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They already do everything that you've mentioned.

In specific case of Win8, here is a rather detailed explanation of how it all works, and why.

Thanks for the typical obligatory karma whoring post full of snark.

Meanwhile, they did figure it out to the extent it can be.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/03/21/scaling-to-different-screens.aspx

Meanwhile, Apple has similar issues with their retina display:

http://blog.macsales.com/14111-15-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-lessens-web-experience
http://www.robertotoole.com/2012/06/17/macbook-pro-retina-display/

Meanwhile, let the anti-MS bashfest continue.

I'm amazed VS2012 was released looking like this. Was there really enough positive feedback to justify it? was there a lack of negative feedback?

There were loads of negative feedback once the beta with the new theme was out. E.g. this is still the highest-upvoted user feedback item on UserVoice for VS, and you can also go read the comments to the blog post that announced the changes. What you see in RTM is actually better than what was originally there.

I can assure you that there is also a lot of negative feedback internally, myself included. Several developers have actually posted links to those UV items on their personal blogs to drive votes.

Is the capital letters thing part of Office 2013 too, or is it just VS that's like this?

It's there in the public beta of Office 2013. Whether it sticks for release or not is not for me to say. I would hope they'd learn something from our experience.

It should be noted though that other aspects of their theme are much better, IMO. They also went all in for the flat look, but they didn't convert icons to nearly monochrome - they're flat, but they still use colors, and in more or less the same way they've always been used (e.g. folders are yellow, and save floppy is dark blue). So overall it looks better. Also, for them, the ALL CAPS are used for Ribbon titles, which is not quite the same as main menu - as Ribbon is normally always expanded, and rather heavyweight, those caps don't look overly heavy and imbalancing.

Is there any possibility we can have a poll on whether the person behind this vandalisation of the interface can be taken out the back of your offices and shot too?

The closest you can get to that is voting for those two tickets (colors and caps) on UserVoice. I can tell you that a lot of people are watching those closely and getting regular updates on their status.

I'm amazed VS2012 was released looking like this. Was there really enough positive feedback to justify it? was there a lack of negative feedback?

There were loads of negative feedback once the beta with the new theme was out. E.g. this is still the highest-upvoted user feedback item on UserVoice for VS, and you can also go read the comments to the blog post that announced the changes. What you see in RTM is actually better than what was originally there.

I can assure you that there is also a lot of negative feedback internally, myself included. Several developers have actually posted links to those UV items on their personal blogs to drive votes.

Is the capital letters thing part of Office 2013 too, or is it just VS that's like this?

It's there in the public beta of Office 2013. Whether it sticks for release or not is not for me to say. I would hope they'd learn something from our experience.

It should be noted though that other aspects of their theme are much better, IMO. They also went all in for the flat look, but they didn't convert icons to nearly monochrome - they're flat, but they still use colors, and in more or less the same way they've always been used (e.g. folders are yellow, and save floppy is dark blue). So overall it looks better. Also, for them, the ALL CAPS are used for Ribbon titles, which is not quite the same as main menu - as Ribbon is normally always expanded, and rather heavyweight, those caps don't look overly heavy and imbalancing.

Is there any possibility we can have a poll on whether the person behind this vandalisation of the interface can be taken out the back of your offices and shot too?

The closest you can get to that is voting for those two tickets (colors and caps) on UserVoice. I can tell you that a lot of people are watching those closely and getting regular updates on their status.

VS 2012 is not a Metro app. It's a desktop app that tries to look like Office 2013, and doesn't even do that quite right. None of the things that you're complaining about is Metro-related, anyway.

Some kind people *ahem* have snucked in a registry key to let you turn all caps in menu off. But please also vote here.

You can get VS 2012 colors back (or roll your own theme) with this extension.

Unfortunately, there's no workaround for icons.

