What is likely to work however, is a cracked version of that software.

Well you get what you pay for when buying such devices...
There are standards for printers, scanners and various other hardware. I wouldn't ever buy a printer which didn't support Postscript, and i never install the official drivers as they're often extremely bloated and probably full of ads. Sure printers which support postscript generally cost more, but they're usually higher quality, older ones are still available cheaply and the toner/ink is likely to remain available for far longer.

This is one of the inherent problems of being closed source, support for niche and older hardware will be lacking.
Microsoft have to break compatibility from time to time in order to progress, either due to hardware changes (64bit) or software changes (new video driver stack etc).

The problem is that with closed drivers, only the original authors of those drivers can change them and hardware manufacturers have little or no incentive to continue supporting old hardware as they want to sell you new kit. With open source drivers, all it takes is for one of the users to either update it themselves, or hire someone capable of doing so. In some cases updates aren't even necessary, eg a lot of linux drivers written for 32bit x86 compile just fine on 64bit or even other architectures like ARM.

The same is true of niche hardware, a lot of hardware was intended by the manufacturer to be connected to x86 systems but uses standard cross platform buses like pci or usb... While the number of people using linux on ppc, alpha, sparc or arm etc might be too low for the manufacturer to bother providing official support, the drivers will often just work. I used to run an alphastation on linux with all manner of pci and usb devices which were never intended to be used on alpha based hardware.

Svavar Knútur is great... the music's really pretty, but between songs he's a standup comedian. ;) That said, some of his songs are funny too... one of his songs (in Icelandic) is about a guy on his way to propose to his girlfriend when he gets bitten by a zombie, and he meets up with her and is trying to propose while slowly turning into a zombie and increasingly wanting to eat her instead... but it turns out that she was bitten by a zombie too, so they end up living happily ever after ;) Oh, and then there's this song.

If Earth becomes Venus-like then those with innovation and drive will innovate a way to protect themselves, while those that don't will eventally adapt, growing a hard, rocky skin and blood based on liquid metals rather than water. The climate has changed in Earth's past and life survived; if our future is to be a tribe of hideous rock monsters ruled by clever, pitiless human overlords in protective bubbles, then bring it on. It's not a reason to hinder economic growth.

--
Vote freedom. Vote prosperity. Vote Reanimated Corpse Of Ayn Rand in 2016.

I more prefer my apocalypse-themed music to be romantic and slightly nerdy ;)

99% percent of the time, people use the search to basically type just enough text to get the item they want on top, and then press Enter. If your list of installed apps doesn't change frequently, over time you just learn what to type, and it becomes sort of a keyboard shortcut. You don't need a fullscreen search screen for that.

BTW, Start Menu in Win10 is not fixed size. It grows as you pin more tiles to it.

Have you actually seen Win 8.1? What you describe is what's coming up in Win 10 only; Win 8.1 still had the new Start screen in all its glory, not in the least resembling the Start Menu of Win7.

You forgot cheapest! More proof that nuclear power is the cheapest low-carbon power source, not a tech more popular on K street than Wall Street that gets by via being absolved of all potential liability for major accidents, getting huge loan guarantees, and being allowed to pass off cost overruns to consumers at-will and even still has trouble finding investors. Nuclear power has always been more popular on K-Street than Wall Street.

How did that "nuclear renaissance" work out for you all? Yeah, that sure bombed out fast. Gotta love an industry with a negative learning curve, where costs continually rise with time and scale rather than dropping (aka, learning of new potential problems and risks faster than refining the technology to lower costs).

Nuclear scares the public a lot more than it actually poses a risk to their health or life. But you know who it scares even more? Investors. Given the race out the door today, can you imagine what it'd be like if the industry wasn't let off the hook for potential damages over a maximum in the event of a major accident? No insurance company would touch the industry with a 10 foot pole. Nuclear accidents may not be good at killing people, but there's one thing that they're damned good at and that's costing a bloody fortune to remedy.

An interpreter would be slower. A JIT-compiler, OTOH...

VB6 compiler is written in C++.

What's even funnier is that C# and VB.NET compilers are also written in C++, even today (yes, there's Roslyn, but Roslyn-based compilers haven't shipped stable releases yet; the ones in VS 2013 are still the C++ ones).

You mean, like this?

It's actually really simple (though I agree that it is surprising): if an identifier is assigned inside a code block (which is e.g. a body of function or a class; but not a body of a loop or a conditional statement), that variable is treated as a local variable throughout that entire block, unless there is a "global" declaration for it in that block. So:

x = 1; y = 2
 
def f():
  x = y
 
def g():
  y = x
 
def h():
  global x
  x = y
 
def m():
  print(x)
  x = y

Inside f, x is a local (because it is assigned to), and y is a global. Inside g, y is a local and x is a global. Inside h, both x and y are globals.

This gets more interesting in m, where you'll get an error trying to read an unassigned variable when printing x, because x is treated as a local throughout the body, not after assignment (and the scope is still lexical, not dynamic - it doesn't even matter if assignment executes or not).

"C-based" is modern speak for "Algol-derived" for people who don't know what Algol is.

And you can use it for Python, with everything that you wrote still being true.

For this kind of stuff you really don't need to. I would be extremely surprised if all the tasks that he covers in his class wouldn't be covered even by the base Python install downloaded from http://python.org/ (which PTVS will even tell you to do if it finds that you don't have Python). And if that is not true, then a prepackaged Python distro like Anaconda - again, a single-click install - will surely be enough.

I would argue that the cruft that VB.NET puts on top of C# is mostly useless as training wheels - it's no big difference between IF..END IF and curly braces - and in some cases is actively harmful because it uses its own terminology that is not shared with any other programming language, in lieu of terms that are commonly used throughout the field (like MustOverride/MustInherit instead of abstract).

Basically, if you are teaching people VB, you might as well teach them C# right away. It'll take 1% more effort, but they'll have a more useful skill from the get go, and knowledge of syntax will help them when it'll come to C++, Java, JavaScript etc.