And proper context menus for the start screen.

Espen Harlinn wrote:

There shouldn't be any passwords to read from the memory on the server - only the cryptographic digest, which, on it's own should be worthless ...

Hashed passwords (even salted) can be cracked much faster than you think in may cases because people are bad at generating randomness. As such by going through likely passwords it is possible to crack thousands of passwords in a few hours.

For a self compiling compiler, you should have your compiler: A: LLVM (seems to be the easiest for machine code right now) for a backend B: Target a virtual machine (e.g. JVM or .NET) that has the features you need C: Translate code to an existing language that runs on platforms you care about (Like the first C++ compiler generated C code) For any programming language, you will need to write a parser. I prefer inline PEG parsers (like Boost Spirit and Parslet) over parser generators. Having a lexical analyzer can make parsing a lot easier when, but it is not required. If you are planning on making a serious language that you want other people to use, read this article. Popular languages that are not aiming to be a C/C++ replacement tend to converge to a hybrid of Lisp and Smalltalk but with a better syntax. So look those up to get good foundation, and while researching Lisp you may also want to look at Scheme and Kernel. Maybe Prologue as well, since it is so different and therefore might help with inspiration. Finally, lambda-the-ultimate.org is a good place to look for stuff on programming language theory and design. P.S. Making a language is a long and involved process if you want to make a good one.

Those old. Now all Linux guests need is the Hyper-V drivers, which are in the kernel's source tree.

The 1st Generation VMs work well as long as the OS you install has the drivers. I imagine the 2nd Generation VMs work well with a Windows 8 guest, but you need to watch out if installing Linux. While the kernel drivers have been working since 3.10 or 3.11 and Secure Boot can be turned off, the efibootmgr from Intel does not format the entries in a way that complies with the UEFI standard. Thus when it creates entries (and the setup tool for all the boot managers use it) it corrupts the VM config file and renders it unusable. Then Hyper-V stops acknowledging the VM exists and will not even let you delete it. I believe there are some very recent patches in Ubuntu to fix this, but it will be a while before they get to other distros. Till then just name the loader bootx64.efi and put it under "efi/boot" if you care to try.

The problem is you have to find out what the obscure COM bits that are missing are and find a way to get a hold of them. :sigh:

OriginalGriff wrote:

"Windows 8 is wonderful!"

Maybe as a whole it is not, but the "dism /online /cleanup-image /RestoreHealth" command that was added in Windows 8 is wonderful. Cause it fixes the component store so that "sfc /scannow" will repair all corrupted system files.

For the Surface, it depends. With RT (and is suppose the associated version of Windows 8) you need to be able to license the app and have a compiler for ARM (which I think is only in the paid version of Visual Studio). For Pro it is the same as any desktop, laptop, or tablet that contains an Intel processor. Cause that is what it is: a small ultrabook that happens to be the same form factor as the Surface RT. And you could remove Windows from it and install Linux, though I imagine that would void the warranty.

My limited* experience with Mono has left me less than impressed with its ability to make C# programs work on other platforms. Be prepared to watch your development time to be eaten up fixing things that do not quite work correctly. Both externally (e.g. Mac OS X has a builtin function for F12, and there is not much to do about it other than use another key if you are using a WinForms UI) or internal (e.g. some aspects of WinForms and threading differ in ways that can create issues under Mono). Also, for the one project I did it turned out that if your code needs to be different for each platform for any reason you will end up with different builds for each as there did not seem to be a good way to detect the platform at run time (well, there seemed to be a way for Mono, but then it failed on Windows unless you used Mono there too). * Only for my senior project in the spring.

Be sure to tell both the compiler and the linker that you are making a 32 bit app (-m32). Also, 64 bit gdb does not work with 32 bit programs as it will load systems libraries from the 64-bit directory instead of system32 (cause Windows redirects 64-bit programs away from 32-bit binaries should be). The error message suggest that there is a way, but I never worked out the details of it. EDIT: Also, if you have made sure both of the above are not the issue, then it is likely you have a 64-bit version of a dll your program links against in the search path. This is solved by using static linking or dropping the 32-bit version in the same directory as the application. Specifically, I would imagine that the mingw-64 compiler is on your PATH, and it will have the 64-bit versions of many of the dlls it links your programs against in the same folder as the compiler since it uses them.

I use MSE on both my computers. Last I checked on the site I like to look at AV products (http://www.av-comparatives.org/[^]) it was getting 93% of known viruses. Combine* it with Malwarebyte's Antimalware Pro (the liceinse is good as long as you have the key and uninstall from the previous computer, but it is worth a new copy for each computer if you plan to use it for 3+ years) which has a high rate of getting malware that is not in its database. Also a good firewall and maybe something to limit the damage things can do if they get on your system (particularly preventing them from terminating your other security software) will then have you in good stead. Check http://www.matousec.com/projects/proactive-security-challenge-64/results.php[^] for a quick look at products that do well at stopping the stuff your scanners miss. Also if you really feel insecure with free stuff, consider looking into security setting to turn on that are part of Windows such as Data Execution Prevention. * Be sure to look up information on configuring them to coexist, which when I installed them meant excluding each from the other's scans.