The Coffeehouse

Resource based economy, would it work?

androidi — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:36:49 GMT

I like the pretty CGI. I've not watched this to the end yet, so far this hasn't answered the questions of motivation and control of things that don't exist abundance, I hope those are answered in the later parts. I personally know all type of people but in the current system it's hard to say are there enough self driven people to maintan such system and what about the rest who just choose to party all the time? Suppose 80% of world population would just party their entire useful lifetime Is that a good system considering we could if not educationally, genetically modify people such that they would instead do whatever is deemed to be better than just partying all night along?

Live Space, why it sucks?

magicalclick — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:20:23 GMT

I am using Live Space, it is fine for me, but barely anyone use it. Why is that? How come MS didn't do anything about it.

It's Mono 2.0

eagle — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:35:13 GMT

Mono 2.0 released to the world

Mono 2.0 is both a runtime for application and a kit for developers for writing applications with C# and other ECMA CLI languages for a wide spectrum of uses.
Congrats to Miguel and Team, can Moonlight 2.0 be coming soon?

Markets still crashing - Who'se to blame?

phreaks — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:44:33 GMT

According to Bloomberg, Democrats!

Bloomberg said:

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn't be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie ``continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,'' he said. ``We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.''

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

...

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that's worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aSKSoiNbnQY0

ASP.NET MVC - Production?

nosajis — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:20:07 GMT

Anyone using this new model in production? Does it have a Go-Live license? Are we even allowed to? Is there a production release time frame? Looks good, works good, when can I start seriously using this tech set?

High Priority Free Software Projects

littleguru — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:38:24 GMT

The Free Software Foundation has published a list of projects that they think are important for the adoption on free software. Check out #7. ;)

It seems to me as if this is a call for volunteers... I wonder if these projects aren't going that well and therefore the FSF decided to go with this kind of campaign or if they only want to bring the projects more in the center of attention.

iPhone Game Dev

eagle — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:31:59 GMT

iPhone Games

Justin Ficarrotta of Freeverse talked about creating and selling iPhone Games at the first NY Games Conference

Media player with a record button

turrican — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:20:01 GMT

Hm... this ( http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/431252-Why-is-Windows-Media-Player-so-awful/?CommentID=431331 ) made me create a new thread about it. Is there any media player out there with a native record button? Something as simple as the real life tape recording was, where you could listen and just hit "record" and it started to record whatever you heard.

Why did this record button never even made into for my knowledge so far ALL media players!?

MDI vs well, panels???

turrican — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:12:08 GMT

Perhaps this been discussed before, I seem to recall from somewhere that WPF doesn't allow MDI "natively" and that MDI forms are no longer "recommended" to use. A lot of enterprise applications where data is managed has a need to see two or more modules at the same time, like if you open a customer, you also want to open sales reports and maybe warehouse stocks.

I'm currently developing a winforms+WCF enterprise application, a LOT of stuff in it. Right now, I am using panels and an "outlook bar thingy" on the left + a treeview on top of it for subsections. However, I have not yet solved the issue how to make two or more of each section visible for the user at the same time, I mean the way you could do it with MDI windows.

How can this problem be solved in a non-MDI environment? Running several copies of the application?

I am not asking for a "how to do MDI in WPF" but I would like to know what other ways are there to solve such issues since I am probably not alone about this.

What are your thoughts on this?

Thank god it's Monday!

dcuccia — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:28:55 GMT

Can't wait to work on the crap I couldn't finish all weekend...

It's over. I'm leaving.

jamie — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:38:33 GMT

This place sucks! as do ...shoes!

C9 Opposite Week 2008.

jamie — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 01:48:28 GMT

OK so here it is 9:45 - Sunday Oct. 5 2008.

So tomorrow (mon) to (fri) is c9 opposite week.

To participate, you simply post the opposite of what you would normally post. All week. Mon - to fri.

*or you can ignore this. Im going to try it.. as of midnite tonight :)
*so i can still be "normal" for 2 hours

* be opposite of yourself - in everyway. lets break data!

