SUA Deprecated In Windows 8? 226
An anonymous reader writes "I just tried to install Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) on Windows 8 Preview and found that it's marked as DEPRECATED: 'Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) is a source-compatibility subsystem for compiling and running custom UNIX-based applications and scripts on a computer running Windows operating system. WARNING: SUA is deprecated starting with this release and will be completely removed in the next release. You should begin planning now to employ alternate methods for any applications, code, or usage that depend on this feature.'"
Metro (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Metro (Score:4, Insightful)
It's console-only, actually. It's just something that runs on the POSIX subsystem that NT provides, but it really sucks. First, it's an ancient POSIX interface. Second, it's command line only - it's not like you get X or anything. Third, well, you lose access to Win32 (can't cross subsystems).
If's really a checkbox item, just like how NT had the ability to run OS/2 programs too.
If you're porting a Unix app to Windows, you don't use SUA. You use a Unix-to-Win32 porting library (of which Cygwin is just one), just like how Windows apps can be ported to Linux using WineLib or its commercial equivalents as well.
Hell, a Cygwin program at least can mix Win32 API calls with POSIX calls, because Cygwin maps POSIX calls to Win32.
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Cygwin (Score:5, Insightful)
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Commercial customers that require production-quality platforms with enterprise-level support probably will avoid Cygwin.
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How about this? http://www.redhat.com/services/custom/cygwin/
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Mainly because SUA is faster, since there's no translation to Win32 - it sits directly on top of the kernel.
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The installer for Cygwin is extremely simple and intuitive to use, andmakes remote, unattended installs a breeze,so you'll have no difficulties there.
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Re:Cygwin (Score:4, Informative)
Look, I love Cygwin and have been using it since forever. But it's pretty slow at a lot of crucial operations, making it unsuitable for a large class of things folks use SUA for.
More importantly, it suffers from a serious lack of manpower and direction. For a project which is so vast and so important to open source, it has alarmingly few active maintainers. The lack of maintainers is made worse by the fact that a considerable amount of maintainer effort is duplicated between cygports and the official cygwin distribution.
Everybody uses cygwin but as far as I can tell very few people pay RH for cygwin support, and thus there are AFAIK only three people who are paid for their work on cygwin.
The lack of manpower really shows. Crucial packages go for long periods without important bugfixes, and new releases take a long time to get ported&integrated from upstream. Development on the cygwin core is fairly slow. NT-based versions of Windows offered quite considerable benefits over Win9x (lots of additional capabilities and much less of a mismatch with POSIX -> better security and performance), but the first version to really take advantage of these benefits was 1.7, released for Christmas 2009 [slashdot.org]- 7 years after the majority of users (much less the majority of technical users likely to use cygwin) had made the switch. The developers had their first serious discussion about the possibility of a 64-bit version of Cygwin in June of this year; it will likely be quite a while before a 64-bit version is released. A lot of cygwin's performance problems could be fixed if the core developers weren't already overburdened as it is.
Unless cygwin can attract a lot of new developers I don't think the project can stay up-to-date enough to continue to support the uses we all already rely on it for, much less be in a position to give SUA emigres a soft landing.
What packages are so slow to update? (Score:3)
All I really use Cygwin for is a bash script interpreter. It's done a fine job of that, though it does take an abominable amount of time to start a console window.
It lets me write cross-platform database installation scripts for *nix and Windows, but to be honest, that's about all the use I have for it at this time.
I haven't even bothered updating the install in over a year. Why bother? It works.
Who uses that anyway? (Score:4, Informative)
Cygwin or UnxUtils [sourceforge.net] work great.
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UnxUtils hasn't been updated since 2003. I'm not sure when SUA has been updated but it can't be too far behind.
Re:Who uses that anyway? (Score:4, Informative)
Cygwin? (Score:2)
I think Cygnus Solutions solved your problem about 20 years ago.
