I have employed both windows admins and Linux admins and to be brutally honest the windows admins peformed as poorly as the software they were looking after At the risk of sounding troll-ish...
Have you ever considered hiring good windows admins, rather than bad ones?
You distinguish the good ones the same way you do on other OS's. Do they understand the underlying fundamentals, do they choose to leverage automation rather than poke & click or manually doing things, do they use scripting and programming to solve most non-trivial tasks, etc.
Thats just silly. You (or whomever owns the box) chose to have the system running where it would randomly reboot. You made a choice to configure it that way.
It is trivial and well known to configure it otherwise, and control the patch and reboot schedule.
Yes, we'd all like windows to be able to reboot less or not at all, but lets not confuse tehcnical limitations of windows with operational mis-management.
Especially considering Microsoft's creation of programming languages has pretty much consisted of making clones of preexisting languages (ie. Java --> C#, PHP --> ASP). Are you kidding me?
Aside from the fact that ALL languages are based on other languages.... which really moots the whole point. I mean do you really think that Java sprung whole from Bill Joy's forehead and wasnt based off lessons learned in any other language?
And to suggest that ASP was a clone of PHP? Can you back that up with any sort of logical argument?
PHP3 and ASP1 both released about the same time. ASP doesnt have any similarities to PHP, other than the fact they're both languages that run on the server and interact with the web-server.
PHP is based on C. ASP is not even a new language, its just VBScript with some built-in references to IIS helper objects and a couple minor syntactical additions.
No languages are developed in isolation. They all are built with lessons learned from other languages. This is a silly argument.
You've got it backwards. The consumers of this stuff _already have_ a windows stack.
So these are free, open-source (so the end-user can modify them) tools that run on and enhance the platform they already are using.
It's therefore a great thing, because it adds value to something they have, and doesnt cost them anything.
No one goes around looking for utility tools and add-ons, and then chooses the platform to fit the tools. The vast majority of people already have a chosen, standardized platform in their shop, they just want tools that work on what they have.
Wow, a confession, or did Twitter's account get hacked?
I don't really do a good job for M$. I think you probably do a good job for MS, actually. You're so ridiculously far beyond rational that you come off pretty clearly as a kook. And you probably do a pretty good job of associating yourself with all things Linux/FOSS, which tarnishes their reputation with your own.
So your net effect is probably marginally effective for MS. Did you get fired or something, or why the confession here?
With BSD-like licenses, they can simply steal your work and you cannot do a thing about it. That is such a ridiculous statement.
BSD licenses allow people to create private derivative works and not re-release your derivative works. Thats one of its defining features.
Therefore, if someone who created code CHOOSES to release it under a BSD license, then by definition they are okay with people doing this. Otherwise they wouldnt have released it under a BSD license.
Calling it stealing and 'nothing you can do about it' is just absurd and ignorant. If you wanted to do something about it you wouldnt release it under a BSD license!
Ask yourself why MS is doing this. Why release the MS-PL and MS-LPL, with such similar naming to the GPL and LGPL, but making the MS-LPL an awful license. Because they have a business to run. And they want to release some code in a reasonably open, BSD-style license, and they want to release other code in a way that is still reasonably open, but keeps it on their platform.
I cant think of a more reasonably way to do that than what they've done. The MS-PL and MS-LPL are identical (to my quick read at least), except the MS-LPL restricts it to the Windows platform. Again, their code, their right. Would you like someone trying to tell you what kind of license you can release code you create under?
And to say that MS-PL and MS-LPL are 'purposefully similar' in name to GPL and LGPL is just being either disingenuous or ignorant of the facts.
Let's look at some of the more popular, well known licenses supported by OSI, and how similar they are to the GPL and LGPL:
MPL - Mozilla Public License CDDL - Common Development and Distribution License CPL - Common Public License EPL - Eclipse Public License ECL - Educational Community License APL - Adaptive Public License OSL - Open Software License QPL - Qt Public License LPL - Lucent Public License
And you know what? Either phonetically, visually, or statistically (length, similarity of characters in similar positions, etc), the MS license abbreviations deviate farther from GPL and LGPL than do the other open source licenses supported by OSI.
