Posts by TheVogon 3511 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2013
"I dont think it is the Year Of Linux on the Desktop yet."
It might be this year. Well sort of - Microsoft apparently plan to support Ubuntu running under Windows 10!
I think the idea is that developers can easily access their legacy text based *NIX command line tools that work well for say AWS and that some prefer over the more modern object orientated Powershell in Windows...The ultimate objective presumably being more Windows boxes and fewer *NIX boxes.
"Our agency adopted Google Apps"
Google got quite a head start on Microsoft and got this out the door while Microsoft were napping, and had a lot of initial success while Microsoft were behind the curve. However it now seems to me that Microsoft have leapt ahead and have left Google Apps behind in the dust with the latest releases of Office 365. I don't often hear of Google Apps wining any significant paying business these days.
Google Apps certainty does work OK for small companies, and for start-ups - but I'm not convinced as to it's readiness for enterprise.. It's very sucky in many respects in when you compare it to Office 365 - especially when you want advanced enterprise type features and capabilities. The rental cost difference in the two products isn't very great versus the TCO, so I can't see many situtations these days in which I would recommend using Google Apps.
"It's astoundingly slow at searching "folders" - far slower than grepping through a bunch of mbox-format files would be "
I suspect you haven't used Outlook in a long while. Searching my local Outlook 2010 mailbox on Windows 7 with well over 100,000 messages and many folders gives an instant response to any keyword - including in messages themselves.
"renders some non-text media by default in the preview and reading views. That's been a whopping security hole since the late '90s."
Outlook stopped rendering active content in preview about 15 years ago. I am not aware of any publically attacked exploits since then that automatically exploit Outlook with no user interaction.
"Splitting large message stores apart, for example to improve backup time, is a pain in the ass."
You don't normally backup Outlook locally - the data is on the server. But VSS can take a near instant snapshot if you want to backup locally regardless of the store size.
"Outlook sucks"
I have yet to use a mail client that even comes close, so would be interested to know what you recommend instead that could practically be used in SMEs?
"Installed Mint on my main box with a swappable drive. So it boots native. Installation was extremely painless and fast. They also include 'commercial' drivers for the GTX980, and the thing is blisteringly fast"
But Windows 10 is faster on the same hardware. Especially the latest games that support Direct-X 12. Hence why my PC - which is primarily used for gaming - runs Win 10.
"LOL, so you "don't use Flash or Java" but you use MS Office with its macro problems? "
Macros are disabled by default in Office. Also our Group policy only allows signed and trusted macros to run.
"become far less platform dependent as such documents render equally well on OSX and Linux"
MS Office works just fine on OS-X. Pretty much no one uses Linux on the desktop so it's an irrelevance. However Office 365 web access works just fine on Linux.
"There's also the fact that ODF is a mature, organically developed document standard as opposed to MSOOXML "
Lucky then that MS Office provides more advanced and less buggy support for it than LibreOffice does...
"As an office system, LibreOffice has pretty much everything there to walk all over anything that Microsoft Office can do"
If you mean MS Office from 20 years ago maybe. To suggest it's an equivalent is simply not the case.
Also LibreOffice requires Java installed which is an absolute no along with Flash on any of my PCs.
"Its probably the cryptolocker virus hard at work on the USB drive, we're talking Windows after all."
You know there is a native Linux version and a Linux NAS version of Cryptolocker? And that unlike the Windows versions, those don't require user interaction to spread?
"because they seek to associate Microsoft with "security" (which is why they're insulting)"
FYI - there has been zero malware, and zero critical vulnerabilities across all versions of Windows Phone to date.
Iphones are nearly as bad as Android too - see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/16/acedeceiver_ios_malware/
"the ads get served async from the server from the content server"
Which will show on the advert network as zero page views then. Or maybe one view when you make the copy....Or do you actually think they would trust website owners to tell them how many times the advert was viewed?!
"You do know that idea came from Unix in the first place, right?"
But not from Linux, which has a big capability gap here.
"Even the most cursory reading of the man page would show you that's total cobblers."
Even the slightest technical knowledge about SUDO would tell you that's EXACTLY how it works so you clearly don't understand the subject matter - /usr/bin/sudo must be owned by uid 0 - the next time you run SUDO, type echo $UID
"Even with Oracle database products, Microsoft ensures that it cannot perform on Windows as it does on Linux"
That's historically got a lot more to do with Oracle's use of crapware like Java, Oracle's poor adoption of threading and users not implementing Oracle recommended settings than anything deliberate by Microsoft. From Windows Server 2008 and Oracle 11g R2 onwards these issues are largely fixed provided you follow the Oracle recommendations - and you now get similar performance on Windows Server versus Linux for the same hardware.
