And you're a good example of how deluded some Linux geeks are, and cannot accept the fact that Microsoft actually makes good products, especially for businesses and companies. As much as I generally hate Internet Explorer, it's a good example of how open source developers just don't get what the real world requirements and needs are. IE is still the only browser that is easily mass-deployed with site wide policies and settings. I personally use Opera and Chrome, but those would be hell to deploy on a larger scale on some corporate network.

What Microsoft does get is what actual, real world businesses need. They also get what real world programmers need, and they get what enterprise servers need. Linux is great, but it misses many of those features - for example, how do you connect to a remote PC with bash and run your commands there? Oh, you can't. With PowerShell you can easily do that.

Then you aren't doing any serious programming. Good IDE really is a must for any larger project. And seriously, it's almost 2012 and Linux shells still pass data as text, when passing objects would make so much more sense and give a lot more options. Linux's problem is staying with some 80's mentality and when trying to come up with new stuff, doing it completely wrong (like the newest Gnome and KDE versions)

That's like saying no one puts a Linux based server up on the Internet where it can be attacked. UNIX based OSes have had many more remote vulnerabilities than Windows within it's entire history. Now a days the malware problem is mostly because of stupid home users and third party software like Flash. However, by default Windows Server is very locked down and no sane admin uses a server to browse for random stuff anyway. Third party software is also just as exploitable on Linux.

By the way, I would think exchange and email servers are quite critical for business functions. Hell, one of the largest programming websites StackOverflow uses Windows Servers, as do many other large businesses.

Why you blame Microsoft for it? What about we turn it around and ask why can't Linux folks just make a good PowerShell variant for Linux distros?

So you are bashing PowerShell for allowing you to do more than what you need with it? Seriously? You don't need to use those extra features if you don't want to, but for anyone actually doing some work it's a great tool (you know, for those that actually do something else than play around with their wardrobe servers).

I don't think you have even used PowerShell, you just want to hate on it because it's Windows-based and that "ooh Windows admins must be stupid!" line makes it even more visible. The hard cold truth is that Windows Server is used on around 50% of servers, and is usually much better choice for certain things than Linux based server, especially in corporate environments. Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work, but the real world still uses Windows Server a lot.

PowerShell is much more powerful than bash. Bash is pretty much just running linux commands with a few logical structures built-in. PowerShell is a lot more like an actual programming language, with real objects, functions and data handling.

No it doesn't apply, as there just isn't any development tools as good as Visual Studio, nor there is cloud platform that integrates so good with your development tools. Nothing really offers the same kind of usability.

On a related note, I was seriously surprised how easy it is to develop software for both Windows Phone 7 and Azure with Visual Studio. Just try it. And the best thing is, they all work together - from your Windows app to WP7 app and to a Silverlight applet and Azure cloud. No other system comes even close to the level of integration MS has done. Just for that reason I think they're doing a great job with it.

And to be honest, Azure is probably the best cloud platform there is currently. It integrates beautifully with Visual Studio. When you compile your code you can run it directly in Azure and even debug it in the process. You have to test it yourself how easy it is actually is, there's no other platform that makes it so streamlined. If Microsoft does something right it's developing tools for programmers.

How does Facebook or Microsoft sell your data? To begin with, Microsoft always asks you first if they can collect anonymous usage data. Google doesn't even ask.

Secondly, Facebook also uses data the same way that Google does - to show relevant ads. They don't sell that data to anywhere. Hell, it's their largest asset, they would be insane to do stuff like that.

* Google's business model fundamentally relies on violating peoples privacy and selling users private information.

That is all that needs to be said, even while there's a lot more.

And seriously, you can make that kind of list of any company, even Microsoft. MS does a lot of cool R&D in Microsoft Research, they give out software freely to students, they give out Visual Studio Express freely, they support charities, and they also massively support open source software outside of their core business.

Google does a lot of evil things. You can't kill an innocent little girl and get off of it by saying "but look, I also help homeless people by giving them food!". If you do evil, you do evil, and you should be punished for it, no matter if you do good things as well.

You seriously think Russia can't ignore international agreements if they want to? US does all the time, Russia can too. Even if just to show off to USA. What will the rest of the world do if Russia ignores the agreements? Stops buying energy from them? People in Europe better get used to having no electricity, and prepare for a cold winter.

Yes it does, and Microsoft has fully published the details so people can make their own implementations. If Mono is lacking behind on something, well, that's Mono's developers fault.

On the other hand, Google App Engine is competely closed. No published docs, no information about the API's, no open source code. Fully proprietary platform, from Google.

And would you say this same thing about Microsoft and their Office file formats? "Don't like MS Office file formats? Write your own and don't support them!" Google has seriously brainwashed you. They do all the same bad things Microsoft, Facebook and many other "bad" companies do but you're too clueless to see it.

It wasn't free from the beginning either, you know. Now they just seriously limited the resources and raised prices. Since slashdotters think Google is so much about open source and free software, why is App Engine backend proprietary. I'm not even asking something like their search engine code, just the App Engine backend so that people can move to other service providers with their projects if Google charges too much. Oh yeah, but Google doesn't want that. They won't open source it because then they couldn't lock down developers.

And that is exactly why it's insanely stupid idea to start relying on something Google makes. For all you know they will just shut it down the next day.