you'd have to be particularly crazy to develop a game that requires DirectX 11.1 any time soon
Given a pragmatic developer I can't see how that would happen, unless they were doing a tech demo. Most of the DirectX utility and sample code sets up the device like this:
so now you add:
All the fixed function stuff is gone now. You do your own object-local-to-word transform in the vertex shader, and then the world-to-view transform using the projection matrix. If you have stereoscopic rendering, then you have 2 projection matricies in the shaders.
Thus in the above tests you get back what version of DirectX is running, and load the corresponding set of shaders for your world, lighting and material renderers. You'd need the option to turn on or off stereoscopic rendering anyway, so it makes having an exclusive Directx11.1 renderer highly implausible.
98 SE was better. I've not been a fan of the NT line
No way. I had NT 3.51 as my main OS (circa 1995). That was the good version before they killed it with NT 4.0. This OS gave you the OS/2 experience with a Windows skin (If you used OS/2 2.0 then you know what I'm talking about), and OpenGL to boot (no DirectWhatever). The multitasking was butter smooth, and it came with a C/C++ compiler bundled in the OS. I was doing user/programmer tech support at the time, and all the 98SE machines I saw that came years later sucked arse.
NT 4.0 with the Windows 95 skin was a backwards step. Apparently Billg had a bee in his bonnet about beating MacOS at the automated bytemark benchmark in word processing or something, and so the OS guys had to move GUI stuff into the kernel to get the benchmarks up. It was downhill from there.
Oh by the way, if anyone's looking for a 39 yr old programmer with a boat load of experience (150 different skills), I'm open to offers... just though I'd add that in, in case someone reads this, as some of my clients have hit hard times recently, hence I've....
Java has something C# lacks: a good IDE. Java has eclipse.
Wow, where did you get that opinion from? Using a beta version of VS2005? VS2001?. The team I'm in right now is coding Java for Android in NetBeans because Eclipse sucked hard. But coding in C# in Visual Studio 2008/2010 is way better, way more productive. Hell even coding Javascript / HTML in VS2010 is better than this.
Years ago I was sitting at light. The light turns green and the driver in front of me starts going oblivious to the car that's sailing down the road and clearly not intending on stopping for the red. So this guy slams right into the guy in front of me.
In Taiwan the lights count down to when they turn green, so as it gets to 3,2,1 you look both ways and can see if anyone is going to run the opposing red light. Apparently this reduced the sort of accident you saw by 30% vs putting in red light cameras that increased rear-end accidents by 20%. So they don't have red light cameras. They do have big yellow and black painted speed cameras, that are sign posted so people can clearly see where they are, but these are just in areas where they really do need people to stick to the speed limit.
You make it sound like people WANTED Windows 7. They didn't and they don't. Even today, if Windows XP was an option, they would go with that
Ha! good one. This should be awarded Troll of the week! I wish there was an option on slashdot to count troll points as +ve rather than -ve, as I have to browse at -1 to read good stuff like this.
I know the code you pasted was for C#, my comment was directed at your initial opening sentence...
.Net has both query form Linq (what you posted) and method form Linq (what the java version looks like), and the two are interchangeable.
I read your comment in the wrong context. Thanks for clarifying.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.