Discussions

The biggest "Wow!"s will come with the applications developed for the platform. At least the wows people will report on.

In a way i think that is a great thing. MSFT has given the MSFT development world an excellent platform for the future (one that should become far better over time). Devs now have some great tools to really push the ideas of what applications should feel like and to redefine "connected" for the average user.

Personally i never expected more than the true geeks to be excited (i know i was).... average users won't find too many reasons yet to make the jump. In the coming months and years there will be far more compelling reasons as new applications come to the forefront making people finally go "Ohh Wow!!"

just my .02

Chadk wrote:

But are we developers gonna have an API, to make stuff with the server, like expose services, that we have made?

I could see some very cool scenarios for this!

good idea... might be some really kewl stuff we could do.

PaoloM wrote:

 and a recipe app that can access local ones (possibly imported from here) and access online ones (foodtv.com, for example).

Any other ideas for a kitchen app?

Ok out of my head Mr. Recipe ML was my intended format for the recipe app. I had also planned to make sharing recipes easy with RSS like flickR does with images. You could then instantly share recipes with family and friends or get the newest ideas from your favorite chefs.

Access to the weather from inside MCE would be great as well. Many of the weather addins I've seen either target the wrong area (currently the best Vista MCE addin is targeting Australia) or just have horrific unusable UI. Something like the weather gadget added the MCE main UI along with details and say 10day forcast would be great.

PaoloM wrote:

Btw, my plan for the kitchen computer was not that fancy. I'm just shooting for a MCML UI for recipes, traffic and somesuch...

Where can I find a 17" touchscreen monitor?

Not sure about the 17" touch screen. but the additions for MCE you mentioned are ones that have been missing for some time. There was once an addin for recipes but its defunct now. A new MCML based addin would be awesome. I've considered working on something similar before. hard to work on stuff like that when "work" is looming over you though.

love to hear how that project comes along (assuming you are planning to work on something)

If you are just using regex to prevent SQL injection (ie stings like " ' or 1=1;-- " etc) then just use Parameterized queries which are already safe from sql injection attacks.

maybe im missing what you are getting at.

John Galt wrote:

And then there is your stupid power grab over the Office 2007 UI, which is NOT new, even VS.net uses tabs and buttons on tabs all over the place, Borland developer tools have done that for years, as has Adobe, so you know you can't patent it, so instead you try and give yourselves precidence by sucking idiots into signing a contract with you for nothing. Slimy stupid antics that you should be ashamed of. Yes, you did good stuff with Office 2007, but trying to patent that which you know you can't patent with an end run and the implied threat of lawsuit? That's just slimy, discusting behaviour that you should want to throw up over.

So you actually have no idea what the purpose of the contract for the Office 2007 Guidelines is about I take it? The Guidelines define the behavior an application wanting to look and have ui that acts like office 2007 should implement (so the experience is the same in applications that look like Office 2007 as it is in Office 2007). The only thing the guidelines contract prohibits you from doing is creating an application that competes with an office 2007 application AND uses its UI guidelines.

When i say guidelines i am talking about the 119 pages that explain how a tab should react to resizing and how elements should be drawn on the screen in certain situations etc.

Now that that is cleared up I have tons of problems with Vista the least of which is that I have spent many years teaching my parents how to do a great many tasks on their own. Many of which I will get the <sarcasm>gret pleasure of teaching them again</sarcasm>.

sorry JasonOlson I've seen too many professionals and novices get stumped with Vista UX.

Here's a test for you.... take a seasoned computer user who has never seen/Used IE7 before (but knows all about IE6) and ask them to open the "internet options"... then watch them fumble around. This gets worse when you apply this to a novice who happens to know that "internet options" is in the tools menu (which they learned from many tech support calls).

Matter of fact. New idea. Vista developers should be required to spend a day doing tech support for users getting to use Vista for the first time. except tech support over the phone and without the luxury of having a live vista desktop in front of them.  So they get to be one of the thousands of ISP techs come feb 1st.

I love Vista too... don't get me wrong.. but i still don't think its ready.

ducting the intake from the front of the case is an excellent idea as well. and you are right that at almost any speed (depending on the fan... a Yate Loon for example would be no problem) there may be a little starvation of the cpu best to keep those fans on med to low. they just need to draft away the heated exhaust from the CPu cooler. Which of course is why your ducting example would work really well. There was a  case (i can't remember exactly which one) that did something similar to great effect.

a good option as well is to remove the grills on the back on the case that gaurd the fan(s). install some wire fan grills instead to get less noise and more cfm from slower speed fans.

in the instance of the Zalman CNPS9500 or better the heatsink is designed to pretty much create the effect you are talking about regarding the ducting....... the fan blows the air from the front of the case across the fins to the back of the case. its a pretty effective design tho rather heavy.

I haven't spent much time in the modding community in awhile.... i kinda miss this stuff.

lol funny how i mentioned the P180 and that happens to be the case you own.

Richard its far from over engineered. It has been considered one of the finest examples of affordable (if several hundred dollars can be called that ) near silent cases on the market.

Personally i wouldn't go ducting a P180 its chambered design keeps many of the hotest componets away from each other (the PSU and disk drives are seperated away from the CPU and have their own ventalation path). I would however invest in a better than stock CPU cooler as well as some cable management (round cables are nice but proper management of flat cables can make them disapear). cleaning up the cables should give you better less turbulant airflow and offer better circulation. I would also turn the rear fans to medium and turn up the front fans. This should create possitive pressure in the case and help keep out dust (air will escape from watever cracks it can find to balance the pressure). Also replace the missing brackets from the case they are letting cool air out without cooling anything.

this or this (with a decent fan) should provide more than adequate
cooling.

for GPU cooling im a zalman fanboi tho the artic silencers are great if you can find one for your card.

of course you can go really really overboard just depends on how much you love your machine.

eagle wrote:

....but you any experience creating Media with a MCE XP or Vista.......32 or 64bit?

Please explain to me how MCE is intended for creating media. I sure would like to know as I use an MCE box every day and for the most part (besides TV recordings which need to be converted to wmv) I don't see how MCE has a true purpose as a platform for creating media. And even TV recording can easily be done without the use MCE.


Also MCE is being shipped on laptops and desktops alike for economical reasons. It's simply cheaper on the OEMs to ship MCE over XP Pro. (Most home users don't require the functionality that is removed from XP Pro within MCE... like joining domains... which as W3bbo pointed out can still be done)

XP MCE 2005 SP2B : $109.99 -- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16832116049

XP Pro SP2: $139.99 -- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16832116059

pretty much basic economics if you ask me. and most users think they are getting more (which many of them are).

richard you are quite right that "ducting" as its refered to in the modding community does drasticly improve cooling performance. By gaining the ability to cool the CPU with the cooler air from outside the case thermal transfer can be achieved more readily. you can see some commercial examples here however they can just as easily be made with dryer hose. You can even buy newer cases with the ducts already in  place however I've alwasy prefered to do my own on cheaper cases (if you have an Antec P180 you know better than to start cutting ).

Anyways this is an excellent fresh air mod however I would suggest filtering the entrance (some old pantyhose or used dryer sheet works great) to protect the cpu cooler from unnecesary dust.