Pull up the Windows 10 duvet and pretend Win8 and Vista were BAD DREAMS Each time there’s a new version of Windows, Microsoft bills it as “the best Windows yet," understandably enough. History teaches us that each time Microsoft tries to really stretch itself and push the development envelope on Windows, it backfires. Windows 8 was the most recent stumble in Microsoft’s journey, with Redmond …
I wonder if with so much cloud and virtual server useage in enterprise systems they will start to look at the old dumb terminal approach using something more on the lines of a chromebook or simiar in place of the laptop.
Given the choice I for one would rather just have to maintain the server farm and not worry about the devices out there that the user prefers to use, ie a tablet or phablet etc instead of a PC.
No more windows except for some of the servers, lovely....
We've been using thin clients for over a decade, but it looks like they might be thrown out and Windows PCs coming in...
Our mobile users all seem to be switching to Surface Pro 3s. I bought one privately and showed it off at work, since then everybody wants one.
Windows 8.1 probably has about a 60% share of our Windows end devices, although Windows 2008R2 TS is still the most used desktop environment.
big_D
Gotta love those downvotes for doing nothing than stating your own experience.
H8ters gotta H8.
I much prefer Win8.1 over XP & 7 now, it has some annoying things, but now I find 7 more annoying than 8.
Prefer Win Phone over Andriod
but prefer Linux / Apache over IIS
No more windows except for some of the servers, lovely....
I've never really understood why a server O/S needs Windows. I recently completed a six-month sentence contract where I had to migrate legacy applications from Windows 2003 to 2008. There were about ten servers, so it amounted to a lot of very repetitive point-and-clicking while following checklists. The IIS management interface is especially heavy going (not to mention gratuitously different between 2003 and 2008).
It's not that I'm a command-line machismotist, but the use of a Windows UI to manage servers makes it difficult to guarantee that the same thing is done everywhere. Microsoft never seem to have grasped this point. Windows was launched with a crap command interface inherited from MS-DOS, which they've tried to enhance with obscure extensions.
Did you look at using PowerShell to run commands and automate the process?
Have you actually used PowerShell to automate GUI operations? By the time you've converted the manual point+click script into an automatic script and tested it you could have got a junior/student to perform it manually on 50 machines - and even then, there will always be something that just can't be done without the GUI.
The killer feature of Windows is everything is accessible via the GUI. The command line was just hacked onto it later.
There is an awful lot you cannot do with the GUI that you can do easily, and most importantly repeatedly with powershell. A lot of advanced Exchange administration is PS only, and even for the basic stuff, who wants to run through 20 mouse clicks for 1000 users when you can just pipe it in with csv?
2012 is more Powershell based, the OP was doing a migration from 2003 to 2008, which assuming it was since the release of 2012 is it's own kind of messed up.
For me the gui has it's place for some tasks, and a shell is good for others, and both are good for starting pointless arguments.
2012 is more Powershell based, the OP was doing a migration from 2003 to 2008
I was responding to the idea that Windows will always need a GUI. In 2008 Powershell wasn't up to running the whole system yet, but it got there eventually.
It's now 2015... can you actually use the system without a GUI, yet?
My Powershell knowledge is such that if I had a Win2012 system then yes I could. Unfortunately our servers are all still on Win2008 and budget constraints mean we're unlikely to update any time soon.
and even then, there will always be something that just can't be done without the GUI.
From what I've been told, as of Windows Server 2012 not only does the GUI just act as a front-end for Powershell but most of the time it actually tells you what command it's running. So if you're paying attention you can point and click once and it writes the script for you. And in 2012 you can install the system with no GUI at all (as a server should be in my penguin-addicted opinion).
I don't know why you are down voted for this. As an example when you perform anything in Server Manager such as promoting a server to be a domain controller the last step of the wizard shows you the script, you can copy and paste it in powershell, keep it as documentation or adapt it to run on many servers instead of using the gui every time. Hell you can run the server in core mode so there is no GUI and do everything on powershell if you really want to.
So many people on here think their windows knowledge from 15 years ago makes them an authority now. There's is very little need to automate the GUI using powershell, a lot of the GUI in the latest windows is just a wrapper around the powershell functions. You seldom need to "automate GUI operations" when you can just invoke the things the GUI was going to invoke...
You know that to run Windows 3.1 you typed "Windows" from the dos prompt? Hardly hacked onto it later....
You know that to run Windows 3.1 you typed "Windows" from the dos prompt? Hardly hacked onto it later....
Actually, the command was "win". Rather ironic since I didn't get that winning feeling when the Program Manager appeared.
" You know that to run Windows 3.1 you typed "Windows" from the dos prompt? Hardly hacked onto it later....
Actually, the command was "win". Rather ironic since I didn't get that winning feeling when the Program Manager appeared."
Someone had probably written a batch file for him...
Actually, and this will surprise you, I haven't started up Windows 3.1 from DOS for more than 20 years and I didn't remember that it was "win" and not "windows". Nice distraction from my rather more relevant point that the command line was not bolted on later....
Actually, it was bolted on later - we are talking NT-based systems, here, NOT DOS/9x.
