You're looking in the wrong place!

They're called features, and they're on the technet website for all the world to see.

Like how in older Windows versions, disks would be auto-mounted, and NTFS didn't have native active/active capability. In other words, if you made the slightest mistake in your FC zoning, then you could kiss your multi-terabyte cluster volume goodbye.

I'd disagree.

Bad code is bad code whether it is old or new, but with new code you're much more likely to be able to use new tools, which are generally speaking vastly better than old tools.

For example, with .NET you can use Visual Studio and with Java you can use IntelliJ IDEA. Both of them will give you powerful refactoring capabilities and help you navigate unfamiliar code. It's not just IDEs either, there are huge tool chains built around the new stuff, like static analysis and runtime capture such as IntelliTrace. Both of those do wonders for finding hidden issues in someone else's code. Even with C/C++ code you sometimes hit a wall with very old code bases that newer tools can't process.

I once had to support an application written in Clipper for 16-bit DOS with modules written in a dialect of C so old that practically nothing could compile it. There is nothing out there to assist with that crap. You basically get a choice of your favourite text editor, and you should consider yourself lucky if you get syntax highlighting and stack traces after a crash!

Meanwhile, I've solved issues in compiled binary code using Visual Studio. For example, I used the Concurrency Visualizer to figure out why iTunes hangs on my computer for hours. Turns out that one of its threads get stuck in a loop waiting for a synchronization primitive shared with the Bonjour service. I uninstalled Bonjour, and hey presto, problem solved! Solving issues like that in minutes instead of days or weeks is why I avoid anything written in languages other than Java or C# like the plague.

Yeah, I've noticed this before, and it's insane.

The .NET Framework and VB/C# in particular are a bit strange in that they have much better perceived performance on a desktop compared to Java, the closest equivalent, but actually have very poor performance. Java is something like 2x faster in benchmarks!

This is because unlike Java, Microsoft has a sane startup sequence for applications. The .NET framework shares DLLs, shares pre-JIT-ed uncompressed native code, etc... In contrast, Java lives in an isolated bubble world and repeats every single step of the launch sequence every time, for every application, no matter what. It unzips JAR files every time, for example, which is crazy slow. It interprets instead of JITs during the first pass, which is crazy slow. It never caches anything. It never shares anything between processes, including the entire Java runtime itself.

On the other hand, Java wins benchmarks because its JIT generates a whole bunch of fancy optimisations, sometimes even with runtime profiler-based optimisation. Meanwhile, there's a section in the C# manual somewhere that states something along the lines of "The C# compiler does not perform optimisations. If this is required, use C++/CLR". Similarly, the .NET JIT is not as good as the Java JIT, and doesn't do anywhere near as many optimisations. The .NET Framework manual states somewhere that "optimisations should be performed by the high-level language compiler". Err... what the fuck?

The result is that .NET apps written in VB or C# are much more responsive than Java apps, but lose benchmarks. On a 3GHz Intel CPU, this just doesn't matter any more for typical GUI apps, or even some games. On a phone, Java's advantages are much more important. The JRE is permanently loaded, so most of the startup performance issues are gone. Some phones reduce startup times by sharing various things, which Java on the PC doesn't. Some phones pre-JIT Java apps. This is why Android can run a Java-derived language and get great performance.

The state of .NET performance was good-enough for a 1.0 release on high-performance PCs, but Microsoft dropped the ball by not continuing to optimise it to have better throughput for high-performance server applications and low-powered embedded applications like phones and tablets.

ClearType increases that apparent resolution in one direction only by about a factor of two. In theory it sounds like it should increase resolution by a factor of three, but that would result in coloured fringes around the letters, so filters are applied which reduces the benefits but prevents the issues.

