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Here's an example of the type of products we used back in the day to try to get more RAM without taking out another home mortgage.

> What the hell has Microsoft done for the poor?

Lots.

Microsoft's employee's have donated over $1 billion to non-profits and MSFT has matched those donations"

MSFT donates, on average $1 million worth of software to non profits every day.

MSFT works to help recovery from natural disasters

MSFT offers training programs and career opportunities in economically disadvantaged countries.

I know many of these programs aren't aimed at the poor specifically, but the poor most definitely do benefit from them.

> What the hell has Microsoft done for the poor?

Lots.

Microsoft's employee's have donated over $1 billion to non-profits and MSFT has matched those donations"

MSFT donates, on average $1 million worth of software to non profits every day.

MSFT works to help recovery from natural disasters

MSFT offers training programs and career opportunities in economically disadvantaged countries.

I know many of these programs aren't aimed at the poor specifically, but the poor most definitely do benefit from them.

> What the hell has Microsoft done for the poor?

Lots.

Microsoft's employee's have donated over $1 billion to non-profits and MSFT has matched those donations"

MSFT donates, on average $1 million worth of software to non profits every day.

MSFT works to help recovery from natural disasters

MSFT offers training programs and career opportunities in economically disadvantaged countries.

I know many of these programs aren't aimed at the poor specifically, but the poor most definitely do benefit from them.

I have the suspicion that Seagate is planning quite specifically; but just don't care all that much.

The majority of orders will, presumably, be from OEMs looking to stuff HDD slots on the cheap, while still complying with the Win8 hardware certification requirements(most notably, resume in under 2 seconds) and possibly Intel's "ultrabook" requirements, which have their own I/O demands.

I suspect that Seagate's calculations of 'How cheaply can we build a drive that will satisfy the letter of the requirements that our customers need to meet?" were made with care, and aren't crap at all. They're just something of a lie if you expect that level of performance to be maintained under more stressful loads.

No, but it means that people with a need for DOS should still be using DOS. In a lot of cases, only DOS supports legacy or hobbyist hardware that bit-bangs the parallel port. Likewise, the AC that you replied to has a need for Windows XP for much the same reason: to use hardware that lacks an NT 6 driver.

I've bit-banged the parallel port. In Windows XP. I've even had Win32 programs bit-bang the parallel port too. Presumably, one could do it for Windows 7 and 8 as well, though you'd have a hard time finding it because malware authors have basically caused every signing certificate used to sign it to be invalidated.

How? There's a driver out there called giveio that resets the processes' I/O permissions in the task block so that using the in and out instructions don't generate an exception.

Not really recommended these days to be honest, and if you really need to bit-bang, there are often USB HID controllers with GPIO pins you can use.

Apple managed it, why didn't MS? They should have put a transparent VM into Vista and 7 to run binaries, drivers, etc and called it Windows Classic. They could have had everyone migrated by now and made more money in the process.

I know right? You know, Microsoft could make it really easy and call it "Windows XP Mode"!

You put it in quotes so I assumed you were quoting one of the two links you put in but neither state that. I know there's a lot of anti-MS people here but stick to the facts please. I understand that the current solution they offer is not a patch but something that the user needs to do manually, but seriously when you quote something use what they actually said. "Recommendation. Apply the suggested action to require a certificate verifying a wireless access point before starting an authentication process. Please see the Suggested Actions section of this advisory for more information." - from: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/advisory/2876146

Can you estimate how many Windows XP installs without a valid license are able to use Windows Update? My understanding is that you need a valid license plus activation to use windows update anyway so if my understanding is correct, it is hard to follow your comment logic.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326851

YYYYMMDD also has the advantage of being unambiguous - you don't have to guess whether whoever wrote the date is american and if so, whether they're using a sane or insane date format or not

Hmm... never underestimate the human capacity for insanity; ambiguity between YYYYMMDD vs YYYYDDMM is a very real thing. See for example this.

