A few comments. Microsoft has already ported office to several architectures years ago, and it's very likely that they've kept office portable since, given the high hopes Itanium had, then other architectures.
Second, Microsoft has never been as worried about commercial app compatibility as they have with custom app compatibility (all those special purpose apps that companies write internally). After 10 years, most of those apps have been converted to.NET which is architecture agnostic (for the most part). Any.net app will run without change on a version of windows for a new architecture. If they have their apps, and custom apps covered, that's probably 80% of the market, and given that ARM is likely only going to be used in tablets and possibly netbooks, rather than desktops.. they can sell an awful lot of those with 80% of the market.
My understanding is that Google does NOT run Apps for Government in the same cloud infrastructure. They deliberately isolated the Govt systems for security purposes.
I think you misunderstand what you've seen. Not surprising, since you seem to misunderstand most everything else you talk about.
The "Windows Phone 7" interface is not for WIndows 8 desktops, it's only for use in tablet interfaces (which are just giant smartphones anyways, without the phone). It's not going to be used on desktops, so pretty much your entire rant is moot, since you completely understood what you were being told.
Besides, it's still way early. Microsoft floats technologies like this out there to get feedback on them. If the feedback is bad, it will change.
It's funny how you say XP sucked pre-sp2 when at the time sp2 was released, everyone said SP2 sucked and they were sticking with SP1. People hated having more security, which was the #1 problem with Vista. They hated having to approve things, and not just let whatever write all over the OS.
And don't talk about patches.. every OS has tons of patches after being out there for a long time. Linux, OSX, everything. That's a function of the long release cycles, not how secure the OS is.
Better is in the eye of the beholder. It takes 15-20 seconds for Acrobat reader to initialize. It may do more functions, but a simple, full fidelity reader that starts instantly would be very appreciated over Adobe's click and wait approach.
You're confusing "coupled" with "installed by default". Most Linux distros ship with far more crap.
IIS is a very good web server. It's secure, has has almost zero vulnerabilities (and what few there have been have not been critical), and performs well. What is so "shit" about it? No, Search does not use > 1GB of memory. In fact, you can disable search and see that's actually pretty minimal. Your search results are probably from not knowing how to use search functions. But, I'll admit that it's not as powerful as it could be (but that would us a lot more memory. Funny how you complain about mutually exclusive things).
Most of WIndows 7's memory goes to system cache and the DWM (Display Window Manager), but DWM has become a lot more efficient in windows 7 if you are using a a decent driver that supports WDDM 1.1 (a lot of people still use older drivers for some reason, and that's really stupid). WDDM also supports driver crash recovery without killing your GUI apps, something X11 can't do.
No, UAC is not Sudo, but it's 90% of it. There are some philosophical differences between the way UAC and Sudo works, largely because Microsoft has to deal with morons that will click "yes" to anything.
Windows already has built-in secure remote access, both with Remote Desktop and Remote Management (remote command shell). PowerShell already has this built-in. But you wouldn't know that because you don't even know what powershell can do.
The problem with running Windows and OSX on the same hardware is that what you mean is, Windows running on a Mac uses more power. And the reason for that is that Windows doesn't have optimized drivers for the Mac's hardware. This is something Apple guards very closely. They WANT windows to be worse on Mac hardware. And there is absolutely no way that a Hackintosh runs more efficently, because of the emulation required, not to mention the fact that MacOS doesn't support most power management hardware natively in standard PC's.
Event viewer is slow, i agree with you. But it's also a much more powerful tool with advanced searching, categorizing, and management features. I don't like how they did it either, but it's very powerful. Sometimes that level of flexibility reduces performance.
Your list of "issues" provides no support. You claim it's "common knowledge", but it's not.
For example, Windows is VERY efficient at using system resources. It's designed to use all the resources you have free to improve speed and performance, and giving up those resources when apps need them.
Most people look at Windows 7 running on a 4GB machine and complain that it's using so many resources. This is the wrong way to look a it. You want the OS to use all those resources, not leave them idle doing nothing... so long as they're available for apps when they need them. What good does extra memory doing nothing do? Likewise, Windows purges uncommonly used memory to make more room for things like disk cache and other buffers, because those provide real immediate performance improvements at the cost of having to page in some less commonly used resources on occasion.
