They do. It's a multi-AZ outage, despite what Amazon is saying.
Amazon's multiple availability zones stuff is total bullshit. It has become painfully apparent during every single one of these outages that the so-called availability zones are not separate because an EBS problem propagates everywhere. No one can actually work the availability zones out either because what Amazon cunningly does is call zones by different letters for different customers, so availability zone 'a' for one might be availability zone 'c' for another so no one can actually compare. That fact alone sent my bullshit meter off the scale. It just seems excessively evasive and sneaky for my taste.
If you want redundancy you are going to have to go to completely geographically separate zones. Keeping those zones in sync is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority. Either that or you have a backup cloud provider, but again you have to be so paranoid and trust Amazon so little that you have to be able to have your data out and off Amazon's infrastructure at least nightly at a moment's notice. Sorry, but that just doesn't work.
We're experiencing our own outages at work, unrelated to AWS, but I'd hate to be an AWS admin during one of these major outages.
I used to be an admin working on AWS through some of these outages, and it's not pleasant let me tell you. The amount of redundancy you need to get through this makes putting stuff in the cloud prohibitively expensive and things are basically out of your hands. When you run your own servers you know how long it will take to replace a piece of hardware or take emergency measures to keep things running. At least you know you have control over the process. Amazon? They recover what they can of your EBS disks in a few days without telling you anything and in the case of the European outage they actually screwed the EBS snapshots with a recovery job they ran. Thankfully I ran backups every night that took all data off Amazon's system. All I didn't know was when I could be back up and running.
Using AWS for throwaway computing where you just want some computing power for a few weeks of the year? Yes, fine. Permanently running stuff in it? Nope.
Sounds like Britain's NHS 'internal market' on steroids with lots of zeros added to the end and both are doomed to failure, fraud and unsustainable costs.
I have no problem at all with free healthcare providing a safety net for those who can least afford it. Indeed, I find the escalating costs of the US's private health insurance system quite scary and it is not sustainable at all. However, if you're going to have a publicly backed health system then have it within a public sector organisation with a proper mandate. Mixing public sector planning with public sector printed cash and the private sector simply results in private companies and those who make public sector buying decisions getting drunk on printed cash at taxpayer's expense. The whole fraudulent system is based around how big everyone feels they can make the numbers on their invoices because they know the government can always print more, and everyone knows that is the case with Medicare.
Buh? The open sourcing of this was pursued by an external volunteer. It's purely for historical interest. I don't see how opening it is a disrespect to the "community" more than keeping it closed and letting it fester further.
This is not just being done by an 'external volunteer' and there is nothing historical about it, I can assure you. A lot of insanely expensive applications still run on a CDE/Motif environment and I can only see this as a way of maintaining the status quo on Unix platforms. We still haven't got out of the 80s/90s.
It is still used for some things. For example Philips Pinnacle radiation therapy planning system uses Sun/CDE and sells for 80k a pop ~1-2M for a typical sized cancer centre to have a dozen or so stations).
That's why CDE is being open sourced now. It's just a means for the Unix vendors to keep these expensive applications going. They have no real interest in getting out of the 80s/90s.
So, I take it we've come full circle with Unix desktops and we're right back to where we started? I can only ask myself why this has happened after all this time and inactivity and I can only think that CDE is making a comeback amongst all the ex-CDEers. They just want some basic crap they can pass off a a graphical environment.
Or is Microsoft so stupid as to prevent Win8 from installing in virtual machines. If so, what's the point of Microsoft contributing copious amounts of code to the Linux kernel?
Anon because I'm too lazy to log in.
They want to control the environment that Windows runs in and better control when you have to upgrade. They do not want you upgrading your hardware and continuing to run the same version of Windows you do now as many people are doing with VMware and Linux as the hypervisor. Microsoft have always been mighty uncomfortable with virtualisation.
They are almost certainly going to be requiring signed firmware images on any Win8 Logo'd hardware so no you won't be hacking the BIOS so simply....
Yep. The thing that's hilarious about this is that hardware vendors can barely get out functioning BIOS and firmware updates out that actually work. Adding cryptographic signing into that is going to be hilarious to watch.
