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This is because you have to use Microsoft's Windows 10 installation media creator. Attempting to create a bootable USB from the ISO won't work. They have done something goofy with the ISO. You have to go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... to download and run the USB installer from a Windows PC (might work with Wine, haven't tried).

...In desktop GUI programming, inheritance is used very rarely, ... I can only speak for GTK+, Qt, wxWidgets, WinForms in C#, etc.

And you speak poorly about them. Qt, for example, uses inheritance all over the place in its widgets.

Just one example: QPushButton inherits from QAbstractButton which is inherited from QWidget which inherits from QObject.

You also are wrong about WinForms:

Let's look at the Button class:

Inheritance Hierarchy
System.Object
System.MarshalByRefObject
System.ComponentModel.Component
System.Windows.Forms.Control
System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase
System.Windows.Forms.Button

I could go on but I won't. You couldn't have been more wrong if you tried.

That's actually pretty pathetic.

In the 4th quarter of fiscal year 2017 alone, Microsoft's revenue was greater than that Red Hat market cap value you gave.

Microsoft's profit in that one quarter alone was about 2 to 2.5 times the Red Hat revenue value you just gave.

It would take Microsoft only a couple of weeks to make more than the Red Hat revenue value!

Your comment reminds me of the delusional people who claim that Firefox is a "success", despite recent market share stats showing it only has about 5% of the browser market, while individual versions of Chrome like Chrome 62 and Chrome 63 each have 2 or more times as many users!

What makes your point even worse is that Red Hat is perhaps the most successful of the open source focused companies, and it's "achievement", if we can even call it that, pales in comparison to so many of its competitors.

Same thing, different article. Not available yet, I believe...

https://blogs.microsoft.com/tr...

This is a lovely idea. I wonder whether we could also come up with a digital filter that could take out Parkinson's tremors when using an ordinary mouse. I want to work on it.

MS should provide a patch that loads the microcode on OS boot to cover all devices that may be unsupported but still compatible with Windows, as they have in the past like here: https://support.microsoft.com/...

If for some reason they are late in doing so, load the microcode yourself with this: https://labs.vmware.com/flings...

You should expect a microcode update from MS such as this while we wait for BIOS updates to come out https://support.microsoft.com/...

OR by Windows Update when manufacturers are slow / not supporting their hardware anymore.

https://support.microsoft.com/...

This is why we have OS microcode updates. Better safe than sorry.

Alright, I have good news for you: the 2 links don't need manually enabled! They are enabled by default and MS talks about it for orgs that want to switch them off and on without dealing with uninstalling the update.

Src:
Note By default, this update is enabled. No customer action is required to enable the fixes. We are providing the following registry information for completeness in the event that customers want to disable the security fixes related to CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5754 for Windows clients.

https://support.microsoft.com/...

It's a bit like operating systems. Apparently Windows always run on more than one architecture to make sure people wrote portable code.

Even when only the x86 version was distributed there was always an internal build for Alpha and then Itanium and Microsoft started off developing in i860s and then MIPS machines and only add x86 rather late to stop people writing x86 only assembler which the old 16 bit code was full of.

As Raymond Chen observed x86 is the wierdo, i.e. all the other architectures have more in common with each other than any of them do with x86.

And I've noticed with embedded systems and Windows applications that adding support for a third architecture is not too bad but adding support for a second architecture is usually painful. When you add support for a second architecture you're essentially making non portable code portable and that portability helps you when you add support for a third.

It's possible that bilingual kids have some analogous effect - having to support two languages as first class citizens makes their internal language processing language independent. It's very noticeable in places like Sweden or the Netherlands that people speak English as well as they do Swedish or Dutch because they grew up speaking both. Meanwhile if you grow up speaking only one language any other language will always be a second class citizen.

However I still think if you're going to try to learn a language you should learn a real one - Spanish or German or Chinese for example.

That means you have the install media and can reinstall the damn thing.

Install media these days is whatever USB thumb drive I can find lying around that will fit a linux image. It it "bricked" all of my house machines at once, well I'd have problems. Fortunately that is unlikely.

Also I'm pretty sure you can just download windows 10 these days, even without MSDN. link

You can also make media (i think) from the OS. You probably need to take a picture of your windows key and save it to email or something, just in case...

