Peter Koen writes:
Beta 1 of kkrieger, an ego-shooter doom3 like game in 96kb has been released this weekend:
This games needs DirectX 9.0, and a high-end graphicscard (Pixelshaders)! Everything has been done with Visual C++ and x86 Assembler!

Take note that the game requires Pixel Shaders 1.3 to run.
System requirements listed are:

• A 1.5GHz Pentium3/Athlon or faster.
• 512MB of RAM (or more)
• A Geforce 4 Ti (or higher) or ATI Radeon 8500 (or higher) graphics card supporting pixel shaders 1.3, preferably with 128MB or more of VRAM.
• Some kind of sound hardware
• DirectX 9.0b

As noted in a previous "blogsicle", I have a strange habit of wasting countless hours browsing Slashdot comments, alternating between abject horror and mild amusement at the outlandish things people post there.

Two things that are said time and time again about Windows are:

1) In Windows, you have to run as Administrator.

2) In Windows, every file is executable if it has the right extension.

The first claim is of course completely bogus. For better or worse, Windows makes people Administrators by default (otherwise, how would they install software, set the system time, add other users, etc?) but that doesn't mean you have to stay that way. I have been running as a "Normal User" (not even "Power User") for quite some time now (over a year?) on Windows XP with very few problems. Sure, it's a bit of a pain that I have to use RUNAS when I want to go to Windows Update and install a patch, but day to day it does not interrupt my routine. I can browse the web, use Microsoft Office applications, build apps with Visual Studio .NET, play music, and do pretty much whatever I want without any issues.

As promised, an updated Visualizers How-To! My last how-to entry on Visualizers was targeted at the PDC release of Whidbey, as you may (or may not) remember. This time I don't feel the need to cringe at times as I describe the process. :0)

First, a high level overview of Visualizers. Visualizers allow for advanced, customized viewing of data while debugging. Today's data windows have their limitations; text-only, hierarchical, spatially constrained - not the best for viewing an image, for example. Visualizers allow you to create completely custom views using WinForms to best show the data within any managed object. Yes, unfortunately this feature will only available for the managed world.

I’m often asked by audiences, visitors to Microsoft and journalists to explain our position with respect to UML (e.g. VSLive! Interview). Many people who read our views on model driven development, as described in these postings and other places, assume that our emphasis on domain specific (modeling) languages, or DSLs, somehow has put us into an anti-UML position. We want to make it clear that this is not true. While I laughed out loud at some points in Alex Bell’s excellent article in March 2004 ACM Queue called Death By UML Fever, we still agree with many of the points made by Grady Booch in his response. Before UML, there was an unproductive diversity of modeling approaches, and their convergence into UML 1.0 was a significant step forward in using models in software development.