There is no us. Microsoft has a voluntary & optional program for putting MS logo on your product. They have guidlines for that. Vendors want that logo because it helps them sell their product. There is no effect on OEM pricing because of this program.
ROTFL. The fact that you've felt the need to pop in that last sentence tells us that it is indeed true. Well done astroturfer.
If all the big Linux based services companies can't spend some money so that a simple cryptographic key is included in the UEFI based motherboards so that THEIR CUSTOMERS can have an easy way to install THEIR PRODUCT, they they are just fucking parasites. But maggots like you are useful to them.. keep dancing you little bitch..
ROTFL. Yer. We who buy our hardware and want to run what we like on it are all parasites.
Alas, closing the PC as a platform is a fatal mistake and it will kill Microsoft because all they have left is to try and protect the Windows revenue stream. Everything else they've tried to do has failed, utterly and completely.
A Windows Server may also disable Secure Boot remotely using a strongly authenticated (preferably public-key based) out-of-band management connection, such as to a baseboard management controller or service processor.
Worms, meet can. This provides no benefit to users whatsoever and presents yet another security risk.
Imagine malware using this to lock out legitimate software................
Disabling Secure Boot must not be possible on ARM systems."
Yes, because they don't control Arm as a platform, don't have any existing applications running on it that people give a shit about, don't have any existing users to piss off that would make them not upgrade and they're just absolutely terrified of low cost operating systems running on it. They're scared shitless of it.
We'll look back on this period and identify this as a time when the PC platform died. Locking it down is just not a good idea, but they simply cannot resist it because they think there are so many benefits.
They will be. There wouldn't be a problem if they weren't, but the reason why people are getting uptight about this is that it's pretty clear this won't be turned off in future versions of hardware and this will end up infecting every part of the UEFI system - including dictating what hardware you can run, excluding older hardware from being installed, locking out hardware competitor and new entrants...... You name it, they will not be able to resist locking down every part of the PC platform.
Microsoft have never got this, and they probably never will. First they tried to turn phones into Windows desktops with a start button, now they're trying to turn Windows into a smartphone.
They'd have been a latecomer to a saturated market.
No, they wouldn't. This is about saving what they have (or had) that Android has largely taken off them, plus they would have had a platform with a lot of applications. As it stands now they've just pissed that away.
Windows may have been a risk, but at this stage, delaying entry into the android market for another year isn't going to be a huge cost.
I was just discussing this on G+ where it was claimed that Billy boy has wiped out Polio in the third world. To which I said, Uh, No.
Bill Gates has temporarily suppressed Polio in certain parts of the third world and helped sell it out in the process. In order to get vaccinations you have to provide strong IP protection to Big Pharma. So strong that if your people are dying and you make the medication to save them instead of buying it because you can't afford it that the WTO will end up owning your asshole. Meanwhile, they're not going to get into every nation, which is what it actually takes to eradicate a disease. Instead they are lending a false sense of security while creating a ticking time bomb.
I'm pleased to see this has been modded as it should be. I've said something like this in the past and the usual suspects (those with their hands in this very large cookie jar when you have a look at their 'blogs') were out in force. There is a lot of money sloshing through this 'foundation' and that makes it a magnetic for all kinds of sordid schemes from the pharmaceuticals. You have to be exceptionally naive to buy the whole 'philanthropic for the good of mankind' image that has been put up around this. Alas, most people are that naive when it comes to charities. That's what makes them a good vehicle for being above any kind of scrutiny.
Oh yeah, how dare he use his money to cure malaria, the false bastard
Curing malaria? No. 'Treating' it forever and a day? Yes. Why? Well, a cure would kind of put a dampener on the gravy train that is the Gates Foundation, especially for all the drugs companies getting money sloshed through it.
You don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.
(1) VB6 is an object-oriented language. Its support is poor--eg. no inheritance, clunky syntax--but programmer-defined classes exist. If you meant just the new OO features you should have said so--your wording is imprecise throughout.
OK, I'll bite hard - a little bit. If you're going to accuse someone of not having any idea it is usually a good idea to get a fracking clue yourself - which you evidently do not.