I had to do a study at a former employer that was buying 5,000 laptops, and wanted to know if the extra Million or Two was worth it for the Intel SSD's in our thinkpad's.. The short answer, hell yes.. The "faster" ones were even worth it over the slower Samsung drives. (at the time of the T400, about 1/3 the speed, but still much faster than disk)

Did all sorts of boot testing.. and to the actual definition of "started" both the 5400 rpm, 7200rpm, and SSD drives were about the same speed. But none of our users cared about how fast it got to the login prompt. They didn't consider the computer "up" until outlook was open (with many > 2GB OST files), chat program was open, excel, web browser, AV, and TWO monitoring programs (different departments trying to figure out why things were slow.) . this testing got really, really interesting. The no seek time, and massive random IO meant that we went from about 10 Minutes for some users to be completely usable, to under 1:51 seconds. The boot graphs (See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pigscanfly/ for some great info about windows performance and graphing) were amazing with the SSD. Just a straight line maxed out. With a professional company, where the average Bill rate of its staff was something close to $100/hour the payback for the Intel SSD's was about 2 months. Once login happened, the computers were trying to start up so much crap, that the apps were fighting for disk IO with a spindle, even though we hand NCQ on the drives.

Sorry, but at least two of your points are factually incorrect.

* ReFS is lacking a few notable features, including file compression / encryption, sparse files, hard links, extended attributes, disk quotas, and others[1]. You could say that the only notable improvements over NTFS that it has would be much improved resiliency and higher capacity limits. You can't compare this to BrtFS. At all. The two aren't even in the same ballpark. ReFS is there to store millions of large files and managed bad blocks in a smart way without taking the volume offline. It supports little else.
* Dynamic access control can't even be compared to SELinux. SELinux can restrict a program to running from a certain location, it can restrict which ports in the TCP/IP stack it can/can't open, it can restrict which hosts a specific process can talk to, and yes, it can alter the fundamental view of the file system hierarchy based upon access levels granted. Dynamic access control is really just more complexity in the form of an ACL on top of the already present windows file system ACLs, and it impacts nothing outside of files[2]. Now, you can use claims (which dynamic access control is built upon, at least partially) to control other aspects of your environment, but that isn't "dynamic access control" as far as MS is concerned. Further, it really is another layer of complexity -- if your claims server (which is a web server(!)) goes down, you're losing access to stuff (but if you're a decent sized MS shop, this will likely not be an issue, as you're already maintaining decent uptime on your DCs). Then the file system level ACL comes into play again. It's going to be crazy stupid hard to diagnose a claims access issue in a large production environment, no matter what MS has done towards fixing these issues. Somewhat amusingly, dynamic access control isn't supported on ReFS at all [2].

Now normally I'd just trust you that you googled around to find this stuff, but you've got some powershell in your signature, which leads me to believe that you've done a bit more checking than the "stereotypical slashdot linux sysadmin" and this only goes towards scaring me a bit.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx
[2] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831717.aspx

Maybe if I read the Microsoft blog linked from the original Sladot article about this or if I searched for the word "reputation" in the Ars Technica article, however that would involve reading the fine article and nobody on Slashdot does that; so I can't. Sorry. It would be immoral.

Um, check the date on that blog post. March 22nd, 2011.

This was a feature added, by default, to Internet Explorer 9.0. It is a part of the browser. If you are running Windows 7 and have updated to Internet Explorer 9.0 then it is already doing this. All Windows 8 does is have Internet Explorer 10 installed by default.

Yes, this article is the one they should have linked to.

Scroll down to the part labeled "Microsoft SmartScreen for Internet Explorer and now for Windows too."

It seems from the MSDN link this can be avoided by simply not using Internet Explorer, as if you needed another reason not to

This was IE only in Windows 7 with IE9, but it's built into Windows 8 now

and applies to all applications marked as downloads.

So, if you download something from Firefox, then attempt to run it, data about it is sent to Microsoft.

There will be an enterprise version of windows 8. This is soho/home version.

sure there is.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/04/25/deploying-metro-style-apps-to-businesses.aspx

businesses are just going to skip 8 for some time.

2012 jeep review in sweden the vehicle is consistently blowing tyres and nearly rolled over once. Most of the video is trying to figure out why it nearly rolled over once but not on subsequent attempts. But the tyres blowing at 70-80Km/h is uh... bad. Really really bad.

That's the designer/manufacturer/operator's fault. I.e. people.

