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Here's some good news for the non-Microsoft world. According to SJVN:
Three and a half years ago, Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO, Microsoft's cloud, said, "One in four [Azure] instances are Linux." Next, in 2017, Microsoft revealed that 40% of Azure virtual machines (VM) were Linux-based. Then in the fall of 2018, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive VP of the cloud and enterprise group, told me in an exclusive interview, "About half Azure VMs are Linux". Now, Sasha Levin, Microsoft Linux kernel developer, in a request that Microsoft be allowed to join a Linux security list, revealed that "the Linux usage on our cloud has surpassed Windows".
Linux totally rules everything except the conventional desktop. Even on Microsoft's own cloud.
This is why I don't mind running Windows desktop anymore. The monopoly failed to take hold anywhere other than the desktop. All of the big clouds, even Microsoft's own, are now Linux-majority. Supercomputing is practically a Linux monopoly. The vast majority of smartphones run Linux (apple being the notable exception).
Microsoft bashing is still fun, and they still deserve it. I still want Bill Gates to be fed feet-first into a wood chipper. But anyone still making #ResistMicrosoft a big part of their world (as I did for a long time, when it felt like it mattered) is wasting their energy.
Mon Jul 01 2019 09:59:35 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ UncensoredMicrosoft bashing is still fun,
Shouldn't you be spelling it with a $ instead of an 's'
omg.
I'm doing my first real project in PowerShell right now. What a crappy, over-engineered, confusing language. Everything about it is just *screaming* "second system effect".
Imagine if the project were just getting started today? There's a chance that they'd say "just use Python." But this piece of crap was built during the Gates/Ballmer era, and it shows.
I'm doing my first real project in PowerShell right now. What a crappy, over-engineered, confusing language. Everything about it is just *screaming* "second system effect".
Imagine if the project were just getting started today? There's a chance that they'd say "just use Python." But this piece of crap was built during the Gates/Ballmer era, and it shows.
Heh... having to work with it now.
You work with it because you're sorta forced to. Windows doesn't have a 'bash' that just comes with the OS and doesn't involve some weird bolted-on thing that turns it into Linux. And while you can try to do everything in batch files (cmd.exe), you can also just throw yourself off a cliff and enjoy the ride a bit better.
So you deal with PowerShell. It has real variables. It has real conditionals.
It has structures, objects, and so forth. You can write scripts with it that aren't as convoluted and awful as working with the traditional '.bat' file shit you had to do for over a decade.
You don't necessarily *like* it. You might prefer to use bash instead. But you just kinda have to deal with it, because the alternatives suck even worse.
(This is coming from someone having to create build scripts with this thing since he can't run bash on Windows to accomplish his goals).
It's clunky, it's too verbose, and it still has BASIC-like syntax. I'm working
with it right now because I have to automate and monitor some things in VMware,
and they built their "PowerCLI" API in PowerShell. After I built my initial
program I was able to bring it over to Linux ... using PowerShell and PowerCLI
on Linux. Ultimately I have to run on Linux because I intend to extend SNMPD.
In other news, Micro$oft has announced end-of-life for "Skype for Business" (formerly known as Lync). They want everyone to move to Teams. This means that if you want to use their instant messaging and collaboration software, you MUST run it in Office 365, on their servers. There's no on-prem version.
I wonder if they'll do the same with Exchange? I'd love that. If the market for on-premises email became too small for Microsoft to bother with, but large enough for the rest of us to feast on... oh boy.
In other news, Micro$oft has announced end-of-life for "Skype for Business" (formerly known as Lync). They want everyone to move to Teams. This means that if you want to use their instant messaging and collaboration software, you MUST run it in Office 365, on their servers. There's no on-prem version.
I wonder if they'll do the same with Exchange? I'd love that. If the market for on-premises email became too small for Microsoft to bother with, but large enough for the rest of us to feast on... oh boy.
Oh gods.. There are places where the only form of screen sharing they presently
allow is Skype for Business. Which I absolutely despise by the way. It's a
bloated piece of carp. Anyway. When is the planned end of life?
Currently announced EOL is 2020-apr-01. And yes, it's a bloated piece of
crap, but Teams is even worse, it's like a bad clone of Slack, which is a
bad clone of IRC.
XMPP was supposed to do for chat what SMTP did for email. And we'd have gotten there years ago if it weren't for greedy pigopolists working hard to lock everyone into their own walled gardens.
My workplace is still using on-prem Exchange, but moved Sh*point and now Skype-->Teams onto Microsoft's servers. I don't know how anyone who even has an even remotely sane security posture can tolerate outsourcing their communications to a massive shared platform.
XMPP was supposed to do for chat what SMTP did for email. And we'd have gotten there years ago if it weren't for greedy pigopolists working hard to lock everyone into their own walled gardens.
My workplace is still using on-prem Exchange, but moved Sh*point and now Skype-->Teams onto Microsoft's servers. I don't know how anyone who even has an even remotely sane security posture can tolerate outsourcing their communications to a massive shared platform.
Teams was their fastest growing product, because it came free with O365, and
people used it like Slack, without spending more.
Now they're creating this bastard hybrid with Skype.
MS had an opportunity to really shake up the UC space with Skype. But Lync / Skype / Teams transition has made people either keep Avaya or go Cisco.
Skype is still out there, mostly in huge organizations who are doing limitied POCs, or small orgs where it's good enough.
Typical MS arrogance.
Now they're creating this bastard hybrid with Skype.
MS had an opportunity to really shake up the UC space with Skype. But Lync / Skype / Teams transition has made people either keep Avaya or go Cisco.
