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Sometimes dropping support is not because it won't work, but because the cost/benefit ratio of testing to guarantee it will work is not worth the effort.

Pertinent facts:
    Vista represents less than 1% of the market, we're talking 3 to 4 times less than linux
    Vista exited mainstream support FIVE YEARS AGO
    Vista extended support expires this week

At some point you just stop beating the dead horse.

Nah, you can use the modern.ie VMs for something like 30 days without phoning home to MS. And when that time limit is up you can just revert to the snapshot you took before booting for the first time (you did take a snapshot before booting for the first time, right? ;) ).

Personally, 30 days using windows sounds like 30 days too long. It was certainly long enough for me to do compatibility testing for Edge.

No I am not making this up either. Also a beta version of Visual Studio for Mac is available too as well as better Android and IOS support.

It's "Visual C++ for Linux Development", not "Visual C++ for Linux". The IDE runs on Windows and uses ssh to remotely compile and debug. And not just on Linux, anything with gdb and an ssh server can be used.

It doesn't run on Linux. "Visual Studio for Mac" is not Visual Studio at all, but a new name for the product formerly known as "Xamarin Studio".

Use any compiler you want

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c...

captcha: impress

The only reason to stay 32-bit is legacy dependencies, native extensions and so on. Staying there because 3.5GB is good enough for most people (where have we heard that sort of argument before) isn't a good reason. Ironically Microsoft themselves recognize these limits themselves and have written blogs about how they've strived to reduce memory consumption that was hitting the limits. Even some of their scenario improvements still leave consumption in excess of 3GB.

Linux support for VC++ is mentioned seems pretty big.

Also a mac version is in preview and better Android and IOS development with Xamarin is included.

I've read the pages where Microsoft attempt to justify this decision, e.g. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c.... I don't buy it. It's institutional laziness and resistance to change first and foremost. Choosing on a per-application basis whether to make it 32-bit or 64-bit is madness, especially in the situation here where you force every plugin and library being loaded to be 32-bit. You're developing a *system*, but it's really an agglomeration of different bits with little coherence or common direction. Linux distributions got this right. The whole installation is x86 or amd64. No confused mess of the two, x86 compat libs aside. We didn't agonise over minutiae, we did a complete conversion by treating them as two separate architctures, with biarch and multiarch for running legacy code. As is typical for Microsoft, they didn't have a transition plan, leaving much of their product line 32-bit only despite most developers and user having fully transitioned to x64 Windows over a decade or more back. Meanwhile on FreeBSD, Linux and MacOS X 32-bit is a distant memory on 64-bit platforms; the transition was done well over a decade back for many distributions as amd64 rebuilds were completed. What's tragic is they did the exact same thing with the 32-bit transition. Remember what a mess it was in the mid-90s to mid 2000s with a jumble of 16- and 32-bit code? It's exactly the same mess today with 32-bit and 64-bit code! They need some direction from the top to pull their fingers out and go 64-bit only, or do builds of both. If the BSD and Linux distros can build code for >10 architectures then I'm sure Microsoft can manage two, or three if we count their arm port (which is even more limited due to their x86 depenence, who would have expected that... Maybe build all your code on all architectures and x64 and arm could be first-class citizens.)

I notice they finally added simple refactoring capabilities, like "Extract Function," so you know, they're making progress: soon they might catch up to Eclipse.

If you're just now noticing that, you're way behind the times. This has been built into Visual Studio since at least VS2005.

No I am not making this up either. Also a beta version of Visual Studio for Mac is available too as well as better Android and IOS support. VS since 2015 also comes with Java and Android emulators as well via Hyper-V.

MS is getting quite serious about being cross platform

No I am not making this up either. Also a beta version of Visual Studio for Mac is available too as well as better Android and IOS support. VS since 2015 also comes with Java and Android emulators as well via Hyper-V.

MS is getting quite serious about being cross platform

Try installing that "64-bit" version. Pretty sure devenv.exe is still going in "Program Files(x86)".

See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...
About **still** using msvsmon.exe to debug 64-bit in 32-bit VS...

But you should be able to create an offline installer

Although Edge supports extensions, and Chrome extensions can be easily ported, Microsoft still hasn't fully opened submissions to their extension gallery. At the moment you have to be invited to submit, and there are currently only 23 listed.

Although Edge supports extensions, and Chrome extensions can be easily ported, Microsoft still hasn't fully opened submissions to their extension gallery. At the moment you have to be invited to submit, and there are currently only 23 listed.

