There are some who claim that its somewhat verbose syntax ('dim varname as vartype' instead of 'vartype varname;' for example) and Basic-like loop and code structure make it an inherently worse language. It looks kind of ugly to an experienced developer in C-style languages, but I honestly don't see much basis for disliking it beyond a degree of elitism that drives one to scorn a highly readable "easy to learn" language.
Under the covers, aside from a few assemblies specificlaly to aid compatibility with legacy VB code, VB.NET is just another.NET language. It's a little less powerful than C# in some ways - for example, I don't think it allows unsafe code bloacks (direct pointer access) - but it's not any slower, or less efficient, or less compatible (it works in Mono, incidentally), or anything of that nature.
Chrome and Firefox both use the Netscape plugin API, which run code at the "raw executable" level. The proccess which host the code are sandboxed to a degree, true - but bringing that up totally doesn't help your case, because IE was doing that before either Chrome or Firefox (not surprising, since the Low IL process integrity level used for IE's Protected Mode and Chrome's whatever-they-call-it sandboxes was, of course, developed by Microsoft).
You didn't honestly think that Flash on Firefox or Chrome was safer than ActiveX on IE, did you? It's another API for the same functionality. The only significant difference today (barring past exploits where ActiveX controls could be installed without user control, which also could have happened with the NPAPI) is that there's a lot more ActiveX binaries installed on a typical system than there are NPAPI binaries.
You don't even need Windows today. It's a little awkward using a cross-compiler, but not *that* hard. C# and VB.NET apps can be coded and compiled using Mono. For that matter, Windows has supported "HTML Applications" written using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for years now, though nobody much uses them.
On the other hand, to use the new "Windows Runtime" Win8 APIs that make these new apps really integrate with the OS, you'll want at least a reference guide. Building the pieces into an app package, testing it, and submitting it to the app store all probably won't be possible until Wine catches up.
Based on... what? Did you actually watch the presentation (it's a free video stream) or did you simply ready the heavily slanted summary?
Productivity improvements: Remote Desktop with support for multiple connections from the same app (essentially a tabbed interface).. Improved taskbar support for multi-monitor (span monitors, each part showing only icons for apps present on the monitor in question). Lower base RAM utilization means you don't need powerful hardware or to wait for disk swapping as often. Built-in support for re-imaging your box if something goes wrong. Built-in Hyper-V support, even in client SKUs, makes it extremely easy to run VMs.
There's probably many more - enterprise customers have always been a huge part of Microsoft's target market, and I'm sure they still are - but those were specifically demoed today.
Good thing it's largely optional. The only part of interface that is really "Windows Phone" like is the new Start screen (replacing the Start menu) and if you use Start like I do - hit the Windows button, type a few letters to identify an app, hit Enter - your usage won't be affected at all. You only need to look at the new start screen if you're trying to find an app visually instead of by search, and I think it's probably quite acceptable for that.
The desktop is still there and still uses a "windowed" user interface. A very big deal was made out of the fact that all Win7 apps will run on Win8, so they could hardly have done away with the existing Win7 UI paradigm (unlike WinMo to WP7). Your keyboard shortcuts are still there, as are your command line programs and your Desktop and Taskbar icons (along with some cool taskbar improvements, like in-box support for spanning monitors).
The new "metro-style" apps appear to be standard Windows apps except they run full-screen and have some new APIs to play with for hooking into things like a system-wide Search capability (app A registers that it can search for images, then contributes results anytime the user wants to do an image search - even from within unrelated app B). The ability to write them using C/C++, or.NET, with optional XAML for UI, or using JS with CSS/HTML5 for UI, is cool but not revolutionary; Windows has supported "HTML Applications" for years.
If your story were true, you could very easily sue for wrongful termination. Unless your employment contract had some clause that mandates overtime, that's not a valid reason to fire somebody under any legal system that I've ever heard of. In fact, requiring overtime is supposed to be illegal. You were meeting commitments and more.