The MS- in the front of each really distinguishes them. Maybe twitter would like to chime and and suggest that they should all be M$-.
About the only similarities are:
They all end with 'L'. But this is true for pretty much every license at OSI, so nothing unusual there.
One of MS's licenses ends with PL. So do a great number of other licenses at OSI, nothing unusual there.
MS has adopted a modifier pattern to their licenses to make some of them 'Limited'. MS-PL and MS-LPL, MS-CL and MS-LCL for example. This is similar in style to what FSF has done with GPL and LGPL, though its arguable that the 'Limited' has a nearly opposite meaning of what the 'Lesser' in LGPL has.
So in short, when looking at the license abbreviations, compared to the population of other OSI supported licenses, we see that the MS licenses vary far more from the GPL/LGPL than other OSI supported licenses do.
Based on this, it appears that, quite the opposite of your claim, MS went out of their way to make their license abbreviations easily distinguishable from the GPL and LGPL.
Then they will release code under the MS-LPL license. Most people won't understand or see that extra L, and assume it's similar. What does that matter?
Most people (ie, the software users) wont care. They dont care what license the source code is licensed under. They just care whether it works for them, and that they can get it. Both of those things are not impacted by license.
And any software developer that 'gets confused' about what license he's working with probably deserves to learn from their mistake.
And even if MS released huge amounts of amazing astounding granfantabulously amazing software, but only under the MS-LPL, that is their right. This is something more fundamental than issues about licensing. If you write it, you own it, and you get to distribute it however you want.
MS didnt divide the community, FSF did with the release of the GPL.
NOTHING is compatible with the GPL, thats its key feature. It subsumes all other licenses, or they cant play with it. Submit or go play elsewhere.
And thats great! It's basically creates and enforces a public domain of useful code that will always grow (and cannot shrink). This is useful to human society.
But GPL is not the only Open Source. BSD & Apache are open source. There are others. And they are equally valid, very useful, but completely incompatible with the GPL unless you re-license that code as GPL in the bundling.
Heck, there are licenses out there that were created specifically to build a community that commercial players could come in and fork/re-brand the code, but also allows the original owners to keep control of the reference line.
GPL != Open Source
If MS wants to release a bunch of stuff in a BSD style license, thats OKAY, by definition of the BSD style license. If they then change their minds, and want to retreat back into their own non-open-source world, thats OKAY by the definition of the license. But they cant revoke the code thats already out there. And they cant stop others from using it.
Your worst case scenario as described is okay, and will benefit the community. It may not maximize the benefit of 'society' but it will be better than it is today.
In fact, when I read the OSI front page, I see this:
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community.
One of our most important activities is as a standards body, maintaining the Open Source Definition for the good of the community. The Open Source Initiative Approved License trademark and program creates a nexus of trust around which developers, users, corporations and governments can organize open-source cooperation. Nope, nothing in there about Linux or GPL.
So what do they (Linux and GPL) have to do with the topic, the article, or anything at hand?
XP x64 has been running on 64-bit hardware for years as well. So have many other OS's. Whats your point?
And windows x86 has been able to address more than 4GB for ages, using PAE and AWE, similar to the software tricks x86 Linux and other systems use when running in 32-bit mode.
The security issues with Windows made me load three pieces of software to keep my machine protected, fine. But they had to scan on start-up each time. So if you dont like scan on startup, then turn it off. It's not necessary anyway.
I know the strategy is to hibernate or suspend the laptop between uses, but that also made for long load times, and if the laptop was hibernating for more than a day it needed a restart just to get it usable again. This doesnt make any sense whatsoever. Hibernate is off. The memory state is written to the hard drive, and all power is shut off to the machine. The processor isnt running, memory isnt powered, and the hard drive isnt spinning. It's physically impossible for the state to change once its gone into hibernate.
