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Microsoft has, for years, maintained three separate tools in this space (that I know of, there might be others). They change the names of them periodically, to confuse their hapless victims.

Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool
You gotta read this page. They release a new version every month. It apparently cannot remove viruses which are not actively running. Why is this tool not built in to Microsoft Windows Defender?

Windows Live One Care
This link shows a forum moderator, chastising a poor infested user for asking a question about a different Microsoft antivirus product -- Microsoft Windows Defender. Why are these separate products, again?

Microsoft Windows Defender
Formerly known as Microsoft AntiSpyware.

These should be one product. The fact that Microsoft maintains three separate products to deal with this problem is, itself, an indication of a very serious ongoing problem at Microsoft. As a company, they still don't take this seriously.

Firewire 1600/3200 is _really_ 1600 and 3200 mbit, no overhead etc. issues and you can CHAIN them without losing bandwidth. Think about netbooks having to have 3-4 USB inputs in such small space. A single FW1600 can handle all with amazing speed. What stops firewire? Of course, the high price of implementation. Apple can actually erase half or more of the price instantly with a single memo.

The fact that Windows XP SP2 totally screwed up Firewire support didn't help. Every FW device was slow, but many didn't work at all. To make things worse the fix was a big pain in the ass (matching up a bunch of values from the Device Manager with registry entries and editing them and running some patch program.) I'm surprised that anti MS people don't bring that up more often. It's the best "Windows isn't ready for the Desktop" evidence I've encountered.

There are some great technologies failed just because they weren't supported on Windows natively. Just look how that FAT16/32 dinosaur lives on while there are dozens of better filesystems out there.

I'm no expert on filesystems, but the fact that determining the free space on a FAT32 volume takes several seconds does seem a bit questionable. Plug an empty USB thumb drive into your system and watch how long the little LED flashes before it's ready.

If I recall correctly, the API:s that expose browser components (e.g. to Windows Help) were designed with the intention of making rendering engines pluggable. Thus, Windows Help could at some point in the future use Mozilla to render if Mozilla wrote a bit of code and Microsoft finishes this API.

The API to host IE is COM-based, so it consists of a bunch of interfaces, all of which are documented. Technically, anyone can reimplement those interfaces to the spec, replace IE's CLSID in the registry with its own, and everything on the system will start using the new code. We do actually have the first part of it done already, though the coverage is not 100%.

The tricky part is that most applications that host IE also assume IE-specific behavior when rendering pages, running scripts, ability to host ActiveX controls inside, and so on. That's what's hard to duplicate.

If I recall correctly, the API:s that expose browser components (e.g. to Windows Help) were designed with the intention of making rendering engines pluggable. Thus, Windows Help could at some point in the future use Mozilla to render if Mozilla wrote a bit of code and Microsoft finishes this API.

The API to host IE is COM-based, so it consists of a bunch of interfaces, all of which are documented. Technically, anyone can reimplement those interfaces to the spec, replace IE's CLSID in the registry with its own, and everything on the system will start using the new code. We do actually have the first part of it done already, though the coverage is not 100%.

The tricky part is that most applications that host IE also assume IE-specific behavior when rendering pages, running scripts, ability to host ActiveX controls inside, and so on. That's what's hard to duplicate.

Years ago, Microsoft released an unbundled version of Windows like this in the past when the European Commission had an issue with Media Player, called Windows N. It was a sales flop.

Windows NT is THE evidence of the market's rejection of UNIX. Nobody can argue that NT didn't trounce UNIX

Windows NT's "trouncing" of UNIX is more an indication of Microsoft's market MANIPULATION: Microsoft used various means, many of which nefarious, to leverage its monopoly to shoehorn its way into the server market. Hardware costs were also a factor: NT ran on relatively cheap x86 processors -- while Unix, at the time, did not. I don't dispute that NT was a passable server OS; in fact, to get back to my point in the GP, many of its best attributes where derived from Unix -- as Bill Gates acknowledged:

Well, Microsoft stepped back and looked at that situation and said that the best thing for us might be to start from scratch: build a new system, focus on having a lot of the great things about Unix, a lot of the great things about Windows, and also being a file-sharing server that would have the same kind of performance that, up until that point, had been unique to Novell's Netware.

And through Windows NT, you can see it throughout the design. In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix. There are so many of the design decisions that have been influenced by that environment.

Regarding Linux, rather than improved usability, cost was the primary factor why it gained market share from Unix: other than support, Linux is free; and, as with Windows, Linux runs on x86. Actually, in terms of usability, features, and robustness, Solaris rivals, if not surpasses, any Linux distribution.

Google them? http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html

Try Search Server 2008 Express from Microsoft. Although it has no hard limits, it can index upto a 1 million documents before you have to scale out. Best of all it is free!

If you need high availability, redundancy, fail-over or more document support, look at the standard version of the product or consider SharePoint 2007/2010 or FAST.

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/en/us/search-server-express.aspx#none

msg me, if you have questions, I work at Microsoft.

Even if I accept your specious argument that market place acceptance is predicated on the desktop presence, that still doesn't imply that Unix hasn't had a strong impact on the market. Microsoft Windows, especially since Windows NT, has been greatly influenced by Unix -- a point even Bill Gates acknowlegdes.

The non-standard keybindings (F5 to lock, F9 to refresh, when the rest of the Windows world uses F5 to refresh, for example)?

The "non-standard" keybindings are "non-standard" because they were implemented before there was a "standard". Besides, on what planet is F5 the standard. In Excel it is F9 In Outlook it is F9. In Word it is F9.

Apparently you have taken the fact that MS is totally inconsistent as a flaw with Notes.

The useless changing hieroglyphics as you typed in your password?

