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You aren't, it's been done before, as Apple did with Classic. And in fact Microsoft tried it before as well .... when developing Windows 95.

The 16->32 bit transition was rather complicated, and basically meant rewriting large parts of Windows. The whole programming model changed. It seemed like the easiest approach to compatibility would be to run Win3.1 inside a VM, with a "screen in a window" design. This would certainly have been convenient for the engineers.

One small problem. People hated it. Really hated it. They would have to run a mix of old/new apps and they couldn't copy/paste between the apps. They got confused by the window-in-a-window. They couldn't drag and drop. File associations didn't work well. More and more holes had to be poked into the VM to give users the experience they expected, that pretty quickly the VMs became so tightly interlinked that they weren't really a "virtual machine" anymore. But the upgrade experience was great!

You can read more about it here. Anyway, I don't want Windows to run old apps in a VM. You're practically guaranteed to be running an old app at some point, and then you double your overheads. Many good apps aren't being rewritten to new APIs anytime soon - look at the pain Adobe goes through trying to keep up with Apple. Often they are the last by a long way, because it's so painful. Now multiply that by 1000x and you have the situation on Windows.

"P.S. There is a reason why Firefox stomps IE and That's because WE made it good"

I wouldn't have so much of a problem with IE if it were forced to always run in "sandbox mode" (only available in Vista as well) and also conformed to W3C standards.

The fact it's tied in directly to the kernel of every Windows OS otherwise just makes it unusable. Mostly, I just hate it (like most web developers) because I'll write some html or javascript that conforms to standards and works perfect on opera/firefox/safari and then totally breaks in IE, forcing me to spend extra time fixing a broken browser.

I can't upgrade IE.

FWIW You can run IE6 and IE7 on the same machine fairly easily.

• Using a separate binary in Windows
• IEs4Linux using Wine in Linux
• Using VPC or Vmware

Just another statistic: if I have my dates right, it took IE7 2.5 months to reach 100 million users. Firefox is currently at 23 million and given the current rate (1080/min), FF3 on pace to beat that - even without being distributed as part of an OS (granted, IE7 was only part of volume licensing at that date, and not retail sales).

I think they should be jamming GPS in some places. Or more specifically, start jamming some people's GPS. [...] I know one bridge that has been hit 12 times in the last 3 years by trucks that were too tall.

You don't need a GPS jammer.

If your bridge is 8 feet high, you simply need a metal arch 9 feet high, and a 'low bridge' sign suspended from it by two one-foot pieces of chain.

Hence, any driver approaching the bridge who should fail to notice the 'low bridge' sign will have their attention drawn to it when it collides with their vehicle, causing a loud noise but less danger than a vehicle-bridge collision.

Firstly, there are commercial vehicle GPS units that are programmed with heights of bridges and stuff, and routing algorithms that will not only avoid these, but prefer truck routes as well. Just that well, they're more expensive than the $100 TomTom you find on sale. The cost comes from the fact that NavTeq doesn't provide height information, so that has to be gotten from another provider.

As for the "low bridge" thing, turns out drivers ignore them too. Raymond Chen details oen such bridge which had the signs, the low bar, even laser sensors that trigger flashing lights. And people still get stuck.

Another thing that gets insteresting are vehicles that are short enough, but because there's an upslope somewhere in the middle, they get stuck because the clearance decreases due to the upslope (front wheels on slope, while back wheels are on the downslope or level part).

He said it twice, I know some guys who were there.

I've just been pointed by a contact at Microsoft corporation to this blog posting which by not deying the quotation implicitly confirms it. At this point even the big sceptic in me concedes: yes, you're right, the quotation is legitimate.

Even Microsoft can get hit by this.

Here are some of the blogs I read:

Joel on Software
Introversion - an indie games company
The Old New Thing - Raymond Chen of Microsoft
The Daily WTF - how not to code
The Consumerist
FAIL Blog
Not Always Right - for people who [used to] work in retail

News feeds:

IE Blog - for keeping track of what MS is up to on the browser front
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xml

Standards Blog - not as many posts now days, was very important during the height of the ooxml/odf war
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/backend/geeklog.rss

I keep OSNews for completeness, but it is pretty useless - software news
http://osnews.com/files/recent.xml

Anandtech - hardware news and reviews
http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx

Ars Technica - tech news and commentary
http://arstechnica.com/index.rssx

Phoronix - linux graphics news and info
http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php