On the other hand, if you could actually do that quality of work, you're wasted in a company like that. Yes, I'm a 20-something, but hell, my dad still has a job in the industry anytime he wants, and he's old enough I think his resume lists more assemblers than "high-level" languages like C.
Also, where the heck do you people find all these awful managers? I'm only 6 years into the field (counting internships) but I've never even heard such stories in person except from one friend who left the company and moved to Amazon for a 60% pay raise to boot. That's including my personal experience, my co-workers, and my university friends. We work at companies large (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) to small (Zillow, White Pages, Palantir, J Street Tech, and one very literal start-up) with lots in between, and I've never seen anything like what you all are describing.
Yes, you are in fact wrong. Very astute of you to guess it.:-)
Open the Start menu. Hold the Ctrl+Shift keys. Right-click the menu (not an item, the menu itself). Select "Exit Explorer"
Note that your windows stick around (except possibly Explorer file-browser windows, unless you've set it up so each opens in its own process). Window management gets a little funky without a Taskbar - and Alt+Tab works, but only in a pretty primitive way - but the computer is pretty much still usable.
Oh, and to restart Explorer? Ctrl+Shift+Esc to bring up Task Manager. File -> New task -> "explorer".
The window system has almost nothing to do with Explorer. I believe it's handled by win32k.sys, a very low-level DLL. It's certainly no part of Explorer. The window manager is part of Explorer, but there's fall-back behavior as well. You can still move and resize and focus and minimize windows without Explorer, though it's messier and more primitive. The shell is all Explorer - the launcher (Start menu), the program switcher (taskbar), the file manager (Windows Explorer) and more of the standard shell features are all part of Explorer. However, you can replace Explorer with a different shell if you want; Windows doesn't require that you use Explorer, it's just the default.
Running as a limited user in XP is a complete pain for many things. Want to install an MSI package? You'll probably need to manually elevate msiexec.exe; XP won't do that automatically or give you a "Run as Administrator" option on an MSI file. Want to modify permissions on a file you don't own? Unless you're really good at running cacls from an elevated command line, you'll need to start an elevated Explorer session. Want to use any of the management consoles? Manually invoke MMC.exe elevated, or use elevated Explorer (same goes for a lot of control panel tasks, too). Oh, and be wary of that elevation dialog: on XP, that dialog is running in the normal user session, and if an attacker already has software running in your session they can steal the credentials you enter. In later versions, the Secure Desktop boundary prevents that.
There's also a lot of apps that expect to be admin all the time. In fact, even with "modern" apps, you'll see plenty of them that expect to be Admin *if they are running on XP* because that's what everybody does on XP, right? XP doesn't have the automatic (and app-transparent) redirection of certain things, like virtualizing writes to HKLM into HKCU instead, or ProgramData (global, essentially/etc) to Application Data (user-writable).
Then there's other security issues. Lack of ASLR is a big deal - return-oriented programming is so mature these days that DEP (which XP has) without ASLR (which XP lacks and will never have) is just a trivial speed-bump. Lack of Mandatory Integrity Control means that you can't get a really proper sandbox for a browser or similar, and even a limited user (if at medium IL, or without ILs at all) has enough access to install spyware or a spambot. Newer Windows versions support better crypto, and disable old and insecure crypto by default. XP's built-in firewall is very limited compared to Vista/Win7, being one-way-only and lacking the configurability of the later versions.
If you really like the VI keybindings, there's a way to make VS use them. A quick search found two plugins, vsvim and viemu. They're They're not part of any language pack, so it should be possible to use them with this Python package.
Why the <REDACTED> do people keep spamming this "takes up screen real-estate" BS? Ever since the beta versions of Office 2007, it's been possible to hide the ribbon by double-clicking on the tab. You can show it again for one action by single-clicking a tab, or "pin" it again by double-clicking one. Once you do that, it takes no more space than the menu bar used to (and less than menu bar + even a single toolbar).