Because MS doesnt write the code that does this work. The hardware manufacturer does, in the driver.
And many drivers are crap. Windows just sends the command to the hardware to sleep or resume, and the driver deals with alot of the details.
This is why when you use a machine for a year or two, you find that what makes hibernate/sleep finally start working well are driver or bios updates, not windows updates.
Well, each to his own. I also know people who like JavaScript/EcmaScript/ActionScript, but I just dont see it. I've been doing debugging on things and it'll just 'stop'. No explanation why, no errors thrown, no useful information in the debugger.
I find I can be some much more productive with refactoring, F3 (eclipse), CTRL+SHIFT+T, and all the stuff that a statically typed, compiled language gives you when working in a decent IDE.
From a pure technical perspective, Silverlight is basically just C#/.NET/WPF, or at least a subset thereof. Plus some really nice dynamic language support, so you can do IronPython, Ruby, whatever. Very technically compelling. I think you have to base Silverlight on the correct MS team track record. This is largely coming out of the group that did.NET, C# and the like. Their track record there has been impressive. The issue you're quoting is an IE/HTML parsing thing. And although IE is improving, that groups work has not been terribly impressive.
I think the tough thing will be whether MS can make it really ubiquitous, across the major platforms.
You can only play with Microsoft if you only play on Microsoft and you are completely controlled by Microsoft via platform ownership and control. That is it. It does not matter if you find one pin prick which seems like fun, like it's cool, etc. It is fucking limiting and 20+ years of Microsoft business practices show this if you are willing to actually look at them out from under their rose colors glasses.
Thats interesting, because I dont seem to suffer from these same limitations. I do some things on the MS stack where its smart, and some elsewhere where its smart. We've got clients that do everything from enterprise financials on java to a pure.net/ms stack on windows, with a smattering of Macs.
Many of the smaller clients stick pretty much to windows, because its just usually easier and cheaper in the long run, and things tend to 'just work'.
And you know what, the single biggest challenge we face with microsoft 'business practices' is challenges in activating older systems that are rebuilt. But that only comes up when people other than us were doing their systems before, and not doing things in the smartest way.
I'm not sure what happened to you that you go so horribly burned by them, but I just dont see that kind of thing in the real world. They're just another business to deal with. Just like I wouldnt put all my trust and faith into Sun, I wouldnt into Microsoft.
But there's no mystical magical trap that you fall into when using their systems. Sure its easier to keep using their systems once you're on them, but duh, they're a business. Of course they're setup that way. It doesnt take much intelligence and planning to make sure that you dont get dependent on them. If the cost/benefit of MS ever swings to the negative, you simply move on.
It's really not that big of a deal, and I dont see why you make it into such a religious thing.
Obviously, if you have no possibility of ever doing anything exciting, innovative, or just plain fun and only care if it works on your Windows box, there is no way you'd agree that supporting a company and it's products because of how it damages choice outside that world.
Well, I dont know what you're doing that is letting some other business damage your choices, but I dont experience that problem. And just like elsewhere in the world, there is some damn interesting stuff coming out of MS.
C# and.NET are a compelling platform. Would they be more compelling if there was a 100% compatible stack on all the other major platforms, sure! But given that 95%+ of the systems (desktops) we encounter are windows, and the other 5% are Mac, this really just isnt a problem.
If/when MS loses their hold on the desktop, and it becomes a more heterogenous environment, then we'll adapt. It's just really not that big of a deal. Just requires a little bit of thinking ahead, and you can maximize your opportunities now, and minimize risks later.
But for the moment, C#/.Net with Linq and some of the XAML/WPF tech stacks are quite compelling. If MS can manage to not shoot themselves in the foot and create a situation where the Silverlight client is ubiquitous, then they may stomp the alternatives. If I'm given the choice to develop an app on one of these kinds of stacks, and my choices are C#/.Net/XAML or Flash/Javascript? Well, thats an easy damn choice. I'll take a real compiled language and a modern layout system anyday of the week than trying to build real solutions in Javascript.
