Slashdot Mirror

I believe you misunderstand the concept of file streams.

Extensions are a form of file typing, like MIME is. The extension you mention above is just a part of the naming of the file. Streams are not (although can be accessed as such from applications that do not understand streams natively, such as notepad).

So I see the 110MB "explicit". What's using the rest?

Let's see. Part is heap fragmentation. That's heap-committed - heap-used = 25mb. The rest is probably code. On my Linux machine, we load about 35mb of code (about half are shared libraries). 25mb + 35mb + 110mb = 170, which is very close to your 172.5mb of resident.

There are a lot of things here that we can improve. urlclassifier (phishing protection) does not need to use 20mb of memory; someone is working on this. We don't know where 1/3 of your memory is going (heap-unclassified); it's a slog, but we improve this a little in each version. 25mb of heap fragmentation is more than I'd like, and we're working to update our malloc library, jemalloc, to the newest version, which will hopefully improve this. I've also done some work to reduce the number of calls we make to malloc() in the first place, which has helped some.

As you can see, there's room for improvement, but we have to fix a number of small things to get a big change.

The vsize value [342mb] seems different from the windows reported VM size (about 170MB).

I think task manager may be counting only private bytes, but Firefox is counting everything in its virtual address space. On my Windows 7 VM, Firefox's vsize matches Process Explorer's virtual size column. If these don't match for you, that's probably a bug!

WindowsXP will be supported until 2014 http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&C2=1173
Office 2003 will be supported until 2014 http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=2488

WindowsXP will be supported until 2014 http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&C2=1173
Office 2003 will be supported until 2014 http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=2488

It's true that formal verification can't prove the program "does what I want" if you screw up specifying what you want

Which is exactly my point. For any sufficiently interesting problem, specifying what you want in a 100% perfect way is impossible.

In addition, there's no formal way to prove that two programs produce the same output (that would be equivalent to solving the Halting Problem), and as a consequence there's no general way to prove that a program is equivalent to the specification.

You overstate the theorem. Determining whether or not two programs produce the same output is undecidable. That doesn't mean that given two non-trivial programs, you can never prove that they produce the same output (rather, it means that there's no algorithm that can receive the representation of the programs and determine in finite time and without mistakes whether or not they have the same output).

So, where does this put us? To get safety and correctness guarantees about programs, we need not write algorithms that prove correctness about any program provided to them. Rather, we need to write proofs concerning the particular program that we wrote - and it helps if we wrote our program in certain ways that make those proofs easier to develop. This is certainly possible.

You might counter that certain correct programs have no correctness proof. This is true only in a superficial way. A program may have correct behaviour, but if its author cannot write a correctness proof for it - even an informal one - then that means the program isn't understood by its own author, and should be fixed. Good code has correctness proofs, even if they're informal and only in the author's head.

I must make one exception to this rule, however. In AI code, there are sometimes heuristics that have no proof, not even an informal one, because the author doesn't have more than an intuition about why the heuristic should work. But that's a small minority of the total amount of code being written.

Of course, like you said, parts of the program can be simple enough to prove in a formal sense, but that doesn't nearly cover all the interesting cases. There's still plenty left over.

And, like I said in my first post, even formally verifying the parts where it is possible would lead to unacceptable budget and deadline overruns, so it's rarely done.

This is often true, but as you probably know, there are cases where verification is worth the cost. Aerospace and medicine come to mind. I'd also hazard a guess that operating systems deserve the extra investment of formal verification. Has anybody ever made a quantitative comparison of the up-front cost of formal verification with the cost of bugs and maintenance work that would have been prevented by formal verification? Is formal verification really that expensive, or are does it just seem expensive because we habitually ignore the costs of skipping it?

But the browser doesn't click on a shortcut.

You don't need a shortcut file to pass an nShowCmd to ShellExecute.

It's final:

https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2011/oct11/10-13SkypePR.mspx

And note that Microsoft STILL DOES NOT OWN SKYPE.

YES IT DOES.

Stupid lameness filter won't let me yell back at people who yelled first.

And note that Microsoft STILL DOES NOT OWN SKYPE.

YES IT DOES.

Stupid lameness filter won't let me yell back at people who yelled first.

Here I was thinking that AVs used the publicly documented File System Filter Driver APIs.

Doing stuff on a *nix system is not hard...

It's very, VERY hard. So difficult that you failed to solve the rather trivial problems I gave. You gave me something that is incomplete, and does something only vaguely similar, yet is still complex and wrong.

I didn't say "export to some random text file", I said, "comma separated values" (CSV) file -- something I can double-click and open in Excel without problems. I want commands for a CSV file from both data sources, not just one, because I want you to sit down and figure out it, and realise that you'll end up with two very different solutions, even thought the problem description is nearly identical: get some data, format it.

Your SSH command is for one machine only, and doesn't include the machine name in the output as a column. Sure, it vaguely does what I said, but what I want to do is compare the CPU times of processes across my farm of servers using Excel. Does you solution do that? No.