Re:Cygwin? (Score:4, Informative)
Have you ever actually tried to use Cygwin as a *nix-compatibility layer in a production environment. The word "kludge" doesn't seem to begin describe it.
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I agree with you entirely - but the author is stupid enough to be relying on SUA so rather than that statement that "it is a kludge" I'd say it's a question of "is it a better kludge?".
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Yes. Where I work, we have a production load and test process for some of our hardware that depends on cygwin. We have had cygwin cause problems for us only once, and that happened to be on a non-production station. (Production stations had all their files on the local hard drive - this machine was performing some operations on LAN shares and the Cygwin issue was related to LAN shares.)
Now the Xilinx ISE toolchain that was being called from our scripts hosted in Cygwin... ugh that's a whole other story.
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And cygwin is massively crippled compared to *nix. Wherever possible, I try to get native user land ports, and if I need more advanced things, well, there happen to be a number of open source *nix-like operating systems out there. It's one thing to want to run sed on your Windows box, quite another to basically try to port over the entire *nix environment.
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Re:Cygwin? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cygwin? (Score:4, Interesting)
100% agreed. The commercial alternative - MKS Toolkit [mkssoftware.com] - integrates seamlessly with Windows, and is both more complete and faster than Cygin. Yes, it costs money, and no, it is not open source - but if you need to do Unix-like stuff on Windows, it actually makes life tolerable.
But Unix-like stuff itself is not tolerable, which is why it has to be reimplemented with GNU, Linux, Cygwin and other free software.
For instance, how does the vi editor in MKS stack up to Vim? If the following link gives a more or less complete manual, it's freaking pitiful:
http://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/vi.1.asp [mkssoftware.com]
Why would I pay money for that stuff if I would end up compiling GNU coreutils, bash, and other packages?
projects depending on this (Score:3)
Well, I actually failed to find a project that would really depend on SUA. Anyone knows about anything that would be harmed by this change?
Now you have it, now you dont. (Score:2, Insightful)
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I still rue the day they dropped proper MS-DOS from Windows. So much great software developed in that environment, you'd think they'd still be updating it today.
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We relied on FoxPro from the 2.5 DOS version through the upgrade path to Visual FoxPro6.0. Then, MS announced on the UniversalThread VFP forum that they were dropping VFP and set up classes on that forum to teach .NET, the "new" developer paradigm. They bestowed "MVP" badges to prominent VFP forum members who then played the .NET flutes that led the children out of the VFP villages. The outrage among a large number of the approximately 300,000 VFP developers, world wide, was palatable. MS was t
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Hello, I am billions of dollars of enterprise backend software written in C# and .net. Can you please explain to me how Microsoft is going to phase out C# and convince the millions of C# developers to rewrite their enterprise software in HTML5 and Javascript?
Can you explain to me how future versions of SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc, are going to be written in HTML5?
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He can't. It's just something he posts over and over, despite being unable to support it. He's been called out on it many times.
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most recent was silverlight.
Silverlight wasn't really killed in the niche where it was actually being used (for intranet apps, rather than as a Flash killer) - it just got a facelift. If you actually look at Win8 UI framework, it's basically Silverlight reimplemented in native code with a bunch of namespaces renamed. You can port a Silverlight app to Win8 in a few hours at most.
.net people were already going amok in their community forum, all ablaze due to rumors tied to win 8.
"Rumors" being the key word here. Going from "you can now write apps in HTML/JS" to ".NET is dead" was quite a stretch, but there were enough people willing t
SSO (Score:2)
Windows itself seems close to being deprecated (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this a shock to anyone after The Week of Windows 8 Hype? If there was a theme running through all of the stories it was this: Windows as you have known it is deprecated, a traditional Windows desktop will be available (certainly on x86, perhaps on arm) for those who are determined enough to figure out how to reenable it but don't expect it to last much longer. If Windows and native Win32 executables themselves are on the chopping block why would they have any interest in maintaining a UNIX command line layer?
