Discussions

14 hours ago, Craig_Matthews wrote

As for DVDs - I use a DVD player. But seriously, people watch DVDs on airplanes, in waiting rooms, and even at their desk at work on their notebook.  

I don't know of anyone who watches DVDs from spinning media when they're on battery - most laptop batteries can't make two hours if they have to be constantly spinning.   Whenever I've seen people watching movies on their laptops, it's typically from ripped videos.

8 hours ago, Maddus Mattus wrote

@Harlequin: I just run Windows 8 off a virtual harddisk, I really hate vritual machines.

+1 on Maddus' response - Ed Bott had a good write-up on how to boot from VHD for testing Windows 8.

MSDN should have information about whether a particular winrt API works in desktop or metro or both (there are some desktop-only winrt APIs, many metro-only winrt APIs and some APIs that work in both environments).

The last I looked, about 50% of the winrt APIs work in both environments (I'm not sure if that 50% number includes the XAML APIs or not though - none of the XAML APIs work in desktop apps).

No windows runtime APIs will work on Win7 - I'm not aware of any plans to support windows runtime apps on Win7.

My personal laptop is running the CP (about to upgrade to the current build), my dev machine is running whatever build was Monday's daily build (I upgrade my dev machine every Monday) (one of the nice perqs of working on the windows team).

I want to be running the CP on 2 machines at home, unfortunately there's an issue with the USB configuration for one of my devices that prevents CP setup from installing on those machines (it's fixed in current builds).  I'll be putting the next public release on the home machines as soon as I can.

On the other hand, I'm a bit of a self-hosting nut - I've been self hosting Win8 on my laptop and dev machine since shortly after Win7 shipped.

The OS has been wonderfully stable this entire time (except for a couple of rather notable exceptions - one filesystem issue that caused it to not be able to recognize the volumes that contain my source enlistments, and a chkdsk related issue that cost me a bunch of personal documents (stupid me, I had no backup)).

One of the fun things about self hosting for so long is being able to see how the system has evolved over time (the same was true for Win7 watching as it evolved from Vista).

6 hours ago, Bass wrote

@PaoloM:

If you want to pop off on me about that, go right ahead. I don't care. The fact is WebGL is advertised as a web standard, and that's what I am going to call it.

 

I personally like the IETF definitions. There are two kinds of standards: Informational ones and standards track ones.  The informational standards are invariably proprietary protocols where the owner of the protocol wants to document the protocol.  The standards track protocols are created by doing the work of gaining consensus on the design and implementation of a protocol.  

Do the WebGL folks allow people to contribute to their standard?

3 hours ago, IDWMaster wrote

WebGL can easily be disabled from a command line option passed into most WebGL compliant browsers. Also; who says that WebGL HAS to run whenever a page requests it? Couldn't browsers make it so the user is required to OK the use of WebGL before it runs on the system? There's nothing that says that a browser can't do this.

A prompt doesn't help - the prompt would be "Do you want to see the 3d dancing bunnies?"  And there is only one reasonable answer to that prompt: Yes.  Because the user ALWAYS wants to see the dancing bunnies.

This was asked and answered 6 months ago on the SRD blog:

webgl considered harmful

The key point of the blog post: Silverlight and your web browser were hardened against attacks because they were designed to run in a hostile environment.  The graphics driver for your display adapter wasn't.

Why not use the official Windows 8 forums (as described in this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/14/best-place-to-discuss-windows-8.aspx)?  There are "very senior people" listening (and posting) to those forums.

metro style apps run in something called an appcontainer to prevent them from interacting with other applications on the system.  And I'm sure that all metro style applications will have to enable safe SEH and ASLR to improve their resiliency to threats.  But the appcontainer isn't about stopping malware.  It's about helping ensure that windows 8 end-users won't ever regret installing an application.

@cbae is correct - use add/remove windows features to add the .Net 3.5 back.