Right now, the sexy space is, in my ken, a fast dynamic sytem like Ruby or Python plus the appropriate toolkit for web apps (RoR, Django, etc), plus.Net or Java on the backend for the heavy lifting. And the choice of.Net or Java is really going to depend on the staff in place in the org. They're both fine, the costs arent that much different, and both are incredibly powerful.
And if you have any hope that a Microsoft technology will get you anywhere but roped, lashed, bolted, and tied to Microsoft you are seriously mislead. .NET is quite successful. It's arguably technically superior to Java in a number of ways (though inferior in some, and many say the non-platform-agnostic is a big downer). But it hasnt resulted in torture devices being used on anyone.
It's basically resulted in the same situation that we've always had: If you can run your servers on Windows (for web-based stuff), and/or your app will work being windows only (for rich client stuff), then.NET is quite nice.
No torture necessary. Heck,.NET has pushed some great features that Sun has rushed to adopt, and the Java community has created some amazing things (spring, hibernate, ant, junit) that have leaked over into the.net world (spring.net, nhibernate, nant, nunit). It's really been quite a win/win scenario for the Universe.
Considering that, it's strange that people keep going with Microsoft, which isn't exactly folding, but has been known to pull the rug from under people's feet once in a while. New OS releases that come with new and incompatible driver models. New Office releases that save in new file formats that can't be read by older software. Visual Basic 6 will no longer be supported. Oh, and they gave you free, automatic upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. Right, that means Internet Explorer 6 won't work anymore, and neither will software that requires it. Oh, your app doesn't work in Vista? Well, guess you'll have to update it. And on and on. These things arent relevant for what you're talking about in a business environment.
No one is making you do an in-place upgrade to Vista on machines that dont have adequate driver support. Businesses just dont roll out vista until their hardware supports it, period.
No one forces you to upgrade Office, a ton of the world still runs on Office 2000 or so. But for those business who DO want to upgrade, they can trivially adjust the default save format for their entire domain in 5 minutes. This is not something that trips up any organization with an IT department.
Visual Basic will be supported for at least another 10 years, probably longer. The runtime will continue to ship with all Windows systems for the forseeable future.
Now if you mean that they arent continuing to develop VB, well thats true. And that was the correct choice. There was no evolutionary path from VB6 to.NET, and it would have held back the entire industry to try.
So basically, businesses have 10-15 years to migrate their VB stuff to something else. And to be frank, they wont migrate it, they'll just replace them through normal attrition.
And no one forces you to upgrade to IE7. I know many orgs who still use IE6 on their systems. It's real simple. If you have dependencies on IE6 because of web apps that are critical to your business, then you stay there for now. If you dont, then you upgrade to IE7, which for all of its problems, is vastly more secure than IE6 was.
I could go on. MS will support XP and that whole stack until ~2010 (IIRC), the VB runtime will be around forever, etc.
From what I've seen Silverlight is very much like Flash functionally. In fact (and please feel free to correct me) aside from being a WMV wrapper and there-by providing their own DRM system natively I see very little difference. It's actually quite different, fundamentally so.
Among other things, it was developed from scratch for a more application-targeted usage, whereas Flash is basically an animated movie player that was modified with spit and duct-tape to kind of be an application delivery platform.
Silverlight uses a subset of the XAML and WPF frameworks, which are light years beyond doing layouts in Flash. And here's the biggie for app developers: Silverlight doesnt force you to work in the death-trap that is Javascript. You can use a real, compiled, IDE-supported language to do your development, and not be stuck in the 1980's with javascript.
Look into it a little more. The media-delivery stuff is just what's sexy right now, due to YouTube's success. But its really a tiny piece of it. Just think of it as a mini app-dev platform for web delivery.