Win32 (and UNIX more so) isn't going to lend itself to the sort of app store lockdown Microsoft is moving to. If you have a choice of buy Win32 apps/games at Walmart/Gamestop and Microsoft gets no taste of the action or buy everything at the App Store and give Microsoft 30%, which do you think they are going to 'nudge' you toward? And by 'nudge' I mean turn your PC into an iPhone with hard crypto locks and remove all options that do not let them rake off their 30 points.
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> Windows as you have known it is deprecated, a traditional Windows desktop will be available (certainly on x86, perhaps on arm) for those who are determined enough to figure out how to reenable it but don't expect it to last much longer. If Windows and native Win32 executables themselves are on the chopping block
I think that's going to last about 6 months after Win8 release, and then they're going to realize that early adopters are putting keyboards and mice on their tablets and struggling to re-enable
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That's like taking off in an airliner with holes in the wings and hoping that the stewardesses will pass out parachutes.
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Some have stated that Win8 is stated to be a failure already as far as x86 machines go, based on the fact that companies waited 10 years on XP and skipped Vista, and are only now moving to W7. Companies won't be going to W8 anytime soon. Consumer PC purchases in the windows market are down, so who's actually going to go with W8? Tablets and phones seem about all that's left, and they're not running x86. (That means no W7 interface on those devices)
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The old rule was that there was always two reasonable windows releases for every bad one (win95, win98; winME), (win2000, WinXP, Vista). Now the rule appears to be every other release is going to suck. So though Win7 is ok, win8 appears doomed. That metro interface isn't going to fly in the corporate world where people are trying to get real work done.
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"I think that's going to last about 6 months after Win8 release, and then they're going to realize that early adopters are putting keyboards and mice on their tablets and struggling to re-enable the traditional desktop"
You do realize that Windows 8 is for both desktops/laptops and tablets? Tablet users use keyboards as well (witness the sale of keyboards for the iPad); the Metro interface is just a touch-friendly environment. It takes all of one registry edit to kill it permanently and switch back to all-tr
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> Win 8 - it's gonna suck, right?
Yep. It's inevitable. I think the even/odd thing is that in release (a) we try new stuff, and in release (b) we fix/withdraw it, and then in release (c) we try new stuff again, so it tends to devolve into even=suck odd=less_suck. Or the other way around, depending on if they start at "1" or "0".
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a traditional Windows desktop will be available (certainly on x86, perhaps on arm) for those who are determined enough to figure out how to reenable it
"Determined enough"? You mean, like locating a huge (2x1) tile labeled "Desktop", with Win7 wallpaper for the background picture, right at the home screen?
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"for those who are determined enough to figure out how to reenable it"
Hint: Click on the tile marked "Desktop".
photo shop is a big windows and mac app that will (Score:2)
photo shop / the adobe CS pack is a big windows and mac app that will not work good with a touch based ui (maybe for a photo shop light), also it has lot's of 3rd party plug ins' (I hear that the MS app store is more open to that then the apple one). Also big screens and dual or more helps with it as well.
AutoCAD is a other high end app that needs a good input, good CPU + GPU, big screen / dual or more screens and there even high end mouses for it http://www.chipchick.com/2007/08/spacepilot_makes_life_easie [chipchick.com]
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"That may be Microsoft's plan, but it's a real loser for expensive specialty software. At my work, we have plenty of technical apps that cost more than the Windows machine they're running on, even though they require fairly hefty hardware. There's no way a company writing a $10K app is going to be willing to hand over $3K to Microsoft to get it on their appstore."
If you think that company is going to re-write their "$10k app" that requires "hefty hardware", in HTML5/Javascript, you've got a screw loose. Met
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Metro apps can be written in native C++, .NET, or HTML5/JS. So, porting the guts of just about any app to metro is trivial. I've been working on the developer preview with our application, and the integration with the old code is trivially easy. It's the writing of a new interface that poses difficulty. I could see photoshop moving its browser to Metro, or Autocad providing a metro-style viewer - a full screen touch-based Autocad viewer could be pretty cool on a tablet actually.