All performance optimization is about tradeoffs.
Windows also comes with PowerShell, a shell that is arguably more powerful than bash (but that's because bash tends to use external progarms for many tasks). It's object based approach makes it far more flexible and modular, while providing a standardized information pipeline.
Windows has very simple remote access builtin, be it a remote management shell, or remote desktop.
Windows can be highly customized, it just doesn't include all the customizaiton tools with the OS. There's lots of hooks there for almost any kind of customization you want to do.
Lower hardware requirements? Why? Even the least powerful computer you can buy today is more than enough to run windows well. Windows minimum "requirements" are for using all the features, if you choose not to use high end features that require lots of resources, then you can run Windows on very low end hardware.
You really don't know much about Windows, or what it's capable of. You just perpetuate stereotypes.
WMI is just the windows implementation of the Common Information Model (CIM) that many Linux systems also support. It's an industry standard. I think you mean Remote Management, which uses industry standard Web Services, such as WS-Management.
SSH doesn't support the kind of ACL security that Microsoft feels are needed.
Your entire argument boils down to "I don't like the way they did this or that". Not that the tools are bad, or suck, or can't do this or that.. but just that you don't like the WAY they do them... which boils down to "it's not bash".
\n is a convention, it's not an unchangable constant of the universe. PowerShell has verbose and compact syntax, plus aliasing. Don't liek "Write-Host" change it to something else. Oh, and echo works just fine. It's all about your personal preference.
Both Vista and Windows 7 come with full SFU built-in (in the enterprise and ultimate sku's).
Exec Shield? Windows has had NX support since XP SP2, not to mention stuff like ASLR and other technologies. PaX? That does stuff that Windows already does, by default.. but you typically have to enable it on Linux because it interferes with too many other tools.
Microsoft has made a lot of scalability improvements in Windows 7, particularly in the areas of multi-core support. But, because this is under the cover, most people don't see these changes.
Microsoft has also been improving modularity. IIS7 and IIS7.5 for instance have gone completely modular compared to IIS6. They've decoupled the UI from the browser. They've made a lot of changes that improve things.
Window management has improved greatly with the DWM.
I don't find the Gnome menu or the K menu any better than the Start menu.. i don't know what would be better.
The GUI is already decoupled in a lot of ways. Windows server 2008 supports "core" mode that doesn't use a GUI.
Windows 2000 and Windows XP were both pretty good products in a row. In many ways, XP SP2 was almost a complete redesign of the OS, so you could almost say 3 products in a row.
Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2003 Server were good products in a row. Windows 2008 R1 was actually pretty good as well, since nearly all of Vista's failings were in the desktop technologies. SQL Server 7, 2000, 2005, 2008 and 2008 R2 have all been very good products.
IIS 6 proved to be a VERY good product, and IIS7 and IIS7.5 even better.
There are lots of cases of connected products being quite good. It's only in the desktop OS department that Microsoft has had some failures, but to be fair, those were products that were either shipped as stopgaps (Windows ME was never planned, it was done because WIndows 2000 slipped and wasn't going to be Windows 9x replacement. Also, Vista ended up being shipped as a pain point, to deliberately make breaking changes, so that the next version could be much better).
By that argument, all version of Linux are just the previous version of Linux with a new skin.
There was actually a lot of under the covers changes in Windows 7, and the kernel changed substantially. Those aren't things you can see though, so you look at it and say "It's just windows with a new skin" because the skin is all you can see.
Yes, netcraft *ONLY* counts hostnames. (well, not true, they count a lot more stuff, but they only publicly publish the host name survey) They don't count myspace pages, or facebook pages, because those all use the same host name.
Think about it, netcraft only lists about 300 million sites. There are over 500 million facebook pages alone, and at least 200 million myspace pages. Wherever you get your information, it's very very wrong.
This is true, but does it really matter? Most people don't choose an OS.
However, in the case of android, since the apps are all written to a bytecode, the OS is largely irrelevant. Google could replace the Linux kernel and android would still be android.
That's 20% of the hostnames, which is a dubious metric. 20% of the web could man a number of things. 20% of the traffic? 20% of the pages? 20% of the physical servers or instances of IIS vs Apache?