I used to think we live in a sane world where YYYYMMDD is unambiguous, and have been bitten by it -- not specifically by SQL Server, but by a custom-made application written by what I can only assume are insane people.

Spot on. Much of the research is open too. Have a look at http://research.microsoft.com/
Then point me the equivalent of Apple.

Many of the people using Tor in restrictive countries won't have the luxury of switching away from Windows. Even if they don, they won't necessarily know how.

You know, if Linux still installed from 30 floppies or needed Loadlin, I would agree but installing Ubuntu takes like 11 freakin mouse clicks now. Anyone concerned with security, and still using Windows, is either a helpless victim of Lock-in, or just too damn change-resistant for their own good.

Windows is actually one of the better operating systems security wise these days.

No, actually it's not. Historically and subjectively, each release of Windows has been prone to the same old problems as the previous releases. Internet Explorer/ Active-X/ Application specific exploits both on removable media or over the network. We won't even start with the Abysmal practice of Domain Admin passwords stored on laptops Still using stupid hashing algorithms

bring on the irrational arguments and Microsoft hate.

Not trying to be irrational or hateful -- it's all fact dude. Open your eyes.

That's the RT, not the Pro.

I read up on it...

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/which-surface-is-right-for-you

No, I did not understand the difference.

Surface pro pricing is being lowered due to poor Surface rt sales.

That being said, I still think the price is too high and based on the new info feel that it is for a niche market where it competes against less expensive laptops. Major corporations might get it for their Senior Directors but a $600 laptop will do just fine for mangers and below.

I can't even see developers getting it unless they are developing for the product. And I personally prefer a lot more real estate to develop on so you are probably talking about docking it and running multiple monitors on a desk if you are developing.

As a tablet for carrying to meetings- it's bloody expensive.

Oh and graphic artists- -but again, as an artist- I need a fairly large screen. You might be able to rough things out on the tablet, but there would be a lot of zooming in and out. So again- really docked at a desk with monitors.

Which again- leaves the main benefits in carrying it around. As a tablet, it's heavier, less battery life, and expensive.

From one of the reviews...
For
        Windows 8 in a tablet
        Fantastic pen
        Bright touchscreen
        Up to 2TB expandable storage
        Touch and Type Cover keyboards

Against
        Heavy
        Shorter battery life than RT
        No home for the pen
        Kickstand can be awkward

---
WIndows 8, currently sucks- It's tablet oriented so in some areas my friends report it as painful to use with a mouse until they installed a standard desktop. But they'll fix that with the 8.1. Microsoft eventually gets things right. I have multiple Windows machines at home.

One vendor certainly did this.

It's a large company too.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/compare

iPad vs. Windows

Get the best of work and play with a Windows tablet. Play games, watch your favorite movies, read, and catch up with family and friends. Plus you can get stuff done with Office, do two things at once side-by-side, and access your files anywhere. An iPad just canâ(TM)t do all of that.

Choose from sleek new Windows 8 and Windows RT devices that fit your life and your pocketbook.

Windows 8 interface ... sucks.

Microsoft Office 2013 interface ... hurts my eyes just looking at it.
And I'm not the only one

If Microsoft is stagnant or dieing, it is by their own hand.

>Microsoft's spec is supposed to allow people to install their own keys

The Windows 8 certification requirement outright mandates that users are able to upload their own keys. (See here, "Windows 8 System Requirements", page 121, paragraph 17.)

This thankfully gives us a pretty solid standing to complain at hardware makers who don't do it right.

In the long run, I am not sure it will be necessary, though. I've been looking into those issues after getting a laptop with SecureBoot enabled, and sane options are in development. The interesting thing about UEFI is that it comes with an extensive API, and can be configured from inside the currently running OS (check out efibootmgr on Linux for instance). When the dust has settled, installing and launching Linux will probably not be so vastly different from right now. Time will tell.

Seriouly, there's no hope you'll actually be able to cram everything you need to know into your brain and make it stick. You need runbooks.