Apparently that wasn't discoverable enough, though - in Office 2010 they added a little arrow on the left side that you could click on to hide (or show) the ribbon. I guess even that wasn't enough, though...
Also, I hear there's this amazing thing called the World Wide Web, and it contains so much information that almost anything you could want to know that might reasonably be known by more than a few people is posted there. To help you find it, there are these nifty things called "search engines". I typed "How do I hide the ribbon?" into a few of them, and got lots and lots of helpful links! *ROLLS EYES*
Embryonic stem cell research doesn't use embryos destroyed "for the purposes of scientific research" though... it uses embryos that were already being destroyed as redundant. Artificial fertilization is not an exact science yet, so any given attempt at the process has a considerable chance of failure. To avoid unreasonably long delays and high costs, multiple attempts are made in parallel. Typically, more than one succeeds, but all except one are disposed of.
ESC lines were created from these excess successes, not from anything that was either created or destroyed for purposes of research. The alternative was letting them go to waste. The ban on creating any new lines with government funding just means we're back to throwing them in the garbage, impairing progress toward medical cures without having any impact on the number of embryos created whatsoever.
Clearly, a win for morality and all of humanity! ~
Yes, I know you didn't directly claim otherwise, but you strongly implied it. I'm not opposed to a ban on "the destruction of an embryo for the purposes of scientific research" since there are so many other sources that are currently being wasted, but I'm strongly opposed to anybody getting up on their moral high horse to impede scientific progress based on a pack of lies (such as that ESC lines come from abortions [stated], or that embryos were being created purely for destruction [implied]).
The tools, including Express version of Visual Studio and a GUI-creation tool called Expression Blend, and an emulator, are already free. There's typically a $100 fee to publish apps to the marketplace - this is the same as on iOS, I believe (could be outdated info). That covers things like the cost of certifying apps for publication.
The phones are obviously not typically free, unless you get a good deal on a new two-year contract.
WinMo is dying. WP7 is rising. Currently the death of WinMo is faster than the rise of WP7, but that's not actually so surprising to me - WinMo was a mature but outdated platform, and WP7 is new and still somewhat immature (in terms of app store size, APIs, etc.). They're also in totally different niches, though - WP7 is much closer to the iOS style of walled garden (hopefully with a bit more transparency) while WinMo was closer to Android or even Maemo; not open source, but you could write and publish whatever you wanted for it, tweaking the system at almost any level.
As WP7 matures within its niche, it will start picking up users much more quickly. Once WinMo is fully abandoned (not far off now; it's not been popular for years but was holding on at Apple-like marketshare until the last year or so), you won't see the month-to-month percentage decrease because of it. Don't count on WP7 not becoming a major player, either - the app store is growing very quickly (compared to where competitors were at this point in their release cycles, it's doing very well indeed) and the Mango update addresses a lot of the missing feature complaints and SDK limitations.
Except there are already much better services out there.
In addition to the ones mentioned in the subject, there's things like Zune Pass, which is a more direct comparison - it's available for streaming and/or downloading on phones. $12.50-$15 / month, depending on subscription length, gets you all-you-can-eat DRMed music, plus 10 credits per month to download DRM-free songs (typically charged at $1 each). Cost for the anything-on-demand DRMed music, assuming you'd be buying at least 10 songs per month anyhow, is $2.50 to $5 - easily competitive on price, but with fewer restrictions. The DRM-free downloads, from the credits you spend, can be used on any device capabile of playing MP3 files.
Of course, it's also from Microsoft, who to the average Slashdotter is far worse than RIM.
I wouldn't even bother commenting except somebody modded this up, but... really?
A) A solar sail space craft has negligible mass. Seriously, light pressure isn't very strong. If you want any decent acceleration you need a ludicrous area-to-mass ratio. Against an asteroid this size, there's not going to be much concentrated impact.
B) Space is mostly empty, but there's a lot of little stuff floating around, and a large asteroid will have hit some of it before. They're not *that* fragile. I mean, it's literally a big rock. Go find yourself a nice boulder and throw paper airplanes at it until it breaks - that's about the level of what's being proposed here.