This is (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at the kind of work Microsoft has put into the Linux kernel recently relating to Hyper-V...
https://lwn.net/Articles/451243/ [lwn.net]
One might gather that it's not worth the trouble for NT to ape Unix anymore. Chances are pretty good Linux is the new SUA and virtualization will be the new supported solution to this problem. I mean, why should Microsoft bother maintaining its own Unix tools when they're actively maintained elsewhere? Given the work they've done on both virtualization and linux integration I would say that there's no great conspiracy here.
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Microsoft, if you're reading this, provide a real note app too al-la
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They didn't put that "work" into their code voluntarily. They were forced to do it because they were in violation of the GPL.
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They didn't put that "work" into their code voluntarily. They were forced to do it because they were in violation of the GPL.
I don't see how that has anything to do with virtualization being a strategy for Microsoft. Whether linux kernel drivers are packaged or pushed upstream is just an operational consideration.
SUA is pants (Score:2)
I think this is yet another indication that SUA is pants and everyone should be using Cygwin.
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I think it's another indication that anyone who trusted MS to support functionality that didn't directly benefit MS was a damned fool. When it comes to Microsoft, the only way to win is to not play. i.e. Don't buy their stuff, ever.
The problem, for those asking, is customers (Score:2)
Windows-only shops may tolerate you insisting on SUA, because it's a Microsoft product.
Start talking about CygWin or VMs and their eyes glaze over, they suck their thumbs, and moan "Wasn't on my MCSE, hippies will eat me, wasn't on my MCSE, hippies will eat me."
I know that there's not really any significant difference in support terms (other than not getting the flakey almost-POSIX and BSODs that continue to burden SUA), and that they'd be better off switching to a native POSIX environment anyway, but t
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Those people are all going to die of acute boneitis when they first clap eyes on Metro anyway.
SUA is already dead in Windows 7 (Score:3)
They've killed it by only supporting the features necessary to re-share existing NFS services using SMB and AD. Integration of Windows with non-AD LDAP and Kerberos is virtually non-existent and requires a ton of work and 3rd party utilities to get it working. I don't think NFSv4 is even supported.
it does make sense. (Score:2)
why support something that your new os's 'made for' or 'works with' branding program is designed to kill?
Windows doesn't fully support SUA even now... (Score:2)
...Which can be seen by viewing SUA based process in Windows's Task Manager.
Do this:
1. Install SUA
2. Run KSH (the command line shell that SUA installs)
3. Open Task Manager
4. Change the columns so that 'command line' is showing.
You will notice that the SUA processes have _wrong_ (corrupted?) information displayed. This is based on the fact SUA is a different _subsystem_ and stores process based information (specifically, command line information) in memory in a _different_ format than the _Win32_ subsystem.
S
Oh, no, maybe 0.2 people affected (Score:3)
I have never seen one instance of this actually being used in any environment from small up to very large enterprise.
My two cents worth. (Score:2)
VMware workstation running one of the many "live" distributions as a mountable .iso image.
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I was wondering the same thing. What's the use of this SUA thingy?
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Re:Cygwin (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not Cygwin. It's an implementation of the POSIX APIs that goes directly to the NT APIs instead of through Win32.
I can't comment much on the tradeoffs except to say that I think it solves the problem of Cygwin's fork() being terrible. (SUA also provides a route to get multiple files with the same case-folded name but different case-sensitive names, which I don't think you can do with Cygwin since it goes through the Win32 API.)
Re:Cygwin (Score:4, Informative)
I can't comment much on the tradeoffs except to say that I think it solves the problem of Cygwin's fork() being terrible. (SUA also provides a route to get multiple files with the same case-folded name but different case-sensitive names, which I don't think you can do with Cygwin since it goes through the Win32 API.)
