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Designated initializers?

They're there in VS 2013 already.

Compound literals?

Also in VS 2013.

_Bool / stdbool.h as well, and most C99 standard headers except for tgmath.h are there as well.

DevSense are the PHP-in-VS guys. Have you seen their product? They do, in fact, share a lot of code with PTVS, and contribute back improvements.

Yeah, but the callback model is incredibly ugly. In Lua I can do precisely what Node.js does--juggle thousands of simultaneous connections--but at least be able use a normal flow of control via the use of coroutines.

In C#, this was solved with async/await, which, like Lua coroutines and Python yield, let you basically write the code as sequential, sprinkling "await" in points where you want asynchrony. Since then, a similar thing has been proposed for the inclusion in C++17, and there is another proposal for EcmaScript 6 - support for which has already been added to Node.js.

That's might be a tweak on your system but MS says nothing about "right-click". So either you have customization on your system or you are fibbing.

No, and this demonstrates that you have not even used Windows 8 and therefore do not know what you are talking about, so just stop your idiocy. For changing the desktop wallpaper you can go through the steps outlined in the link or you can do it exactly as you do on Windows 7 which is to right-click the desktop and click "Personalize". But you haven't even used it which is why you don't know this.

So you have to remember something on a video instead of having a feature self-discoverable. What kind of idiocy is that in a GUI? What if it's not your computer?

Yes, just like any training but once you've learned it it's easy, in fact in 8.1 they added additional visual cues to help with this.

Wow. It seems you've never used Win 8. Everything I open on Win 8 takes the entire damn screen. Just watch this video on how to change the desktop as one example. The settings menu takes the whole damn screen.

Wrong again, if you want to use Windows 8-specific stuff - which is the Metro UI - then yes that stuff is full screen, but why would you want to do that? There's no need to do that, it's optional, if you want to just use the applications like you did on Windows 7 then they work in exactly the same way. So again, what programs did you use on Windows 7 that forces fullscreen on Windows 8? Photoshop? Lightroom? AutoCAD? Nope, all work the same as Windows 7.

Why can't Microsoft put out a Visual Studio plugin for Powershell with full intellisense, breakpointing, inspections, etc. ?

We don't need to - someone else already did that.

Keep in mind that we're a relatively small group - 6 developers/testers (we all do both) and 1 project manager, covering two projects already (PTVS and NTVS). We can only do so much. Then again, that's precisely why the code for both products is open source - so that people can take it and use it as a foundation for similar products for other languages. Here is one more for PHP, for example.

Why can't Microsoft put out a Visual Studio plugin for Powershell with full intellisense, breakpointing, inspections, etc. ?

We don't need to - someone else already did that.

Keep in mind that we're a relatively small group - 6 developers/testers (we all do both) and 1 project manager, covering two projects already (PTVS and NTVS). We can only do so much. Then again, that's precisely why the code for both products is open source - so that people can take it and use it as a foundation for similar products for other languages. Here is one more for PHP, for example.

Obviously the proposal is nonserious(though it's probably good that I'm not given discretionary power over substantial numbers of people, that might end badly...); and the point moot; but the evolution of the PC audio subsystem, in whatever Intel is calling the successor standard to AC 97 these days, has really picked up some character.

Back in the good old days, you had your fixed-function jacks, hardwired to various ins and outs of the amplifiers and the ADCs, and physically-switched headphone jacks, with an actual little contact to detect insertion, and muting usually happening below the software level.

Now, not so much. Port assignment and presence detection are generally handled in software (the system will even try to guess correctly based on device impedance ).(doc warning, Microsoft did the exhaustive-classification-of-stuff-by-typical-impedance, and that's the format they put it in)

Unless the driver is in a good mood, and the details of the OEM's implementation up to snuff, failure to mute on headphone insert, massive confusion between mic-in and line-in, etc. are all to be expected. If the computer in question has an internal speaker, the fun will usually increase.

Obviously, not much to be done against somebody with a sharp object an no aversion to property damage; but authoritatively silencing a computer is substantially more complicated than it once was.

Changing the desktop wallpaper on Windows 8 is exactly the same as on Windows 7, right-click and select 'Personalize'.

