Not only they're making a profit during a recession, but they're making a profit during a recession even with all the bad publicity from Vista (while I love Vista, one cannot argue the bad reputation it has).
Just one thing though: it is very rare for anyone to pay full for any Microsoft product. 25k is retail price, for CPU licenses, when A) CPU licenses are fairly rarely sold, and are for uncommon scenarios (I mean, I -can- think of dozens of them, but they're still the exception, not the rule, no matter how common they may seem). Usually companies will go for the CAL scheme, because since you'll have tons and tons of database servers, it ends up much cheaper to get 1 CAL for everyone in the company, then pay the much cheaper server price.
Second, enterprise products from Microsoft are usually sold via subscription/software insurance, so its paid per month. (Note that SQL Server does NOT have an upgrade pricing...so if you want to upgrade without paying full price again and again, thats the only way to go).
Finally, volume licensing. To take an example I'm more familiar with: an MSDN Premium subscription is, let say, 2600$ per year (retail). However, for TWO years, which falls under volume licensing, is about 2700$, or 100$ more. (I don't remember the real price, but it IS about 100$ of difference). So really, its 1350$ a year. Now, same deal with all other Microsoft products.
So for a company large enough to use SQL Server 2008 Enterprise (and thats -large-... SQL Server Standard really does the trick up to a very large scale), you'll pay maybe 5k per server and 30$ per user per year. Maybe. (I'm making up numbers here, since those things are dealt on a contract by contract basis, so it depends how good you are at negotiation, but it gives an order of magnitude).
No one in the corporate world pays 250$ per license of Windows, 400$ for Office, or 25k per CPU for SQL Server.
No highly-qualified candidate you interview is going to want to hear this number and the best ones are certain to find it out either from you or other sources.
40% isn't even that guy... in lower skill industries, turnover bordering the 80-100% aren't unheard of. And while 10% per quarter may be pushing it, a company willing to trim the fat and keep only the best tend to end up having a lot less interpersonal issues. When companies stop firing people, its when the internal wars start.
Yup. I just recently got a new job for a very senior position for a very cool company, one of the best to work for in the region anyway. There was multiple openings for the team. Not a single one, ZERO, nadah, none, of the candidates they interviewed had what they needed (and what they needed wasn't obscure by a long shot, and the required skillset wasn't 16 page long...they just wanted someone good). They couldn't find any.
In the end, I got the job even though I didn't have one of the major requirements, because they thought I was good enough to be worth training. Even with that concession, I was the only person they could find on the continent (no one in the region at all, big metropolitan area, and no one on the -continent- who was willing to move). Finally, they found ONE other person for the job, who had worked for them in the past across the globe in asia (no, not in a third world country...I'm being vague since, well, can't post all the details on the net), and they're relocating him.
Qualified people are almost inexistent if your requirement goes beyond raw computer science or script kiddies, the two extremes. And for the AC that posted, no, they weren't looking for someone with 20 years of experience, I have something like 7.
Ahh yes. Then we're in perfect agreement. Netbooks are useful for college students who use a lap-top only to write papers and take notes in class too (so not the average CS or Design major of course).
I'm personally holding out to see if they come out with (admitedly high end) multi-touch Windows 7 based net books. There's already some slick tablet PCs that are nearly netbook-sized (I've only seen them in some asian countries, dunno if some are available here...didn't see any anyway), the future is looking bright.
Well, if we're talking home machine here, what CANT a netbook do for an average user? You can browse the web and emails fine, an office suite will work fine, you can listen to music and view your pictures.
What else does an average user do (lets keep it in the realm of legality here). Graphic design? No. 3d modeling? no. Compiling C++? No. Watch HD movies? Uncommon, thats for the TV, and besides, some netbooks could play 720P. High end games? No, even the average lap-top can't do it, hell, even desktop, and some people play WoW on netbooks.
So really, why couldn't a netbook replace a full PC in "most cases"? Unless we totally differ on what "most" people do on their computers.
My major gripe with Vista was games performing poorly, having a few heavy processes caused the system to perform poorly, pretty much poor performance all around.
On the same machine, where I had recently installed Vista. With the same drivers from Vista I install Windows 7, poof, problems gone away - I am certain it wasn't a driver issue.
Disclaimer: Vista is working wonderfully for me, so I'm not saying the following from personal experience, but simply from technical data I gathered about Windows 7.
You said what slowed things down for you was a few heavy processes. Fair to say those were services? Because the primary, biggest change in Windows 7 isn't the taskbar or whatever, its the service handling engine. The old way (leaving services that "may" be needed, just in case, running perpetually) was completly revamped with a very powerful trigger mechanism. The system is made to detect various conditions (which can be quite involved) in which services may be needed (or not), and turns them on or off completly and automatically as these situations occure. For example, the plug & play service will not start until devices that need it are detected. Windows Domain services are only started when a domain is detected (as opposed to always running, just in case you connect to a domain). These services turn off automatically once they're not needed.
Of course, the first reaction is to say "Well duh! it should have been that way all along!", but the examples I gave are quite silly, the engine can handle much, much more complicated scenarios, and all around, it provides a "lazy loading" of services... so Windows 7 ends up running as little as possible at any given time, which is the polar opposite of Vista (which had as much services as possible running at any given time, just in case you may need it =P)
Probably why your experience changed so much between the two.
You're right, though I wasn't clear on my side. The SQL Server release schedule was always every 5 years, and with SQL Server 2008, it was moved to 3~ They didn't make the projected date, but were way ahead of their previous 5 year schedule.
The dev tools have updates to work with the "new cool stuff" relatively quick and off band. When I said things went too quick, it was more like,.NET 2.0 -> 3.0 -> 3.5. Not only it added a lot of the "new cool stuff", it also added entire new technology stacks. It was too much to swallow for anyone but the most hardcores. Heck, a lot of places didn't upgrade to VS2008 yet even though its virtually 100% backward compatible, aside for a few minor things and the database tools (which can be installed side by side anyhow)
Games is obviously not very relevant in the enterprise environment, though, Crysis aside, I haven't hit a game in a long time that pushed Vista over 2 gigs of RAM (that wouldn't do the same to XP that is). Didn't try GTA4, I heard that was pretty bad, but aside that?
VMs, ok, but those take exactly the amount of RAM you want them to take, give or take the overhead, you can bust 10 gigs of RAM on any machine with that if you so wish it, and I did mention design and stuff (so Photoshop).
I haven't rebooted since the last patch tuesday, and search all the time, including un-indexed search, and the worse I can get to happen on a terrabyte of storage is 30 megs~ for explorer.exe. Wonder if there's a third party app that hooks into it (maybe an AV?) and it messes with that? No clue. That saids, even with that, did you hit swap? Vista tries to use as much RAM as it can while avoiding swap like plague (I never once hit swap file here), so at that point, it really doesn't matter.
I have to ask though, what do you do with Vista that needs so much RAM, seriously? I'm a windows developer, with tons of high volume services installed on my box (from SQL Server to Oracle, from Visual Studio in multiple flavors to Eclipse, etc), and I often have most of that running all at once, and while I have 4 gigs of RAM (well, 2.75...I need to move to 64 bit, ugh...), It has been MONTHS, according to my system's stats, since I went over 2 gigs, and from memory, when I did, it was because I let Firefox run too long with its glorious memory leaks.
I know that having McAfee, Norton or AVG (among others), especially the enterprise versions, on machines, will totally trash performance. It does in XP too (my current job has been on an XP box with 4 gigs of ram and Norton...performance is unacceptable, and makes that 1 gig Vista box look like it flies), but it affects Vista worse. Thats definately a problem, and if you blame it on Vista or on the AV vendors, thats up to you. Vista is impossible to use with those installed, period.
Without that though? What the hell are people doing to need that much RAM? (I know extremely large compiles, design and editing, rendering, etc can...but it does on XP too...but I'm talking about stuff that isn't known to bust 6 gigs even on Linux here).
Yes Windows 7 is much faster...among other things, it implemented a massive "service trigger" system that allows services to be off until the very moment you need them, and go back to off when you're done... but it won't help any once you flick McAfee on it. The subsystems are still similar, and if third party app vendors still force their half-assed "break-all-windows-development-standards" versions, the same problems will happen.
Actually, MS has been a bit on the early side lately. Visual Studio and SQL Servers' latest versions came up a little on the early side, for example. With the organizational and project management internal issues that caused Vista now fixed, they freed up a -lot- of resources. Its actually a bit hard to keep up with them really, because a lot of people got used to the crawling snail paced release schedule of the early decade.
If you're in a "fortune 10 company", then you probably are aware that the ones that bitched the most at Vista being so late was the fortune tops. Usually, with volume licensing and license insurance and all that junk, you break "even" if a new OS comes out every 3 years, so anything beyond that and you're getting rimmed.
That said, if your Vista equipped 4 gigs lap-top is even significantly slower than XP, your department needs to do their job better. Making sure the software installed on it (anti-virus comes to mind...) isn't known to be just a quick port of the XP version on Vista to bleed customers, tends to help. We rolled out Vista pre-SP1 on 1 gigs machines for developers and designers at launch and it was more than acceptable.
Windows 7 is being rolled out this fast because: A) until the WinFS fiasco (among other things) that slowed down Vista's release like crazy, that was pretty much the accepted pace (Win2k vs WinXP anyone? 20-21 months apart. Thats a LOT closer than Vista vs Win7), and B) because the Vista name is tainted by people who didn't update their OS rollout knowledge.
Being in an extremely large company doesn't make t he sysadmins any smarter. I worked for one of the 5 largest corporations in the world where untested crap was getting rolled out semi-randomly and blew up everything, so its really no indication.
GETDATE() (or pretty much any sensible implementation doing the same thing on any other database server) will return the date as a, well, date, not a string. At whichever point it gets converted is where you hit the problem. If the recordset gets read in Java, C#, C++, whatever, the driver will give you a date object, that you can convert at will in the format you wish. Same deal the other way around, when you pass a parameter, don't pass in the date as a string, but as an SQL Date parameter (or whatever is the equivalent on your favored platform).
Unless you have some fairly weird requirement, you should rarely if ever have to deal with dates as string at the SQL level, with probably the primary exception being the development tool themselves, when you try to run a stored procedure directly from Management Studio or whatever. Beyond that, that string date behavior is the norm more than the exception, and not just in the SQL world, thus why if the format matters to you, you should always explicitly define the current culture (which can also be done in T-SQL, btw, forcing whatever culture you want at the stored procedure level without changing the server or database settings)
Virtually all of your info is for XP, and is partly wrong. Retail XP cannot be installed indefinately before you have to call Microsoft. And In Vista, they did away with the different CDs. Sure, some OEM vendors have custom disks, but the keys WILL work with any disk, period. All of the versions are on one disk, its only the key that will change which version ends up being installed (upgrades being the exception I guess, that I never tried).
Try it, you'll see. All that blah blah, basically to say absolutely nothing.
Up to 75 employees, you can use Small Business Server, and for that many users, it will cost a little under 7000$... that includes all Windows Server licenses, Exchange licenses, and you can use the other Windows Server stuff like Sharepoint. My part time job while I was in college paid more than that, and after college, well, it wasn't close, hehehe.
Its the process integration stuff, from email to scheduling, integration with third party stuff (BlackBerries... you can integrate with other solution, but its nowhere as comprehensive) etc. It works, it maintains itself (well, with Small Business Server anyway, its hard if you do it yourself). Before Small Business Server, I would have agreed with you, but SBS was released as an answer to stuff like Google Apps. Even then, I still agree that for a small company (someone who replied to you said he was asked to install Exchange for 3-4 people...thats ridiculous) it is a bad idea. But 20~ employees or more, it can be cost effective, if you use a lot of its features.
Outlook/Exchange will also integrate itself with a lot of other things. Office Communicator is a big one, Sharepoint like I mentionned above, and all around, if you set it up right, you do save money in the long run. You still have to consider alternatives though, because if you're not planning on using Exchange's features, its silly.
We use Linux -too- (dozens of thousands of Linux boxes, and not just servers, desktops too). But it doesn't do everything, no matter how many senior *nix engineers you put on it, no matter how much money (well, realistically...) you drop on the open source community.
Because of that, the vast majority of our desktops are Win XP (and trust me, Linux is everywhere where its realistic to make it work for us), our back end is mostly *nix (various flavors, not just Linux), we have our own custom Linux "distribution", but even there, we have a lot of Windows Server for stuff where *nix is just not the best at (and there's more than you may think).
Take Office for example. We don't even use it for the file format (we have enough influence to tell our partners to eat whatever format we pick, so we could switch to OpenOffice quite easily). We extend it though, because its by far the easiest office suite to develop for, interop with, and extend/tweak/plugin. Once you go far enough in developing very specialized stuff for it, Wine will choke on it, so thats not an option, and it goes downhill from there. The licensing cost is insignificant (Microsoft has "infinite" license deals, and its not as expensive as one would think), so its just cost effective like that.
Best tool for the job. We even have stuff thats Firefox-only! But no, Linux doesn't do everything...not every close, even if you throw a few hundred people at the code.
I can still download updates for Windows 98. And thats -updates-, downloads of significant size (compared to a web page or a text file i mean), and they're still there. So activating WinXP... probably forever. I'm pretty sure they don't have much choice anyway. The day they refuse activations is the day they get butt raped without lube by antitrust groups on both sides of the ocean.
XP had the same issue actually, unless you had the corporate version. 3 strikes and you're out. Vista was indeed reduced as far as I can tell. On the other side though, all of the disks are the same, so if you have a valid key (including the OEM key taped on a Dell machine), you can use it with any other disk (though it will only install the version matching the key, but all versions are included on disk for a given architecture), and it will work. You'll indeed have to call Redmond (which takes a few minutes at most), but it will work. And the key works for 32 and 64 bit, so you can switch between the two.
Gain some lose some, I actually prefer the new system, personally (though I hate both, and stuck with Win2k for the longest time because of it)
There's actually too much major changes to the core of the system to release it as a service pack... There's major changes to the kernel, to the service subsystem, the dependencies subsystem, and a whole new service trigger mechanism wrapping those things up, with a large amount of stuff that had to be overhauled to take advantage of it.
Even if released that as a SP (I mean, almost anything can be back ported, even a kernel, so well...), it probably would be the size of a fucking OS, and for companies pushing it, they'd have to act like its a new OS.
The driver system and the UI didn't change much, so it looks similar on the surface, and its vastly more backward compatible, but thats where the similarities end... It was a faster release mostly because there wasn't a WinFS ressource blackhole internally at MS.
Regardless of how perfect or not Windows 7 is, at this point, ANY migration away from XP will be painful... companies often have 6 years~ of invested work in it. The company I work for has a custom "build" of it, with many core DLLs recoded from scratch to change base behavior (with the blessing of MS), our own Linux-like package management system, our own set of registry tweaks, and all around, deep, and often unsupported modifications.
Needless to say, a lot of that stuff will ONLY ever work on Windows XP...it made sense at the time, since XP lived for so long, and we skip every other Windows releases no matter what, but now, thats a LOT of stuff to migrate. We have, even in this time of harsh economic environment, the ressources to do it, and we will. There are plans to switch to Windows 7 already.
Pretty much. When it comes to color and image, I'm as close to an average joe as it gets, and I love the glossy screens =P Of course, if I had to do any actual work, or cared about correctness of the display, it would be totally awful.
its a bit like the Digital Vibrance setting you can tweak on the videocard panel... it makes thing stand out more, brighter, and for an average joe, its great. Probably makes even an amateur designer or photograph cry though.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only they're making a profit during a recession, but they're making a profit during a recession even with all the bad publicity from Vista (while I love Vista, one cannot argue the bad reputation it has).
Thats something.
Just one thing though: it is very rare for anyone to pay full for any Microsoft product. 25k is retail price, for CPU licenses, when A) CPU licenses are fairly rarely sold, and are for uncommon scenarios (I mean, I -can- think of dozens of them, but they're still the exception, not the rule, no matter how common they may seem). Usually companies will go for the CAL scheme, because since you'll have tons and tons of database servers, it ends up much cheaper to get 1 CAL for everyone in the company, then pay the much cheaper server price.
Second, enterprise products from Microsoft are usually sold via subscription/software insurance, so its paid per month. (Note that SQL Server does NOT have an upgrade pricing...so if you want to upgrade without paying full price again and again, thats the only way to go).
Finally, volume licensing. To take an example I'm more familiar with: an MSDN Premium subscription is, let say, 2600$ per year (retail). However, for TWO years, which falls under volume licensing, is about 2700$, or 100$ more. (I don't remember the real price, but it IS about 100$ of difference). So really, its 1350$ a year. Now, same deal with all other Microsoft products.
So for a company large enough to use SQL Server 2008 Enterprise (and thats -large-... SQL Server Standard really does the trick up to a very large scale), you'll pay maybe 5k per server and 30$ per user per year. Maybe. (I'm making up numbers here, since those things are dealt on a contract by contract basis, so it depends how good you are at negotiation, but it gives an order of magnitude).
No one in the corporate world pays 250$ per license of Windows, 400$ for Office, or 25k per CPU for SQL Server.
40% isn't even that guy... in lower skill industries, turnover bordering the 80-100% aren't unheard of. And while 10% per quarter may be pushing it, a company willing to trim the fat and keep only the best tend to end up having a lot less interpersonal issues. When companies stop firing people, its when the internal wars start.
Yup. I just recently got a new job for a very senior position for a very cool company, one of the best to work for in the region anyway. There was multiple openings for the team. Not a single one, ZERO, nadah, none, of the candidates they interviewed had what they needed (and what they needed wasn't obscure by a long shot, and the required skillset wasn't 16 page long...they just wanted someone good). They couldn't find any.
In the end, I got the job even though I didn't have one of the major requirements, because they thought I was good enough to be worth training. Even with that concession, I was the only person they could find on the continent (no one in the region at all, big metropolitan area, and no one on the -continent- who was willing to move). Finally, they found ONE other person for the job, who had worked for them in the past across the globe in asia (no, not in a third world country...I'm being vague since, well, can't post all the details on the net), and they're relocating him.
Qualified people are almost inexistent if your requirement goes beyond raw computer science or script kiddies, the two extremes. And for the AC that posted, no, they weren't looking for someone with 20 years of experience, I have something like 7.
Ahh yes. Then we're in perfect agreement. Netbooks are useful for college students who use a lap-top only to write papers and take notes in class too (so not the average CS or Design major of course).
I'm personally holding out to see if they come out with (admitedly high end) multi-touch Windows 7 based net books. There's already some slick tablet PCs that are nearly netbook-sized (I've only seen them in some asian countries, dunno if some are available here...didn't see any anyway), the future is looking bright.
Well, if we're talking home machine here, what CANT a netbook do for an average user? You can browse the web and emails fine, an office suite will work fine, you can listen to music and view your pictures.
What else does an average user do (lets keep it in the realm of legality here). Graphic design? No. 3d modeling? no. Compiling C++? No. Watch HD movies? Uncommon, thats for the TV, and besides, some netbooks could play 720P. High end games? No, even the average lap-top can't do it, hell, even desktop, and some people play WoW on netbooks.
So really, why couldn't a netbook replace a full PC in "most cases"? Unless we totally differ on what "most" people do on their computers.
No. UAC is meant to have people run as unprivileged accounts without having the people who MUST RUN AS ADMIN OR ELSE!!! cry -too- much.
Its just impossible to get a balance between making people aware of admin-account requirements, and having people not bitch too much.
Ahh ok, I misunderstood then.
That said, they did revamp the user-mode scheduling architecture. So yes, there is something improved with the scheduler (namely: everything)
Disclaimer: Vista is working wonderfully for me, so I'm not saying the following from personal experience, but simply from technical data I gathered about Windows 7.
You said what slowed things down for you was a few heavy processes. Fair to say those were services? Because the primary, biggest change in Windows 7 isn't the taskbar or whatever, its the service handling engine. The old way (leaving services that "may" be needed, just in case, running perpetually) was completly revamped with a very powerful trigger mechanism. The system is made to detect various conditions (which can be quite involved) in which services may be needed (or not), and turns them on or off completly and automatically as these situations occure. For example, the plug & play service will not start until devices that need it are detected. Windows Domain services are only started when a domain is detected (as opposed to always running, just in case you connect to a domain). These services turn off automatically once they're not needed.
Of course, the first reaction is to say "Well duh! it should have been that way all along!", but the examples I gave are quite silly, the engine can handle much, much more complicated scenarios, and all around, it provides a "lazy loading" of services... so Windows 7 ends up running as little as possible at any given time, which is the polar opposite of Vista (which had as much services as possible running at any given time, just in case you may need it =P)
Probably why your experience changed so much between the two.
You're right, though I wasn't clear on my side. The SQL Server release schedule was always every 5 years, and with SQL Server 2008, it was moved to 3~ They didn't make the projected date, but were way ahead of their previous 5 year schedule.
The dev tools have updates to work with the "new cool stuff" relatively quick and off band. When I said things went too quick, it was more like, .NET 2.0 -> 3.0 -> 3.5. Not only it added a lot of the "new cool stuff", it also added entire new technology stacks. It was too much to swallow for anyone but the most hardcores. Heck, a lot of places didn't upgrade to VS2008 yet even though its virtually 100% backward compatible, aside for a few minor things and the database tools (which can be installed side by side anyhow)
Games is obviously not very relevant in the enterprise environment, though, Crysis aside, I haven't hit a game in a long time that pushed Vista over 2 gigs of RAM (that wouldn't do the same to XP that is). Didn't try GTA4, I heard that was pretty bad, but aside that?
VMs, ok, but those take exactly the amount of RAM you want them to take, give or take the overhead, you can bust 10 gigs of RAM on any machine with that if you so wish it, and I did mention design and stuff (so Photoshop).
I haven't rebooted since the last patch tuesday, and search all the time, including un-indexed search, and the worse I can get to happen on a terrabyte of storage is 30 megs~ for explorer.exe. Wonder if there's a third party app that hooks into it (maybe an AV?) and it messes with that? No clue. That saids, even with that, did you hit swap? Vista tries to use as much RAM as it can while avoiding swap like plague (I never once hit swap file here), so at that point, it really doesn't matter.
I have to ask though, what do you do with Vista that needs so much RAM, seriously? I'm a windows developer, with tons of high volume services installed on my box (from SQL Server to Oracle, from Visual Studio in multiple flavors to Eclipse, etc), and I often have most of that running all at once, and while I have 4 gigs of RAM (well, 2.75...I need to move to 64 bit, ugh...), It has been MONTHS, according to my system's stats, since I went over 2 gigs, and from memory, when I did, it was because I let Firefox run too long with its glorious memory leaks.
I know that having McAfee, Norton or AVG (among others), especially the enterprise versions, on machines, will totally trash performance. It does in XP too (my current job has been on an XP box with 4 gigs of ram and Norton...performance is unacceptable, and makes that 1 gig Vista box look like it flies), but it affects Vista worse. Thats definately a problem, and if you blame it on Vista or on the AV vendors, thats up to you. Vista is impossible to use with those installed, period.
Without that though? What the hell are people doing to need that much RAM? (I know extremely large compiles, design and editing, rendering, etc can...but it does on XP too...but I'm talking about stuff that isn't known to bust 6 gigs even on Linux here).
Yes Windows 7 is much faster...among other things, it implemented a massive "service trigger" system that allows services to be off until the very moment you need them, and go back to off when you're done... but it won't help any once you flick McAfee on it. The subsystems are still similar, and if third party app vendors still force their half-assed "break-all-windows-development-standards" versions, the same problems will happen.
RDO still supported that way of doing it all the way back then :) All the way back to Visual Basic 4!
Actually, MS has been a bit on the early side lately. Visual Studio and SQL Servers' latest versions came up a little on the early side, for example. With the organizational and project management internal issues that caused Vista now fixed, they freed up a -lot- of resources. Its actually a bit hard to keep up with them really, because a lot of people got used to the crawling snail paced release schedule of the early decade.
If you're in a "fortune 10 company", then you probably are aware that the ones that bitched the most at Vista being so late was the fortune tops. Usually, with volume licensing and license insurance and all that junk, you break "even" if a new OS comes out every 3 years, so anything beyond that and you're getting rimmed.
That said, if your Vista equipped 4 gigs lap-top is even significantly slower than XP, your department needs to do their job better. Making sure the software installed on it (anti-virus comes to mind...) isn't known to be just a quick port of the XP version on Vista to bleed customers, tends to help. We rolled out Vista pre-SP1 on 1 gigs machines for developers and designers at launch and it was more than acceptable.
Windows 7 is being rolled out this fast because: A) until the WinFS fiasco (among other things) that slowed down Vista's release like crazy, that was pretty much the accepted pace (Win2k vs WinXP anyone? 20-21 months apart. Thats a LOT closer than Vista vs Win7), and B) because the Vista name is tainted by people who didn't update their OS rollout knowledge.
Being in an extremely large company doesn't make t he sysadmins any smarter. I worked for one of the 5 largest corporations in the world where untested crap was getting rolled out semi-randomly and blew up everything, so its really no indication.
GETDATE() (or pretty much any sensible implementation doing the same thing on any other database server) will return the date as a, well, date, not a string. At whichever point it gets converted is where you hit the problem. If the recordset gets read in Java, C#, C++, whatever, the driver will give you a date object, that you can convert at will in the format you wish. Same deal the other way around, when you pass a parameter, don't pass in the date as a string, but as an SQL Date parameter (or whatever is the equivalent on your favored platform).
Unless you have some fairly weird requirement, you should rarely if ever have to deal with dates as string at the SQL level, with probably the primary exception being the development tool themselves, when you try to run a stored procedure directly from Management Studio or whatever. Beyond that, that string date behavior is the norm more than the exception, and not just in the SQL world, thus why if the format matters to you, you should always explicitly define the current culture (which can also be done in T-SQL, btw, forcing whatever culture you want at the stored procedure level without changing the server or database settings)
Virtually all of your info is for XP, and is partly wrong. Retail XP cannot be installed indefinately before you have to call Microsoft. And In Vista, they did away with the different CDs. Sure, some OEM vendors have custom disks, but the keys WILL work with any disk, period. All of the versions are on one disk, its only the key that will change which version ends up being installed (upgrades being the exception I guess, that I never tried).
Try it, you'll see. All that blah blah, basically to say absolutely nothing.
Up to 75 employees, you can use Small Business Server, and for that many users, it will cost a little under 7000$... that includes all Windows Server licenses, Exchange licenses, and you can use the other Windows Server stuff like Sharepoint. My part time job while I was in college paid more than that, and after college, well, it wasn't close, hehehe.
Its the process integration stuff, from email to scheduling, integration with third party stuff (BlackBerries... you can integrate with other solution, but its nowhere as comprehensive) etc. It works, it maintains itself (well, with Small Business Server anyway, its hard if you do it yourself). Before Small Business Server, I would have agreed with you, but SBS was released as an answer to stuff like Google Apps. Even then, I still agree that for a small company (someone who replied to you said he was asked to install Exchange for 3-4 people...thats ridiculous) it is a bad idea. But 20~ employees or more, it can be cost effective, if you use a lot of its features.
