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Since 2001, dolt. So, so much for your bullshit statement quoted here:

"I assume this APK is the same APK (aka. akowals ... akowals1@twcny.rr.com ) that trolls Ars as well as here." - by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20, @10:34AM (#37455704)

IF you call telling the truth via facts &/or documentations that are often used to backup my statements trolling, then YOU'RE FULL OF IT, troll.

As far as arstechnica though? Well, after all - There's NOTHING there of value to learn, since I often had to help OR correct their "best & brightest" in coding in their arsware for instance!

E.G. #1 of 2 - COOLMON, which the coder had NO errortrapping code in, which if performance counters were set "off" (they do NOT come for free, so turning them off saves CPU cycles/RAM/Other forms of I-O etc.) it would crash - I had to TELL him HOW to "get around it" via programmatic checks in the registry for it, ala > http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc784382(WS.10).aspx as one method, OR, using extctrlst.exe from the reskit (tracing it shows the appropriate registry entries it makes to shut down perf. counters on various services etc.)).

E.G. #1 of 2 - The late Aryeh Holzer (whom I actually LIKED, since he wasn't the "typical trollish ne'er-do-well" that infests their forums largely & he did SetiSpy before he passed on) also got a tip from me on how to make his app use less CPU (ala the SAME I did for the folks in UltraDefrag, one of INFOWORLD's top 8 apps in fact recently from the Open Source world -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2435272&cid=37443252 because his app needed it so the actual SETI exe would run with more CPU possible allocation while his monitoring app was minimized).

There's others as well, & it was what made me realize they're mostly a pack of noobs, & largely for the most part, what I called them here: The 'NEST of "ne'er-do-wells" online @ arstechnica - home of the underachievers of the internet", lol!

APK

P.S.=> Lastly, & probably MOST IMPORTANTLY here in closing? The FACT you came here to bother myself, & basically gave away the fact you come from arstechnica SHOWS WHO THE TRUE TROLLS ARE, especially no balls ones like yourself that post as AC & don't even "sign off" as I do with your intials... you're pitiful, and STUPID to top it all off!

... apk

Define 'separate'. They're certainly not separate when you download the Android development environment, which includes an Android emulator. It's shipped as one cohesive product. Whatever separation is kept in Google's development labs is irrelevant - they are being distributed as one product, and the GPL is a licence that is concerned with distribution.

Dude, that's irrelevant.
Look, I'm not going to explain the GPL license on a Slashdot comment box. Read up particularly on tivoisation (which is a much worse situation) and how it led to GPLv3, which Linus rejected for Linux, BTW, and which still wouldn't matter in the case of Android.

Here's what I think. I think that the people who would normally be up in arms about this are also heavily invested in Android, both financially and emotionally. They own Android devices and love them. They are not about to point out the elephant in the room.

That's also irrelevant. The only people who'd be able to sue Google about it would be Linux kernel contributors. There are thousands of them, do you think each and every one loves Android and Google?
Did you know that Microsoft is a Linux kernel contributor?

Precisely my point. Who is going to go up against Google's lawyers over a GPL violation?

At least you're funny :-)

Wait and see what Microsoft's lawyers do to you if you try to use it for commercial product development.

Do you know what you're talking about? A quick google makes it looks like their lawyers should be fine with it:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/Vsexpressinstall/thread/7390B2FE-54CA-4A5A-BE4F-EC044BE9545D

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/Vsexpressvc/thread/3030a179-f7be-4f40-84ff-debd6d290b2c

Wait and see what Microsoft's lawyers do to you if you try to use it for commercial product development.

Do you know what you're talking about? A quick google makes it looks like their lawyers should be fine with it:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/Vsexpressinstall/thread/7390B2FE-54CA-4A5A-BE4F-EC044BE9545D

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/Vsexpressvc/thread/3030a179-f7be-4f40-84ff-debd6d290b2c

Your sysadmin can decrypt your bitlocker?

Yes.

Remember that it's an enterprise deployment of BitLocker. This differs from a personal deployment, where the company may sometimes need access to an encrypted computer if the person originally using it was hit by a bus.

They finally added that with 7?

No, read the parent post again. They added it with Vista.

I'm aware that Windows and all desktop OSes before iOS didn't have the walled garden.

I included the "works well" bit specifically because I was thinking of just how great Windows is. It's so fast and securely designed that IIS still has access to kernel memory space by default just to try to keep up with Apache.

