Re: I predict they write off $20 billion in value before 2020
"MS is not a healthy company"
An AAA credit rating (better than Apple) says otherwise...
3511 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2013
"but I also will be voting for Brexit, beacuse I care about democracy!"
I will because of immigration. Just think about what's going to happen when say much of Bangladesh sinks under the waves in a few decades due to global warming / sea level rise.....The EU will be inundated by even more undesirable economic migrants and refugees.
"Err, you know that formatting input and outputs can also mean things like getting fields in the correct order"
The major advantage of Powershell is that you DO NOT need to keep track of the text position as it passes around objects. In Bash you select parameters from multiple commands piped together using text position often using awk, cut, etc.and that can sometimes be difficult if the text rows have different number of arguments such as iptables logs for example.
A longer list of some Powershell advantages over BASH:
1) Object oriented pipes so that I don't have to format and reparse and be concerned about language settings.
2) Command metadata. PowerShell commands, functions and even *script files* expose metadata about the names, positions, types and validation rules for parameters, allowing the *shell* to perform type coercion, allowing the *shell* to explain the parameters/syntax, allowing the *shell* to support both tab completion and auto-suggestions with no need for external and cumbersome completion definitions.
3) Robust risk management. Look up common parameters -WhatIf, -Confirm, -Force and consider how they are supported by ambient values in scripts you author yourself.
4) Multiple location types and -providers. Even a SQL Server appears as a navigable file system. Want to work with a certain database? Just switch to the sqlserver: drive and navigate to the server/database and start selecting, creating tables etc.
5) Fan-out remoting. Execute the same script transparently and *robustly* on multiple servers and consolidate the results back on the controlling console. Try icm host1,host2,host3 {ps} and watch how you get consolidated, object-oriented process descriptions from multiple servers.
6) Workflow scripting. PowerShell scripts can (since v3) be defined as workflows which are suspendable, resumable and which can pick up and continue even across system restarts.
7) Parallel scripting. No, not just starting multiple processes, but having the actual *script* branch out and run massively parallel.
8) True remote sessions where you don't step into and out of remote sessions but actually controls any number of remote sessions from the outside.
9) PowerShell web access. You can now set up a IIS with PWA as a gateway. This gives you a firewall-friendly remote command line in any standards compliant browser.
10) Superior security features, e.g. script signing, memory encryption, proper multi-mode credentials allowing script to be agnostic about authentication schemes which may go way beyond stupid username+password and use smart cards, tokens, OTPs etc.
11) Transaction support right in the shell. Script actions can join any resource manager such as SQL server, registry, message queues in a single atomic transaction. Do that in bash?
12) Strongly typed scripting, extensive data types, e.g first class xml support and regex support right in the shell. Optional static/explicit typing. Real lambdas (script blocks) instead of stupidly relying on dangerous and error prone "eval" functions.
13) Real *structured* exception handling as an alternative to outdated traps (which PowerShell also has). try-catch-finally blocks.
14) Instrumentation, extensive tracing, transcript and *source level* debugging of scripts.
15) Consistent naming conventions covering verb-noun command names, common verbs, common parameter names.
"especially since programmers must spend more time now parsing, transforming and formatting inputs and outputs"
With an Object Orientated solution like Powershell you don't have to spend time doing this. It's one of the many advantages of PowerShell. These types of structural problems are far more an issue with say BASH and similar text data only based scripting formats...
"positional text-based exchange formats"
See the above.
"Water and electricity are never a good mix. Too many opportunities to damage a pipe leading to significant outage."
That has never seemed to stop the Americans using water based overhead fire extinguishing systems in datacentres regardless of the obvious stupidity and inherent safety hazards...
"Those victims have little recourse because no state will reissue a new driver licence number"
But what sort of security system relies solely on a short personal number as any sort of protection?! That's ridiculous - the problem is whatever organisation is stupid enough to allow a license number to have any meaning in terms of personal identity. It's like being able to take someone's money just by knowing their bank account number...
"If, like me your main firewall/NATS is your ADSL router but have a sep. wifi access point then the firewalls on all your devices have to be OK if you let anyone connect to your wifi."
ADSL firewalls by default let open ports on your internal devices connect to the internet. No home grade device does anything significantly more than stateful tracking of connections, which stops nothing if the port you want is open anyway. Therefore allowing access via WiFi is little different. Most modern WiFi routers can separate the traffic between an internal DMZ and the WiFi network to provide the same degree of "protection" anyway...
"Just to give you an example, it still runs an outdated (almost 30 years old) filesystem -NTFS-, while others have made enormous progresses and also taken into account new things like SSD"
Just like ext is an outdated (almost 30 year old filesystem) ?
NTFS has multiple versions - currently we are on 3.1- and has had many feature updates along the way. And there is ReFS - which isn't feature complete yet, but it's pretty good.
nb - NTFS doesn't need to take into account SSD as that's handled in other layers in Windows - for instance Storage Spaces that provides features like automated tiered storage.
"No I am thinking of the Ukrainian Soviet leader who gave Ukrain Crimea."
It was given to Ukraine by the Presidium - which is a council of leaders, not by just the head of state at the time Kliment Voroshilov.
"Middle East has been a total screw up since the demise of the Ottoman Empire"
I think you mean since the demise of the British Empire....
"the Russians annexed land they loaned to Ukraine"
It was given, not loaned:
"the transfer of Crimea from the RSFSR to the UkrSSR was carried out in accordance with the 1936 Soviet constitution, which in Article 18 stipulated that “the territory of a Union Republic may not be altered without its consent.” The proceedings of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium meeting indicate that both the RSFSR and the UkrSSR had given their consent via their republic parliaments."
"the Russian Federation expressly accepted Ukraine’s 1991 borders both in the December 1991 Belovezhskaya Pushcha accords (the agreements that precipitated and codified the dissolution of the Soviet Union) and in the December 1994 Budapest Memorandum"
"A recent Windows 7 update partially bricks computers that have an Asus motherboard fitted, it emerged this week."
Either it bricks them or it doesn't. Reading the article implies it does nothing of the sort. And it's not a Microsoft issue.
"Microsoft half-bricks Asus Windows 7 PCs with UEFI boot glitch "
So actually it's more like "Asus Windows 7 PCs fail to boot due to UEFI bios glitch" - but I guess that wouldn't get as many clicks?
"Why should license admin not be considered a support task?"
The service he was using is a consumer focused service. Enterprises usually use MAK keys and have no normal need to make such transfers. There IS a professional support option for license admin via the Microsoft Licensing Portal and associated services but again those are always fluently English speaking.
Anyway, personal license transfers are not in anyway part of Microsoft Professional Support (which is usually chargeable per incident).
"First of all, a machine cannot boot off a ReFS partirion, it also doesn't work with databases"
"Users do need to be mindful that ReFS in its current iteration is not meant to be a replacement for NTFS. Instead, it is a complimentary file system, designed to handle tasks where NTFS falls short, such as file and data archival servers."
"Later versions of ReFS may very well replace NTFS as the default Windows file system, but it isn’t going to happen soon. After all, it took NTFS 8 years from its introduction until it became the default file system for consumers in Windows XP"
"Databases? They go in a VM"
Not in any large environment. Or for anything that needs licensing from Oracle.You would normally have an SQL Server (and maybe Oracle) cluster that hosted multiple databases with appropriately sized hardware. There is no gain to be had from virtualising such an already shared platform.
"Get your databases on a proper DB server and thus on a proper OS!"
Yep, SQL Server is the easy choice. My condolences for those still stuck with Oracle.