If I was them (and I'm a nice person, so this comment is written purely as an exercise in evil:) I'd do it like they so the search provider option:
Choose your internet browser:
1. Microsoft Internet Explorer, optimised for Windows 7 (tm). Microsoft recommends IE8 for super-fast and safe internet surfing.
2. A different browser. Note that Microsoft corporation has no control over other browser's safety, speed or features. Packages listed may not be as suitable for Windows 7 (tm) as other browsers, users may use one of these at their own risk.
option 2 takes you to a list of alternatives, with another option to go with IE8 (of course)
I think the success of C# is part of why these things are being considered.
No, the success of C# is because Microsoft has pretty much said that if you want to do any development for Windows, you'll have to use a.NET language - and C# is the only one that's feasible for most. That it looks like c++ with its {} makes it 'cool' enough for old cpp/java devs to try it.
Imagine the situation if MS had released VB.NET and, say Pascal.NET and ignored Java.NET (ie C#). I think things would be no different, only the more hard-core devs would be grumblng about having to use them.
Don't forget that C# started out without lambdas and suchlike,.NET 2.0 was still just as successful for Windows developers.
includes are like an interface, the menu not the meal, so you know what you'll be getting when you use that class.
'modern' languages do away with this and effectively fold the header into the source, but then they also ship with features like reflection that allow you to access the stuff you'd normally put in the header file anyway.
So it comes down to : do you as a dev write a header, which is efficient for the compiler to use (subject to complexity of the language!), or do you allow the compiler to generate it for other tools to display to the user. Its a classic trade-off between 5 minutes of developer time v no developer time but added compiler resource, binary and tool usage.
Personally, I prefer to spend the few moments it takes, but then I was never so lazy at doing my coding 'right' to care about a couple extra minutes of my time.
its not quite like that - we had a surprise inspection from Microsoft.. well, they surprised us by telling us we'd be inspected, and they kindly offered to come and do an analysis of our software licences to see which ones we'd accidentally forgotten to buy.
Unfortunately, the analysis required the use of a 3rd party who were very happy to charge us only a reasonable sum to let us run a licence-checker tool on every workstation and send the results to them where they'd put it in excel and tell us how many licences we should have bought, leaving us to compare that to the number we had bought.
so in effect, we had to pay to inspect ourselves. And we still owe MS a bundle!
but my objects use more than 2k for their vtable entries, memory guard blocks and garbage collector references before I even start writing any of my code, you insensitive clod!
Oh god, I have to second that - Sharepoint is abysmally unproductive. From a technical point of view that you can put documents online and access them through a web browser, it works. However, for some reason, no sharepoint server has ever made it easy to find or access those documents, they always end up in a sprawl of links.
I wouldn't start top describe the 'addon' functionality as I doubt anyone really uses it.
of course that's until they get it and realise the UI isn't quite as good as promised. I installed the RC build recently on a PC I was reinstalling anyway and gave it a couple of days running.
The new task bar is appalling.
I like the ability to move the iconised windows around, but - I hate the grouping so I turned it off. Guess what, all the windows still appeared grouped when you hovered over them, and they didn't helpfully show the titles - I had 3 firefox windows open, it was difficult to tell them apart. This was a big downgrade to Vista's 'quite nice' preview-on-hover. Also MSN Messenger (we use it at work) refused to minimise to the tray, so it stayed on the taskbar all the time.
I can see little things like this giving W7 a much poorer reception than Vista if they're still in the final build. After all, no-one really cares that it is a bit faster if they've bought it on a new PC - they'll think the speed increase is due to the better hardware. But good UI is really important.
Is the problem down to the Boehm GC or is it a more fundamental problem - I've seen too many.NET apps leak memory (some dramatically), I feel its a problem with.NET: not with the GC or technical issues but with human ones.
Its easy to write a.NET application, but its harder to write a good, stable one. The coder is told "don't worry, the GC will take care of that", and so the coder doesn't worry about memory (not that they have much choice in the matter) but they end up getting object lifetime leaks (same difference as memory leaks as far as I'm concerned) because they do not track their object usage and assume they will be cleaned up.
Maybe one day this issue will be a 'known common problem' with.NET that coders will be taught: although you have a GC, you still need to take full control of all your memory allocations. Then MS will replace it with something else.
yes, I know Silverlight is a lot like WPF - 'a lot' is not the same as 'exactly the same'. When you've used software for as long as I have you realise the small differences are the biggest bitches. My point is that if you can get Silverlight going on the desktop to do everything WPF does, why bother with WPF anymore. Remove all the niggles before you find them.
