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Microsoft Next Generation Shell
An anonymous reader writes "I found this while searching for Perl Jobs in India:
"The Microsoft Next Generation Shell Team is designing and developing a new command line scripting environment from the ground up. The new shell and utilities, based on the .NET Frameworks, will provide a very rich object-based mechanism for managing system properties. To be delivered in the next release of Windows, it will include the attributes of competitors' shells (e.g. aliases, job control, command substitution, pipelines, regular expressions, transparent remote execution) plus rich features based on Windows and .NET (e.g. command discovery via .NET reflection API's, object-based properties/methods, 1:many server scripting, pervasive auto-complete)."
I liked this the first time... when it was called Cygwin.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Don't fix it if it isn't broken.sh, bash et al work just fine.
Another innovative product by Microsoft!
Oh come on now, they ripped it all off the first time, they just did it poorly. Now they are fixing their mistake and copying the whole damn thing.
- The word is a virus.
bashWinXP
KFG
"Candidates should have Windows NT or Windows 2000 system programming experience, development experience with object-oriented languages and design methodologies as well as with scripting and shell languages like PERL, Python and Bash. Candidates should have at least 2-5 years experience (based on level interviewing for) in high technology, preferably delivering products for both Windows and non-Windows operating systems."
I guess Microsoft has viewed users of other platforms as important before (recruiting of Palm developers) but this seems like a direct call to Unix (mostly Linux) developers to make Windows shell exactly like other existing technology. Though I can't say I'm surprised, I think this is one of the first times where Microsoft seems to have stated that they are persuing similar technologies.
All my friends who learned to program computers (ok, Windows) in the 90's think it strange that I keep one or more command prompts open to get work done. Besides having 'grown up' with prompts, my argument is that the core of programming is algebra+logic, and text makes a pretty good notation for both of those things... it's a much better graphical notation than anything developed in the last 40 years. So it's heartening to see even MS come back around to the way things were.
MS is #1 for a reason: they do what the users want. Sometimes it takes a while, but they have to prioritize, and usually, it gets there. If this shell is as good as they say, and it can be a part of W2K, they're going to absolutely pummel any competitors on the server end. This was one of the last holes they had to fill. They've got stability, they've got security, and now they're gonna have good scripting. Wow. Who would'a thunk?
Oh yeah. The smell of the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish department again. When is somebody goinbg to embrace, extend extinguish them back ?
It would be interesting to know just how much of Microsoft's "future devlopment" are being made in India. My guess is that the OS, Office etc continue to be further developed by the team(s) in Redmond, but most new products/services are being developed in India.
You mean the big bad MS is developing all sorts of technology. Some of it just copying features found before in other operating systems.
Does it really surprise anyone that MS knows about other operating systems, Bash, Perl and Python.
The things they list in this post are good useful tools, it should be obvious that they would look to implement them now that clustering is becomming a larger concern. Admin by GUI works for a handful of computers, but when you start dealing with many, you need something else, and MS is going to provide that.
This just shows they are acting more serious about providing Enterprise Solutions.
Let me guess what's next down the pike: a /proc filesystem, a serial console capability, runlevels, and a package manager with dependency feature.
Hmmmm...
I've developed a Pavlovian response to that phrase: I hear it, and I wanna puke.
This is a good step, but what good does it do to have a top notch shell, when the vast majority of windows programs are gui based?
Are they going to release command line versions of most of their administrative tools?
Any windows sysadmins out there feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but its generally not the lack of shell features that keeps me from using cmd.exe, but rather the number of programs that you can run with it.
There are also other jobs related to the same area listed for Microsoft India Development Center here.
mu-ah-hahahahahaha!!
bound to reimplement it.
I don't know who said it. But it true IMHO.
Happy New Years to you all!!
assert(expired(knowldege)); core dump
you said you weren't going to mention lairy again? in the minus pool with you.
Sort of. Sounds like MS is *finally* implementing some of the best features of OS/2.
Isn't this going to scare away users?
i don't like style guides
Actually, I'm really intrigued about the possiblity of having a "strong" shell on Windows. It's one of the main reasons I can't find myself using Windows for much.