Of course I haven't actually tried all this, so ymmv..

Exactly. Instead of coming up with all this gimmicky stuff like voice-controlled thermostats, they should rather focus their energy on making the service available to everyone on Windows 10. MS has an infuriating habit of going overboard with features for en-US and treating the rest of the world as an afterthought.

The current availability of Cortana's services is pitiful. It is constantly hyped about new features that have been added (they even got it to speak Klingon), yet for most of the world, it's a glorified interface to Bing.

Years ago, before Win10 was officially released, and when Cortana was first being developed, I read an interview with one of the high-ups in the Cortana project, who said that they were really keen on making it available in an alpha state to as many users as possible, as the key way to train it properly to work in different regions and cultures is to expose it to as much input as possible. That never happened, and the list of supported countries and regions is the same as when I last looked at it over a year ago.

If Cortana's uptake is struggling, it's purely because they limited the user-base themselves to a market that's already invested in Siri, Alexa and Google Now, instead of entrenching its use in the regions where the other players aren't yet fully available. I also believe that's the real reason that Windows Phone failed as well. They did very badly in the US market because iPhones and Android were both already entrenched, but there were a lot of other regions where WP did really well despite the lack of attention from MS. So naturally, instead of solidifying their market position in those regions, they continued ignoring them and focusing on the US where they had already lost the battle, and eventually lost support from the regions which actually had it. Then Joe Belfiore complains that they had no support from developers, ignoring the fact that there's a huge number of developers outside of the US who were hesitant to invest in a platform that MS themselves showed no interest in supporting for their markets.

TL;DR: MS needs to abandon this habit of region-locking features, and then complaining that people aren't supporting or using those features.

This is not entirely accurate. You have unified memory access in CUDA, and it's been that way for years. The CUDA driver has system-level privileges.

A quick google turned up this NVIDIA blog post. You can dig into the details on CUDA Zone if you're really curious.

Unified memory is also supported in DirectX 12 if the underlying hardware supports it.

In both cases, the driver shuffles data transparently. There are already a lot of attacks that rely on manipulative accesses of memory/cache to ensure that data is being read from desirable locations, so it is conceivable that GPU code could expose kernel memory. After all, the driver that provides memory management would have access to it.

I think I've found the answer!

Here is the companion document:
Client-
https://support.microsoft.com/...
Server-
https://support.microsoft.com/...

Answer-
https://support.microsoft.com/...
At the bottom:
BTIWindowsSupportEnabled: True -> on client, no action required. On server, follow guidance.
KVAShadowWindowsSupportEnabled: True -> on client, no action required. On server, follow guidance.

So it seems that the client document just has that same info, but on client, no action required.

What a documentation crazy-fest!

I think I've found the answer!

Here is the companion document:
Client-
https://support.microsoft.com/...
Server-
https://support.microsoft.com/...

Answer-
https://support.microsoft.com/...
At the bottom:
BTIWindowsSupportEnabled: True -> on client, no action required. On server, follow guidance.
KVAShadowWindowsSupportEnabled: True -> on client, no action required. On server, follow guidance.

So it seems that the client document just has that same info, but on client, no action required.

What a documentation crazy-fest!

I think I've found the answer!

Here is the companion document:
Client-
https://support.microsoft.com/...
Server-
https://support.microsoft.com/...

Answer-
https://support.microsoft.com/...
At the bottom:
BTIWindowsSupportEnabled: True -> on client, no action required. On server, follow guidance.
KVAShadowWindowsSupportEnabled: True -> on client, no action required. On server, follow guidance.

So it seems that the client document just has that same info, but on client, no action required.

What a documentation crazy-fest!

https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...

It's pretty cool.

Kb4056894 does include the mitigation for the rogue data cache load and the software portion of the mitigation for branch target injection.

Microsoft describes this KB as the resolution for this issue on Windows 7 here:
https://portal.msrc.microsoft....

Note that to be fully protected from branch target injection you also need a CPU Microcode update from your hardware vendor.

new boss.

Same as the old boss.

According to this page, only clients (WinX, 8.1, 8,7) need these 2 registry entries:

https://support.microsoft.com/...

Thoughts? Still applies to all windows OS's?