Bugs fixed in Visual studio 2012 some of this stuff goes back years and has to be compared against the c++ STL precisely because the way it does work, and the way it should work are not the same.

That's the designer/manufacturer/operator's fault. I.e. people.

Don't get me started on years of various nVIDIA and AMD tools not playing nice with OpenGl or Directx.

That's the designer/manufacturer's fault. I.e. people.

Wiki on accidental discharge lists two scenarios, where a weapon is dropped, or when a weapon overheats that it can accidentally fire if it was improperly designed (e.g. a poor choice of materials).

That's the designer/manufacturer/operator's fault. I.e. people.

So yes, cars themselves can cause accidents, guns do kill people, and IDE's can cause bugs in your code.

Hyperbole troll is hyperbolic...

Cars don't cause accidents. Guns don't kill people. IDEs don't write bugs.

if only. Then we'd never have recalls on cars, never have to patch bugs in IDE's and never have never have guns that accidentally discharge.

2012 jeep review in sweden the vehicle is consistently blowing tyres and nearly rolled over once. Most of the video is trying to figure out why it nearly rolled over once but not on subsequent attempts. But the tyres blowing at 70-80Km/h is uh... bad. Really really bad.

Bugs fixed in Visual studio 2012 some of this stuff goes back years and has to be compared against the c++ STL precisely because the way it does work, and the way it should work are not the same.

Don't get me started on years of various nVIDIA and AMD tools not playing nice with OpenGl or Directx.

Wiki on accidental discharge lists two scenarios, where a weapon is dropped, or when a weapon overheats that it can accidentally fire if it was improperly designed (e.g. a poor choice of materials).

So yes, cars themselves can cause accidents, guns do kill people, and IDE's can cause bugs in your code.

Microsoft beat them to it.

If you want to Target XBox Live as a platform from an indie perspective. C# with XNA is really your only option. On the plus side, it's very user friendly and easy to learn. There is also tons of free documentation online for it, with tutorials for just about anything you could want to do. Start at http://create.msdn.com/

I prefer One Note to Evernote. In Windows 7, Handwriting recognition goes far beyond OCR, since it actually looks at the trajectories of the ink as you write and how they connect to further classify your handwriting. You train it before hand by giving it samples. For my handwriting, accuracy was incredible. See this for more information.

So instead of post-processing the notes, I'm tagging them in real time, and One Note looks over them as I write. The benefit was that while studying, I could look up a keyword and get any references to that word across powerpoint slides, audio transcriptions, and my handwritten notes (which I never converted to text by the way).

it's not as entirely about not wanting to integrate with metro, it's with microsoft putting rules on metro app deployments.
you think microsoft is encouraging 3rd party software marketplaces on windows market? hell no. the writing is on the wall that MS wants control and MS is taking steps to having control over what Metro apps you can run.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/04/25/deploying-metro-style-apps-to-businesses.aspx

I agree with a fair bit of that, but you need to get up to speed on modern C++. Try this video, it's not too long but is very good for you.

All native and cloud development is moving towards C++ again, so .NET is left as a desktop development environment.

You've got it about as wrong as possible. Most of new .NET work these days is, in fact, in and around the cloud. Remember Scott Guthrie? He's the lead of Azure platform team now (which pretty much means dev tools). ASP.NET MVC, WebMatrix etc - it's all there.

On the other hand, on the client (yes, including Metro), .NET now has to compete against C+ and HTML5/JS. But no, it's not a "you can, but" kind of thing. In fact, .NET is still the most convenient way to write Metro apps, because it has language level support for task-based asynchrony in C# and VB - and async APIs are very prominent in Metro & WinRT. In C++ and JS, you have to manually chain callbacks, Node.js style. In C# and VB, you write code pretty much as if it was synchronous, with an occasional "await" to obtain the result of a task, and let the compiler transform that to continuation-passing style for you. Much more concise and readable.