See http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/dotnet/tech-info/ow2010-windowsdb-performance-177304.pdf
"superiority of database systems like PostgreSQL "
PostgreSQL has had more security holes, has far fewer features, and has way lower benchmark performance - so not quite sure how that's superior?
"what 'enterprise-scale features' are you referring to?"
How about constrained delegation:The ability to give an account only the minimum rights required for a specific task. Not a bodge like SUDO that MUST have root access (UID0) to work.
Or how about granular auditing and ACLs: the ability to control the changing of a single setting in a config. Not a per file only bodge....
I could go on as there are lots more, but you get the idea...
"Linux supports a lot more CPU cores than Windows"
Windows Server supports all shipping Intel based hardware - as far as I am aware the largest Intel CPU based box you can currently buy has 32 physical CPUs. The actual Windows Server 2012 limit is 640 logical CPUs - which is an arbitrary choice based on hardware limits rather than any inherent scalability limit.
"the idea that Windows has better scalability is ludicrous"
Why is that ludicrous? A different OS kernel design means you likely do have different performance strengths. There are benchmark examples where Windows Server (and the Hyper-V hypervisor) perform better than Linux in specific workloads. It's not all about the maximum CPU core limit that you choose to enable.
"They just decided that releasing the main SQL Server that most people use earlier was preferred "
I think this is planned as a loss leader. They will let developers play on a limited version for free on Linux that some may prefer, but when you want to run it in production and need the fully featured version with say clustering you will likely need the Windows Server version...
" in Windows 10 isn't that an oxymoron, or were you being sarcastic?"
Tracking Protection Lists (aka advert blocking) works just fine on IE in Windows 10, but not on the Edge browser, which is rather annoying as Edge is the one of the fastest Windows browser options.
Allegedly this is going to be fixed very soon with the ability to use extensions in the Edge browser.
"The bigger question is whether Microsoft's heart is really in the Windows business."
Market share is still not declining on the desktop from ~ 90% and it's still increasing on the server, application, hypervisor and cloud side, so I suspect they are still in it!
"Microsoft's revenue is rather dependent on masses of corporate desktops running Windows which then leverage CALs and other data centre sales"
Partly - but it's much more about cloud these days. Microsoft overtook Amazon for cloud revenue a few quarters back and are growing faster!
"Move away from Windows Server and the argument for the corporate Windows desktop gets much weaker"
It really doesn't - it's far more about the applications actually on the desktop in most corporates. People have already moved away from Windows Server in some places for common tasks - e.g. NetApp filers - and it's made zero difference on the desktop.
"Oracle and DB2 scales up to System Z which is a magnitude over the max 8 socket PC/Wintel architecture."
Uhmm... NO!
http://www8.hp.com/lamerica_nsc_carib/en/products/integrity-servers/product-detail.html
That can run Windows Server. Scale out is usually the cost effective way to go these days though...
"large company with a vice-like grip on its customers"
There is a choice for greenfield users not to use Oracle, and stuff like this stops that new business in it's tracks. I can't see many reasons to choose Oracle these days - unless you really want to be personally sponsoring their efforts to win the America's cup!
The only time I use Oracle these days if I can possible help it is if RAC is absolutely required, as no other database can yet match this for real time load balancing and failover functionality afaik.
"EnterpriseDB/Postgres picking up where Oracle left off."
Any market share figures to back that up? The vast majority I see that moves goes to MS SQL Server.
"being taken over by Dell was not entirely predictable"
VMware have not been taken over by Dell. They are a separate company from EMC, and EMC don't own all of it!
"They really do have a massively captive user base. VMware does not."
In the hypervisor space VMware have a larger captive audience than Microsoft. However they can't compete with free - Hyper-V Server costs nothing to license.
Also VMware are not executing well in the off-the-shelf hybrid cloud space - whereas Microsoft are
growing market share versus VMware and AWS with Azure + Hyper-V.
"Except that the ARM-based Windows tablets couldn't run those apps, because MS couldn't be bothered to include a suitable translation layer"
Not true - Surface RT ran Win32 apps just fine. Microsoft just didn't want you to run Win32 apps as the experience on a tablet was poor as they were not designed for the UI.
This is now being addressed via "Universal Windows Apps" - but I expect it to be a few years before most apps for Windows also work well on a tablet or phone format.
"the height of desperation that Microsoft has to clone Android in order to get traction in the mobile market"
That's not what they are doing at all. They are making Microsoft's key products and services available on the Android platform whilst avoiding paying Google (or the Playstore) for doing so.
(Microsoft have dropped plans to port Android apps to Windows Mobile - instead going for IOS portability only. IOS apps are usually better than Android ones and have more exclusives so it makes sense...)
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