Apparently This is a temporary solution according to Microsoft.
https://support.microsoft.com/...

Q3: How long will Microsoft require setting a registry key to receive the January 3, 2018, security updates?

A3: Microsoft added this requirement to ensure customers can successfully install the January 2018 security updates. Microsoft will continue to enforce this requirement until there is high confidence that the majority of customers will not encounter device crashes after installing the security updates.

That's such BS and Apple users pay a premium as it is. "Durable" has nothing to do with "obsolete". I own a "durable" iPhone 4S - arguably the most "durable" phone they ever made - hell, it feels heavy in your hand - it's perfectly functional yet it has been rendered obsolete by Apple which quit releasing updates for it without warning. The day I bought it I had no idea how long it would be supported because Apple doesn't publish this information. That sounds like planned obsolescence to me. When you buy a Mac or iPhone you have no idea how long it will be supported once the warranty expires. Contrast that with Microsoft which publishes that e.g. Windows 7 will be supported until 1/14/2020: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet and they publish this shit like 10 years in advance.

They do:

https://support.microsoft.com/...

Sadly, the success rate IME is only about 50%, and manual methods are required, e.g. turn off Windows Update service, rename "c:\windows\software distribution", restart Windows Update service, and try again.

Even that doesn't always work.

They did?

https://support.microsoft.com/...

It needs cmpxchg16b in 64 bit mode too

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

Which means it doesn't have a 8TB address space limit. On the other hand it also means it won't run on the original AMD Opterons

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

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

It needs cmpxchg16b in 64 bit mode too

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

Which means it doesn't have a 8TB address space limit. On the other hand it also means it won't run on the original AMD Opterons

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

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

It needs cmpxchg16b in 64 bit mode too

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

Which means it doesn't have a 8TB address space limit. On the other hand it also means it won't run on the original AMD Opterons

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

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

Windows 8 and later require SSE2 too

https://support.microsoft.com/...

Windows XP and 7 don't.

looks like there is. It's only documented for Windows Server, but it's documented here.

(Also there's some PowerShell commands documented there to determine the status and whether patching is required.)

There is KB4012982, which is an update that detects newer CPU, and disables futher updates.

https://support.microsoft.com/...

The workaround for that is quite simple, uninstall and block that update, and you can continue to patch...

Some versions of embedded versions of Windows XP are still in extended support until 2019, since they were released in 2009.
Windows Embedded Standard 2009: Extended Support will end on Jan. 8, 2019.
Windows Embedded POSReady 2009: Extended support will end on April 9, 2019.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://portal.msrc.microsoft....

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...
https://www.powershellgallery....

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://portal.msrc.microsoft....

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...
https://www.powershellgallery....

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://portal.msrc.microsoft....

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...
https://www.powershellgallery....

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://portal.msrc.microsoft....

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...
https://www.powershellgallery....

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://portal.msrc.microsoft....

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...
https://www.powershellgallery....

Show me a real POC, then we can panic.

Releasing details for a serious bug before making a fix available is the definition of a zero-day, and is a pretty stupid thing for Microsoft, or the Linux Foundation to do.

There appears to be an embargo on the details until the fix is distributed; grumblings have it pegged as mid-January before it's lifted.

Microsoft's Azure cloud has a scheduled reboot of all of their VM's on Jan 10th

, so we probably won't get any details until at least then.

I imagine Linux 4.15 will be released around the same timeframe.

Speed is always a good thing, but it's got to be viewed as relative to the capability of the product. Right now, with Edge not supporting extensions or plug-ins, it's not even if the same league as the browsers it compares speeds with.

Edge supports extensions, by Plug-ins, do you mean something like Flash which is also supported?

Amazon Kubernetes Service: https://aws.amazon.com/eks/
Azure Kubernetes Service: https://azure.microsoft.com/en...

Kubernetes doesn't compete with Docker. Kubernetes competes with Docker Swarm.

Microsoft actually has a case study up describing their Hotmail migration from FreeBSD to Windows 2000

Your link is a somewhat sanitized version of what happened, and ignores the first three years of fiascos.