First of all, if the network connection drops for any reason then the user ends up off-line and can't print. Losing the ability to print is something that only happens in a very specific set of conditions, notably that your file server is also your print server.
This happens because Offline Files marks the entire server offline if it decides it cant contact it, so if your print queues are there too, then those go offline as well. But if your print queues are on a different box, then this doesnt happen.
This is also only true in 2000 and XP. Not marking the entire server offline is one of the improvements made in Vista's offline files.
I cant speak for Verizon or AT&T, but Sprint actively markets these to business users, and actively market it as a way to VPN into your home company when mobile.
At least for the dedicated data cards (EVDO revA) and unlimited data plans from Sprint, this is the case.
heck even the JVM is written in C++ (iirc). Allow me to recant this piece. Just did some quick looking and it seems that there are some JVMs written in Java, and that Sun may have done an original bootstrapping and now its all java.
Unfortunately, its friday night and I dont have time to do the research before fun-time.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever considered hiring good windows admins, rather than bad ones?
You distinguish the good ones the same way you do on other OS's. Do they understand the underlying fundamentals, do they choose to leverage automation rather than poke & click or manually doing things, do they use scripting and programming to solve most non-trivial tasks, etc.
Thats just silly. You (or whomever owns the box) chose to have the system running where it would randomly reboot. You made a choice to configure it that way.
It is trivial and well known to configure it otherwise, and control the patch and reboot schedule.
Yes, we'd all like windows to be able to reboot less or not at all, but lets not confuse tehcnical limitations of windows with operational mis-management.
Aside from the fact that ALL languages are based on other languages
And to suggest that ASP was a clone of PHP? Can you back that up with any sort of logical argument?
PHP3 and ASP1 both released about the same time. ASP doesnt have any similarities to PHP, other than the fact they're both languages that run on the server and interact with the web-server.
PHP is based on C. ASP is not even a new language, its just VBScript with some built-in references to IIS helper objects and a couple minor syntactical additions.
No languages are developed in isolation. They all are built with lessons learned from other languages. This is a silly argument.
This should be blatantly obvious, but ...
These tools are not intended to convert/brainwash/convince/whatever anyone of anything.
They are tools and community intended to make life better for MS customers.
So the people who go here ALREADY HAVE a windows infrastructure.
People trying to get a job done dont sit around contemplating the subtle philosophical differences between flavors of open source.
They just want tools that make their lives easier, preferably for free.
This sort of communities serve this purpose.
So to repeat, so that its clear and easy to understand:
CodePlex and associated projects are not intended for you. They are intended for MS customers, who can benefit from them.
You've got it backwards. The consumers of this stuff _already have_ a windows stack.
So these are free, open-source (so the end-user can modify them) tools that run on and enhance the platform they already are using.
It's therefore a great thing, because it adds value to something they have, and doesnt cost them anything.
No one goes around looking for utility tools and add-ons, and then chooses the platform to fit the tools. The vast majority of people already have a chosen, standardized platform in their shop, they just want tools that work on what they have.
So your net effect is probably marginally effective for MS. Did you get fired or something, or why the confession here?
BSD licenses allow people to create private derivative works and not re-release your derivative works. Thats one of its defining features.
Therefore, if someone who created code CHOOSES to release it under a BSD license, then by definition they are okay with people doing this. Otherwise they wouldnt have released it under a BSD license.
Calling it stealing and 'nothing you can do about it' is just absurd and ignorant. If you wanted to do something about it you wouldnt release it under a BSD license!
I cant think of a more reasonably way to do that than what they've done. The MS-PL and MS-LPL are identical (to my quick read at least), except the MS-LPL restricts it to the Windows platform. Again, their code, their right. Would you like someone trying to tell you what kind of license you can release code you create under?
And to say that MS-PL and MS-LPL are 'purposefully similar' in name to GPL and LGPL is just being either disingenuous or ignorant of the facts.
