Tech Club

I think the biggest win for PowerShell is it’s essentially a front end to .NET. That’s incredibly powerful right there. You can directly address .NET objects and types. You can emit and compile C# code on the fly (great for getting direct access to Win32 APIs). There’s many other great things you can do.

For instance, want a GUID on the fly?

Done!

Need to convert a long to an IP address (something I needed to do today):

[ipaddress]::new(16777343)

Done!

It’s well supported and constantly being improved.

Obviously I’m a pretty big fan.

4 Likes

Multipath TCP. On anyone’s radar? I’m just wading into it.

RFC 6824

1 Like

I admit that my perspective on it is very much that of an administrative script-bodger, so most of the elegance is lost on me; but the thoroughness with which the bits of of Windows that need twiddling have been exposed in Powershell for twiddling is highly appreciated.

On a theoretical basis, I can appreciate the virtues of the fact that MS has gone from having pretty much the lousiest scripting environment available to having a shell heavily anchored in its (mostly well received) software development tools; but I’m too much of a lightweight for that to really change how I use it very much. This hardly means that “your shell scripts can seamlessly range from basic batch files up to basically full .NET development” is a bad thing; it’s just not a thing that I’m enough of a developer to make any use of.

The fact that Microsoft is taking a fairly serious stab this time around at making “If you can do it in the GUI, you can script it, period; plus you can script a whole bunch of other stuff.” actually true, by contrast, is something that has saved me considerable weeping and gnashing of teeth. If I sucked less at programming the elegance of the implementation would probably matter more to me; but since I don’t, the big change from my perspective is that MS is actually attempting to make CLI administration feature complete; which has historically not been the case, at all, on Windows.

(TL;DR: I in no way deny praise of Powershell’s elegance/architectural power/etc.; but from the perspective of someone with a limited ability to appreciate those virtues, the big deal is that Powershell coincides with MS moving to make CLI a first class UI and expose a lot more of what traditionally had no CLI mechanisms to work with.)

4 Likes

Last weekend for an emergency job I used AWK for the first time in like 20 years. It is astonishing how much you can forget in 20 years. (I’d also forgotten how limited AWK is. As much as I used to appreciate how lean *nix utilities are when working with 64k of RAM, that probably isn’t necessary any more.)

3 Likes

6 Likes

Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism

UPDATE: dang, scooped by Cory!

1 Like

This does not appear to be the thread I should stumble into drunk. Off to the lounge!

5 Likes
5 Likes

this might be the greatest thing i’ve ever seen.
thank you.

3 Likes

I just posted this in another thread, but I probably should have done it here.

6 Likes

I’m a BSD head. Take that in to consideration when I make this statement.

Fuck you linux. Get your userspace in sync with the kernel. Don’t just pile a bunch of toys on top of it and call it an “operating system”. (Problem being “your” is distributed through a bunch of random enthusiasts.)

8 Likes

I’ve been having my linux woes recently too.

I’ve been running LinuxMint 17 for… A long time now, and suddenly on a restart TeamViewer stops working (yes, I know I should do something better, like SSH or what have you, shaddup). And also most software seems to be unable to install.

As far as I can tell, all my sources have gotten corrupted, along with my GStreamer framework, which means Firefox won’t even run HTML5 video in the browser correctly anymore.

It’s starting to look like I need to backup and reinstall. Which is something that I’m only used to doing under Windows. Typically, if I don’t monkey around with shit too hard, linux doesn’t get broken this way for me. I don’t even know how this could happen all at once.

4 Likes

But at least it’s not Window amirite!

(Happy with Win10, except for these incessant advertising)

2 Likes

Heres a pointless endeaviour I found linked to in the xkcd explanation wiki.

3 Likes

I’m sympathetic to your point, but in this case it actually wasn’t a bunch of random enthusiasts, it was Red Hat - the supposedly standard reliable expensive distro - that broke linux POSIX compliance in their PAM/NSS solution. Ever since they created Fedora they’ve been getting less and less in touch with the server room customers that made their success… it seems the Fedora devs aren’t much different from random enthusiasts in any positive way.

5 Likes

So what are your thoughts on systemd? <ducks/>

1 Like

I can’t give a like for that.

2 Likes

I vary between a resounding meh and feeling a tired exasperation with the people responsible. (Which is kind of how I feel about grub, too.)

I’d rather write a BSD or sysV init script than a systemd simple unit file any day. When done properly a script gives more control with less ugly syntactic sugar.

I wish more distros had rejected it, so there would be more diversity in the linux software ecosystem. But just like grub, systemd appears to be here to stay as the dominant player.

3 Likes

I kind of figured, with your comment about POSIX compliance. My big gripe with systemd is that it just tries to do too much, and is incredibly un-unix like in that respect. It has buy in from Mr. Torvalds though, so all the Linux fankids that think the sun shines out of his ass, and it’s all about comparing Linux to Windows, give it an automatic pass.

2 Likes

Oh, absolutely. I think everyone who pays attention to such things agrees that it’s architecturally unsound in concept, but it’s pretty easy to make the argument that orthodoxy isn’t the best path to innovation.

Very little, really. None of the luke-warm praise Linus has given systemd has come without caveats, generally including explicit disapproval of binary logging and pointed criticism of the behavior of Poettering and Sievers. Apparently that’s enough for Red Hat to keep going full steam ahead, though.

3 Likes