Brandon Paddock

@MxxCon

You are also incorrect. While "50% faster" is a dubious claim, especially given OS X's tendency to not be a fully 64-bit environment, you are incorrect that the only advantage of compiling applications for AMD64/x64 is the ability to address more memory.

You are also incorrect that having larger addresses means "the system has to work with more data." Larger addresses don't mean larger data, except for pointers, which represent a very small fraction of an app's memory usage.

As I said, I'm less familiar with the Mac's historically remedial 64-bit support, but on Windows *certain* code can indeed see a substantial improvement by compiling for AMD64 versus x86. AMD64 (and whatever Intel calls their implementation of it) includes a significant number of optimizations over x86, including twice as many GPRs, more MMX/SIMD registers, and new instructions. It also benefits from heavy compiler optimizations like using a fastcall variant instead of the traditional stdcall/cdecl calling conventions. Substantial gains can be made because of this in certain kinds of code, like in software-based drawing routines.

The most common code out there may receive small or negligible benefit, but I take issue with your post because your last sentence insults alohamora for not researching the topic when you have clearly failed to do so yourself. Further, his point was correct, the lack of a 64-bit version of Safari on Windows may result in discrepancies between benchmarks across platforms. I'd prefer to point out that other factors may result in discrepancies as well. For instance, Apple developers may be better skilled at Mac development, and probably have a larger team than those writing the Windows port. On the other hand, Windows tends to be faster in general, especially when hardware acceleration is involved.

So next time before posting, do some research - or at least try to be less of a jerk.

Yeah but if you went for the 328i you'd have to drive around in a 328i.

So... fail.

Weight makes a large difference.

Drivetrain loss is also less on the TT (and A3). Remember, the TT/A3 use Haldex AWD versus Torsen center diff + LSDs on the A4/A5.

@boe

That's simply untrue. I have a Droid. It syncs my Exchange calendar and I can read all of my Exchange folders. It works at least as well, if not better, than my iPhone ever did (which would weirdly mess up meeting requests sometimes among other problems).

Weird, I've had a Z520N for a year now and I love it. Very solid machine (feels as sturdy or more than my old black Macbook, which set a high bar).

Umm, this *rumor* was proven false before Engadget even echoed it.

Old news is old. False rumor is false.

http://bit.ly/FkzeF

What do you mean "where the resources are?"

Again I think you're not understanding what COM is.

COM gives you a solid and straightforward refcounting mechanism and interface-based extensibility model. And the frameworks built on it like ATL are really handy. Plus you get the flexibility of handling both in-proc and out-of-proc objects with the COM runtime handling most of the heavy lifting re: marshalling, server / process lifetime, caching, etc.

Oh, and lets not forget managed interop or scriptability / automation (IDispatch, etc).

Why god why would you get rid of COM?

COM is great! Not everybody wants to write managed code. Most people who disparage COM have no idea what it is or how to use it.

As Steven said, the Beta is the only build officially released by Microsoft. If anyone has 'rumored' that 7057 is the RC, they're lying. The RC has not been released.

Why not point at the official Press Release - which makes it very clear there are TWO editions.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/feb09/02-03Win7SKU-QA.mspx

There is Home Premium and there is Professional.

Anything else is for a special channel or market and won't be presented to consumers...