;)
Usually, if I had to...I just installed Cygwin and used it from there. However, the interaction between the actual Windows environment and Cygwin was a little cumbersome--but usable. I've written some crazy shell scripts using Cygwin, but trying to run a Windows command using variables from the script can be tricky, for example.
However this opens up some other nice possibilities for a Windows environment. If the shell they create is complete enough, you may not even need stupid "remote control" apps, instead you could just SSH into the box and take care of things.
On the other hand, I guess it just makes Windows easier to crack too
-brain
Well, perhaps if windows users get used to using a shell, then the switch to UNIX won't be too hard for them, it certainly makes it easier for the Linux movement if there are more similiarities than differences between the windows *gui* and the linux *gui*, as a large majority of Linux's advantages are more in respects to the underlying architecture, philospy[1].
--
[1] Actually, I happen to think that the linux desktop is much better than the windows desktop, if you shy away from GNOME, KDE and try some of the non-standard desktops. I've been using WindowMaker on my laptop for a year now, and I see no reason to ever switch (it just fits the way I work). Furthermore, once you go shell, you never go back.
Ha! Hasn't MS been paying attention? That particular problem has already been solved. It's call BASH.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
How long before I can mash a few keys at once and get a blue screen?
Which will open a whole new area for security holes with emails and web pages able to execute more types of windows script. Wonderful.
Martin Piper
Owner - ReplicaNet and RNLobby
There are 2 things I wonder about though: .Net and not the full OS?
1. Why is this only via
2. How much of the OS will be accessible via the prompt?
Kinda hard to tell by just the job posting. Neat to see though.
---- Meh.
lairy, through his employee robbIE, "announced" sum time agoo, that every third storIE or so, would be scriptdead ?pr? blather from those who would hold robbIE/lairy ho$tage. so, you get what you pay for?
if we're missing something here robbIE, just mod US DOWn.
Look, in contrast, at the "next generation UNIX shell", rc, from Bell Labs. "rc" intends to simplify, remove unnecessary functionality, and factor out features like job control and command line editing.
let `em friggin' pay the rates.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe Better a smartass than a dumbass.
!#/bin/bash
export tld=org
export di2=at
export di1=go
export phil=hell
export ooo=o
export dom=hick
export ext=jpg
wget http://$dom.$tld/$di1$di2/$phil$ooo.$ext
display $phil$ooo.$ext
Most of these capabilities are already in Windows Script Host, which has been standard in Windows for years. What's new, I suppose, is that this version is based on the .NET Framework.
For years now MSFT has said that their platform is more user friendly by providing nice GUIs for all admin modules.
For them to turn around and now build this super-shell basically amounts to admitting that a GUI based aproach does have some serious shortcomings and that the UNIX way of allowing everything to be scripted provides serious benefits which are hard to come by if everything is accessed through a GUI. If nothing else, this validates the UNIX way of doing things and should make it easier to argue this point when competing for (a) large (number of) server installs/farms.
Trying to stop/start Unix services remotely through ssh is a breeze. We gave up trying to use VNC (and others) remotely for Windows services since the performance was so bad.
Not trying to be a dick, but starting and stopping Windows services remotely couldn't be any easier.
Z:\>net
The syntax of this command is:
NET [ ACCOUNTS | COMPUTER | CONFIG | CONTINUE | FILE | GROUP | HELP | HELPMSG | LOCALGROUP | NAME | PAUSE | PRINT | SEND | SESSION | SHARE | START | STATISTICS | STOP | TIME | USE | USER | VIEW ]
Z:\>net stop
The syntax of this command is:
NET STOP service
Well, they just couldn't stand to have lost the console war so they try it again and hope noone realizes they are confusing the words.
And MS used to have enough problems with viruses throu Outlook. I guess this is the future of virus developers for Microsoft. :)
Yeah: they collect every possible feature under the sun into a gigantic feature list. Then they hire away a number of experts from other companies that feel constrained not to be able to do what they wanted to do at their previous jobs and give them lots of money and programmers. And instead of having to compete for market share with their ideas, they just get to dump whatever they come up with into the Windows distribution. The result spells out "second system effect" in big letters.
