Linux will support RAID - 0, 1, 1+0, etc - Windows 7 only supports RAID 0, and RAID 1 for those who buy Professional or Ultimate, and cannot do RAID 1+0
Do you really want your OS taking on the overhead of RAID? Desktop motherboards with hardware RAID 0/1/0+1 are easy to find and cheap. How many desktop users actually have the four hard drives necessary (at a bare minimum) for 0+1 anyway?
You do want the OS to handle RAID for most modern desktops and servers, excepting specialized RAID hardware. There are a few reasons you want the OS to handle the RAID if you are going to use RAID:
Cards less than $500 often have crappy hardware and will hinder performance. Just because a motherboard has a RAID feature, does not mean that it is any good. Software RAID in modern, multicore machines often has superior performance. RAID hardware is often underpowered unless you spend a significant amount of money. Using a fraction of a core for RAID is hardly noticeable overhead these days.
Motherboard raid, unless a coprocessor and memory is specified (a very rare thing), it is actually going to be software raid, just with the software loaded with the firmware.
Using a form of hardware RAID locks you into that specific card or controller (sometimes you can get away with similar controllers, but they might use slightly different disk signature). Manufactures like this because if a RAID card or controller croaks, you have to often buy a card of motherboard from the same maker as the failing hardware.
Software RAID gives you greater granularity and flexibility to configure your disks. With software RAID, you do not have to use entire disks. You could configure it so that part of your disk is simple, flat storage, part RAID 1, part RAID 0. You can even use disks of differing sizes and use the portion that a hardware RAID would cut off to make all drives in the RAID set the same size.
The failure model for software RAID is different from hardware RAID. One of the most commonly overlooked failures in RAID systems is the RAID card itself. If a RAID card goes toast, it can often take the entire data set with it. Models that support multiple RAID controllers for a single RAID set are more rare and expensive. With software RAID, you can combine different inexpensive controllers, so if one controller fails, you have a possibility of still having an operational data set.
With RAID 5 and 6, there are some additional considerations due to the parity data structure. Because data loss may occur if certain write operations are not completed, many decent RAID cards have a form of battery backup in the case of power failure. In a software RAID, you would want to make sure that the system has an uninterpretable power supply to deal with that risk. A UPS unit is also more general and helps with other data loss factors as well.
Software RAID, because it is more general, often has better real-world testing and reliability. Hardware implementations (especially motherboard implementations) use proprietary implementations that have smaller user bases, so may have more errors.
This isn't the first time Microsoft has done an anti-virus product. I remember using MSAV.EXE for MS-DOS. I wonder if Microsoft just took this out of their digital freezer, updated that code base slightly, and gave it some new chrome?
Microsoft can't even launch an mp3 player that is good, they haven't even bothered launching it in the UK and much of Europe.
(emphasis added)
What do you mean? The ZuneHD is amazing. And with a ZunePass the experience is incomparable.
It looks like you were not paying attention to what the parent actually said. The Zune HD is not available in outside of the States (and it looks like you cannot even get it in Canada), so I do not see how a product you cannot buy is any good.
You might want to look at Cairo. It has a Win32 backend as well as many other platforms. It is written in C and has bindings for C++ and lots of other languages as well.
http://cairographics.org/
Since Microsoft would have to keep supplying patches to XP, there will be no reason to even think about installing Windows 7.
It gets even better. If they ship an XP compatibility layer in 7 it tells everyone that XP apps will be a supported option for the lifetime of Windows 7. And if XP is kept alive in this way, ya you are probably right that patches for XP itself will probably be continued for quite some time, especially since they are going to be selling newly licensed copies at least as late as this Xmas.
If you read the fine-print, they don't need to support Windows XP for the life of Windows 7. Notice that this is not bundled with the OS, but is available as a download for customers of those editions of Windows 7. This means that Microsoft will consider it as a different product, and thus it is reasonable to assume that it will have a different support time schedule than Windows 7 itself.