Your "awk" version is even more complex, doesn't include proper column headers, and won't escape quote characters correctly.

Notice how "ps" has like... a bazillion options? What the fuck is "-ef"? I had to look it up. It's "show every process" in "full format". Err... obviously. What exactly is "full format"? Who knows! It's... something fuller than not-full format, clearly. It has it's own sort syntax, different to the sort syntax of other commands. It outputs tabular data, but god only knows in what format exactly. It certainly doesn't have the same output format as any other command. Notice how the exact same option to "service" is not "-ef", but "--status-all". Does "service" have a "sort" option? Nope.

Meanwhile, in Windows land: Sort-Object (or just "sort") works on the output of every command exactly the same way. The Format-Table" and Format-List commands work, again, exactly the same on the output of every command. There's no need for pages of cryptic options for such a basic command as "ps". Take a look at the list of options for Get-Process. Not counting common parameters, it has a grand total of just six! In comparison, ps has over 50, and the list depends on the platform.

I mean, for God's sake, even just this bit: "ps -ef |grep bash" has a subtle error in it. What happens if a user's account name contains the character string "bash?" As in, say, BobAshfield or something? You get unexpected, spurious output. This is what happens when you blindly use string processing to perform database-like functionality. You have a table of data that you want to filter by a column. Why do a text-search instead? What you meant was:

      Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq 'bash' }

Or more elegantly:

      Get-Process -Name 'bash'

But there's an alias for Get-Process (ps), and the "name" is the default... so:

      ps bash

will work, if you must save those precious keystrokes.

But why would you? Everything tab-completes in PowerShell, even the parameter names.

Doing stuff on a *nix system is not hard...

It's very, VERY hard. So difficult that you failed to solve the rather trivial problems I gave. You gave me something that is incomplete, and does something only vaguely similar, yet is still complex and wrong.

I didn't say "export to some random text file", I said, "comma separated values" (CSV) file -- something I can double-click and open in Excel without problems. I want commands for a CSV file from both data sources, not just one, because I want you to sit down and figure out it, and realise that you'll end up with two very different solutions, even thought the problem description is nearly identical: get some data, format it.

Your SSH command is for one machine only, and doesn't include the machine name in the output as a column. Sure, it vaguely does what I said, but what I want to do is compare the CPU times of processes across my farm of servers using Excel. Does you solution do that? No.

Your "awk" version is even more complex, doesn't include proper column headers, and won't escape quote characters correctly.

Notice how "ps" has like... a bazillion options? What the fuck is "-ef"? I had to look it up. It's "show every process" in "full format". Err... obviously. What exactly is "full format"? Who knows! It's... something fuller than not-full format, clearly. It has it's own sort syntax, different to the sort syntax of other commands. It outputs tabular data, but god only knows in what format exactly. It certainly doesn't have the same output format as any other command. Notice how the exact same option to "service" is not "-ef", but "--status-all". Does "service" have a "sort" option? Nope.

Meanwhile, in Windows land: Sort-Object (or just "sort") works on the output of every command exactly the same way. The Format-Table" and Format-List commands work, again, exactly the same on the output of every command. There's no need for pages of cryptic options for such a basic command as "ps". Take a look at the list of options for Get-Process. Not counting common parameters, it has a grand total of just six! In comparison, ps has over 50, and the list depends on the platform.

I mean, for God's sake, even just this bit: "ps -ef |grep bash" has a subtle error in it. What happens if a user's account name contains the character string "bash?" As in, say, BobAshfield or something? You get unexpected, spurious output. This is what happens when you blindly use string processing to perform database-like functionality. You have a table of data that you want to filter by a column. Why do a text-search instead? What you meant was:

      Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq 'bash' }

Or more elegantly:

      Get-Process -Name 'bash'

But there's an alias for Get-Process (ps), and the "name" is the default... so:

      ps bash

will work, if you must save those precious keystrokes.

But why would you? Everything tab-completes in PowerShell, even the parameter names.

Doing stuff on a *nix system is not hard...

It's very, VERY hard. So difficult that you failed to solve the rather trivial problems I gave. You gave me something that is incomplete, and does something only vaguely similar, yet is still complex and wrong.

I didn't say "export to some random text file", I said, "comma separated values" (CSV) file -- something I can double-click and open in Excel without problems. I want commands for a CSV file from both data sources, not just one, because I want you to sit down and figure out it, and realise that you'll end up with two very different solutions, even thought the problem description is nearly identical: get some data, format it.

Your SSH command is for one machine only, and doesn't include the machine name in the output as a column. Sure, it vaguely does what I said, but what I want to do is compare the CPU times of processes across my farm of servers using Excel. Does you solution do that? No.

Your "awk" version is even more complex, doesn't include proper column headers, and won't escape quote characters correctly.