Classical VB did not, and does not, have inheritance and subclassing (utterly fundamental to a language actually being object oriented) nor the polymorphism you see in proper OO languages as a result. If you don't have that you certainly do not have an object oriented language and you most certainly don't know what one is. My wording is not imprecise. It is very clear and there are no such thing as 'new OO features'. Anyone who actually programs with half a clue understands what a language has to satisfy to be object oriented. Seriously, you can Google this stuff.
Point 2 is utter, utter twaddle and cant be replied because you obviously know nothing about classical VB.
(3).NET and VB6 are comparable in speed (except loading times,.NET is worse there).
Yay. Let's rewrite our applications that replicates existing functionality and have them startup at least five times slower. Seriously, you can go away and have a cup of coffee before a decent sized.Net application starts up. Sorry, but that's not a rational business case.
(7) You'll be able to create.NET Metro style apps. Converting an existing desktop app may or may not require significant work.
No one cares. Windows.Forms, WPF, XAML, Silverlight and the other smorgasbord of pointless crap cranked out via MSDN have already ensured that few people who need to get work done actually care. For the handful of consultancies peddling this they will probably make some money rewriting everything again for people who are stupid enough to do so. Seriously, I've had MSDN weenies crawling out of my ears over the last ten years peddling a rewrite in *insert latest nonsense from MSDN magazine here*. It's all pointless hand-waving.
(6) Lots of people care about.NET apps. Glance at the Tiobe index, for instance.
Yep. There's people as far as the eye can see crying out for.Net 1.0 and 1.1 support because so much was written with them. The companies who are using VB who have prompted Microsoft to do this don't go anywhere near the Tiobe index, and they are the silent majority..............
(8) You greatly exaggerate the backwards compatibility problems and you know it. Some large projects are suited to automated/assisted migration; just read these zillion testimonials. It's far from perfect, but it's also far from nothing.
No, I don't - and being somebody who possibly sells this shit to people you know it. If it wasn't a problem we wouldn't be commenting on this article because it wouldn't exist, would we bright spark? 'Zillion testimonials.........' What are you? 11?
You do have at least a few good points--lots of businesses absolutely rely on very old technology and wouldn't upgrade without support
If Microsoft actually had a clue about supporting existing code in their new development products this wouldn't be up for discussion. Oh, and trust me, if you think VB applications are 'old technology' then think COBOL. Many VB desktop applications perform fairly critical business functions and they are going to have to be supported for decades. Just like the lines of COBOL out there runni
I thought there were major compatibility problems with the VS98/VB6 IDE on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (caveat: I heard this from a large desktop consultancy that were brought in to provide new systems for a large organisation - I haven't validated it myself).
There is your answer right there. I've heard this myself from large consultancies trying to sell you the latest alphabet acronym soup of Microsoft's latest development technologies so they can make a bundle. Those who have bought in then get to upgrade and rewrite all their code in the new latest and greatest.Net version 77.4 and whatever the latest name for Windows.Forms is in perpetuity. It never ends. You end up firefighting and upgrading more than you do actually coding useful updates into the application
History over the past decade should teach us to be very, very wary of buying into any of the latest development technology from Microsoft. Silverlight developers are soon to be dumped on from a great height and these pitiful Metro applications we're all supposed to write now make me laugh, all so little baby Ballmer can have yet another expensive failure at being Apple or Google on mobiles.
I'm genuinely interested in your strategy going forward, as a friend maintains a VB6 application that is going to be a nightmare to port to VB.NET, so it might as well be rewritten in something else.
The quiet secret is that a lot of companies if they've rewritten anything over the past decade have rewritten their applications to be run over HTTP and a web browser. Anything that can't has stayed as it is. Not that web applications are perfect by any stretch of the imagination but at least there is a relatively stable target there now and you have other browsers besides Internet Explorer, and even other operating systems besides Windows, so the rug doesn't get pulled out from underneath you. Deployment is quite a bit easier as well.
I've been talking about this for years, and I've even been laughed at here on Slashdot for suggesting classical VB will never be going away. How could it? There is that lovely fully object oriented thingy called VB.Net? Why wouldn't you want to rewrite all your applications in it for no appreciable benefit whatsoever?