Maybe MS will improve one over the other as time goes by, if Silverlight does all WPF does, why would I want to waste my time trying to maintain 2 framework GUI apps when I can do just 1.
Now, if Silverlight can't do some of the things a WPF app can (even when run in a local, secure, desktop environment) then I'm not sure I need Silverlight - Flash is much more widespread, so if I have to maintain 2 apps - one for desktop, one for web, I should use Flash for the web instead. a de-facto standard always wins, Microsoft knows that!
I'm looking forward to VS2010, I want to see if it really is the massive resource hog its been reported to be so far.
I was just thinking that.... if Silverlight is so great for web and desktop applications, why would anyone bother with WPF? In fact, does this mean that WPF is now another obsolete Microsoft technology? I wonder if anyone who has retooled their business applications to WPF will now be a bit pissed.
"cut your teeth" is a general expression used to refer to your initial experiences with something. Possibly comes from baby's teething (where they cut their teeth on life itself)
for example: I cut my teeth on learning about idioms by using Google.
absolutely, that's why people code in C#. Nothign to do with professionalism, fgood code, efficiency, and al the other bits and pieces that have been forgotten in today's rush for "developer productivity" (at the expense of end-user productivity, of course).
that's why, for example, Tomboy leaks memory like a sieve. Who cares, its fun to code note-let apps in the new language that doesn't have memory leaks anymore.
Or as this blog note says: I have to admit, however, that I admire Jo's sincerity when he makes this point: it's not the users who want it, it's the developers. It can't be denied that.NET was indeed instrumental in the development of Gnote
lol, well I was trying to be funny, but I guess I shouldn't do that in between the bug reports I should have been working on.
Still, convicted monopolist is a daming inditement. Tbe world is always a better place with competition - that's what our free-market, capitalist society is built upon. Monopolys subvert that for their own benefit, not ours.
Everyone else *should* give a damn. That's the whole point.
Its more telling to see what's being sold in between the list you gave (Win7 top seller... must be pre-orders)
#4 Quickbooks pro. And to think MS killed Money off to give them this market all to themselves. That's not the Microsoft I know!
#6 Norton Internet security. OK, now I know the technical understanding of the people buying things off this list and I've lost all respect for them.
#7 Adobe Photoshop elements. Do people *need* to put their neighbour's head on porn starlets?
#8,#9 Norton security things again. Crickey, well at least people are trying to stop giving their CC details to the botnets.
#10. Quicken Willmaker Plus. Hope I die before I upgrade to Vista?
Yes, its not surprising that most of the software in the list are products from a convicted monopolist for their operating system. In a perfect world they'd stick to selling the OS, and let other companies develop productivity software, but not Microsoft - they have to supply you with *everything*. I'm only surprised that there is products in that list that isn't sold by MS, but I understand they are coming out with a new AV product to kills off Norton soon.
Nobody expects Windows to significantly lose market share overnight, but its the trend that matters. If Windows starts to lose the 'must-have', 'only-option' mindset from the ordinary home and business user (because a credible alternative appears) then you can expect that market share to disappear faster than IE when Firefox arrived. Of course, we just need an alternative that's as credible in the OS marketplace as Firefox was in the browser one.
You are kidding (or are a kid who's never used DOS, Windows 3.1, Win95/98/Me). Windows used to crash continually, it was such a joke. Just like Word which crashed so often they invented the 'autosave' and 'document recovery' options.
I suppose that means Microsoft has innovated something new to the industry:)
Windows 7 is pretty much Vista with a few more unnecessary UI changes (open control panel and feel the corporate helpdesk's pain), and a load of slow, crufty code taken out to make it a bit more efficient, and less resource hungry. There's very little you can consider 'innovatingly new'.
I can see where you're coming from - that the 'standard' of Windows was required in order to move the business world of desktop computing forward to the point where it is today. Fair enough on that, I won't argue.
I will argue that Microsoft has been a force for good in the world past the point where Windows seemed to have a monopoly. The browser wars, bad. Office, bad (yes, there was Wordperfect and Lotus 123 well before Word and Excel came along and was 'aggressively' marketed and enforced on us by using Windows as leverage to gain customers), and all the others - I'd be here all day typing if I had to list every dodgy practice Microsoft has done.