Prior to the acquisition, Hotmail worked closely with the FreeBSD devs to optimize their servers. This led to things like the "sendfile" system call, where a program could pass a filename and an open socket to the kernel, and the kernel would write the file to the socket with none of the bytes touching userspace. So when Microsoft took over, they got a lean, optimized, and efficient system, and tried to replace it with one of the worst server operating systems ever. Each FreeBSD system (a $200 motherboard sitting on a piece of cardboard), needed 20 Win-NT servers to replace it, each costing ten times as much as the FreeBSD boards. Since this was clearly unworkable, they waited another 3 years to do the transition, while both hardware and software improved. All of this was further complicated by many of the original Hotmail people quitting to go elsewhere (this was the height of the boom), leaving the remaining employees just treading water with little time to work on the transition.

Microsoft actually has a case study up describing their Hotmail migration from FreeBSD to Windows 2000

Your link is a somewhat sanitized version of what happened, and ignores the first three years of fiascos.

Prior to the acquisition, Hotmail worked closely with the FreeBSD devs to optimize their servers. This led to things like the "sendfile" system call, where a program could pass a filename and an open socket to the kernel, and the kernel would write the file to the socket with none of the bytes touching userspace. So when Microsoft took over, they got a lean, optimized, and efficient system, and tried to replace it with one of the worst server operating systems ever. Each FreeBSD system (a $200 motherboard sitting on a piece of cardboard), needed 20 Win-NT servers to replace it, each costing ten times as much as the FreeBSD boards. Since this was clearly unworkable, they waited another 3 years to do the transition, while both hardware and software improved. All of this was further complicated by many of the original Hotmail people quitting to go elsewhere (this was the height of the boom), leaving the remaining employees just treading water with little time to work on the transition.

Thanks for posting this. It seems that Slashdot forgot their own news history yet again.

Microsoft actually has a case study up describing their Hotmail migration from FreeBSD to Windows 2000

Your link is a somewhat sanitized version of what happened, and ignores the first three years of fiascos.

Prior to the acquisition, Hotmail worked closely with the FreeBSD devs to optimize their servers. This led to things like the "sendfile" system call, where a program could pass a filename and an open socket to the kernel, and the kernel would write the file to the socket with none of the bytes touching userspace. So when Microsoft took over, they got a lean, optimized, and efficient system, and tried to replace it with one of the worst server operating systems ever. Each FreeBSD system (a $200 motherboard sitting on a piece of cardboard), needed 20 Win-NT servers to replace it, each costing ten times as much as the FreeBSD boards. Since this was clearly unworkable, they waited another 3 years to do the transition, while both hardware and software improved. All of this was further complicated by many of the original Hotmail people quitting to go elsewhere (this was the height of the boom), leaving the remaining employees just treading water with little time to work on the transition.

Microsoft actually has a case study up describing their Hotmail migration from FreeBSD to Windows 2000

Your link is a somewhat sanitized version of what happened, and ignores the first three years of fiascos.

Prior to the acquisition, Hotmail worked closely with the FreeBSD devs to optimize their servers. This led to things like the "sendfile" system call, where a program could pass a filename and an open socket to the kernel, and the kernel would write the file to the socket with none of the bytes touching userspace. So when Microsoft took over, they got a lean, optimized, and efficient system, and tried to replace it with one of the worst server operating systems ever. Each FreeBSD system (a $200 motherboard sitting on a piece of cardboard), needed 20 Win-NT servers to replace it, each costing ten times as much as the FreeBSD boards. Since this was clearly unworkable, they waited another 3 years to do the transition, while both hardware and software improved. All of this was further complicated by many of the original Hotmail people quitting to go elsewhere (this was the height of the boom), leaving the remaining employees just treading water with little time to work on the transition.

Thanks for posting this. It seems that Slashdot forgot their own news history yet again.

Microsoft actually has a case study up describing their Hotmail migration from FreeBSD to Windows 2000

Your link is a somewhat sanitized version of what happened, and ignores the first three years of fiascos.