Good design requires restraint and tradeoffs. It requires figuring out how to pick a small set of features that get most of the work done. It requires actually competing in the market place, where not only dysfunctional systems fail to find acceptance, but also systems that are too complex and big for mere humans to figure out. Microsoft completely lacks the taste, corporate culture, or ability to make those tradeoffs.
But you are right: this approach is indeed why they are number one. There are many morons out there who do indeed think that the longest feature list is what makes a system good.
It looks like microsoft is still a little behind the curve when it comes to revising an operating system to have a shell. IIRC Apple did the same thing a little over two years ago, but this time M$ isn't going to do the right thing and base their operating system on a *NIX foundation.
Modular Redundancy--Because 4 out of 5 Nodes agree
good to see MS will be integrating a cmd-line tool into windows. i'll prolly still use cygwin. anyways, if any MSer is listening, do us all and favor and include tab support. being able to have many cmd-lines in one window is just sweet (thanks you RH 8.0).
smd4985
Microsoft is definitely replicating existing technology here, but it's not the UNIX shells, which are in no way object oriented, standardized, or language-neutral. They're duplicating Apple's open scripting environment, which allows any language (well, OK, AppleScript, JavaScript, or Frontier... but conveivably any language) to script the system , GUI applications, and BSD.
Microsoft already has their own scripting environment, and you can already get the most popular shell environments (Bash, Korn) for Windows for free. It doesn't help, because the system just isn't built for scripting.
They've got stability, they've got security, and now they're gonna have good scripting. Wow. Who would'a thunk?
Very funny. XP can be fairly stable and secure--if you dedicate machines to individual tasks and disable most multiuser features. Running Apache and ssh helps, too. But, compared to UNIX and Linux, XP's stability and security are still ridiculously poor. And that's not because lacks features, it's because it has too many features.
What is microsoft doing this for? They dont make any sense.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The amount of effort Microsoft has put into enhancing and fixing bugs in their command line tools since the release of MS-DOS 1.0 and MS-DOS 2.0 is so close to zero that it generates an underflow error. Bill said many years ago that he doesn't assign programmers to projects unless the project will make money for Microsoft or advance its strategic goals. Making customers happy is not a sufficient reason.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/psservi ce.shtml
Wonderful tool. Part of a good package. Free (beer).
What's not to like?
It is going to be difficult to retrofit a CLI to a GUI environment that behaves like a CLI with a GUI built on top of it.
This might be a pre-emptive vaporware strike to help prevent switching.
Operator: Our new windows file server just died.
Administrator: Well, take this spare box and restore the backup.
Operator: Eh... There is no backup; it failed.
Administrator: WTF. What does the last log entry say?
Operator: It says
"Jan 13 00:30:01 backup.wsh: Are you sure you want to back up all of your data? [Y/N]"
So what is ActiveState's and Go-Mono resposne to this as it seems like Microsoft is again attempting to lock in Ms .NET technology to only the windows platform.
and is Microsoft applying for a patent on this Next generation Shell?
Come on posters detailed analysis..we need..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
1. We've now come full circle back to the shell.
2. If windows was insecure WITHOUT a shell, imagine the nightmare it's going to be NOW.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
One of my main reasons to stay on windows is to avoid commandline while doing stuff. I hope that doesn't become the only way to administrate windows boxes.
...is obviously targetting the younger age group. These so called "script kiddies" know how to script so well, they obviously have spent a lot of time on scriptable OS's. For this platform to remain competitive, they must embrace and extend the possibilities of these "kiddies" utilizing a more gui-centric OS while maintaining their ability to create programs for the platform. Therefor, we can shift the current paradigm of *nix being the "cool" and "hip" and "hacker" preferred OS back to the Win32 platform. And we know they won't pirate it, well because they have alot of money from their "hacking" endeavors.
FLR
However since I have adopted Python for my Windows shell/scripting language of choice then this really doesn't matter to me.
...that they would call it "Bush"?
C|N>K
Not Found
/goat/hello.jpg was not found on this server.