The hieroglyphics had a use. Nobody bothered with them, but they had a use. It was a non-text hash of your password. That way you could see that you had typed in your password correctly without revieling what it was. Turns out that most people would rather just type their password, and if they got it wrong, try again. Given that they didn't hurt anything, complaining that there was a feature you didn't use seems silly at best. Of course these days I just use Single Sign In so that the the credentials from the OS gets used to log me into Notes.

Make it not a massive memory hog?

I'll give you that one, but then memory is cheap now, and what isn't a memory hog?

Make it an actual usable MDI app, instead of allowing only tabs in a single window (so you couldn't have 2 emails side by side for reference)?

Yes, they have. (I always could do MDI) Of course now that everybody else is jumping on the Tabs bandwagon, I expect that there will be complains about that too.

So, what was the complaint? Since other than having a high memory footprint, there doesn't seem to be a valid one in your post other than the common, 'Its not a shiny as Outlook.'

The non-standard keybindings (F5 to lock, F9 to refresh, when the rest of the Windows world uses F5 to refresh, for example)?

The "non-standard" keybindings are "non-standard" because they were implemented before there was a "standard". Besides, on what planet is F5 the standard. In Excel it is F9 In Outlook it is F9. In Word it is F9.

Apparently you have taken the fact that MS is totally inconsistent as a flaw with Notes.

The useless changing hieroglyphics as you typed in your password?

The hieroglyphics had a use. Nobody bothered with them, but they had a use. It was a non-text hash of your password. That way you could see that you had typed in your password correctly without revieling what it was. Turns out that most people would rather just type their password, and if they got it wrong, try again. Given that they didn't hurt anything, complaining that there was a feature you didn't use seems silly at best. Of course these days I just use Single Sign In so that the the credentials from the OS gets used to log me into Notes.

Make it not a massive memory hog?

I'll give you that one, but then memory is cheap now, and what isn't a memory hog?

Make it an actual usable MDI app, instead of allowing only tabs in a single window (so you couldn't have 2 emails side by side for reference)?

Yes, they have. (I always could do MDI) Of course now that everybody else is jumping on the Tabs bandwagon, I expect that there will be complains about that too.

So, what was the complaint? Since other than having a high memory footprint, there doesn't seem to be a valid one in your post other than the common, 'Its not a shiny as Outlook.'

The non-standard keybindings (F5 to lock, F9 to refresh, when the rest of the Windows world uses F5 to refresh, for example)?

The "non-standard" keybindings are "non-standard" because they were implemented before there was a "standard". Besides, on what planet is F5 the standard. In Excel it is F9 In Outlook it is F9. In Word it is F9.

Apparently you have taken the fact that MS is totally inconsistent as a flaw with Notes.

The useless changing hieroglyphics as you typed in your password?

The hieroglyphics had a use. Nobody bothered with them, but they had a use. It was a non-text hash of your password. That way you could see that you had typed in your password correctly without revieling what it was. Turns out that most people would rather just type their password, and if they got it wrong, try again. Given that they didn't hurt anything, complaining that there was a feature you didn't use seems silly at best. Of course these days I just use Single Sign In so that the the credentials from the OS gets used to log me into Notes.

Make it not a massive memory hog?

I'll give you that one, but then memory is cheap now, and what isn't a memory hog?

Make it an actual usable MDI app, instead of allowing only tabs in a single window (so you couldn't have 2 emails side by side for reference)?

Yes, they have. (I always could do MDI) Of course now that everybody else is jumping on the Tabs bandwagon, I expect that there will be complains about that too.

So, what was the complaint? Since other than having a high memory footprint, there doesn't seem to be a valid one in your post other than the common, 'Its not a shiny as Outlook.'

Let's put it this way: I saw a drive by download on a fully patched Vista SP2 machine with IE8 on Friday. If the user had been in the admin group, it could have been owned. Now with http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS09-025.mspx I'm not so sure (why does it say valid creds are needed? Could a drive-by exploit it?).

I thought the home market wouldn't care about things like this on average. How many people actually use Microsoft Office with their new OEM PC rather than use MS Works, or some crippled version of MS Office?

They really aren't any "crippled" versions of MS Office.

MS Office Home includes full versions of Exel, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote, with a three-seat license.

The Ultimate Steal includes everything for $60. For this will need an .edu address and proof of enrollment.

0.5 credit hours.

If your employer has a volume license with Microsoft, home use is likely to cost you no more than S&H on the disks.

But there is no getting around the fact that the MS Office product - retail boxed - sells very, very well: Software Best Sellers in Business and Office

The problem for the GIMP is that products like Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate & VideoStudio Pro X2 Bundle pack a lot of power into a less intimidating package.

It is not always clear to me that the geek has decided on his target audience before he begins work on a project like The GIMP. That touches on issues like feature sets, UI design, the help system, tutorials, online resources...

and, of course, avoiding such elementary mistakes as choosing a name for your project that is not instantly offensive to anyone other than a gnome.

Is that you Giampaolo, from the MS ad?

It has come to my attention that the entire Linux community is a hotbed of so called 'alternative sexuality,' which includes anything from hedonistic orgies to homosexuality to pedophilia.

What better way of demonstrating this than by looking at the hidden messages contained within the names of some of Linux's most outspoken advocates:

• Linus Torvalds is an anagram of slit anus or VD 'L,' clearly referring to himself by the first initial.
• Richard M. Stallman, spokespervert for the Gaysex's Not Unusual 'movement' is an anagram of mans cram thrill ad.
• Alan Cox is barely an anagram of anal cox which is just so filthy and unchristian it unnerves me.