The cool thing about powershell is that a lot of the stuff that works in ksh works in Powershell ;-) .. Ok, backticks are backslashes, use $(<command>) to execute a sub-command ...
Yes, Powershell is worthy, CMD.EXE is piss-poor - I much rather prefer to ssh into the windows box from UNIX or GNU/Linux with a proper terminal.
This post has been deleted by its author
Call me old-fashioned if you must... but wasn't windows.3.1 really just a GUI nailed onto DOS 6?
XP was hailed as the first of the line where windows ran in it's own environment...
or at least that was how Micro$oft spun it to me - at the time.
Talking about spin...
Seeing as M$ has taken everyone for a fairground ride with 8 and the absolutely TORTUROUS upgrade path to 8.1 that has taken quite literally tens of thousands of people up to six months of tuning KB's to discover that it wasn't even worth the bother, I think the least they could do is support 7 through to when 8.1 is due to expire to try to make amends for all the pain that they inflicted on people that just wanted to get some work done on their sodding computer.
...thus speaks the retired IT guy that knows his way around computers but wonders why the hell he has to jump hurdles for everyone with a computer that knows I'm a retired IT guy. (Sorry mate, it came with 8 when I bought it - and I don't want it)
Me? I just cut the crap and restored 7 and am living happily ever after. 7 IS the new XP and M$ has a way to go to get past that fact.
9 disappeared en route, presumably because too many people would have wanted a free upgrade, showing once again that M$ continues adding to it's track record of making it's customers pay for it's cock-ups - I honestly wonder how it is that they still have any customers, they are gonna need to pull a bloody big rabbit out of their hat to convince me to upgrade when 7 takes care of everything I ever need out of a computer.
Good luck doing that if you have more than one hard drive.
Took me a while of searching when 8.1 first came out that it was that causing the upgrade to fail, because the actual error returned by the installer was absolutely useless
Windows NT was the first real OS from MS, and is the father of Windows 2000, Windows XP and later versions. I seem to remember that Windows 2000 was more stable than Windows XP, since for XP they made concessions to allow games to run better, and thus opening up the platform for more abuse from the application programs.
DOS and the ugly add-on Windows [1,2,3].[0-9]+ was mostly a bag of drivers with no protection from misbehaving applications, and only cooperative multitasking (if one was lucky).
Windows NT was created by people from DEC who knew about real operating systems. Gates earlier was into Unix, but greed and stupidity led him to not do away with DOS in a timely manner, and instead imposing hurt on the general ignorant public. (RSI from Ctrl-alt-delete was a real prospect.)
He also dumped the rather nice OS/2 just to not give IBM any leverage. All business decisions, with no regard for the end user experience.
I'm mostly using OS/X nowadays, as it brings together a slick GUI (better than windows in so many ways) with a nice Unix.
@anonymous boring coward
your post started out well, which is why I upvoted it, then I got to the last couple of paragraphs and nearly changed that to a downvote.
You went from providing useful, upvoteworthy information in a relatively unbiased form, then you suddenly sounded like an OS X fanboy and the last part of your argument doesn't hold water these days - and in any case, it is down to personal preference, I switched from Linux to OS X to Windows as my daily driver over the years. I still use them all, but I prefer Windows, that is a personal preference and like your rant at the end, has little, if nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Thanks for your reply!
I'm no "fanboy". This is the first time I've even mentioned I use OS/X.
It's pretty slick, that can't be denied. Using it with a touch pad it's a lot like using iOS, so Apple is obviously working hard to converge the feel and subjective GUI performance of the platforms. Scrolling is getting more like iOS (even on my underpowered old Mac Mini driving two 24 inch displays), unlike Windows which feels so 1990s still. When I fire up Windows 7 it does feel like going back at least a decade (on a much, much more powerful energy sapping rig). I also use Ubuntu and various other Linux versions. I started using Linux circa 1991. I liked it better in the early days when it wasn't as bloated as most distros are nowdays. In 32MB of RAM I could open 100 Netscape windows -those were the days. Of course Flash and various other annoyances hadn't appeared yet.
I also enjoyed my Wyse terminal hooked up to a AT&T 3B2 (used a multiple virtual terminal emulator for screen swapping on the VT100 terminal). Real nice keyboard on that one, with the control key in the right place -which incidentally OS/X allows me to configure too (right where the mostly useless Caps Lock sits).
Oh, and if you are an old Emacs user, OS/X implements most of the cursor movement and edit keybindings in all input fields! For example right here in the browser when I'm typing this. (just did CTRL-K, CTRL-Y just to verify)
A large negative with Apple is that they tend to abandon old-ish hardware that would be able to run the latest OS/X with only some small penalty (performance, or turning of some feature). I don't like that.
Server is odd. Everything in a GUI I have found in a powershell - its just easier to do in a GUI than a silly command documented badly. However there are quite a few things missing in GUI that you can only do in a powershell script (clustering is a big culprit here).
Problem with MS is the way things are FORCED onto you (using the GUI remotely on server 2012 was awful at least they fixed a huge chunk of that in R2)
Call me old-fashioned if you must... but wasn't windows.3.1 really just a GUI nailed onto DOS 6?