The next best thing would be if they made Dolphin look, feel, and behave like Thunar. Maybe better would be to throw Dolphin out the fucking window. The way it displays files and directories sucks shite (and NO, none of the Dolphin view options is worth a wet sack of monkey shit). Say what you will about the Windows Explorer look and feel, but Thunar is the most usable of any of the Linux GUI file managers

That's odd, I run XFCE and pop open Dolphin whenever I want some GUI file managment. 99% of the time, Bash does everything I need. For that 1% of the time left, I'm probably doing something that needs 2 panes. Thunar is so simplistic as to be essentially useless, you might as well use the Windows 3.1 File Manager.

I was a Dolphin skeptic back when they first deprecated Konqueror. But they've made it good and featureful, and took the best from both single pane and orthodox file managers. My only regret is that I have to load KDE libs to use it.

Win 2008 can run headless. Here is now to do it.

The more interesting thing is that Microsoft now requires all server apps be able to run without a GUI. There was also a /. story about it.

BTW, nice 4 digit /. UID. :)

See I know you know better then what you are saying so it makes me wonder why you are deliberately spreading information that is wrong and so easily verifiable as not correct. http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-531T "And you have your choice of world-class development tools and languages. JavaScript, C#, VB, C++, C, HTML, CSS, XAML, all for X86-64 and ARM." "This is an extremely important point: If you go and build your Metro style app in JavaScript and HTML, in C# or in XAML, that app will just run when there's ARM hardware available. So, you donâ(TM)t have to worry about that. Just write your application in HTML5, JavaScript and C# and XAML and your application runs across all the hardware that Windows 8 supports." http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/ssinofsky/2011/09-13BUILD.aspx

Windows 8 on ARM already does no longer have the old UI.

It certainly does. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/09/building-windows-for-the-arm-processor-architecture.aspx

"The availability of the Windows desktop is an important part of WOA. The desktop offers you a familiar place to interact with PCs, particularly files, storage, and networking, as well as a range of peripherals. You can use Windows Explorer, for example, to connect to external storage devices, transfer and manage files from a network share, or use multiple displays, and do all of this with or without an attached keyboard and mouse—your choice. This is all familiar, fast, efficient, and useful. You’ll have access to a deep array of control panel settings to customize and access a finer-grained level of control over your system, should you want to. And if you’ve used the Developer Preview with a touch-capable PC, you know that the desktop user-interface has been refined for touch interaction with improved user-interface affordances."

And by the way, the "old UI" in Windows 8 is crippled enough

How so exactly? If you boot to desktop and install an application launcher of your liking, the only metro aspects you'd ever realistically interact with are the metro search and the charms to access settings and wireless. Other than that, the Windows 7 interface is in tact.

Not for much longer. Microsoft has already removed support for XP from the current version of Visual Studio, just like how they removed W2K support from VS2008.

If by "current version" you mean the most recent released one, that's VS 2010, which runs on XP and lets you target it as well. If you mean the upcoming VS 2012, then by itself it won't even run on Vista, much less XP - Win7 is required. On the other hand, while it can't target XP out of the box for C++, the outcry about that was strong enough that support was re-added, though it will now have to come as a separate download because the decision was reversed so late in the release cycle.

Sure, you can still compile for W2K with VS2005, but for those who want to be completely legal about it, just try buying VS2005 licenses now.

Boxed versions of VS 2005 are still available. More importantly, MSDN subscription includes legal downloads for all Visual Studio versions all the way back to 6.0.

Give us $1 million or WE WILL USE BLOCK CAPS EVERYWHERE.

You think you're just kidding.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-design-with-all-caps.aspx

You're using Windows with four screens? Are you using a different window manager or some additional software to manage windows?

Windows 8 actually has quite significant multi-screen improvements built in, see the blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-windows-8-for-multiple-monitors.aspx

It seems you're under the impression that Windows 8 is only for the full screen metro apps. Here are some points you might be interested in:

1) Everything you did in Windows 7 you can do in Windows 8 in terms of multitasking and multi-window management. Full screen is only a requirement for metro apps. The full desktop is still there in Windows 8.
2) Windows 8 has much better multi-monitor support, so for hardcore multi-taskers, it's a great improvement over Windows 7.
3) The ability to dock applications along side the desktop is a multitasking improvement. You can dock a music player, IM, and presumably as apps are added, things like doc references or Skype.
4) Win+tab allows you to see all open metro apps and switch between them in a flash.

