It's a question without a good answer. There doesn't appear to be a "permanently prevent Windows 10 upgrade" switch anywhere.

If someone made a tool that lets me use Windows 10 with security updates but without spying or cloud or unwanted upgrades, I would pay for that. I don't see any technical reason why a 3rd party can't provide that. When Windows 8 messed up the start menu, tools like Classic Shell stepped in to fill the gaps, with huge popularity, and I think those download statistics were actually persuasive to the "data driven" business strategizers at MS.

Mod parent up!

For me the killer feature is USB redirection. I can use a VM to install stuff like questionable device drivers, ancient apps, bloatware like iTunes or Zune, etc. and then attach the USB device to the host PC and use it within the VM (without polluting the host PC's OS). Hyper-V can't do that.

> So it only took about a year of screaming from the users
> and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and
> brought back the MENU instead of that god damned
> useless start screen.

No, what it took was a new CEO. Don't flatter yourself. What you have observed is merely the surface of a significant shift that is happening. The fact that these effects are already visible in the first 6 months is pretty telling.

If Microsoft can have those people wait for Windows 9 and Windows 9 is an improvement of any sort, they stand a better chance of keeping the customers.

Really? MS didn't change much in Win8.1, and they are making Win7 really hard to buy. It implies they really believe Win8 isn't a disaster.

The head of the Windows division got fired shortly after Win8 shipped, and the whole company seems to be treading water while the board hunts for a new CEO.

It's unrealistic to expect any changes to the Windows 8 vision until that shakes out. But when it does, you can bet the Surface/metro thing will get ripped apart, and Julie Larson-Green will be replaced by someone who isn't just keeping a seat warm. Whether that's for better or worse really depends on who the CEO is.

.NET also has a managed C++ model, which as allows C++ objects to be tightly bound to C# including garbage collection in an extremely natural way, while still having inline assembly language and all the performance of C++. And for managed languages (C#, VB, PowerShell, Python, etc) you get very deep integration that is probably the best that could be hoped fo. The F# mutability example is unreasonable, given the radical difference between these languages. And for all of this integration you get to use a single IDE with a visual debugger that shows you a single callstack with thr different languages mixed together.

Microsoft solved this problem so thoroughly, you couldn't ask for much else, except that none of it works on any OS other than Windows.

and, in the case of zombies, a canter or even a slow trot will easily get you past any somewhat mobile rotting corpses.

...until you encounter your first ZOMBIE HORSE!
Nay, naaay!