Linux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/headlines/rss

KDE announcements
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf

Open Source Software Planets:

http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.fedoraproject.org/atom.xml

http://planet.ubuntu.com/rss20.xml

http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml

http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.freedesktop.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml

http://planet.jabber.org/atom.xml

mostly software releases and XEP updates
http://planet.jabber.org/news/atom.xml

http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/atom.xml

environment feeds:

Good Pacific Northwest environmental news
http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/rss

Best environmental news and discussion on the web
http://www.worldchanging.com/index.xml

I keep Treehugger for completeness, but I mark 90% of their posts as read without looking at them.
Really too "light green/consumer green" for me
http://www.treehugger.com/index.xml

other feeds:

Dive into Mark - not what once was, but good enough to keep around
http://diveintomark.org/feed/

Loooong posts on software
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Bruce Scheier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf

The intersection of Science (especially Evolution), Liberalism, Atheism, and Squid
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml

"Your comment has too few characters per line" - what a load of bull. Taco, I know this and the timer are supposed to cut down on spam, but I think they annoy legitimate posters more than they reduce spam. You should really reconsider these "features".

• Sorting it all Out - a Microsoftie who specializes in i18n/l10n. This is always a joy to read, even for those who don't run Windows.
• Sutter's Mill - Anyone doing heavy C++ will know of Herb Sutter. His blog is updated regularly with standards work and other interesting C++-related things.
• MAKE Magazine - Making weird stuff just for the hell of it.
• TEDTalks videos - TED never fails to fascinate me.

Do you really believe that? At what point was Word ever better than Word Perfect? Bonus: why?

Word for Windows or Word for Mac ?

On the PC side, Word 6.0 was the version that really started to hurt Wordperfect (although even the earlier versions had won some praise). As to why, that would depend on the exact customer, but WYSIWYG, ease of use, integration with other applications (ie: Office) and being a Windows application would have been the major drawcards. Also, due to the _massive_ effort Microsoft put into file conversion abilities and a "WP Mode" for Word (same keystrokes, etc), the transition was relatively easy.

When was IE ever better than Netscape? again, why?

From version 4.0 (3.0 was merely "as good"). It was more standards compliant (relatively unimportant), faster and more stable (very important, especially since Navigator 4.0 was both horribly slow and horribly unstable). Which is why it _slaughtered_ Navigator's market share long before its integration into Windows 98 became a factor.

The whole DOS background printing, inDOS flag, and other undocumented features were used my multiplan and word. Windows 2.x has a section in the SDK called "Extensions to Windows for MS Word."

Which, clearly, had nothing to do with Word beating Wordperfect, because that didn't happen until Word 6.0 and Windows 3.x, ca. 1994, whereas the timeframe you're talking about was 5+ years earlier.

This blog post does a fairly good job of highlighting all the stuff Microsoft did right and all the stuff Wordperfect did wrong.

I'd say that iWork isn't a fantastic candidate due more to the fact that it neither supports ODF nor (as far as I know) has any plans to. iWork's formats may bear a superficial resemblance to ODF in that they're based on XML, but they are nevertheless completely proprietary.

Completely proprietary doesn't mean the same thing as somewhat open unless it's also patented.

However, Apple appears to be lying down with the beast, not the 'freetards', in their push for the enterprise. They appear to be 'embracing' at this point, though I think they've already got 'extend' done, so they'll be moving for 'extinguish' post haste.

At least, that's their plan... likely they'll push out some WinCE and RIM while Android comes in and takes over on the carriers people care about.

It depends on what you're doing and with whom you're working. For example, the equation editor changed between 2003 and 2007. If you create a document with equations using the native 2007 editor, there is no way for a 2003 user to edit the document. It's not a matter of the file format, the ability to edit that kind of equation simply doesn't exist in 2003. And similarly, 2003 equations are not readily edited in 2007 unless you find the old editor and make it available. So it's a mess, but upgrading everyone is one way to get compatibility going forward. Keeping everyone in 2003 is another solution. But, I mean, WTF?? Who makes decisions like this? I read the blogs from the Microsoft programmers about the new equation editor and my jaw hit the floor. They're goofing around with half-implementing things (such as equation numbering) that LaTeX nailed 20 years ago. They should be ashamed.

It's as if a kindergartner was in charge of the release process.