** reminder wallpaper:

Windows: Kitchen table

jamie — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:26:22 GMT

With the bailout news and presidential campaign news... it is sometimes hard not to view Microsoft (financial bellwether and economy driver )in the same camp/league as presidential choice.

So is MS mccain - or obama?

Will there be more of the same? or something truely NEW. ?

If Windows 7 were a political candidate - what would it take for you to vote for BUYING it?

i would list change, repairing damaged reputation, reaching out to lower income buyers and getting a bit more coolness involved somehow

so im firmly obama ms. I think steveb is firmly mcain ms.

Do you think comparisons can be legitimately drawn? or its a whole different thing.

?

*also - would democrats impose new restrictions on ms? would repubs let the stevebush machine run willy nilly wild as of late?

Last - if there was a person of moral standing - running ms - i would be less warry of repubs - but because of steveb - i almost think more oversight could help FIX ms

?

ps - where the heck is everyone? haha
test..test... is this thing on?

Why is Windows Media Player so awful?

Bas — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:40:38 GMT

And I specifically mean when editing metadata. Why does it just randomly forget a song's title, or album, or artist, even though it remembers other metadata I added? And why does it only occasionally write that metadata to the actual file, even when I explicitly tell it to do so? Where is Media Player 12? Has Microsoft just given up on it?

Will Windows 7 see new ftp client, paint and notepad?

androidi — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 01:55:54 GMT

Answer: Yes.

When typing "cmd" on the prompt, it will open the WinMarket and offer various command line shells. PowerShell for just $30.

No "ftp" or god forbid, ftp with passive mode support. No problem, type "ftp" and WinMarket will popup. Lots of opportunity for devs here!

Same for Win+E. Tired of plain ole Explorer? It's good thing theres so many partners to do our work for us!

Want to crop large screen shots better than what mspaint can? Press Print Screen for no end of 3rd party solutions just for this task!
How about opening files with mac/unix line endings? You should know what to do by now!

One of my pet hates ... The Start Button

Sabot — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 14:32:23 GMT

One of my pet hates ... The Start Button

If I was to wish to change one thing in Windows it would be the Start button.

I was more than disappointed when Vista arrived to discover that designers had decided that to keep continuity with previous versions of Windows and keep the Start button with nothing more than a make-over. But it did seem for awhile that with Longhorn it was at last disappearing.

The Start button is actually an extremely useful UI vehicle as it allows someone who is unfamiliar with a machine a standard avenue to discovery, this has to be applauded as it is a simple construct that is universal but it is in the same token very restrictive. If anyone remembers Windows before 95, then you know that Windows could indeed be a disorganized mess. The Start button offers a simple restriction, where the only other alternative to navigating through menus was groups of icons on the desktop.

In recent years to help stem the sea of desktop icons, the Quick menu has appeared however if you want to have some sort of organization and (here comes the important word) 'categorization' it meant creating folder structures that turned into a skilled drilling frenzy whether on desktop or in Start Menu.

However, what’s the point of trying to get organized? Who has that many programs anyway? Well the simple reason is that we all now have loads of programs, files, documents, videos, films, pictures just lots and lots of stuff all over the place. Strangely enough however I don’t want to find anything using a search term, that’s like admitting defeat.

The Start button doesn’t really help as the menu is small and restrictive, you can't move it or expand it and you can’t have more than one of them such as an ‘Office Start Button’, a ‘Games Start Button’. So to get some semblance of categorized organization I’m using a Dock, like you can find on the Mac or Linux that has tabs to get a bit of organization.

Now that Windows 7 development is in full swing can I please ask the UI designers to take a long hard look at the Start Button. I thought we almost had it with a similar Vista Start button appearance type thing in Office 2007, I just wanted to rip it off the top right hand part of my Office window and place it next to the Start button and say … this is what I mean, more of this please!

So what do say Microsoft? Can you help me keep my hair please?

