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I don't work with VisualStudio, but I remember reading documentation that it takes a toggle of one property to compile a 64-bit application instead of a 32-bit application.

If Win64 were radically different from Win32, that simply wouldn't happen.

Having said that, didn't the 64-bit versions of Windows drop support for Win16?

This is just so full of bullshit. First off, only 64-bit versions of Windows will refuse to load unsigned drivers.

Second of all the driver needs to be signed by the developer of the driver, not Microsoft.

Third of all, the DDK (now called the WDK) can be downloaded using the directions on this page (no pooch screwing necessary!)

Fourth of all, that Guttman diatribe has been refuted at least 5 times, yet it still comes up. For the love of all that's holy, stop trotting it out already. Find something actually researched and up to date!

The compiler, docs and tools are free. No, not the-business-buys-MSDN-free, completely 100% download it right now free. The completely functional optimizing commandline compilers for C++, C# and VB are freely downloadable. The IDE with most designer support and full debugger support is freely downloadable. The entire documentation set is available online, for free. You can use these free tools to write applications and then sell them.

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

Why is it that you think that MS tools cost $3000/seat/year? If you want the most expensive of all possible developer packages, then sure, it will cost some cash. But unless you're running a large enterprise and want to use MS's brand of application lifecycle management and source control, you DO NOT NEED to pay that.

And you've never, ever had to pay a cent to Microsoft to legally develop or deploy a commercial application on Windows. Stop spreading FUD you dumb fucking retard.

What exactly are they lying about? I didn't bother to dig into the case studies, but if you look at actual pagehttp://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/compare/default.mspx, they make the following claims:

1) Windows Server 2008 can run Apache, PHP, and PERL.

True.

2) Group Policies (and other Windows security features) are superior to SELinux.

True, SELinux sucks.

3) Windows has better support than Linux.

True.

4) Windows has more enterprise partners and applications than Linux.

True.

5) Windows Server 2008 is more interoperable with your old Microsoft products than Linux.

Again, true.

The only thing I see fishy on the front page is the "TCO" arguments, which are a bit dubious. Of course, MS is making arguments that heavily favor their platform. But they're MARKETING people for crying out loud. They're very explicitly ADVOCATES. Nobody should be suprised if the saing Windows Server 2008 cures cancer and raises the dead.

This douchebag should spend his time going after supposedly "objective" reviewers, but he'd rather piss and moan about MS.

I spent around US$75 each on Microsoft Ergo 4000's for home and work when I first started getting RSI, they're worth every cent.

Well, since Windows is impossoble to set to get email the way that that section defines it (Windows simply does not do email, just pop and imap)

Are you saying that you cannot run an SMTP service on Windows? If so, then that is incorrect. You can enable SMTP on Windows XP Pro. From this KB article:

Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, and Microsoft Windows 2000 Server include a SMTP server as part of Microsoft Internet Information Services.

Um?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937279/en-us

Follow-up.

SQL Server remains off-limits for benchmarking. From the EULA for SS2005 Std / Ent:

5. BENCHMARK TESTING. You must obtain Microsoft's prior written approval to disclose to a third party the results of any benchmark test of the software.

However the company has now changed its restrictions for .Net benchmarking. One can release results according to certain ( sane ) requirements on the condition that Microsoft can reciprocally benchmark your software:

Benchmark Testing, Microsoft .NET Framework

Still glad I don't use proprietary software.

It's really just that FUD. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/ On the upper right is a search field, search for "FUD" - the first or second hit should help you out ;)

Can't you get premier support in India? That would be a surprise??

http://www.microsoft.com/services/Microsoftservices/srv_premier.mspx

Besides software roadmaps aren't meant to plan your business around. if that was the case more people would be upgrading to Vista. They are only for slowing down your competitors.

Users of Ubuntu LTS versions know that they'll be supported for at least 3 years on the desktop and at least 5 years on the server. Users of non-free (as in beer) versions of Novell/SUSE Linux know that they'll get at least 5 years of "general" support and an additional 2 years of "extended" support.

Users of Microsoft "business/pro" software know that they'll get at least 5 years of "mainstream" support and 5 additional years of "extended" support. Users of MS Windows can be reasonably assured that new versions of Office will work with their version of Windows as long as it's still in its "maintream" support phase. They also know that Windows desktop licenses will be available for at least 4 years after the date of general availability.