What that article sums up better than I can,but I'll try to anyway for the "never RTFL" crowd,is that they do clean code. But if you'll look at the comments nearly all the ugliness comes from backwards compatibility. If I had to guess I'd say there is just too much legacy crap that should have been VM'd left floating in the system folder. I do remember reading an article where Allchin himself spent two weeks cooking up a VERY ugly hack involving memory pointers just so that Sim City would run in Win95,because apparently it exploited a bug in the DOS memory subsystem.

And while IMHO I agreed with the backwards compatibility above all mantra when they were converting the DOS users to Win9x to me it seemed the height of insanity to keep all the kludge in once we passed the 1.0Ghz mark when a VM could have run it without leaving a bunch of garbage behind. I mean honestly who cares if a program written for a 30Mhz 486 can't run at the full speed of your 2.0Ghz CPU? Personally I'd like a VM that I could control the speed of,then I wouldn't need DOSbox and MOSLO for ancient programs. I could go one about how Vista is proof that backwards compatibility plus new technologies ultimately don't mix,but hopefully anyone who wishes to know more will check out the link to the excellent article you found. Thanks again for that BTW. And as always this is my 02c,YMMV

I would recommend against charging for education. Education will simply stick with the (heavily-discounted for education) Microsoft development products if you do.

Visual Studio Professional is free to students if your school participates in MSDNAA (MSDN Academic Alliance). VS2008 is also available on Microsoft's Channel 8 site if your school is a DreamSpark participant OR if you can prove to JourneyEd that you're a student.

For students & teachers, it's even better - the XNA Creators Club subscription is free through their 'DreamSpark' thingee:

https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/Products/XNA_Game_Studio.aspx
(Looks like 'free for 1 year, then $100/year afterwards' is the official line)

It's the actual software they use on CSI. Read more here.

No, this is the software they use on CSI (NY, at least). You can read a few articles about it starting here.

It uses a Windows 2000 kernel, but it doesn't use any of the rest of the Windows 2000 operating system. They implemented an Xbox OS on top of the Win2k kernel that has almost no hardware abstraction because they know what the hardware is going to be and they need the performance. This OS re-implements many Windows APIs so from a programming standpoint they are functionally similar, but it doesn't use the same HAL architecture/code that the desktop and server Windows uses. It mostly doesn't use one at all.

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/17/534421.aspx

If you use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel) on a link it opens it in a new tab - so there one click :) ... Unless you are using a mac in which case you are stuck in the mouse stone age

Please read this article: DOS Ain't Done Till Lotus Won't Run. It does a good job of debunking this myth. So does common sense. Why would Microsoft make an OS where a product used by the lion's share of users won't run anymore?

In fact, until the Vista release, Microsoft has had an insane commitment toward backwards compatibility. Read some of the horror stories from Raymond Chen's blog. You'll hear about how the core Windows 95 code was modified so that a bug in SimCity could be side-stepped. You'll read about how Excel developers purposefully added buggy behavior to Excel so that it would make the same mistakes as Lotus 1-2-3!

Granted, today Microsoft appears to be less in tune with this mantra of backwards compatibility. Joel Spolsky has a passionate diatribe on this matter: How Microsoft Lost the API War. Personally, I think that Microsoft is going to be just fine long term. They make great developer products, have a huge install base, tons of cash in the bank, and some very smart people at key positions in the company.

To address this issue in Windows Vista, we implemented TCP auto-tuning. It enables TCP window scaling by default and automatically tunes the TCP receive window size based on the bandwidth delay product (BDP) and the rate at which the application reads data from the connection. With TCP auto-tuning, we have seen 1000% (10x) throughput improvements in internal testing over underutilized wide-area network links.

"Yes, it's called managed code (Java/.NET)"

Another software solution, which also begs the question, what protects the 'managed code' bits from getting buffer overruns and wouldn't it be simpler to do it in the hardware? Of course the 'managed code' bits are only good in so far as they manage to detect malware all the time. Wouldn't it be simpler to make the kernel immune to these type of bugs as in the SAFECode project. That way when a process fails on garbage collection hooks, exception handling, type safety, array bounds and index checking, nothing happens.

I remember when there was only two kinds of ones and noughts, code and data and as long as you didn't download and run someone elses code you were totally safe. Another question to raise, and I realize I am crying in the wilderness here, is there any other way of achieving Web 2 type functionality without sacrificing security. Like, the current security debacle was caused by bad design decisions made years ago, something that is going to cost and is still not fixed, if at all fixable given the current state of 'innovation'.

