Posts by Willie T 22 posts • joined 2 Jun 2010
Must be a slow news day? This has been the standard for electronic documents for years now. As a tech guy in my 50s I was taught typing with 2 spaces following end of sentence. It has been many years since I was rudely corrected by a millennial editing my docs that I was hopelessly behind the curve. And I believe Word has been flagging my accidental double-spaces as typos for some time now.
But don't let this discourage the MS haters from piling on - enjoy yourselves :-)
"Microsoft wants to be Google and Apple"
You realize that on the consumer side Google & Apple have been eating Microsoft's lunch with integrated and locked down ecosystems? The Windows Store is the response to the Apple Store. Your Microsoft Account is so you can sync data across all apps - just like your Google Account. Of course it is going to be integrated into everything else Microsoft, that is the power of an ecosystem. And if it doesn't also have hooks into open standards and support use with competing platforms it will die. This is reality today whether you get your app from Apple, Google or Microsoft. And that independent app you love will get bought out by one of them if gets too popular and they can't code a better version. Welcome to 2019!
I don't believe for a minute you are a sysadmin who will now stop using Chef. What I do believe is you are a political troll that is trying to make it look like this is going to hurt the company financially. I don't think they give a rats ass whether you use their software or not - clearly large contracts like this are what they are live on. Most likely they made a business decision that - barring a few idiots like yourself - most customers would be more likely to do business with them if they didn't have this stain on their reputation.
Sorry but I ran OS/2 Server as a plant LAN admin for 2 years. As soon as I was allowed I "sensibly" switched to Netware. And eventually, when NT 3.51 was available as a server O/S, we migrated to that. All the application support & GUI goodness (& a bit more buggy than Netware) but infinitely more stable than the crap-tastic OS/2.
"for the Rolex wearers" - spot on my friend! Both require you to pay much more than something is actually worth to get a product that is good but not nearly as good as it's reputation and can be beat by less expensive competitors. In other words, people who care more about appearance than practicality.
I say this having recently switched to an iPhone 7 myself (US carrier had a buy-one-get-one promotion) and I am thoroughly unimpressed. I finally joined the cult to get a device where all apps are available & full featured, plus it works with everything I want to integrate it with. This is much more due to the popularity of the phone than it is to any design or feature advantage. I'll keep using mine until it dies, gets dropped or stolen. No interest in the X, even at half the price.
Someone must have published one of the April 1st articles early as this is obviously a joke. Everyone knows that Apple products "just work" and never require users to fiddle with such mundane things as settings, cache, cookies, etc. And crash? Never!
This is obviously a story about a Windows user that someone replaced all the references for IE & PC with Safari and MacBook. After all, we know nothing on those crappy Windows machines ever works and they crash constantly - every version, including all future ones.
@gollux - If you are responsible for a Windows 2012 R2 server and it is installing patches and rebooting overnight without your knowledge or approval then perhaps you should consider some basic training on the O/S you are managing.
I had a co-worker who often used a phrase in meetings (going way back to the Windows NT days) to describe the difference between machines that blue-screened frequently compared to ones that ran for months at a time with no issues: "Any idiot can run setup.exe". If you are moderately educated as to the capabilities of your OS and best practices for operations you will have much more success regardless of which flavor you choose to run.
I will qualify by saying nothing is true 100% of the time. I have worked with very competent folks here on H1b visas. And I have worked with citizens who are recent college graduates that couldn't pass the basic HW/SW A+ certification. That said...
I can give you the names of 6 college graduates from the last 3 years (relatives & children of friends) with IT degrees that were very competent, just lacking experience. Searching for months, applying everywhere, no offers. Forced to take a non-tech job to pay the bills.
In the same time period I have worked with 3 times that many H1b workers who don't have an effing clue. You are literally teaching them Computers 101 concepts in trying to work with them. I know they graduated from some sort of technical training in their home country to qualify for the job but there is no way they have the same level of education as a 4 year degree from most American universities. And I have seen the legally required postings showing that a job is being granted to a H1b visa with the requisite language showing the salary and stating it is customary for the title and area -- even though it is 70% or less what the job would normally pay.
I have absolutely no objection to a qualified foreign worker coming to the U.S. to do a job. In fact let all the migrants come across our southern border and do jobs for minimum wage that no American is willing to do for that pay. No worries. But stop lying to us and saying you need to bring in skilled people to do IT jobs because not enough Americans have the skills required. If you really need these people so badly then don't saddle them with the "slave" conditions of H1b -- let them come over and do whatever job they want, no restrictions or company lock-in. That should quickly get their wages up to a proper level and put an end to this nonsense.
"I remember people complaining when Windows came on 7 3.5" floppies and what memory hog it was."
Need to knock the cobwebs off of your bias. You are remembering Windows from the late 90s. A bit has changed since then, you might want to read up.
