TERIN'S PROFILE

I actually work for Microsoft (subsidiary, but I get info/updates on all "top secret" Microsoft things), so I have some insight as to what they're adding. It's cool, but I think mostly ill-conceived. It's built entirely on Windows Vista's kernel (not a big surprise), but the entire hope/idealism for a MinWin/minimalistic kernel hasn't come to fruition at all.

They're really shooting for a better "user experience," which seems to be the theme. However, it doesn't seem like anyone is listening to any details regarding the entire need for writing a more minimalistic/simple thing. Just more services and other things. I have a feeling they'll at least be addressing some of the issues that were built into Vista, i.e. network throttling, as there have been lots of complains about it, and file-transfers. I really hope they will, otherwise, I might not have a very bright career outlook -- on the plus side, I think Windows/'nix support a lot more simple languages to write in than Mac. The big thing, which I hope is common knowledge and I'm not leaking anything, is that Windows 7 is going to have better voice recognition and alternative input support, as well as touch-screen support.

In my eyes, Windows 7 is either going to be Windows 98 or Windows ME to Vista being Windows 95.

As far as Midori, since ShadowText brought it up, they're still being very strange/indecisive about what they want. At first it was "Hey, let's make this a distributed OS with all of the household machines running off of a mainframe-esque design" (which is stupid -- if everyone's on a thin client in a household and you have one physical machine, how do you handle people with very intensive things, i.e. gaming? You'd need a very fancy "thin" client, which might as well just be a damn normal machine). I tossed my two cents in, along with many other developers, and there's a lot of movement towards making it just "possible" to do something with distributed machines/thin clients. THAT would be smart. Make it easier to build distributed applications/split loads on things. The big thing about Midori is that you can find pretty much all of it in Singularity, Microsoft's "research" OS. So look at the features there -- the Midori kernel is fairly similar -- entirely managed to prevent things from going haywire. For backwards support, you'll probably be running a virtualized instance of something like XP or Vista for backwards compatibility with your applications that aren't native to Midori. But Midori will change everything -- and I think for the better. Very modular, very robust -- they're moving away from the paradigms that were set in stone back when mainframes were the big thing (well, mostly, with exception to that retarded move for thin-clients/single household server). Midori will definitely be to Windows what Mac OS's were to OS X. I think it'll be a real winner -- but that's quite a few years off -- although, I can say, Windows 7 would be built/updated a lot faster if they pulled people away from Midori.

I'm mixed about Win7; Vista isn't too bad -- but I'm really looking forward to Midori.

Spiderman. Doesn't need a cape, either. Or Mr. Incredible. That's just red spandex.

author=YummyDrumsticks link=topic=1751.msg28139#msg28139 date=1219600638
Not as bad as that one time where the government spent millions of dollars on psychologist to figure out why prisoners wanted to escape ... prison.

It was the food, from what I heard.

C# is a better version of Java, imo. I would definitely throw C# out there to you if you have any coding experience at all. It's cross-platforming too, if you use mono, which compiles most (if not all) of my things great. C# also can make a game just as good as C++ with only a very minor loss in quality, if everything is done correctly.

Python is a very interesting language as well. If I ever lost all programming knowledge, it would definitely be a language I'd want to learn to start with. That and C#. Probably Python first so you can understand scripting, then C# to use objects in a cleaner, enforced-object-oriented environment.

C# also takes a lot of the guess work/memory management that used to plague C and C++. It's a really good system, but there are obvious slow-downs. But making a MMO in it (or a game) shouldn't be ruled as impossible -- I have a feeling it's VERY possible, and I'm trying to prove this theory true. I've written a few engines (privately) that ran 2D games great in C#; my OpenGL app right now is working pretty well also (it's 2.5D ala FFTactics, etc, though, so not huge on polygons, but very huge on crunching and mashing textures).

Just my few cents. But I am a C# enthusiast/evangelist to some degree...

That LG looks nice, WIP.

Unfortunately, the new iPhone has a few problems with it. My 8gb fried last night and would constantly crash, miss calls, etc. I went to try to replace it today and had a shitload of problems trying to exchange it. Finally, I managed to upgrade to the white 16gb. Works a lot better and I'm really enjoying it.