Notice how "ps" has like... a bazillion options? What the fuck is "-ef"? I had to look it up. It's "show every process" in "full format". Err... obviously. What exactly is "full format"? Who knows! It's... something fuller than not-full format, clearly. It has it's own sort syntax, different to the sort syntax of other commands. It outputs tabular data, but god only knows in what format exactly. It certainly doesn't have the same output format as any other command. Notice how the exact same option to "service" is not "-ef", but "--status-all". Does "service" have a "sort" option? Nope.

Meanwhile, in Windows land: Sort-Object (or just "sort") works on the output of every command exactly the same way. The Format-Table" and Format-List commands work, again, exactly the same on the output of every command. There's no need for pages of cryptic options for such a basic command as "ps". Take a look at the list of options for Get-Process. Not counting common parameters, it has a grand total of just six! In comparison, ps has over 50, and the list depends on the platform.

I mean, for God's sake, even just this bit: "ps -ef |grep bash" has a subtle error in it. What happens if a user's account name contains the character string "bash?" As in, say, BobAshfield or something? You get unexpected, spurious output. This is what happens when you blindly use string processing to perform database-like functionality. You have a table of data that you want to filter by a column. Why do a text-search instead? What you meant was:

      Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq 'bash' }

Or more elegantly:

      Get-Process -Name 'bash'

But there's an alias for Get-Process (ps), and the "name" is the default... so:

      ps bash

will work, if you must save those precious keystrokes.

But why would you? Everything tab-completes in PowerShell, even the parameter names.

Doing stuff on a *nix system is not hard...

It's very, VERY hard. So difficult that you failed to solve the rather trivial problems I gave. You gave me something that is incomplete, and does something only vaguely similar, yet is still complex and wrong.

I didn't say "export to some random text file", I said, "comma separated values" (CSV) file -- something I can double-click and open in Excel without problems. I want commands for a CSV file from both data sources, not just one, because I want you to sit down and figure out it, and realise that you'll end up with two very different solutions, even thought the problem description is nearly identical: get some data, format it.

Your SSH command is for one machine only, and doesn't include the machine name in the output as a column. Sure, it vaguely does what I said, but what I want to do is compare the CPU times of processes across my farm of servers using Excel. Does you solution do that? No.

Your "awk" version is even more complex, doesn't include proper column headers, and won't escape quote characters correctly.

Notice how "ps" has like... a bazillion options? What the fuck is "-ef"? I had to look it up. It's "show every process" in "full format". Err... obviously. What exactly is "full format"? Who knows! It's... something fuller than not-full format, clearly. It has it's own sort syntax, different to the sort syntax of other commands. It outputs tabular data, but god only knows in what format exactly. It certainly doesn't have the same output format as any other command. Notice how the exact same option to "service" is not "-ef", but "--status-all". Does "service" have a "sort" option? Nope.

Meanwhile, in Windows land: Sort-Object (or just "sort") works on the output of every command exactly the same way. The Format-Table" and Format-List commands work, again, exactly the same on the output of every command. There's no need for pages of cryptic options for such a basic command as "ps". Take a look at the list of options for Get-Process. Not counting common parameters, it has a grand total of just six! In comparison, ps has over 50, and the list depends on the platform.

I mean, for God's sake, even just this bit: "ps -ef |grep bash" has a subtle error in it. What happens if a user's account name contains the character string "bash?" As in, say, BobAshfield or something? You get unexpected, spurious output. This is what happens when you blindly use string processing to perform database-like functionality. You have a table of data that you want to filter by a column. Why do a text-search instead? What you meant was:

      Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq 'bash' }

Or more elegantly:

      Get-Process -Name 'bash'

But there's an alias for Get-Process (ps), and the "name" is the default... so:

      ps bash

will work, if you must save those precious keystrokes.

But why would you? Everything tab-completes in PowerShell, even the parameter names.

On windows the CLI is useless

Have you used it recently? PowerShell is far more capable and user friendly than anything on Linux, and Microsoft is throwing their full weight behind it. In Windows 8, it will have modules for basically everything, and a Windows administrator will be able to script circles around anyone still using archaic shells like Bash.

Every time I hear someone talk about the real-world benefits of Linux, the command-line is often near the top, but that's about to vanish. Microsoft, whatever their faults, has huge manpower available to implement things in a consistent, documented, integrated way, and now that they have an elegant framework for a command-line shell, they're going to throw a ton of weight behind it. In Windows 8, the number of PS modules has gone from less than a dozen to over 200!

Even PowerShell 2 already ships with an integrated GUI IDE and visual debugger, a command-line debugger, a tracing utility, secure remote shell, and a job system. It's user friendly and can be trivially extended with C# or VB.NET, which can be developed with free GUI IDEs!

Explain to me again what is so superior about Linux's command-line?

Better yet, I'll give you a simple challenge: As fast as you can, list for me the command-lines to perform the following three tasks in a robust way:

- Generate a CSV export of all running processes, including performance statistics
- Generate a CSV report of all services, including status (stopped, running, paused, etc...)
- For each of the above, do the same, but generate a combined report across many computers listed by name in a text file. Include the computer name as a column in the output.