It's not incompatible with Aero Peek and such (obviously, since that's an OS feature), but the look and feel is the same on Win7 and Win8 - and is clearly geared to look more like Win8 (not even what's in RP, but rather the new "glassless" look that'll be there in RTM) - flat and white. Ironically, Office actually goes further by also flattening the icons and making them more abstract; Win8 itself seems to be mostly using the same icons (semi-realistic 3D with glass effect) as Win7, which looks kinda funny on a flat backdrop.

There is a follow-up blog post where Zink backtracks a bit and admits the headers could be forged.

"In comments of various blogs a lot of people have suggested that these headers are spoofed, or there was a botnet connecting to Yahoo Mail from a Windows PC and sent mail that way. Yes, it’s entirely possible that bot on a compromised PC connected to Yahoo Mail, inserted the the message-ID thus overriding Yahoo’s own Message-IDs and added the “Yahoo Mail for Android” tagline at the bottom of the message all in an elaborate deception to make it look like the spam was coming from Android devices."

You conveniently left out that Sophos claims all the evidence they gathered this is indeed Android devices although not provable.

Office was not innovative

I'm half joking here but have you tried automating any other suite as easily, especially for the average office power worker?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tzink/archive/2012/07/03/spam-from-an-android-botnet.aspx

Here's the original blog entry.

There is a follow-up blog post where Zink backtracks a bit and admits the headers could be forged.

"In comments of various blogs a lot of people have suggested that these headers are spoofed, or there was a botnet connecting to Yahoo Mail from a Windows PC and sent mail that way. Yes, it’s entirely possible that bot on a compromised PC connected to Yahoo Mail, inserted the the message-ID thus overriding Yahoo’s own Message-IDs and added the “Yahoo Mail for Android” tagline at the bottom of the message all in an elaborate deception to make it look like the spam was coming from Android devices."

according to that link PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512 is, when implemented correctly; as an example of bad implementation see that microsoft blog post about .NET 2.0 (we are at 4). A good place to start is to understand that jargon is RFC 4868 as it has almost all the links to the pertinent material.

Windows Azure is DOWN AS WE SPEAK: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/03/01/windows-azure-service-disruption-update.aspx ... congrats on paying for your non working OS without any indemnity either.

anything written in WinRT will work on both machines without even the need to recompile..

That's not true (and given that you can write in C++ for WinRT, would be one hell of a trick). You certainly can write a Metro app that's x86-only.

Wrong, you will be able to target them with one project, even if C++.

http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-30-15-metablogapi/0121.image111_5F00_thumb_5F00_604BA47B.png

http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-30-15-metablogapi/2337.image120_5F00_thumb_5F00_38A7B902.png

anything written in WinRT will work on both machines without even the need to recompile..

That's not true (and given that you can write in C++ for WinRT, would be one hell of a trick). You certainly can write a Metro app that's x86-only.

Wrong, you will be able to target them with one project, even if C++.

http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-30-15-metablogapi/0121.image111_5F00_thumb_5F00_604BA47B.png

http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-30-15-metablogapi/2337.image120_5F00_thumb_5F00_38A7B902.png

Please don't do that to lock the screen. It's people like you that abuse rundll32 that cause Microsoft to put in horrible hacks to work around people mismatching the calling convention.

Please don't do that to lock the screen. It's people like you that abuse rundll32 that cause Microsoft to put in horrible hacks to work around people mismatching the calling convention.

I like the advanced taskbar options about moving the icons to the taskbar where the application is open and a few other tidbits.

As for "I can still play my games" -- it is still a beta OS with Beta drivers. So I am happy that the drivers are good enough that my games don't constantly crash.

In addition I like the start screen. I like how you can create and label groups on the start screen, I enjoy live tiles, and I find I am as fast if not faster when using the OS than I am in Windows 7.

I am also a fan of the metro design language -- I am happy to see Aero go and welcome the new flat squared off look.

I have installed the CP and now RP on my Desktop, Laptop, my Wife's Laptop and my mom's. All of us have enjoyed moving to W8. My wife does not like Metro and lives entirely in the desktop with her 4 pinned applications.