C) Even if some small piece does fly off, it's not necessarily a risk. Many, many tons of material hit the earth (or at least its atmosphere) every year. Most people call them "shooting stars".
If the headers on the files indicate that they are volatile and expire frequently, then they would certainly get crawled frequently, and downloaded "over and over and over." Again, this sounds like a serious IT error (possibly because there was not IT staff, one of the advantages you get of using professional hosting). Our site gets crawled regularly, and it's a portion of our total bandwidth, but it's not a major portion because our pages, and especially our images, don't change very often at all... and the crawlers know that.
Have you used a 360 S? They're much quieter than the old Xbox 360 was, just as the PS3 S is quieter than the original PS3. In fact, this has been the biggest single commendation of the new 360 that I've heard - people exclaiming over how quiet it is.
Most AV suites are active less than 1% of the time on modern systems. Yes, they do add *some* cost, but it's hardly likely to sway the results by much.
Besides, AV is not strictly required. If you know what you're doing and don't get particularly unlucky, you can get by for years without it. If you are sufficiently unlucky, you can get completely taken over even if you know what you're doing and run up-to-date AV as well. I run a free and non-obtrusive AV program, but if it started having a noticable impact on performance, including battery life, I'd kill it in an instant.
Have you used Linux recently? One thing I've noticed, as a part-time Linux user for over five years, is that Linux quality grows at an astounding rate. There will always be gaps doing certain things where commercial software has put a lot of effort, but in general the open source software world moves incredibly quickly. Arguably, the worst aspect of it is that the constant update treadmill gets a little tiresome (not that it costs anything but time). These days I typically only upgrade every 12-18 months, where I used to do 6-9; I don't get the new awesomeness as quickly, but I also get bigger bites of it when I upgrade. It also helps get over the problems a new release sometimes has.
For the record, the same argument for "have you checked out X recently?" applies to Windows; I've seen an awful lot of people (on/. and elsewhere) complaining about things in Windows that don't apply to any version newer than XP. You obviously don't care about proprietary vs F/OSS that much, but I will grant that Linux is more targeted at your type of audience.
I find the example of Clippy amusing, though - you could permenently disable the Office Assistant, something that very few of members of the so-called "savvy audience" seemed understand...
Serious question, since I'm not in the industry: What other tools can import project files from previous versions of FCP? If such tools exist and are reasonably usable, I can certainly see them being a lot more popular soon. If they don't exist, I imagine somebody, either commercial or open-source, has just started a project to make one (either adding support for the format to an existing tool, or creating a translator to some other tool's format).
Also it can run Xbox Live games, earning achievements and gamerscore. For some reason, that's a hugely valuable capability to some people. Also it can use Zune Pass, streaming and downloading all-you-can-eat music on a subscription service. That one is actually pretty cool. There are a few other interesting features (the live tiles thing has some potential) but those two are clear differentiators that will be a big deal to at least some portions of the market.
Why do you call it a mock-up? The phone appeared to be fully functional in the video, running the OS and various apps.
Prototype, perhaps. There's always a cycle of development hardware to get the kinks out before the first actual retail devices are manufactured. Calling what was shown in the video a "mock-up" is just flat-out lying, though.
Exactly. Whether or not WebKit (and Safari/Chrome) existed, Konqueror wasn't going to just vanish without Mozilla. In fact, it may well have gotten more development support (it's already a good browser, but any project that big could use more contributors). Don't like KDE dependencies? Extract the rendering engine (KHTML, the base of WebKit) and put it in your own browser (which is pretty much what Apple did, plus maintaining their own version).
Then there's Opera. Say what you will about proprietary software, Opera is a pretty damn good browser and runs on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some who claim that its somewhat verbose syntax ('dim varname as vartype' instead of 'vartype varname;' for example) and Basic-like loop and code structure make it an inherently worse language. It looks kind of ugly to an experienced developer in C-style languages, but I honestly don't see much basis for disliking it beyond a degree of elitism that drives one to scorn a highly readable "easy to learn" language.