I'm sure that Eric S. Raymond, composer of the satanic homosexual propaganda diatribe The Cathedral and the Bizarre, is probably an anagram of something queer, but we don't need to look that far as we know he's always shoving a gun up some poor little boy's rectum. Update: Eric S. Raymond is actually an anagram for secondary rim and cord in my arse. It just goes to show you that he is indeed queer.

Update the Second: It is also documented that Evil Sicko Gaymond is responsible for a nauseating piece of code called Fetchmail, which is obviously sinister sodomite slang for 'Felch Male' -- a disgusting practise. For those not in the know, 'felching' is the act performed by two perverts wherein one sucks their own post-coital ejaculate out of the other's rectum. In fact, it appears that the dirty Linux faggots set out to undermine the good Republican institution of e-mail, turning it into 'e-male.'

As far as Richard 'Master' Stallman goes, that filthy fudge-packer was actually quoted on leftist commie propaganda site Salon.com as saying the following: 'I've been resistant to the pressure to conform in any circumstance,' he says. 'It's about being able to question conventional wisdom,' he asserts. 'I believe in love, but not monogamy,' he says plainly.

And this isn't a made up troll bullshit either! He actually stated this tripe, which makes it obvious that he is trying to politely say that he's a flaming homo slut!

Speaking about 'flaming,' who better to point out as a filthy chutney ferret than Slashdot's very own self-confessed pederast Jon Katz. Although an obvious deviant anagram cannot be found from his name, he has already confessed, nay boasted of the homosexual perversion of corrupting the innocence of young children. To quote from the article linked:

'I've got a rare kidney disease,' I told her. 'I have to go to the bathroom a lot. You can come with me if you want, but it takes a while. Is that okay with you? Do you want a note from my doctor?'

Is this why you were touching your penis in the cinema, Jon? And letting the other boys touch it too?

We should also point out that Jon Katz refers to himself as 'Slashdot's resident Gasbag.' Is there any more doubt? For those fortunate few who aren't aware of the list of homosexual terminology found inside the Linux 'Sauce Code,' a 'Gasbag' is a pervert who gains sexual gratification from having a thin straw inserted into his urethra (or to use the common parlance, 'piss-pipe'), then his homosexual lover blows firmly down the straw to inflate his scrotum. This is, of course, when he's not busy violating the dignity and copyright of posters to Slashdot by gathering

It has come to my attention that the entire Linux community is a hotbed of so called 'alternative sexuality,' which includes anything from hedonistic orgies to homosexuality to pedophilia.

What better way of demonstrating this than by looking at the hidden messages contained within the names of some of Linux's most outspoken advocates:

• Linus Torvalds is an anagram of slit anus or VD 'L,' clearly referring to himself by the first initial.
• Richard M. Stallman, spokespervert for the Gaysex's Not Unusual 'movement' is an anagram of mans cram thrill ad.
• Alan Cox is barely an anagram of anal cox which is just so filthy and unchristian it unnerves me.

I'm sure that Eric S. Raymond, composer of the satanic homosexual propaganda diatribe The Cathedral and the Bizarre, is probably an anagram of something queer, but we don't need to look that far as we know he's always shoving a gun up some poor little boy's rectum. Update: Eric S. Raymond is actually an anagram for secondary rim and cord in my arse. It just goes to show you that he is indeed queer.

Update the Second: It is also documented that Evil Sicko Gaymond is responsible for a nauseating piece of code called Fetchmail, which is obviously sinister sodomite slang for 'Felch Male' -- a disgusting practise. For those not in the know, 'felching' is the act performed by two perverts wherein one sucks their own post-coital ejaculate out of the other's rectum. In fact, it appears that the dirty Linux faggots set out to undermine the good Republican institution of e-mail, turning it into 'e-male.'

As far as Richard 'Master' Stallman goes, that filthy fudge-packer was actually quoted on leftist commie propaganda site Salon.com as saying the following: 'I've been resistant to the pressure to conform in any circumstance,' he says. 'It's about being able to question conventional wisdom,' he asserts. 'I believe in love, but not monogamy,' he says plainly.

And this isn't a made up troll bullshit either! He actually stated this tripe, which makes it obvious that he is trying to politely say that he's a flaming homo slut!

Speaking about 'flaming,' who better to point out as a filthy chutney ferret than Slashdot's very own self-confessed pederast Jon Katz. Although an obvious deviant anagram cannot be found from his name, he has already confessed, nay boasted of the homosexual perversion of corrupting the innocence of young children. To quote from the article linked:

'I've got a rare kidney disease,' I told her. 'I have to go to the bathroom a lot. You can come with me if you want, but it takes a while. Is that okay with you? Do you want a note from my doctor?'

Is this why you were touching your penis in the cinema, Jon? And letting the other boys touch it too?

We should also point out that Jon Katz refers to himself as 'Slashdot's resident Gasbag.' Is there any more doubt? For those fortunate few who aren't aware of the list of homosexual terminology found inside the Linux 'Sauce Code,' a 'Gasbag' is a pervert who gains sexual gratification from having a thin straw inserted into his urethra (or to use the common parlance, 'piss-pipe'), then his homosexual lover blows firmly down the straw to inflate his scrotum. This is, of course, when he's not busy violating the dignity and copyright of posters to Slashdot by gathering

It has come to my attention that the entire Linux community is a hotbed of so called 'alternative sexuality,' which includes anything from hedonistic orgies to homosexuality to pedophilia.

What better way of demonstrating this than by looking at the hidden messages contained within the names of some of Linux's most outspoken advocates:

• Linus Torvalds is an anagram of slit anus or VD 'L,' clearly referring to himself by the first initial.
• Richard M. Stallman, spokespervert for the Gaysex's Not Unusual 'movement' is an anagram of mans cram thrill ad.
• Alan Cox is barely an anagram of anal cox which is just so filthy and unchristian it unnerves me.