That's might be a tweak on your system but MS says nothing about "right-click". So either you have customization on your system or you are fibbing.

There's a video tutorial when you first log in.

So you have to remember something on a video instead of having a feature self-discoverable. What kind of idiocy is that in a GUI? What if it's not your computer?

ummm....no, that's just wrong. What applications were you using on Windows 7 that Windows 8 requires you to run fullscreen? I think you would be hard pressed to find one much less "every", all the applications I used on Windows 7 work the same on Windows 8.

Wow. It seems you've never used Win 8. Everything I open on Win 8 takes the entire damn screen. Just watch this video on how to change the desktop as one example. The settings menu takes the whole damn screen.

"While Ubuntu has become a more or less Canonical-owned project, openSUSE is becoming more and more community-driven."

I recall something about Microsoft promising not to sue developers as long as they acknowledge Microsofts patent claims against Linux and agree they don't own their own code and undertake not to work on OpenSuSE in company time. Not much community driving going on there that I can see.

Microsoft’s Patent Pledge for Individual Contributors to openSUSE.org

And you can get the source to Windows and do the same.

Are you talking about this? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/default.aspx
I'm not sure what you meant by "you can get the source", but it does not apply to this reader nor hardly anyone else on Slashdot. Does your statement depend on some unusual definition of "you" or "can get"?

However I have had a copy of various variants of Linux's code since near the beginning as well as the compiler's code and apps, and I've read most of it as have many, many people. I doubt there's a need for an "army of $200K math/cs geniuses".

However, your point about the security of the repository is important as repositories have indeed been hacked in the past, and I can't claim that all attacks were discovered.

If one looks at the link to CVE-2013-0634, there is a link to a MS Security Bulletin first posted in March 2013 & last updated in April... even saying:

Recommendation. Most customers have automatic updating enabled and will not need to take any action because this security update will be downloaded and installed automatically. Customers who have not enabled automatic updating need to check for updates and install this update manually. For information about specific configuration options in automatic updating, see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 294871.

Way to go editors... this bug was reported & fixed 7 months ago and only now are we to get paranoid over what it could do if Windows Update isn't enabled? sheesh

If you believe you are safe, think again.

Oh, it gets worse than that... much, much worse...

Skydiving is 7 microsofts per jump. That's equivalent to Windows Vista running on the firmware of your car.

Source

FTFY.

Actually, it's just IE on XP.

And IE on Windows Server 2003 and 2003 R2, which uses almost the same kernel as XP but is supported until July 2015. And Android Browser on Android 2.2/2.3.

They still are, for the most part, either pointer typedefs or wrappers around pointers.

Nope.

In VC++ they're objects which are range-checked, become invalid if the container changes in a way that invalidates them, etc. There's no way to set them to 'null'. You can't assign an iterator for one container the value of an iterator from a different container. Operator[] also behaves like at() (will throw an exception if the index is out of range).

In short: Anything that can be checked, is (and has been by default since VC++2008), even in 'release' compiles.

You can have 'raw pointers' if you want them (extra speed!) but you have to ask for them with a special #define.

See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa985896(v=vs.90).aspx

It boggles my mind why you would want to continue doing business with a company that treats you this way. You must be a glutton for punishment.

Want and need are (often) two different things. My company uses Office 2010; I sometimes work from home ... yada, yada, yada.

Just to clarify things, the troublesome Office 2010 sub-component I'm talking about is the Upload Center (MSOSYNC) used by Sharepoint (previously Groove) and auto started just about all the time. Here's a link listing many other people annoyed that they cannot easily disable and remove this component / service - along the instructions from someone in the World with the manual steps to actually do so via msiexec.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/79e88e72-e9a2-4740-a41e-dbec4511ec59/disable-upload-center-via-oct-2010

The Sharepoint IE plugins must still be disabled manually in IE and/or removed via editing the registry.

I've been a Unix(ish) SA and system programmer, on just about every platform known from PC to Cray-2, for ~30 years, as well as a Windows SA / programmer. So while not a glutton for punishment, I certainly have taken some. Computers piss me off.