It was a crap move by Microsoft to sneakily renege on their advertised support schedule for Windows 7. "Yes, sure we support Windows 7 over the agreed lifecycle, but don't dare buy a new PC".

I at first understood it to mean that Microsoft includes new support for brand new PC hardware during the "mainstream support" phase, which for Windows 7 ended in January 2015 (source). The rest is extended support, which is mostly security updates and updates to the means of delivering security updates. But then I saw that Windows 8.1 is not getting hardware enablement while still in its mainstream support phase.

The cap for an Office 365 user running Outlook is 150MB.

That means they can only send it to another Office 365 user running Outlook...

https://technet.microsoft.com/...

An AD administrator in charge of purging old user accounts was using a script to cull AD. He put an * someplace he shouldn't and deleted all the users in a sub-domain. That was a fun week. And I was still cleaning up after that fiasco months later.

Why would it have taken a week to recover? You can un-delete objects in AD. Below is an example... Should have taken, at most, a few hours to recover, not a week.

https://technet.microsoft.com/...

I'll just leave this here:
https://developer.microsoft.co...

It doesn't help with Chrome and Firefox, but at least it is a VMed Edge already built for you.

I'm running Windows 10 LTSB. It does not include Windows Store.

Still there, called AppLocker and can be set to lock down whatever you want. Whitelist, blacklist etc.

"As much as it is fashionable to bash MS at this anti MS website"

For a long time, this place has been know as the Microsoft slashdot. Do you have anything to say regarding Microsoft's claims regarding the better security in Edge as compared to other browsers?

"Internet Explorer 10 introduced Enhanced Protected Mode (EPM), based on the Windows 8 app container technology .. Microsoft Edge takes the sandbox even farther, running its content processes in app containers not just by default, but all of the time." ref

"I will ask if you think Chrome is any better? It is kind of unfair as of course Google won't disclose it's own bugs.

Chromium issue tracker - Monorail

Maybe it's better now but knowing MS it will not have changed much since 2000 when I tried using my computer as a normal user.

What? Have you not heard about the User Account Control (UAC) that was implemented with Vista? It does exactly what you described happens on the Mac:

It only asks for administrator passwords when doing administrative things like installing programs and changing global settings.

Yep, that's exactly what Windows does. They really have done work on Windows in the last 17 years!

Just stating MS is making enterprise more readily available

How? Where?
Stating "Yup you can" and nothing more goes against the research of a large amount of people that proves otherwise.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Licensing/licensing-programs/software-assurance-default.aspx#tab=2

(Warning, Firefox wouldn't let me click or link from "tab=2", which is the "Getting Software Assurance" tab)

It says right there volume licensing to enterprise editions requires a minimum of 250 user or device licenses.

250 * $8/month = $2000/month

Also once activated you need to account for them when Microsoft audits your network yearly. So you can't be giving them out to friends unless you want to get hit with $150000/year/loaned-copy in fines.

Even going with just Open Licenses requires a minimum of 5 user/device licenses, however you can't buy these from Microsoft, need an established account with a corporate reseller, in the US a tax ID code issued to your company, and then on top of that you need to pay for a fairly high monthly Asure account to run your domain controller in the cloud so MS can audit you there.
That means a charge for RAM, storage, CPU cycles, and network bandwidth on a monthly basis.
And domain controllers are pretty network-chatty things.

If you use 3 or more of those 5 minimum required open licenses, you'll easily exceed $2000/mo in Asure cloud charges alone.

So please please tell us where this $8/month WIn10 enterprise edition is (legally) sold from?

Hi Oswald, I work on Outlook.com and just wanted to clarify that Microsoft and Outlook.com does not mine your email content to offer up content-based ads unlike other email services you mentioned. You can find that commitment here: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/ "No content-based targeting: We will not use your email, chat, files or other personal content to target ads to you."

Yes, indeed. No marketing whatsoever.

... why does Google drop bugs about MS at or before 90 days, while giving Apple 1+ year to fix bugs in past?

Microsoft appears to give the answer to that question itself in the blog referenced by TFA:

Windows is the only platform with a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible. And we take this responsibility very seriously.

https://blogs.technet.microsof...

The worst part is it's an intentional decision. Microsoft decided that the risk of something crashing due to mismatched library versions was more important than countless billions of man-hours. It's one of the more staggeringly wasteful decisions in history, in my opinion.

