buggy123

>My primary argument against GC is that it doesn't do anything
>for non-memory resources (finalizers are an abomination).

Why is there any debate?  Ref counting is universal (release when done works with any resource type), GC is only for memory (release when memory pressure).  Therefore GC can not be a drop in replacement for ref counting, case closed.  There is no amount of performance or any other straw man  that can change that.

Yet that's precisely what was done from vb6 to vb.net

Since you are on the inside, can you find out why Microsoft's .NET people appear to not understand this?  Do they really believe that another abomination, the dispose pattern (which is nothing more than manual malloc, free) is really a "solution?"  Are there plans to change that?

The following point, made in this video, needs to be stressed,

deterministic reference counting is a universal resource management technique, whereas garbage collection is useless for anything other than memory.  For that reason GC is simply not a replacement for ref counting no matter how much Patrick Dussud congratulates himself.

Cycles can be worked around but total lack of support for managing non memory resources in .net, can't be, you are back in the C world of malloc (new), free (dispose) with absolutely no help from the compiler/runtime.

I think you lost the adult audience with this interviewing guy, but I'm sure kids 2-6 will enjoy his antics. It's great you're thinking about the children as well.

OMG he met Steve Jobs! He met Steve Jobs! He was his best buddy, OMG OMG!!!

Right...

really she is looking hot .............just i was looking @ her 00 ..

First a question: what were all those programs used? I think I saw cygwin and emacs being used, but what was the shell that would highlight the old commands on mouse over?

And then a comment: my problem with offloading stuff to the GPU is that the numerical environment is a joke. You don't know anything about the radix, the range of fp values, if +, -, *, /, and sqrt follows the sane rounding rules of IEEE, controlling any reorderings or fusions (i.e. a*b+c -> fma(a,b,c)) that are allowed to take place, NaNs, -0, Inf (if so, affine or projected?), what happens on overflow/underflow/etc., all the nice functions in the latest draft IEEE standard or C99, controlling directed rounding, etc., etc., etc.

It's fine for doing things like CoreImage or accelerating game physics, but not for some of the things I'd love to offload that requires careful analysis. I hope you guys nag the DX people (at least) for some pragmas or mode that will tighten up the fp environment and/or the ability to set/query anything interesting (see limits.h or float.h from C99 as an example).


And the use of functional type stuff scares me. Do you guys automatically break data down into smaller tiles to keep the memory usage more manageable?

Oh joy. Only 2 more versions of dotNet to go before we're capable of writing VB6 code. What progress that is! Plus, all that wait and we'll still have crappy dotNet performance. "dotNet... like running from the internet, no matter what!"

Not only do I only use 100 percent pirated copies of Windows in massive OS rollouts, I also disable all sounds upon installation.  Eat it, Micro(I need to watch my language).


Larry Osterman: Watch your language.

It sounds good, im using Vista like sounds packet since long time. Im wondered how the final Sounds will sound like

That is the dumbest thing I've seen in a while

If this Restart Manager functionality is taken up, it could potentially mean that Windows could gain the feature that Gnome and other Linux window managers currently have that lets you save the whole desktop state across reboots. Basically, upon shutdown you use the Restart Manager interfaces to persist the state of all running processes, which is restored when you log in again after the computer comes back up. This would be cool, and it seems a shame to relegate the functionality to being part of the Windows Installer component rather than a wider Windows metaphor.

BSP

I thought it was a good video, I like most of the concepts he was displaying, right up until the end.  I think they have their priorities for  themes/skinning completely backwards.  Allowing developers to alter the look of standard controls to defy the standards set by the rest of the interface is a tremendous mistake.  "Triangular shaped buttons, star shaped buttons, 3D buttons..." That's NOT great!  The only thing that will do is confuse users, as consistency is thrown out the window with Microsoft's blessing and support.  One of the things I hate about XP is seeing applications sporting non-standard interfaces.  Yes, most of them are hideous, but even the attractive ones look bad because they don't fit in with the rest of the UI.

I've seen plenty of Windows 2000 users at work that change system fonts and colors to suit their own preferences, and it sounds like Vista will be as limited as Windows XP in this regard.  Especially considering the vector based interface, Vista should have the most customizable UI of any Windows to date.  Please don't make the same mistake; allow us to force standard UI elements on custom designed applications!  Allow us to change colors, fonts, themes, whatever we want!  Branding be damned, we already know we're using Windows for Pete's sake!

618mb? Damn. 41 minutes? Is it in HD? It sure would be great if this had a bittorrent link to speed this propaganda on to my machine... See, there are non-piracy uses for BT... {this post brought to by BugMeNot. I'm not hopping through all those hoops to post one reply once...}