What's this then? http://advertising.microsoft.com/en-us/display-ad-targeting

Who cares if the targeting data comes from an email or what you type into google or bing or what news stories you click on? It's all being tracked. Stop fucking kidding yourself and shilling for MS.

Free was not one of your original criteria.

I apologize for the omission. Or did you consider $748 for the first year plus $99 for each additional year a reasonable part of a device's total cost of ownership for hobbyist developers?

However, all the necessary Microsoft tools for developing for Windows phone are free

It requires a Microsoft account. That might be acceptable if Microsoft requires less personal information than Google requires. Is this the case?

It also requires Windows 8, which people might not already have for one of at least four reasons. The first is people who use Linux on a PC built from parts to avoid buying Windows in the first place. The second is people who bought a computer prior to Windows 8's general availability on October 26, 2012, and haven't yet dropped $120 (source: microsoftstore.com) on upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8. The third is people who prefer the user interface of Windows pre-8 and are unaware of Classic Shell. And the fourth is Mac owners. True, Mac owners are more likely to buy an iPhone, but a Mac owner might consider buying a Windows Phone 8 phone to avoid the $99 per year fee associated with running one's own software on an iPhone. Or are only an insignificant number of users affected by these four cases?

Free was not one of your original criteria. However, all the necessary Microsoft tools for developing for Windows phone are free. The $49/yr cost is to publish apps on the Windows Store (the Google Play store has a one time $25 fee). If your apps are just for yourself you don't need to pay those. If you want to distribute your apps and you really, really don't want to use that distribution method you can still send your apps through any channel and have the end user sideload it,

Understanding Downgrade Rights Windows 8/1 Pro can be downgraded to Windows 7 Pro.

Digital River is the official online distributor for Microsoft products. Content hosted by them (mydigitallifecontent) is legitimate. Search for "Windows 7 iso digital river" and you'll see several forums linking to Digital River hosted ISOs directly.

It's not the first time it happens on Windows but similar issues have also affected Linux and most likely OSX too.

Using EMET provides additional layers of protection against this kind of thing.

Note that the instructions to enter Safe Mode requires the computer to be booting successfully. Also note that they tell you that you can't use F8 to boot into safe mode any more, but don't tell you that it's now shift-F8. The bit about Windows 8 giving you no chance to hit this is actually true; I wound up powering off the laptop during boot to "trick" Windows 8.1 into taking me to the recovery menu. (As getting to the black screen counted as "booting" as far as Windows cared.)

I've given up using F8/shiftF8 in virtual machines. I directly edit boot.ini (in notepad) to turn on safe mode and later turn it off. WinFLP also boots too fast to hit F8.

The boot switches for boot.ini:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/239780

You can also edit boot.ini from booting a live Linux distro and doing it that way if it's totally FUBARed.

--
BMO

Wow, you sure found a lot more problems with Windows 8.1 than I did. Really, I only had one problem with it: when booting, after making it past the Windows logo, it just sits at a black screen. You can move the mouse around at this black screen, but you can't log in or do anything.

Other than it crashing to a black screen on boot, I've had no problems with Windows 8.1.

Well, OK, I've posted about this on Slashdot before, and finally got it fixed. Apparently Windows 8.1 decided to nuke the drivers that came with my laptop and use broken ones instead. Reinstalling the original drivers fixed everything. So, thanks for that, Windows 8.1 upgrader.

And because they're still hilarious, here are Microsoft's instructions for booting Windows 8/8.1 into Safe Mode. Note that the instructions to enter Safe Mode requires the computer to be booting successfully. Also note that they tell you that you can't use F8 to boot into safe mode any more, but don't tell you that it's now shift-F8. The bit about Windows 8 giving you no chance to hit this is actually true; I wound up powering off the laptop during boot to "trick" Windows 8.1 into taking me to the recovery menu. (As getting to the black screen counted as "booting" as far as Windows cared.)

Shift-F8 does work, by the way, if you get lucky and hit it in that incredibly short window that the OS checks for it.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2902864

It's a firmware update -- it's only for an issue on Surface 2 devices and wont install on a Surface 1. This has nothing to do with Win8 vs. 8.1.

The Anandtech article does not say anything about the original Surface Pro. It covers only the Surface Pro 2.

