Re: our NHS will be short staffed
"Presumably there would be conversion courses to allow American doctors to learn British physiology ?"
Yep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLi55MV04a8
3511 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2013
"And address the reasons why people don't train to do these jobs, or stay in their careers."
Paying market rates automatically fixes that. Supply rises to reach demand as pay rises until it does.
e.g. Not enough people with a certain skill? Market rates will rise. More people will then train in that skill until an equilibrium is reached.
"And yet we have IE-specific apps that won't run in Edge no matter what we do."
See the comment above. Use Enterprise Mode to automatically launch them in IE.
"After the last Win10 update came down the wire even IE would just sit there sullenly refusing to pick them up"
So they used to work but now dont. Probably related to a security lockdown, which can generally be removed with the right policy setting. Suggest pressing F12 to enter dev mode, selecting the network tab, pressing the play button to start it analysing and then typing in the URL. That should show you where it's going wrong.
"Entire organizations have web applications that only work on that perverted browser and can't use Edge."
Edge has a setting called 'Enterprise Mode" that automatically switches to IE on websites of choice so yes they can. It's one of the major reasons enterprises dont use say Chrome on Windows 10.
"Then there's the fact that gas supplies are finite, and are increasing in cost as supplies deplete"
See https://www.flogas.co.uk/frequently-asked-questions/how-long-will-natural-gas-reserves-last
"Proven and probable reserves are sufficient for about 200 years consumption at current rates."
So not a problem unless you drive a Delorian.
"That's a generalization"
Hence the wording "about"
"If you don't use a lot of hot water, the cost of simply having a gas supply can outweigh the savings"
Having a gas supply costs next to nothing. 25p a day is a typical standing charge for low use, or less than £2 a week. It is unlikely that many residents would find using electricity cheaper for hot water versus a high efficiency on demand boiler.
"... to be grateful that I live in a flat with no gas appliances... this is it."
You are glad you use electricity for hot water?! The lifetime cost is about 3 times higher than gas.
I have an electric water heater in an outbuilding and it draws ~ 11KW to be able to run a bath or a shower at a reasonable rate.
"I needed a Microsoft account to activate my Office 2016"
I purchased a MAK key for Office 2016 on eBay. Worked just fine. No Microsoft account required to activate. (Although some purchase formats require Microsoft account to convert a voucher to get the license key.)
(Microsoft cant stop people reselling licences under EU law.)
"This is despite the devs telling management that AWS is a far better fit from a technical point of view."
Azure is a way better technical solution and far easier to integrate and manage from an Infrastructure point of view and cloud infrastructure services are generally considered an infrastructure decision, not a development one.
"According to Gartner."
A large chunk of Microsoft's cloud revenue is from O365, Xbox Live, dynamics online, visual studio online, etc. Not just Azure. In Azure (PaaS and IaaS) Azure is consistently growing ~ twice as fast as AWS and significantly more Companies are planning to move to it as cloud platform of choice.
"That does not mirror what I see in the industry. Except their forced cloud365 offerings nobody seems to even remotely consider them as a platform to use."
Way more CTOs are planning to use Azure than any other cloud platform. And I guess you are not aware that Microsoft's cloud division overtook AWS in revenue over a year ago now? And are growing much faster.
"I have looked at the fee for a normal user and its £7.90 ($10.20) a month. "
It's £59 a year for a normal user or £69 for a family subscription with up to 5 users.
"In 2008 I bought the Office products for £70 and its done me 10 years."
Well its about £120 to buy it outright these days. You still have that choice.
"I think it is somewhat hypocritical to be criticising Israel while "we" are happily blowing up weddings, markets, hospitals, school busses"
Not really - those things are not in general deliberately targeted. Israel is deliberately choosing to shoot unarmed civilians including children. Over 2000 shot in the last 6 months alone. That's the difference.
"So you're telling me the big companies need special software to book meeting rooms?"
Yep.
"They dont have some sort of electronic calendar?"
Sure - they all use Outlook, but they need a system that also allows for updating the display panel outside each meeting room and allows confirmation and amending bookings from there. Also they commonly need to allow for certain meeting rooms to have booking approvers. They need to allow for catering to be ordered, and a cost code supplied. They need something that can request guest names and notify reception. etc. etc. Condeco does all of that and lots more.
"Micro-shaft's strategy seems all about "the trap" and/or "the lock-in". It's followed up by subscription pricing, where you must pay annually for 'whatever' rather than one-time only."
But subscription pricing is the opposite of lock in. You can scale it up and down on demand and if you don't need it anymore you can stop paying with no loss of upfront investment.
"such as the NHS promise"
There was no promise. All was stated was that we send 350 million a week to the EU (which is true) and the question was asked why not spend it on the NHS instead?
That there would be many other costs to be met on leaving the EU is not in question and I think the vast majority of voters would have realised that.
"What is really choice about Windows production servers is requiring an antivirus program that somehow gets its its new definitions stuffed up and voila you have a hung 2gig Symantec process you can't kill because it has its hooks deep into the OS"
That's not a problem with Windows that a problem with your AV vendor / your testing and rollout process.
For reference installing say an Oracle RAC server cluster to a running state on Windows Server is an order of magnitude faster and simpler than on Linux.