I'll give you the one-line PowerShell solution to one of the last ones for comparison:

      Get-Process -ComputerName ( Get-Content servers.txt ) | Export-CSV processes.txt

Too verbose for your taste? The complete solution in PowerShell is just the following four lines:
      gsv | epcsv services.txt
      ps | epcsv processes.txt
      gsv -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_services.txt
      ps -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_processes.txt

On windows the CLI is useless

Have you used it recently? PowerShell is far more capable and user friendly than anything on Linux, and Microsoft is throwing their full weight behind it. In Windows 8, it will have modules for basically everything, and a Windows administrator will be able to script circles around anyone still using archaic shells like Bash.

Every time I hear someone talk about the real-world benefits of Linux, the command-line is often near the top, but that's about to vanish. Microsoft, whatever their faults, has huge manpower available to implement things in a consistent, documented, integrated way, and now that they have an elegant framework for a command-line shell, they're going to throw a ton of weight behind it. In Windows 8, the number of PS modules has gone from less than a dozen to over 200!

Even PowerShell 2 already ships with an integrated GUI IDE and visual debugger, a command-line debugger, a tracing utility, secure remote shell, and a job system. It's user friendly and can be trivially extended with C# or VB.NET, which can be developed with free GUI IDEs!

Explain to me again what is so superior about Linux's command-line?

Better yet, I'll give you a simple challenge: As fast as you can, list for me the command-lines to perform the following three tasks in a robust way:

- Generate a CSV export of all running processes, including performance statistics
- Generate a CSV report of all services, including status (stopped, running, paused, etc...)
- For each of the above, do the same, but generate a combined report across many computers listed by name in a text file. Include the computer name as a column in the output.

I'll give you the one-line PowerShell solution to one of the last ones for comparison:

      Get-Process -ComputerName ( Get-Content servers.txt ) | Export-CSV processes.txt

Too verbose for your taste? The complete solution in PowerShell is just the following four lines:
      gsv | epcsv services.txt
      ps | epcsv processes.txt
      gsv -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_services.txt
      ps -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_processes.txt

On windows the CLI is useless

Have you used it recently? PowerShell is far more capable and user friendly than anything on Linux, and Microsoft is throwing their full weight behind it. In Windows 8, it will have modules for basically everything, and a Windows administrator will be able to script circles around anyone still using archaic shells like Bash.

Every time I hear someone talk about the real-world benefits of Linux, the command-line is often near the top, but that's about to vanish. Microsoft, whatever their faults, has huge manpower available to implement things in a consistent, documented, integrated way, and now that they have an elegant framework for a command-line shell, they're going to throw a ton of weight behind it. In Windows 8, the number of PS modules has gone from less than a dozen to over 200!

Even PowerShell 2 already ships with an integrated GUI IDE and visual debugger, a command-line debugger, a tracing utility, secure remote shell, and a job system. It's user friendly and can be trivially extended with C# or VB.NET, which can be developed with free GUI IDEs!

Explain to me again what is so superior about Linux's command-line?

Better yet, I'll give you a simple challenge: As fast as you can, list for me the command-lines to perform the following three tasks in a robust way:

- Generate a CSV export of all running processes, including performance statistics
- Generate a CSV report of all services, including status (stopped, running, paused, etc...)
- For each of the above, do the same, but generate a combined report across many computers listed by name in a text file. Include the computer name as a column in the output.

I'll give you the one-line PowerShell solution to one of the last ones for comparison:

      Get-Process -ComputerName ( Get-Content servers.txt ) | Export-CSV processes.txt

Too verbose for your taste? The complete solution in PowerShell is just the following four lines:
      gsv | epcsv services.txt
      ps | epcsv processes.txt
      gsv -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_services.txt
      ps -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_processes.txt

On windows the CLI is useless

Have you used it recently? PowerShell is far more capable and user friendly than anything on Linux, and Microsoft is throwing their full weight behind it. In Windows 8, it will have modules for basically everything, and a Windows administrator will be able to script circles around anyone still using archaic shells like Bash.

Every time I hear someone talk about the real-world benefits of Linux, the command-line is often near the top, but that's about to vanish. Microsoft, whatever their faults, has huge manpower available to implement things in a consistent, documented, integrated way, and now that they have an elegant framework for a command-line shell, they're going to throw a ton of weight behind it. In Windows 8, the number of PS modules has gone from less than a dozen to over 200!

Even PowerShell 2 already ships with an integrated GUI IDE and visual debugger, a command-line debugger, a tracing utility, secure remote shell, and a job system. It's user friendly and can be trivially extended with C# or VB.NET, which can be developed with free GUI IDEs!

Explain to me again what is so superior about Linux's command-line?

Better yet, I'll give you a simple challenge: As fast as you can, list for me the command-lines to perform the following three tasks in a robust way:

- Generate a CSV export of all running processes, including performance statistics
- Generate a CSV report of all services, including status (stopped, running, paused, etc...)
- For each of the above, do the same, but generate a combined report across many computers listed by name in a text file. Include the computer name as a column in the output.