In short then, MS was good for us in the beginning, once it started to get big I think it should have come to the attention of the authorities (oh it did!) and be broken up into NanoSofts (well, they had the chance) which would have continued the benefits of ubiquitous desktop computing without most of the predatory and abusive business practices the big MS engaged in.
(as for Grandma, if she just wants her webcam to 'just work', she will be disappointed when she installs Vista and finds that drivers are no longer available for that model - unless she wants to spend $$$ on a brand new one. Or install modern Linux which does just work with more hardware than Windows nowadays!)
PS. I started computing with an Acorn Atom, moved to an Amstrad than an Amiga while I used the mainframe and Sun Unix workstations at university. PCs running Windows in those days were considered toys. It was NT4 that made the big difference, before that, Windows was a joke.
as its Google, and they want to reuse their apps on Chrome, this new windowing app will be heavily based around javascript and html. I doubt it'll be 3d opengl windows, or anything like the old desktop system, instead I think it'll be more like each window is a cut-down browser, one without bookmarks and tabs and so on. They'll have to create a new navigation system (but I imagine bookmarks will feature in there), and you'll be able to dock and stack windows (which may appear with tabs on the top)
They'll still need a lightweight OS to display those 'browser' windows, and X is good enough for the task. If they want to improve it with a framebuffer approache, then that's fine too - as a developer for this new platform, you'll be writing HTML for the gadgets and putting 'code' in java or javascript applets. I hope there will be a native application API (ie C/C++ based applications that can be invoked from the "browser" directly), but if its got any Android heritage, such integration will be limited.
I can't see them creating a cut-down Linux distro for netbooks. Not when they want their apps running on the netbook to work on the internet in Chrome too.
one man's 'clunky' interface is another man's 'horrible, broken, unmaintainable, must-be-rewritten-from-scratch' interface. The reality is that its almost always good enough for its purpose assuming you are prepared to work with it and not assume that everything needs to be 'fixed' by changing them to your preferred programming model.
Its not just that its 'promised' to be added to the Community Promise, its only the ECMA 334 and 335 standards that will be added (possibly).
According to TFA:
ECMA 334 specifies the form and establishes the interpretation of programs written in the C# programming language, while the ECMA 335 standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consideration the unique characteristics of those environments.
however.. later on, he says about Mono:
Astute readers will point out that Mono contains much more than the ECMA standards, and they will be correct.
In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others.
So really, even if MS adds the 2 standards to their Community Promise, that still doesn't mean you get anything useful - if you write a simple app that does nothing, you're fine. If you want DB access, or web serving, or a GUI.. you're still in the same problem as before.
Replacing a $0.25 bulb with a $5 bulb is not a good use of government power. People can do that on their own, if it suits them.
no they can't - no-one in their right mind would buy a roughly equivalent 25c bulb for $5, and as a result, the manufacturers would not even bother trying to make and sell them. Net result: 25c bulbs are the only option.
Sometimes you need some external stimulus to provoke a change in a stable environment, like sticking your finger in still water.
Similarly, saying "the market will provide more power stations", well yes it will - eventually, in the meantime while the market is getting to the point where more power is required, you're suffering brownouts. Besides, it is often in the market's interest to let you suffer like that as they you will pay more.
Sometimes you need more forward planning and organisation than market forces allow.
These 2 factors are why we need and have governments, if only life was as simple as you think, we'd be living in a utopia.
and don't forget the platform SDK (and all the other SDKs) that you should install, that most devs don't because they think what comes with Visual Studio is everything there is.
no, it wouldn't be dissimilar to a java stack on top of Solaris. Unfortunately, they already tried to solve the problem the same way an enterprise Java app would - by throwing lots more servers at it. The run the whole thing on 100 HP Proliants!
But otherwise, yes, a realtime OS wouldn't necessarily be the correct solution, but on the other hand - who said it had to be cluster? A group of RTOS servers in a load balanced scenario with shared-nothing data. As the servers are spread over London, a cluster wouldn't handle it, you'd need some direct connectivity and an architecture that could cope with any server or group of servers dying at any time, without downtime or pauses - clusters don't ten to do that, they pause a little while they reconfigure the system. So considering the current system isn;t a traditional cluster, there's no reason why a RTOS couldn't be employed.
Slashdot Mirror
If I was them (and I'm a nice person, so this comment is written purely as an exercise in evil :) I'd do it like they so the search provider option:
Choose your internet browser:
1. Microsoft Internet Explorer, optimised for Windows 7 (tm). Microsoft recommends IE8 for super-fast and safe internet surfing.