It's going to be object-orientation. If you've ever used powershell, that's an example of what they are trying to do. Basically, it's like the UNIX "everything is a file" abstraction (that was taken further in Plan 9) except that they say "Everything is an object". So you have your | pipe command, but instead of piping text (stdout) output you are piping a copy or reference to an object. On the commandline you have basically access to the entire library of DLLs, so you can build a program on the commandline. It's sort of like a commandline version of .NET. Here's a good demo and here's the Powershell Blog.

Of course, there's this thing called Perl.....

Last I read the WinFS project is totally dead. Many pieces of the technology that would have made up WinFS though live on in other areas; parts went into Ado.Net for example.

http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/archive/2006/06/23/644706.aspx

The "It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway" series:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/09/20/5002739.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/08/07/4268706.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/08/592350.aspx

The "It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway" series:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/09/20/5002739.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/08/07/4268706.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/08/592350.aspx

The "It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway" series:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/09/20/5002739.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/08/07/4268706.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/08/592350.aspx

I think you missed my point.

Vista was developed not as an OS to give customers a better experience, but as a DRM platform. This is rather evident in the final product.

The DRM is a large cause of the sluggishness and poor driver stability. Not to mention it drives up the cost of hardware in general due to Microsoft now dictating certain aspects of hardware design to satisfy the DRM requirements. And what about when it breaks?.

I would say it is most relevant to me regardless of use. The OS is full of code designed specifically to deny my use of it. It doesn't matter that I "might never trigger it". What matters is that it's there. It's like having a bucket of acid over my head with the guy holding the chain swearing he won't let it drop unless I misbehave. Where is the sense in me paying a guy to do that?

Misleading. 32 bit Vista can only access 3.1GB without a hardware hack called PAE which will not work with all software.

Part 1. View/query

Roll your own in Silverlight, it will then work in Win/mac/Linux online and offline.

using-the-silverlight-datagrid
http://blogs.msdn.com/scmorris/archive/2008/03/21/using-the-silverlight-datagrid.aspx

You need to dl the free Vs 2008 C# Express to get started. If you later need search/query capability it's simple with LINQ.

Part 2. Automate adding of Wireless Access Point data:

Get the source (C#) of Inssider http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider .. It continously tracks access points around you using native Vista API without interfering your WLAN connection. It has a list of AP's seen in last x minutes, it's trivial to save this data and fetch it to your DataGrid.

If you're never written a line of C# it'll take a while to get the basics, couple days for super smart, couple weeks for retard (me). Very much worth it though and best done with a project you NEED to get done, for the motivation fueling the learning.

http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/rss.xml

"And of course users can set ODF to be the default format if they wish, the same way they would for other Word, Excel or PowerPoint formats."

The "STANDARD USABLE menu system" is overwhemled by Office's features, so they dumped it rather than keep force-feeding things into that already overburdened old UI.

Check out The Story of the Ribbon blog entry by Jensen Harris, which includes presentations in PowerPoint and PDF formats, as well as a 90-minute video on why and how the new UI came to be. It's fascinating, and the best UI presentation I've seen.

If Office 2k7's UI had been produced by some OSS outfit, slashdotters would be praising it to the heights and mocking Microsoft for being stuck behind the times.

While not the be-all-and-end-all of code quality metrics, VS2008/Team Foundation Server has this built-in now so you can stop developers checking in completely junk code if you so wish - http://blogs.msdn.com/fxcop/archive/2007/10/03/new-for-visual-studio-2008-code-metrics.aspx

FxCop too has gone server-side too (for those familiar with .Net development). It takes one experienced dev to customise the rules, and you've got a fairly decent protection scheme against insane code commits.

The OLPC laptop hasn't been selling in anything like the numbers the idealists expected.

The price just keeps edging skyward.

Meanwhile, the designer of OLPC's display has moved on to greener pastures. In a year or two, perhaps three, the XO's hardware will be out-gunned by every budget laptop on the planet.

The Intel Classmate is already in its second generation.

If you are shopping for a dynamo and solar powered radio, your choices now extend far beyond the Freeplay.

Given enough time, the precision manufacturer in Asia will beat you on tech and beat you on price

- even with an OEM Windows install.