Yes.

Sysinternals Process Explorer, and add the network graphs.

Uhm, no? The name "Pirate Party" works much better in Sweden, which has Pirates in their history and a population that knows enough English to know the term "software piracy". In Germany, pirates are usually associated with Somalia and the German equivalent for "pirated software" translates as "robbery copy". There was a lot of debate about weather or not it's a good idea to even call it "Pirate Party", in the end it was decided that a consistent name across all countries has more value than having names that better match the local culture.

tl;dr In Germany, "Pirate" is a meaningless, valueless (or bad) word when used in politics.

Not exactly true; "Softwarepiraterie" (literally "software piracy") is a well-known german term that's used in public discussions about the subject quite frequently.

Powershell is awesome to automate the administrative tasks in outlook 2010 server and for general automation in windows 7 and windows server 2008 R2.
If you are interested the best place to start is http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee332526.aspx .

By the way, I am a java architect, not an Microsoft shills, but between 10% to 20% of my time at job is officially dedicated to the wonderful role called 'technology scout' and when I see a good tech I do not care from who it came even though it is still weird to recommend a Microsoft solution...

Uhhh...you mean included in a standard desktop like say... all versions of Windows 7 except Starter? While I haven't personally tried it I hear its quite nice.

As for TFA if they can score football and basketball they have a shot, but if they don't get the content they are boned. I guess it will all come down to how much Ballmer is willing to lose to get a real toehold in the market, because as we saw with the original Xbox MSFT isn't above taking a loss if it'll get them a good foothold into a new market they desire.

That's true, but sharing the same libraries doesn't mean too much. You could make the argument that Python and Perl can share libraries (so long as they're written in C, they could be exactly the same for both as well; interfaces could be written the same for both easily so that utilizing the library would be the same for both, although that's not always the case for C# and VB.NET). My point was more towards the syntax differences, not the libraries. Also, VB.NET has its own runtime library that runs on .NET as well (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.visualbasic.aspx), which is certainly not shared with C#.

Also, there's no way that VB.NET is closer to C# than VB6, except for automagically working with everything .NET. And even then, the syntax differences are too big to ignore. Look at all the code snippets on MSDN; they're wildly different between VB.NET and C# quite a few times. Look at the VB6 to VB.NET migrator, it's extremely trivial (only really converting everything to use .NET).

Cash cow? I doubt it.

You don't need to doubt it, just read the financial statement. Windows brings in $12B/year; Office+SharePoint+Exchange is $14B/year.

. In my territory, MS Office is selling at a slightly lower price than Windows. And not only that: it comes with 3-seat license, so it's effectively less than one-third the cost of a Windows license. Sure, this is the vanilla version that comes without the "enterprise" goodness of Access and the groupware tools, but for most people and small businesses having something to print out a quick report or do a spreadsheet of the week's expenses is more than enough.

Thing is, a single large business that buys several thousand, or even ten thousand, seats of enterprise edition "compensates" for a lot of those small home/office users in terms of income. And there are very few businesses with users in thousands that don't license Office for a significant proportion of their employees.

> Javascript is in IE8 on win xp.

Uh.... This is the same IE8 that doesn't have a JIT, right? Unlike every single browser actually shipping now?

Here's a relevant graph: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/benchmarks/sunspider/default.html

It's a bit out of date, since all browsers have gotten faster since then, but it shows IE8 being about 18x slower than any modern browser on this particular benchmark. And this is a benchmark that hammers a lot on the VM (dates, regular expressions, etc), not the language itself.

On code that runs for longer than a few ms and is actually compute-intensive the difference between IE8 and any modern browser is even more pronounced.

Heck, at this point you can compile C code to JavaScript and then run it in some browsers and have it be only about 5x slower than the original C code. That's with (typed) arrays representing the C stack and heap and so forth...

I'd love to see your benchmark code, by the way. Or for you to rerun the benchmark in something that actually tries to run Javascript quickly, as opposed to IE8.

so your saying that just because you are reducing the number of CA's (global trusted CA's now to the domain registrars) that while it makes the # of targets less does not remove the single point of failure?

i'd like to point out to you your own "Microsoft" example.. VeriSign who is Both a CA and a registrar has already in the past, before we had nearly as many registrars and ca's, given a code signing cert to unknown people for "Microsoft Corporation".