2. A different browser. Note that Microsoft corporation has no control over other browser's safety, speed or features. Packages listed may not be as suitable for Windows 7 (tm) as other browsers, users may use one of these at their own risk.
option 2 takes you to a list of alternatives, with another option to go with IE8 (of course)
I think the success of C# is part of why these things are being considered.
No, the success of C# is because Microsoft has pretty much said that if you want to do any development for Windows, you'll have to use a .NET language - and C# is the only one that's feasible for most. That it looks like c++ with its {} makes it 'cool' enough for old cpp/java devs to try it.
Imagine the situation if MS had released VB.NET and, say Pascal.NET and ignored Java.NET (ie C#). I think things would be no different, only the more hard-core devs would be grumblng about having to use them.
Don't forget that C# started out without lambdas and suchlike, .NET 2.0 was still just as successful for Windows developers.
I only count 1 answer, and 4 comments.
includes are like an interface, the menu not the meal, so you know what you'll be getting when you use that class.
'modern' languages do away with this and effectively fold the header into the source, but then they also ship with features like reflection that allow you to access the stuff you'd normally put in the header file anyway.
So it comes down to : do you as a dev write a header, which is efficient for the compiler to use (subject to complexity of the language!), or do you allow the compiler to generate it for other tools to display to the user. Its a classic trade-off between 5 minutes of developer time v no developer time but added compiler resource, binary and tool usage.
Personally, I prefer to spend the few moments it takes, but then I was never so lazy at doing my coding 'right' to care about a couple extra minutes of my time.
its not quite like that - we had a surprise inspection from Microsoft.. well, they surprised us by telling us we'd be inspected, and they kindly offered to come and do an analysis of our software licences to see which ones we'd accidentally forgotten to buy.
Unfortunately, the analysis required the use of a 3rd party who were very happy to charge us only a reasonable sum to let us run a licence-checker tool on every workstation and send the results to them where they'd put it in excel and tell us how many licences we should have bought, leaving us to compare that to the number we had bought.
so in effect, we had to pay to inspect ourselves. And we still owe MS a bundle!
but my objects use more than 2k for their vtable entries, memory guard blocks and garbage collector references before I even start writing any of my code, you insensitive clod!
Oh god, I have to second that - Sharepoint is abysmally unproductive. From a technical point of view that you can put documents online and access them through a web browser, it works. However, for some reason, no sharepoint server has ever made it easy to find or access those documents, they always end up in a sprawl of links.
I wouldn't start top describe the 'addon' functionality as I doubt anyone really uses it.
those companies (I know one) are upgrading to XP!
of course that's until they get it and realise the UI isn't quite as good as promised. I installed the RC build recently on a PC I was reinstalling anyway and gave it a couple of days running.
The new task bar is appalling.
I like the ability to move the iconised windows around, but - I hate the grouping so I turned it off. Guess what, all the windows still appeared grouped when you hovered over them, and they didn't helpfully show the titles - I had 3 firefox windows open, it was difficult to tell them apart. This was a big downgrade to Vista's 'quite nice' preview-on-hover. Also MSN Messenger (we use it at work) refused to minimise to the tray, so it stayed on the taskbar all the time.
I can see little things like this giving W7 a much poorer reception than Vista if they're still in the final build. After all, no-one really cares that it is a bit faster if they've bought it on a new PC - they'll think the speed increase is due to the better hardware. But good UI is really important.
Is the problem down to the Boehm GC or is it a more fundamental problem - I've seen too many .NET apps leak memory (some dramatically), I feel its a problem with .NET: not with the GC or technical issues but with human ones.
Its easy to write a .NET application, but its harder to write a good, stable one. The coder is told "don't worry, the GC will take care of that", and so the coder doesn't worry about memory (not that they have much choice in the matter) but they end up getting object lifetime leaks (same difference as memory leaks as far as I'm concerned) because they do not track their object usage and assume they will be cleaned up.
Maybe one day this issue will be a 'known common problem' with .NET that coders will be taught: although you have a GC, you still need to take full control of all your memory allocations. Then MS will replace it with something else.
yes, I know Silverlight is a lot like WPF - 'a lot' is not the same as 'exactly the same'. When you've used software for as long as I have you realise the small differences are the biggest bitches. My point is that if you can get Silverlight going on the desktop to do everything WPF does, why bother with WPF anymore. Remove all the niggles before you find them.
