The factory workers in Detroit had it pretty swank actually.

Thanks to the unions btw, which basically created the middle class and raised capitalism from the same old mess to something actually quite liveable. I still cannot comprehend why they're seen as malevolent on the western side of the atlantic.

Your wage does not correlate with how necessary you are to our society.

Spot on! Consider garbage collectors; no other profession has had a larger impact on the health of society as a whole. Without them rampant cholera would actually be the least of our troubles.

Why don't you have compassion for those whose labor is confiscated in order to pay for your social stability scheme?

Because we know it's mere chance separating those who can labor from those who cannot. It cannot be rationally dealt with, and it's therefore beyond capitalist economics (which assumes rational players).

Also, if it's about cost, consider this: the life of every ALS-patient ever lived and which shall ever live is quite nicely paid for by the life and works of one person, Stephen Hawking. The same can probably be said of every major illness.

Why should anything be rationed on any basis other than your ability to produce enough for society to afford it?

And why should your ability to produce enough for society be measured by how much money you have?

What an unfortunate choice of words.

Now they're locked in to PHP.

Apparently they were under a lot of pressure.

The DLL has to be designed to use and install into the WinSxS mechanism

Oh, yeah, you're right, sorry. Somehow the myriad SxS calls I've seen littering the MFC source must've slipped my mind.

MS shouldn't really be allowing such poor practices.

What are you proposing exactly, have them automatically analyse all code that is being released (and solve the halting problem at the same time)? And how would you propose they deal with the ensuing shitstorm? There are actually legitimate reasons for DLLs changing you know, like the common controls I mentioned.

Besides, what would you rather have, a program not working in its entirety, or working properly and using a meg more memory (that'd be a huge DLL; the code segment of most DLLs is barely half that)?

The real problem is C version Y not being backward compatible to C version X, leading to this idiocy of piling more and more complexity on top of a totally rotten mechanism.

It might surprise you, but Microsoft isn't actually to blame here. Rather, the legions of incompetent programmers that wrote DLLs such as C are to blame. We'd call them idiots, but Microsoft calls them paying customers. Thus prompting them to design SxS and incorporate it in WinXP.

Also, SxS is what made the restyling of the UI (through common controls version 6) technically possible.

Microsoft takes backwards compatibility very seriously.

the current versions of the public SDK still use Visual Studio 2005

For most projects, upgrading sources from VS2005 to VS2008 is really quite painless, no harder than opening the .SLN in 2008 and letting it save the converted result. Are the Source sources really that problematic?

What might be interesting to note here is that the summary isn't everything there is to side-by-side (SxS) assemblies.

Suppose you're building an application using two DLLs, let's call them A and B. Both depend on a third DLL named C. Now, suppose A uses C version X, and B uses C version Y. You're screwed, right? Not with SxS, since that allows multiple versions of C to be loaded. That's the real added value of SxS.

All this is in theory of course, which as we all know is in theory equal to practice, but in practice is not...

Please tell me you aren't driving during your commute.

I commute by train, 15 minutes each way. Also, I don't think we live on the same continent (I'm Dutch), so you're probably safe :)

there's no clear way to define a per-device mapping

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys, select keyboard to apply to. I've had per-keyboard mappings (one for my macbook's builtin keyboard and one for my Model M) since 10.4.x (Tiger).

Hope that helps.

Once I press Stop the page loads and displays properly however the browser will lock up for approximately 30 seconds.

That's caused by the large amount of Javascript processing /.'s dynamic frontpage does. I disabled the dynamic frontpage and all the other ajaxy features of /. and now it's quite usable on my iPhone 3G. On my commute I occasionally even find myself reading comments and moderating.