Agreed - its a stinking turd, but at least it's not oscommerce :)

I think its a naive attempt at describing worker processes and application scope. if you have a worker process per endpoint which is common with .net apps and lots of endpoints, its quite hard to balance resources. This is true. In PHP, none of this is of consequence.

Now I've got a tiny (280mb deployable, 5 hosts, 37 application pools, 5000 in flight requests 24/7) behemoth on my hands and I can testify its an arse pain to manage resources.

Are you serious?

I wrote an x86 NT utility back in 1996 on NT4 (with no service packs). It still executes and works perfectly on an x64 Windows 8 machine.

That's a mere 17 years ago.

There are two APIs now. The old one isn't going away either.

I don't think the OP was talking about breaking backward compatibility with Win32. More like releasing a version of "Java" that produced bytecode that wouldn't run on anything but Microsoft's virtual machine. Or just the general and continuing behavior of Microsoft's developer tools to produce and encourage developers to write software that only runs or runs properly on Windows.

Well what do you expect them to do?

I think they would be batshit insane to do otherwise.

I expect them to do what they've been doing. They're Microsoft. That's what they do. That's the problem.

Nobody wants to be locked into a single vendor's platform. It's good for the vendor and bad for everybody else. How can they be surprised that everybody else now dislikes them for doing it?

Th problem is whatever you do you're locked into an ecosystem of some sort. Even open source software. Have you tried building a portable c program on windows, Linux and OSX? Java is the least painless thing but we all know that's just another ecosystem.

The bit people forget is: stop procrastinating and build some shit.

To be honest, most people really don't give a shit. The next cigarette or pay day is far more important. Perhaps I'm getting old, but there are more important things to worry about.

>Th problem is whatever you do you're locked into an ecosystem of some sort.

The difference is that not all ecosystems are tied to a single vendor. Nobody has a lock on POSIX or Java like Microsoft has on Win32. And the hardest part of getting a portable C program to run on Windows, Linux and OSX is to get the program that was much more easily ported between Linux and OSX to run on Windows, because Microsoft has to do a million inane things like using WSAGetLastError instead of errno just to be different.

>The bit people forget is: stop procrastinating and build some shit.

I don't think people forgot that. We've just started building shit for and on non-Microsoft platforms and found it to our liking.

This is welcome news. At least they are listening to people these days.

Nope, I think this is just a legal compliance issue.

Yes but Microsoft activation can make than damn hard if they want to.

Actually this is not true on windows phone 8 and windows RT. The only requirement is that you use the native API which means the browser back end will need to be ported to it.

This may be or may not be hard work.

Seriously you can turn all that on if you want. My keyboard has a volume control.

And use PowerShell ISE as your command line.

Agree with this. Surface RT is painful. Especially office.

I'm quite happy with my Surface RT. I use it every day, mostly for browsing and watching video. I agree with the article that Metro-IE10 is very very good on the Surface in tablet mode. Good apps are coming slowly.

But Word, Excel and even PowerPoint are too much for it. Only good for reading. OneNote is very usable on Surface RT though, I do use that to take notes during meetings.

The Windows Mail app also sucks, and on RT you cant install Outlook.

I haven't done any killer spreadsheets as I can't have my plugins working.

But I've not found RT office to be unusably slow.

For me it lives up to its purpose of being a compaingion device.

The problems I have are basically the Mail app is uselessly bad and the Photos app sometimes grinds to a complete halt.

Same thing, but I dislike Windows 8 in the same way I hated the bad bits of vista. I'll live with it if my ThinkPad dies big time though. The concept is really good but the execution is a bit clunky.

I'm quite happy with the tiles concept. In fact I'm typing this on a Lumia 820...

Windows Blue I imagine will iron out these issues. I have some hopes that it will be the next windows 7.

I understand the premise of the fine, but how is this supposed to help the consumers and businesses who now have to foot the $50 bill per seat?

If MS raises its prices, it will weaken their market position - that's the punishment for their malbehavior.

By that logic no company should ever be fined as it hurts their users.