Microsoft has a page that appears to reference the original Surface Pro and lists an October firmware update that lists "improved Wi-Fi" - this is what Anandtech talked about in their Surface Pro 2 article.

Furthermore, the original Surface Pro has an Oct 5 firmware update available to it if it is running 8.1. Does that firmware contain the Wi-Fi improvements that give better battery life? Somebody will have to find out. Do you know for sure, one way or the other?

And the switch to monthly subscription for office is a very bad thing, i hope people realize this as well!

I don't see the problem here.

Office 365 Home Premium $99/yr.

5 PCs and/or Macs + any five mobile devices + your Windows phones.
MS Office Pro, full versions of every program, locally resident and always up to date.
MS Office Anywhere, full versions of every program, streamed on demand to any Win7/8 PC.
MS Office Web and Office on Mobile Devices.
20 GB of SkyDrive Storage
60 minutes of global Skype calls per month.

If you are a college student, Office 365 University is $80 for four years with an option to renew in the third year.

If you are a NPO, Office 365 can be yours for free. Office 365 for Nonprofits

If you need a managed turn-key HIPPA compliant medical office system Microsoft has you covered. Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations

And the switch to monthly subscription for office is a very bad thing, i hope people realize this as well!

I don't see the problem here.

Office 365 Home Premium $99/yr.

5 PCs and/or Macs + any five mobile devices + your Windows phones.
MS Office Pro, full versions of every program, locally resident and always up to date.
MS Office Anywhere, full versions of every program, streamed on demand to any Win7/8 PC.
MS Office Web and Office on Mobile Devices.
20 GB of SkyDrive Storage
60 minutes of global Skype calls per month.

If you are a college student, Office 365 University is $80 for four years with an option to renew in the third year.

If you are a NPO, Office 365 can be yours for free. Office 365 for Nonprofits

If you need a managed turn-key HIPPA compliant medical office system Microsoft has you covered. Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations

I do know people using F#. But if one wants innovations innovations take time to catch on. It is unreasonable to expect new invention -> product -> popular product, to happen quickly. Rather we can show Microsoft at all stages in the process. I was just showing new products that came out of their inventions.

As for SQL you are misreading my comment. I said LINQ for SQLServer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/bb397926.aspx

And I've not really seen Microsoft innovate itself out of a paper bag in years

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/

Videos are for these people:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/training-courses-for-outlook-2013-HA104032127.aspx

Microsoft has tried something similar. Each distinct executable has to build up a reputation over some long period before IE SmartScreen stops flagging it as "not commonly downloaded". The only way to make an executable build up reputation faster is to apply for an Authenticode software publisher certificate from a commercial CA ($$$) and keep it renewed ($$$ per year), which lets good reputation spill over from other executables from the same publisher that have earned good reputation. This especially messes with the release early, release often mentality of amateur free software developers who might not be willing to form an LLC and buy and maintain an Authenticode certificate.

Then install Windows 7 and run XP Mode for stuff that absolutely must run in XP.

Wow. Hard.

Flawless software exists. NASA can do it...

But not always, even when they try. The LEM had a couple of bugs that made the Apollo 11 landing even more dicey than it would have otherwise been. Mars Pathfinder had a priority inversion bug that caused software resets. And of course the Mars Climate Observer was lost because of its famous metric vs imperial unit mixup.

And those are just the ones that I know about.

Wake me when I can have my enterprise-level software dynamically generate iWork documents via something similar to System.IO.Packaging without invoking external application executables or command-line utilities via system commands.

Until then, iWork (and OO.org and LibreOffice) are quaint toys.

Funny thing is, the last time I had to extract content from an iWork (Pages, specifically) file, it was structured eerily similar to a Microsoft-Not-So-OpenXML document (which is itself a ripoff of the OO.org format). It was even in a zip archive, just like a docx/xlsx/pptx/whatever-x file is. Which means that System.IO.Packaging isn't too far off from being able to work with iWork documents and OO.org/LibreOffice documents with the addition of some object models. And there's nothing really holding anyone back from building those API's for other platforms or frameworks, either. It's not like they're terribly complicated or difficult. They're a zip archiver and an XML manipulator rolled into a special-purpose API. It's not rocket science.