Let's look at some of the more popular, well known licenses supported by OSI, and how similar they are to the GPL and LGPL:
From Open Source Licenses by Category:
GPL
LGPL
MPL - Mozilla Public License
CDDL - Common Development and Distribution License
CPL - Common Public License
EPL - Eclipse Public License
ECL - Educational Community License
APL - Adaptive Public License
OSL - Open Software License
QPL - Qt Public License
LPL - Lucent Public License
Now lets look at the MS licenses:
MS-PL
MS-LPL
MS-CL
MS-LCL
MS-RL
And you know what? Either phonetically, visually, or statistically (length, similarity of characters in similar positions, etc), the MS license abbreviations deviate farther from GPL and LGPL than do the other open source licenses supported by OSI.
The MS- in the front of each really distinguishes them. Maybe twitter would like to chime and and suggest that they should all be M$-.
About the only similarities are:
They all end with 'L'. But this is true for pretty much every license at OSI, so nothing unusual there.
One of MS's licenses ends with PL. So do a great number of other licenses at OSI, nothing unusual there.
MS has adopted a modifier pattern to their licenses to make some of them 'Limited'. MS-PL and MS-LPL, MS-CL and MS-LCL for example. This is similar in style to what FSF has done with GPL and LGPL, though its arguable that the 'Limited' has a nearly opposite meaning of what the 'Lesser' in LGPL has.
So in short, when looking at the license abbreviations, compared to the population of other OSI supported licenses, we see that the MS licenses vary far more from the GPL/LGPL than other OSI supported licenses do.
Based on this, it appears that, quite the opposite of your claim, MS went out of their way to make their license abbreviations easily distinguishable from the GPL and LGPL.
Most people (ie, the software users) wont care. They dont care what license the source code is licensed under. They just care whether it works for them, and that they can get it. Both of those things are not impacted by license.
And any software developer that 'gets confused' about what license he's working with probably deserves to learn from their mistake.
And even if MS released huge amounts of amazing astounding granfantabulously amazing software, but only under the MS-LPL, that is their right. This is something more fundamental than issues about licensing. If you write it, you own it, and you get to distribute it however you want.
MS didnt divide the community, FSF did with the release of the GPL.
NOTHING is compatible with the GPL, thats its key feature. It subsumes all other licenses, or they cant play with it. Submit or go play elsewhere.
And thats great! It's basically creates and enforces a public domain of useful code that will always grow (and cannot shrink). This is useful to human society.
But GPL is not the only Open Source. BSD & Apache are open source. There are others. And they are equally valid, very useful, but completely incompatible with the GPL unless you re-license that code as GPL in the bundling.
Heck, there are licenses out there that were created specifically to build a community that commercial players could come in and fork/re-brand the code, but also allows the original owners to keep control of the reference line.
GPL != Open Source
If MS wants to release a bunch of stuff in a BSD style license, thats OKAY, by definition of the BSD style license. If they then change their minds, and want to retreat back into their own non-open-source world, thats OKAY by the definition of the license. But they cant revoke the code thats already out there. And they cant stop others from using it.
Your worst case scenario as described is okay, and will benefit the community. It may not maximize the benefit of 'society' but it will be better than it is today.
You know that Linux and the GPL does not represent open source, right? For example, there is BSD style open source, and Mozilla license style open source, and Educational Community style open source, there are purely NASA-style open source and a host of others?
In fact, when I read the OSI front page, I see this: The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community.
One of our most important activities is as a standards body, maintaining the Open Source Definition for the good of the community. The Open Source Initiative Approved License trademark and program creates a nexus of trust around which developers, users, corporations and governments can organize open-source cooperation. Nope, nothing in there about Linux or GPL.
So what do they (Linux and GPL) have to do with the topic, the article, or anything at hand?
XP x64 has been running on 64-bit hardware for years as well. So have many other OS's. Whats your point?
