Subversion was written as a replacement for CVS, and designed to address its short-fallings, hence subversion kind of supersedes CVS. As to a replacement for WinCVS, well I've not used it so I couldn't say, but there are plenty of good SVN tools out there. By far the most popular is TortoiseSVN which integrates with Windows Explorer, or if you want a standalone client try checking out Subcommander or SmartSVN http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/[^] http://subcommander.tigris.org/[^] http://www.syntevo.com/smartsvn/[^]

side lane digital development

After 8+ years of working with VSS this year I switched to Subversion, and now wonder why I ever put up with VSS at all. We also used SourceOffSite for external access, which was always a pain and a clunky way to access your data externally. If your head is stuck in VSS mode, then you need to step back a little to really appreciate SVN and how to use it properly, but it's a pretty low learning curve. Like many posts already, I'd advocate VisualSVN + TortoiseSVN for the VS and explorer integration, and VisualSVN Server running on the backend, mainly for its simplicity. Another plus, for me anyway, is that it's entirely cross-platform, with tools available for loads of different platforms. No brainer.

side lane digital development

I was comparing it against Preemptive Dotfuscator, which is over three times the price. Back when I bought it (c2006) there wasn't a lot else competing with it either in terms of price or functionality. Looking around now there are cheaper alternatives. I came across Deep Sea Obfuscator the other day [http://www.deepseaobfuscator.com/], which is cheaper, but I've not tried it out yet.

side lane digital development

From my experience, dongle-based safety is often a pain, and expensive. If it's .net obfuscation you're after, I'd go with Smart Assembly. It's easy to use, fairly well priced, and whenever I've come up against a problem the developers have been very responsive. http://www.smartassembly.com/

Amen to that brother...

Not according to the MS Visual Studio product comparision. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/vs2008/products/cc149003.aspx I've got a both copy of standard and pro and I certainly can't find it in the standard edition. If you could show me that would be ideal.

Sorry but that's where you're wrong. AAC is not an Apple proprietary format, they've just popularized the use of it as the default setting in iTunes. From Wikipedia: "Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at many bit rates. AAC has been standardized by ISO and IEC, as part of the MPEG-2 & MPEG-4 specifications. The MPEG-2 standard contains several audio coding methods, including the MP3 coding scheme AAC is also the standard audio format for Sony’s PlayStation 3, latest generation of Sony Walkman, Sony Ericsson Walkman Phone, Nintendo's Wii (with the Photo Channel 1.1 update installed for Wii consoles purchased before late 2007) and the MPEG-4 video standard. HE-AAC is part of digital radio standards like DAB+ and Digital Radio Mondiale." And I don't know what's wrong with your iPod but I've got mine full of MP3 files which are all held in my iTunes library. If you look at the settings iTunes gives you a choice of codec.

OK, Express editions you got me there. Good products for the price, especially SQL Express. But there are limitations in the Express product set which MS puts in place to force your hand to buy the full version of Visual Studio. An example being if you want to be able to do Windows Mobile development you need the pro version.

Yes you can run Virtual PC's, but what I meant is run the other OS in a virtual sense, ie: run Mac OS X on a virtual machine under Windows. Don't get me wrong, my whole point really was that don't knock the Mac if you don't know that much about it. You're right each OS has it's place (and it's fans), but it's good to understand where the limits of each are.

If you're having to type your password every time you want to do anything there's certainly something wrong with either your system or with what you're trying to do with it. Try running Disk Utility and repair permissions on your system drive. I admit it must be annoying if that is happening, but hey UAC anyone? Hello? I've been using a Mac since early OS 9 days (circa '93) and Windows machines (3.1/95/98/NT/XP/Vista) for about the same. Are they different? Of course they are. Is one better than the other? Well that depends on what you are trying to do. That's like trying to compare a salad and a steak. One thing that I've found over the years is that using a Mac you get a better view of the wider world, particularly when it comes to file formats, usually MS ones. Personally I've never had any airport issues, nor any issues with any USB drive. WMA files, well as usual that's a MS proprietary file format. That's what they do. Forget adopting anything that is already good enough for the job, let's create our own format. Sony are just as bad. Unlike Apple who went with AAC for iTunes, but also made it flexible enough for people them a choice. If you want to play WMA on a Mac you have plenty of choices, try checking out MacUpdate HERE NTFS? Well firstly you can read NTFS disks by default under OS X and of course read/write even format disks in FAT32. When was the last time you were able to read an HFS/HFS+ disk on a PC? Need to write to an NTFS disk? Try NTFS-3G Forgot cross platform file issues though, have you ever tried to open a MS Works database file in MS Access? Or a Works Word Processing file in Word? MS don't even support all their own formats on their own platform (by default anyway). Granted that XCode might not be the slickest IDE in the world, but at least they don't have the balls to charge you for it. When did MS last give away Visual Studio? You want to write in BASIC, what about REALBasic? Alright, it's not exactly the same as MS VB, but it's not trying to be. That said though what MS tool will compile your VB code into an OS X/Linux/Win executable? Want to write .net code on a Mac try looking up Mono. Granted the GUI sucks, but it can be done. I could go on all day, but it's the same old story. The bottom line is that you need to accept that different computers are good at different things. I use a Mac on a daily basis for my graphic and web work, but I als