It is very, very, hard to stay ahead in this game.

The OEM doesn't have to design for the fantasy of local production and service. The manual assembly and repair of an out-sized clockwork mechanism. That sort of thing.

He can sell his product in any market he chooses to enter. The case doesn't have to lime green.

[and given the trendy designer colors of the latest mass-market Dell laptops, that should stand as the most naive and short-lived anti-theft device ever conceived by the mind of man.]

Most importantly, he doesn't have to conform to a constructivist philosophy of education or the geek's ideology of free and open source.

What place these have in the primary grades, how well they serve the student in the higher grades and in vocational training, are decisions he can leave to the education minister.

Which, from the minister's point of view, is where they belong.

If he wants Squeak, he can have Squeak. If he wants Coding4Fun he can have Coding4Fun. If he has doubts about Sugar, if he thinks that understanding the Windows GUI and MS Office are marketable skills, he has an alternative.

The geek forgets that arguments about lock-in can cut both ways.

Apple's worldwide share of the PC market was 3% in late 2007 - and probably closer to 2% when OSX was being offered to OLPC for free. In the third world the visibility of the Mac can be as close to zero as makes no difference.

The pragmatic choice, if you went for the proprietary OS, was always Windows.

I'm not sure you've been using C# enough. Let me address a couple points:

* Deployment model is similar to basic executables - for each assembly you create a .dll/.exe and deploy it. That doesn't seem that much different from sticking everything into a single .jar (.zip)
* There have been many books\blogs\papers written about how the GC works. There are in general 3 GC options in .Net, with a proper one being picked depending on the application type. (The server GC is a single GC per CPU, with more Gen0, but less Gen2 collections) You can control the GC behavior from within the application somewhat, but it is not as tweakable.
* The libraries might be closed source, but there are two easy ways of getting the source.
  The first option is the .Net Reflector which lets you see implementation of any non-obfuscated .Net assembly
  The second option is the full source released for majority of the libraries.

I am not sure I've seen such large deficiencies in .Net libraries. Can you point some major ones? The rest of the points don't seem to be as applicable now than they used to be a few years back.

See mention of successfully porting Mono to CE here:

"How do I serve webpages from NETCF?"
http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2005/02/how-do-i-serve-webpages-from-netcf.html

"2. [...]
c) Port the ASP.NET MONO implementation (not aware of any *public* project that has achieved it, but there are some guys that have done it (ended up at ~1300KB) and if they want to go public with it I am sure they will - I cannot say anything else, I'm afraid)"

If your app really is that simple and cost is that much of an issue Embedded Visual C++ v3 & 4 are both 100% free. They are also very feature-free & may thus be more to your liking that Visual Studio.

Otherwise the best way to get Visual Studio cheaply is a free copy at a local user group launch event, or the "Heros Happen Here" even that's running now (though that's only Visual Studio Standard Edition): http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere

Depending on your licensing situation, the student Dream Spark program is offering the professional version for free: https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

Also look at the "Spark Your Imagination" program for a great deal on not only Visual Studio, but also Platform Builder & actual hardware: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/embedded/products/spark/

Seriously, WTF?

The most fun software projects I've done have involved reverse engineering. Telling people that they need to have source code stops them learning about debugging, or IDA or Ethereal. They'll just turn into Web 2.0 script monkeys who don't know about things like this.

Which means if they ever get a real job and need to work with third party binary components, they'll be fucking useless when those components don't work 100%.

Bcastner's Broadband/DSL Reports forum thread shares Jane Maliouta's IEBlog about Microsoft Windows XP SP3 and how it'll work with the various released versions of Internet Explorer (v6.0 to 8.0 beta 1).

Also, this is another why you shouldn't upgrade right away, especially major upgrades. SP3 is not urgent. I am just going to wait until MS or something else forces me to upgrade to it. I am fine with SP2 and MS is still supporting it for a while (no idea when it ends).

Already cookin', chief.

"Software-as-a-service," a/k/a/ "software rental model"... translation: you never own anything - you pay and pay and pay and pay and pay, and if you stop paying, they turn off your rig. This is the holy grail for companies that don't really feel like developing new software, or in updating their software with appealing new features that you might actually buy. They'll just sell you the same thing for eternity.