I'll give you the one-line PowerShell solution to one of the last ones for comparison:

      Get-Process -ComputerName ( Get-Content servers.txt ) | Export-CSV processes.txt

Too verbose for your taste? The complete solution in PowerShell is just the following four lines:
      gsv | epcsv services.txt
      ps | epcsv processes.txt
      gsv -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_services.txt
      ps -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_processes.txt

On windows the CLI is useless

Have you used it recently? PowerShell is far more capable and user friendly than anything on Linux, and Microsoft is throwing their full weight behind it. In Windows 8, it will have modules for basically everything, and a Windows administrator will be able to script circles around anyone still using archaic shells like Bash.

Every time I hear someone talk about the real-world benefits of Linux, the command-line is often near the top, but that's about to vanish. Microsoft, whatever their faults, has huge manpower available to implement things in a consistent, documented, integrated way, and now that they have an elegant framework for a command-line shell, they're going to throw a ton of weight behind it. In Windows 8, the number of PS modules has gone from less than a dozen to over 200!

Even PowerShell 2 already ships with an integrated GUI IDE and visual debugger, a command-line debugger, a tracing utility, secure remote shell, and a job system. It's user friendly and can be trivially extended with C# or VB.NET, which can be developed with free GUI IDEs!

Explain to me again what is so superior about Linux's command-line?

Better yet, I'll give you a simple challenge: As fast as you can, list for me the command-lines to perform the following three tasks in a robust way:

- Generate a CSV export of all running processes, including performance statistics
- Generate a CSV report of all services, including status (stopped, running, paused, etc...)
- For each of the above, do the same, but generate a combined report across many computers listed by name in a text file. Include the computer name as a column in the output.

I'll give you the one-line PowerShell solution to one of the last ones for comparison:

      Get-Process -ComputerName ( Get-Content servers.txt ) | Export-CSV processes.txt

Too verbose for your taste? The complete solution in PowerShell is just the following four lines:
      gsv | epcsv services.txt
      ps | epcsv processes.txt
      gsv -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_services.txt
      ps -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_processes.txt

On windows the CLI is useless

Have you used it recently? PowerShell is far more capable and user friendly than anything on Linux, and Microsoft is throwing their full weight behind it. In Windows 8, it will have modules for basically everything, and a Windows administrator will be able to script circles around anyone still using archaic shells like Bash.

Every time I hear someone talk about the real-world benefits of Linux, the command-line is often near the top, but that's about to vanish. Microsoft, whatever their faults, has huge manpower available to implement things in a consistent, documented, integrated way, and now that they have an elegant framework for a command-line shell, they're going to throw a ton of weight behind it. In Windows 8, the number of PS modules has gone from less than a dozen to over 200!

Even PowerShell 2 already ships with an integrated GUI IDE and visual debugger, a command-line debugger, a tracing utility, secure remote shell, and a job system. It's user friendly and can be trivially extended with C# or VB.NET, which can be developed with free GUI IDEs!

Explain to me again what is so superior about Linux's command-line?

Better yet, I'll give you a simple challenge: As fast as you can, list for me the command-lines to perform the following three tasks in a robust way:

- Generate a CSV export of all running processes, including performance statistics
- Generate a CSV report of all services, including status (stopped, running, paused, etc...)
- For each of the above, do the same, but generate a combined report across many computers listed by name in a text file. Include the computer name as a column in the output.

I'll give you the one-line PowerShell solution to one of the last ones for comparison:

      Get-Process -ComputerName ( Get-Content servers.txt ) | Export-CSV processes.txt

Too verbose for your taste? The complete solution in PowerShell is just the following four lines:
      gsv | epcsv services.txt
      ps | epcsv processes.txt
      gsv -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_services.txt
      ps -cn ( gc servers.txt ) | epcsv remote_processes.txt

It's not exactly security secret information, the only time where it might be useful to know it is when you're on a LAN and if you are then you can get it from ARP anyhow. If someone has it they can probably guess what model your machine is or maybe your wifi chipset if you're on that. That information might be useful for an attack, but usually only within a LAN context where as I said before they'd have it anyway.

But you raise a good point giving away your permanent address to everyone you connect outbound? Well you don't have to, on modern ipv6 stacks you get a EUI-64 address as your permanent address, and along with it a random dynamic address assigned as your temporary. Windows 7 and Mac OS X do this already, RFC 3041 described here. If you want anyone to be able to connect to you permanently only then do you give them your permanent address (back to my mac, VNC connections, etc). But for all outbound connections you always use your temporary.

Why? What does 7 do that XP don't?

I'm still using Windows 2000, but only now I'm finding that programs don't work. I was going to upgrade to XP, but I heard people talk about Windows 7 etc.

Here is the website:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/compare?T1=tab20
Here are some "features":
* Touch and tap instead of point and click. (I don't want this)
* Stream music, photos, and videos around your house. (I'd rather use existing programs.)
* Open programs and files you use most in a click or two.

