meaty

Agreed - its a stinking turd, but at least it's not oscommerce :)

I think its a naive attempt at describing worker processes and application scope. if you have a worker process per endpoint which is common with .net apps and lots of endpoints, its quite hard to balance resources. This is true. In PHP, none of this is of consequence.

Now I've got a tiny (280mb deployable, 5 hosts, 37 application pools, 5000 in flight requests 24/7) behemoth on my hands and I can testify its an arse pain to manage resources.

Th problem is whatever you do you're locked into an ecosystem of some sort. Even open source software. Have you tried building a portable c program on windows, Linux and OSX? Java is the least painless thing but we all know that's just another ecosystem.

The bit people forget is: stop procrastinating and build some shit.

To be honest, most people really don't give a shit. The next cigarette or pay day is far more important. Perhaps I'm getting old, but there are more important things to worry about.

Businesses do go to war regularly against nations. Its pretty much how the mineral, precious stone and oil industries work.

Afghanistan looks like a useless chunk of dirt until you dig some holes.

If Microsoft did it, I'd probably laugh a bit at the irony simply because its how the EU operate.

Well what do you expect them to do?

I think they would be batshit insane to do otherwise.

Are you serious?

I wrote an x86 NT utility back in 1996 on NT4 (with no service packs). It still executes and works perfectly on an x64 Windows 8 machine.

That's a mere 17 years ago.

There are two APIs now. The old one isn't going away either.

This is welcome news. At least they are listening to people these days.

Yes but Microsoft activation can make than damn hard if they want to.

Actually this is not true on windows phone 8 and windows RT. The only requirement is that you use the native API which means the browser back end will need to be ported to it.

This may be or may not be hard work.

Seriously you can turn all that on if you want. My keyboard has a volume control.

And use PowerShell ISE as your command line.

Agree with this. Surface RT is painful. Especially office.

Same thing, but I dislike Windows 8 in the same way I hated the bad bits of vista. I'll live with it if my ThinkPad dies big time though. The concept is really good but the execution is a bit clunky.

I'm quite happy with the tiles concept. In fact I'm typing this on a Lumia 820...

Windows Blue I imagine will iron out these issues. I have some hopes that it will be the next windows 7.

Never had that problem!

I can't tell the difference in speed between a 2007 Lenovo T61 and a 2010 MBP.

Works fine for apps. Windows 8 actually makes distinction between documents, apps and settings.

Which is still an issue for a lot of people who depend on them.

They already have been doing that for a long time. They are in compliance now.

I understand the premise of the fine, but how is this supposed to help the consumers and businesses who now have to foot the $50 bill per seat?

I don't think they can just cut off every Microsoft consultancy, every Windows user and throw them out of the EU.

If they did, I'd be heading to Brussels with a pitchfork along with about 100 other people at my company.

What motivation have Microsoft got to pay this?

Sorry I will be 100% honest - I misread the first paragraph in the last message you posted. My apologies.

I think you are smoking crack. Our AD is on azure. Its not designed for http specifically. The azure web instances bit is but the whole platform is IaaS style.

So hadoop with SQL server (even ESENT if you want a key-value store) and MSMQ/BizTalk are not used? Only the entire health service in the UK runs on their 'poor offerings'...

Deep sigh. I think there are two views of reality.

That's web sites. That's a fraction of the real world, which is my point. Most businesses don't run over HTTP. If most of the top 500 web sites disappeared, the world wouldn't stop.

GitHub is not a good measure of popularity of a proprietary language mainly aimed at internal and closed source software. In fact, if you added our 4.2mloc of total c# code to githib I reckon the stats would be different.

Yep the consumers buy a laptop because it is pink or cheap which usually ends up running windows as its the only thing at the price point. When they buy a tablet, they buy a shit no brand one running an ancient android release, realise it sucks and just go and buy a shit windows laptop.

Less than ten percent of consumers are not moronic enough to buy something better the first time.

The businesses buy windows because its good enough and already works for what they need and they don't want to learn it all again.

I live in an expensive bit of London where people can afford i-this and that and everyone still had cheap pink laptops running windows. Phones are different but there is a definite shift towards blackberry and windows phone around me from iPhones. Most people whinge about their iPhone these days.

Uptime is not a problem. Stuff breaks. Being able to contact someone, get a root cause of an issue and get help to mitigate it is what is important.

In our case, a trial with Hetzner found their support to be somewhat lacking if something went wrong.

The azure outages didn't affect us at all.

Out load characteristics are somewhat higher than that. We can shift 10 million http hits an hour quite happily.

Because its not opinionated at all, allows you to do what the hell you want and has very good support.

I've been burned by AWS and GAE support which is sometimes non existent. If you're running your business off it, you can't afford that risk.

I'm not concerned who it comes from.

Perhaps us .Net devs are the silent majority?

Windows pays the bills for a lot of people.

One of our clients has 17,000 windows desktops, 3,500 windows laptops, 500 windows servers and a team of 80 people looking after it all. None of this is connected to the internet or is tongue-wagged about profusely. There are thousands of companies that size hiding that no one hears about here be use they are not clever, vc funded or bleeding edge.

The world is built on lots of things, but a chunk of it certainly is built on windows, possibly more than you can see with the naked eye.

Yep it is expensive, bit hetzner are unreliable, their kit performs poorly, their support sucks and you can't deploy a sql server instance quickly (the latter is quite useful if you use sql server).

It's tidier than AWS and GAE, better performing and slightly more expensive. Tooling is good, support is excellent (I can get someone who knows arse from elbow on the phone in 2 minutes flat). Some of it is a little odd, but it makes sense eventually. API is a little clunky though.

We have some kit in it (Linux and windows which might sound odd), but it seems to be pretty reliable. Our AD forest root servers are in it and two OpenLDAP roots for clients as is our web site (which is 3rd party PHP).

It basically does everything. It's sort of GAE's app model and AWS's server + network model in one.

We did have a network/vlan issue but they sorted that on the phone in literally 10 minutes.

Azure is quite scary good but the main problem is that people really don't understand what it is. If they actually work through that, I fully believe it will win.

We have a couple of Linux instances on azure to give you an idea how odd it is.

Start, type, search results. Its had that since vista!