and yet everyone who comments on the XP obsolescence issue always mentions health-care situations where some microscope or other device is hooked up to a controlling workstation running XP..

Though maybe such devices aren't mission critical in the same way as nuclear reactor control software.

and don';t forget that the GC may not fragment like the standard malloc-style heap does, but to achieve this it has to compact the heap regularly. Note that we have generational GCs - because compaction is so expensive, they "split" the GC heap into sections and only compact parts of it.

If you want to waste memory, you can use fixed-block pool allocators that do not suffer fragmentation, so C++ gives you even more of a benefit over GCs.

I agree - all the 'firewalls' are really just iptables configuration guis.

In the day I used to use APF, a text-based configuration tool. It was very easy to use.

Obama "changed his mind" when it became apparent that voters didn't want it - amazing how principles can be changed in a twinkle of a opinion poll.

At least Eich (like a lot of people) thought marriage should be a heterosexual thing and stuck to his principles.

you assume that the cost of training users to use Windows 7 is less than the training cost of Linux. Generally they're exactly the same.

Tech support and application availability - that's a different story.

pfffft. .NET 4 - obsolete. In a few years, you'll be the first saying "which Linux/FOSS distro is fully compliant with .NET native WinRT spec?", conveniently forgetting that you were advocating .NET 4 in 2014.

You needed to show then the Government's own report on OSS and security

particularly note 2:

Strangely enough that is the state of play a few years back - when MSDN and Technet really described everything, and did it really well.

Nowadays, there's so much crap on there, mainly caused by Microsoft changing the format every year, but also adding so much new product and new incompatible versions, that the documentation isn't nearly as good as it used to be.

I remember the days when you could buy a 5-volume Windows NT manual that was awesome. Not any more.

On the other hand, take the documentation from someone like RedHat, that is really good, all-in-one and very comprehensive, just like the old days of Windows.

I think part of the problem is that Linux can have many "3rd party" features added to it, so when you step away from what RH ships, then you're on your own, but everyone assumes that it should have the same level of documentation.

Yes, and LGPL libraries become effectively GPL.

Security updates would also be the responsibility of the vendor too - you can't rely on Windows Update to give you new system dlls if they're embedded into your exe.

But, I do like it as an option.

Global optimisation has been in VC++ for years.

Most people don't care that it works - you pass source and libs to the 'compile suite' and it does its magic in some black-box kind of way. As long as you get a binary at the end, you're happy,

See the msdn blog for more info

.NET Native sounds like a great thing, except it's also an obvious thing that should have been the way .NET worked right from the start.

amen, and then they might ave done something like RIAA instead of garbage collection so we wouldn't have to suffer IDispose and using statements and try/finally statements to get object lifetime cleanup correct.

However, I think they could have spent all that effort they spent making .NET, C# and VB.NET IDE, compiler, runtime and all the other supporting stuff, and simply have made the tool support for C++ much better. Generally C# is a good language solely because Visual Studio makes it easy to code in it (hints, wizards,snippets, code completions, intellisense, object browser etc). If it wasn't for all those tools, C# would be just another language. God knows its got enough niggles and anti-features to not stand up on its own without the massive investment in tooling Microsoft gave it.

yes, the comments on TFM say that you have to upload MSIL to the APPStore server which will compile it to native code. I expect they will compile to all known architectures at that point.

So the appstore will become a compile farm.... I like that, I remember when sourceforge did exactly that.

This would mean it gets compiled like C or C++. You would still need the .NET redistributable for any libraries you reference just as you have done with C++ libraries or DLL libraries in traditional Windows development

I see your point - libs will still be needed, whether .NET framework or individual dlls, however... from the comments on the article (yes, I RTFM!!!) it seems you will be able to statically link everything together into a single, self-contained executable.

This is insightful?!

Exchange is a horribly bloated and slow piece of work, in the days before super-fast supercomputer server clusters, Exchange would handle relatively few users compared to a mail system (that, admittedly didn't do calendar or tasks or other crap no-one uses).

Active Directory is LDAP, with a few extra bits Microsoft wanted to lock you into. To think that LDAP is not scalable but Active Directory is, is laughable.

MS knowledge is cheap- - you can pay $16k a year and get a MCSE who is really not as competent as you think, who can do the basics but will fall down totally when things go south. Why else do you think good admins are expensive?

So, sorry.. your post is entirely trolling bullshit.

actually no. RTFM: London council dumping their old remote terminal and web browsing desktop machines with shiny new remote terminal and web browsing machines. Shiny new machines that are significantly cheaper.

They are also buying new Windows 7 PCs for specialist apps that don't run over RDP.

One thing to note: Windows 8 was not even considered (Mac and Linux considered but not chosen, due to the particular use-case they needed)