For a variety of reasons, don't confuse hostnames with market share.
While that may be true, Linux impedes dominance by making it impossible for inertia to develop. It seems all the momentum Linux vendors seem to generate has a far greater force pushing against it.
I'm glad you have no issues with your recent versions of Ubuntu, a quick perusal of the Ubuntu support forums tells a different story though.
Just because it works for you, doesn't mean it works for everyone. This seems to be the most common reaction to problems with Linux. One user says such and such is broken, another user it works fine and they call him a liar.
20 years ago, Microsoft had no server OS. How could Linux rise to defeat Microsoft in a market it wasn't even in when Linux was created?
Apart from that, Linux's "dominance" in the server market is misunderstood. Typically, the only evidence to support this is the Netcraft hostname summary, which shows that 70 some percent of hostnames run on an Apache web server. This is misleading, because not only does it not take other kinds of servers into account (Database, File, Directory, etc..) it doesn't even accurately reflect web servers, since a) Apache runs on Windows (and lots of people do run Apache on Windows, particularly with Tomcat) and b) Windows servers tend to be corporate servers which do not have a large numbers of hostnames per server. Most ISP's run Linux or BSD servers and have very high levels of hostnames per server.
hostnames != marketshare.
Last I read, Linux servers only accounted for about 30-some% of all servers sold. And in the server market, people don't buy servers with Windows and wipe them and replace them with Linux. Windows server licenses are too expensive for that.
Certainly, Linux dominates in the android vs windows mobile market, and it dominates in the server appliance market over windows. But that's about it.
Slashdot Mirror
A few comments. Microsoft has already ported office to several architectures years ago, and it's very likely that they've kept office portable since, given the high hopes Itanium had, then other architectures.
Second, Microsoft has never been as worried about commercial app compatibility as they have with custom app compatibility (all those special purpose apps that companies write internally). After 10 years, most of those apps have been converted to .NET which is architecture agnostic (for the most part). Any .net app will run without change on a version of windows for a new architecture. If they have their apps, and custom apps covered, that's probably 80% of the market, and given that ARM is likely only going to be used in tablets and possibly netbooks, rather than desktops.. they can sell an awful lot of those with 80% of the market.
My understanding is that Google does NOT run Apps for Government in the same cloud infrastructure. They deliberately isolated the Govt systems for security purposes.
I think you misunderstand what you've seen. Not surprising, since you seem to misunderstand most everything else you talk about.
The "Windows Phone 7" interface is not for WIndows 8 desktops, it's only for use in tablet interfaces (which are just giant smartphones anyways, without the phone). It's not going to be used on desktops, so pretty much your entire rant is moot, since you completely understood what you were being told.
Besides, it's still way early. Microsoft floats technologies like this out there to get feedback on them. If the feedback is bad, it will change.
It's funny how you say XP sucked pre-sp2 when at the time sp2 was released, everyone said SP2 sucked and they were sticking with SP1. People hated having more security, which was the #1 problem with Vista. They hated having to approve things, and not just let whatever write all over the OS.
And don't talk about patches.. every OS has tons of patches after being out there for a long time. Linux, OSX, everything. That's a function of the long release cycles, not how secure the OS is.
Better is in the eye of the beholder. It takes 15-20 seconds for Acrobat reader to initialize. It may do more functions, but a simple, full fidelity reader that starts instantly would be very appreciated over Adobe's click and wait approach.
You're confusing "coupled" with "installed by default". Most Linux distros ship with far more crap.
Are you confusing sleep with hibernation? My windows systems are instant-on from sleep.
A few quick googles found the answers to the problems you can't seem to figure out. Took all of 10 seconds.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/disable-the-mouse-drag-window-arranging-feature-in-windows-7/
IIS is a very good web server. It's secure, has has almost zero vulnerabilities (and what few there have been have not been critical), and performs well. What is so "shit" about it? No, Search does not use > 1GB of memory. In fact, you can disable search and see that's actually pretty minimal. Your search results are probably from not knowing how to use search functions. But, I'll admit that it's not as powerful as it could be (but that would us a lot more memory. Funny how you complain about mutually exclusive things).