Here's a Technet Article on how to put together a Windows server run book. You'll also be able to google for Linux or Unix examples, although you'll find mostly snippets focused on how to write a runbook section for one specific product or another.

A high-level runbook should document overall systems architecture: network layering, external and important internal connections, service agreements, contacts, roles and responsibilities. The per-system runbooks should focus on configuration details and functional description (why the server is in the architecture). Per-service runbooks crosscut servers and describe how a particular service is deployed, started, stopped, upgraded, etc.

It's a lot. If you don't already have a lot of this, start now. If you do, get it current and updated now.

I was referring to the narrative that since Microsoft released software for Android Linus won. Pointing out with the title that Google really builds and controls the SDK to a point and that Microsoft has released Office on Mac's for a long time, before windows in fact, http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Office. So if Office is the measure of making it, isn't apple on top? Or more to the original point, this isn't really a good metric since "it's just on android". Now Office running without wine on a desktop Linux distribution, where Microsoft actually has a large market share would be impressive. Microsoft has never done well with mobile, and continues to do bad, they've just started caring about it because its starting to displace full blow desktops.

No, this has nothing to do with Aero. There are customisations that cannot be accomplished in Windows Vista or 7 even with Aero enabled. You still cannot get the same degree of fine-tuning in GUI adjustment with Windows Vista or 7 -- regardless of what "mode" (Aero, Basic, or Classic) -- as you could with XP. There is so much real estate wasted by "fluffy crap", particularly with Aero enabled, and you can't adjust most of it. For example, window border sizes -- even with the Border property set to 0 -- are still fat/wide compared to XP. And you still can't get a readable title bar (no matter what "mode" you use) if you use darker colours in your theme; you end up with this unreadable shit pile.

Microsoft did all this on purpose, and that's confirmed by their further removal of GUI adjustment capabilities in Windows 8, in addition to their own reps. stating public that they are intentionally doing away with such.

If I could get the same UI customisation capabilities in Windows Vista or 7 then I wouldn't be bitching. It's as sootman said -- Microsoft should have let alone many of the things that made XP sleek/convenient/fast and instead improved upon that, instead of doing things like screwing around with the GUI customisation capabilities (starting with Vista and progressively gotten more aggressive about removing such in 7 and especially 8). The GUI is just one of many things they've touched, but Windows is a GUI-based OS, and the GUI is the most important part. If it wasn't, you wouldn't see people complaining about the lack of Start button and related menus on 8.

If you really think you can get the same degree of control on 7, then you need to do exactly what I said in my previous post -- sit down with an XP machine (or in a VM) and try to get it to look the same, or even remotely the same. You can't. How do I know? Because at my past job (at/for Microsoft -- surprise!) we moved from XP to Vista to 7, and for the last 5 years I had to deal with the GUI idiocy. Five days a week I'd come home and feel relieved using my XP workstation, after 10 hours of tolerating a shitty UI. About the only thing I miss from 7 is the taskbar improvements (specifically the "Pinning" feature), although I loathe the fact that you cannot remove (not shorten, but completely remove) the "Show desktop" crap on the far right of the taskbar.

On the bright side, at least Windows 7 fixed this total catastrophy (one of the few things in XP that drives me insane, and the workarounds provided on that site don't actually fix the problem; it's also broken in Vista, just in a different way). When a mouse-driven OS can't even get mouse tracking correct, you have to wonder if the vendor even understands the technology they're trying to utilise/program for.

There are even things like this in Windows 7 which baffle the mind -- things you cannot unsee once you've seen them. And with regard to that one, I ask you: Microsoft has had 5 years to fix that, so why haven't they? How is it no one at the company noticed that problem, yet one random Internet guy managed to figure out the root cause?