A second problem is that that the direction in which ClearType works depends on the physical arrangement of sub-pixels on the screen. On a normally aligned PC monitor, this is great, because text needs horizontal resolution more than vertical resolution, as most glyphs have thin vertical lines close to each other. However, as soon as you rotate the screen the benefits of ClearType are hugely reduced. In the PC world this is rare, but with tablets it's common. I'm reading an eBook right now on my iPad in portrait mode, because that matches the page layout of a typical book. Reflowing the content for landscape mode isn't always possible, for example with PDFs.

The iPad has ~4x the resolution of the Surface tablet, and it also has anti-aliasing to further refine the edges of fonts. Sure, it doesn't have ClearType, but it doesn't need it!

On top of that, the Microsoft marking guy is carefully skirting around a much more important detail: ClearType does exactly nothing for all other graphics, such as vector art or bitmap images. The iPad meanwhile has 4x the pixels to throw at everything, not just text.

Sure, I could waste my time reading his reference, or... just open my eyes and look at the obvious difference.

This is trivially circumvented:

Lets say it costs $10K to patent something successfully, and there is a $1M penalty for failure.
Company A wishes to patent something, but they know they probably can't get away with it.
They set up a new Company B, worth exactly $10K, and have that company file the patent.
If the filing succeeds, they merge with company B, and acquire their patent portfolio.
If the filing fails, Company B is sued for everything they're worth by the government and goes bankrupt.
Meanwhile, Company A is laughing.

This is why game theorists should be writing laws, not lawyers! 8)

[CITATION NEEDED]

While your statement is colloquially accepted as true, there are lots of cases where increased employment is a bad sign.

Imagine for a moment a government using income from natural resources to invest in foreign assets, and then distributing the dividends from that investment as income for their citizens so none actually have to work for a living. Would that be a failure? Look up the Alaska Permanent Fund and the policies of Saudi Arabia for some real-life examples of governments aiming for that goal.

Similarly, it's not productive for governments to manipulate the job market to create inefficient jobs just so that they can come closer to 100% employment. Digging holes and then filling them up again doesn't produce anything of value. Spending $10M to build a rocket to destroy a mud-brick hovel in the Afgan desert isn't exactly "value for money" either, but lots of politicians and even some oxygen-deprived-at-birth economists would have you believe otherwise.

My own government here in Australia regularly goes on TV to proclaim how wonderful it is that some new mega-project will create "thousands of jobs", as if it's a good thing that my taxpayer dollars are wasted on inefficient bureaucracies. I would give all my votes to a party that would go on TV to proudly proclaim how few people it will require to complete a new project under their direction, not how many!

Think of the super-long-term vision as well. Do we really want a future society where 100% of the population has to work? Why can't we aim for a post-scarcity society as envisioned in Star Trek and the like? Wouldn't you want to live in a world where automation produces all material goods, and people work only because they want to?

ABS doesn't decrease stopping distance! Instead, it reduces the breaking force just enough to provide steering authority. It's a trade-off. You lose stopping power but gain control.

A bunch of statistics shows that while ABS can make some scenarios worse, it helps overall. For example, it helps to avoid pedestrians on the road when the best thing to do is to simultaneously swerve and brake. Very skilled drivers can do this, but the typical driver can't. Also, ABS makes it very easy to automatically apply "nearly the safe maximum" braking force without thinking: just stomp on the brake. This makes people more willing to brake rapidly, even though they could have stopped even faster without ABS!

You also need to solve for time. Quartz oscillators aren't precise enough for a fix to within even kilometers, let alone meters.

Please stop voting this guy up, while simultaneously voting down the numerous posts that are correct.

Four satellites are required because there are four unknowns, and only one measurement per satellite available, irrespective of precision or lack thereof.

Here's some quotes from Global Positioning System so we can all stop agreeing with the loudest person instead of the facts:

"About nine satellites are visible from any point on the ground at any one time, ensuring considerable redundancy over the minimum four satellites needed for a position."

"The receiver uses messages received from satellites to determine the satellite positions and time sent. The x, y, and z components of satellite position and the time sent are designated as [xi, yi, zi, ti] where the subscript i denotes the satellite and has the value 1, 2, ..., n, where n >= 4."