Under the covers, aside from a few assemblies specificlaly to aid compatibility with legacy VB code, VB.NET is just another .NET language. It's a little less powerful than C# in some ways - for example, I don't think it allows unsafe code bloacks (direct pointer access) - but it's not any slower, or less efficient, or less compatible (it works in Mono, incidentally), or anything of that nature.
Chrome and Firefox both use the Netscape plugin API, which run code at the "raw executable" level. The proccess which host the code are sandboxed to a degree, true - but bringing that up totally doesn't help your case, because IE was doing that before either Chrome or Firefox (not surprising, since the Low IL process integrity level used for IE's Protected Mode and Chrome's whatever-they-call-it sandboxes was, of course, developed by Microsoft).
You didn't honestly think that Flash on Firefox or Chrome was safer than ActiveX on IE, did you? It's another API for the same functionality. The only significant difference today (barring past exploits where ActiveX controls could be installed without user control, which also could have happened with the NPAPI) is that there's a lot more ActiveX binaries installed on a typical system than there are NPAPI binaries.
You don't even need Windows today. It's a little awkward using a cross-compiler, but not *that* hard. C# and VB.NET apps can be coded and compiled using Mono. For that matter, Windows has supported "HTML Applications" written using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for years now, though nobody much uses them.
On the other hand, to use the new "Windows Runtime" Win8 APIs that make these new apps really integrate with the OS, you'll want at least a reference guide. Building the pieces into an app package, testing it, and submitting it to the app store all probably won't be possible until Wine catches up.
Based on... what? Did you actually watch the presentation (it's a free video stream) or did you simply ready the heavily slanted summary?
Productivity improvements:
Remote Desktop with support for multiple connections from the same app (essentially a tabbed interface)..
Improved taskbar support for multi-monitor (span monitors, each part showing only icons for apps present on the monitor in question).
Lower base RAM utilization means you don't need powerful hardware or to wait for disk swapping as often.
Built-in support for re-imaging your box if something goes wrong.
Built-in Hyper-V support, even in client SKUs, makes it extremely easy to run VMs.
There's probably many more - enterprise customers have always been a huge part of Microsoft's target market, and I'm sure they still are - but those were specifically demoed today.
Good thing it's largely optional. The only part of interface that is really "Windows Phone" like is the new Start screen (replacing the Start menu) and if you use Start like I do - hit the Windows button, type a few letters to identify an app, hit Enter - your usage won't be affected at all. You only need to look at the new start screen if you're trying to find an app visually instead of by search, and I think it's probably quite acceptable for that.
The desktop is still there and still uses a "windowed" user interface. A very big deal was made out of the fact that all Win7 apps will run on Win8, so they could hardly have done away with the existing Win7 UI paradigm (unlike WinMo to WP7). Your keyboard shortcuts are still there, as are your command line programs and your Desktop and Taskbar icons (along with some cool taskbar improvements, like in-box support for spanning monitors).
The new "metro-style" apps appear to be standard Windows apps except they run full-screen and have some new APIs to play with for hooking into things like a system-wide Search capability (app A registers that it can search for images, then contributes results anytime the user wants to do an image search - even from within unrelated app B). The ability to write them using C/C++, or .NET, with optional XAML for UI, or using JS with CSS/HTML5 for UI, is cool but not revolutionary; Windows has supported "HTML Applications" for years.
If your story were true, you could very easily sue for wrongful termination. Unless your employment contract had some clause that mandates overtime, that's not a valid reason to fire somebody under any legal system that I've ever heard of. In fact, requiring overtime is supposed to be illegal. You were meeting commitments and more.
On the other hand, if you could actually do that quality of work, you're wasted in a company like that. Yes, I'm a 20-something, but hell, my dad still has a job in the industry anytime he wants, and he's old enough I think his resume lists more assemblers than "high-level" languages like C.
