMD when it comes to character escaping. However, to state "There is no equivalent to grep" just shows your ignorance of the platform. There's actually a lot of Unix-esque commands in Windows that many people don't know ("tasklist" and "taskkill", "mklink" and "robocopy", the hugely overloaded "net" and the powerful "netsh"). That's not even counting all the stuff in Powershell.
I'm not sure what exactly you consider a "basic scripting language" but modern versions of Windows ship with at least four different scripting languages supported: Command scripts (a superset of DOS batch files, and more primitive than Bourne shell scripts but roughly equivalent in usage), Powershell scripts (possibly a little *too* powerful in some cases, and verbose to write, but capable of nearly anything right up to some GUI stuff), JScript (JavaScript plus some extensions, very powerful if used correctly; runs in Windows Script Host), and VBScript (a BASIC dialect somewhat similar to Visual Basic and intended for scripting small macros and such but can be used for larger tasks; runs in Windows Script Host). Windows Script Host is also extensible - there are plugins for many scripting langauges, including Perl and Ruby - and has been built in for even longer than Powershell (which is only included by default in Vista and later, though is available for XP).
I'll grant you that Windows has no decent code editor out of the box (just because Notepad will happily open.c files doesn't mean it should!) and that the compiler toolchain is not installed by default (although it's a free download from Microsoft). However, it's really nowhere near as bad as you seem to think. They really should provide a better editor, though!
If what you really want is a Unix-like environment in Windows, though, consider Interix. Running in NT's POSIX-compliant Subsystem for Unix Applications (SUA), it's only available on the high-end Windows editions, but it's worth looking into. It integrates much better with Windows than Cygwin does (as a random example, setuid/setgid work) while also feeling much more Unix-y (executables do not need extensions, the file system can be treated as case-sensitive, etc.). Interix comes with a working GCC-based compiler toolchain, although you can build SUA executables using Visual Studio and/or the Windows compiler (MSVC) as well, if you want. SUA is based a moderately old POSIX standard and doesn't support some of the newer stuff, but for "give me a shell where I can run my *nix commands on Windows" it does an excellent job. You can read more about it, including getting the download links, at http://suacommunity.com/ (not associated with the site aside from being a forum member there).
Do you also specifically seek out stores with exit scanners or security devices of some sort to shoplift at? Does hearing a warning on the radio about DUI patrols lead you to go on drunken joyrides? I mean, you literally just explained that your response to things intended to prevent criminal activities is to turn criminal. So much for personal responsibility for your actions... "It's not *my* fault, your honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury; the media companies made me do it! How could they possibly think that making me wait an extra four seconds before seeing a movie is okay? They were asking for it!"
In the case of the CD, which is (unlike the absurd complaint of the FBI warning) actually a legitimate case of not receiving what you paid for, did you ever consider the morally justifiable action of taking the disc and its case back to the store and pointing out that it's defective? I mean, they can't legally sell you a music CD as an Audio Compact Disc with the CD(R) logo if it won't play in players designated as such. Attempts at music CD DRM have been rare and very abortive, for exactly that reason; companies who tried to do it anyhow got sued and lost. As a side note, your car couldn't have played your vinyl records either, and (depending on how old it was) quite likely couldn't have played burned CD Rs, certainly not if they weren't finalized correctly. If somebody sold you an unfinalized CD R as an audio CD, you would have every right to demand a refund for it too.
The logical conclusion to draw from your post is that you are a sociopath and at some point decided it was no longer worth pretending to have a conscience for purposes of conformity. Am I wrong?
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Testing is "easier" in the sense that developing in PHP is easier. It doesn't require as much skill or knowledge to accomplish *something*, but just because the minimum bar for "success" is lower doesn't mean you're doing it right. In other words, "testing" isn't easy; bad testing is easy. Good testing actually requires a fair bit of development itself, but it's a different kind of development; try writing a really good distributed load tester or fuzzing framework some time.
Depends... security test brings down quite "big bucks" and I come from a more "typical" test background. However, it's definitely a bit of a niche job market (security test, I mean). More niche than it should be, but that's what keeps the demand (and salaries) high.
Type 1 diabetes (also called IDDM - the ID stands for Insulin-Dependent, for the benefit of those unfamiliar) can be less of a problem on an extremely low-carb diet - that is, if you needed to survive as long as possible without insulin, if you could drink a ton of water and eat nothing with carbs in it and you might survive for 1-2 months - but in the end your body does need glucose, does produce it from food, and if it can't absorb it (because it doesn't have insulin) you will die.