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms01-017

it's happened before and it will happen again, also note that while yes the mixed existing CA and DNSSEC is a hazard - DHSSEC will be very easy to bypass as long as clients support traditional DNS.

DNSEC is nice - it is helpful - it is useful - it is by no means a perfect answer to the current CA problem, and it does have the same single point of failure problem just of a different scale.

There are a bunch of improvements specifically pertaining to SVG in IE10 - most notably, SVG filter effects.

Good morning, Microsoft apologist!

Since your selective memory or, rather, your biased focus on this company is making you unable to see the truth, I shall ask you to look into this link: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/products/ie-9/compare-browsers

See related reply - they counted blatant XP license installs as "Windows 7" licenses, so the figure is suspect at best, a blatant lie at worst.

Look it up for yourself: http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/downgrade_rights.aspx

Not "Magic Mouse." Microsoft Touch Mouse.

Um, the linked subset is only for Win32 APIs. You would rarely if ever actually use them from a Metro apps - you'd use WinRT APIs instead. That Win32 stuff is there mainly for existing libraries - if they only use that, you can reuse them as is - and also some new bits that provide low-level support for WinRT itself, such as string handling and instantiating objects.

* no need to install a whole DVD of stuff to start developing
- I'm not sure if that's true, but last time I needed C# and VS to develop a web application I had to download a whole DVD full of stuff and install multiple gigabytes on my computer. Even if I'm going to install the whole LAMPP stack on my laptop, with JEE support, that's no way multiple gigabytes. The whole LAMPP stack is 416MB, plus Tomcat 7MB, plus the JDK it's about 50MB, plus Eclipse EE 210MB. That's just a little over 500MB.

Microsoft has made great strides in this area. The Microsoft Web Platform Installer (currently, it's here) lets you download the free versions of their development stack quickly and painlessly.

Yes, it's the reduced "free" versions of their software, and I personally think it would make a lot of sense for Microsoft to release the full versions for free. But the free versions of their stuff aren't unreasonably crippled. SQL Server 2008 R2 Express, for instance, supports only a single physical CPU core and limits your databases to 10GB in size. I don't like restrictions of any sort but that is pretty liberal.

You can use Win32 APIs in Metro apps - some of them are not available (largely because they are pointless in the sandbox, or deal with the old UI concepts), but some are. If you open windows header files - "windows.h" and friends - they now have blocks of code that look like this

It seems that the docs for this are now up, so it's probably easier to see what parts of Win32 API are supported in Metro apps here.

Also have a look at these two links.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh464947(v=VS.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br211377(v=VS.85).aspx

Also have a look at these two links.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh464947(v=VS.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br211377(v=VS.85).aspx

You're spot on with respect to WPF/Silverlight-like popups - they're still there, practically as-is:

public sealed class Popup : Windows.UI.Xaml.FrameworkElement
        Member of Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls.Primitives

Summary:
Displays content on top of existing content, within the bounds of the application window.

In fact, the whole WinRT UI framework is very close to Silverlight API- and capability-wise. You get a bunch of namespaces renamed, but most classes are the same. Of course, the other difference is that it's implemented in 100% pure native code now, just accessible directly from .NET as if it was a managed class library.

You haven't named any flaws in JavaScript as a language

This question keeps coming up in every Slashdot story mentioning JS. Frankly, I'm sick and tired of having to re-type it over and over again. I'll just keep linking to this post from now on.

there are a lot of things that JavaScript does really well. Try doing what an asynchronous XMLHttpRequest does in Python, or Java, or pretty much any other language.

What, you've never used an asynchronous API in other languages? I guess then that you don't know that some of them have a single standardized API that is shared beween all async operations (rather than some ad-hoc, slapped-together design for one very narrow use case). And some even have extensive support for async operations in the language itself.

You haven't named any flaws in JavaScript as a language

This question keeps coming up in every Slashdot story mentioning JS. Frankly, I'm sick and tired of having to re-type it over and over again. I'll just keep linking to this post from now on.

there are a lot of things that JavaScript does really well. Try doing what an asynchronous XMLHttpRequest does in Python, or Java, or pretty much any other language.

What, you've never used an asynchronous API in other languages? I guess then that you don't know that some of them have a single standardized API that is shared beween all async operations (rather than some ad-hoc, slapped-together design for one very narrow use case). And some even have extensive support for async operations in the language itself.

And yet, the ongoing real world persistence of privately reported array out-of-bounds errors in critical security-dependent code continues to show that apparently, even the best programmers objectively can't write secure code even if their professional reputations depended on it.

