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Comment Re:I think it is aimed at businesses and academia (Score 1) 287

This. We can't wait for the Surface so we can deploy RemoteApp (Remote Desktop Services, i.e. Terminal Server) versions of our legacy applications.

All the Executive types see these Apple iPad ads where Doctors are manipulating ultrasounds, or sales guys showing off an amazing PowerPoint deck and we're the ones who have to bring them back down to earth with, "well, it doesn't really work like that because your ERP system doesn't have a native iPhone app".

Comment At the end of the day... (Score 3, Insightful) 303

Microsoft Windows native/legacy applications -- a massive massive software ecosystem unparalleled by any other OS/platform (besides the Web perhaps?) -- is the reason why they can never turn their backs on it. Its the key to their power, but with power comes a great responsibilit^H^H^H burden.

They will try, but at the end of the day, the Microsoft walled garden will always have the gate left open.

Comment How is this different than any other tablet? (Score 2, Insightful) 303

Apple has a walled garden. That's it. Android does too. Microsoft has a walled garden, but if you have an x86 tablet, you can plant petunias and begonias if you want in there. That seems like an improvement to me. And it's likely a technical reason too: all those Windows-native calls/hooks that your typical Windows-compatible applications require likely do not exist on the ARM version of Windows 8 (I'm not a Windows programmer/guru, so I'm speculating here, but seems likely no?).

Comment Re:Silly (Score 1) 388

I'm in Canada and I can't think of a brand of beer, domestic, premium, or imported that doesn't come in can as well as bottles. It might not be stocked at every Beer Store or LCBO (Liquor Store), however.

Comment If they actually added real features... (Score 1) 349

...paying to upgrade wouldn't be painful, but actually welcomed.

Just the other day we setup a client with a delegate mailbox so she had two inboxes in her Outlook profile. Problem is, the pop-up notification only works with her primary inbox, not the other one. There are a bunch of hacks out there using VBScript and Win32 pop-ups, but they're nothing like the Outlook one (can't click on message, for example).

Instead, Microsoft puts their money behind such memorable hits like, "Where'd My Message Headers Go?". In Outlook 2003, you could right-click on the message and go to Properties. In Outlook 2007, it was right-click, Options, now it's under the abysmal Home Button thingy > Options, and you have to have the message opened to do. I'm sure some fanboi is going to jump on here and tell me of some other way to open it, but the point is, I don't want to learn new ways to do the same thing; we spend enough time in IT learning new technologies that UI distractions like Microsoft fobs off on us are unwelcome and counterproductive.

Comment Getting fed up (Score 4, Interesting) 134

of shoddy browser security. Could this not be "solved" with proper sandboxing? If there's legacy code to support (this has been cited many times in the past for reasons why), please, please fork IE into two branches: IE Classic or whatever that's fully backwards compatible, and an IE Lite that's completely sandboxed and locked down for wide-spread corporate deployment.

Comment Re:Your first server, in 2012 (Score 1) 152

...looks alot like the one from 2008. Big three = hardware warranty and support: drive dies, Dell guy's there in less than 4 hours. That covers the entire lifecycle of the server (3-5 years) while it's in production and playing a mission critical role. Virtualization/consolidation/cloud are whittling away at the server market, but it's never going to go away. Right now I'm dealing with an EC2 instance that won't start and I can't detach the volume to try to snapshot it or mount it to another new instance... yeah, yeah, "b-b-but you don't have an Elastic Load Balanced, Cloud Reach-around setup?". Well, this isn't a mission critical server and nightly backups are good enough, but it's still annoying to me and the end-users. And at ~$100 a month (reserved medium Windows EBS instance), I could've leased a new low-end PowerEdge over 3 years...

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