The fact is that Visual Basic was and is used for what it was good at. Departmental and business applications where the overhead of that object oriented nonsense didn't make any sense at all. The fatal mistake that Microsoft made with VB.Net is that it was completely backwards incompatible (yes it is, and no, don't give me any of that 'compatibility' nonsense. It doesn't work, hence this article). You couldn't take a VB6 application, make a couple of changes and recompile it as you'd always been able to do. What they should have done was built a RAD environment on top of.Net that you could compile VB code into, but it's all too late for that now.
Put simply, if Windows 8 couldn't run classical VB/COM applications no one, and I mean no one, in business would ever consider upgrading to it. Windows up to version 7 would have been virtualised forever. No one cares about.Net applications and no one gives a flying fsck about Metro applications that Microsoft wants you to rewrite everything in...............AGAIN just so they can piss about with trying to amount to something on mobiles. Seriously Microsoft, no one gives a shit. Windows is a legacy application shell and nothing more.
I think that is the real thing MS wants to destroy. The ability to virtualize their OS.
I think so too. Restricting Linux as a dual boot OS is nice but the ability for Microsoft to get back control over their own OS regarding what hardware it is run on is the most important thing for them. Heck, with virtualisation you can upgrade your hardware and run pretty much any version of Windows you want without upgrading it right now.
Untrue. The requirement is that secure boot can not be disabled. If you have a signed bootloader (like one from Red Hat, Fedora, or any other distro that pays the $99 to use this service) you can boot any OS you want.
Which is the point the OP was making. Someone has to pay for you to get the OS you want to run on your hardware, and they have to say yes to it, and they have to keep saying yes to it for every new piece of hardware.
I wish people would stop making these crap throwaway comments that have nothing to do with the absolute central problem with this. They are not interesting or insightful in the slightest.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that availability zone 'a' might be 'd' for others. Amazon does not let you work out what availability zones everyone really has.
They do. It's a multi-AZ outage, despite what Amazon is saying.
Amazon's multiple availability zones stuff is total bullshit. It has become painfully apparent during every single one of these outages that the so-called availability zones are not separate because an EBS problem propagates everywhere. No one can actually work the availability zones out either because what Amazon cunningly does is call zones by different letters for different customers, so availability zone 'a' for one might be availability zone 'c' for another so no one can actually compare. That fact alone sent my bullshit meter off the scale. It just seems excessively evasive and sneaky for my taste.
If you want redundancy you are going to have to go to completely geographically separate zones. Keeping those zones in sync is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority. Either that or you have a backup cloud provider, but again you have to be so paranoid and trust Amazon so little that you have to be able to have your data out and off Amazon's infrastructure at least nightly at a moment's notice. Sorry, but that just doesn't work.
We're experiencing our own outages at work, unrelated to AWS, but I'd hate to be an AWS admin during one of these major outages.
I used to be an admin working on AWS through some of these outages, and it's not pleasant let me tell you. The amount of redundancy you need to get through this makes putting stuff in the cloud prohibitively expensive and things are basically out of your hands. When you run your own servers you know how long it will take to replace a piece of hardware or take emergency measures to keep things running. At least you know you have control over the process. Amazon? They recover what they can of your EBS disks in a few days without telling you anything and in the case of the European outage they actually screwed the EBS snapshots with a recovery job they ran. Thankfully I ran backups every night that took all data off Amazon's system. All I didn't know was when I could be back up and running.
Using AWS for throwaway computing where you just want some computing power for a few weeks of the year? Yes, fine. Permanently running stuff in it? Nope.
Surely you mean a Miles M52? ;-)
Sounds like Britain's NHS 'internal market' on steroids with lots of zeros added to the end and both are doomed to failure, fraud and unsustainable costs.
I have no problem at all with free healthcare providing a safety net for those who can least afford it. Indeed, I find the escalating costs of the US's private health insurance system quite scary and it is not sustainable at all. However, if you're going to have a publicly backed health system then have it within a public sector organisation with a proper mandate. Mixing public sector planning with public sector printed cash and the private sector simply results in private companies and those who make public sector buying decisions getting drunk on printed cash at taxpayer's expense. The whole fraudulent system is based around how big everyone feels they can make the numbers on their invoices because they know the government can always print more, and everyone knows that is the case with Medicare.