And windows x86 has been able to address more than 4GB for ages, using PAE and AWE, similar to the software tricks x86 Linux and other systems use when running in 32-bit mode.
Because MS doesnt write the code that does this work. The hardware manufacturer does, in the driver.
And many drivers are crap. Windows just sends the command to the hardware to sleep or resume, and the driver deals with alot of the details.
This is why when you use a machine for a year or two, you find that what makes hibernate/sleep finally start working well are driver or bios updates, not windows updates.
Cookies have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Web browsers send a 'user agent' string as part of their requests.
For example, mine looks like this on this laptop:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Disabling cookies will have no affect on this user agent string being sent.
The only thing disabling cookies will stop is the hit counters from following you around their site, and building session/browsing histories.
Well, each to his own. I also know people who like JavaScript/EcmaScript/ActionScript, but I just dont see it. I've been doing debugging on things and it'll just 'stop'. No explanation why, no errors thrown, no useful information in the debugger.
.NET, C# and the like. Their track record there has been impressive. The issue you're quoting is an IE/HTML parsing thing. And although IE is improving, that groups work has not been terribly impressive.
I find I can be some much more productive with refactoring, F3 (eclipse), CTRL+SHIFT+T, and all the stuff that a statically typed, compiled language gives you when working in a decent IDE.
From a pure technical perspective, Silverlight is basically just C#/.NET/WPF, or at least a subset thereof. Plus some really nice dynamic language support, so you can do IronPython, Ruby, whatever. Very technically compelling. I think you have to base Silverlight on the correct MS team track record. This is largely coming out of the group that did
I think the tough thing will be whether MS can make it really ubiquitous, across the major platforms.
You can only play with Microsoft if you only play on Microsoft and you are completely controlled by Microsoft via platform ownership and control. That is it. It does not matter if you find one pin prick which seems like fun, like it's cool, etc. It is fucking limiting and 20+ years of Microsoft business practices show this if you are willing to actually look at them out from under their rose colors glasses.
Thats interesting, because I dont seem to suffer from these same limitations. I do some things on the MS stack where its smart, and some elsewhere where its smart. We've got clients that do everything from enterprise financials on java to a pure .net/ms stack on windows, with a smattering of Macs.
Many of the smaller clients stick pretty much to windows, because its just usually easier and cheaper in the long run, and things tend to 'just work'.
And you know what, the single biggest challenge we face with microsoft 'business practices' is challenges in activating older systems that are rebuilt. But that only comes up when people other than us were doing their systems before, and not doing things in the smartest way.
I'm not sure what happened to you that you go so horribly burned by them, but I just dont see that kind of thing in the real world. They're just another business to deal with. Just like I wouldnt put all my trust and faith into Sun, I wouldnt into Microsoft.
But there's no mystical magical trap that you fall into when using their systems. Sure its easier to keep using their systems once you're on them, but duh, they're a business. Of course they're setup that way. It doesnt take much intelligence and planning to make sure that you dont get dependent on them. If the cost/benefit of MS ever swings to the negative, you simply move on.
It's really not that big of a deal, and I dont see why you make it into such a religious thing.
Obviously, if you have no possibility of ever doing anything exciting, innovative, or just plain fun and only care if it works on your Windows box, there is no way you'd agree that supporting a company and it's products because of how it damages choice outside that world.
Well, I dont know what you're doing that is letting some other business damage your choices, but I dont experience that problem. And just like elsewhere in the world, there is some damn interesting stuff coming out of MS.
.NET are a compelling platform. Would they be more compelling if there was a 100% compatible stack on all the other major platforms, sure! But given that 95%+ of the systems (desktops) we encounter are windows, and the other 5% are Mac, this really just isnt a problem.
.Net or Java on the backend for the heavy lifting. And the choice of .Net or Java is really going to depend on the staff in place in the org. They're both fine, the costs arent that much different, and both are incredibly powerful.