My mom on the other hand enjoys the apps and splits time between traditional Desktop IE and new Metro Apps like USA Today.

Check out this video if you have the time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJUqX5avAi0

IE 10 Windows 8 Tip
In Windows 8 go to Desktop.
Load Desktop IE 10 (Desktop IE is basically IE like you use in Windows 7, just IE10).
Hit the Gear in the Top Right Corner
Select Internet Options
Click the Programs Tab
Under "Choose how you open links."
Select "Always in Internet Explorer on the desktop" and check the Checkbox "Open Internet Explorer tiles on the desktop".

Two months old news.

Ok, so let me get this straight, Slashdot finally reports on something within the same day, and it's a British article that's two months late to the argument?
Every complaint about the start screen is in the comments of my link, which is significantly longer than the article.

The "nobody used it" was apparently based on some subset of users that agreed to have their clicking of the OS tracked so MS could decide how to change things. There are plenty of counterarguments on the comments of the real article about how that self-selected demographic is roughly a rounding error in the Windows userbase. It did not deter any of the marketting folk who write the Win 8 blog.

If you have a touch-based UI, it is easy to make that work with a mouse. The opposite it not true; my fingers are too big for tiny icons. I'm glad Microsoft is finally pushing developers to consider that constraint.

Check out Sinofsky's explanations of how Microsoft specifically keep the mouse in mind when designing Windows 8, and the studies and theory supporting the notion that it is better for mouse input than previous versions: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/11/reflecting-on-your-comments-on-the-start-screen.aspx.

I agree that it's still rather far fetched; I was just saying that it's not as complicated as you made it sound initially. HTML5 in Metro was a deliberate bet to get an existing large developer community onboard with minimal need for them to learn anything new, and by letting them easily target Win8 as one of the supported platforms, rather than the only one.

Personally, I don't really see any obvious cases where a Metro app would give any considerable advantage over a web app in a business environment, other than when the device is not "always on" - which these days is vanishingly rare in workplaces, at least for the kinds of devices that'll run Win8. It also supports pinning websites to the Start screen as tiles - much like iOS - but also lets them specify their own tile image, and provide tile notifications (via polling), which for many apps is all they really want to do. And it's still easier than repackaging it as an HTML5 Windows app.

About the only other thing I can think of where you'd want to make it an app is if you need notifications beyond a simple counter on the tile - i.e. pop-ups. Other browsers already offer some form of those, most notably Chrome; if you start adding support for that, it should be trivial to also add support when running as a Metro app.

You didn't discredit him at all because you're just a dumbfuck with a big ego. In fact, your attacks are quite pathetic, and you don't even understand a lot of what the other person is saying because of your self-righteousness.

Oh, I understand what he is saying very well. He is one of "programmers" who only got dumbed-down prescriptive knowledge in his "education". He does not realize that everyone who actually practices programming, got descriptive knowledge, and is capable of operating beyond the stupid rules he believes to be fundamental in computing, or fundamental parts of C++ language.
He (you, actually -- obviously it's the same idiot, or one completely interchangeable with him) berates people for not shitting in a potty, and wandering out of his room, just because those are things he was told not to do.

Others are pointing and laughing.

Who exactly is "pointing and laughing", other than kindergarten kids?

You're just another C moron.

The only people I have heard complaining of this, are 1990's crash-course graduates who believed that they can make BIG MONEY by "studying computers" and ended up being fed an idiotic set of "how-to-fake-it" instructions that have nothing to do with either Computer Science or practical software development. There were hordes of them in 90's when anyone claiming to be able to program, would get a job, and they have spent 2000's picking up each and every fad. The arrival of widespread use of STL caught them at the time when they were abandoning VB, so this is what they sucked up as the fundamental -- the only fundamental -- part of their understanding of C++ and object-oriented programming in general. They were enamoured with each and every ideology that proclaimed itself to be "the right way" to write software -- not because those people could understand the reasons behind but because each such ideology is proclaimed in the same commanding form of rigid set of rules that they are indoctrinated to accept and obey.