A More Reliable Task Manager

tfraser — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 12:32:43 GMT

The other day my system encountered a full freeze where I wasn't able to access Windows Task Manager, therefore making a reboot the only solution. With the crash-catching and application recovery improvements in Windows Vista this doesn't happen often, but when it does it's a real pain.

This got me wondering whether WTM could be made a more reliable way of rescuing the OS. I'm thinking of something where a small section of the CPU and RAM resources could be permanently reserved for use by WTM in the event of a freeze. This way WTM can still be started and used to trim some troublesome processes to restore Windows to a functioning state. I'm aware that the resource requirements of WTM vary based on other currently running processes, but surely calculating this would not be overly complex.

The concept seems so obvious to me that I'm certain Windows already has something similar, though if the feature does indeed exist it clearly isn't working the way it should. What are your thoughts on it? Do you think it would be useful or viable?

How to get rid of HTTPS security warnings in FF3?

BlackTiger — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:16:44 GMT

Each time I'm opening C9 site I'm getting annoying "warning" from FF3 because I'm entering "secure" zone! It happens because of redirections between C9 and "login.live.com". I've already turned off ALL warnings in FF3's settings, but still getting that stupid warning.
There was no such warning in FF2, no warning in IE7... I hate such things like "oversecured security" and "good inventions"!

How do you get ideas for projects?

Chadk — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:40:02 GMT

So over the last few months I have tried hard to come up with some kind of project I could work on and maybe make a coin or two after some time(Hosting isn't free).

So I'm obviously doing something wrong.

What's your "secret" for coming up with good ideas you can make into an useful product?

Is anyone boycotting nVidia yet ?

YyzPro — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:24:13 GMT

A ton of people are really **** off because of the high nVidia GPU failure rate, especially in notebooks. If your noteobook has not failed yet then you can get a BIOS update that will turn your fans on all the time and have your battery or fans go first - in any case, problem will show up until way after 1yr warranty runs out. nVidia is also #1 in trashing Vista reputation because of crappy video drivers. Any thoughts on this?

Home Server backup

Refrax — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:01:24 GMT

as it seems keepvault no longer has an option for unlimited storage. had just finished uploading about 90 Gigs from my homeserver when i went to see if there was an update to the software. i noticed that the page had changed so i looked to see what option there was to buy for their services. no more unlimited storage. i remember a post somewhere that had a questionare from microsoft asking about a $50/year unlimited online backup, i hope that is something more than just an idea. anyone else doing a online backup of their homeserver?

Buying an upgrade from 32bit to 64bit

Cyonix — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:54:44 GMT

My friend wants to move to Vista 64bit and has already bought Vista 32bit (his had it for a few months now), is it possible to buy an upgrade to go from Vista 32bit to Vista 64bit or is he required to go buy another copy? I remember with Windows XP you could trade in your 32bit XP copy for a 64bit copy... do Microsoft still have anything like that?

PDC Boy Band

HumanCompiler — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:47:04 GMT

http://channel8.msdn.com/Posts/PDC-2008-is-cominghellip-and-I-canrsquot-wait/

Alas, the Channel 9 Dev Team opted out of joining the band in favor of writing some ASP.NET MVC code. We've regretted it every day since. :'(

But seriously...funnayz! Recognize some of the 'softies? :) See Long's post for details.

Vice Presidential debate

corona_coder — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 05:57:41 GMT

Palin obliterated Biden. He looked like a kid that was about to wet his pants, he walked away like a dog with his tail between his legs. It was great. Anyone who votes for Obama now is just plain idiotic. McCain is the way to go. For the best choice for the white house, McCain/Palin is the way to go. Obama/Biden are just a waste of time.

Windows Media Player 11 sorting...

Harlequin — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:32:55 GMT

Anyone find a way to get it to stop sorting alhpabetically, ignoring "a" and "the"?

I found out finally how to do it in ITunes, but can't find how to do it in Media Player.

Tough to search for "a" or "the" in web searches :)