"Although four satellites are required for normal operation, fewer apply in special cases. If one variable is already known, a receiver can determine its position using only three satellites. For example, a ship or aircraft may have known elevation.

The time precision required for a fix of any reasonable accuracy requires atomic clocks. You can't carry atomic clocks in your pocket, they're a tad too big for that. There is no way to know the time on the satellites from the ground, because you don't know where you are, and hence how far the satellites are from you, and hence the delay added to the signals. You can use three satellites to figure out where you are, if you know what time it is, but you don't. Adding a fourth satellite in the mix lets you solve for all four unknowns in the equation. Note the exception in the wiki article applies only in some rare cases, like the GPS units used by ships, not the GPS units handed out to most military personnel.

THIS HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH SELECTIVE AVAILABILITY.

The military encryption simply reduces the precision of the solution, it doesn't actually change the number of unknowns and hence the equations in any way. A civilian marine GPS could locate itself with just 3 satellites even with selective availability enabled, as long as it assumes that it's at 0 elevation. In all other cases, four satellites are required, even for military units.

It would change things for the better, not worse.

There might be some very short-lived havoc in the markets caused by the sudden devaluation of energy company stocks, but that's it.

First of all, most energy consumers aren't using fungible energy forms like electricity, but specific forms such as coal (smelting) or oil (fertilizers, fuel). Even if electricity was made free overnight, petrol would still cost money the next day! Converting all factories to purely electricity and building plants to generate hydrocarbon feedstock from CO2 and electricity would require massive investment in capital works. The markets would recover, and the result would be a boom like no other. Engineers that lost their jobs in the oil extraction industry would retrain and find jobs in the oil generation industry, or the oil-to-electricity plant conversion industry.

On top of that, whole new industries would pop up or get a massive boost. For example, recycling is mostly a question of energy. Currently, it's just not worth it for a lot of things. Given unlimited free energy, the local rubbish tip suddenly becomes an worthwhile source of rare metals.

To see how stupid your statement is, imagine living on a Moon base. What if somebody proposes a new technology for the free production of Oxygen:

"Because cheap (or free), clean, unlimited oxygen would collapse the economy overnight and the ramifications of that would change the world as we know it. I'm all for unlimited clean air because I'm sure that stuff is great for people, but not at the expense of my life style. So if someone does come up with this, it better cost a few hundred million (or more) bucks to build a reactor and get it online."

See how stupid that sounds?

Is the Earth's economy endangered by an endless supply of free Oxygen?

How about the endless supply of free sunlight?

True, but MLC has come a long way. For example, the Z-Drive R5 has ridiculous specs: 2.52 million IOPS and 7.2GB/s throughput.

I'd like to see the workload for which that is "just not good enough"! 8)

I've been waiting for "enterprise" SSD prices to drop for ages, because even though I'm now on my fourth consumer SSD, I've only seen SSD drives in the enterprise space for three out of the last twenty customers or so! Anything esoteric you plug into a server magically becomes 10 to 50 times as expensive. Currently, that's SSD drives and GPUs. The latter has only some niche uses, but everybody could benefit from 1000x lower I/O latencies.

I recently noticed that there's a new OCZ brand for enterprise SSD storage. They sell drives in every form factor, and with very impressive specs. Their drives are already between the $3-$7 per GB mark and dropping. Until recently, most vendors were selling the same kind of thing for over $15 per GB, which is insane.

Competition is good! 8)

Because it didn't require research or investment to come up with it, and hence doesn't warrant a temporary monopoly enforced by the government.

Using diffuse gases to slow orbiting vehicles is common, it's called aerobraking. Doing it with artificially created puffs of gas isn't exactly a new or unique idea either. I guarantee you Boeing didn't wasn't the first to come up with it, they were just the first to patent it. They can get away with that, because there's no prior art -- not because it had been impossible for others to come up with it before -- but simply because there has been no need for it. No market = no prior art. Now that the problem is starting to get worse, there's going to be a market soon. Boeing is just being anti-competitive by rushing to patent obvious stuff that just didn't need to be used before.

