Slashdot Mirror
Windows 10 Gets Core Console Host Enhancements (nivot.org)
x0n writes: As of Windows 10 TH2 (10.0.1058), the core console subsystem has support for a large number of ANSI and VT100 escape sequences. This is likely to prepare for full Open SSH server/client integration, which is already underway over on github. It looks like xterm is finally coming to Windows. OpenSSH was previously announced (last year) by the very forward-looking PowerShell team. The linked article provides some context, and explains that the console host isn't the same as either cmd.exe or powershell.exe, but there is a lot of overlap in functionality.
Exchange Server is one of the killer points, yes. The other one is Domain Login with the attendant domain-wide security model. As a *nix booster, I must say those two continue to absolutely show up *nix to this day. Those two give more than enough of a "point".
Both Mac OS X and RedHat Linux have answers to both domain login and domain-wide security. The Linux implementation is somewhat less robust (i.e. it's possible to escape exclusion groups, and there's no external group membership resolver like there is on Mac OS X, so there's still the 16 group limit), but it at least is a proof by existence that the claim is wrong. And you can always install the Samba implementation manually on any Linux or BSD box.
If you want to get technical, had Windows not added the proprietary field, we're just talking a KDC implementation, as in Heimdal Kerberos, or before that, MIT Kerberos, and that's been around since Project Athena, which means early 1980's, which means over 30 years. Microsoft's implementation was 1995 or so, and it was the late 90's before they made it non-interoperable with the proprietary field, so they are predated by at least a decade.
Kerberos was interesting, in that it abused the setgroups() and cr->ngroups to store the Kerberos key in the last two groups field, but at that point you were not really using groups anyway (since you were using remote Andrew FS or similar, and it was doing server side credentials enforcement).
So TL;DR: they absolutely did not, and do not, "show up *nix".
Full integration with Active Directory, for fine-grained permissions over all aspects of the mail/calendar system.
For example, with Exchange and AD, I can create a distribution group, and delegate "ownership" of that group to a specific user, so they can add/remove users to that group. I can set that group to "open" or "closed", meaning users can either join it/leave it without owner approval, or not.
I can give an arbitrary user access to another users entire mailbox, or give them only permission to "send as" a different user, or distribution group.
I can allow only certain users to send to specific addresses, meaning I can have a "My Entire Company" distribution group that only specific people can send mail to.
And then there are similar permissions/delegation options for calendars, and Public Folders, and even Skype for Business. If you have VoIP phone systems, and compatible phones, you can even access all of your mail/calendar/Skype messages from your phone.
I can set deletion and archive polices for each user, or a group of users. I can set mailbox size limits per user, or per group. I can create a "discovery search", meaning I can allow access to a user's mailbox, but only for mails that meet a specific search criterion.
And of course, there is a cottage industry of add-ons for Exchange to do a million other things. Mimecast, for example, allows automatic off-site archiving of all email (with an Outlook plugin to search the mail), and automatic failover to Mimecast's servers if Exchange goes offline.
It's just endless. Exchange has no real competition. Is it perfect? No. But it's better than anything else for corporate messaging, by a wide margin.