Good lord, no. MS-DOS 6 wasn't released until a year after Windows 3.1 went GA.
More importantly, from Windows/386 (a version of Windows 2.1) on, Windows on an 80386 or better-class CPU could run in "386 enhanced" mode. In that mode, Windows had its own protected-mode kernel and ran unprotected apps as Virtual-8086 tasks. DOS was no more than a bootloader.
The idea that Windows NT was the "first Windows OS" is simply wrong. Windows/386 running in 386-enhanced mode was Microsoft's first Windows-based OS. DOS was still present as the bootloader, but once Windows started up it was discarded.
My first job at IBM was working on the largely-forgotten "DOS 4.0 and Windows Kit", and that included working with pre-release Windows/286 and Windows/386. We even had the source code, or a good chunk of it, anyway. It was actually kind of fun in those days, particularly after one of my colleagues wrote a replacement for the "MS-DOS Executive" (the precursor to Windows Explorer) that had enough functionality to be useful. The 'Kit also included some handy apps - an equation editor, a data-graphing package - which made it decently useful for the university undergrads it was aimed at. Never took off, though. And I didn't use it myself, since I had access to proper UNIX workstations and could write my papers in roff.
> DOS was still present as the bootloader, but once Windows started up it was discarded.
Untrue.
Some DOS calls would be intercepted by VMM/VXD, but not all. Right up until WinME an API call could still end up serviced in real-mode DOS.
-A.
I found upgrade from 8 to 8,1 extremely easy, not in the least torturous. I didn't have to tune any KBs. And I find the 8.1 GUI at least as good as the Windows 7 GUI, better than the XP Pro GUI, and infinitely better than the Vista GUI. It lets me use a decent command language, run 5 instances of sql server using 3 different releases (2008R2, 2012, and 2014) ,allows me to use an old-style start menu, makes it very easy to work as an unprivileged user instead os having all sorts or privileges (as used to be required to work efficiently under XP and various Unixes), in general it doesn't present any problems.
Maybe having first started messing about with computers 50 years ago has made it easier for me to adapt to changes in OSs and UIs that you seem to have found adapting to Windows 8.1.
This post has been deleted by its author
To properly alter a server, you need to :
a) Backup/Snapshot the configuration
b) Write a verification test
c) Write the change script
d) Execute the change
e) Execute the test
f) Execute all the previous tests to ensure that not only does the new change work, but it hasn't broken how the other features of the system work.
g) Roll back the change if any tests fail
h) Store documentation of the change and it's results in a change management system (like Git)
So... if you think this is better handled by a human, you're simply doing it wrong and should in fact be fired. Your company REALLY doesn't need you and you certainly should not be called a Senior
"Have you actually used PowerShell to automate GUI operations?"
Every day.
" By the time you've converted the manual point+click script into an automatic script and tested it you could have got a junior/student to perform it manually on 50 machines - and even then, there will always be something that just can't be done without the GUI"
Only if you are a moron. Most of the GUI tools actually run Powershell under the covers...
There is almost nothing these days that can only be done via a GUI - and lots that can only be done via Powershell or outside of the GUI.
@big_D Did you look at using PowerShell to run commands and automate the process?
Yes, but having expended time in the past on learning the two previous attempts at a Windows command interface, and with the client breathing down my neck for instant results, I felt I couldn't afford the time for yet another. Why couldn't they implement a standard scripting language? There are plenty to choose from.
TBH, Windows servers aren't really my area of expertise, and it was supposed to be a development job, not server migration. I suspect I was only there because I have background knowledge of the legacy applications running on the servers.
OK, so I decided I'd better look at PowerShell. The introduction I was reading said you could enter ls for a directory listing. I was quite impressed to find that Unix commands are included. So I entered the directory command I use most.
ls -ltr
Get-ChildItem : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'ltr'.
At line:1 char:4
+ ls -ltr
+ ~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (:) [Get-ChildItem], ParameterBindingException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : NamedParameterNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetChildItemCommand
"Linux was launched with a crap GUI inherited from UNIX"
Err, unix doesn't come with a generic GUI. It comes with X windows which is a networked graphics server. The GUI is just a bunch of libraries sitting on top and you can have a number of different GUIs and/or Window Managers. Unix had all this back in the late 80s when Bill Gates still considered DOS to be advanced. Took MS 20 yeas to play catch up and they still haven't replicated all of the functionality yet.
"Funny, all the copies of unix around here came with a generic GUI."
ITYF there will be more than one installed so the "generic" one you're talking about is whatever WM is kicked off in the xinitrc file. If you had a clue you might realise this.
"Even Linus T doesn't think that unix == the kernel."
It isn't. Its the kernel + filesystem + all the admin & userland tools and sub systems NOT including graphics. The majority of the worlds linux/unix systems spend their lives as headless servers or embedded devices - not desktop PCs. They don't need graphics. Something MS only cottoned on to in the last few years. But then their "servers" have always been a bit Fischer Price compared to unix and mainframe systems to be frank.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