Sure, they are still there. The amount of horrible, primitive code that does not do its work and leaks memory when it does not crash, is a proof that they are around. They all went, like sheep, into "managed code", .Net and C# when Microsoft promised it as a panacea, and they are now running back to C++ once same Microsoft made a 180 degree turn, and called Stroustrup to Redmond to announce it (oh wow, I have just checked, your qsort() example was a copypasta from his presentation there).

(I can do it until this article is locked -- I had to deal with you morons for half of my life, and my hatred for people like you is far beyond anything you can ever feel or be motivated to do. So if you are trying to create an impression that your opinion is popular by posting schoolyard insults in large numbers, you are going to lose).

...because it is built on MS Access.

Well, there's your problem right there....why didn't they use a (real) database?

Like Microsoft Excel?

Are you sure it was Microsoft Access the database?
Maybe they used the original Microsoft Access, the serial communication program that failed to compete with Procomm and Qmodem and suchlike back in the late 1980s to early 1990s. It would explain a lot...

Intriguingly, references to the original Microsoft Access have vanished from Wikipedia and from almost everywhere on the web.

"Another problem with the Windows hosts file: if you're running Microsoft Security Essentials, it will view modificaitons to the hosts file as a virus and remove them." - by arbulus (1095967) on Wednesday June 20, @01:17PM (#40387273)

Funny - it doesn't do that here on Windows 7 64-bit, & with the latest update to MS Security Essentials, both the app itself AND its updated data files, daily.

* I wonder WHY that's happening for you...

---

I can, however, tell you 1 thing, for sure/certain, where MS is erring:

The local DNS clientside cache service has to be 'shutdown' with relatively LARGER hosts files...

I've shown + proven other facts about errors in that service, and things MS did to hosts files period, VISTA onwards, here:

All systems (VISTA after 12/09/2008 hotfix "Patch Tuesday" by Microsoft did so and now VISTA &/or Windows Server 2008 will NOT work using 0, but can use 0.0.0.0 for example & Windows 2000 pre Service Pack #1 will do the same - it will not use anything but 127.0.0.1).

REPORTED TO MICROSOFT by APK here -> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/02/25/feedback-and-engineering-windows-7.aspx?CommentPosted=true&PageIndex=3#comments

And here on www.slashdot.org to a Richard Russell who posts as FOREDECKER there (he is a senior VP at Microsoft and leader of the "Windows Client Performance Division" there, or was then, & may have moved to another division)

Yes, and he conceded my points on HOSTS files also:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1467692&cid=30384918

  So, why are 0, &/or 0.0.0.0 faster & better on disk and reads than 127.0.0.1? Well, the first octet(s) IS/ARE 2-7 bytes (16 bits) smaller each entry used is why: COMMON-SENSE & over a large amount of entries this makes for FASTER loadtime from disk into your local Cache and since 0 and perform no "loopback operation" and are essentially analogs to a DROP request vs. 127.0.0.1 doing essentially a DENY request (as in firewalls) and a loopback operation directing back to itself, you have more efficient operations doing 0 or 0.0.0.0 vs. 127.0.0.1, the "loopback adapter" and its address (yes, even on Windows where there is a loopback adapter one may bind to a protocol (which is only a dummy driver for systems that have no NIC in them, see here in that regard ->

http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/john-savills-windows-faqs/what-is-the-microsoft-loopback-adapter-and-why-do-i-need-it-for-sql-server-.aspx

APK

P.S.=> I don't recall "messing with" ANY of MS Security Essentials options either, & simply run it in 'default' settings mode afaik (but, I can check on that, unless YOU can tell me differently in regards to its settings)... apkPageIndex=3#comments

And here on www.slashdot.org to a Richard Russell who posts as FOREDECKER there (he is a senior VP at Microsoft and leader of the "Windows Client Performance Division" there, or was then,

My understanding from that link you posted is that WinRT will NOT run .NET apps.

Your understanding is wrong it seems.

From the article:

When it comes time to upload your app to the store, you can build a “Neutral” package if you only have managed code in your app (C#, VB, JavaScript). This indicates that the package contains code that will run on either x86, x64 or ARM

Obvious by my confusion with the command-line, I wasn't even aware there was an approved specification for .NET's VM (or any Microsoft product, for that matter). But regardless of whether it's standardized for all to use or not, the article focuses on Microsoft.