Yep, fork() on Interix (SUA) works much more efficiently. The NT kernel has supported what's essentially fork() since at least NT 4.0. The problem until Interix - and the reason why Cygwin's fork() sucks - is that the Win32 DLLs don't react well to being fork()ed. kernel32.dll gets confused, and simple things like console output stop working. Interix doesn't use the Win32 API, instead using a custom POSIX API and the NT API directly. The NT API has been updated to work in the event of a fork().
The NT API function NtCreateProcess [ntinternals.net] spawns a new process. The SectionHandle parameter takes a handle to the image section (IE, CreateFileMapping with SEC_IMAGE) representing the EXE you want the new process to run. If you pass NULL for SectionHandle, you will instead be creating a copy of the parent process's address space, the main part of fork().
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Licenses? cygwin is GPL last time I checked.
Re:Cygwin (Score:4, Informative)
Reaching back a bit, I think the use was that it meant that Windows NT and successors could tick the "Posix compliant" tick box that was required by some (mainly publice sector) contracts.
Perhaps Posix is no longer on so many checklists.
SUA vs Cygwin (Re:Cygwin) (Score:5, Informative)
Well, first off the basic thing is speed. SUA has kernel hooks for syscall translation. It's able to do many of the POSIX syscalls in a much quicker fashion than Cygwin. Cygwin, on the other hand, does *everything* for POSIX syscalls in userland, causing it to be slow (for example, a fork, at times can take *seconds* to complete).
So, SUA is much better this way... problem is, it's tricky to get things to compile for it, I never did get things building reliably for it. Cygwin has a full suite of programs already built, and it's much easier to build existing Linux/UNIX/POSIX programs for than SUA.
Being a Windows user who needs *NIX tools for many processing tasks, what do I use? Cygwin. Easier to set up and get running. The speed drives me insane, though. My login script, which runs many programs before bringing up my bash prompt will take 5-6 seconds.
Ideal solution: Hyper-V or some other VM software running a VM in the background that I can get a terminal to, that has filesystem access to my system drives too.
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Fastest and most compatible way to run Linux programs on Windows (which doesn't even need any special hardware) ?
http://colinux.org/ [colinux.org]
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SUA was once called SFU (Services For UNIX), and it replaces the built-in POSIX subsystem which has been an integral part of NT since NT 3.1.
The built-in POSIX subsystem alone was basically useless as shipped, since it came without many command line utilities, but SFU (now SUA) upgraded it to a more or less useful configuration, including a series of commands built to use the API; in some ways it accomplished the same thing as Cygwin, but in a different way.
In my opinion, Cygwin is vastly better since i
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SUA was once called SFU (Services For UNIX), and it replaces the built-in POSIX subsystem which has been an integral part of NT since NT 3.1.
SUA was once called SFU, which has been replacing STFW (and STFW's predecessor, RTFM) for years now.
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SUA was once called SFU (Services For UNIX), and it replaces the built-in POSIX subsystem which has been an integral part of NT since NT 3.1.
SUA was once called SFU, which has been replacing STFW (and STFW's predecessor, RTFM) for years now.
Rumor has it that Windows 8 deprecates SUA in favor of its newer, sexier replacement, OMGWTFBBQ.
You heard it here first.
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I thought it was being replaced with STFU... to truly tell the users how they feel. ;)
Of course, there's also the new service used for background downloading images called "NSFW" that was planned for Metro.
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I doubt telling people to "just use Linux" is a reasonable solution though. If it were that simple they wouldn't be bothering with SUA in the first place.
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I don't think so. Even if that is attempted it isn't hardware, it's firmware. Firmware can be updated.
UEFI cannot be user-updated, that is its whole security model. You can bring it in to Dell and ask them to install Grub on it though, I'm sure.
Re:I feel like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I feel like... (Score:4, Insightful)
a full blown unix VM
That's the key right there. With virtualization software in the state that it is now, why would you run POSIX applications shoe-horned into windows, when you can have a proper POSIX system running in a VM.
