Though you still have the issue of the fluctuation due to whimsical behavior of the populace.

Basically you have one of two issues:
-A system where a designated few are given power to manipulate the whole currency, complete with how bad that can go when such power is wielded in a corrupt or incompetent way. On the upside, they can apply some manipulation to mask a transient issue that can and has sent economies spiraling into collapse if it manifested in the value of the currency directly.
-A system where the currency is more fixed, 'value' subject to the whims of the general participants in the economy. Note that those whims can be and have been quite successfully manipulated by sufficiently confident/charasmatic folks (e.g. relatively few very vocal folks largely drove Gold value up not so long ago), so the potential for manipulation by a few is still very real, even if not institutionalized.

It seems in practice the latter is more destructive, though the former *feels* more wrong. There are of course spectacular examples of the first going wrong, but most of those systems are working. There aren't really any at scale examples of the latter going right in this day and age.

No, they still use the phrase 'Windows as a Service' prominently. There's no hint that means anything with respect to how people *pay* for the thing. It seems to refer to two things depending on the audience:

-Rolling release for the consumer space. No longer do consumers have to/get to decide on a particular version. On the plus side, if you were running Vista and then 7 level of functionality came along, you get fixed for no additional cost. On the down side, if you are running something 7 like and 8 comes along, you get changed to the 8 vision (8 underpinnings were great, except for 'Modern' UI and apps).

-Deferred recognition of revenue for investors. Investors want the appearance of a 'subscription' like revenue stream. MS realizes this would be suicide for an *OS*, but still has to satisfy those demands. So hypothetically a user buys the OS for $100 from his perspective. MS defers the revenue so it *looks* like the user pre-paid for 4 years of a subscription at $25/yr. Note that there's not guarantee that the user will stop using it before that 4 years is up, but the expectation is that in aggregate that'll be the useful life of that purchase (tied to the hardware device, maybe not transferrable even for retail anymore?).

Windows has made a lot of advancements, but the picture is not clear cut.

Performance: Graphics driver stack and utilization Windows is ahead by a wide margin. Otherwise Linux usually wins (though some debate can be had about scheduling behaviors). For reference, look at the Top500 list and count the Windows deployments versus Linux.

Security: This really is more subjective than objective in many ways. Windows let's you *think* you are logged in as admin without actually giving admin in a pretty sophisticated way. Given the common use case of desktop users using just one account as 'admin', this is probably one of the most important facets. Additionally the ability to hold multiple security contexts without having distinct processes enables applications to take advantage of OS privilege enforcement in a more efficient manner. On the flipside, Linux has more advanced namespace manipulation and enriched mandatory access control. There is much better framework for hard enforcement of very fine grained things in Linux.

Stability: At this point things are fairly even. MS gets a nod for more resilient graphics stack, but I'd say the quality of third party drivers is frequently lower in Windows than Linux. I get more crashes on a modern Windows system than a Linux system, but I don't think MS is to blame anymore directly. If Linux were more popular and third parties did the same BS they do in Windows, Linux would probably suffer just as badly. In this way, the GPL I think has helped Linux as a kernel greatly.

Not to mention that 1Y ago it was $650 per unit, and was almost $1000 a year before that.

So on top of a massive inflation over two years, they are saying they are so stable they predict a 200-300% deflation thanks to how awesomely stable it is...

I don't understand how anyone can testify to the stability of bitcoin with a straight face.

That's incorrect. Gold fluctuates pretty wildly with mass hysteria, compete with massive deflation and inflation. Much like bitcoin. Prior to the 20th century, when communication wasn't quite so instant and pervasive, gold did a pretty good job because it was rare for *everyone* to panic more or be more confident all at once.

That is true, but gold/silver is more concrete. There is a psychological factor in concrete things.

So here we had a few admins and a bunch of 'normal' users. The normal users needed an admin to create a new group to facilitate sharing. With seafile, the users could create their own groups. That and frankly we hit a few bugs with sync and seafile seemed to do better.

owncloud's document preview and the plugins were a bit worse than seafile's baked in, but primarily it's just a platform for replicating and sharing file content for us, we don't really care about anything beyond that. We don't use the commercial seafile.

Except Lotus Notes is still around, but yes, it's like MS took a look at Lotus Notes and said 'now *this* is the way to do things'.

This is the example of precisely how disciplined the 'appliances' you get from vendors are constructed.

This is a *security* focused appliance that made this goof from one of the more well regarded vendors in the market.

Think about that next time you save a few seconds of your time buying an appliance or even pulling down something from dockerhub instead of just installing the platform.

Of course the software industry has gone to town with appliances, meaning they spend no time properly packaging things anymore because an 'appliance' will take care of all of it.

Sharepoint needs absolutely zero help to look silly.

Of MS world of products, sharepoint is perhaps the worst festering thing they got.

Depending on your usage, I'd recommend http://seafile.com/en/download...

We were using owncloud, but at least at last check a non-admin user needed a lot of things done by an admin on their behalf, and seafile let's people make their own groups and such.

One: Superfish was not exactly a Lenovo invention, it was crap shovelware that was gimped by their use of highly insecure Komodia (which also got their insecure interception into other products, just Superfish via Lenovo was the most notorious vector). All the PC/laptop vendors were basically playing russian roulette with crapware to get costs down and Lenovo lost. The somewhat silver lining is that it was a wake up call to the industry that crapware comes with a very real and very high risk.

Two: Superfish was part of the general cost cutting measures for cheap laptops that they thankfully spare the Thinkpad series from. Even 'ThinkVantage' design has been decreased over time as Microsoft beefed up in-box capabilities.

Three: I agree it's rare for me to want to have a premade desktop and make my own (mainly because some of the components I like are generally tied to needlessly high end other poarts), but there's not realistic options in the portable space.

Note that Lenovo gets blame, and Superfish gets blame, but let us not forget that the critical flaw originated with Komodia, which managed to get their mistake into more than just Superfish. People who didn't even have superfish were exposed to the exact same problem.

They do that. My broadwell X1 Carbon has nicely backlit keyboard (though I never use it).

Well there's certainly a prominent example of a company taking explicit aim to *break* knock-off devices in a driver update:
http://arstechnica.com/informa...