Telnet client is no longer installed by default on Windows machines, and the protocol is deprecated for good reason, but I still use it occasionally to connect to TCP port 25 on an SMTP server and manually type commands to send a test e-mail.

A lot of the things above are very familiar (physical text terminals, jumpers, serial ports ....) but one I haven't seen mentioned is a bit newer, but still once known but forgotten - the fact that early Macintoshes (and thus MS Excel for Macintosh) used 1 January 1904, rather than 1 January 1900, as the first date (for intresting reasons: Why Do Older Macs Reset to 1904?).

Of course for backwards compatibility MS Excel for Macintosh continued to use this as the default for many years afterwards, causing confusion among those unfamiliar with it when transferring files with dates even quite recently, and there is still an option in Excel to set this.

Differences between the 1900 and the 1904 date system in Excel

What Are Some Things That Every Hacker Once Knew?

Do you mean hacker as in programmer or hacker as the media usis it to describe a digital burlgar? If you mean the former, these days it seems to be simple stuff like checking for open ports with telnet and then having fun by typing in protocol messages: http://www.shellhacks.com/en/S..., or even simpler stuff like editing documents with vi and using command line programming tools. These used to be things that every programmer knew, I learned this in school but many of our new recruits seem to be totally unaware of this stuff. I've written programs tens of thousands of lines long with nothing but vi, gcc/g++, make, tcpdump+Wireshark, valgrind, vi and a few other choice commandline monsters but these days the GUI generation seems to need a GUI editor, preferably a GUI IDE, a GUI networking tool, a GUI debugger, etc... to do simple stuff. I don't usually even need a debugger, I can normally figure out what is wrong without one. A few years ago I was handed a .NET assignment. After much complainign and whining (Unix guy through and through) I coded it up using that primitive little Windows CMD terminal, a freely available .NET compiler and vi/make before the IT department got around to installing Visual Studio. The really funny thing was that even some seasoned .NET developers were surprised to see you could (a) run vi/make and other GNU tools on Windows and (b) compile .NET code from the command line: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-.... BTW, and this is probably heresy around here, but I really like how Microsoft seems to have a well documented API for everything as long as you are willing to bother learning .NET or Visual Basic.

Linux is mainly for servers and embedded systems. On the desktop it's for people that enjoy tinkering with computers rather than getting work done.

While that is a popular impression of Linux, the past several years has been allowing people who have no idea of what they are doing to use Linux. It is now simpler to use than Windows by a wide margin. My wife was so pissed off at Windows 8, she refused to use the nice laptop I bought her. I installed Mint, and she hasn't looked back, and even does her system maintenance now.

Perhaps http://www.microsoft.com/en-us... has something to do ith it. Politicians are easily purchased. And I am certain that Redmond has been having a hissy fit since Munich betrayed them, so the right number of Deutschmarks to the right people and all your problems go away. Because there are no problems with Windows 10 - it's the best OS ever!

Personally, I hope that they do, so that they can experience the joy of Windows 10.

Equivalent setting in IE is in the registry (where else?) at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\MaxConnectionsPerServer as a REG_DWORD. See https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c... and https://support.microsoft.com/... .

Equivalent setting in IE is in the registry (where else?) at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\MaxConnectionsPerServer as a REG_DWORD. See https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c... and https://support.microsoft.com/... .

Our attention span has not reduced to 8 seconds. Heavy consumers of media and tech do not pay attention to non-interactive content (TV, ads), but are better at paying attention to interactive content (games, software). This is a shift of attention from passive consumers to active participants. When presented with passive content, tech users tune out... no surprise. But that's not the same as a globally reduced attention span.

The full report is available.

Why don't they simply add another record ("source") to help make the driver comparison? A typical Microsoft solution I would say.

Windows already keeps track of the source when ranking drivers, it's just MSFT changed the default Window policy to ignore it (to address certain issues, some technical, some political) and apparently used this kludge to mitigate some of the tradeoffs. The blog description skipped over several steps on how Windows ranks drivers. The first and main criteria is on how a driver is signed (i.e., the source), and only after that does it potentially need to tie-break based on the blog's description of hardware IDs, dates, and file versions.

Lowest rank score wins, and an inbox driver (i.e., a driver included with Windows) is scored 0x0D000003, which is higher than a WHQL signature score of 0x0D000002 or 0x0D000001 (according to setupapi.h in the Windows SDK). However, in Windows 7 the default policy was changed to now treat all signers the same, which now effectively ignores the source. Apparently this date is used to still try to favor vendor drivers despite this change in policy.