So do not tell me "everything in 7 is great" -- the number of stupidities in 7, for me, easily outweighs the negatives in XP. The biggest, as I've demonstrated so far, is the GUI. If Microsoft had kept most of the 2K/XP GUI, as well as its adjustments/customisation capabilitie

No, this has nothing to do with Aero. There are customisations that cannot be accomplished in Windows Vista or 7 even with Aero enabled. You still cannot get the same degree of fine-tuning in GUI adjustment with Windows Vista or 7 -- regardless of what "mode" (Aero, Basic, or Classic) -- as you could with XP. There is so much real estate wasted by "fluffy crap", particularly with Aero enabled, and you can't adjust most of it. For example, window border sizes -- even with the Border property set to 0 -- are still fat/wide compared to XP. And you still can't get a readable title bar (no matter what "mode" you use) if you use darker colours in your theme; you end up with this unreadable shit pile.

Microsoft did all this on purpose, and that's confirmed by their further removal of GUI adjustment capabilities in Windows 8, in addition to their own reps. stating public that they are intentionally doing away with such.

If I could get the same UI customisation capabilities in Windows Vista or 7 then I wouldn't be bitching. It's as sootman said -- Microsoft should have let alone many of the things that made XP sleek/convenient/fast and instead improved upon that, instead of doing things like screwing around with the GUI customisation capabilities (starting with Vista and progressively gotten more aggressive about removing such in 7 and especially 8). The GUI is just one of many things they've touched, but Windows is a GUI-based OS, and the GUI is the most important part. If it wasn't, you wouldn't see people complaining about the lack of Start button and related menus on 8.

If you really think you can get the same degree of control on 7, then you need to do exactly what I said in my previous post -- sit down with an XP machine (or in a VM) and try to get it to look the same, or even remotely the same. You can't. How do I know? Because at my past job (at/for Microsoft -- surprise!) we moved from XP to Vista to 7, and for the last 5 years I had to deal with the GUI idiocy. Five days a week I'd come home and feel relieved using my XP workstation, after 10 hours of tolerating a shitty UI. About the only thing I miss from 7 is the taskbar improvements (specifically the "Pinning" feature), although I loathe the fact that you cannot remove (not shorten, but completely remove) the "Show desktop" crap on the far right of the taskbar.

On the bright side, at least Windows 7 fixed this total catastrophy (one of the few things in XP that drives me insane, and the workarounds provided on that site don't actually fix the problem; it's also broken in Vista, just in a different way). When a mouse-driven OS can't even get mouse tracking correct, you have to wonder if the vendor even understands the technology they're trying to utilise/program for.

There are even things like this in Windows 7 which baffle the mind -- things you cannot unsee once you've seen them. And with regard to that one, I ask you: Microsoft has had 5 years to fix that, so why haven't they? How is it no one at the company noticed that problem, yet one random Internet guy managed to figure out the root cause?

So do not tell me "everything in 7 is great" -- the number of stupidities in 7, for me, easily outweighs the negatives in XP. The biggest, as I've demonstrated so far, is the GUI. If Microsoft had kept most of the 2K/XP GUI, as well as its adjustments/customisation capabilitie

MS doesn't break out revenue for Xbox and Xbox Live so I'm wondering where you got that number from?

Xbox is part of the Entertainment and Devices Division which also includes Windows Phone and Skype.

Skype cost a huge amount of money.

Windows Phone cost a huge amount of money (Microsoft continues to pay Nokia just to use Windows Phone).

FWIW, of course Microsoft (like Apple) has on-line sales...

Of course it's really easy to forget you can buy things online these days, right?

Not that online sales helped at all in this case, but it just illustrates that often math rears its ugly head in straw-man arguments...

(mostly because I use it on windows where I don't have multiple desktops)

There's a little tool from SysInternals called Desktops that may be of use to you.

It's not Mission Control (very, very far from it), but it can help if you don't need the same program in more than one "Desktop".

Microsoft Security wants to make sure that anyone discussing such an issue as this is firmly, completely part of the hive-mind: https://www.microsoft.com/security/msrc/collaboration/mapp/criteria.aspx

Microsoft whistles past the graveyard once again.