Patents are (theoretically) for protecting the fruits of expensive novel research, not for trivial, handwavy ideas that suddenly have a market. This is why we're all so pissed off with all the patents along the lines of "existing idea but now with computers", which are far too common. Those ideas would have been impossible decades ago not for a lack of research, but a lack of a market. Before ubiquitous computers, there was no profitable way to "add computers" to an existing method or process. It's not research that enabled these new patents, but changing market realities.

Lets say Boeing starts actually developing these gas-based systems, but finds that the gas tank nozzle is clogged because of the cryogenic temperatures causing trace gases like CO2 freezing inside the valve and blocking it. Compared to cold-gas reaction control systems, their satellite may need a very slow gas release rate, and hence a narrow nozzle, so this could actually be a big problem. They may want a passive system to avoid the need for complex, heavy, and failure-prone active heating systems. Lets say one of their engineers develops a special curved shape for the nozzle that accelerates the expanding gases in such a way as to prevent frozen particles from adhering to the walls. This might require complex mathematics, extensive numerical simulations, and lots of engineering tests in vacuum chambers with expensive gases. The result would be trivial to copy, but had needed expensive research into a wholly new concept. That is something that is worthy of patent protection.

Setting something in a text file is easy.

Setting a previously configured setting back to a given value is also easy... if you know the value that you need to set it back to.

That's where things get difficult. The default value is often just in the original text file, which is now lost -- overwritten by the modified text file. So then, no problem, just archive it! Except then what happens is that when you make two revisions to the file, then suddenly it's no so easy to undo a change from the first revision without breaking changes made in the second revision.

If a text configuration file is completely under the control of a management system, this can be handled, by storing all the deltas along with the unmodified original, and then merging them back as required. However, this then blocks the ability for the users to save their preferences into the same file, because that would break the configuration file management system. The solution is to have a set of fully managed policy configuration files that combines dynamically at run time with separately stored user settings.

At this point, you've re-invented the Microsoft Windows registry and group policy system, but with text files instead of binary containers, which is a minor implementation detail. You may as well just take it to the next level an implement multilingual administrative templates as well, so that your users don't feel like they're getting a giant "fuck you, learn English" message every time they have to use your software.

Some UNIX/Linux applications re-invent this wheel out of necessity, but badly, with many missing features, and of course -- inconsistently with every other application that also had to re-invent the same wheel.

What rock have you been living under?

Upgrades and installations have been doable as a 100% unattended task for over a decade now, with Microsoft tools only! Not only can you do it remotely, it's possible to power on a machine over the network, have it upgrade itself, and shut itself back down without any human intervention whatsoever.

PXE boot, reliable network broadcasts, image-based installation, pre- and post- installation scripts, driver injection, update merging, various upgrade scenarios, backup and recovery of user data, etc... are all old hat. Most of those don't even require any additional licensed software such as SCCM, which just provides a GUI and a database for tracking progress.

Tada: Windows Deployment Services and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. Just because you aren't aware of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

On top of that, Group Policy shits all over the desktop fleet management systems available in Linux, because it's based on a hierarchical policy engine instead of flat text files, which have poor support for things like rollback.

For example, I bet every Linux admin here can tell me a dozen ways they can set arbitrary values in configuration files across 10,000 machines, but not one of them can give me a good solution for undoing various random subsets of those settings years later! For example, you may want a site-specific setting to revert to defaults when the computer is moved out of the site, without undoing other settings in the same file that are relevant to all sites.

Good luck implementing a general-case solution for that problem in Linux, because the text-file configuration paradigm just doesn't work that way! You'd have to convince the entire Linux community to switch to some other paradigm first, and that's just not going to happen.