That's actually the thing that concerns me about this treatment. A very good friend of mine with IDDM has been forced to take insane risks with her blood sugar because she didn't have a job that provided health insurance, but she worked part time at a couple jobs (this is right out of college) and thus made just enough money to not be eligible for the various aid programs. She could no longer afford the injection kits for her pump (they have to be replaced frequently) and could barely afford the insulin itself on top of her other living expenses. Diabetes is a real bitch of an expense if you don't have insurance...
This almost exactly mirrors my experience. I just don't *use* Metro stuff for anything except a couple of apps that I snap to the side of the Desktop (Skype, mostly) and a few full-screen games (except that most of the games I play aren't in the Windows store at all...)
Like you, I find the Search change to be literally the most annoying thing about the OS. Not the Start screen, or the fact that it's what you boot to (I don't give a damn about that screen, or the menu it replaced; either is visible for only a few ms before I start typing the thing I want to run). I do appreciate that the number of visible items in each "category" is no longer capped at 5 or whatever, but they need to find a middle ground between that and not showing the other categories at all (also, it's typically faster for me to refine my search than to switch category).
With that said, you can still search for things like "devmgmt.msc" (Device Management) and they will show up in the default list. You do need to type the full filename, though.
Not surprising. The difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero is that the former is based on the New Coke flavor, while the latter was specifically to produce a diet cola for people who dislike Diet Coke (which is plenty of people - if I wanted it to taste like Pepsi, I'd drink Diet Pepsi).
Or the Tibetans... oh wait, there aren't really any Tibetans anymore. OK, how about the Nepalese, who share a border with the part of China that was once Tibet, and who the Chinese have built a large modern road (with bridges capable of supporting tanks) to their border?
China's grip on their part of the world is growing slowly, not (mostly) in the crushing impact of military combat that people see on TV, but in the slow subjugation of the nearby countries' economies and military potential, until there really isn't anything left to fight when they move in.
Funny and concerning, all at once. If some really good games *do* come of this, I don't want them to end up dropped on the floor unplayable as soon as Google decides they don't care anymore or aren't making enough money at it.
[Heroes Of] Might And Magic series, at least the earlier set of them, were pretty big. A-list, perhaps not (although it depends what you go for; a serious first-person shooter gamer will have no reason to know this company, but to a turn-based strategy gamer they were a pretty big deal) but very successful for a time, and (IMO the more important point) developer of a number of games that are still popular now, over a decade later.
Lucasfilm is pretty obviously a big deal, even if not around anymore; the produced a number of very popular games.
Besides, I'd really rather have somebody who made good games than somebody who made big money. Whever the hell keeps churning out the Madden series? Waste of developer resources.
Compatibility Mode only swaps out the user agent string and the rendering engine. It doesn't change anything else, such as browser security settings. For example, if the site is using SSL 2.0 only, then no modern browser will allow a connection to it (2.0 being rather broken). However, an old enough browser might still allow 2.0, which is a setting independent of the rendering engine.
How about the US federal tax code? Close enough? A couple "married filing jointly" receive federal tax benefits not available to the unmarried... or to those who are married but the federal court refuses to recognize it. Try gelling a married gay couple that "there is no federal law concerning marriage at all" on April 15th and see how far that gets you.
TL;DR: You're full of bullshit.
Yeah... marriage has *always* been a legal thing (specifically, it usually falls under property laws, from archaic laws which effectively or literally defined the wife as the property of the husband up to the modern versions where it determines things like next of kin). It just used to be that laws were created by the religious leaders of the community. However, if you look back into the very earliest experiments with freedom (or at least tolerance) of religion and secular laws, they all still speak of marriage. As long as there have been governments, marriage has never *not* been a government thing.
Considering that they themselves keep releasing Win32 and .NET apps... yeah, that's not happening. They might like it if it could - the sandbox that WinRT is designed to accommodate breaks most Win32 apps, so almost nobody bothers to sandbox their software (some web browsers and Adobe Reader are the only things that come to mind) but given that an RT app can't even launch another program directly... yean, not happening.
What you heard is correct. The full Win32 API is supported, as are most of the modern Windows libraries. Some of the older libs are missing - older versions of DirectX, for example - but most things are there, or can be made available.
There is a list (with links) of ported and known-to-work programs and libraries here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=36534446 .NET programs work just fine without even recompiling, as the default way to compile .NET programs produces an architecture-independent intermediate language (Common Intermediate Language or CIL, formerly called MSIL). However, that only works if they don't require anything that was deprecated and removed in .NET 4.0; Windows RT doesn't have any older versions of .NET than 4.0.