"Do you even sysadmin? ..

If you don't have to deal with the Microsoft paradigm then you don't spend your time endlessly reinstalling or patching against malware. I suspect a large part of the design philosophy is to make it virtually impossible to clone.

"Do you even sysadmin? ..

If you don't have to deal with the Microsoft paradigm then you don't spend your time endlessly reinstalling or patching against malware. I suspect a large part of the design philosophy is to make it virtually impossible to clone.

Interactive services can expose system-level access to users - a design flaw shich should not be allowed.

This was deprecated in Windows 2000/XP (and you had to explicitly allow a service to interact with the user) and it was disallowed in Windows Vista and has been ever since.

The problem was that a service which typically runs with some form of elevated rights (at least to some resources) could expose those rights/permissions if there was a flaw in the interactive part that communicated with the user.

Your complaint is interesting, because the risk is very much the same posed by sudo (and every other SUID root) utility: The user is allowed to directly interact with a process which has higher privileges than the user.

Windows eliminated it. What about SUID root tools, which have historically *many* vulnerabilities and actual exploits and system compromises on its conscience?

I also remember when Vista moved graphics processing into user mode, so that the usual BSOD from graphics drivers famous in XP would simply be an abnormal termination. Reading suggests this was reversed in 7 because of the slowness this added.

Sorry, but this is BS. You need to cite sources for that "reading" you have done.

WDDM is still very much a split driver model where the driver author has to create a (small) kernel mode part and a user model part. The graphics subsystem is still much more stable on Windows than Linux. And even when the driver or hardware fails (e.g. overheated) it merely resets and comes back up, *without* killing any processes, clipboard or services.

If graphics - fundamentally the way the OS communicates with the user, since the command-line is supposed to be a second resort - has to be so close to the metal it can't be in user space without slowing it down, this is not good.

Wrong on all counts. Windows allow multiple ways to "communicate with the user". Core versions of the servers, for instance, does not use GUIs. And it is your BS claim that it "is slowing it down". All benchmarks I have seen strongly suggests that Linux has a very hard time keeping up with Windows in this area - even when Windows uses a compartmentalized (and more stable) driver model.

But if the intent is to provide a windowing environment, and the method of doing so is not secure, maybe the kernel has exceeded its usefulness.

1998 called. This is not the 9X kernel. The Windows kernel of today runs services in a ''seperate session'' from the users session.

I should also say that a lot of uninformed people parrot the idea that the kernel is well designed, siply because it flies in the face of all the Microsoft hate. The original nerd hipster, who likes something - or believes that something can be good - even if the masses hate it. Or just because the masses hate it.

So far you have offered nothing but speculation and outdated myths. Talk about uninformed.

I have personally used a Shatter attack to expose passwords masked by asterisks. There is a single byte in the window definition that says "replace every character with this one because this is a password box". If it is not filled in, the text box is normal. If it is filled in, it's a password box. Most apps that display a password set the password style (by default filling that byte with an asterisk) and put the password up.

I don't know a single application that pre fills password boxes with the current password. Would you care to elaborate on that?

Since Windows Vista, applications running with medium integrity level *cannot* freely send messages to other processes' windows. UAC integrity levels mandate that in order to send

Interactive services can expose system-level access to users - a design flaw shich should not be allowed.

This was deprecated in Windows 2000/XP (and you had to explicitly allow a service to interact with the user) and it was disallowed in Windows Vista and has been ever since.

The problem was that a service which typically runs with some form of elevated rights (at least to some resources) could expose those rights/permissions if there was a flaw in the interactive part that communicated with the user.

Your complaint is interesting, because the risk is very much the same posed by sudo (and every other SUID root) utility: The user is allowed to directly interact with a process which has higher privileges than the user.

Windows eliminated it. What about SUID root tools, which have historically *many* vulnerabilities and actual exploits and system compromises on its conscience?