If this same story was posted about a local 7-Eleven store, no one would give a shit, no one would read, and no one would comment on it.
Ahh, well that makes it perfectly OK then.
Buh? The open sourcing of this was pursued by an external volunteer. It's purely for historical interest. I don't see how opening it is a disrespect to the "community" more than keeping it closed and letting it fester further.
This is not just being done by an 'external volunteer' and there is nothing historical about it, I can assure you. A lot of insanely expensive applications still run on a CDE/Motif environment and I can only see this as a way of maintaining the status quo on Unix platforms. We still haven't got out of the 80s/90s.
It is still used for some things. For example Philips Pinnacle radiation therapy planning system uses Sun/CDE and sells for 80k a pop ~1-2M for a typical sized cancer centre to have a dozen or so stations).
That's why CDE is being open sourced now. It's just a means for the Unix vendors to keep these expensive applications going. They have no real interest in getting out of the 80s/90s.
He doesn't need to. I know where it comes from and even used it and it still looks like crap.
So, I take it we've come full circle with Unix desktops and we're right back to where we started? I can only ask myself why this has happened after all this time and inactivity and I can only think that CDE is making a comeback amongst all the ex-CDEers. They just want some basic crap they can pass off a a graphical environment.
Or is Microsoft so stupid as to prevent Win8 from installing in virtual machines. If so, what's the point of Microsoft contributing copious amounts of code to the Linux kernel?
Anon because I'm too lazy to log in.
They want to control the environment that Windows runs in and better control when you have to upgrade. They do not want you upgrading your hardware and continuing to run the same version of Windows you do now as many people are doing with VMware and Linux as the hypervisor. Microsoft have always been mighty uncomfortable with virtualisation.
They are almost certainly going to be requiring signed firmware images on any Win8 Logo'd hardware so no you won't be hacking the BIOS so simply....
Yep. The thing that's hilarious about this is that hardware vendors can barely get out functioning BIOS and firmware updates out that actually work. Adding cryptographic signing into that is going to be hilarious to watch.
There is no us. Microsoft has a voluntary & optional program for putting MS logo on your product. They have guidlines for that. Vendors want that logo because it helps them sell their product. There is no effect on OEM pricing because of this program.
ROTFL. The fact that you've felt the need to pop in that last sentence tells us that it is indeed true. Well done astroturfer.
If all the big Linux based services companies can't spend some money so that a simple cryptographic key is included in the UEFI based motherboards so that THEIR CUSTOMERS can have an easy way to install THEIR PRODUCT, they they are just fucking parasites. But maggots like you are useful to them.. keep dancing you little bitch..
ROTFL. Yer. We who buy our hardware and want to run what we like on it are all parasites. Alas, closing the PC as a platform is a fatal mistake and it will kill Microsoft because all they have left is to try and protect the Windows revenue stream. Everything else they've tried to do has failed, utterly and completely.
A Windows Server may also disable Secure Boot remotely using a strongly authenticated (preferably public-key based) out-of-band management connection, such as to a baseboard management controller or service processor.
Worms, meet can. This provides no benefit to users whatsoever and presents yet another security risk. Imagine malware using this to lock out legitimate software................
Disabling Secure Boot must not be possible on ARM systems."
Yes, because they don't control Arm as a platform, don't have any existing applications running on it that people give a shit about, don't have any existing users to piss off that would make them not upgrade and they're just absolutely terrified of low cost operating systems running on it. They're scared shitless of it. We'll look back on this period and identify this as a time when the PC platform died. Locking it down is just not a good idea, but they simply cannot resist it because they think there are so many benefits.
Fuck that. Right now, that's not the case. The day it is is the day I worry about it.
People who say retarded things like that generally say things like "Oh, I wish I had seen this coming and done something about it......"
They will be. There wouldn't be a problem if they weren't, but the reason why people are getting uptight about this is that it's pretty clear this won't be turned off in future versions of hardware and this will end up infecting every part of the UEFI system - including dictating what hardware you can run, excluding older hardware from being installed, locking out hardware competitor and new entrants...... You name it, they will not be able to resist locking down every part of the PC platform.
