I would like to see multiple inheritance with classes like in C++ supported within C#.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I've felt the class-interface inheritance style wasn't very good.... 

Sven Groot said:

W3bbo said:

*snip*

Simple. MS doesn't believe in those superstitions, but there are people who do. Subsequently, those people would not buy Office 13 or Windows 13, which is lost revenue for MS. Plus you know ever blogger out there would go "see, bug X is evidence that Office 13 is cursed!" Much easier to avoid any trouble by just numbering it 14.

And the number 7 is a magically powerful number and is good luck too. In China, the number 4 is bad luck, because in Chinese, it is similar to the word for death. I bet that factored somewhere in the release of Windows 95, which is technically Version 4 of the Windows that used DOS as its kernel.

With 7 being magically powerful and good luck, maybe Windows 7 will do really well?

DCMonkey said:

Ubuntu said:

*snip*

Apparently compatibility with apps written for L!nux ecosystem is overrated as well, as it appears ChromeOS will be designed to run only web apps.

So end the end it will do about as much for the Linux desktop as all those routers running an embedded Linux do.

I doubt it will only be web apps. I think they will go more for the Android model. Google will provide a base, and an App Store, possibly even support for Android apps, while bringing in web services to act like regular applications, similar to Flex, Prism, etc.

fknight said:

Bass said:

*snip*

Microsoft could GPL every bit of code they've ever written and renounce all patents and people would still say not to use it because "they still might sue you" or claim it's some kind of trick.

Nah. There is only so far people will go towards hate.

Microsoft, being as large as it is, is unfortunately not very uniform in its ideals.

For example, Apple presents a clear image of a Mac-centric world, or in the case of the browser market, a desire for a duopoly, even though it is practically impossible given that Safari doesn't doesn't in Linux.

Microsoft's goals are a lot murkier. Some people within Microsoft present the company image as a friendly company that is willing to work with partners and competitors in the spirit of "coopertition." The Port 25 guys are an example of people trying to pull this off.

The company sometimes present a darker image of a company willing to do what it needs to do to remain on top, even if it is of questionable taste. An example of this would be Steve Ballmer stating Linux violates 235 patents, without stating what the patents are. Or the various offhand comments he has made about his competitors over the years. They show overconfidence and cockiness. Even though Steve is a horrible salesman, he is quite good at stirring the pot, just not always in the way Microsoft wants.

Then there are the parts of Microsoft that are trying hard to be a part of the open source world, without being butchered alive. The CodePlex and MS Visual Studio Express efforts are examples of this.

Everyone knows Microsoft values Windows to an extremely high degree. Why wouldn't they? It was the OS that got them to the top. Maybe in another world, OS/2 is the one Microsoft truly values. But the fact is, Windows isn't what makes Microsoft the big bucks. It's their other software, particularly Microsoft Office and Visual Studio. Both of which don't need to really depend on Windows. If within the next year, the whole world suddenly starts migrating to Linux, Microsoft wouldn't die. They would adjust to the new market and survive (possibly with wider profit margins too).

In the unlikely event I would ever get to talk to Microsoft execs personally, I would have quite a lot to say to them. I have been using Microsoft software since I was six years old (I'm 18 now). I started with MS-DOS 5.0 and kept up all the way to Microsoft Windows Vista. I used Office, Windows, DOS, and I even tried out Xenix at one point. Microsoft did a lot right, and a lot wrong. But what they did right was force the UNIX vendors to change. Most of the UNIX distributions that were available in the 80s are dead now, but the ones that survived have learned their lesson from the UNIX wars era.

In my opinion, UNIX was a great idea, and was even implemented rather well. But the vendors competing and making changes to cause incompatibilities screwed us all over. Microsoft brought home the important lesson of standardization, even if nowadays they don't quite follow it that much anymore.

Now, with Windows' greatest competitor being Linux, Microsoft has a bit to worry about. Linux, even though it is fragmented into a multitude of distributions, remains largely compatible with each other. However, since a majority of distributions are not made by a company, Microsoft feels little worry from them because nobody really advertises for Linux.

CannotResolveSymbol said:

W3bbo said:

*snip*

At least in the existing implementations (Firefox's Ogg Theora and Safari's H.264), a plugin isn't used to play back content in a <video> tag; the necessary codecs are embedded in the browser itself and video becomes a first-class citizen on the page, like images or text...  Mozilla has some pretty cool demos where they do CSS transforms and animation on running video.

It isn't quite true that Safari includes the H.264 codec within the browser. Technically, what Safari does is that it connects to QuickTime and uses the QuickTime engine to play back the video.

There are already QuickTime codecs for Theora, but the problem is that Apple refuses to either include them or reference them at all on the web page for QuickTime codecs on Apple's website.

Mozilla does actually include the codecs within the browser code. Easier to maintain for them, from what I guess. I have no doubt that Microsoft will never include Theora support. As far as I know, the only time Microsoft ever acknowledged that Ogg codecs was when they included Vorbis in the original Xbox, I don't even know if Vorbis is used in the Xbox 360.

Google has pretty much been fence sitting on the whole matter, given that they advocate H.264 through YouTube, while not actively dissuading Theora usage. Additionally, Chrome is currently using the ffmpeg engine to support <audio> and <video>.

One way that Silverlight could actually best Flash would be if Silverlight was made into a usable fallback engine for <video> and <audio> as supported by Mozilla Firefox. Of course, I doubt we will see it anytime soon. Maybe in Moonlight, when it gets ported back to Windows.

Flash and Silverlight, in their current states, are rather unreliable in the browser. Plus, they kinda bypass the browser security model, given that they are both plugins. The only possible exception to the rule would be Chrome, since it isolates plugins in a separate process, but I don't completely understand how that works, so meh....

Shining Arcanine wrote:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_editions.asp

I have Windows Media Center Edition 2005, which is a superset of Windows XP Professional, which is a superset of Windows XP Home, which is a superset of Windows XP Starter Edition. Windows Media Center Edition 2005 is very affordably priced (you can get it for around $125), and I really like it because it has Windows XP Professional's Remote Desktop and Dual Processor support.

In Windows Vista, Windows Home Premium is analogous to Windows Media Center Edition 2005, except that Windows XP Professional's features have been stripped out and Windows Media Center Edition is sitting on top of Windows XP Home's feature set. That means that I cannot use Windows Remote Desktop from my laptop when I want to combine my laptop's portability with my desktop's processing power and that I no longer have the option of running a dual processor PC. Windows Ultimate is the only thing in Windows Vista that gives me this feature set, and since it will be marketed as an ultimate product, it will be super expensive.

So my question is, should I be upset now or should I wait for pricing information?