Skype is still out there, mostly in huge organizations who are doing limitied POCs, or small orgs where it's good enough.
Typical MS arrogance.
LOL
They really announced an EOL of 2020-Apr-01? As in, an April Fool's prank?
*grin*
"What do you mean, Skype for Business isn't running... you're pulling my leg, right?"
Our team relies on it pretty heavily ... so I guess we'll move to Teams.
Sure hope it installs more easily. My biggest beef with SFB involves the many variations of installers available for it, many of which aren't compatible.
So you install it on some machine somewhere to work with one server, but find it won't work with some other company. So ... you have to uninstall it, then install the other one?
I'm just sorta tired of this kind of nonsense with SFB.
Maybe, hopefully, Teams will work better.
OTOH, Yet Another Conferencing Software, I guess. Nobody has really quite captured this space, and it feels like too many people have been trying to do so for decades.
They screwed it up bigtime. Lync was ok (but a bear to install if you had
more than one server and/or wanted it to integrate with your phone system).
Then they bought Skype and started trying to merge all of the technologies together, and it was just a big mess. It still is.
My biggest issue with Teams right now is that if you have a meeting, everyone has to use headsets on their computers; there's no option to have call-in users unless you purchase and implement a very expensive integration. I'd be happy if they simply offered an option to turn it off completely and simply display a bridge number to call. But that would mean Microsoft couldn't sell you their expensive UC solution, and Microsoft's interests are more important than yours, citizen.
Worse ... we *have* Cisco UC and they still activated this Teams crap.
Then they bought Skype and started trying to merge all of the technologies together, and it was just a big mess. It still is.
My biggest issue with Teams right now is that if you have a meeting, everyone has to use headsets on their computers; there's no option to have call-in users unless you purchase and implement a very expensive integration. I'd be happy if they simply offered an option to turn it off completely and simply display a bridge number to call. But that would mean Microsoft couldn't sell you their expensive UC solution, and Microsoft's interests are more important than yours, citizen.
Worse ... we *have* Cisco UC and they still activated this Teams crap.
M$ has released a new console font called "Cascadia Code" [ https://tinyurl.com/cascadia-console
] which I am trying out now. They're releasing it as open source under the
SIL Open Font license, so I guess we'll be seeing it showing up in Linux distributions
as well (but unlike msttcorefonts it won't require a meta-package that downloads
them later).
It's pretty, but I'm not sure how I feel about it as an all-day console font yet. I'm going to live in it for a few days and see how it goes.
It's pretty, but I'm not sure how I feel about it as an all-day console font yet. I'm going to live in it for a few days and see how it goes.
I just installed it. It's hard to read. Kind of reminds me of old attempts
at making fonts that are OCR compatible.
The characters seem to be designed so that they are hard to mistake for each
other, which I like. The cross-strokes on some of the characters, such as
the lower case "f" and the numeral "4", seem unusually low. That reminds
me of fonts on 1980's computers that had some strokes in weird places just
to be able to fit the entire character into the matrix, like the VIC-20.
Nearly two months later, I'm still using Cascadia Code as my daily driver.
I think the thing I find attractive about it is that it *does* have a slightly retro look to it, but not at the expense of having to use an 8x8 bitmap font on a screen that is thousands of pixels wide.
And now I'm reading that the Windows Terminal is finally getting a tabbed view. Nice to see that they're catching up to the state of the art from like fifteen years ago. :|
I think the thing I find attractive about it is that it *does* have a slightly retro look to it, but not at the expense of having to use an 8x8 bitmap font on a screen that is thousands of pixels wide.
And now I'm reading that the Windows Terminal is finally getting a tabbed view. Nice to see that they're catching up to the state of the art from like fifteen years ago. :|
I made the mistake of trying out Hyper-V on my Windows 10 machine. Ugh.
This started when I was switching my Linux VM from CentOS to Ubuntu, because reasons. So I figured I'd give the "native" hypervisor a try while I was at it.
For starters, it simply didn't bother to install its own administration tools, even after two attempts at installation and lots of reboots. I ended up having to get into it by adding a snap-in to MMC.
Then it broke my VPN, which I had to reconfigure just to get it working again.
When I tried NAT mode to avoid touching the VPN, it simply didn't work at all.
So I uninstalled it, only to find that after I reinstalled VirtualBox, that wouldn't work anymore either. After a few minutes of Ducking I found that lots of other people had this problem, and found the secret incantation to unbreak things so that it would run again after Hyper-V screwed up the machine.
So there you go. It's been out for years and still isn't ready for prime time. I'd love to put Linux underneath instead of on top, but this machine has The Standard Corporate Image (tm) and I'm not inclined to rock that particular boat right now. Now I know why VirtualBox is still so popular: it works.
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This started when I was switching my Linux VM from CentOS to Ubuntu, because reasons. So I figured I'd give the "native" hypervisor a try while I was at it.
For starters, it simply didn't bother to install its own administration tools, even after two attempts at installation and lots of reboots. I ended up having to get into it by adding a snap-in to MMC.
Then it broke my VPN, which I had to reconfigure just to get it working again.
When I tried NAT mode to avoid touching the VPN, it simply didn't work at all.
So I uninstalled it, only to find that after I reinstalled VirtualBox, that wouldn't work anymore either. After a few minutes of Ducking I found that lots of other people had this problem, and found the secret incantation to unbreak things so that it would run again after Hyper-V screwed up the machine.
So there you go. It's been out for years and still isn't ready for prime time. I'd love to put Linux underneath instead of on top, but this machine has The Standard Corporate Image (tm) and I'm not inclined to rock that particular boat right now. Now I know why VirtualBox is still so popular: it works.
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