I'm sure that Eric S. Raymond, composer of the satanic homosexual propaganda diatribe The Cathedral and the Bizarre, is probably an anagram of something queer, but we don't need to look that far as we know he's always shoving a gun up some poor little boy's rectum. Update: Eric S. Raymond is actually an anagram for secondary rim and cord in my arse. It just goes to show you that he is indeed queer.

Update the Second: It is also documented that Evil Sicko Gaymond is responsible for a nauseating piece of code called Fetchmail, which is obviously sinister sodomite slang for 'Felch Male' -- a disgusting practise. For those not in the know, 'felching' is the act performed by two perverts wherein one sucks their own post-coital ejaculate out of the other's rectum. In fact, it appears that the dirty Linux faggots set out to undermine the good Republican institution of e-mail, turning it into 'e-male.'

As far as Richard 'Master' Stallman goes, that filthy fudge-packer was actually quoted on leftist commie propaganda site Salon.com as saying the following: 'I've been resistant to the pressure to conform in any circumstance,' he says. 'It's about being able to question conventional wisdom,' he asserts. 'I believe in love, but not monogamy,' he says plainly.

And this isn't a made up troll bullshit either! He actually stated this tripe, which makes it obvious that he is trying to politely say that he's a flaming homo slut!

Speaking about 'flaming,' who better to point out as a filthy chutney ferret than Slashdot's very own self-confessed pederast Jon Katz. Although an obvious deviant anagram cannot be found from his name, he has already confessed, nay boasted of the homosexual perversion of corrupting the innocence of young children. To quote from the article linked:

'I've got a rare kidney disease,' I told her. 'I have to go to the bathroom a lot. You can come with me if you want, but it takes a while. Is that okay with you? Do you want a note from my doctor?'

Is this why you were touching your penis in the cinema, Jon? And letting the other boys touch it too?

We should also point out that Jon Katz refers to himself as 'Slashdot's resident Gasbag.' Is there any more doubt? For those fortunate few who aren't aware of the list of homosexual terminology found inside the Linux 'Sauce Code,' a 'Gasbag' is a pervert who gains sexual gratification from having a thin straw inserted into his urethra (or to use the common parlance, 'piss-pipe'), then his homosexual lover blows firmly down the straw to inflate his scrotum. This is, of course, when he's not busy violating the dignity and copyright of posters to Slashdot by gathering

You keep hearing, but you not watching? A preview of Data Parallel Haskell is a part of GHC 6.10. I guess they just need more time, people and/or money - the scope of their project seems to be much broader.

I wouldn't be surprised, but there's one other thing to remember: Microsoft (or rather specifically Microsoft Research) is pretty heavily involved into GHC. So it may be more than a coincidence.

The Client Security Agent appears to be another bit of Microsoft Madness

Which appears to require MS Windows.

Given the the classicly high rate of computer infection among teens, this could be make sense for the school administration. Of course, it might be easier if they just required everyone to just get a Mac.

I think that GP was referring to some stuff that isn't out of beta yet:

Parallel LINQ (for .NET)
Parallel Patterns Library (for native C++)

Obviously, this stuff didn't have a chance to have any significant effect yet, and won't until first stable versions are released.

I think that GP was referring to some stuff that isn't out of beta yet:

Parallel LINQ (for .NET)
Parallel Patterns Library (for native C++)

Obviously, this stuff didn't have a chance to have any significant effect yet, and won't until first stable versions are released.

The first patent looks kind of interesting, inasmuch as it seems like they are applying it to a database

I don't think so. From reading the claims, it seems to be quite obviously a patent for Parallel LINQ to me - it specifically covers all LINQ operators one by one. And PLINQ isn't for databases - it's for in-memory data. Essentially, it's just map/filter/fold/join on arbitrary sequences with automatic parallelization.

Though I don't see why it wouldn't be just as applicable to databases (which are, after all, just advanced implementations of the above).

I know of no database that actually does a single query in parallel, but I'm not sure it would be any more efficient, because there is only one disk.

Records aren't read from disk one-by-one - they are usually read in pages, and once in-memory, it's obviously faster to e.g. filter rows in parallel on as many cores as there are available. Doing it for a simple SELECT .. WHERE .. is trivial. The trick is to get it right for operations involving joins, grouping, and ordering, with arbitrary sequencing and possibly nesting. Which, if I understood correctly, is what the patent is about.

Anyway, for a shared-use RDBMS, it might be moot, because it usually has more than one query to process at any given time - and so it's easy to load-balance all cores just by assigning queries to them.

Judges, can I get a ruling?

You have to account for dividends including special dividends. E.g., "The board also approved a one-time special dividend of $3.00 per share, or approximately $32 billion, subject to shareholder approval of stock plan amendments that will allow certain adjustments to employee equity compensation awards to offset the impact of the special dividend. The special dividend will be payable on December 2, 2004, to shareholders of record on November 17, 2004, conditioned upon shareholder approval of amendments to the employee stock plans at the annual meeting of shareholders scheduled to be held November 9, 2004."

You should also consider MSFT's current performance - as a stock - to a broader, generally depressed index. Better than GM, yes?

I'm still somewhat at a loss to find a savings account that would net a 13% gain in ten years... that's about a 1.3% APR which isn't unachievable but the market went below that for long chunks. And again, plus dividends. In 2003, they were 8 cents a share post-split. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/Jan03/01-16ds.mspx

I kinda get the feeling that Microsoft had done the majority of their best work by 1999, but considering their product prices since, having sold at least one license for windows and office to almost every work computer in America, I'm shocked they haven't made more.

