Win7 seems to be what Vista was originally supposed to be, before marketing and accounting demanded the release of something--anything--to keep the OEM license gravy train going.

7's been my main desktop OS for 8 months, and it's certainly an improvement on Vista, but it still seems like a step backwards in some areas. Spending 3e12 cycles on takeown and icacls was not how I expected to spend my Friday night.

I think Vista is straying closer over to Apple, like if Windows decided to look like Mac for a day. It's the glassy buttons that bother me. It's better in Vista than XP, but if I really wanted glassy buttons I would have gotten a Mac.

The current NP looks mysteriously similar to tdeb. I mean, there's the new blog stuff, and maybe the store is finally working. It almost feels like new versions keep surfacing with little change. I think the next NP (there undoubtedly will be another) should have all the new features finished.

There is no shared code between TDEB an NP7. Some of the features of TDEB might've been a good idea and gotten incorporated into NP7 but I don't know. In general the feature set of NP has been largely the same post-NP4 (I think, any old-timers want to verify?). What has been going on is a lot of refinement at the implementation level and how things work / site direction.

With NP7 there are, however, two cool new features (that are finished).
1. Blogs -- these were incorporated because people have long been wanting a good way to help contribute. These blog posts basically a few clicks away from being promoted to the front page -- if we notice something that stands or if you write something you feel is of high quality bring it to our attention.

2. Knowledge Base -- There is a _lot_ of intelligence distributed among NP users. This is where you can go to ask questions and leverage that intellect. Right now the strongest sections of NP Knowledge Base are technical and math, we'd love you to sign up and ask/answer questions. It's actually pretty rewarding =)

There is quite a bit more with NP7 that we'd like to roll out but there are only so many hours in the day.

So is it better to ask questions in the knowledge base or the forums? I guess it would be the same participation level since their aren't too many active members...

Ideally people would be using the Knowledge Base. I think we're planning on implementing some kind of resolution-tracking system where people will gain points in an area as they answer more questions. Also, the more people that use it the more likely Blake is to fix some of the notification issues I've been bugging him about =)

Ironically, that might be contributing to it being used less.

Yup! I suspect it'll happen reasonably soon -- Blake seems to be on a bug fixing spree.

I'm back, everyone!

And there was much rejoicing! \o/

This is my thousandth post!

I'll be back soon, in about a week and a half. I'll probably switch to Ubuntu by then.

YAY!

Yea! Good job man. Just remember to partition your drive so you can remove windows forever when you realize you never want to use it again :D

I'm back!

(and I defenestrated Windows!)