Microsoft have never got this, and they probably never will. First they tried to turn phones into Windows desktops with a start button, now they're trying to turn Windows into a smartphone.
They'd have been a latecomer to a saturated market.
No, they wouldn't. This is about saving what they have (or had) that Android has largely taken off them, plus they would have had a platform with a lot of applications. As it stands now they've just pissed that away.
Windows may have been a risk, but at this stage, delaying entry into the android market for another year isn't going to be a huge cost.
They'll be bust by then.
I was just discussing this on G+ where it was claimed that Billy boy has wiped out Polio in the third world. To which I said, Uh, No.
Bill Gates has temporarily suppressed Polio in certain parts of the third world and helped sell it out in the process. In order to get vaccinations you have to provide strong IP protection to Big Pharma. So strong that if your people are dying and you make the medication to save them instead of buying it because you can't afford it that the WTO will end up owning your asshole. Meanwhile, they're not going to get into every nation, which is what it actually takes to eradicate a disease. Instead they are lending a false sense of security while creating a ticking time bomb.
I'm pleased to see this has been modded as it should be. I've said something like this in the past and the usual suspects (those with their hands in this very large cookie jar when you have a look at their 'blogs') were out in force. There is a lot of money sloshing through this 'foundation' and that makes it a magnetic for all kinds of sordid schemes from the pharmaceuticals. You have to be exceptionally naive to buy the whole 'philanthropic for the good of mankind' image that has been put up around this. Alas, most people are that naive when it comes to charities. That's what makes them a good vehicle for being above any kind of scrutiny.
Oh yeah, how dare he use his money to cure malaria, the false bastard
Curing malaria? No. 'Treating' it forever and a day? Yes. Why? Well, a cure would kind of put a dampener on the gravy train that is the Gates Foundation, especially for all the drugs companies getting money sloshed through it.
You don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.
(1) VB6 is an object-oriented language. Its support is poor--eg. no inheritance, clunky syntax--but programmer-defined classes exist. If you meant just the new OO features you should have said so--your wording is imprecise throughout.
OK, I'll bite hard - a little bit. If you're going to accuse someone of not having any idea it is usually a good idea to get a fracking clue yourself - which you evidently do not.
Classical VB did not, and does not, have inheritance and subclassing (utterly fundamental to a language actually being object oriented) nor the polymorphism you see in proper OO languages as a result. If you don't have that you certainly do not have an object oriented language and you most certainly don't know what one is. My wording is not imprecise. It is very clear and there are no such thing as 'new OO features'. Anyone who actually programs with half a clue understands what a language has to satisfy to be object oriented. Seriously, you can Google this stuff.
Point 2 is utter, utter twaddle and cant be replied because you obviously know nothing about classical VB.
(3) .NET and VB6 are comparable in speed (except loading times, .NET is worse there).
Yay. Let's rewrite our applications that replicates existing functionality and have them startup at least five times slower. Seriously, you can go away and have a cup of coffee before a decent sized .Net application starts up. Sorry, but that's not a rational business case.
(7) You'll be able to create .NET Metro style apps. Converting an existing desktop app may or may not require significant work.
No one cares. Windows.Forms, WPF, XAML, Silverlight and the other smorgasbord of pointless crap cranked out via MSDN have already ensured that few people who need to get work done actually care. For the handful of consultancies peddling this they will probably make some money rewriting everything again for people who are stupid enough to do so. Seriously, I've had MSDN weenies crawling out of my ears over the last ten years peddling a rewrite in *insert latest nonsense from MSDN magazine here*. It's all pointless hand-waving.
(6) Lots of people care about .NET apps. Glance at the Tiobe index, for instance.
Yep. There's people as far as the eye can see crying out for .Net 1.0 and 1.1 support because so much was written with them. The companies who are using VB who have prompted Microsoft to do this don't go anywhere near the Tiobe index, and they are the silent majority..............
(8) You greatly exaggerate the backwards compatibility problems and you know it. Some large projects are suited to automated/assisted migration; just read these zillion testimonials. It's far from perfect, but it's also far from nothing.
