I was horrified. I bought one for my ferry ride home. Half way through the ride I saw the words AlkoholFrei on the label. I felt cheated. Strangely, it tasted OK until I realised there wasn't any alcohol in it. :)

Chipset was NVIDIA GeForce 8600M (Dedicated GDDR3 256MB video memory) [^] See following filing if you don't believe me: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000119312508145974/d8k.htm[^] Here is some more reference: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080716-nvidia-denies-rumors-of-mass-gpu-failures.html[^]

Nice to see you're training. The quicker way to do it is sack all your VB6 programmers and hire C# programmers :)

Here is there web site for HK, you could donate there instead: http://www.msf.org.hk[^]

I'd stay away from NVidia if I was you. The NVidia chipset burnt out on my laptop due to hardware problems, and they want to charge me to fix it because it is 1 week out of warranty. I think NVidia should pick up the tab as it is due to their faulty chipset. This one will run and run. Seems there is a big black cloud hanging over them as many of their recent chips have a high failure rate. I think they are going to take a very big hit as more people hit this problem.

You could use an XmlReader to parse through the document without having to load the entire document in memory. I've found this useful when loading records from very large XML files (i.e. 100Mb and above).

Yep Subversion and Tortoise has my vote ... and it's free. Did they ever fix the timezone bug in Source Unsafe?

Well you learn something new everyday. What an awesome little command that is! My random trawls of The Lounge have finally proved fruitful. :)

Hong Kong: hot, humid and horrible! Still the monsoon blows the pollution back to China which only makes it worse as it's too hot to do anything outside, but looks gorgeous all the same. 35C in the day, 30C at night, with humidity so high it probably can get any higher. Oh, did I mention the rain...

Anyone else living outside of the US think that the iPhone is overpriced and feature-less. I pay USD25 a month for a full 3G service, with Video calls and thousands of minutes. I have a Nokia N93 which cost me about USD400 10 months ago, with a 18 month plan. I have a 4Gb memory card with my music, podcasts (which download through my wireless LAN), SMS, MMS, games, email sync with outlook, POP3 with my ISP. My friend has a touch screen O2 for about the same amount of money, with similar features, with a similar plan. The iPhone will be more expensive and I'm told the starting plan will be USD100 per month! It seems Apple is just trying to shake up the US market, which seems to be 10 years behind Asia, and 5-7 years behind Europe. I can't see them doing many sales anywhere else. Stano

I'm off to the Hong Kong Rugby 7s (http://www.hksevens.com[^]). It's pretty much three days away from a computer, just watching rugby and drinking beer (although not necessarily in that order). I have friends flying in from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, so it promises to be a good event. The thing is, I don't particularly like Rugby: I'm more of a football man myself; but my clients have been informed that I will be unavailable until Monday afternoon and not to call me whatever happens, so that in itself is a cause to celebrate. Stano.

As long as you're not restricted to Base 10, in Base Infinity the answer is infinity. :)

Hardware is a Samsumg X60 laptop without any modifications. Worked fine on XP. Hardware hasn't changed. Other apps do not exhibit any problems and continue to run flawlessly while Vista apps such as Explorer are restarting all around it. As I said, these are soft crashes, not BSOD problems, which I would put down to faulty hardware. I just think Vista was released too early.

Computer is a Samsung X60 laptop without any modifications. As I mentioned the crashes I am experiencing are soft crashes. Visual Studio continues to run without problems, even during a long build it is not effected by the restart of Explorer. It just seems bugy as hell.

Other that the fact that it worked fine from RC2 back in August 2006 to the January 27th Microsoft Service Pack upgrade, and then stopped working after the reboot. No doubt the DRM crap has something to do with it. Still that doesn't explain the numerous crashes of non-driver related software.

Not for me. I may think it's a buggy piece of crap and was released to market too early, but we've already integrated glass in to our apps (keeps the investors happy :rolleyes:) , and are now working on using the Vista crash recover API (keeps the testers edgy) for those poor soles that take the plunge and upgrade. In this game, if you're not moving forward, you're moving backwards.

I can understand the non-Microsoft drivers, which is out of Microsoft's control, I haven't mentioned the problems I've had there. But since I cleared our my error reporting logs yesterday, I've had: 10 crashed of Exporer, 3 crashes on the IP Helper service (which seems related to the Microsoft PPTP VPN utility), BITS has crashed once, as has Windows Defender! This never used to happen on XP. Yes it recovers for the most part, but I don't think this was ready for release. They skipped RC3 and I think they will have to pay the price.

University of Liverpool offers one.

Not writing it off as a loss, as there isn't an alternative. I just think that there will be a huge back-lash from people who have paid to upgrade it. I just wanted to see if anyone else was having problems with it.

Never. I know that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a MS-basher by any means, but I've just had to clear off 3Gb of error reports from my Hard Drive still waiting to be delivered to Microsoft for "analysis". I just think that when the novelty wears off (like it has for me) with the semi-transparent screens, gadget and such-what, people will be asking why they upgraded to a product that doesn't provide much more useful functionality than what they used to have, crashes more often, and generally runs slower. Am I the only one thinking this?