Yes, many of the machines running XP (especially the ones that were already old tech when XP was released) won't run Win7, at least not with any decent performance. After that you are as wrong as can be. Windows 7 actually had performance improvements over Vista. Better benchmarks on the same hardware. And anything that was W7 certified would run Win8. In fact the official qualification for a machine to be certified to run W8 was if it was certified to Win7. No promises from MS yet but all indications show the same will probably be true for W10 - any box running W7 or W8 today will be able to run W10 just fine. Truth is that Intel's worst nightmare is Microsoft actually building more efficient OS upgrades (while still stuffing in more features & security). Why should I buy new hardware when my 5 year old PC runs the new OS just fine?
You gave a very valid point for so many home computers not upgrading from XP, then proceeded to slam W7/8/10 on a point that had no merit.
How many of the folks posting here have an actual IT career? At a company of more than a dozen employees or so? And do they actual read and/or comprehend the article or do they just see "Microsoft" and go off with their clubs to begin the bashing?
Nothing suggests that the new "social" features in Office will be the same as Facebook, Twitter or any other time wasting social network. Other than the click bait title the article makes it clear that the concept is to allow users to "socialize" work efforts. In other words, if I am about to begin work on a new project I can scan the internal social sites or put out a query to see if anyone else has done something similar. If I remember seeing something about a recent document in a past email I can search for it easier even if it was not shared with me.
Are people really that daft that they believed the new Office features were going to allow us to follow the personal lives of our co-workers? Really? It is a productivity enhancement. The managers that buy into these enhancements aren't quite as stupid as you think they are. The goal is to bring the concept of social networks to work, not the silliness. Sheesh.
Only thing funny about this is your total ignorance of the relative security of current versions of operating systems. Windows Server 2008 R2 was very secure and WS 2012 is leaps and bounds ahead of any flavor of Linux in that regard. Either you don't work in the industry or if you do I feel sorry for the folks who are writing your check as they should really invest in someone who keeps up with current tech.
Do a search on "Azure Hybrid Cloud". Existing tech and one that MS is using as a primary selling point to customers. I believe VMWare may be heading in that direction but right now Microsoft is in a category of one in being able to seemlessly integrate your on-prem and cloudy bits. Paris, in recognition of her "integration" skills.
Microsoft has a similar certification for some time now, the Microsoft Certified Architect. All of the details listed on the VMware cert are nearly verbatim what is required for the MCA: years of experience, multiple lower level certs, a major project that you can present and defend to a screening panel, etc. It is also a very rare cert only held by the top level folks in these specialties it is offered in.
I guess their PR department isn't as good as VMware when it comes to getting articles posted in El Reg.
Amazing to me that Microsoft could be one of the most successful and valuable companies on the planet and yet in one fell swoop (Windows 8): fail to do any market research, completely fail on the design of their product, not pay any attention to what consumers or business wants in an O/S, miss the mark entirely on the direction of user interface and produce software that is slow, buggy and full of security holes all while spending tons of time and millions of dollars on development. Stunning!
Or maybe the people posting comments here are a bunch of uninformed morons who will bash anything Microsoft does regardless of the good reviews, excellent performance benchmarks and glowing reports from security experts on Windows 8. Hmm, which scenario is more likely? I mean really, as much as you would all like to see them fail do you really believe everything you are saying? Or just going for cheap laughs?
Just because your original post and the reply above were completely reasonable and logical, don't expect everyone to take them so. Discussing MS with many people is like discussing Satan with a devout Christian. It is all black & white and their mind is made up way before the discussion begins.
After 25+ years in technology I find it a good indicator of someone's experience and over all knowledge of the field: most of the folks who have been around for a while have a much more practical view of ALL technologies. And those few old-timers that are still fanatical about the whole thing? Well, there are crazies in every profession. :-)
As a friend, former co-worker and fellow Windows engineer was fond of saying "Any idiot can run Setup!"
I am certain the percentage of Windows back office systems being installed by idiots is much higher than Linux. I've worked with a lot of Linux admins and by and large they are some smart folks. Thank goodness I get to compete against the Windows guys for jobs. :-)
Bill
(fixing Windows for 20+ years and loving it!)
If you had started in the I/T field 25 years ago when the dominant players were IBM OS2, Novell Netware, WordPerfect & Lotus, everyone was doing development with Borland tools and no one ran critical business apps on anything but a mainframe you would show a little more wisdom instead of blind hate for anything Microsoft.
Yes, MS has entered a few markets only to flounder, fail and pull out. But they have had just as many where they went from upstart to dominant player - through innovation, aquisition or just plain determination to keep improving until they came out on top. And lets not forget that Apple did not invent the GUI, the MP3 player, the smart phone or the idea of a small tablet computer. Much like Microsoft they saw an market niche with potential growth and tried to make a better product. Competition is good.
Will the Zune, Windows 7 phone or XBox dominate or fade away? No way to be sure, but I wouldn't be scheduling any dances on Microsoft's grave just yet.
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