Six years ago is "ancient history" for some emails to surface, but the Halloween memos twenty years ago is still held up as proof of Microsoft's bad faith in open source.

y tho?

All the clouds have their own storage platforms which are far more performant, far more available and far cheaper than you could ever run it on a set of your own nodes. There's no point for them to encourage you to build it on your own when they provide a far better option already.

Maybe because PowerShell treats everything as a .NET object, so you get all the power of using .NET methods against that data, whereas bash treats everything through the pipeline as text, and so of course they are quite different.

For tail, you go get-content -path -tail . Not an equivalent for head though. select-string is basically grep, with support for regex and all.

The Internet, by design, is very different from the "natural monopolies" of water, sewer, etc. Because of the Internet's settlement-free peering regime (which the FCC also threatens to upend by starting to regulate peering), and because one can connect at any point and reach the others, there is no need for Internet infrastructure to be a monopoly. Our wireless ISP competes handily with cable, DSL, and all other forms of Internet service. Do you want to have a choice of providers, and be able to switch if you are not satisfied? Or do you want to be stuck with a monopoly -- one that (even worse) is run by unelected government bureaucrats and is therefore completely unaccountable to you?

There is no "muni network contract." The municipalities that petitioned the FCC want to get into the ISP business -- even outside their borders! They simply want to take over the business of broadband in and around their cities, without "bidding" on anything.

Actually, the FCC's action will have exactly the opposite effect. I own and operate a small, competitive ISP, and am quite willing to (and capable of) going up against any competitor on a level playing field. But I simply wouldn't enter any market where the city was providing service. Why? Because the city would engage in all of the following anticompetitive and predatory practices:

* The city would completely control my access to rights of way and pole attachments, and would be motivated to keep me from getting that access or make it expensive;

* I would be taxed and the taxes would be used to subsidize my competitor;

* The city would engage in horizontal monopoly leverage from its other monopoly businesses (trash, water, sewer, and in many places energy) and would enjoy cross-subsidies from them; for example, it wouldn't have to build a new billing system but could use its existing one;

* The city could also use its ability to tax, and bonding authority, to obtain capital for the buildout at bargain rates;

* The city, with its deep pockets and by expending some of that capital, could engage in predatory pricing, offering its service below cost due to taxpayer subsidies. It could do this at the outset, to take customers away, or possibly permanently;

* The city, because it provided those other services, would GET PAID more easily than I would because users wouldn't want their water, etc. cut off if they didn't pay the bill;

* The city would know when both owner-occupied and rental real estate was turning over (because of changes in the party being billed) and so could always sell to people as they moved into a new home before they would have a chance to consider my service;

* The city ISP would get the lucrative business of the city itself (eliminating one of the largest potential customers), as well as that of other government entities such as the county government and state government offices; and

* The city, under the FCC's new Title II regime, could demand franchise fees from me that it would not have to pay itself.

So, if you put yourself in the shoes of a hard working local ISP (which I am), or of a customer who wants choice, this no longer seems like such a good idea. Any ISP entering the market would have to fight an uphill battle against City Hall. So, new ISPs will not enter the market and existing broadband providers will have a strong incentive to pull out, leaving a monopoly. What is needed is FAIR, PRIVATE competition, not the unfair competition that turning unaccountable city bureaucrats loose would bring.

Our ISP is in a distant rural area, and the peering point to which we connect is not one of the ones where Netflix peers. We need to cache; this is the situation that caches are for. But just as banks will only give you a loan if you don't need it, Netflix will only give you a server if you don't need it.

My small ISP asked Netflix for a cache, but was refused. Apparently, unless you're a huge ISP like Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T, Netflix won't let you set up a storage node.... And they won't let you cache on your own, either. In short, if you are small enough to need a cache, you can't have one.

The user's service did not include permission to operate a server.

ISPs have no problems with their business models. It's Google who has a problem with their business models... if there's a penny left on the table that Google (which is the force behind the regulations) can't grab. Or if ISPs, who build the Internet, actually get to make something for their hard work.

The user is not paying us for the bandwidth or duty cycle to run a server. The content provider is hoping that we won't notice and that it can effectively become an unauthorized, non-paying user of our network resources. Google has had P2P built into the Flash player for use by YouTube, incidentally.

You, the user -- especially if you are a typical, naive user -- have no idea how much bandwidth you are using. Nor do you know whether the app you downloaded just to "access" a service actually turns your computer into a server, which the content provider hopes will be hosted on the ISP's network for free. ISPs are not making massive profits -- in part due to shenanigans such as these. But Google has multiple monopolies and is making billions.

Total BS. As the operator of an ISP (and a former columnist for InfoWorld who was dismissed because I didn't go along with Microsoft's monopoly propaganda... not much different from monopolist Google's fearmongering above), I can say with authority that no ISP wants to limit what sites users can visit. That's the scare tactics that the lobbyists are using to push so-called "network neutrality" regulations, which are not neutral at all; they're designed to tip the economic balance away from ISPs and toward content companies such as Google. The regulations prohibit ISPs from charging more when content providers waste bandwidth or attempt to demand priority delivery of their content -- in short, when they ask for something for nothing. They also prevent ISPs from blocking software that exploits the ISP's network for the benefit of a content provider. In short, they're all about regulating the Internet in ways that benefit powerful corporations. Worse still, they let the camel's nose into the tent. If the FCC can regulate the Net to advantage Google, it can also regulate it in other harmful ways. Want to see censorship? Government blocking of sites? Even more intense spying on your Internet activities? If these regulations are not overturned, the precedent will open the door to all of those things.

There is basically no lock-in to any virtualisation platform these days. They all use essentially open virtual hard disk formats and it's trivial to convert from one to the other. But you end up locked in anyway, as all your scripting & management is targeted at whatever platform you choose - be it KVM/vSphere/Hyper-V. So choose the one that makes managing it easiest for you. If you like bash, choose KVM. If you like PowerShell, choose Hyper-V or vSphere.

If you are so fat and lazy that moving your arm 24 inches occassionally is causing you strain, then using a touch screen is the least of your worries.