I also remember when Vista moved graphics processing into user mode, so that the usual BSOD from graphics drivers famous in XP would simply be an abnormal termination. Reading suggests this was reversed in 7 because of the slowness this added.

Sorry, but this is BS. You need to cite sources for that "reading" you have done.

WDDM is still very much a split driver model where the driver author has to create a (small) kernel mode part and a user model part. The graphics subsystem is still much more stable on Windows than Linux. And even when the driver or hardware fails (e.g. overheated) it merely resets and comes back up, *without* killing any processes, clipboard or services.

If graphics - fundamentally the way the OS communicates with the user, since the command-line is supposed to be a second resort - has to be so close to the metal it can't be in user space without slowing it down, this is not good.

Wrong on all counts. Windows allow multiple ways to "communicate with the user". Core versions of the servers, for instance, does not use GUIs. And it is your BS claim that it "is slowing it down". All benchmarks I have seen strongly suggests that Linux has a very hard time keeping up with Windows in this area - even when Windows uses a compartmentalized (and more stable) driver model.

But if the intent is to provide a windowing environment, and the method of doing so is not secure, maybe the kernel has exceeded its usefulness.

1998 called. This is not the 9X kernel. The Windows kernel of today runs services in a ''seperate session'' from the users session.

I should also say that a lot of uninformed people parrot the idea that the kernel is well designed, siply because it flies in the face of all the Microsoft hate. The original nerd hipster, who likes something - or believes that something can be good - even if the masses hate it. Or just because the masses hate it.

So far you have offered nothing but speculation and outdated myths. Talk about uninformed.

I have personally used a Shatter attack to expose passwords masked by asterisks. There is a single byte in the window definition that says "replace every character with this one because this is a password box". If it is not filled in, the text box is normal. If it is filled in, it's a password box. Most apps that display a password set the password style (by default filling that byte with an asterisk) and put the password up.

I don't know a single application that pre fills password boxes with the current password. Would you care to elaborate on that?

Since Windows Vista, applications running with medium integrity level *cannot* freely send messages to other processes' windows. UAC integrity levels mandate that in order to send

There is Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications, which is used now instead of the ancient posix layer you mentioned.

THIS PROVES IT EVEN MORE: DLL nightmare, moron? Ok, time to dust your wannabe ass as usual:

(Since you don't understand all the protections built into the dll calling rules, in std./classic dlls or OLEServer dlls)

Yet you SAY you worked @ Microsoft and yet you don't KNOW this stuff? WTF were you there?? A janitor???

For seek on load & for DLL load security:

1st - The System &/or App uses the KnownDLL's registry data.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\KnownDLLs.

2nd - IF you have to ship another model of a DLL, you place it into your application's folder with it - that's the 1st place an app looks for it and when it finds it there, that's the version used. I.E.-> The current directory.

3rd - The Windows system directory's model if one is NOT in the app's folder/directory

4th - The Windows directory is next.

5th - Current Directory.

6th - The directories listed in the PATH environment variable.

* OLE Server DLL have even more via their GUID loading so you marshall them by that, and can load more than 1 version, even with the SAME name, but it's that identifier that directs to the one you need & use for that app calling. This protects them from 'dllhell'.

Windows File Protection &/or System File Protection http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222193 also supplement that too! Windows XP had SafeDLL search mode too, but it's deprecated in modern versions. There's also the System File Checker tool sfc.exe (named system resource checker in more modern versions).

QUESTION TO THIS IDIOT: What EXACTLY is "flawed" in the driver model? THIS I have to hear. These aren't NLM's from NetWare!

APK

P.S.=> You really are incompetent technically. How the hell can you even claim you work @ VMWare or formerly @ Microsoft being as technically weak as you are, I will never know (or are you like a mason that gets 'free ticket placement' into jobs because of that, or are you related to the owners, or what)...

... apk

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724832(v=vs.85).aspx

I'm hard pressed to think of anything really innovative Microsoft has done in years -- mostly they look at what others are doing and copy it (or buy it).
 