Why don't they simply add another record ("source") to help make the driver comparison? A typical Microsoft solution I would say.

Windows already keeps track of the source when ranking drivers, it's just MSFT changed the default Window policy to ignore it (to address certain issues, some technical, some political) and apparently used this kludge to mitigate some of the tradeoffs. The blog description skipped over several steps on how Windows ranks drivers. The first and main criteria is on how a driver is signed (i.e., the source), and only after that does it potentially need to tie-break based on the blog's description of hardware IDs, dates, and file versions.

Lowest rank score wins, and an inbox driver (i.e., a driver included with Windows) is scored 0x0D000003, which is higher than a WHQL signature score of 0x0D000002 or 0x0D000001 (according to setupapi.h in the Windows SDK). However, in Windows 7 the default policy was changed to now treat all signers the same, which now effectively ignores the source. Apparently this date is used to still try to favor vendor drivers despite this change in policy.

halivar: "The Halloween emails were almost 20 years ago. No one from that time is left in Redmond. At some point, it's time to let it go."

"Acquired rights. You will defend us against any claim that arises .. We may modify this agreement at any time by posting a revised version on the legal information section of the Portal" ref

translation: You agree to be fucked twice in both ends ..

The summary (as well as the cited article) gloms together two unrelated issues. The 10,000 patents have nothing to do with protection against patent trolls -- by definition, trolls typically don't have an active business and therefore there's nothing to infringe patents that a defendant might counter-assert.

The original MS blog post clearly separates the unlimited indemnification (useful for all patent suits, including troll suits) from access to the 10,000 patents (potentially useful for patent suits filed by real operating companies who might have products of their own that fall under MS's patents).

There's obviously quite a few ways of resolving that such as simply allowing a button to have a shape (i.e. a rectangle) which in turn allows it to be swapped out for a circle if you want round buttons for example. The danger with inheritance is that you're effectively fixing that behaviour.

Clickable I'd argue is more suited to an interface, interfaces are quite good at representing behaviour.

But in modern GUIs it's obviously become a lot more complex than all that, but in a good way - it means we have a steeper learning curve, but much more maintainable and testable code. We typically try to separate these things to a much greater degree now, as we really don't want visual design to impact on business logic. If you look at something like WPF you'll see that you basically have a button that inherits from a control, which in turn inherits from UI element (because not all UI elements need to be controls). The base UI element class has members that define how the element should be rendered - because in WPF you're not limited to rectangles, you may want a star shaped button or god knows what else if you're creating some weird UI for a game or something. It also has properties for things like size, width, font, colour, fade in/fade out effects and so on and so forth. Effectively the UI element class allows anything inheriting to look like anything, so an inheriting button class might implement some default behaviour, such as a rectangle, which in turn can be further overridden by a user, but ultimately it means that how the button looks slots in in a number of has-a relationships - has a colour, has a font, has a shape, has a size and so on and so forth.

Things like clickable are simply exposed via events - a Control (which inherits from the above mentioned UIElement for display) will expose a number of common events such as OnClick and so forth, in C# events are basically just a form of callback, so effectively once you create a button you just assign callback handlers to those events which are again present in has-a relationships, so that a button has an on click event, a button has a resize event, and so on and so forth.

What this means is that a button is really just an abstract concept for the most part - how that looks is really about how you set it's look and feel properties, how it behaves is really just defined by whatever you hook up to none, some, or all of it's many events.

Now I'm not arguing that WPF is some example of perfect OO design, not by any measure, I'm citing it as an example of one way to design a GUI library without needing multiple inheritance. I believe that WPF's composition is actually quite messy - personally I think a UIElement should have a "visual style" and that in turn that visual style should encapsulate all the visual elements - if you look at the interface it's massive and messy, though to be fair a lot of this is because Windows is still dragging a fuck ton of legacy along behind it:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...

For more simplistic designs you may just determine that all UI elements are in fact controls and just merge UI element and control into one base class (which is basically what you have in WinForms). Essentially the goal of WPF is to separate concerns - you don't have to worry about someone having checked the button out to write code defining how it looks whilst someone else wants to check it out to define what it does, because the button is just abstract - someone can define how it looks in one file, and someone else can define what it does in another. Only one of them has to wire it up without being concerned about the implementation details, and it kind of works. WPF has an XML GUI definition called XAML not too different to the way websites have their visual elements defined in HTML with the idea being that the whole interface can be defined by someone who doesn't even know code, whilst developers write the business logic behi

Microsoft are just getting efficient. They have simply skipped "Embrace".