They are independent software stacks running on the same hardware, so they are running two different kernels. To have only the host OS care about those security problems would mean that the Windows 7 kernel would need to keep tabs on what the Windows XP kernel was doing, which sounds needlessly complicated and would likely have worse overhead than running an anti-virus program in the virtual Windows XP space. Most virus infections attack from an off-disk location and infect from memory first, so by the time it would touch the hard drive, it would be too late to prevent infection.
The firewall issue is similar, but not quite the same. If you wanted to have control over outbound communications, running a firewall in the Windows XP space would be best because the Windows XP instance would have better information about the process requesting outbound communication. If all you care about are incoming connections, then relying on Windows 7's firewall or an external hardware firewall would most likely be sufficient.
The whole approach of having a CAPTCHA that is validated by a computer breaks down at some point. The Turing test is performed by a human, not a computer. With CAPTCHAs, since they are computer-automated, it will always be a cat-and-mouse game between those who design and implement the CAPTCHA problems, and those who work on ways to subvert them.
For a more definitive way to tell automated actions and people apart would be to use people to test them, yet this may be prohibitive in many cases due to the labor costs involved.
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Linux will support RAID - 0, 1, 1+0, etc - Windows 7 only supports RAID 0, and RAID 1 for those who buy Professional or Ultimate, and cannot do RAID 1+0
Do you really want your OS taking on the overhead of RAID? Desktop motherboards with hardware RAID 0/1/0+1 are easy to find and cheap. How many desktop users actually have the four hard drives necessary (at a bare minimum) for 0+1 anyway?
You do want the OS to handle RAID for most modern desktops and servers, excepting specialized RAID hardware. There are a few reasons you want the OS to handle the RAID if you are going to use RAID:
This isn't the first time Microsoft has done an anti-virus product. I remember using MSAV.EXE for MS-DOS. I wonder if Microsoft just took this out of their digital freezer, updated that code base slightly, and gave it some new chrome?
Microsoft can't even launch an mp3 player that is good, they haven't even bothered launching it in the UK and much of Europe.
(emphasis added)
What do you mean? The ZuneHD is amazing. And with a ZunePass the experience is incomparable.
It looks like you were not paying attention to what the parent actually said. The Zune HD is not available in outside of the States (and it looks like you cannot even get it in Canada), so I do not see how a product you cannot buy is any good.
... to discover that?
10/22 = 10 2 2 substract 1 to each number: 9 1 1 ... Maybe a subliminal message?
yeah... should stop working and go back home.
They just wanted to one-up the competition.
You might want to look at Cairo. It has a Win32 backend as well as many other platforms. It is written in C and has bindings for C++ and lots of other languages as well. http://cairographics.org/
If you read the fine-print, they don't need to support Windows XP for the life of Windows 7. Notice that this is not bundled with the OS, but is available as a download for customers of those editions of Windows 7. This means that Microsoft will consider it as a different product, and thus it is reasonable to assume that it will have a different support time schedule than Windows 7 itself.
They are independent software stacks running on the same hardware, so they are running two different kernels. To have only the host OS care about those security problems would mean that the Windows 7 kernel would need to keep tabs on what the Windows XP kernel was doing, which sounds needlessly complicated and would likely have worse overhead than running an anti-virus program in the virtual Windows XP space. Most virus infections attack from an off-disk location and infect from memory first, so by the time it would touch the hard drive, it would be too late to prevent infection.
The firewall issue is similar, but not quite the same. If you wanted to have control over outbound communications, running a firewall in the Windows XP space would be best because the Windows XP instance would have better information about the process requesting outbound communication. If all you care about are incoming connections, then relying on Windows 7's firewall or an external hardware firewall would most likely be sufficient.
Whoever said that Microsoft Bob never had any effect on the world?
The whole approach of having a CAPTCHA that is validated by a computer breaks down at some point. The Turing test is performed by a human, not a computer. With CAPTCHAs, since they are computer-automated, it will always be a cat-and-mouse game between those who design and implement the CAPTCHA problems, and those who work on ways to subvert them.
For a more definitive way to tell automated actions and people apart would be to use people to test them, yet this may be prohibitive in many cases due to the labor costs involved.