You're forgetting the fact that the stock split twice between 99 and 09.

More.

Engineer is a reserved title, which makes it illegal for people not part of the "Ordre des ingenieurs du Quebec" to call themselves engineers.

You should have seen a couple years ago with the MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) certification... Hahahaha!

Here:
http://www.microsoft.com/canada/learning/QuebecMCSE/default.mspx

ps.: To be part of the Order in Quebec, you need a 4-year (would be 5-years in USA) university degree in engineering.

Knowing that F# came out of Microsoft Research and that some other .NET code has been released as free software by Microsoft in the past, I was hoping that the F# compiler would be free software too. Sadly this is not the case - at least as far as the licence in fsharp.zip here is concerned; it's distributable for non-commercial use only. So while F# looks very interesting, for now it's something of a Microsoft lock-in, and I won't be adopting it because it removes the possibility of porting to Mono.

And it is getting significantly improved code completion, and on-the-fly error checking in 2010.

If you read the comments in that post, it looks like C++/CLI isn't supported by the new, improved intellisense.

Honestly, we took to calling it "Intellinonsense" at work, given the number of times it fails to complete; you can rate it by failures per second...

Doesn't sound "abandoned" to me.

On the language front, Visual C++ in 2010 gets a bunch of C++0x features: lambdas, type inference (auto), static_assert , rvalue references (&&), and decltype. This is quite a lot, and lambdas are especially nice since they actually let you use STL algorithms as God intended without writing tons of boilerplate code for function objects.

Then also there's Parallel Patterns Library, which provides STL-like algorithms with automatic parallelization.

Yes, the actual c++ compiler and library support has definitely improved. But there seems to be no corresponding improvement in the IDE's functionality. When Visual Assist X becomes a requirement for working with any kind of productivity, it's a rather sad situation. You've got to spend on VS, and then on VA-X for every developer, when the alternative is eclipse with mingw, giving all those above-mentioned features (aka, parts of the standard) for free, and a real usable IDE along with that!

This one is interesting. I do not know of any C++ IDE or plugin that would provide working C++ refactoring, for very simple reason - it is extremely hard to properly parse C++, taking into account all templates and template specializations, and other context-dependent things. Heck, something like a<b>c can be parsed either as expression (a < b) > c, or as a variable declaration a<b> c, depending on the context - and that context, again, includes template instantiations, which form a Turing-complete language that has to be interpreted correctly to produce matching results. I once wrote a C++ program, for fun, which had in it a piece of code as described above, which was parsed and compiled either as expression or as variable declaration depending on whether char type was signed or unsigned was for a given compiler - so you could play with compiler options and get different results. How can IDE possibly handle this?

You can say that it does it for code completion, but the truth is that a lot of it is guessing and heuristics. And there's the catch - when it guesses wrong, at worst, you get a wrong code completion list, or no list at all. But when you do a refactoring like, say, "rename class", and it fails to correctly determine that the class is referenced at some line of code, and doesn't rename it there, then your program no longer compiles...

That said, VS2010 IDE C++ parser (used for code completion and "Go to definition") is EDG-based, so it should be much more accurate - so hopefully we'll get reliable C++ refactoring eventually. Just not in this release.

Eclipse and the still-in-beta KDevelop 4.x give you at least some basic refactoring support. Eclipse has done so for a few years now...

I agree with that, but there are many good thir

Allow me to introduce you too... http://www.microsoft.com/Express/ There will be VS2010 versions. It's not the high-end dev environment, but it does quite a bit.

Quite a bit actually. Personally for me, the top 3 features are:

• F# - Finally a functional programming language with a real chance of becoming mainstream. I personally would have liked Haskell though :(
• Parallel Patterns Library - An STL like library for doing parallel computation. For example, instead of the STL for_each you can use the PPL parallel_for_each. Combine this with lambda functions for best results.
• C++0x goodies - These includes lambdas, auto, rvalue references, etc.

Apart from the above it includes a completely new intellisense for C++, using the EDG frontend. All this in addition to the usual .Net stuff.

The ClearType Tuner PowerToy [microsoft.com] can also help.

It will not, since it only tunes Windows's built-in ClearType renderer. Visual Studio uses WPF, which has its own renderer. There isn't really anything you can do to make it better.

That said, the blurriness is recognized as a problem, and will be fixed for 2010:

We are replacing WPF's text rendering stack in WPF 4.0, and this should allow you to render text with comparable sharpness to what you're used to with GDI. The reason the existing text stack in WPF looks blurrier than GDI's is that GDI text is typically rendered with Compatible Width Layout, whereas WPF's existing text stack always uses Ideal Width Layout. Compatible Width Layout snaps glyphs to pixel boundaries, Ideal Width does not, which is why WPF's text looks blurrier than GDI's. WPF's existing text stack also does not support use of the embedded bitmaps that are included in many fonts and are intended to be used when rendering at smaller sizes.

The new text stack in WPF 4.0 will allow Compatible Width Layout, and it will also support embedded font bitmaps. We believe this will solve all of our text blurriness issues.

Thanks!
-The WPF Graphics Team

It just didn't get into beta 1 yet.

As it says right there in the screenshot, the possible harm is from custom build steps.

To clarify (since it may not be obvious to those who haven't used VS, and, in fact, even to many who did) - Visual Studio projects are nothing more but MSBuild makefiles, which has roughly the same expressive power and extensibility as, say, Apache Ant. In particular, the build steps can include file system operations, and execution of arbitrary shell commands. By default, VS-created projects have nothing like this, and so the verifier lets them load without asking. But if the file was hand-edited to include any such things, you'll see the dialog such as one on the screenshot.