Note that many
As for the rest, yes, you can recompile apps just fine. Most of what we have are open-source apps for Windows that were already being built using Visual Studio, although there are a few surprises in there; for example, you can get an official RT build of (G)Vim from ftp.vim.org. Some stuff has been too difficult to port thus far, though (there's a project to port Chromium, but it's going very slowly). There is a thread with instructions on how to set up Visual Studio 2012 (older versions won't work) for compiling RT desktop apps; it's pretty simple (change one line in a config file, then add the "ARM" platform in the place where you usually target "Win32" or "x64"). More info: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2096820
There are actually also some projects specifically targeting RT. Some are simple utilities and tweaker tools to just make life a bit easier, but the really big impressive one is an x86 emulation (well, dynamic recompilation) compatibility layer for running "normal" Windows apps on Windows RT. The performance obviously suffers, and many libraries don't work yet so there are only a relative handful of apps known to work with the current beta version (mostly but not entirely games), but it's under active development and new builds with improved performance, compatibility, and features are released about every couple weeks. Project thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2095934
How do you make something less dangerous than approximately the noise of popping a blown-up paper bag and a streamer of smoke? This was an explosive only in the sense that a pop-bottle rocket is a "missile" - technically true, but you'd have to be gripping it with both hands to get any meaningful injury out of it.
Your items 1 and 2 are not explanations, and arguably #1 is even false (they have to do with each other in that the DA in question was the same person, an explanation for whose behavior we are seeking).
#3 is true, although as a general rule we prosecute people who use "firearms" (even though BB guns are not technically firearms, they resemble them and are used for essentially the same purpose) to kill somebody regardless of them being on school property or not so it's a pretty weak argument for why one kid should get the book thrown at them and the other not.
#4 is stretching the truth a bit. It's true that Kiera (the black girl) was intentionally mixing chemicals, but it's also true that Skyler Richardson (the white boy) was intentionally cocking a weapon, pointing it at his brother's head, and pulling the trigger. Kiera considered it an experiment, with an interest in what would happen (a small "bang" and a stream of smoke), while Skyler thought the gun was unloaded (no BB; this obviously wasn't the case). Neither one intended any harm, of course, but of the two of them the kid who was intentionally shooting a gun at his brother's head strikes me as the one who should have been less surprised by the direct consequence.
#5 is true, of course, but school shootings and such aren't that far in the past either. The "bomb" in question is less impressive than many firecrackers, although it produces more smoke. Meanwhile, even bringing a toy gun that can't shoot anything at all to school is technically grounds for expulsion and arrest (admittedly, I'm not from Florida and don't know if the law is different there), but apparently actually shooting somebody with one is OK so long as you didn't know it was loaded? Don't bother pointing out that BB guns aren't *supposed* to kill people; you'd just about have needed to swallow Kiera's experiment to be hurt by it.
I'll grant you that there is no proof that the differences in prosecution are racially motivated, but you've failed to convince me that they aren't. Which of the differences above do *you* think is the most likely reason?
Win8 has full kernel debugging (including "rewrite in memory" capability). Windows RT does not, but that didn't stop people from overwriting a kernel value in memory (how the "jailbreak" for RT devices works). You can also install your own drivers on Win8 (or on RT post-"Jailbreak" if you can find a copy of the RT DDK). I don't see any sign of either of those features going away for Win8; a disgusting number of software products require drivers for DRM, for example.
The Skype app is good enough I haven't bothered to install a standalone one. The only others I use much are games. Pretty much all of the other "utility" apps are crap, and only a few of the apps offer any meaningful advantage over using the relevant site in a web browser.
"Free" money? Those apps didn't write themselves. Nor is it free to provide the services that the apps rely upon. Do you expect that your so-called "real job" would come with a paycheck as compensation for the work, or would you say anybody who expects that just wants "free money" as well?
I can understand the hatred of in-app ads, although in the real world most people are less upset by ads than by the concept of actually *paying* for the software they use. You went a bit off the deep end when you went on your rant about developers of ad-supported apps, though. Nobody is entitled to successful business or anything like that, but the user you quoted has a perfectly legitimate concern: through no fault of their own, the monetization strategy they were using fell through. Would you tell somebody to "get a real job [with job security and pensions]" if they complained about suddenly being part of a massive layoff?
Plenty of servers host really big image files... NASA, for example, has a handful of great ones.
It was also broken months ago; my RT device unlocks that restriction automatically upon bootup (company bought me one as a research target) which is how I'm able to get away with so little use of Metro.
