Quppa

This appears to include ReFS on Windows (although with the creation of ReFS volumes being limited to enterprise-targeting editions of Windows 10, perhaps this won't affect too many people).

Not sure I can say.

On a positive note, it's given us an opportunity to focus on performance improvements :)

I don't mind Facebook crawling pages as long as it respects robots.txt, but for the last few weeks we've been hammered by requests from Facebook-owned IP addresses (millions of hits daily, 50+ for the same URL at times). They don't even set the User-Agent header.

There's a bug report regarding the missing header here: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/1654459311255613/

Unfortunately it seems impossible to get in touch with Facebook devs directly.

Indeed - hotpatching support was removed in Windows 8. Apparently it was only ever used in a few updates, and some unscrupulous folks took advantage of the capability: https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/04/hacking-group-plati...

The usage share was 0.97% at the end of 2015, 0.87% at the end of 2016 and 0.75% in the latest survey. This might still translate to a growing absolute number of Linux users, but it would be nice to see the momentum start going in the opposite direction when it comes to those percentages.

Given that the percentage of Steam users running Linux is declining, I'm not as optimistic as you.

http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Hwsurvey-Febr...

Only the Fitbit Surge has built-in GPS (the first generation Charge and Charge HR didn't).

The Charge 2 does cost more at retail presently, however.

Edge 14 in the Anniversary Update actually brings back ClearType support for at least some text, so there's still a glimmer of hope that Microsoft will work to improve text rendering in Windows. Raymond Chen had an interesting post on how subpixel scrolling makes ClearType smoothing impossible: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=...

Office 2013 introduced these animations. Sadly, it also ditched ClearType in most of the UI.

These days .NET 4.0 is probably a better target for maximising compatibility - Windows 8 and above don't come with .NET 3.5 installed by default, and a lot of Windows XP/Vista/7 machines will already have .NET 4.0 or newer installed thanks to Windows Update.

Do you need to target versions earlier than Windows 10? If so, you'll have to rule out a Universal Windows Platform app (which might otherwise suit your needs, though you wouldn't be able to use it to write to AppData).

A Windows Presentation Foundation or Windows Forms app targeting .NET 4.0 will get you pretty good compatibility - Windows 8 and above come with it pre-installed* and it's an optional Windows Update for Windows XP/Vista/7. I don't think the XAML learning curve is as steep as some people claim, but it'll still be quicker to hack something together in WinForms over WPF if you haven't used the latter before.

Also check out the Desktop App Converter for Windows 10 - you can now package up a WPF/WinForms/Win32/etc. app into a UWP app for Windows 10 users and pick up some of the benefits that those apps have†.

* But also heed Raymond Chen: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110404-00/?p=... † https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bridges/deskto...

It's a combination of what you mentioned and incompatibility with APIs like Direct Manipulation. Raymond Chen explains it here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=...

Meanwhile Microsoft has basically given up on sub-pixel smoothing: it's missing from Windows Store/Modern/Metro apps (including Edge) and IE10 and newer and is mostly absent from Office 2013 and newer when running on Windows 8 and above†. More's the pity - not all of us have high DPI screens yet.

† https://www.quppa.net/blog/2012/07/17/office-2013-further-ev...

Triskaidekaphobia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskaidekaphobia). The same thing happened to Microsoft Office - Office 2007 was version 12 internally, yet Office 2010 jumped to version 14. On the plus side, it means that the upcoming release (Office 2016) has an internal version number that matches the year.

I guess the question is whether the people at Microsoft who decide these things are themselves superstitious or whether they think their customers are superstitious (to the point that they would avoid a product with an unlucky internal version number).

I hope you're right.

On the other hand, the 'power of youth' works both ways - it seems like a non-negligible percentage of youth in the West favour more censorship, not less - witness the rise of 'trigger warnings' and 'safe spaces' on university campuses, for example. Their aims might be quite different to those of a semi-authoritarian government, but the censorious impulse is the same.

South Korea is a good example of how the proliferation of technology doesn't necessarily entail increased political freedom. They might have great internet connectivity, but it comes with all sorts of overt censorship - the government blocks numerous websites, and periodically crack down on 'false rumours' online. Previously they enforced the infamous 'real name' law aimed at preventing anonymity on arbitrarily large websites.

The author described Windows 10 as 'kind of gorgeous', which was somewhat surprising. Until now the most generous thing I've heard someone say is that it's not finished. (Seriously, though, the UI is very unpolished at this stage, even for Windows. I wouldn't be concerned if not for the fact that RTM is only a few months away.)

Sadly Microsoft is in a rush to embrace the 'hamburger menu' in Windows 10 (mobile and otherwise), basically because it's common on the dominant mobile platforms: http://www.windowscentral.com/why-microsoft-hamburger-menus-...

Speaking as an occasional pedestrian in Japan, it would be nice not to have to deal with cyclists hurtling down the sidewalk at great speeds as happens today.

WPF font rendering was fixed in .NET 4 back in 2010.

IE10+ on Windows 8+, Office 2013+ on Windows 8+ and the Modern/Metro/Immersive environment on Windows 8+, on the other hand, are doomed to have poor font rendering thanks to their use of the Direct Manipulation APIs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2015/01/29/10589...

I doubt this will be fixed - the world is slowly moving towards high DPI screens where subpixel font smoothing isn't as important. For existing hardware, though, it stinks.

Fixed relative to what's in build 10036, undoubtedly, but I'm struggling to see how it will end up being an improvement over the Windows Vista/7-era version as far as desktop users are concerned. That said, it is an improvement over the Windows 8/8.1 Start Screen.

That's really soon, which fills me with dread. The UI as seen in the most recent pre-release builds is atrocious and it seems to be getting worse, not better, with each build.

Just look at these icons: http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-10-10036-83-updated-icons...

Perhaps they're pulling another 'Watercolor' (the pre-release decoy Windows XP theme that was replaced by Luna at the last minute), but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Install a Start Menu replacement like StartIsBack (http://www.startisback.com/) or Classic Shell (http://www.classicshell.net/) and voilà, you've got the productivity of the Windows Vista/7 desktop and the performance improvements of Windows 8/8.1. No hot corners to worry about.

Even if you don't use a third-party Start Menu replacement, this update will mean less pain - with power and search buttons on the Start Screen, there will be little reason to use the 'Charms bar', which eliminates two hot corners. With the Start button's return in Windows 8.1, the bottom left hot corner isn't an issue, either, and the top left hot corner is only necessary if you use Modern apps (and it sounds like you don't).

Changing the default file handlers for audio and video files back to desktop programs for non-touch users is a fantastic change and I hope heralds a small shift of focus away from Metro.