I doubt Microsoft is scared of this in any substantial way. They trademarked the word "office" for crying out loud. When you talk about so-called productivity software, there's always this nagging trademark in the back of your mind. When Apple distributes iWork, is it an office suite, or is it an Office(tm) suite? Believe me, Microsoft is not quaking in their boots over this insignificant event.

(And, since you seem to enjoy casting aspersions: I do not work for Microsoft. But I do use their software development products at my day job.)

Don't kid yourself, TradElect was a poster child for Microsoft's server and tools strategy. The project was swarming with Microsoft engineers. But you don't have to believe me, the financial industry rightly perceived Accenture as Microsoft's sock puppet.

Actually, this was an all too rare case of the industry dumping the blame where it belonged: squarely in Microsoft's lap. Not that Accenture deserves any praise mind you.

What makes this whole story especially sweet is the way Microsoft crowed about its LSE win. Not surprisingly, Microsoft pulled down http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/default.mspx long ago, but the net remembers it.

Since that fiasco, Microsoft's presence in financial platforms immediately dropped to zero. We can be thankful for that, and it demonstrates clearly where the industry thinks the blame lies.

I might as well post my final update - after tweeting to Samsung support, they explained how to get the SW Update tool to download older drivers. The original AMD graphics drivers for Windows 8 work just fine - the crashing is indeed caused by the Windows 8.1 upgrade itself installing broken drivers.

I probably should have included this earlier, but here's the official Microsoft support page where they tell you that you can't use F8 any more and to first boot into Windows successfully to enable Windows recovery options. Notice that they don't mention shift-F8 anywhere on that page.

ProcMon ProcExp and ProcDump All go a long way toward tracking that sort of info down and are all free (as in beer) to boot.

ProcMon ProcExp and ProcDump All go a long way toward tracking that sort of info down and are all free (as in beer) to boot.

ProcMon ProcExp and ProcDump All go a long way toward tracking that sort of info down and are all free (as in beer) to boot.

Timers of all programs are synchronised so they are fired right after each other so that there are longer periods processing and longer periods of idle. This means that frequency throttling up and down happens a lot less often.

That sounds a lot like the timer coalescing added in Windows 7, and it did have notable improvements in power usage over XP. So while the idea isn't new or innovative on the part of Apple, it does help them maintain their lead over Windows when it comes to lower power consumption.

It certainly won't work when there are usable default or better alternatives already available on PCs that allow it.

Office only has a native client on Windows,

I beg to differ.

Yeah, that was an embarrassing omission. Especially since I actually have a MS Office 2011 for Mac license but I never bothered to upgrade to 365 so forgot about it even though it is, of course, cloud integrated.

Office only has a native client on Windows,

I beg to differ.

(1) there is so much cruft under the surface in Windows (fake DOS calls, umpteen levels of virtualism, etc) that the machine expends a ton of cycles doing what is NOP in newer systems not supporting 1980 calls.

64 bit versions of Windows have never had this sort of cruft.

As a practical matter, there's a widely used program that tries to solve the halting problem by formal means - the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier. Every signed driver for Windows 7 and later has been through that verifier, which attempts to formally prove that the driver will not infinitely loop, break the system memory model with a bad pointer, or incorrectly call a driver-level API. In other words, it is trying to prove that the driver won't screw up the rest of the OS kernel. This is a real proof of correctness system in widespread use.

The verifier reports Pass, Fail, or Inconclusive. Inconclusive is reported if the verifier runs out of time or memory space. That's usually an indication that the driver's logic is a mess. If you're getting close to undecidability in a device driver, it's not a good thing.

Doesn't the fact that it includes an "Inconclusive" category pretty much mean that it absolutely does not try to solve the halting problem?

The halting problem doesn't state that you can never determine if any specific algorithm halts or not, just that there exists some algorithms which will be inconclusive for any finite bound on the time used to determine if it halts or not.

Have you ever typed a mistake similar to the following? I will see you their. In Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word, you can select the Use contextual spelling check box to get help with finding and fixing this type of mistake.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/choose-how-spell-check-and-grammar-check-work-HP010354280.aspx

I can well believe there are differences in battery performance between the OSes but we need someone to sit down with programs performing exactly the same operations on base configurations of all the OSes and then report the results. Saying they vary is one thing but far more interesting is to know why. Is it the drivers, is it the scheduler, is it the kernel, is it a better userspace or is it some combination of all of them?