Besides software roadmaps aren't meant to plan your business around. if that was the case more people would be upgrading to Vista. They are only for slowing down your competitors.

Users of Ubuntu LTS versions know that they'll be supported for at least 3 years on the desktop and at least 5 years on the server. Users of non-free (as in beer) versions of Novell/SUSE Linux know that they'll get at least 5 years of "general" support and an additional 2 years of "extended" support.

Users of Microsoft "business/pro" software know that they'll get at least 5 years of "mainstream" support and 5 additional years of "extended" support. Users of MS Windows can be reasonably assured that new versions of Office will work with their version of Windows as long as it's still in its "maintream" support phase. They also know that Windows desktop licenses will be available for at least 4 years after the date of general availability.

There seems to be a big assumption that good CEOs, especially good Tech CEOs, are easy to come by. They aren't. Yang just stepped in less than a year ago at Yahoo after Semel's abruptly quit. Ballmer has been CEO since 2000, and last time I checked, Microsoft's profits rose 11.4% last year and their EPS grew approximately 18%. I would be surprised if their is an insider successor who could easily replace Ballmer. An outside CEO wouldn't be cheap, and would be difficult to adapt and understand Microsoft's culture.

As much as I dislike Microsoft ... the current leadership, the current Board of Directors seem pretty solid, and seem to keep their shareholders happy.

There seems to be a big assumption that good CEOs, especially good Tech CEOs, are easy to come by. They aren't. Yang just stepped in less than a year ago at Yahoo after Semel's abruptly quit. Ballmer has been CEO since 2000, and last time I checked, Microsoft's profits rose 11.4% last year and their EPS grew approximately 18%. I would be surprised if their is an insider successor who could easily replace Ballmer. An outside CEO wouldn't be cheap, and would be difficult to adapt and understand Microsoft's culture.

As much as I dislike Microsoft ... the current leadership, the current Board of Directors seem pretty solid, and seem to keep their shareholders happy.

There seems to be a big assumption that good CEOs, especially good Tech CEOs, are easy to come by. They aren't. Yang just stepped in less than a year ago at Yahoo after Semel's abruptly quit. Ballmer has been CEO since 2000, and last time I checked, Microsoft's profits rose 11.4% last year and their EPS grew approximately 18%. I would be surprised if their is an insider successor who could easily replace Ballmer. An outside CEO wouldn't be cheap, and would be difficult to adapt and understand Microsoft's culture.

As much as I dislike Microsoft ... the current leadership, the current Board of Directors seem pretty solid, and seem to keep their shareholders happy.

To play the devil's advocate here, you can find the EULA on the vendor's website. Like for WinXP.

From appearances Yahoo seems to be a terrible acquisition target; it is large and healthy enough to be very expensive and burdensome, but not growing rapidly or successful enough to be a major asset to someone like Microsoft.

MS is not a US corporation any more than it is a European, African, East Asian or Indian.

It would be more honest - but less satisfying - to say that the market has met OLPC's price.

That it is - or very soon will be - possible for the OEM to build a fully competitive educational laptop, pre-load Microsoft's Student Innovation Suite and sell it for less than the XO.

You want Squeak? You can have Squeak.

The Windows platform demands no ideological or religious commitment whatever.

You can load and run software under any license you chose. Without ever once being drawn into a theological argument over how many angels can dance on the head of a GPL pin.

sem.LockIf( !sharedMemInitialized ) {
//................ initialize
}

if (Interlocked.Exchange(ref sharedMemInitialized, 1) == 0){

// Initialization
}

The rest of your post is sound, but this particular snippet is simply technically incorrect, assuming we're talking about ASP.NET.

That would be an incorrect assumption. I was actually referring to a winforms web browser control:

e.g.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2te2y1x6.aspx

This is a control that takes an url or webpage as input and renders it in a control. Its basically an embeddable web browser. And of course it relies on the Internet Explorer (Trident) rendering engine. I use them, for example, for printing in quick and dirty utility apps. Suppose I've got some data structured as an xml document -- its SOOO easy to just write a quick xsl transform, and push the xml through it to an attractive formatted html/css document and feed it to this control which renders it, and can also print it.