Ironically, "CIL" is actually the term for .NET bytecode that comes from the Ecma standard. The .NET-specific one - and the one that's used far more often (hence why a lot of people reading your article are likely to be confused) is "MSIL".

But that's hardly of importance. Your article is subpar for several other reasons. To point out a few:

"HTML5 Metro interface" - HTML5 and Metro are orthogonal. You can write Metro apps in HTML5, yes, but you're not required to - .NET managed code, and pure native code calling WinRT directly, are other, first-class alternatives for Metro.

"If Microsoft does not port the .NET runtime to Windows 8 on ARM, allowing apps compiled from C#/VB/C++ to CIL to execute on either supported hardware platform" - a silly question. .NET already is on Windows 8 on ARM. That's what all Metro apps written in managed languages use. If you install VS 2012 RC, you can see over a hundred managed Metro samples...

"trying to shift their developers’ focus to HTML5 Metro apps with Windows Phone compatibility" - there's no compatibility between Windows Phone and Windows 8 so far. Most certainly, HTML5 would be the worst choice there, since there's no good way to write HTML5 apps for Windows Phone 7.x as of today. Whether it'll be different for WP8 is currently unknown.

"Microsoft may have something with making every part of their programming API HTML5-based" - more confusion between Metro and HTML5. Metro APIs are not actually HTML5-based - they are exposed via WinRT (Windows Runtime), which is a standardized native ABI that is further development of COM. This ABI is then projected to a higher-level API that is specific to every target language/framework - there's a high-level native C++ projection known as C++/CX, then there's the .NET projection, and finally the JavaScript projection. The latter is actually the most restricted of the three, though it's partly compensated by intrinsic HTML5 features (like canvas, IndexedDB etc).

"And, of course, Java is long-dead and more than likely will not be ported to the new Windows 8 for ARM OS" - it's not more than likely, it's outright impossible to port Oracle JVM to Win8/ARM. First of all, it does not allow third-party desktop (Win32) apps at all, and JVM is currently decidedly a desktop app. As for Metro, its sandbox (app container) is deliberately designed to restrict the ability to generate code at runtime - in particular, there's no way to allocate a block of memory that has both write and execute permissions, or change them after the fact. This means no JIT (other than the one in .NET and JS). So any Java implementation would have to be either a bytecode interpreter (slow!), or a native compiler, which precludes a straightforward port.

"It is unclear as of now whether genuine native apps written in C++ calling the Win32 API will be supported on Windows 8 for ARM" - it is not at all unclear. If the native app calls a

Microsoft Windows 7 is the same quality as Windows ME, just with a fancier UI, which I don't need anyways.

How the hell did a comment like this get modded Insightful?

Windows Me was a single-user OS with, frankly, no such thing as security. It was the last iteration of the 9x kernel, a system so archaic that it still used DOS as a boot loader and 16-bit device driver compatibility layer.

Windows 7 is the most recent production release of the Windows NT kernel, which effectively reimplemented the Win32 API from scratch in a new, modern OS. The WinNT security model is actually better than that of Unix, but the need for legacy compatibility required pretty much everyone to run as administrator during the Windows XP era, which rendered many of the security improvements null and void. That is why UAC was introduced on Vista; though it had serious flaws at first (multiple clicks required for basic OS functions) it did wave a big red flag in front of developers requiring admin permissions in their software, saying "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG". By the time Windows 7 came around, limited user access was a realistic possibility for most users. Added functionality like protected mode for the browser also made a real difference. These days, exploits are much more likely to come through the Java runtime or through one of Adobe's browser plugins than through a security hole in Windows itself. Things aren't perfect by any means, but no matter what else you might criticize them for, no one can reasonably dispute that Microsoft has gotten a LOT better on system security since the Windows Me era.

The opposite is true, and the specific ratio is about 40:1 reads to writes. The reason is obvious: data is written to the page file in large mostly sequential writes, but read in small chunks as needed. From the horse's mouth:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx