Honest question, since when is windows not known as reliable? I have just as many problems supporting Linux on anything as Windows and to be quite honest, sometimes it may be worth paying the couple of dollars to license an OS that has great vendor support out of the box than to roll your own. Microsoft for example offers Windows 8.1 for free on Devices 9" screen size. I can't imagine this version costing much if anything at all - running similar to licensing of Android where some specific configurations may have costs.

Knowing Microsoft will have a "universal" app ecosystem and fully expecting that WinRT will be ported to IoT platforms fully (don't think it has been for 8.1 IoT platforms) it would be silly for an internet of things company to be concerned with OS when they can focus on Device - especially knowing Microsoft's long tail support of everything..

It's a shame the first few posts are complaints about virus's or other nonsense. Microsoft has had Windows 8.1 for IoT for a little while now and they have a great growing community of developers and devices that Windows runs on. It's pretty amazing that Windows can run on these devices. Raspberry Pi running Windows 10 with Plex should be a fun experiment if Plex makes a port and it will be exciting to see Visual Studio updated to have the Pi as supported device.

What are you talking about? Nothing is "exactly" as bad as "we" always said they would. There is nothing "right".. (rightness?? seriously?)

Surely you gest..

The MS antitrust case was nearly 14 years ago and people here still pretend it was yesterday.

Citation needed.

Microsoft licensing isn't really an issue, the OS is free on certain profiles such as small tablets and mobile devices and with everything hinted at with Windows 10 it appears that the OS will become further more affordable to consumers/end users. Schools also get incentive programs, discounts and free student/teacher licenses. If anything, Microsoft is embracing Android & iOS more these days so the biggest loser stands to be ChromeBooks in the end. Windows devices are price point competitive with ChromeBooks. Visual Studio being free, .Net going cross platform, Windows for "Free" on mobile/tablet platforms.. this all seems like nonsense.

Someone attending a 3 month crash course is going to be an intern/beginner developer. This is the point. They're going to start working at the bottom of the career ladder and work their way up. One could argue that after 4 years they would have improved especially if they're of the type where they know that programming is a never ending learning experience. One could also argue that a large problem with the university system is that a lot of graduates feel that once they have graduated they're accomplished and done.

I actually support whatever methods we can employ to get more people into development. Girl scouts often does 3 month crash courses to get girls coding, girls who code, the same. We have to start somewhere as the university system isn't for everyone and should NEVER be a qualifier for what is good in the day and age when we can all learn and share and knowing how to learn is the most important aspect of being good at anything.

STOL aircraft are the hottest selling GA aircraft there is right now, the "CUB" variants from super cubs to pipper cubs to the dozen other builders / models are selling like hotcakes and doing great in both certified and sport aircraft models and the Zenith STOL's are being built by the thousands.

They were never designed to take off on the street like out of ones neighborhood, but people with a few hundred feet of grass can certainly do it. They're used for hunting trips, bush pilots, search and rescue, leisure flying and much much more.

Also, STOL aircraft are some of the most economical to operate - often designed around automotive (mogas) and now with diesel (jet-a).

Sony isn't doing too hot in Revenue and their stock went up over rumors of splitting / spinning off as well.

Microsoft on the other hand makes exponentially more revenue and the XBox is part of their 3 screen initiative. The largest share holders of MS aren't going to allow a complete outright sale of Xbox, but maybe it could be innovative being less tied to MS corporate.

Like the other poster said, you're making a religious argument. I was mostly showing how a mess up of epic proportions could happen regardless of the platform but at the same time, i wouldn't doubt that if Knight Trading *DID* run Windows you would happily use it as case of epic failure of the platform..

That is not the way it pans out.. You can run Windows on almost every cloud provider there is out there and you can run Linux on Azure too. In fact, Microsoft's licensing is fairly well priced that its either included in your pre-pay budget or billed so cheap its the same price as getting an RHEL license or any OS with support.

Rackspace and Amazon have millions in revenue from Windows customers, if not billions.

All hell froze over when Oracle certified its entire app stack and database system on azure.. i think HyperV is the only non oracle platform certified to be virtualized on.. Microsoft isn't the same company you

You can get a 120 day free account and try out azure for yourself.. I'm running a few debian boxes on there, but there are some pre-built Centos and other linux systems as well. It's pretty easy to build a VM on windows 8 as well and publish your own VHD/image (pro includes hyperv..)

You guys hold some weird grudges.. There have been billions lost on companies running every OS under the sun out there.. lots of people lost great fortunes for many an absurd cock up or failed IT project.

The trading company that recently lost half a billion dollars because they couldn't code right ran linux.. is that a fault of linux? nope.. so not sure what your case has any bearing or relevency of.

Microsoft's Bing, Xbox Live and Cloud services already host something like a million servers across its datacenters.. they had some growing pains over the years and they finally dogfooded everything they use so windows is maturing much more in line with the market than ever before.

Nope.. don't work for Microsoft.. nope, don't run many Microsoft servers.. I have tons of linux vms running on vmware internally but i know lots of people having great success with azure and i know people working at Microsoft doing some great things that would make any IT nerd jealous.

Time to grow up and move on.

Who in their right mind would buy hardware today if their apps are so easily hosted? Why have the headache of data center cooling, data center security, data center facility maintenance, data center redundancy, data center capacity and everything else that goes along with it? The cost of the servers have really little to do with the overall cost. Electricity, support, maintenance & everything else add up.

With azure and services like azure i can scale in many ways much more easily too. I can scale up load balancers, i can scale out mirroring and regional file access (content delivery) and i can do everything through an API so i can spinup/shutdown services dynamically..

If you're the owner of a line of business app that you can host on azure, isn't a 110 bucks a month a bit easier to budget than say trying to get capital approval on a server, server support, server installation, provisioning and bandwidth and capacity/power/cooling research done? Also, if you want to scale up on demand where only 10 days a year you need a second server, that is easily done without having to deploy your own infrastructure.

If you have your own local virtualized infrastructure and services, i'm sure your local costs are still probably as high or higher than the costs outsourced to azure, amazon, google, ibm or whomever you choose simply because they have economies of scale most could never dream to achieve internally without spending hundreds of millions to mimmic..

You should always use your own client controlled encryption to protect yourself regardless of which offsite backup solution you choose. Even with amazon glacier i encrypt locally.

It's not very locked in at all. Anyone moving to the cloud will use SCCM, Chef, Ansible, Puppet or whatever desired state config system and provisioning platform they want and provision & deploy environments on demand. You simply run your Windows / Linux VM's or deploy your apps to the app services and scale out as needed. If you get tired of azure or find something cheaper, you edit your provisioning & deployment to deploy elsewhere.