Instant attractive report printing, and as a bonus I've got attractive onscreen display that copes with rezizing etc, the option to save as html/css. or even as an xml/xsl pair. Which makes it easy for someone else to work with the data, and view it attractively.

Contrast with the effort of developing something to print 'manually'. Which just gets me printer output and is a TON more work.

The big handicap though is that I'm basically embedding 'Internet Explorer', and leveraging its features... but I get all its warts too, and have little real control over the rendering.

All stock Web controls provide a protected non-sealed virtual method named "RenderControl" (actually, they all inherit it from their common base class). You can always override that in a derived class, and do what you see fit in your implementation, without any preparsing.

All true, and I'm a big fan of ASP.NET because of this. The only things that really bug me about asp.net rendering output is that:

a) some of the defaults really suck (but can be easily fixed as per above),

b) the fact that they seem to have disowned maintaining the browser-capabilities which is why safari 3 gets treated as 'downlevel' for items like certain menu control configurations when it's more than capable of handling the uplevel code correctly. And worse the company they handed it off to... 'cyscape' has even less interest in maintaining it... no they want me to pay for their product that does it.

If Microsoft wants to support uplevel/downlevel browsers and send custom code to different browsers, that's great. But I shouldn't have to manage this myself except maybe for bleeding edge beta browsers. And I certainly shouldn't have to bloody pay for it.

c) the __VIEWSTATE and a couple other item names that piss off 'html tidy' and don't validate as strict xhtml. I've never found a good way of 'fixing' that. I've seen a few idiotic solutions that run a regex on the incoming requests and outgoing pages to fix it, but that's a stupid performance hit just to get a 'green-checkmark'.

-cheers

The root of the problem is shared state, operations on shared state need to have ACI properties - atomic, consistent, and independent. Some languages / environments, like Erlang and QNX, solve this problem by basically getting rid of shared state and making all threads communicate with each other over socket-like abstractions. With common programming languages the solution is mutually exclusive locks. You lock up the memory you're working on then unlock it when you're done.

Locks have problems. In order to get good concurrency, you need fine grained locking. Once you have multiple resources protected with multiple locks you run into gotchas like deadlocks and race conditions. There are also issues with exceptions and programmer mistakes causing locks to remain locked or unlocked. All of this can make it very difficult to reason about what is happening in your program and you can end up with bugs that are very difficult to reproduce and/or fix. Locking is also pessimistic - you pay for the cost of locking even if nobody else is looking at the same pieces of memory while you are. Finally, you can't necessarily compose two operations that use their own locks.

A relatively new approach is (Software) Transactional Memory. This is an optimistic method that doesn't use locks. Instead its more like an in-memory database transaction that provides atomic, independent, and consistent access to a set of shared variables. Shared variables have versions associated with them. When you start a transaction the runtime records the versions of the variables. Then after reading and/or writing all the variables in the transaction the runtime compares the current versions with the originally recorded versions. If they are the same the transaction commits and you continue, otherwise the runtime "rolls back" the changes and retries (or doesn't retry, you get control over that if you want.) The cost for uninterrupted reads and writes is very low, you only pay a higher recovery cost when there is an actual conflict.

There are STM libraries available for many popular languages (C#, C++, Java, Ruby) but the most mature and elegant support seems to be in Haskell. Since Haskell is a pure functional language, all side-effects are encapsulated in monads. Because of this encapsulation enforced by the language, it's impossible to actually read or write any transactional variables outside of a transaction. Reading or writing a transactional variable "infects" that function and every calling function until the data is safely brought out of shared memory locations by a transaction. The rest of your code is already thread safe because it doesn't have shared state. The compiler keeps you safe and type checks everything.

There are a bunch of papers you can check out as a starting point. I think this is definitely the future of multithreaded programming.

Keep in mind that an MS product is at fault here... or uh, silly users... either way, with relations to MS ... read this:
http://www.microsoft.com/industry/healthcare/providers/businessvalue/housecalls/clinicalworkflow.mspx

Microsoft has already created a number of software products that help make it possible to develop flexible, affordable, and more intuitive clinical records systems. Microsoft .NET Framework for connected healthcare Web services, for instance, enables a wide range of data-keeping systems to exchange information. Microsoft Pocket PC and Tablet PC technology help physicians take information with them and access it when and where they need it. And Microsoft Office products, such as Microsoft Office InfoPath--along with Microsoft SQL Server and other data management products--benefit from a consistent interface that makes them easily accessible to new users, reducing training and improving productivity.

