Discussions

Red5 said:

turrican said:

*snip*

I don't know about dead, but... http://www.stephenforte.net/PermaLink,guid,bc1bc043-3cdc-4ac2-8b46-3c72ad1d61cf.aspx

 

Hey Red5, nice avatar icon!  

spivonious said:

Wow, dropping CE support is something I didn't see coming. It doesn't affect me, but I know there are tons of devices out there that use it. I wonder what their reasoning was on that one.

 

So far, aside from the neat thread profiling and debugging tools, I don't see too many reasons to upgrade from VS2008.

To make things even more infuriating, if you have any test projects in VS2008, you are forced to upgrade them to .NET Framework 4.  In other words, they decided to not support multi-targeting for test projects!

 

Isn't that exciting?  You can't even test your code using the same framework version you'll be releasing it with...

The new editor seems to work allright.

Minor suggestion -- replace the yellow smiley face on the toolbar with a C9 smiley.  Yellow is a hair colour, not a face colour.

Simo said:

I'd like the return of 'right-click, select Repair Connection' type of feature. It used to be so easy to tell my boss over the phone to do that + unplug/plug his home router and he'd be back on the internet. These days I get'em to do a full PC reboot.

For networking?  Right-click on the network icon and choose "Troubleshoot problems".  It'll ask some really simple questions and apply a variety of fixes, up to and including resetting the device.

The troubleshooting in Windows 7 is vastly better than previous versions.  I don't think you'll have any problem with it. 

.... in every language supported by the Service Pack, no less.

And it has to be done well.  Microsoft doesn't have the option of doing half-assed Engrish.

billhill49 said:

Hello Everyone:

This is Bill Hill; I've created a new Channel 9 identity as a non-Microsoftie -because I like Channel 9 enough to want to still hang out there from time to time. It's one of my favorite places in all of Microsoft.

Yes, it's true, I have left the company. I'm sorry for the RRS feed confusion. Here's what always happens: I write a blog entry in the Blogger edit window - which is a horrible place to proof-read. Then when I post it, I always spot at least one typo. So I take the post down to edit it, and then re-publish it. I might end up doing that several times - maybe I'll spot something I feel I could have said better. You can take the man out of editing, but you can't take the editor out of the man...

So RSS catches the first post, alerts everyone who has a feed, but by the time they get there, it's down.

Thanks to all the many Niners, and many others, who've emailed me with good wishes, now and over the years.

Bill Gates told me a few months ago that I had really made a difference in my time at the company, and I hope that's true. When I arrived at Microsoft in 1995, people thought I was mad when I said we needed to improve reading on screen. "No-one will ever read for any length of time on a screen," they said. "They'll print out anything they want to read."

Fourteen years on, now people spend about 80% of their time at the computer reading. I have the satisfaction of knowing I helped make that happen. Commissioning Verdana as "a font for reading long passages of text on the Internet" was my first big project at Microsoft.

A lot has happened since then, but there's still a long way to go. Internet Explorer 8 now has the foundation it needs to become a really great reading application.- since it has integrated the world-class PTLS engine and adopted standards-based rendering by default.

I've left some thoughts behind, of course...

I'm not sure what my plans are yet. I do need to write a book about all this - which started for me, I guess, in 1985 when I became involved with hypertext (pre-Web, of course).

I'll keep everyone informed as much as I can on my blog. I'm also on FaceBook (and LinkedIn, for more business-type contacts).

As I look towards the future, there's a little sadness. Greg Hitchcock on the ClearType team revealed that he's a software engineer with the soul of a poet (for the first time in the 14 years I've known him). He wrote me a mail that ended:

"A tear falling on a dirty mark on a piece of shredded tree leaves a blur. A tear falling on an LCD screen leaves a rainbow". I gasped at the beauty of that.

Thanks for being so great, Niners!

Thanks so much for your many years of working to make my computer better, Bill.  I also think you've helped a lot of us here learn how to take a wider view on the topic of reading text, something we normally just take for granted.

If and when you write a book, I'll buy it for sure.  