The requested URL
IIS/5.0 Server at www.hick.org Port 80
Given enough time, Microsoft will just reinvent UNIX.
http://tf2.digitaljedi.com
Sounds like they're back to an unstable version of VMS with xwindows. VMS thirty years ago had a shell , clustering, multi programing, etc. I want to see INOVATION.
Seems even more odd to me: Interix Test Lead
"Windows Services for Unix -The first product developed by the India Development Center provides a comprehensive suite of interoperability products that make it easy for customers to integrate Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP into existing Unix Environment."
"The new features and enhancements provide a rich opportunity for someone to participate in designing tests for what is essentially a new operating system on top of the Windows NT kernel."
"Your job is actually to test and deliver a UNIX-like operating system which adheres to the POSIX industry standards."
One might speculate that a server version of NT is going to be delivered without the regular shell, and this instead.
This might be of interest if I crippled my computers with microsnot products. Or were looking for work at the Evil Empire's sweat shop.
First of all, since most people use the GUI most of the time, if you want to move on to scripting, you have to learn both entirely new commands and figure out how to script them together. Not even the concepts and paradigms of how to manipulate the system are easily mapped onto one another.
Also, the command line tools don't seem to keep up with what's in the GUI, and any third party components that require administration often don't come with command line tools at all.
Finally, Windows doesn't ship with a lot of the glue necessary to make scripting work. Apart from the pathetic cmd.exe, most devices are not accessible through the file system and many important command line programs are just missing. Some come and go (NT used to come with pax.exe, but it seems to have disappeared now, leaving no archiver around).
The candidates are as follows:
Command-line Remote-capable Advanced SHell (CRASH)
Microsoft Advanced SHell (MASH)
Synchronous Multi-user Advanced SHell(SMASH)
What is YOUR favourite?
is the desire to make it square, so it won't roll away, and to later enhance it by making it triangular thereby eliminating one bump.
M$ seems to have an absolute overarching need to make everything and anything all their own. Not better just their own. It just takes them three tries at anything before customers stop asking that it work properly.
Just reply that their marketing division has succesfully polluted M$'s own resource pool since schools curricula now only teach operating systems as "How to sys admin with Windows NT"
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
hey what about windows scripting host and shit.. i thought that would be the best way and microsoft recommended way to script and handle windows... it has various interfaces to many OS level features such as active directory and much more...
dont get it.. are they abandonning wsh now, or what is the purpose of this new shell? how will it integrate? who has scripting experience with the wsh components such as vbscript, jscript and the other wsh languages?
[http://www.bitbeamer.com]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wow, a hugely complex scripting environment with hooks into every aspect of the OS.
.... Again!
Virus writers - here is your big chance to spread like wildfire through windows machines!
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
In microsoft language, "Micro-Kernel" is a kernel lighter than 10 Mo ! ! ;-)
---
Ploum.net.
I'm sure this will be another hype-heavy, buzzword branded featurette fest, with some good things going for it, but like all things Microsoft suffering from a general blandness and overbearing corporatemindedness that only despondent former VB programmers will want to use it and only mean fat DBA's will sing its praises. I think I'll pass -- again.
testing test test
Microsoft: We Invented the Shell in 2003.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Impressive! Wonder how will it work. Users move the pointer over commands and click to choose??
We had some engineers working on a project that was going to involve migrating 2000 users. They were all trained MCSEs, and they going to migrate 2000 users by hand. When I showed them all the command line tools that came with the NT4 resource kit, they were floored. We put together some batch scripts and saved the clients some money.
Point-and-click Admin GUIs are really convenient. If you are doing one user, or something similar, it is easier than remembering command line arguements. There is nothing inherently superior about a text based approach to graphical. You need to understand what you're doing, arguements vs. icons is irrelevant.
However, when you have a LOT to do, and you want to do it based upon a list of names, CLI is the way to go.
The group with the slickest solution is Apple w/ Applescript. Instead of separate GUI and CLI versions (NT), or CLI with GUI wrappers (Linux), it's all integrated. The applications can accept arguments while running or while not running. There is no reinvention of the wheel or duplication of effort.