Maybe MS will improve one over the other as time goes by, if Silverlight does all WPF does, why would I want to waste my time trying to maintain 2 framework GUI apps when I can do just 1.
Now, if Silverlight can't do some of the things a WPF app can (even when run in a local, secure, desktop environment) then I'm not sure I need Silverlight - Flash is much more widespread, so if I have to maintain 2 apps - one for desktop, one for web, I should use Flash for the web instead. a de-facto standard always wins, Microsoft knows that!
I'm looking forward to VS2010, I want to see if it really is the massive resource hog its been reported to be so far.
I was just thinking that.... if Silverlight is so great for web and desktop applications, why would anyone bother with WPF? In fact, does this mean that WPF is now another obsolete Microsoft technology? I wonder if anyone who has retooled their business applications to WPF will now be a bit pissed.
"cut your teeth" is a general expression used to refer to your initial experiences with something. Possibly comes from baby's teething (where they cut their teeth on life itself)
for example: I cut my teeth on learning about idioms by using Google.
Programming is fun
absolutely, that's why people code in C#. Nothign to do with professionalism, fgood code, efficiency, and al the other bits and pieces that have been forgotten in today's rush for "developer productivity" (at the expense of end-user productivity, of course).
that's why, for example, Tomboy leaks memory like a sieve. Who cares, its fun to code note-let apps in the new language that doesn't have memory leaks anymore.
Or as this blog note says: I have to admit, however, that I admire Jo's sincerity when he makes this point: it's not the users who want it, it's the developers. It can't be denied that .NET was indeed instrumental in the development of Gnote
But who cares about the users nowadays?
lol, well I was trying to be funny, but I guess I shouldn't do that in between the bug reports I should have been working on.
Still, convicted monopolist is a daming inditement. Tbe world is always a better place with competition - that's what our free-market, capitalist society is built upon. Monopolys subvert that for their own benefit, not ours.
Everyone else *should* give a damn. That's the whole point.
Its more telling to see what's being sold in between the list you gave (Win7 top seller... must be pre-orders)
#4 Quickbooks pro. And to think MS killed Money off to give them this market all to themselves. That's not the Microsoft I know!
#6 Norton Internet security. OK, now I know the technical understanding of the people buying things off this list and I've lost all respect for them.
#7 Adobe Photoshop elements. Do people *need* to put their neighbour's head on porn starlets?
#8,#9 Norton security things again. Crickey, well at least people are trying to stop giving their CC details to the botnets.
#10. Quicken Willmaker Plus. Hope I die before I upgrade to Vista?
Yes, its not surprising that most of the software in the list are products from a convicted monopolist for their operating system. In a perfect world they'd stick to selling the OS, and let other companies develop productivity software, but not Microsoft - they have to supply you with *everything*. I'm only surprised that there is products in that list that isn't sold by MS, but I understand they are coming out with a new AV product to kills off Norton soon.
Nobody expects Windows to significantly lose market share overnight, but its the trend that matters. If Windows starts to lose the 'must-have', 'only-option' mindset from the ordinary home and business user (because a credible alternative appears) then you can expect that market share to disappear faster than IE when Firefox arrived. Of course, we just need an alternative that's as credible in the OS marketplace as Firefox was in the browser one.
Windows crashing constantly is yet another myth
You are kidding (or are a kid who's never used DOS, Windows 3.1, Win95/98/Me). Windows used to crash continually, it was such a joke. Just like Word which crashed so often they invented the 'autosave' and 'document recovery' options.
I suppose that means Microsoft has innovated something new to the industry :)
Windows 7 is pretty much Vista with a few more unnecessary UI changes (open control panel and feel the corporate helpdesk's pain), and a load of slow, crufty code taken out to make it a bit more efficient, and less resource hungry. There's very little you can consider 'innovatingly new'.
I can see where you're coming from - that the 'standard' of Windows was required in order to move the business world of desktop computing forward to the point where it is today. Fair enough on that, I won't argue.
I will argue that Microsoft has been a force for good in the world past the point where Windows seemed to have a monopoly. The browser wars, bad. Office, bad (yes, there was Wordperfect and Lotus 123 well before Word and Excel came along and was 'aggressively' marketed and enforced on us by using Windows as leverage to gain customers), and all the others - I'd be here all day typing if I had to list every dodgy practice Microsoft has done.