Prior to the acquisition, Hotmail worked closely with the FreeBSD devs to optimize their servers. This led to things like the "sendfile" system call, where a program could pass a filename and an open socket to the kernel, and the kernel would write the file to the socket with none of the bytes touching userspace. So when Microsoft took over, they got a lean, optimized, and efficient system, and tried to replace it with one of the worst server operating systems ever. Each FreeBSD system (a $200 motherboard sitting on a piece of cardboard), needed 20 Win-NT servers to replace it, each costing ten times as much as the FreeBSD boards. Since this was clearly unworkable, they waited another 3 years to do the transition, while both hardware and software improved. All of this was further complicated by many of the original Hotmail people quitting to go elsewhere (this was the height of the boom), leaving the remaining employees just treading water with little time to work on the transition.

Microsoft actually has a case study up describing their Hotmail migration from FreeBSD to Windows 2000. It's of course old and outdated, but may be an interesting read anyway. It made news back when Netcraft confirmed Windows 2000 servers running IIS were killing FreeBSD at Hotmail.

The device uses Bluetooth, yet there is no Windows or Linux application to communicate with the device.

https://www.microsoft.com/stor... Really? No Windows application? I think you are holding it wrong.

See windows 10s which only allows installs from the windows store? Thats the future microsoft wants.

BS.

You can download an ISO file from MS website and install Windows 10 on any computer with a retail (not volume license) copy of Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 by simply entering the product activation key from your installed OS.

If you use assistive technologies or are just a regular user, these are the links for more infomation.

Win7 has a service pack and update rollups.

Why aren't you including updates on your install media?

There may not be an official way, but if your possible systems are all from a limited set and you're really only having to differentiate between Windows and UEFI or DOS and Windows (the other poster pointed out that there's an official way of having both DOS and Windows entry points),

That was me

then it should be possible to find a system call that just provides information on both systems and has a return value that lets you tell them apart. You do this early and then jump to the relevant entry point.

The problem is that even though Windows and UEFI both use PE files, there are significant differences.

Windows applications use subsystem=2 for GUI and 3 for console

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

UEFI applications uses subsystem=10

http://wiki.osdev.org/UEFI#Bin...

Also windows executables are .exe and UEFI applications are .efi

I.e. it's hard to build a single executable that would pass the subsystem and file extension checks to run on both Windows and UEFI. Which of course is by design - otherwise people would run executables on the wrong platform and brick it.

Here it seems like Dell just distribute a bunch of different executables. One for Windows/FreeDOS(.exe), one for Linux(.bin) and one for UEFI (.efi)

http://www.dell.com/support/ho...

You could have them share a data file if space is at a premium.

Though a Win32/UEFI polyglot may be possible I can't find one. And I'm not sure how it would work.

The one possibility would be if Terse Executable files can begin at something other than offset zero in a file. TE files are a sort of stripped down PE file with all the unnecessary crap removed from the PE headers.

http://wiki.phoenix.com/wiki/i...

But it seems unlikely UEFI executable loader code is willing to skip bytes endlessly until it sees a VZ signature.

Sure? https://answers.microsoft.com/...

Microsoft already wrote it down. Here it is.

It's still not easy. In fact, it's complicated as fuck. And it has to be, or else it will limit you.

As with mobile development, Microsoft has a 10-year lead on everyone else in this area, but they'll be shit on and ignored for as long as possible due to stupid people. Fuck stupid people. Fuck them in their stupid ass.

Why are companies allowed to prevent their employees from going to the court?

Not just employees, but customers too.

True - ideally, MS should have been patching in a deprecation warning into Word years ago -- or, maintain a list of deprecated features.in the help menu and online.

There is one specific use-case of DDE that I believe MS Word does still use - when you open a word doc from explorer and Word is already running, the second instance instead communicates with the first to get it to open the document instead of having a second instance.

I don't know if this is still the case, or if people even care any more. However, checking the original article AND the original security advisory, I believe this blocks outgoing DDE launched by fields (and presumably VBA) in the document, not incoming DDE or DDE initiated by word.exe itself. This is all about blocking DDE commands potentially initiated by a malicious document; not about blocking Word's internal mechanisms.

Thus, Word probably continues to use DDE to give the 'single instance', but if you're part of the very small minority that use DDE fields inside Microsoft Word documents, which has been more or less deprecated since about Word 95, then you might have an issue. Most people probably have no idea that this feature existed.

Even then, in Word 95, you could tell this DDE approach was the old approach and you were supposed to be using OLE/ActiveX/COM instead. ANd I suspect MS will be moving completely off DDE at some point.