I think I'll still try and find a copy of XP. I love the speed of Windows 2000. Everything's instant on a modern system. I'm not wasting any cycles on fades, alpha blends and graphical task bars. I'm not wasting time indexing when I only search a few folders anyway. As long as I can run Firefox 4, then I'm okay - I imagine at least for another 5 years.

I don't know about his reg tweaks since according to everything I've read that functionality was removed but don't you worry none friend, old hairyfeet knows how to get around that little PITA and actually give you MORE functionality than it had under XP!

What you need to do is go here and download this little handy dandy freeware tool. this baby will not only remember from 300-10,000 folders (user configurable) but you can even save multiple folders as workspaces and then call them all back up to the original position and view you had set up with a single click! Quite handy when you need multiple folders set certain ways for certain tasks, i found it just wonderful for when i'm editing my multitrack recordings. Just pin it to your tasklists and keep her running, it only uses a few hundred Kb of RAM.

So don't worry friend, there is always more than one way to skin that kitty in Windows!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_xp

XP 64 bit can handle 128 GB (somewhat of a surprise to me, when I looked it up I actually thought the same as you).

Incorrect. Windows Server 2003 32-bit goes up to 64 GB. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx

The reason XP/Vista/7 32-bit is limited to 4GB is because there are so many badly-written drivers that assume they will be in a physical 4GB address space, that there was no way for Windows to change it without massive bluescreens from old drivers.

To use up to 64 GB, apps and drivers have to be written to access all memory through a 2GB sliding Physical Address Extension window.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7 No Windows 7 Home Premium OEM 16 GB cheap box for dev soon :)

What's your definition of "cheap"? Yeah, Microsoft charges USD 200 for Windows 7 Home Premium retail, but HP's selling a 16GB system for $1,269.99 with Windows 7 Home Premium.

Hell, if we don't require Windows, even the company everybody likes to beat up for making horrible overpriced machines will sell you a 16GB Core i5 iMac for USD 2100 (1TB disk rather than the 750GB disk on the HP, but a 2.7GHz quad-core Core i5 rather than a Core i7-2600 quad-core "up to 3.8GHz" with Turbo-Hydramatic, err, sorry, Turbo-Boost).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7
No Windows 7 Home Premium OEM 16 GB cheap box for dev soon :)

A strong math foundation laid in high school and earlier will be fundamental to their success in computer science later. The function of a computer really is to mathematically transform data sets from one format to another. Especially in games, where trigonometry is foundation of physics, no matter how basic. See Xbox Live's Trueskill formula if you don't believe me.

Since when do "open source" software vendors try to prevent people from using their software in whatever manner they want?

Since a long long time. Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, are all "open source software vendors". And they all "prevent people from using their software in whatever manner they want".

LOL!

C# Has had the equivalent of javax.tools.JavaCompiler since v1.1, Microsoft.CSharp.Compiler which is little more than a wrapper around the command-line compiler.

But the .NET framework has also, for a long time, included Reflection.Emit which allows for direct manipulation of CIL bytecode, and System.CodeDom for generating and compiling source code in multiple languages from an abstract representation.

I wouldn't bother reading about Roslyn, though. It couldn't possibly measure up to anything Java has had for ages now, right?

LOL!

C# Has had the equivalent of javax.tools.JavaCompiler since v1.1, Microsoft.CSharp.Compiler which is little more than a wrapper around the command-line compiler.

But the .NET framework has also, for a long time, included Reflection.Emit which allows for direct manipulation of CIL bytecode, and System.CodeDom for generating and compiling source code in multiple languages from an abstract representation.

I wouldn't bother reading about Roslyn, though. It couldn't possibly measure up to anything Java has had for ages now, right?

LOL!

C# Has had the equivalent of javax.tools.JavaCompiler since v1.1, Microsoft.CSharp.Compiler which is little more than a wrapper around the command-line compiler.

But the .NET framework has also, for a long time, included Reflection.Emit which allows for direct manipulation of CIL bytecode, and System.CodeDom for generating and compiling source code in multiple languages from an abstract representation.

I wouldn't bother reading about Roslyn, though. It couldn't possibly measure up to anything Java has had for ages now, right?

Why can't all software do as many of the current web browsers do and remember their state so they can come back up exactly where they were if they are suddenly or even gracefully shut down?

Indeed. There should be some kind of operating system service which could automatically restart any application which were running when the system was shut down. Perhaps it could even interact with them and restore their state such as documents and cursor positions? Oh wait: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373524(VS.85).aspx

The restart manager - if used by the application or service - will actually keep track of files which have been scheduled for updating (new version) during restart. If the files are being kept open by an application or service which has registered with Restart Manager, RM can restart the application and avoid a system restart. Note, this replace is transactional - it only replaces a set of files when all files can be closed by restarting processes.