If they persistently write such buggy code then I wouldn't consider them the "best" programmers. And that's not even consider that we're talking about Microsoft to begin with.

Yes.

I'm sorry, I can't find any specific quote that would nail it down. That said, the dev docs are now up, and something along these lines might be there. The best I can see so far is this, which simply says "Your Metro style apps run equally well on ARM, x86, and x64 architectures". Note that Metro is not just HTML5/JS - it is available to all three languages/platforms, so you can write Metro apps in JS, or C++, or .NET (or mix them as you see fit).

Anyway, trust me on that. It shouldn't really be surprising, to be honest, given that a trimmed CLR version ran on ARM for ages, on WinMo and then also on WP7 - so it's not like this was done completely from scratch.

For Metro apps, it won't be the full framework, though. It's a more trimmed subset, closest to what Silverlight gets.

I'm sorry, I can't find any specific quote that would nail it down. That said, the dev docs are now up, and something along these lines might be there. The best I can see so far is this, which simply says "Your Metro style apps run equally well on ARM, x86, and x64 architectures". Note that Metro is not just HTML5/JS - it is available to all three languages/platforms, so you can write Metro apps in JS, or C++, or .NET (or mix them as you see fit).

Anyway, trust me on that. It shouldn't really be surprising, to be honest, given that a trimmed CLR version ran on ARM for ages, on WinMo and then also on WP7 - so it's not like this was done completely from scratch.

For Metro apps, it won't be the full framework, though. It's a more trimmed subset, closest to what Silverlight gets.

You can write secure code in almost any language.

Perhaps you want to believe that claim.

And yet, the ongoing real world persistence of privately reported array out-of-bounds errors in critical security-dependent code continues to show that apparently, even the best programmers objectively can't write secure code even if their professional reputations depended on it.

At least, they may be occasionally capable of writing secure code, but they're not capable of never writing any insecure code, or even testing for the existence of insecure code in the code they have released. Third parties have that priviledge. We don't know how many of the third parties who find these bugs are black hats, because we only hear from the white hats. But a 50/50 split between white and black security researchers seems like a good wild-ass guess. So figure one zero-day for every reported monthly security bug. Are you scared yet? You should be.

Is this ongoing security massacre the fault of the language programmers are using? Absolutely yes. The point of security is that 99% correct isn't good enough when that 1% of errors your toolchain didn't automatically detect can get your entire customer base simultaneously rooted. And array out-of-bounds errors have been a solved problem in some languages since 1970.

In 2011, insisting on using a language, or any other tool, which doesn't solve a forty-one year old already solved problem is simply an error.

restrict even the owner of a machine from installing applications not included in the repository

Who said anything about doing that?

The article states that the only way to install a Metro style application will be through Microsoft's app store. From the article:

As you would expect, Microsoft will sell both the new Metro apps and conventional desktop software via its own App Store. Indeed, that will be the only way you can get hold of Metro Style apps.

Like Apple, Microsoft will vet and digitally sign Metro apps before they appear on the Store.

In the past, some platform manufacturers have implemented a policy that "the only way you can get hold of" an app is through a specific app store, and they've implemented by not allowing end users to self-sign applications for installation.

DeathFromSomewhere wrote:

$99 per year for access to gcc?

What the fuck are you talking about?

I am aware that Visual Studio Express allows the user to develop classic applications. But will the version of Visual Studio Express made available after the release of Windows 8 allow the user to develop Metro applications? If that were the case, then users could self-compile and -install applications from sources other than the Store, and the article states that like Apple, Microsoft doesn't want that. This is why App Hub (formerly XNA Creators Club) and the iOS developer program have an annual fee.

restrict even the owner of a machine from installing applications not included in the repository

Who said anything about doing that?

$99 per year for access to gcc?

What the fuck are you talking about?

Microsoft has spent more than a decade offering, then deprecating, various incarnations of pseudo-desktop web applications:
- Windows DNA
- ActiveX
- VBScript applications running in Internet Explorer
- No-touch deployment
- Clickonce applications

The result is "web applications" that offer the worst of both worlds: the limitations of web applications, with the platform dependence and deployment complexities of desktop applications. Historically, they only run on one particular version of Internet Explorer (probably 2 or 3 releases old), require a particular version of Java, require administrator access, and need very specific security settings on your browser. These apps run in a browser but don't work with bookmarks, the back button, or right clicking. They are slow because every operation requires contacting a server AND running logic on the client. On top of it, these apps are tough to write: you have to know a server-side language, HTML + CSS + Javascript + Microsoft's DOM, and probably some other language to cover-over the limitations (hence the Java and/or C++/ActiveX part of things).