Microsoft sees a future in which a physician in a hospital calls up a patient records and instantly sees a dashboard of relevant information drawn from all the patient records going back many years. It can require a lot of coordination to make this happen, but the tools are becoming available now. Meanwhile, Microsoft is working hard to help its partners improve the clinical systems being designed today, while building a road to a future where healthcare information is seamlessly connected across the entire healthcare ecosystem.

Except that XP, Vista, and Office all work... right out of the box. And updates are free and easy to apply- if you know what you are doing, all your systems on the entire network will auto-update without any work on the part of the IT staff.

Also, in my entire 15+ year career, I've called MS about three times, and two times were for really obscure MS Exchange problems, one time was for an IOMega bug which prevented a Zip Drive from working on NT4 which they had a hotfix for. Never an issue with Windows, or Office... so no paid support required, none of your imaginary $100/hour MS employees. In fact, even our Exchange support was free of charge... and they even flew three people out to work on it!

But that's because when you pay for your software, you are also getting support. That's why enterprise level organizations love the reliablility inherent in commercial software, rather than the "pay for me to fix my bugs" scam that is FOSS.

Also, no organization I've ever worked for has had trouble with MS Office documents or formats.

Yes you can download the spec for SWF, but nowhere in the spec did it discuss terms of use.

If I implement to their spec, are they going to sue me because of the patents that cover the SWF technology? They say it is available as an "open specification", but there's nothing that says if there are any restrictions on my use of the specification.

Do they have a covenant not to sue like the one that Sun has, the one that IBM has or even the one that Microsoft has?

Godwin's law has one redeeming feature: it discourages people that are not in contact with their brain from bringing up the 3rd Reich, because they think it is a clever law and feel ashamed of falling into the logic trap.

Small world

To be sure I'm not thought of as a Microsoft fanboy or anything, I use FreeBSD and Debian (and Ubuntu, from time to time), and I only have one installation of Windows XP Pro (for games).

Ahem . . .

Sorry to burst your Microsoft-bashing bubble, but Microsoft also releases patches (and viewers) for free, so that users that don't want to upgrade yet don't have to.

To be sure I'm not thought of as a Microsoft fanboy or anything, I use FreeBSD and Debian (and Ubuntu, from time to time), and I only have one installation of Windows XP Pro (for games).

Ahem . . .

Sorry to burst your Microsoft-bashing bubble, but Microsoft also releases patches (and viewers) for free, so that users that don't want to upgrade yet don't have to.

One of my favourite MS oddities.

Of course, this is what 90% of organizations seem to do anyway.

Heck, they could have used the journaling system built into Exchange and achieved what they wanted.

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B258243&x=8&y=15

Windows File Protection only protects a static list of files installed by Windows. To quote MS:

"All SYS, DLL, EXE, and OCX files that ship on the Windows CD are protected. True Type fonts--Micross.ttf, Tahoma.ttf, and Tahomabd.ttf--are also protected."
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/wfp.mspx#E3F

DLL hell still very much exists, as I fight with at work all the time doing application packaging. Typically things like incompatible crystal reports dlls are an issue. Typically and end-user will end up with dozens of different versions of the same DLL in different installation directories, often installing to both %system% and %programfiles%. The next program installed registers it's copy, breaking the old application. App isolation works sometimes, but sometimes it also unfortunately breaks the hell out of things. WFP couldn't even help if it DID apply to these files. .NET thankfully fixed this with the global assembly cache, but that doesn't apply to the win32 world.

Back on topic, it sounds like they DID catch this during testing; which is why it's being delayed! Nice catch, MS. It isn't like we need SP3 direly, right now.

Anyhow,

"The scale of the Windows Experience Index ranges from 1.0 to 5.9." http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/experienceindex.mspx

Shameless karma whoring...

Here for information about what Operations Manager is for those who might like to read before commenting. I know, this is Slashdot and that's frowned upon...