Most of WIndows 7's memory goes to system cache and the DWM (Display Window Manager), but DWM has become a lot more efficient in windows 7 if you are using a a decent driver that supports WDDM 1.1 (a lot of people still use older drivers for some reason, and that's really stupid). WDDM also supports driver crash recovery without killing your GUI apps, something X11 can't do.
No, UAC is not Sudo, but it's 90% of it. There are some philosophical differences between the way UAC and Sudo works, largely because Microsoft has to deal with morons that will click "yes" to anything.
Windows already has built-in secure remote access, both with Remote Desktop and Remote Management (remote command shell). PowerShell already has this built-in. But you wouldn't know that because you don't even know what powershell can do.
The problem with running Windows and OSX on the same hardware is that what you mean is, Windows running on a Mac uses more power. And the reason for that is that Windows doesn't have optimized drivers for the Mac's hardware. This is something Apple guards very closely. They WANT windows to be worse on Mac hardware. And there is absolutely no way that a Hackintosh runs more efficently, because of the emulation required, not to mention the fact that MacOS doesn't support most power management hardware natively in standard PC's.
Event viewer is slow, i agree with you. But it's also a much more powerful tool with advanced searching, categorizing, and management features. I don't like how they did it either, but it's very powerful. Sometimes that level of flexibility reduces performance.
Your list of "issues" provides no support. You claim it's "common knowledge", but it's not.
For example, Windows is VERY efficient at using system resources. It's designed to use all the resources you have free to improve speed and performance, and giving up those resources when apps need them.
Most people look at Windows 7 running on a 4GB machine and complain that it's using so many resources. This is the wrong way to look a it. You want the OS to use all those resources, not leave them idle doing nothing... so long as they're available for apps when they need them. What good does extra memory doing nothing do? Likewise, Windows purges uncommonly used memory to make more room for things like disk cache and other buffers, because those provide real immediate performance improvements at the cost of having to page in some less commonly used resources on occasion.
All performance optimization is about tradeoffs.
Windows also comes with PowerShell, a shell that is arguably more powerful than bash (but that's because bash tends to use external progarms for many tasks). It's object based approach makes it far more flexible and modular, while providing a standardized information pipeline.
Windows has very simple remote access builtin, be it a remote management shell, or remote desktop.
Windows can be highly customized, it just doesn't include all the customizaiton tools with the OS. There's lots of hooks there for almost any kind of customization you want to do.
Lower hardware requirements? Why? Even the least powerful computer you can buy today is more than enough to run windows well. Windows minimum "requirements" are for using all the features, if you choose not to use high end features that require lots of resources, then you can run Windows on very low end hardware.
You really don't know much about Windows, or what it's capable of. You just perpetuate stereotypes.
WMI is just the windows implementation of the Common Information Model (CIM) that many Linux systems also support. It's an industry standard. I think you mean Remote Management, which uses industry standard Web Services, such as WS-Management.
SSH doesn't support the kind of ACL security that Microsoft feels are needed.
Your entire argument boils down to "I don't like the way they did this or that". Not that the tools are bad, or suck, or can't do this or that.. but just that you don't like the WAY they do them... which boils down to "it's not bash".
\n is a convention, it's not an unchangable constant of the universe. PowerShell has verbose and compact syntax, plus aliasing. Don't liek "Write-Host" change it to something else. Oh, and echo works just fine. It's all about your personal preference.
Both Vista and Windows 7 come with full SFU built-in (in the enterprise and ultimate sku's).
Exec Shield? Windows has had NX support since XP SP2, not to mention stuff like ASLR and other technologies. PaX? That does stuff that Windows already does, by default.. but you typically have to enable it on Linux because it interferes with too many other tools.
PowerShell is a very "real" command shell. I can't remember the last time my OS has crashed. Security is also highly improved.
Microsoft has made a lot of scalability improvements in Windows 7, particularly in the areas of multi-core support. But, because this is under the cover, most people don't see these changes.
Microsoft has also been improving modularity. IIS7 and IIS7.5 for instance have gone completely modular compared to IIS6. They've decoupled the UI from the browser. They've made a lot of changes that improve things.
Window management has improved greatly with the DWM.
I don't find the Gnome menu or the K menu any better than the Start menu.. i don't know what would be better.