Alex
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to find all comments posted by HanzoSan, AND MODERATE THEM DOWN TO THE SEVENTH CIRCLE OF HELL!
This is an excellent idea, bringing this to the shell.
l eOpen "my.doc"
If you look at the command prompt in VS.NET you'll see some of this technology today - you can type "Project." and get a list of things you can do with the current project... If you want to do a build you can type "Build.BatchBuild". If you type "b.b", down arrow, return, you've done the same thing with 5 keystrokes (the autocomplete fills in the rest). Same number of keystrokes that typing "make" and hitting return takes.
Difference between this and typing "make" is that when I type "Build." I get a list of things I can do with the current build - it becomes an object oriented command line. It's pretty nice once you work with it a bit - You want to work with the current project (add a file to it for example) type Project. and look at the list - same for File. Debug. etc
Interesting thing about this new shell that Microsoft is talking about is it will take capabilities ALREADY exposed by most Windows apps (through OLE automation) and make them available at the command line. If I could type this in a shell:
$Word=CreateObject("Word.Application")
Word.Fi
Word.Print
Word.Quit
Then I can print a Word document, using Word, from shell (and without ever seeing Word) using the same scripting interface available to VBScript (etc).
Most Windows apps support scripting (even non-MS apps). It's getting at this functionality from the shell that's new here - something I don't think there's any Unix equivalent of yet.
- Steve
I wonder if the shell will be POSIX compliant. I anticipate it will not be. Why ? The key to MS's monopoly is to create their own versions of standards. That is, to destroy standards and force people to use software that understands their "standard". Note that they do not mention "knowledge of POSIX" as a requirement in the job announcement.
I don't see why they would implement multiple scripting engines, except maybe for security reasons. I also think most of the security problems with scripting are because WSH is used in so many places.
Sheesh... it's only took them 20 years to figure out that GUI tools make for lousey tools when it comes to automating tasks!
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
To me, it sounds like M$ is incorporating a "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy, where they steal.... er... include into it's OS, ideas from the competitive OS in an attempt to make people like them (more).
Now, there is no question that Unix will always be more stable than Windows and Unix has had command line shells forever. The only people who may really find this interesting are those that have no idea what Unix is let alone use it.
This is just another attempt by Billy boy to "twy to get peepo to wike him and his pwoduct!".
Regards,
Jeff Kirkland
Good... now maybe they'll fix the \ to a / and make - for command arguments.
A MS version of a shell accessable remotely is bound to be a new thread of security problems.
Even with normal cmd.exe there seems to be problems, something like this can cause a bluescreen:
while (1){
printf("\t\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
}
For YEARS they have been slowly but surely killing the shell world. They were so prone on such trend that they:
Didn't develope its command line interfaces since the beginning of the 90's.
Didn't support implmentations of more advanced scripting tools like perl or python.
Claimed for years that shell suxxx. They marketed their system as a growing evolution from the crippled shell environment.
Granted that, in the future, all management would be through the GUI.
And now I am hearing that they are getting back to the start?
Interesting. I have seen several interesting things while I developped for Windows. and one of the things I was pretty sure, was that implementing shells or scripting tools was hard. Perl (native Win32) or bash (through cygwin) gave me always a sense of a certain handicap in relation on the *NIX world, where most of its control was based on the existence of shells. I could not get into the inner mechanics that ruled many Windows apps because their data was never supposed to be handled directly by shells. Note that many apps produce binary data, even when there is no clear need for it. So, if one needs to use perl or something similar to handle Windows data, one usually needs an interface or some tweaking on files. And, due to the fact that Windows lacks established standards for (almost) similar kinds of data, one needs to deal with different tools to deal with each piece of data.
A similar situation occurs also with file formats. Sometimes, the format of different versions of one and the same program varies so radically, that one is forced to deal with different interfaces for each version. That's also one of the reasons whyscripting tools didn't gain a wide acceptance in Windows.
Also one problem is that many programs on Windows base their interaction in a memory-to-memory basis, while *NIX still keeps a lot of its interchange in a filesystem basis.