If the processes are closed for some other reason and RM suddenly finds that all the files in a replace set now can be safely replaced, it will proceed to do so. Have you ever noticed that the start menu says that you should restart to install update, only later to find that this notification has mysteriously been removed again? That's Restart Manager jumping in a replacing files.

Figures, I just started using Win7 now the talks are of Win8.

XP 64bit has been good to me. I was forced to run Win7
as "Battle Field 3" requires DX11. I still only boot into
Win7 when playing BF3.

I've always assumed the next Windows OS was going to be a
touch screen. Don't know why it comes as a surprise.
Remember the roll out for Surface?
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx
I figure parts-n-pieces will surface [shrug] in Win8.

Kind of a lopsided review; a 3.4GHz quad-core PC with 4GB RAM
Got the power, just no Ram.

How can one accomplish anything at all without something as fundamental and basic as CreateWindow(Ex)?

By using the new non-Win32 APIs.

LoadLibrary was replaced with LoadPackagedLibrary (it was never deprecated)

I should, perhaps, have been more precise. A lot of deprecated stuff was removed, but not all stuff that was removed was deprecated. The other reason for removal is because 1) it is covered by WinRT in a better way, or 2) it lets you do something that Metro apps are not supposed to do (e.g. IPC, or runtime codegen). "Running a fricking program" falls under point #2 - a Metro app cannot directly launch another Metro app. At best, it can register a "charm" (basically an action for the app-wide context menu) for a certain protocol, and another app can register itself as handling that protocol - then, whenever user activates that charm in app #1, app #2 is activated and parameters are passed to it.

Basically, Metro is very different from Win32, and a lot of things that can be done in the latter are deliberately disabled in the former. It's much more like iOS walled garden in that respect.

C# with dynamic typing is still C#.

GIR is not automatic, since it requires writing C code in a very particular way (someone has to write those annotations). The result is, of course, usable from any language, not just Python - indeed, isn't Mono using them?

I don't know what "loose coupling" supposed to mean in the context of language design.

Anyway, my point was that C# - unlike Python - is already "Java-like", and shares common ancestor and a lot of design philosophy with Java. If you remember version 1.0, compared to what Java was back then (which was 1.4), they were much more similar. The difference is that Java language evolution stagnated, while C# has evolved reasonably quickly (for a commercial "enterprisey" language), so what you see today in C# is reasonably reflective of what "Java with first-class functions" and other nifty stuff will be once it gets there.

The only apps allowed on ARM Win8 tablet are Metro apps.

Metro apps do have access to Win32 API, but only a very limited subset of it. In particular, it does not include most calls necessary for traditional Win32 UI, and a lot of calls that were previously marked as deprecated for years are gone completely now.

To put it in perspective, I tried compiling SQLite for Win8 app sandbox - and even there I had to replace or remove about 10 WinAPI calls to make it build and pass certification.

Not really. The ram limit on Windows 7 Pro is 192 GB. Even with 16 slots, you would need 12gb dimms, which don't exist (IDT). Even with 16x 4gb dimms you would only be using 64/192 of your licensed RAM limit. So no, 'the thing holding back desktops' is not Microsoft's license agreement for operating systems. Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7

Wrong.
The licence limits the number of processors in the licensed machine (Home and Home Premium) but there are no restrictions on memory.

Useful link in case you're interested : http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/IntellectualProperty/UseTerms/Default.aspx

Microsoft's page about this project also discusses "Pocket Touch", a capacitive touch panel's that's designed to work through clothing. The idea is that you could have a touch panel on the back of your phone (or whatever) that could respond to gestures while it's still in your pocket.

First, the article makes no sense since Siri doesn't do translation. I guess translation doesn't "exist" yet since Apple doesn't have a product.

Google, Nuance and Microsoft have been pushing Speech Recognition for a few years now. These companies put millions into NLP R&D ever year and are on the forefront of technology. Apple had been ignoring this space and so these companies have had great Speech Recognition and other NLP products for a while and Apple doesn't.

Google and Microsoft are about to release the next wave of speech products ( e.g. in Android 4 and WP 8 ). These companies have NLP technology Apple hasn't even begin to tackle. Like NLP in all major world languages and across many markets ( eg. Checkout EngKoo for example )

IOS was falling behind and Apple scrambled to purchase a Speech recognition mobile app, quickly licensed Nuance and Wolfram Alpha knowledgebase technology, and added those APIs in the operating system. They had to remove Siri from their market place.

Marketing mentions DARPA, but just about all Speech R&D is funded in someway by DARPA. DARPA's been carrying that torch for a while now. Even the popular open source Pocket Sphinx was made possible by partial DARPA funding.

In short this Siri marketing push is the largest scale astroturf marketing campaign I've ever seen.

Name a single thing you used to be able to do on Mac OS X that you can't do anymore on Mac OS X.

Download the compiler toolchain without "registering".