Also, where the heck do you people find all these awful managers? I'm only 6 years into the field (counting internships) but I've never even heard such stories in person except from one friend who left the company and moved to Amazon for a 60% pay raise to boot. That's including my personal experience, my co-workers, and my university friends. We work at companies large (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) to small (Zillow, White Pages, Palantir, J Street Tech, and one very literal start-up) with lots in between, and I've never seen anything like what you all are describing.
Um, no. Outside of serious connoisseurs of Apple Kool-Aid, nobody thinks that Apple has a monopoly on the term "app".
Yes, you are in fact wrong. Very astute of you to guess it. :-)
Open the Start menu.
Hold the Ctrl+Shift keys.
Right-click the menu (not an item, the menu itself).
Select "Exit Explorer"
Note that your windows stick around (except possibly Explorer file-browser windows, unless you've set it up so each opens in its own process). Window management gets a little funky without a Taskbar - and Alt+Tab works, but only in a pretty primitive way - but the computer is pretty much still usable.
Oh, and to restart Explorer? Ctrl+Shift+Esc to bring up Task Manager. File -> New task -> "explorer".
The window system has almost nothing to do with Explorer. I believe it's handled by win32k.sys, a very low-level DLL. It's certainly no part of Explorer.
The window manager is part of Explorer, but there's fall-back behavior as well. You can still move and resize and focus and minimize windows without Explorer, though it's messier and more primitive.
The shell is all Explorer - the launcher (Start menu), the program switcher (taskbar), the file manager (Windows Explorer) and more of the standard shell features are all part of Explorer. However, you can replace Explorer with a different shell if you want; Windows doesn't require that you use Explorer, it's just the default.
Hope that helps.
Running as a limited user in XP is a complete pain for many things. Want to install an MSI package? You'll probably need to manually elevate msiexec.exe; XP won't do that automatically or give you a "Run as Administrator" option on an MSI file. Want to modify permissions on a file you don't own? Unless you're really good at running cacls from an elevated command line, you'll need to start an elevated Explorer session. Want to use any of the management consoles? Manually invoke MMC.exe elevated, or use elevated Explorer (same goes for a lot of control panel tasks, too). Oh, and be wary of that elevation dialog: on XP, that dialog is running in the normal user session, and if an attacker already has software running in your session they can steal the credentials you enter. In later versions, the Secure Desktop boundary prevents that.
There's also a lot of apps that expect to be admin all the time. In fact, even with "modern" apps, you'll see plenty of them that expect to be Admin *if they are running on XP* because that's what everybody does on XP, right? XP doesn't have the automatic (and app-transparent) redirection of certain things, like virtualizing writes to HKLM into HKCU instead, or ProgramData (global, essentially /etc) to Application Data (user-writable).
Then there's other security issues. Lack of ASLR is a big deal - return-oriented programming is so mature these days that DEP (which XP has) without ASLR (which XP lacks and will never have) is just a trivial speed-bump. Lack of Mandatory Integrity Control means that you can't get a really proper sandbox for a browser or similar, and even a limited user (if at medium IL, or without ILs at all) has enough access to install spyware or a spambot. Newer Windows versions support better crypto, and disable old and insecure crypto by default. XP's built-in firewall is very limited compared to Vista/Win7, being one-way-only and lacking the configurability of the later versions.
Yes, I work in the security field.
If you really like the VI keybindings, there's a way to make VS use them. A quick search found two plugins, vsvim and viemu. They're They're not part of any language pack, so it should be possible to use them with this Python package.
VS is more extensible than most people realize.
Why the <REDACTED> do people keep spamming this "takes up screen real-estate" BS? Ever since the beta versions of Office 2007, it's been possible to hide the ribbon by double-clicking on the tab. You can show it again for one action by single-clicking a tab, or "pin" it again by double-clicking one. Once you do that, it takes no more space than the menu bar used to (and less than menu bar + even a single toolbar).