Spend some time at http://research.microsoft.com/ . They do a ton that is innovative in many areas.

I tried to install ie6 but it said I had a newer version of Internet Exploer. I don't have any version of Internet Explorer installed. Although it's a little odd MS has that still up since they also have this site. Man. Look at China. Maybe it isn't the Chinese government hacking. A lot of those machines are probably botnets. Like a black market cloud.

Home versions of windows don't support scheduled backups. You might be able to hack something yourself using task scheduler and a batch file though.

No, that is not correct.

At least in Windows 7 *all* editions have the full image capability. Only the professional/enterprise editions can backup to a *network* drive. But in this case it is a local or attached disk, so the edition really does not matter.

It totally lacks automation, which is a pretty big downside.

wbadmin.exe is available since Vista (where the VSS based image backup was introduced).

How is that totally lack of automation?

Robocopy doesn't keep the ACM dates across volumes. So it is certainly not a 1:1 copy.

The only thing that comes close, but still not there completely, is the legacy MS (Veritas) backup utility. And that one is far from automated.

What about SyncToy? Seems to work pretty well, at least it does for me.

Unless you're running Windows 8 or Server 2012, Windows Backup on Windows 7 and below is functionally obsolete due to the new 3TB + drives now in 4k sector Advanced Format technology. As long as you can still find working 2TB drives and you don't have that much data to backup, you'll be fine with Windows Backup. Otherwise, upgrade the OS or use ArcServeD2D which I know works well (and expensive too).

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2510009

Nothing "Happened". *No* operating system is 100% secure, especially when humans are involved. At the place where I work, people send around user names and passwords in e-mail. Twice I've sent out notes to the entire company admonishing them to not do that and why, but the practice continues.

Beyond simply the operating system, you've got vulnerabilities in things like .net and java.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-040
http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/product_id-3091/Microsoft-Asp.net.html
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

If you really believe that Windows is just as secure as Linux, then go ahead believing that. You're going to anyway.

Use c# and Microsoft Accelerator.

It's very easy to use, and since the VAST majority of your processing is going to occur on the GPU, the language you use is mostly irrelevant.

The main thing you need to be aware of is that the bus to the video card is very, very, very slow. So in order to get any speedup from the GPU, you'll need to send as much stuff to be processed to the video card as you can. Round-trips hurt you a lot, so minimize them any way you can get away with doing so.

DirectCompute into
Some good samples on the MSDN forums

Take a look at C++ AMP. It is a small language extension that lets you target the GPU using C++. The platform takes care of most of the mechanics of running code on the GPU. Also check out this blog post for links to tutorials and samples.

What comes to learning and education, I've found Microsoft Learning to be the place to go. They offer great amount of courses on subjects like Visual Studio, MTA training, MCSE: Server Infrastructure, MCSE: Data Platform, MCSA: Windows Server 2012, MCSA: SQL Server 2012, MCSD, MCITP, Office and SharePoint. It's definitely one of the top places to go if you want to learn valuable IT skills that workplaces appreciate greatly.

"Pretty good?" Their mice are *awesome*. The Arc Touch Mouse is one of the coolest PC gadgets Ive ever bought. Whoever runs that division should be replacing Balmer. Instead in the last reorg Balmer is replacing them with Windows OS Architecture VP Julie Larson-Green (and the phone VP is now running Windows Engineering). So the biggest failures are taking over groups that havent failed quite so bad; Windows 8 VP takes over XBOX and hardware, Phone VP takes over Windows OS. No wonder Forbes named Ballmer the worst CEO in America.

I was thinking the same thing. I keenly remember Microsoft Azure going down for eight hours, right after we migrated to their cloud service. With our old datacenter, we were alerted immediately and their tech support had a bang list to alert all our customers for us that the system was down. With Microsoft, we got NOTHING. Our customers alerted us to the fact that they couldn't access their applications, and we had to go to twitter to @WindowsAzure to ask when the servers would be back up. Then, a year later, the East Coast datacenter went down and we learned that Cloud service does not include disaster recovery and we were responsible for setting up our own recovery solution on Window's Azure's servers.