"Download the compiler toolchain", or "download the current version of the compiler toolchain"? Yes, "I can download the latest version of the compiler toolchain without registering" is better than "I get a version of the compiler toolchain with the OS on my machine", but the latter is better than "I can't get any toolchain without registering", and, as far as I know, it was always possible. Did they ever offer the latest shiniest version without requiring an ADC account, with the requirement to register with ADC to get the latest shiniest version starting with Xcode 4.x? (BTW, I think I may have had to register to get this, but it's interesting that they've offered a free-as-in-beer version for a while now....)

I still have a Microsoft Natural Elite keyboard from 1998 that has survived any number of complete changes of other hardware in my home desktop system. I was a little surprised when googling for the link just now to find MS seem to still be selling them. I don't care for any MS software that I can think of offhand, but some of the hardware sold under their name rocks.

Seconded. I've recently dropped ~70lbs (yes, I have pictures to prove it!! haha) in the span of about 9 months, and have not significantly decreased my time in front of the computer. What I have changed is that I exercise much more (~2h/day), and obviously eating right (but that's not what this is about).

My point is that with exercise, your body will keep itself aligned and tuned up (so to speak). Make sure that whoever your trainer is or "gym guy" is, knows his stuff - mine has made all the difference b/c he was able to spot all of the little "deformities" and "inconsistencies" in posture and movement that I had earned from ~20 years in front of a computer with marginal exercise. For instance, I have a bad knee injury which for the better part of 15 years has plagued me. I'm now able to play sports in spite of not yet having the surgery I need because of all the other corrections in posture and joint movement. Point is: it won't make you a jock, but it will make a HUGE difference and you'll be less vulnerable to "bad" or "un-ergonomic" equipment.

I'm now able to play sports again (like in high-school and early college), and my posture is near-picture perfect (still some things to tweak). I sleep better at night, and have no aches or pains anymore other than the occasional bruise from football (soccer, for the gringos in the house!) contact.

I do have this keyboard (but ONLY the keyboard), but that's because I'm used to the curvature. Other than that my equipment is fairly standard.

One important detail: proper posture of your back when you sit - regardless of the chair - is CRUCIAL. Always sit with your back up straight, no slouching, and your weight on your buttocks and adductors (back of your leg), with your knee making a ~90 degree angle (can be slightly more or slightly less, as comfortable, but the closer to 90 you are the better). You can relax this position occasionally for short periods, but never more than as a "break".

It would be really cool if it put pictures together realtime and sent it to a display like this: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/benko/projects/sphere/

Chrome does in fact ask me when I try to download potentially unsafe file formats (in my case, DMG files =) ), prompting me whether to keep or discard.

Chrome decides based on the file format. IE's filter is more fine-grained, deciding based on the reputation of a particular downloaded executable file (identified by its hash value?) or, in the case of a digitally signed executable, the reputation of its publisher. Microsoft's advice for building an application's reputation (source 1; source 2) involves buying into the Authenticode CA racket, which can prove expensive for an individual student or hobbyist developer.

What these guys are touting is IE9's "SmartScreen" protection which claims to "block 99% of phishing" so I am pondering what that even means.

It uses heuristics to determine whether a site is hosting a phishing attempt. However, like all heuristics, it does have some false positives, and Microsoft's page about SmartScreen for web site owners makes a few recommendations that the smallest web sites might not be able to handle properly:

If you ask users for personal information, use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certification with a current server certificate issued by a trusted certification authority.

True, StartSSL offers free certificates, but a certificate isn't the most expensive part of deploying TLS (formerly SSL). One needs a dedicated IP for each TLS site. Ordinarily, budget web hosts load upwards of a thousand domains onto a single IP address using name-based virtual hosting. There is an extension called SNI to allow TLS to work with name-based virtual hosting, but IE for Windows XP and Android Browser for Android 2.x don't have SNI. This, combined with the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, makes it significantly more expensive to deploy HTTPS on sites that aren't yet popular enough to need a dedicated server.

We've known about deconvolution forever, the trick figuring out the path of the camera to generate the kernel for the deconvolution. In the TFV, he says we use the custom parameter file (that they probably spent months tweaking for each image), lots of computing power and TADA! unblurred image.

Microsoft had something similar a few year ago, where you have a blurred image and a second underexposed image to do the same thing. see paper here and examples here

Outlook 2007/2010 plus Windows Search 4.0 on Windows XP or inbuilt in Vista/7 makes searching effortless.

I'm a "searcher" and I can pull up e-mails from years ago with ease. Searching without an index is painful though, so I can only agree with parent if they've never tried Outlook with Windows Search enab.

• Have only two folders: Inbox, and Reference.
• When an email comes in and it does not need to be acted on, read it, then move it to Reference.
• If an email needs to be acted upon, leave it in your inbox until the task is complete. This may be hours, days, weeks or months. But everything in your inbox is something that is waiting on someone.

I frequently had a habit of reading emails on my smartphone and forgetting about them. Now, I can either move them to Reference on my phone, or do it when I get back to my desk. But nothing slips through the cracks this way, which was a huge problem when I first got a smartphone.