Would you rather pay for your apps? Most apps that I've looked at (admittedly this is very few; I find Metro to be largely useless) seem to have both paid (typically $1-$5) "Pro" versions and also free (ad-supported) versions. Sometimes the ad-supported version is simply the trial version of the paid app, other times it is listed as a separate app. The user has choices.
Where have you heard that? Considering that Win8 is fully functional as a general-purpose OS (and indeed adds many distinctly non-tablet features, such as Client Hyper-V, the Win+X / right-click-on-Start menu, Windows To Go, improvements to Task Manager, and so on), and that Windows "Blue" (which may or may not be Win9) is probably (based on the leaked early builds) adding back the ability to display the Start button at all times and to boot straight to the desktop, I'm not sure how much less ground it could lose on the general purpose front...
Findstr is surprisingly close to grep. It's a new set of arcane command line switches to learn, of course, and even if its regex syntax is identical to grep's (unlikely, though I've never done a proper comparison), you have to deal with the oddities of CMD when it comes to character escaping. However, to state "There is no equivalent to grep" just shows your ignorance of the platform. There's actually a lot of Unix-esque commands in Windows that many people don't know ("tasklist" and "taskkill", "mklink" and "robocopy", the hugely overloaded "net" and the powerful "netsh"). That's not even counting all the stuff in Powershell.
I'm not sure what exactly you consider a "basic scripting language" but modern versions of Windows ship with at least four different scripting languages supported: Command scripts (a superset of DOS batch files, and more primitive than Bourne shell scripts but roughly equivalent in usage), Powershell scripts (possibly a little *too* powerful in some cases, and verbose to write, but capable of nearly anything right up to some GUI stuff), JScript (JavaScript plus some extensions, very powerful if used correctly; runs in Windows Script Host), and VBScript (a BASIC dialect somewhat similar to Visual Basic and intended for scripting small macros and such but can be used for larger tasks; runs in Windows Script Host). Windows Script Host is also extensible - there are plugins for many scripting langauges, including Perl and Ruby - and has been built in for even longer than Powershell (which is only included by default in Vista and later, though is available for XP).
I'll grant you that Windows has no decent code editor out of the box (just because Notepad will happily open .c files doesn't mean it should!) and that the compiler toolchain is not installed by default (although it's a free download from Microsoft). However, it's really nowhere near as bad as you seem to think. They really should provide a better editor, though!
If what you really want is a Unix-like environment in Windows, though, consider Interix. Running in NT's POSIX-compliant Subsystem for Unix Applications (SUA), it's only available on the high-end Windows editions, but it's worth looking into. It integrates much better with Windows than Cygwin does (as a random example, setuid/setgid work) while also feeling much more Unix-y (executables do not need extensions, the file system can be treated as case-sensitive, etc.). Interix comes with a working GCC-based compiler toolchain, although you can build SUA executables using Visual Studio and/or the Windows compiler (MSVC) as well, if you want. SUA is based a moderately old POSIX standard and doesn't support some of the newer stuff, but for "give me a shell where I can run my *nix commands on Windows" it does an excellent job. You can read more about it, including getting the download links, at http://suacommunity.com/ (not associated with the site aside from being a forum member there).
Do you also specifically seek out stores with exit scanners or security devices of some sort to shoplift at? Does hearing a warning on the radio about DUI patrols lead you to go on drunken joyrides? I mean, you literally just explained that your response to things intended to prevent criminal activities is to turn criminal. So much for personal responsibility for your actions... "It's not *my* fault, your honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury; the media companies made me do it! How could they possibly think that making me wait an extra four seconds before seeing a movie is okay? They were asking for it!"
In the case of the CD, which is (unlike the absurd complaint of the FBI warning) actually a legitimate case of not receiving what you paid for, did you ever consider the morally justifiable action of taking the disc and its case back to the store and pointing out that it's defective? I mean, they can't legally sell you a music CD as an Audio Compact Disc with the CD(R) logo if it won't play in players designated as such. Attempts at music CD DRM have been rare and very abortive, for exactly that reason; companies who tried to do it anyhow got sued and lost. As a side note, your car couldn't have played your vinyl records either, and (depending on how old it was) quite likely couldn't have played burned CD Rs, certainly not if they weren't finalized correctly. If somebody sold you an unfinalized CD R as an audio CD, you would have every right to demand a refund for it too.
The logical conclusion to draw from your post is that you are a sociopath and at some point decided it was no longer worth pretending to have a conscience for purposes of conformity. Am I wrong?