Sorry to attach this to your +5 post but I wanted this to get seen:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/apr08/04-28CrantonQA.mspx

From the ms press release:

"COFEE, a preconfigured, automated tool fits on a USB thumb drive. Prior to COFEE the equivalent work would require a computer forensics expert to enter 150 complex commands manually through a process that could take three to four hours. With COFEE, you simply plug into a running computer to extract the data with the click of one button --completing the work in about 20 minutes."

Its little more than an automated tool that can be run by 'joe-beat-cop' instead of sending a forensics computer expert along. It doesn't do anything that couldn't already be done.

This all... MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING!!

Windows admin accounts can "take ownership" of folders and files through permissions dialogs, even encrypted files belonging to another admin account. Without Administrator access or a bootable OS, you can install a parallel OS on the machine or just mount the volume from another system, alter the permissions for folders at will, and access everything. We used this regularly to extract documents from a pooched MS OS when I worked as a bench tech--we used an unpatched WIN2K image and a USB IDE card.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/268019/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421/en-us

Windows admin accounts can "take ownership" of folders and files through permissions dialogs, even encrypted files belonging to another admin account. Without Administrator access or a bootable OS, you can install a parallel OS on the machine or just mount the volume from another system, alter the permissions for folders at will, and access everything. We used this regularly to extract documents from a pooched MS OS when I worked as a bench tech--we used an unpatched WIN2K image and a USB IDE card.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/268019/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421/en-us

Why do you have to drag this bullshit sarcasm into this discussion?

For the record, both Yahoo! and Microsoft have open positions that they have a hard time filling with qualified people (so do Google, IBM, and most other high tech companies):

http://research.yahoo.com/Job_Opportunities

http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/jobs/fulltime/default.aspx

The H-1b caps indiscriminately keep companies from filling those jobs; they keep out US educated Ph.D.'s, they keep out foreign educated Ph.D.'s, and they are a huge problem for industry and US competitiveness. Even if there's some abuse of H-1b's, capping H-1b's to prevent that abuse is like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. If those Ph.D.'s can't come to the US, they work abroad and found their startups there, pay their taxes there, and create jobs there.

So, stop that stupid sarcasm and get some of the facts, OK?

"Microsoft hasn't been fixing many security issues in Vista because they think it is very secure."

I think that Microsoft has not been fixing security issues in Vista because, if they ever deliver a secure operating system, PC customers will never buy another.

It's not an impossible challenge, making a secure operating system. Other organizations have done it. If Microsoft hasn't, that is because it doesn't want to.

Microsoft exploits the ignorance of its customers. But now the customers are beginning to be more technically knowledgeable. Many are, for example, rejecting Vista. Eventually Microsoft's abusive practices will have more complete recognition. What will it do then?

Of course, if Microsoft had a good reputation, there is a huge amount of other software that needs to be wriiten. But that is not an option, because Microsoft has never been known for creativity.

Maybe Microsoft's slogan should be, "Making money through doing evil." That's my opinion, but I'm not the only one who thinks that way.

Eventually software's Dr. Death, the Chief of Grief, the Main Chain of Pain, will become much less influential. Until then, the company is putting the world through a lot of hassle and extra expense, and wasting the time of some of the world's most capable people.

IIRC, both exchange and SharedPoint's protocol document has been release recently. More OOS apps on Windows may appear in next one year or two. ref: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216513.aspx

Yes, T-SQL kinda blows. But it gets the job done. :)

When I mentioned using stored procedures above, I was inferring the use of a Parameters collection (probably should have explicitly stated that :) The stored procedure's input parameters would then be treated as literal values and not SQL code.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998271(printer).aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb355989(printer).aspx

At least, that's my understanding.

Yes, T-SQL kinda blows. But it gets the job done. :)

When I mentioned using stored procedures above, I was inferring the use of a Parameters collection (probably should have explicitly stated that :) The stored procedure's input parameters would then be treated as literal values and not SQL code.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998271(printer).aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb355989(printer).aspx

At least, that's my understanding.

Accessing PSTs via SMB shares is unsupported by Microsoft, for good reason (much more than is mentioned in the Technet article).

But is it really ubiquitous?

This study (from Microsoft, even) suggests that open source rules, based on the numbers of "others" mail boxes and the lack of revenue for others..

http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/8/a/e8a154bf-cc35-4340-bd26-6265cdb06b6e/market_share_March06.pdf