FTFY

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win, and then their paid lobbyists have you legislated out of business.."

I'm sorry, that reference went right over my head...

I wonder how much longer Microsoft shareholders will tolerate the company dumping vast sums of money into product lines that don't make money. Even the XBox division has yet to actually pay for the massive investments.

In units sold you're right. In revenue you're not. Apple has demonstrated with the iPhone 6 that, despite all the claims that it was over the hill, that it still commands significant brand loyalty and dominates the high end smart phone market. All Blackberry and Microsoft have been able to demonstrate is the number of people who actually give a damn about their phones is so small as to be deemed insignificant. Neither Google or Apple are losing much sleep over Windows or Blackberry phones.

I'd argue that if they don't start selling product soon, they're dead. Blackberry will be cannibalized.

Let's be clear here. BB is living on loans and a dwindling cash reserve. It has few customers to speak of. The Passport is not Blackberry Rising, it's a hail mary pass.

By "not very far behind iOS", you mean with actual sales (and no, shipping from factory to warehouse or outlet is not a sale), that are all but insignificant compared to iOS.

Does anyone seriously believe that Windows Phone has any market share of any kind?

If Microsoft, with all its vast resources, cannot make a dent in the iOS-Android duopoly, I fail to see how a company that has basically been swirling around the drain for six or seven years is going to even carve out enough of a niche to stay alive.

Isn't it amazing? An economy fueled by little more than energy exports, a population still in decline, an economic war with a bloc of nations whose GDP in a bad year dwarfs its own by almost an order of a magnitude... and yup, it's going to enter the moon race.

Good thing climatologists aren't members of a religious faith.

But I do enjoy how you've cribbed Creationist thinking that "any day now we'll discover evolution is a lie" and neatly changed some words. Are you proud to be at the same intellectual level as your garden variety YEC?

Except, of course, what you just wrote has nothing to do with AGW models or theories.

Par for the course for science deniers of all kinds; create strawmen of theories they're too emotionally retarded to accept, strike down strawmen and declare victory.

Imagine being so infantile you cannot deal with reality.

Have you looked at Powershell and its scriptlet libraries? It's easier to administer Windows than it was a decade ago, but it's still quite complex. "Better than it once was" is not the same as "better than the alternatives".

And Linux, even with the Redhat ecosystem, can still be lean and mean. Maybe the problem with the AC's IT department is the IT department. I run a whole host of Linux servers, admittedly under Debian (though I've toyed with CentOS), and they're all pretty lean and mean. I'll wager a baremetal Debian or Fedora install is going to be a lot less of a hog than the sparest of CLI-based Server 2012 installs. Nobody seriously moves to Windows Server because of resource issues.

I have six or seven Debian servers, none of which have GUIs, let alone music players. Now it is true that a few servers do have audio capabilities on the motherboards, so an audio driver is being loaded. If I want so squeeze a bit more RAM out of the machines, I could disable those modules, but other than that they are very minimal installs. Basic userland, Samba, maybe LAMP and a few other useful tools and that's about it. I don't know how much smaller you can get without moving to embedded variants like DD-WRT, which have only a subset of a typical *nix user land. Far less useful as servers, mind you.

MAD prevented WWIII. I don't care whether the people who build them or the people who authorize their construction are corrupt, or worship a giant statue of a sexually aroused Beelzebub, the fact is that we are kept largely secure from would be Napoleons, Hitlers and Stalins by the mere fact that these weapons exist.

Who said anything about open source? Even the old direct Unix server variants all ran Bourne shell or c shell and their descendants. For chrissakes, a CLI-based server OS running a scriptable shell is decades old, predating Windows and FOSS by decades. This idea that Server 2012 is doing anything unique boggles the mind of anyone with even a basic understanding of operating system development and administration for the last half century. Maybe the Microsoft-funded diploma mills churn out admins who actually believe that Server 2012 is some revolutionary step, but for those of us who have been in the industry for oh, over seven or eight years, seeing somebody claim "we tossed out *nix and put in Server 2012 'cause it wuns with just a CLI" is liking seeing some fuckwit claim "I just invented the toothbrush!"

If you threw out *nix servers because you like the modern Windows toolset, then great! No prob. I have a network that runs a Server 2012 AD domain and a couple of Hyper-V servers, so it's not like I'm allergic to Windows. But fuck man, reading the parent's post (I dunno, maybe it's your post, I can understand why you would go AC to write such an incredible retarded post), with the underlying notion that Server 2012 is doing something revolutionary, and yeah, I start seeing red. Server 2012 is merely Microsoft, after twenty fucking years, getting the fucking hint.

Can you be specific here? What on a basic net install of Debian or CentOS does not fit your criteria? Christ, the base install of Debian doesn't even come with Samba.