If Microsoft does this right this time, these apps will be purely HTML5 + Javascript. But then if that is the case... haven't they just invented the web browser? The apps should run on a Mac then too. So what's the point?

Microsoft has figured out correctly is that people like apps that look like appliances. No more having 10 toolbars so everything is one click. People are happy today to hide the powerful features if it makes things approachable and pretty. The ribbon in Microsoft Office is an attempt to compromise here. The Windows 7 UI buries and removes lots of features. This is akin to phones: even the most basic options on my Android phone require digging into menus to get there. They do it for screen real-estate. Apple's solution is simply to remove the advanced features. Microsoft is seeing the way the market is going and is trying to catch-up to it. They probably go that right, but they need to find a way to do it without alienating the power that we have today.

Microsoft has spent more than a decade offering, then deprecating, various incarnations of pseudo-desktop web applications:
- Windows DNA
- ActiveX
- VBScript applications running in Internet Explorer
- No-touch deployment
- Clickonce applications

The result is "web applications" that offer the worst of both worlds: the limitations of web applications, with the platform dependence and deployment complexities of desktop applications. Historically, they only run on one particular version of Internet Explorer (probably 2 or 3 releases old), require a particular version of Java, require administrator access, and need very specific security settings on your browser. These apps run in a browser but don't work with bookmarks, the back button, or right clicking. They are slow because every operation requires contacting a server AND running logic on the client. On top of it, these apps are tough to write: you have to know a server-side language, HTML + CSS + Javascript + Microsoft's DOM, and probably some other language to cover-over the limitations (hence the Java and/or C++/ActiveX part of things).

If Microsoft does this right this time, these apps will be purely HTML5 + Javascript. But then if that is the case... haven't they just invented the web browser? The apps should run on a Mac then too. So what's the point?

Microsoft has figured out correctly is that people like apps that look like appliances. No more having 10 toolbars so everything is one click. People are happy today to hide the powerful features if it makes things approachable and pretty. The ribbon in Microsoft Office is an attempt to compromise here. The Windows 7 UI buries and removes lots of features. This is akin to phones: even the most basic options on my Android phone require digging into menus to get there. They do it for screen real-estate. Apple's solution is simply to remove the advanced features. Microsoft is seeing the way the market is going and is trying to catch-up to it. They probably go that right, but they need to find a way to do it without alienating the power that we have today.

The trend seems to start at Windows 95... 3.11 for Workgroups is okay if you need something that will run on an 80386SX @ 12MHz. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126746 seems to indicate that 3.1 will run on an 80286 never seen that done, but it just seems like it would be intensely frustrating...

The reason for [massive memory use when opening windows] was a limitation of GDI at the time, it was really the only workaround, it used more RAM but it meant less CPU usage if you had aero turned on. I wouldn't really call it 'bloat', it was a necessary use of system resources, which - if you had low system specs - you avoided by just turning it off.

If by "limitation of GDI at the time" you mean, "performance regression with Windows Vista and no other version of Windows", then I'd agree. Bear in mind, this problem is fixed in Windows 7. It's true that Windows 7 requires more CPU in some circumstances but you're not seriously considering that that's a trade that the Vista team made deliberately and thought was good, are you? Windows systems running GDI are commonly memory/IO bound (if you're running directx you're likely running games and GPU/CPU are more important). Making basic operations such as opening a window consume massively more memory than previously is a serious performance regression and exactly the kind of thing people refer to as 'bloat'. See point 2 here for a summary of how it's fixed in Windows 7: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx

This is true, it's using your system memory as a cache, they did get a little overzealous on their use of system memory for this purpose, not poor programming just a questionable design choice since if you had a decent amount of ram this was beneficial, if you had too little ram then obviously it's going to impact performance hence the reason they pushed ReadyBoost.

No, you're confusing SuperFetch (a good thing) with running a bunch of services that are rarely needed (a bad thing, especially during startup). Windows 7 still has SuperFetch (which is well behaved and does low priority IO) but it just doesn't run all those services on startup. Running a bunch of stuff you don't need is the very definition of bloat. To read up on Windows 7's fix, "service trigger events", see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd405513(v=vs.85).aspx .