Apparently that wasn't discoverable enough, though - in Office 2010 they added a little arrow on the left side that you could click on to hide (or show) the ribbon. I guess even that wasn't enough, though...
Also, I hear there's this amazing thing called the World Wide Web, and it contains so much information that almost anything you could want to know that might reasonably be known by more than a few people is posted there. To help you find it, there are these nifty things called "search engines". I typed "How do I hide the ribbon?" into a few of them, and got lots and lots of helpful links!
*ROLLS EYES*
Embryonic stem cell research doesn't use embryos destroyed "for the purposes of scientific research" though... it uses embryos that were already being destroyed as redundant. Artificial fertilization is not an exact science yet, so any given attempt at the process has a considerable chance of failure. To avoid unreasonably long delays and high costs, multiple attempts are made in parallel. Typically, more than one succeeds, but all except one are disposed of.
ESC lines were created from these excess successes, not from anything that was either created or destroyed for purposes of research. The alternative was letting them go to waste. The ban on creating any new lines with government funding just means we're back to throwing them in the garbage, impairing progress toward medical cures without having any impact on the number of embryos created whatsoever.
Clearly, a win for morality and all of humanity! ~
Yes, I know you didn't directly claim otherwise, but you strongly implied it. I'm not opposed to a ban on "the destruction of an embryo for the purposes of scientific research" since there are so many other sources that are currently being wasted, but I'm strongly opposed to anybody getting up on their moral high horse to impede scientific progress based on a pack of lies (such as that ESC lines come from abortions [stated], or that embryos were being created purely for destruction [implied]).
The tools, including Express version of Visual Studio and a GUI-creation tool called Expression Blend, and an emulator, are already free. There's typically a $100 fee to publish apps to the marketplace - this is the same as on iOS, I believe (could be outdated info). That covers things like the cost of certifying apps for publication.
The phones are obviously not typically free, unless you get a good deal on a new two-year contract.
WinMo is dying. WP7 is rising. Currently the death of WinMo is faster than the rise of WP7, but that's not actually so surprising to me - WinMo was a mature but outdated platform, and WP7 is new and still somewhat immature (in terms of app store size, APIs, etc.). They're also in totally different niches, though - WP7 is much closer to the iOS style of walled garden (hopefully with a bit more transparency) while WinMo was closer to Android or even Maemo; not open source, but you could write and publish whatever you wanted for it, tweaking the system at almost any level.
As WP7 matures within its niche, it will start picking up users much more quickly. Once WinMo is fully abandoned (not far off now; it's not been popular for years but was holding on at Apple-like marketshare until the last year or so), you won't see the month-to-month percentage decrease because of it. Don't count on WP7 not becoming a major player, either - the app store is growing very quickly (compared to where competitors were at this point in their release cycles, it's doing very well indeed) and the Mango update addresses a lot of the missing feature complaints and SDK limitations.
Except there are already much better services out there.
In addition to the ones mentioned in the subject, there's things like Zune Pass, which is a more direct comparison - it's available for streaming and/or downloading on phones. $12.50-$15 / month, depending on subscription length, gets you all-you-can-eat DRMed music, plus 10 credits per month to download DRM-free songs (typically charged at $1 each). Cost for the anything-on-demand DRMed music, assuming you'd be buying at least 10 songs per month anyhow, is $2.50 to $5 - easily competitive on price, but with fewer restrictions. The DRM-free downloads, from the credits you spend, can be used on any device capabile of playing MP3 files.
Of course, it's also from Microsoft, who to the average Slashdotter is far worse than RIM.
Public high schools are paid for with taxes. There's no tution charge to attend. They are as much "government institutions" as police stations.
I wouldn't even bother commenting except somebody modded this up, but... really?
A) A solar sail space craft has negligible mass. Seriously, light pressure isn't very strong. If you want any decent acceleration you need a ludicrous area-to-mass ratio. Against an asteroid this size, there's not going to be much concentrated impact.