My understanding is that both Linux and Windows supported timer coalescing before OS X. Linux had a tickless kernel. OS X's XNU kernel is allegedly tickless but I can't find out when this change actually took place. As for Windows it's not clear - my understanding is that Windows 8 is tickless but I can't find a clear reference only one that says Windows 8 idles more than Windows 7 so perhaps it has dynamic ticks and hence can be tickless. That last link seems to suggest that Microsoft have put a large amount of effort into trying to make Windows more battery friendly...

In addition to the above, Windows has a huge number of energy saving features: Idle detection that can control things like what processes are allowed to start, Windows 8 store apps use a "only focussed app runs" model unless it's a background task, USB suspend (Windows 7), adjustable tick rate (Windows 2000) (Windows seems to suffer from programs that push for higher resolution ticks though). It would be nice to know whether all these things are having an impact.

One of the things I noticed on OS X 10.8 though is that when the battery is near to depletion it seems to force the CPU to run at a slower rate until the machine power goes out completely. I don't know the other OSes do this or whether it's a positive impact but it could impact on results that purely go on time rather than amount of work done.

I can well believe there are differences in battery performance between the OSes but we need someone to sit down with programs performing exactly the same operations on base configurations of all the OSes and then report the results. Saying they vary is one thing but far more interesting is to know why. Is it the drivers, is it the scheduler, is it the kernel, is it a better userspace or is it some combination of all of them?

My understanding is that both Linux and Windows supported timer coalescing before OS X. Linux had a tickless kernel. OS X's XNU kernel is allegedly tickless but I can't find out when this change actually took place. As for Windows it's not clear - my understanding is that Windows 8 is tickless but I can't find a clear reference only one that says Windows 8 idles more than Windows 7 so perhaps it has dynamic ticks and hence can be tickless. That last link seems to suggest that Microsoft have put a large amount of effort into trying to make Windows more battery friendly...

In addition to the above, Windows has a huge number of energy saving features: Idle detection that can control things like what processes are allowed to start, Windows 8 store apps use a "only focussed app runs" model unless it's a background task, USB suspend (Windows 7), adjustable tick rate (Windows 2000) (Windows seems to suffer from programs that push for higher resolution ticks though). It would be nice to know whether all these things are having an impact.

One of the things I noticed on OS X 10.8 though is that when the battery is near to depletion it seems to force the CPU to run at a slower rate until the machine power goes out completely. I don't know the other OSes do this or whether it's a positive impact but it could impact on results that purely go on time rather than amount of work done.

I can well believe there are differences in battery performance between the OSes but we need someone to sit down with programs performing exactly the same operations on base configurations of all the OSes and then report the results. Saying they vary is one thing but far more interesting is to know why. Is it the drivers, is it the scheduler, is it the kernel, is it a better userspace or is it some combination of all of them?

My understanding is that both Linux and Windows supported timer coalescing before OS X. Linux had a tickless kernel. OS X's XNU kernel is allegedly tickless but I can't find out when this change actually took place. As for Windows it's not clear - my understanding is that Windows 8 is tickless but I can't find a clear reference only one that says Windows 8 idles more than Windows 7 so perhaps it has dynamic ticks and hence can be tickless. That last link seems to suggest that Microsoft have put a large amount of effort into trying to make Windows more battery friendly...

In addition to the above, Windows has a huge number of energy saving features: Idle detection that can control things like what processes are allowed to start, Windows 8 store apps use a "only focussed app runs" model unless it's a background task, USB suspend (Windows 7), adjustable tick rate (Windows 2000) (Windows seems to suffer from programs that push for higher resolution ticks though). It would be nice to know whether all these things are having an impact.

One of the things I noticed on OS X 10.8 though is that when the battery is near to depletion it seems to force the CPU to run at a slower rate until the machine power goes out completely. I don't know the other OSes do this or whether it's a positive impact but it could impact on results that purely go on time rather than amount of work done.