Of course, two other trends will also have to occur:

1) Consumers are used to owning software, and won't voluntarily walk into a rented-software model. So they'll offer rentals as an additional option alongside purchasable software... but the MSRPs for purchasable licenses will slowly climb into the stratosphere, until cheap rentware doesn't look half-bad. Sort of disproves that whole "lipstick on a pig" thing, doesn't it?

2) Want to just run a hacked version, and do away with the messy activation stuff? Nope, sorry, won't run on your new Trusted Computing machine (which is kind of a funny name, since you can't trust it at all to do what you want, isn't it?) It only runs software (and music, and movies, etc.) that's been cryptographically signed with a limited-duration certificate. But you do want to play Halo 4, right?

Folks... I've gotta fess up. After 20 years of running MSIntel systems (dating back to MS-DOS 3.2), I am closer to jumping ship and Ubuntu-ing out than ever before. There are dark clouds on the computing horizon, gentlemen... there's a storm a-brewin', and it's gonna cloudburst probably around 2014 or so. "When did Noah build the ark? Before the rain..."

- David Stein

You should try Windows Server 2008. It is a big more of a memory hog (due to caching) than Windows Server 2003R2, but it is very nice. Try it and see if it does better for you (it did for me). Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/vijaysk/archive/2008/02/11/using-windows-server-2008-as-a-super-desktop-os.aspx

Ahm, this is obviously the same kid that wrote the first part, I'd say he probably never got beyond what they've taught him in college (not much I suppose) - he claims developers are still writing directly to win32 api.

Dunno, but he must be living really, really deep in the cave as developers have been using higher level, object oriented libraries for like a decade and more. I have no idea why this rubbish even gets on the front page (ok I know, it bashes Windows and we like to do that, right comrades?)
Now win32 is exactly the same rubbish as posix, they are both basically just C style functions.. there is no object-oriented design because it was designed long ago, when processor cycles mattered more than today and if they really wanted to waste those cycles they could easily wrote whole damn OS in python. Efficiency, it matters. Now stupid developer (or library writer) will use win32, but a smart developer will rather choose libraries like wxWidgets, MFC or even Java or .NET.

And it's just plain lunacy to say .NET is insufficient. It is the best strongly typed framework, its C# is java 2.0, you can even fuse machine code(x86) into the same binary with C++\CLI and get flexibility and raw power of C++ to do just anything.

He also seems to be very quiet about some of the new stuff in .net languages like linq - or APIs like WPF, which is IMO just the most powerful gui creation library (and by that I mean this - this and this), but unfortuantely only available on windows.
So yeah, I'd say the author has completely no idea what he's talking about..

Check out The Old New Thing. Raymond Chen's posts are a delight to read, if you've ever had to do something with win32 in the past. He's like the Überjanitor of Hell :)

Crazily enough, this has nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with the application developers. The elevation prompt is because the app is trying to write to locations such as the HKLM hive or the Program Files folder. Don't mess with locations that require elevated privileges and you won't need elevated privileges.

This is not accurate. From http://blogs.msdn.com/sajoshi/archive/2007/02/22/uac-five-most-common-install-failure-scenarios-and-workarounds.aspx "In Windows Vista, UAC detects installers and automatically prompts for elevation to admin status. Windows vista heuristically detects updater and un-installation programs too."

"Nothing to do with the OS, everything to do with the application developer." Actually the OS has heuristics to detect that an installation program is being run and when detected it automatically offers to elevate them. See http://blogs.msdn.com/sajoshi/archive/2007/02/22/uac-five-most-common-install-failure-scenarios-and-workarounds.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/08/07/4268706.aspx

The big take away here is that this is not a security hole in any sense of the word. In order for a malware author to exploit this they would first have to get the user to install a service on the machine. If you can get the user to install random software, why bother with any other steps? You've already compromised the machine. I mean if your "security hack" involves the step "Get user to install malicious software", then you don't have a security hole, you have stupid users.

They have years of backward compatibility to support, and they support it as assiduously as Microsoft do. In theory, SunOS 4 binaries will Just Work on Solaris 10, and if they don't it's a reportable bug. (In practice, it's usually because the app was doing something bogus or smart-arsed to tweak the system, but anyway.)

Unlike Microsoft, Sun has a much better platform (Unix) to support backward compatibility on. They also have the "whole widget" advantage for backward compatibility and forward development, of course - but e.g. Fujitsu SPARC boxes running Solaris have the same backward compatibility.