B) Space is mostly empty, but there's a lot of little stuff floating around, and a large asteroid will have hit some of it before. They're not *that* fragile. I mean, it's literally a big rock. Go find yourself a nice boulder and throw paper airplanes at it until it breaks - that's about the level of what's being proposed here.
C) Even if some small piece does fly off, it's not necessarily a risk. Many, many tons of material hit the earth (or at least its atmosphere) every year. Most people call them "shooting stars".
If the headers on the files indicate that they are volatile and expire frequently, then they would certainly get crawled frequently, and downloaded "over and over and over." Again, this sounds like a serious IT error (possibly because there was not IT staff, one of the advantages you get of using professional hosting). Our site gets crawled regularly, and it's a portion of our total bandwidth, but it's not a major portion because our pages, and especially our images, don't change very often at all... and the crawlers know that.
Have you used a 360 S? They're much quieter than the old Xbox 360 was, just as the PS3 S is quieter than the original PS3. In fact, this has been the biggest single commendation of the new 360 that I've heard - people exclaiming over how quiet it is.
Most AV suites are active less than 1% of the time on modern systems. Yes, they do add *some* cost, but it's hardly likely to sway the results by much.
Besides, AV is not strictly required. If you know what you're doing and don't get particularly unlucky, you can get by for years without it. If you are sufficiently unlucky, you can get completely taken over even if you know what you're doing and run up-to-date AV as well. I run a free and non-obtrusive AV program, but if it started having a noticable impact on performance, including battery life, I'd kill it in an instant.
Have you used Linux recently? One thing I've noticed, as a part-time Linux user for over five years, is that Linux quality grows at an astounding rate. There will always be gaps doing certain things where commercial software has put a lot of effort, but in general the open source software world moves incredibly quickly. Arguably, the worst aspect of it is that the constant update treadmill gets a little tiresome (not that it costs anything but time). These days I typically only upgrade every 12-18 months, where I used to do 6-9; I don't get the new awesomeness as quickly, but I also get bigger bites of it when I upgrade. It also helps get over the problems a new release sometimes has.
For the record, the same argument for "have you checked out X recently?" applies to Windows; I've seen an awful lot of people (on /. and elsewhere) complaining about things in Windows that don't apply to any version newer than XP. You obviously don't care about proprietary vs F/OSS that much, but I will grant that Linux is more targeted at your type of audience.
I find the example of Clippy amusing, though - you could permenently disable the Office Assistant, something that very few of members of the so-called "savvy audience" seemed understand...
Serious question, since I'm not in the industry:
What other tools can import project files from previous versions of FCP? If such tools exist and are reasonably usable, I can certainly see them being a lot more popular soon. If they don't exist, I imagine somebody, either commercial or open-source, has just started a project to make one (either adding support for the format to an existing tool, or creating a translator to some other tool's format).
Also it can run Xbox Live games, earning achievements and gamerscore. For some reason, that's a hugely valuable capability to some people.
Also it can use Zune Pass, streaming and downloading all-you-can-eat music on a subscription service. That one is actually pretty cool.
There are a few other interesting features (the live tiles thing has some potential) but those two are clear differentiators that will be a big deal to at least some portions of the market.
Why do you call it a mock-up? The phone appeared to be fully functional in the video, running the OS and various apps.
Prototype, perhaps. There's always a cycle of development hardware to get the kinks out before the first actual retail devices are manufactured. Calling what was shown in the video a "mock-up" is just flat-out lying, though.
Exactly. Whether or not WebKit (and Safari/Chrome) existed, Konqueror wasn't going to just vanish without Mozilla. In fact, it may well have gotten more development support (it's already a good browser, but any project that big could use more contributors). Don't like KDE dependencies? Extract the rendering engine (KHTML, the base of WebKit) and put it in your own browser (which is pretty much what Apple did, plus maintaining their own version).
Then there's Opera. Say what you will about proprietary software, Opera is a pretty damn good browser and runs on Linux.