Outlook/Exchange will also integrate itself with a lot of other things. Office Communicator is a big one, Sharepoint like I mentionned above, and all around, if you set it up right, you do save money in the long run. You still have to consider alternatives though, because if you're not planning on using Exchange's features, its silly.
We use Linux -too- (dozens of thousands of Linux boxes, and not just servers, desktops too). But it doesn't do everything, no matter how many senior *nix engineers you put on it, no matter how much money (well, realistically...) you drop on the open source community.
Because of that, the vast majority of our desktops are Win XP (and trust me, Linux is everywhere where its realistic to make it work for us), our back end is mostly *nix (various flavors, not just Linux), we have our own custom Linux "distribution", but even there, we have a lot of Windows Server for stuff where *nix is just not the best at (and there's more than you may think).
Take Office for example. We don't even use it for the file format (we have enough influence to tell our partners to eat whatever format we pick, so we could switch to OpenOffice quite easily). We extend it though, because its by far the easiest office suite to develop for, interop with, and extend/tweak/plugin. Once you go far enough in developing very specialized stuff for it, Wine will choke on it, so thats not an option, and it goes downhill from there. The licensing cost is insignificant (Microsoft has "infinite" license deals, and its not as expensive as one would think), so its just cost effective like that.
Best tool for the job. We even have stuff thats Firefox-only! But no, Linux doesn't do everything...not every close, even if you throw a few hundred people at the code.
I can still download updates for Windows 98. And thats -updates-, downloads of significant size (compared to a web page or a text file i mean), and they're still there. So activating WinXP... probably forever. I'm pretty sure they don't have much choice anyway. The day they refuse activations is the day they get butt raped without lube by antitrust groups on both sides of the ocean.
XP had the same issue actually, unless you had the corporate version. 3 strikes and you're out. Vista was indeed reduced as far as I can tell. On the other side though, all of the disks are the same, so if you have a valid key (including the OEM key taped on a Dell machine), you can use it with any other disk (though it will only install the version matching the key, but all versions are included on disk for a given architecture), and it will work. You'll indeed have to call Redmond (which takes a few minutes at most), but it will work. And the key works for 32 and 64 bit, so you can switch between the two.
Gain some lose some, I actually prefer the new system, personally (though I hate both, and stuck with Win2k for the longest time because of it)
There's actually too much major changes to the core of the system to release it as a service pack... There's major changes to the kernel, to the service subsystem, the dependencies subsystem, and a whole new service trigger mechanism wrapping those things up, with a large amount of stuff that had to be overhauled to take advantage of it.
Even if released that as a SP (I mean, almost anything can be back ported, even a kernel, so well...), it probably would be the size of a fucking OS, and for companies pushing it, they'd have to act like its a new OS.
The driver system and the UI didn't change much, so it looks similar on the surface, and its vastly more backward compatible, but thats where the similarities end... It was a faster release mostly because there wasn't a WinFS ressource blackhole internally at MS.
Regardless of how perfect or not Windows 7 is, at this point, ANY migration away from XP will be painful... companies often have 6 years~ of invested work in it. The company I work for has a custom "build" of it, with many core DLLs recoded from scratch to change base behavior (with the blessing of MS), our own Linux-like package management system, our own set of registry tweaks, and all around, deep, and often unsupported modifications.
Needless to say, a lot of that stuff will ONLY ever work on Windows XP...it made sense at the time, since XP lived for so long, and we skip every other Windows releases no matter what, but now, thats a LOT of stuff to migrate. We have, even in this time of harsh economic environment, the ressources to do it, and we will. There are plans to switch to Windows 7 already.
But the average company? Thats gonna hurt.
Pretty much. When it comes to color and image, I'm as close to an average joe as it gets, and I love the glossy screens =P Of course, if I had to do any actual work, or cared about correctness of the display, it would be totally awful.
its a bit like the Digital Vibrance setting you can tweak on the videocard panel... it makes thing stand out more, brighter, and for an average joe, its great. Probably makes even an amateur designer or photograph cry though.