I heavily use both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, so I was excited to use 2010. The thing I found most obnoxious about it was the the text in the code editor was blurry at normal font settings (Consolas 10pt). Let me restate that. The text in the primary window of the software that you will be staring at for hours daily... is blurry. How on earth did that get past QA?

Section 2.4.2.2 of the Readme describes why the code can appear blurry:

2.4.2.2 Text may appear slightly blurry
Text may appear slightly blurry. This can occur with any font, although different users may see different fonts as more or less blurred. MSGothic, the default font for Japanese system locales, is known to be more blurred than other fonts.

To resolve this issue:

We recommend that you keep the default fonts for Visual Studio, for example, Consolas for English SKUs of Visual Studio 2010. There is no alternative that is consistently sharper than MSGothic for Japanese characters, although some users find Meiryo more readable.

TrueType fonts are the least blurred of the non-default fonts. These fonts appear in bold in the font list on the Fonts and Colors page of the Options dialog box (Tools menu, Options, Environment, Fonts and Colors). The WPF and Visual Studio teams are working to improve font rendering in the text editor before the release of Visual Studio 2010.

You can also take a look at this white paper for more information on the issue.
The ClearType Tuner PowerToy can also help. If you are running Windows 7, it's built into the control panel.

I heavily use both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, so I was excited to use 2010. The thing I found most obnoxious about it was the the text in the code editor was blurry at normal font settings (Consolas 10pt). Let me restate that. The text in the primary window of the software that you will be staring at for hours daily... is blurry. How on earth did that get past QA?

Section 2.4.2.2 of the Readme describes why the code can appear blurry:

2.4.2.2 Text may appear slightly blurry
Text may appear slightly blurry. This can occur with any font, although different users may see different fonts as more or less blurred. MSGothic, the default font for Japanese system locales, is known to be more blurred than other fonts.

To resolve this issue:

We recommend that you keep the default fonts for Visual Studio, for example, Consolas for English SKUs of Visual Studio 2010. There is no alternative that is consistently sharper than MSGothic for Japanese characters, although some users find Meiryo more readable.

TrueType fonts are the least blurred of the non-default fonts. These fonts appear in bold in the font list on the Fonts and Colors page of the Options dialog box (Tools menu, Options, Environment, Fonts and Colors). The WPF and Visual Studio teams are working to improve font rendering in the text editor before the release of Visual Studio 2010.

You can also take a look at this white paper for more information on the issue.
The ClearType Tuner PowerToy can also help. If you are running Windows 7, it's built into the control panel.

Visual C++ hasn't changed much since VS 2002.

Eh? It's got C++/CLI since then, for starters. It has become much closer to ISO C++ (before 2003 it was a total joke, it didn't even get the scope of the for loop right - and 2003 was only so-so). It's got checked STL containers & iterators in 2005, and C++TR1 in 2008. And it is getting significantly improved code completion, and on-the-fly error checking in 2010. Doesn't sound "abandoned" to me.

On the language front, Visual C++ in 2010 gets a bunch of C++0x features: lambdas, type inference (auto), static_assert , rvalue references (&&), and decltype. This is quite a lot, and lambdas are especially nice since they actually let you use STL algorithms as God intended without writing tons of boilerplate code for function objects.

Then also there's Parallel Patterns Library, which provides STL-like algorithms with automatic parallelization.

And no refactoring

This one is interesting. I do not know of any C++ IDE or plugin that would provide working C++ refactoring, for very simple reason - it is extremely hard to properly parse C++, taking into account all templates and template specializations, and other context-dependent things. Heck, something like a<b>c can be parsed either as expression (a < b) > c, or as a variable declaration a<b> c, depending on the context - and that context, again, includes template instantiations, which form a Turing-complete language that has to be interpreted correctly to produce matching results. I once wrote a C++ program, for fun, which had in it a piece of code as described above, which was parsed and compiled either as expression or as variable declaration depending on whether char type was signed or unsigned was for a given compiler - so you could play with compiler options and get different results. How can IDE possibly handle this?

You can say that it does it for code completion, but the truth is that a lot of it is guessing and heuristics. And there's the catch - when it guesses wrong, at worst, you get a wrong code completion list, or no list at all. But when you do a refactoring like, say, "rename class", and it fails to correctly determine that the class is referenced at some line of code, and doesn't rename it there, then your program no longer compiles...

That said, VS2010 IDE C++ parser (used for code completion and "Go to definition") is EDG-based, so it should be much more accurate - so hopefully we'll get reliable C++ refactoring eventually. Just not in this release.

... decent GUI toolkit. Both MFC and Win32 API are incredibly difficult to code.

I agree with that, but there are many good third-party libraries out there - most notably, Qt.

We run it at work. It is pretty much the same as VS 2005.

If you use it for C++ development, then the C++ compiler in 2008 has better standard compliance, and some nasty bugs in the libraries are fixed. Also, VS2008 SP1 adds C++ TR1 stuff.

So I'm curious, since you're so obsessed with all this hot butt sex you've been having as Microsoft screws you, just how have they screwed you lately? What hostile actions has Microsoft taken towards open source lately? Was it opening the Microsoft Open Source Labs? Was it making sure PHP runs equally well on IIS as it does on Apache? Was it launching the open source .NET portal CodePlex? Maybe it was their monetary investment in several big open source projects? Wow, damn those evil bastards!!

Last time I checked Microsoft never documents what updates actually do.

Microsoft releases a knowledge base article for every update they push on Windows Update. As long as you don't blindly tell Windows to install them without looking at the details, you can follow the links to them and see exactly what the update does.

Now, having said that, KB951847: List of changes and fixed issues in the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 doesn't mention a Firefox plugin at all.