"14 Mbps ought to be good enough for anybody."

I know about msconfig, and I would recommend Soluto above it for 50% of the cases, and sysinternals Autoruns for the other 50% (especially since it can be downloaded straight from http://live.sysinternals.com/

MSConfig is a hammer that breaks a lot of things, and shouldnt be used the way people are using it. It is possible to leave a computer unbootable by disabling services that AV relies upon for example-- see my post above.

And MSConfig does NOTHING to tell you how long each service takes to load, which is what bootvis and soluto both do. For example, I had Eraser on my laptop, and found out that that service takes 15 seconds to load. I sort of wanted the program, but not that badly, so out it went. MSConfig wouldnt have given me that info, and I dont think bootvis works on Win7 x64.

If you want a replacement for msconfig, you should REALLY be looking at sysinternals Autoruns, which does way way more than MSConfig (drivers, winsock stack, services, startup list, codecs, etc).

Honestly, MSConfig is a poor piece of software to use in the way you are using it for a large number of reasons:
    * It will pop up a scary warning the next time that user boots
    * A lot of MS Articles ask you to switch to "minimal startup" for testing, and then set it back to normal. Any user following these instructions would undo all your work.
    * It assumes that there are no vital 3rd party dependencies that will be broken by "disable all"
    * It doesnt give you any way to check the digital signature on windows programs, which might lead to you leaving "Svchost.exe" (an infected copy) enabled
    * And contrary to your belief, a lot of the time, no, it doesnt do the job, and will easily miss the commonest of viruses.

Its utility is mainly in troubleshooting, and not much else.

they were the one major player unable to handle a necessary security task.

I don't know "unable" means in your world, but it my world, it means "not able to be done." Were they slower than others? Yes. Were they the last one? No. Depending on who you consider "a major player", they weren't the last. If you deal with servers, Redhat and Ubuntu also patched the same day. MS only patched 3 days before Apple.

• Ubuntu: September 9, 2011
• Apple OS X: September 9, 2011
• Redhat: September 9, 2011
• FreeBSD: September 6, 2011
• MS: September 6, 2011
• Google Chrome: September 5, 2011
• OpenBSD: August 31, 2011
• Mozilla: August 31, 2011
• Debian: August 31, 2011
• Android: no date
• iOS: no date
• WP7: no date
• BBM: no date

You are assuming that these things do not exist for terminal based editors. They do. It is all about customizing your environment. No, I wouldn't want to use plain old vi for anything other than a quick job, but I get all those things you listed with vim (for example) and I get what vi offers and I don't have to wait for any three rings circuses whatsoever. ;)

You front loaded part of my three-ring-circus-waiting-time with your customization efforts. I may have to wait 30 seconds for the splash screen and the IDE to load up the project, but you just acknowledged that you also spend some amount of time every time you begin developing in a new environment. (And I'd maintain that the graphical presentation of source or program architecture is also valuable, but again not everyone needs or wants it.)

Show me an IDE with a Turing complete context menu and I'll readily concede that point. :)

Here's one way to do it in Eclipse and here's one way in Visual Studio 2005. I've used it to create a plugin that automates the generation of CppUnit unit test skeletons. I've also created a plugin for VS6 (a very long time ago) that automated the maintenance of a project by watching a folder for new source code modules, automatically adding them into the project, and then building with them. I suppose if someone cared hard enough, they could implement ed in a context menu accessible dialog box, using ! as the menu accelerator key. That actually sounds kind of cool...hmm... anyway, it sounds better than Clippy for vi. :-) Anyway, the point is that both text and IDE environments are endlessly customizable.

And I totally get your point that some people prefer IDEs. The problem I have is the attitude those people often display is that IDEs are only for beginners or bad coders, which simply is not true. And many of them do it very arrogantly, which is quite off-putting.

I think the bad rep that IDEs get is that people don't see it as the difference between a performance enhancing tool and training wheels. Look at it with different users, though, and it becomes obvious why there can be differences of opinion.