C# and
If/when MS loses their hold on the desktop, and it becomes a more heterogenous environment, then we'll adapt. It's just really not that big of a deal. Just requires a little bit of thinking ahead, and you can maximize your opportunities now, and minimize risks later.
But for the moment, C#/.Net with Linq and some of the XAML/WPF tech stacks are quite compelling. If MS can manage to not shoot themselves in the foot and create a situation where the Silverlight client is ubiquitous, then they may stomp the alternatives. If I'm given the choice to develop an app on one of these kinds of stacks, and my choices are C#/.Net/XAML or Flash/Javascript? Well, thats an easy damn choice. I'll take a real compiled language and a modern layout system anyday of the week than trying to build real solutions in Javascript.
Right now, the sexy space is, in my ken, a fast dynamic sytem like Ruby or Python plus the appropriate toolkit for web apps (RoR, Django, etc), plus
I think you just need to think about
It's basically resulted in the same situation that we've always had: If you can run your servers on Windows (for web-based stuff), and/or your app will work being windows only (for rich client stuff), then
No torture necessary. Heck,
No one is making you do an in-place upgrade to Vista on machines that dont have adequate driver support. Businesses just dont roll out vista until their hardware supports it, period.
No one forces you to upgrade Office, a ton of the world still runs on Office 2000 or so. But for those business who DO want to upgrade, they can trivially adjust the default save format for their entire domain in 5 minutes. This is not something that trips up any organization with an IT department.
Visual Basic will be supported for at least another 10 years, probably longer. The runtime will continue to ship with all Windows systems for the forseeable future.
Now if you mean that they arent continuing to develop VB, well thats true. And that was the correct choice. There was no evolutionary path from VB6 to
So basically, businesses have 10-15 years to migrate their VB stuff to something else. And to be frank, they wont migrate it, they'll just replace them through normal attrition.
And no one forces you to upgrade to IE7. I know many orgs who still use IE6 on their systems. It's real simple. If you have dependencies on IE6 because of web apps that are critical to your business, then you stay there for now. If you dont, then you upgrade to IE7, which for all of its problems, is vastly more secure than IE6 was.
I could go on. MS will support XP and that whole stack until ~2010 (IIRC), the VB runtime will be around forever, etc.
I dont see any rug-pulling here.
Among other things, it was developed from scratch for a more application-targeted usage, whereas Flash is basically an animated movie player that was modified with spit and duct-tape to kind of be an application delivery platform.
Silverlight uses a subset of the XAML and WPF frameworks, which are light years beyond doing layouts in Flash. And here's the biggie for app developers: Silverlight doesnt force you to work in the death-trap that is Javascript. You can use a real, compiled, IDE-supported language to do your development, and not be stuck in the 1980's with javascript.
Look into it a little more. The media-delivery stuff is just what's sexy right now, due to YouTube's success. But its really a tiny piece of it. Just think of it as a mini app-dev platform for web delivery.
I've been using Mozy as a personal backup on my machine, for about 1.5 years. It's worked fabulously for me, and I've never had any problems with it.
Truly effortless, zero human interaction once its setup. It largely 'just works'.
And at $5 per month for unlimited backups on one non-server machine, its a screaming deal.
This happens because Offline Files marks the entire server offline if it decides it cant contact it, so if your print queues are there too, then those go offline as well. But if your print queues are on a different box, then this doesnt happen.
This is also only true in 2000 and XP. Not marking the entire server offline is one of the improvements made in Vista's offline files.
I cant speak for Verizon or AT&T, but Sprint actively markets these to business users, and actively market it as a way to VPN into your home company when mobile.
At least for the dedicated data cards (EVDO revA) and unlimited data plans from Sprint, this is the case.
Windows Logo Program (for hardware) != signed drivers.
All drivers shipped as part of the Windows Logo Program are signed, but not all signed drivers are part of the Windows Logo Program.
And there are levels of testing in the Logo program, as well, some more rigorous than others.
Unfortunately, its friday night and I dont have time to do the research before fun-time.