There are actually quite a few Windows applications which have been cross-compiled to RT (Win32 desktop or console apps, not WinRT apps). They require a "jailbreak" hack to run on RT, but that has been available for months.

Also, you actually can use (a subset of) the Win32 API even in legit Windows Store apps. As a random example: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364419(v=vs.85).aspx (look under the "Requirements" section).

It (.local) was actually official MS advice for a long time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local#Microsoft_recommendations

I tend to think Apple made a poor choice given the pre-existence of lots of .local domains in use (default on Small Business Server 2000 from memory, and supported by http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296250)

I think that both of them made a terrible choice.

Microsoft advised using a domain that (by their own admission) "At the present time, the .local domain name is not registered on the Internet." Not sure how that could ever have struck them as a bright idea. I guess MS was arrogant enough to think the rest of the world would bend to accomodate their de-facto standards rather than bothering to get them properly ratified.

Apple then went along and chose a name that they knew was already widely in use, per official advice from MS. However, Apple did at least get this standardised (RFC 6762) - if MS had bothered to get their advice standardised then this conflict would never have happened. Apple could easilly have picked any number of equally appropriate TLDs, such as .linklocal

However, IMHO IANA should just go ahead and ignore the idiots who have used arbitrary TLDs for their internal networks - doing stuff like having a ".mail" TLD for mail services does make some sense and if thats the direction they want to go then a few idiots who should never have been allowed to configure a network in the first place shouldn't stand in the way of that.

It (.local) was actually official MS advice for a long time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local#Microsoft_recommendations

I tend to think Apple made a poor choice given the pre-existence of lots of .local domains in use (default on Small Business Server 2000 from memory, and supported by http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296250)

I'm more familiar with .localdomain than .localnet, but it wasn't in wide use until long after .local became popular (though to be fair I can find at least one reference to it as far back as 1994)

Somewhere about 5-8 years ago there was a distinct and obvious transition between MSDN docs written by good tech writers, and MSDN docs clearly written by devs - unsurprisingly this was about the time auto-generating docs from docstring comments became the thing to do.

The docs for the old win32 stuff are still good though. Look at the docs for the famously-silly CreateFile() function. Everything is explained, including all the corner cases, but critically there's also the vital "but you probably just want to do X" hints that are so needed when the docs get this long.

Contrast that with File.Create() which only hints at what the various options do (but at least has proper grammar, unlike some of the seldom-used stuff).

Somewhere about 5-8 years ago there was a distinct and obvious transition between MSDN docs written by good tech writers, and MSDN docs clearly written by devs - unsurprisingly this was about the time auto-generating docs from docstring comments became the thing to do.

The docs for the old win32 stuff are still good though. Look at the docs for the famously-silly CreateFile() function. Everything is explained, including all the corner cases, but critically there's also the vital "but you probably just want to do X" hints that are so needed when the docs get this long.

Contrast that with File.Create() which only hints at what the various options do (but at least has proper grammar, unlike some of the seldom-used stuff).

"One full-time Java programmer told me that he hasn’t had to manually type in any setters and getters in years, and he has a template from which all his objects are typed in automatically, thanks to the code snippet tools in his favorite editor (which isn’t Eclipse—he uses IntelliJ). Clearly, methods of automated typing seem to be a favorite among a lot of programmers. So why did Visual Studio remove a feature that facilitated this? Who knows."

Let's not mention the fact that in C# you don't need to manually type in all the getter/setter junk, just public int MyField {get; set;}

Yep. And let's also not mention the fact that VS2012 *does* have snippets: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/ms165392.aspx

Of course, the "one developer" is heavily biased towards Java (his previous articles were outrageous) and probably *do not know* that snippets exists in Visual Studio because he has never use VS in any professional capacity.