You're right. Nowhere among the Additional Resources pages (kb or readme) do they mention Firefox. On their own MSDN page it's even tagged as malware!!!

I didn't even realize it was in my addons list until I just checked...right now.

You're right. Nowhere among the Additional Resources pages (kb or readme) do they mention Firefox. On their own MSDN page it's even tagged as malware!!!

I didn't even realize it was in my addons list until I just checked...right now.

C++ doesn't have heap compaction

There are ways around this, such as the buddy heap and the Windows XP low-fragmentation heap, which round sizes up to a power of 2 and keep similarly-sized allocations together.

There are 220 messages from @microsoft.com, out of almost 20,000 messages on the mailing list of the HTML WG, and many of those have been Chair-related administrative issues - I only remember a handful of occasions where any Microsoft employees offered feedback on the spec (though they wrote some tests too). The editor says: "Personally I would like Microsoft to get more involved with HTML 5. They've sent very little feedback over the years, far less than the other browser vendors. Even when asking them about their opinion on features they are implementing I rarely get any feedback."

(A lot of the spec is indirectly contributed by Microsoft, via reverse-engineering their implementations (for old features like parsing, and newer ones like drag-and-drop and contenteditable), but that's not really the same thing.)

The licensing for Windows Server doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the size of the directory.

With Server 2008, you have a matrix of options. You can choose whether you want to count licenses by computers or users by the type of CAL you buy (Device or User). Then, you can choose whether you want to license the number of simultaneous connections to a single server (per-server) or by the number of discrete users or devices that have accessed any server (per-user or per-device). Clearly, if you only have one server and it's only being used for authentication, per-server licensing with device CALs makes sense. You only need to purchase sufficient CALs to cover number of computers that will simultaneously authenticate. Another option would be to go with user CALs, but it's probably easier to calculate how many computers will be simultaneously authenticating against or querying the directory. Once you get multiple servers, however, per-server licensing quickly gets expensive. For example, if you have three shifts of 10 users and go with 10 device CALs, per-server licensing will require 30 CALs if you have 3 servers. In per-device mode, however, it only requires 10 CALs. So, in a large deployment with multiple servers, you'll typically go with per-device licensing with device CALs (if users share computers) or per-user licensing with user CALs (if users use multiple computers or all have their own computers). This is because per-device/per-user mode doesn't license the servers; the CAL is good for connecting to any server in your network. In practice, only in the case of User CALs with per-user licensing do you need a number of CALs equal to the number of active users in your directory. You still don't necessarily need one license per user, however, as you can assign CALs away from deactivated users, move CALs from users on leave to temporary users, and use one CAL for a single named user who happens to use multiple accounts.

Check out Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 Licensing FAQ and Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 CAL overview page.

The licensing for Windows Server doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the size of the directory.

With Server 2008, you have a matrix of options. You can choose whether you want to count licenses by computers or users by the type of CAL you buy (Device or User). Then, you can choose whether you want to license the number of simultaneous connections to a single server (per-server) or by the number of discrete users or devices that have accessed any server (per-user or per-device). Clearly, if you only have one server and it's only being used for authentication, per-server licensing with device CALs makes sense. You only need to purchase sufficient CALs to cover number of computers that will simultaneously authenticate. Another option would be to go with user CALs, but it's probably easier to calculate how many computers will be simultaneously authenticating against or querying the directory. Once you get multiple servers, however, per-server licensing quickly gets expensive. For example, if you have three shifts of 10 users and go with 10 device CALs, per-server licensing will require 30 CALs if you have 3 servers. In per-device mode, however, it only requires 10 CALs. So, in a large deployment with multiple servers, you'll typically go with per-device licensing with device CALs (if users share computers) or per-user licensing with user CALs (if users use multiple computers or all have their own computers). This is because per-device/per-user mode doesn't license the servers; the CAL is good for connecting to any server in your network. In practice, only in the case of User CALs with per-user licensing do you need a number of CALs equal to the number of active users in your directory. You still don't necessarily need one license per user, however, as you can assign CALs away from deactivated users, move CALs from users on leave to temporary users, and use one CAL for a single named user who happens to use multiple accounts.

Check out Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 Licensing FAQ and Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 CAL overview page.

It's worth noting that Microsoft also has Services for Unix (applicable for Windows 2000 through Windows Server 2003) and Identity Management for Unix (applicable for Windows Vista through Windows Server 2008).

While Unix boxes can authenticate to an Active Directory domain through the use of Samba and derivatives, the advantage of these services is that they can extend the LDAP schema with NIS attributes to provide native NIS authentication, and also, extend SMB sharing with NFS support to provide native NFS sharing. In both cases, the NIS/NFS support is fully integrated with the native Windows support, and data shared between the two; that is, Windows AD objects can be immediately used with NIS and NFS, they co-exist. I've personally found this a huge convenience as most Unix/Linux distros can authenticate to the domain out-of-the-box and with an absolute minimal amount of configuration, often during the initial installation without even having to dive into configuration files to get the basics done. With some extra work, you can also enable password synchronization in the Unix -> NIS direction and/or the Windows -> NIS direction through the use of a (closed-source) PAM module (the reason for this being that as far as the Unix boxes are concerned they are using NIS, but behind the scenes, it is fundamentally AD with a NIS front-end, and the intricacies of password management and the updating of are very different.)