No, I don't - and being somebody who possibly sells this shit to people you know it. If it wasn't a problem we wouldn't be commenting on this article because it wouldn't exist, would we bright spark? 'Zillion testimonials.........' What are you? 11?
You do have at least a few good points--lots of businesses absolutely rely on very old technology and wouldn't upgrade without support
If Microsoft actually had a clue about supporting existing code in their new development products this wouldn't be up for discussion. Oh, and trust me, if you think VB applications are 'old technology' then think COBOL. Many VB desktop applications perform fairly critical business functions and they are going to have to be supported for decades. Just like the lines of COBOL out there runni
I thought there were major compatibility problems with the VS98/VB6 IDE on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (caveat: I heard this from a large desktop consultancy that were brought in to provide new systems for a large organisation - I haven't validated it myself).
There is your answer right there. I've heard this myself from large consultancies trying to sell you the latest alphabet acronym soup of Microsoft's latest development technologies so they can make a bundle. Those who have bought in then get to upgrade and rewrite all their code in the new latest and greatest .Net version 77.4 and whatever the latest name for Windows.Forms is in perpetuity. It never ends. You end up firefighting and upgrading more than you do actually coding useful updates into the application
History over the past decade should teach us to be very, very wary of buying into any of the latest development technology from Microsoft. Silverlight developers are soon to be dumped on from a great height and these pitiful Metro applications we're all supposed to write now make me laugh, all so little baby Ballmer can have yet another expensive failure at being Apple or Google on mobiles.
I'm genuinely interested in your strategy going forward, as a friend maintains a VB6 application that is going to be a nightmare to port to VB.NET, so it might as well be rewritten in something else.
The quiet secret is that a lot of companies if they've rewritten anything over the past decade have rewritten their applications to be run over HTTP and a web browser. Anything that can't has stayed as it is. Not that web applications are perfect by any stretch of the imagination but at least there is a relatively stable target there now and you have other browsers besides Internet Explorer, and even other operating systems besides Windows, so the rug doesn't get pulled out from underneath you. Deployment is quite a bit easier as well.
I've been talking about this for years, and I've even been laughed at here on Slashdot for suggesting classical VB will never be going away. How could it? There is that lovely fully object oriented thingy called VB.Net? Why wouldn't you want to rewrite all your applications in it for no appreciable benefit whatsoever?
.Net that you could compile VB code into, but it's all too late for that now.
.Net applications and no one gives a flying fsck about Metro applications that Microsoft wants you to rewrite everything in...............AGAIN just so they can piss about with trying to amount to something on mobiles. Seriously Microsoft, no one gives a shit. Windows is a legacy application shell and nothing more.
The fact is that Visual Basic was and is used for what it was good at. Departmental and business applications where the overhead of that object oriented nonsense didn't make any sense at all. The fatal mistake that Microsoft made with VB.Net is that it was completely backwards incompatible (yes it is, and no, don't give me any of that 'compatibility' nonsense. It doesn't work, hence this article). You couldn't take a VB6 application, make a couple of changes and recompile it as you'd always been able to do. What they should have done was built a RAD environment on top of
Put simply, if Windows 8 couldn't run classical VB/COM applications no one, and I mean no one, in business would ever consider upgrading to it. Windows up to version 7 would have been virtualised forever. No one cares about
I think that is the real thing MS wants to destroy. The ability to virtualize their OS.
I think so too. Restricting Linux as a dual boot OS is nice but the ability for Microsoft to get back control over their own OS regarding what hardware it is run on is the most important thing for them. Heck, with virtualisation you can upgrade your hardware and run pretty much any version of Windows you want without upgrading it right now.
Untrue. The requirement is that secure boot can not be disabled. If you have a signed bootloader (like one from Red Hat, Fedora, or any other distro that pays the $99 to use this service) you can boot any OS you want.
Which is the point the OP was making. Someone has to pay for you to get the OS you want to run on your hardware, and they have to say yes to it, and they have to keep saying yes to it for every new piece of hardware. I wish people would stop making these crap throwaway comments that have nothing to do with the absolute central problem with this. They are not interesting or insightful in the slightest.