No they didn't. For one thing, Git has been supported in TFS for four years now. And then there's this:

"Among them, we learned the Git server has to be smart. It has to pack the Git files in an optimal fashion so that it doesn’t have to send more to the client than absolutely necessary – think of it as optimizing locality of reference. So we made lots of enhancements to the Team Services/TFS Git server. We also discovered that Git has lots of scenarios where it touches stuff it really doesn’t need to. This never really mattered before because it was all local and used for modestly sized repos so it was fast – but when touching it means downloading it from the server or scanning 6,000,000 files, uh oh. So we’ve been investing heavily in is performance optimizations to Git. Many of them also benefit “normal” repos to some degree but they are critical for mega repos. We’ve been submitting many of these improvements to the Git OSS project and have enjoyed a good working relationship with them."

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/02/03/scaling-git-and-some-back-story/

But if multiple applications in Office share a library, where do you put that library so that the build process for each Office application can see it? Are submodules or subtrees a good choice, and if "yes," which is more appropriate?

Microsoft experimented with the submodules approach for Windows. Didn't work:

"We started down at least 2 failed paths to scale Git. Probably the most extensive one was to use Git submodules to stitch together lots of repos into a single “super” repo. I won’t go into details but after 6 months of working on that we realized it wasn’t going to work – too many edge cases, too much complexity and fragility. We needed a bulletproof solution that would be well supported by almost all Git tooling."

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/02/03/scaling-git-and-some-back-story/

Don't forget that they name products after common terms ".NET" and "SQL Server." They even conflict internally: they have two tools name ICE: Image Configuration Editor which configures Windows embedded operating systems, and the Image Composition Editor which seams together panoramic images.

Don't forget that they name products after common terms ".NET" and "SQL Server." They even conflict internally: they have two tools name ICE: Image Configuration Editor which configures Windows embedded operating systems, and the Image Composition Editor which seams together panoramic images.

Back when Microsoft Office 2000 was selling for four or five hundred dollars, I got an email offer from them...for $100.

MS, if you're listening, my email is above. Send me such an offer on WXELTSB and you've got yourself a happier techie.

Yes, I can be bought, or at least muzzled.

Where did you get the impression that they are providing the licenses for free?

The summary said that they have 'images' pre-configured for SQL Server and Windows. I read that as VMs that have been provisioned based on Microsoft Windows Server ISOs, or Windows Server + SQL. It does not say anything about licensing.

From an Azure perspective, Microsoft lets EA customers double up on their licenses. You can use your internal license in Azure "for free" and just pay for compute.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en...

Disclaimer: I'm neck deep in building out a private + Azure + AWS hybrid cloud infrastructure so I deal with this on a daily basis.

Yeah, it only occasionally crashes.

Microsoft office crashes too. I have no idea which one crashes more at this point in time but I have my suspicions, given that multiple studies indicate that open source generally ends up with fewer defects than similar proprietary products. Indeed, Libreoffice is runs as one single process, so it all goes down if any component does. Who knows if that is worth a change (a la chrome) but even better is, don't crash. On the rare occasions it does crash, Libreoffice does a very good job of recovering. I say, roughly a tie on that front. It's no contest on the price. Plus Microsoft UI design just isn't ready for prime time.

screw that. give me THE MOST FEATURE-RICH release.

okay, i found it. http://office.microsoft.com/

if you want full compatibility, this is, sadly, the only way to go.

You actually don't know what you are talking about. You should read the response from Rob Koch at the link below which includes links to real world information and explains why Windows Defender is actually the best anti-virus solution for every Windows computer:

https://answers.microsoft.com/...

"who's legally responsible if there's an accident?"

Nobody is liable going by the Microsoft Windows 10 EULA. Indeed the license specifically bars you from sueing them in a court of law and even then you can only get back what you paid for the software or $50.

"One open question is even if the person who used the software could not sue, a third party injured by it might be able to since they are not a party to the license agreement."

The third party can't sue the first party precicely because the first party has no contractual obligations to the third party. Shame on you slashdot for allowing this forum to be used to insert Open source FUD into the blogosphere.

You describe what Microsoft refers to as a "mixed binary" situation. On X11/Linux, unless there have been updates to Linux proper or things with "bus" in the name (dbus or ibus), logging out of your X session and back in usually fixes mixed binary.