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The problem is that VMs consequently bring an isolation level that doesn't allow you, for example, to work at the native filesystem. You cannot easily grep something in your "My Documents" folder, as far as I know and, even if you can, you'll be consuming way more resources than needed, which may bring consequences as bigger execution times. They're a great solution for a lot of problems, though, don't get me wrong.
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You can map a VM drive to a user folder and tell Windows (quite easily now) to store your documents on that drive.
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With software in the state that it is now, why would you run shoe-horned windows, when you can have a proper POSIX system running on your computer?
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That's the key right there. With virtualization software in the state that it is now, why would you run POSIX applications shoe-horned into windows, when you can have a proper POSIX system running in a VM.
I agree that SUA is pretty bad, but running Cygwin allows me to run commands like:
sort -o /dev/clipboard /dev/clipboard
This sorts the data on the Windows clipboard. Having the whole *nix user land plus access to Windows features/drives/data makes the command line in Windows much less painful than before. A VM won't really solve that.
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What FUD? This is an actual story about actual facts involving MS. That is NOT FUD.
What Fear? What uncertainty? what doubt?
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Are you implying that it actually matters or is in any way an "evil" activity?
This stuff isn't used that much anymore on Windows. If the usage isn't there, why continue to support it?
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It's the constant drumbeat of uninformed speculation that gets me worn out. Pandering to leet k3wlness rather than fact-based criticism.
The FACTS are probably nothing like what's being asserted here.
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If you're bitching about Outlook Web Access, try setting your cookies to a non-paranoid mode. Works perfectly fine in Firefox with normal cookies.
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Yup. My guess is that the person who had issues with OWA and Firefox was using excessively aggressive privacy settings.
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Y+Us e missed the point. They are cutting out something people use, and doing it rather quickly.
The fact that it may be a PoS is irrelevant. This is quick even for MS. Deprecated, and then removed in the next release candidate of the same version? Yeah, that's just crappy.
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This is quick even for MS. Deprecated, and then removed in the next release candidate of the same version?
It is quick, but not that quick. Where does it say that it'll be removed in the next release candidate? TFS speaks of "release"; this normally actually means RTM (as in, not a prerelease).
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OWA for Exchange 2010 works much better in Firefox than it does in IE6.
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DR-DOS, Wordperfect, Ami pro count as direct sabotage in modifying their code to break competitors products.
What a load of rubbish! A single beta version of Windows didn't work under DR-DOS. To that sounds like they are just eliminating bugs in the was DR-DOS runs Windows from distracting the developers who are trying to find bugs in their own code. Any version of Windows (pre-Win95) that could be purchased would run under DR-DOS.
WordPerfect killed themselves by resisting the move to WYSIWYG and a Windows version. When they finally did it, it was incredibly buggy. How is Microsoft responsible for that?
As for Ami
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"Should be a rule that you dont' create a model that depends on Microsoft."
If you make an application that runs on Windows, then it depends on MS. How many people had their Netscape installations disabled by MS updates of IE? How many application vendors were unable to compete because MS was the only one with access to undocumented APIs? You do remember that the DOJ eventually found them guilty of unfair trade practices because of these tactics.
Or what about workalike operating systems like DR-DOS. MS a [wikipedia.org]
1-800-what-model-is-that? (Score:3)
Troll much? But let's take a refresher course, ten years later.
1-800-what-model-is-that? I worked in the 1980s on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean input methods. CJK input was a time-limited product, completely dependent on Microsoft, so of course we got eaten when they folded CJK fonts and IME into the operating system.
Your sentiment really pissed me off, because a lot of people gave blood to bring Microsoft down a peg or two in the 1
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Jesus, did you even read TFS? "WARNING: SUA is deprecated starting with this release and will be completely removed in the next release." Or do you not trust what Microsoft themselves tells you about their products (hmmm, can I get back to you on that one ...)?
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If you read the summary, it says Deprecated in Win8 and scheduled to be removed in a future version. Of course, by "a future version", that could be Win10 for all we know. MS has deprecated features in the past that remained well beyond the "next" release.
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