• Do the productivity gains given by an IDE enable a bad coder to write more bad code? Yes, and I think that is heavily related to the biases against IDEs. It enables stupid people to make more mistakes per hour. But that's no different than a stupid person buying a fast car. It doesn't make fast cars bad, it just means stupid people can go faster.
• Will an IDE make a bad coder better? No, although that's a mistaken impression a lot of managers have because the bad coders are more productive. Productive != better.
• Will an IDE help a bad coder become better? (Note the distinction between the previous question.) I believe the complexity of the tools may often hinder learning by hiding important foundational knowledge inside "wizards" or "code generators." But because those tools make a good programmer more productive, they shouldn't be eliminated. Someone will become better only if they're personally interested in improving their skills, but that has nothing to do with their choice of tools.
• Will an IDE make a good coder worse? Absolutely not. There's a learning curve, of course, but anyone able to master programming will have no problem picking up such a tool.
• Will an IDE make a good coder better? I have seen that it can, especially when you're dealing with more than one programmer on a project. Plug in a real-time static code analyzer, and they find mistakes fast. Plug in an architecture visualizer, and they can instantly see if someone is violating layer encapsulation. Plug in a code generator and you el

Has Microsoft solved the problem that it's really friggin hard to separate user data and system data on a Windows Vista/7 installation? This is the best way I found to do it. On XP it was much easier to do and possible without a reinstallation.

I might be overseeing something, but given the popularity of SSD, it should be two clicks on a live system to do this and a (normal, GUI selectable) option during a normal install.

The tool you want to trouble shoot this is xperf (specifically xbootmgr.exe) from the Windows Performance Toolkit. That is part of the Windows SDK. This tool will give you a look into exactly what is going on during boot and what is hogging disk, CPU, and everything. It is very detailed. Our Windows 7 boot is about 35 seconds from "starting Windows" to being at the desktop with the network icon showing an internet connection and being usable. xperf helped us to get to that state. The Windows SDK is here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=8279. With their web installer you can select the components you want and not have to download the rest - for xperf you just need the "Windows Performance Toolkit".

Yeah, it looks like they do. They got their virtual machine patents from Sun, which were used successfully by Sun to extort $900 million from Microsoft (not that I care about Microsoft losing money). There's one link, do a search for 'Sun Microsoft $900 million' to see a bunch of stories. Not to be confused with the earlier Java lawsuits, those patents covered virtual machines, which Microsoft needed for C# (or CLI). It could be Microsoft settled too early, but I'm guessing they thought about it very hard before giving up $900 million.

And now Oracle owns those virtual machine patents. Nota bene they are virtual machine patents, so Google will have to pay them even if they switched to Ruby or something, as long as they are using optimizations covered by those patents.

In wired Ethernet topologies, ...

M point is that while they cite "allow a doubling of network traffic", the reality is even better than that. Full duplex gets you more than double throughput, as well as improved jitter/latency since you no longer have to randomly re-transmit frames (or randomly wait to transmit, as with WiFi collision avoidance).

Mmmm... yes and no. Wired full-duplex is still easier - it's still point-to-point. When switching to wireless and have more than two transmission nodes, one still need to establish a medium access control. See here some proposals (I know, I know - came as a surprise to me as well to see MS is involved in some actual scientific research and not only in taking 5 years+ to release a crappy OS, "getting the facts" or writing Halloween memos).

and thus, the circle is complete...

So:
1. Rice University had (and has) WARP - a sophisticated research platform of software controlled radios, build from the ground up using open source software
2. Stanford has the idea of using self-interference and demoes single-channel full-duplex wireless in 2010 at mobicon
3. Microsoft Research UK had some other ideas (May 2011) on self-interference and meshing for medium access control (check the citations: Stanford is mentioned)
4. Rice University takes a step further and establishes a math model and (this is the actual novelty) a way of doing it using an unexpensive setup.

Can't stop but wonder: in all the above there's no patent? Is it the promotion of "the progress of science and useful arts" possible outside "securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right"? And this is not communism?

Real-time Full-duplex MAC

We’ve implemented a real-time full-duplex MAC for an access point based network. The MAC design is based on the Contraflow generalized full-duplex MAC from Microsoft Research. The design is implemented and tested using the WARP software radio platform from Rice University. Using this MAC, we’ve shown in experiments with real nodes that full-duplex can reduce hidden terminal losses by up to 88% and significantly improve fairness in WLAN based networks.

and thus, the circle is complete...

OMFG. You got modded "informative" for saying SSDs help binary files perform faster.

Files that get read from disk - ONCE.

After that, they're in RAM.

Whoever modded you "Informative" is, umm, ignorant.

It's a little thing called VM and swap files (or pagefile.sys). SSDs make paging in and out much, much faster which makes programs "run" "faster".