As admittedly distasteful as it is that Microsoft has an inherent competitive advantage here in that much of their implementation is proprietary and their competitors is not, leaving them free to support NIS/NFS but not necessarily the other way around, my experience is that they have done their implementation quite well. Word to the wise: I've had a FAR better experience with IDMU on Server 2008 than SFU for Server 2003. The former requires a separate download for SFU while the latter has IDMU included as part of the OS and can be installed at any time as an optional component alongside AD/SMB, either at initial installation of those components or as a future addition post-installation. The result is a tighter coupling of the respective services: it feels like communication between the Unix support division and the Windows tech division was far better for Server 2008; I had to spend many hours getting NIS/NFS to work on 2003, but had it up and working perfectly in under an hour on 2008. That being said, both can be made to work fine and will get the job done well, my experience is purely limited to ease of setup and initial impression on the polish and integration of each, functionality wise, they are both almost identical.

Both are free of charge, provided of course you have a Windows licence, with IDMU effectively being a renamed and improved SFU.

It's worth noting that Microsoft also has Services for Unix (applicable for Windows 2000 through Windows Server 2003) and Identity Management for Unix (applicable for Windows Vista through Windows Server 2008).

While Unix boxes can authenticate to an Active Directory domain through the use of Samba and derivatives, the advantage of these services is that they can extend the LDAP schema with NIS attributes to provide native NIS authentication, and also, extend SMB sharing with NFS support to provide native NFS sharing. In both cases, the NIS/NFS support is fully integrated with the native Windows support, and data shared between the two; that is, Windows AD objects can be immediately used with NIS and NFS, they co-exist. I've personally found this a huge convenience as most Unix/Linux distros can authenticate to the domain out-of-the-box and with an absolute minimal amount of configuration, often during the initial installation without even having to dive into configuration files to get the basics done. With some extra work, you can also enable password synchronization in the Unix -> NIS direction and/or the Windows -> NIS direction through the use of a (closed-source) PAM module (the reason for this being that as far as the Unix boxes are concerned they are using NIS, but behind the scenes, it is fundamentally AD with a NIS front-end, and the intricacies of password management and the updating of are very different.)

As admittedly distasteful as it is that Microsoft has an inherent competitive advantage here in that much of their implementation is proprietary and their competitors is not, leaving them free to support NIS/NFS but not necessarily the other way around, my experience is that they have done their implementation quite well. Word to the wise: I've had a FAR better experience with IDMU on Server 2008 than SFU for Server 2003. The former requires a separate download for SFU while the latter has IDMU included as part of the OS and can be installed at any time as an optional component alongside AD/SMB, either at initial installation of those components or as a future addition post-installation. The result is a tighter coupling of the respective services: it feels like communication between the Unix support division and the Windows tech division was far better for Server 2008; I had to spend many hours getting NIS/NFS to work on 2003, but had it up and working perfectly in under an hour on 2008. That being said, both can be made to work fine and will get the job done well, my experience is purely limited to ease of setup and initial impression on the polish and integration of each, functionality wise, they are both almost identical.

Both are free of charge, provided of course you have a Windows licence, with IDMU effectively being a renamed and improved SFU.

The article says that two hospitals were unable to access patient records. Who knows what the "power surge" actually affected, but it's clear it happened at a shared datacenter.

Their paperwork increased because they couldn't access the applications hosted by the shared datacenter, which is probably some type of retarded Windows Terminal Service setup, and they also couldn't just run the applications locally. So they would have had to start recording data twice, once on paper and another time on their (remote) records system. After a while, staff would not be able to keep up with the data entry and start diverting people.

And basically this would not have happened if anyone even slightly competent had designed their electronic records system not to be dependent on a real-time data link to remote application servers.

My AppleTV, PS3, BlackBerry, DVD player and iPod will all play MPEG-4. None of them will play MKV. Can you give a few examples of popular hardware devices that'll play MKV?

Well, considering that all of those you list have a stake in closed architectures, I'm not too surprised. Neither Apple nor Sony has ever shown much interest in supporting open standards. Have you yet discovered that your PS3 also won't play all flavors of DivX/XviD even in the AVI container?

While some DVD players support DivX and often won't cough with XviD, the manufacturers did so to enable you to play the now-defunct DivX discs. I took back a Sony DVD player and replaced it with a Panny because the Sony had no DivX support and wouldn't play my XviD-encoded programs. Sony wants everyone to conform to the .mp4 container that they prefer.

In answer to your question, how about a COWON A3 for starters? It even supports 720p/H.264 Matroska files (I have a lot of those). Or maybe some of these devices?

If you buy products that are designed to close off your options, then you can't really complain when you find your choices are more limited. While it's possible to argue that hardware manufacturers have been slow to support Matroska because of its small market share, I think it's even more plausible that manufacturers prefer to support formats that give them more control. Not to mention that large manufacturers are much more comfortable dealing with something like the MPEG LA than with an open format like Matroska. They probably have a hard time getting their heads around supporting something that doesn't required licensing fees. (Like in the case of Linux, business types usually think "free" = "inferior".)

It's called COFEE

Q.What is COFEE?

A.COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) is a tool that helps simplify the very complex problem of gathering "live" computer evidence of cybercrime. It utilizes common forensics tools to aid officers at the scene in gathering important live evidence with a single USB device. It also provides reports in a simple format for later interpretation by computer experts, or as supportive evidence for computer investigations. This means that first-responder officers on the scene of a crime don't have to be computer forensic experts to capture live data for later analysis and that this critical information does not have to be lost once a computer is shut down to be taken for a traditional offline forensic analysis.

Cops got even got their own web portal courtesy of Microsoft.

Actually if MS could just stop trying to re-invent the wheel every few years with a "new improved" version of Windows the hardware would catch up to XP, and to a certain extent it already has http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/apr08/04-03xpeos.mspx. IMHO, all of this has the one laptop per child program at it's roots.

My prediction is that a fully functional mini-netbook will be mass marketed for $99.00 by Xmas 2010.