The GUI is already decoupled in a lot of ways. Windows server 2008 supports "core" mode that doesn't use a GUI.
Much of what you ask for is there.
Windows 2000 and Windows XP were both pretty good products in a row. In many ways, XP SP2 was almost a complete redesign of the OS, so you could almost say 3 products in a row.
Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2003 Server were good products in a row. Windows 2008 R1 was actually pretty good as well, since nearly all of Vista's failings were in the desktop technologies. SQL Server 7, 2000, 2005, 2008 and 2008 R2 have all been very good products.
IIS 6 proved to be a VERY good product, and IIS7 and IIS7.5 even better.
There are lots of cases of connected products being quite good. It's only in the desktop OS department that Microsoft has had some failures, but to be fair, those were products that were either shipped as stopgaps (Windows ME was never planned, it was done because WIndows 2000 slipped and wasn't going to be Windows 9x replacement. Also, Vista ended up being shipped as a pain point, to deliberately make breaking changes, so that the next version could be much better).
By that argument, all version of Linux are just the previous version of Linux with a new skin.
There was actually a lot of under the covers changes in Windows 7, and the kernel changed substantially. Those aren't things you can see though, so you look at it and say "It's just windows with a new skin" because the skin is all you can see.
Real, in this case means "Really", as in "extreme", not "real" as in "The Real World" (which isn't really real either really).
Come on, get real, already and really join the real brigade.
And Linux was released in 1991. What's your point?
I'm sorry, but what does windows 7 issues have to do with a claim that Ubuntu no longer has any sound issues?
Yes, netcraft *ONLY* counts hostnames. (well, not true, they count a lot more stuff, but they only publicly publish the host name survey) They don't count myspace pages, or facebook pages, because those all use the same host name.
Think about it, netcraft only lists about 300 million sites. There are over 500 million facebook pages alone, and at least 200 million myspace pages. Wherever you get your information, it's very very wrong.
This is true, but does it really matter? Most people don't choose an OS.
However, in the case of android, since the apps are all written to a bytecode, the OS is largely irrelevant. Google could replace the Linux kernel and android would still be android.
Neither the PS3 or the Wii are Linux based. You're off your rocker if you think so.
That's 20% of the hostnames, which is a dubious metric. 20% of the web could man a number of things. 20% of the traffic? 20% of the pages? 20% of the physical servers or instances of IIS vs Apache?
For a variety of reasons, don't confuse hostnames with market share.
While that may be true, Linux impedes dominance by making it impossible for inertia to develop. It seems all the momentum Linux vendors seem to generate has a far greater force pushing against it.
I'm glad you have no issues with your recent versions of Ubuntu, a quick perusal of the Ubuntu support forums tells a different story though.
Just because it works for you, doesn't mean it works for everyone. This seems to be the most common reaction to problems with Linux. One user says such and such is broken, another user it works fine and they call him a liar.
Here's some relatively recent data:
According to IDC, Windows accounts for 48.9% (from Q1 2010) of all servers shipped, and According to Gartner it's 66.8% (from 2007).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Servers
20 years ago, Microsoft had no server OS. How could Linux rise to defeat Microsoft in a market it wasn't even in when Linux was created?
Apart from that, Linux's "dominance" in the server market is misunderstood. Typically, the only evidence to support this is the Netcraft hostname summary, which shows that 70 some percent of hostnames run on an Apache web server. This is misleading, because not only does it not take other kinds of servers into account (Database, File, Directory, etc..) it doesn't even accurately reflect web servers, since a) Apache runs on Windows (and lots of people do run Apache on Windows, particularly with Tomcat) and b) Windows servers tend to be corporate servers which do not have a large numbers of hostnames per server. Most ISP's run Linux or BSD servers and have very high levels of hostnames per server.
hostnames != marketshare.
Last I read, Linux servers only accounted for about 30-some% of all servers sold. And in the server market, people don't buy servers with Windows and wipe them and replace them with Linux. Windows server licenses are too expensive for that.
Certainly, Linux dominates in the android vs windows mobile market, and it dominates in the server appliance market over windows. But that's about it.
And if that second job is also telecommuting, then I could do the same thing.. and get a third job.. wow, i could get 1000+ jobs that way.