In short then, MS was good for us in the beginning, once it started to get big I think it should have come to the attention of the authorities (oh it did!) and be broken up into NanoSofts (well, they had the chance) which would have continued the benefits of ubiquitous desktop computing without most of the predatory and abusive business practices the big MS engaged in.
(as for Grandma, if she just wants her webcam to 'just work', she will be disappointed when she installs Vista and finds that drivers are no longer available for that model - unless she wants to spend $$$ on a brand new one. Or install modern Linux which does just work with more hardware than Windows nowadays!)
PS. I started computing with an Acorn Atom, moved to an Amstrad than an Amiga while I used the mainframe and Sun Unix workstations at university. PCs running Windows in those days were considered toys. It was NT4 that made the big difference, before that, Windows was a joke.
if our satnav breaks we will use google maps on a smart phone.... in the long run its just no big deal.
I don't know about you, but just talking on your phone whilst driving is considered dangerous.
as its Google, and they want to reuse their apps on Chrome, this new windowing app will be heavily based around javascript and html. I doubt it'll be 3d opengl windows, or anything like the old desktop system, instead I think it'll be more like each window is a cut-down browser, one without bookmarks and tabs and so on. They'll have to create a new navigation system (but I imagine bookmarks will feature in there), and you'll be able to dock and stack windows (which may appear with tabs on the top)
They'll still need a lightweight OS to display those 'browser' windows, and X is good enough for the task. If they want to improve it with a framebuffer approache, then that's fine too - as a developer for this new platform, you'll be writing HTML for the gadgets and putting 'code' in java or javascript applets. I hope there will be a native application API (ie C/C++ based applications that can be invoked from the "browser" directly), but if its got any Android heritage, such integration will be limited.
I can't see them creating a cut-down Linux distro for netbooks. Not when they want their apps running on the netbook to work on the internet in Chrome too.
one man's 'clunky' interface is another man's 'horrible, broken, unmaintainable, must-be-rewritten-from-scratch' interface. The reality is that its almost always good enough for its purpose assuming you are prepared to work with it and not assume that everything needs to be 'fixed' by changing them to your preferred programming model.
Its not just that its 'promised' to be added to the Community Promise, its only the ECMA 334 and 335 standards that will be added (possibly).
According to TFA:
ECMA 334 specifies the form and establishes the interpretation of programs written in the C# programming language, while the ECMA 335 standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consideration the unique characteristics of those environments.
however.. later on, he says about Mono:
Astute readers will point out that Mono contains much more than the ECMA standards, and they will be correct.
In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others.
So really, even if MS adds the 2 standards to their Community Promise, that still doesn't mean you get anything useful - if you write a simple app that does nothing, you're fine. If you want DB access, or web serving, or a GUI.. you're still in the same problem as before.
Replacing a $0.25 bulb with a $5 bulb is not a good use of government power. People can do that on their own, if it suits them.
no they can't - no-one in their right mind would buy a roughly equivalent 25c bulb for $5, and as a result, the manufacturers would not even bother trying to make and sell them. Net result: 25c bulbs are the only option.
Sometimes you need some external stimulus to provoke a change in a stable environment, like sticking your finger in still water.
Similarly, saying "the market will provide more power stations", well yes it will - eventually, in the meantime while the market is getting to the point where more power is required, you're suffering brownouts. Besides, it is often in the market's interest to let you suffer like that as they you will pay more.
Sometimes you need more forward planning and organisation than market forces allow.
These 2 factors are why we need and have governments, if only life was as simple as you think, we'd be living in a utopia.
and don't forget the platform SDK (and all the other SDKs) that you should install, that most devs don't because they think what comes with Visual Studio is everything there is.
no, it wouldn't be dissimilar to a java stack on top of Solaris. Unfortunately, they already tried to solve the problem the same way an enterprise Java app would - by throwing lots more servers at it. The run the whole thing on 100 HP Proliants!
But otherwise, yes, a realtime OS wouldn't necessarily be the correct solution, but on the other hand - who said it had to be cluster? A group of RTOS servers in a load balanced scenario with shared-nothing data. As the servers are spread over London, a cluster wouldn't handle it, you'd need some direct connectivity and an architecture that could cope with any server or group of servers dying at any time, without downtime or pauses - clusters don't ten to do that, they pause a little while they reconfigure the system. So considering the current system isn;t a traditional cluster, there's no reason why a RTOS couldn't be employed.