The fair tax system seems to benefit the top 1% the most, who are generally the people who are most skilled at moving their money around and bribing border officials to let them pass their foreign-bought goods into the country without having to pay taxes on it. 

If you don't think that'd happen, you're hopelessly naive.

And that's to say nothing of the very large number of businesses that would under-report the amount of business they do so that they could keep some of that tax money for themselves. 

If you don't think that'd happen, either, you're hopelessly naive.

Between these two situations, we'd end up with large amounts of money falling out of the country or being handed around privately, with absolutely no ability on the part of the government to trace it or collect their share.  Tax evasion would become so rampant that the government would collapse due to a lack of income.  And it's not like people in other countries would be spending their money on U.S. goods and services, either, due to the exorbitant tax rates.

The fair tax concept reminds me of many other thoroughly, almost childishly naive libertarian princples, that run on the assumption that all people are basically good and honest..... which, biologically speaking, we aren't. 

My no vote is somewhere in there.

I feel more disconnected from my Facebook friends than ever.  What events are my friends going to?  No clue.  Is someone's relationship status changing?  I've no idea.  If I'm lucky I'll notice that someone posted new photos on the far right, but only as long as my browser window is wide enough.

I'm generally very positive about change and moving forward.... this, though, it's really hard to see what they were trying to accomplish.

Great game....   I've completed all but two of the OCDs....

phreaks said:

warren said:

*snip*

Erm, it's not that your health care costs are cheaper, it's that ours is more expensive.

And if you can't tell me why Canada is part of the reason that the US's health costs (especially pharmaceuticals) are so much more expensive; then there really is not much of a reason for anyone to continue this conversation.

You mention something about gleaming information from the Internet, what exactly are your credentials that make you such an expert in global economics again?

And what is Canada's GDP again.

AND BTW, "purchasing parity" is only 1 factor in determining the value of any currency vs another.
In our models it's one of the least weighted; interest rate trends, financial sector strength (which has several sub-factors), consumer spending and cyclical history all have a higher weighting in predicting exchange rates (in my models)

So wikipedia, yeah...

One more thing, I'm not going to argue whose financial model is better, but they are fundamentally different.
And we really don't want to adopt your model, thanks anayway; but our model works pretty well for the most part.

Sure it needs to be re-evaluated now and again, as all models ought to be. And sure we have a higher risk exposure, which contributes to bigger rewards and more opportunities and ... jobs.

I'm up on my knowledge of Canadian & American business, politics and economy because it is a big part of what I need to know for my professional work; I'm also from one country and getting married to someone from the other, so, hey, it's part of what I need to know in my personal life as well.  I don't need to look up exchange rates, gas prices or commentary on the comparative quality of roads, health care and education, or on the state of politics because I live my life in both countries, see these things with my own two eyes, talk to quite a number of people in both countries, and compound that with a lot of research.

That's the starting point for my perspective on things.  Almost by definition, it's going to be more a informed perspective than people who recite the dross you get from self-described patriotic conservative talk radio hosts, or where-ever the hell it is some Americans pick up the kind of badly-informed, unrealistic viewpoints that aren't grounded in actual reality.

As for Canada's GDP, when measured per capita it is more or less on par with the United States, though usually behind by a bit (depends on how you measure it).  Canada's GDP to debt ratio has also been close to the United States, but unlike the United States, Canada has been running budgetary surpluses, not large deficits through the 2000s, so that's been tilting in Canada's favour.

That said, I'm not really much of a believer in using the GDP alone as a proper measure of the success of a nation.  Spending lots of money on stuff is only part of the equation.  Is the money being spent in the pursuit of feeding the personal greed of the few or improving the quality of life of the many?  Is our children learning?  The Human Development Index does a better job of measuring the real effectiveness of both public policy and private spending.  Canada's GDP per capita may be lower, but.... so?  The quality of life is measurably better.

And which is more important to you as a functioning human being?  Money or happiness?

(that question always reminds me of a story: A catholic friend of mine went on a church mission to the shantytowns in the hills surrounding Lima, Peru.  Destitution is widespread there .  But, she found that many of the people there were happier and more at peace with their life than just about everyone she'd ever known in her home state of Connecticut.)