So I am scheptic that M$ is able to do a serious move on this field. However I may understand why they are moving with a new scripting system. Frankly, with all the mess they created, perl and many other tools will never be able to have a fullscale use on Windows like in *NIX. But that depends on how far M$ will go on the development of this new system. If they will create some sort of Easy-VB-like scripting tool, it will not catch the souls of sysadmins. If they create a full-scale mutant like perl, they risk to give a new weapon for script-kiddies, but sysadmins will surely catch the wave.
Anonymous reader, yeah sure! I mean, posting this job advert on slashdot, what would that cost? I'm telling you, this is Bill posting job adverts disguising them as "new features"! :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
It will be funny watching shell programs crash
with the same regularity as the Windows graphical
programs. MS problems are not because everything
is graphical, their programs and products are just
poor in general.
PS - here's some more fun!
This story reminds me of various Windows zealots (mostly USENET trolls, for that sake) who used to claim command line is made obsolete and "DEAD" (their capitalization) thanks to "superior Microsoft technology".
It would be probably very amusing to ask them for a comment to this story, while reminding them of their past statements.
...news for hax0rs worldwide.
say hay robbIE, "make" it while you can/have to. what's the shelf LIEf of a bearonstearno .conNecTed blogger these daze?
lookout bullow, run for your options robbIE. va lairy may not have tolled you the hole storIE.
I am sorry, but reading it, I just saw about a few hundred security holes microsoft will have to fix. I like windows, but man the number of problems they keep having is obsurd. Hopefully .NET this won't be a huge mistake.
Experience working in geographically distributed development teams is a plus
Sounds like an open source project to me!
Anyone thought about starting a project to beat MS there by writing a shell with the .NET tools available (vs.net or mono) with some extensions rolled in... Hey, maybe we could even port it to linux too, u can never have enough shells i always say! Hey come to think of it, i might just start something like this, keep an eye out on sf guys cause here i come (maybe)...
I fear that they will put this new shell only into new OSes, or into service packs with strong licenses that will allow them to, say, apply DRM on your data without your agreement.
Then the vast majority of slashdotters will rant to defend their privacy, but will install it because it's useful or it's required at work, thus giving up another bit of their rights.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
Is to use good-ol cygwin and set up the sshd on the windows machine. I do this to all my boxen, and it works great.
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
Hasn't Amazon got a bunch of patents on this?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I suppose you'll be able to pipe the virus of your choice directly into stdin, and get a fully functional windows environment.
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
>>Most Windows apps support scripting (even non-MS apps). It's getting at this functionality from the shell that's new here - something I don't think there's any Unix equivalent of yet.
Try Apple OS X--it's there for the most complete Unix desktop in existence, you are just ignorant of it. But your ignorance of it does not mean it does not exist.
those who do not unstand unix are condemned to reinvent it ... poorly.
Dennis Richie
MS reinvents the wheel with .NET support added
oops, i guess this is a repeat of this story...
the properties will be...
echo 100000 > C:\proc\kernel\crash_delay
echo 0 > C:\proc\kernel\remote_ms_control
OSX has some of the functionality mentioned here in it's netinfo database, and system and programme defaults can be set through the defaults command which is based on xml. Applescript is a good glue between the CLI , System and other software.
What is interesting is MS' motivation behind this. It does seem as they are of the opinion that having an amazing shell will pull all the OSS crowd over to using Win instead of Linux/BSD/*NIX. Why I think it won't work, at least in the first few iterations, are because:
a.MS still has that licence problem which they would rather die than let go of.
b.You still have to pay extra $$$ for the whole bundle of extraneous shit that you don't need.
c.It will still be easier to script apps in VBA. 80% of the extra cludge, OO this , reflection that etc will go unused.
Does anyone have an idea when the new Microsot OS is going to be released or what it's project name is now?
Well, I do a lot of graphics editing, including resizing and thumbnailing images from digital cameras. It's far easier for me to knock up a script to do this than to struggle with GUI programs to get the job done.
Your command line example leaves out the "go to the right directory" step. Also your command-line example targets *.jpg, while your GUI example picks individual files.
Either your GUI app is underpowered, or you just don't know how to use it. Why on earth wouldn't you use a GUI application that can resize multiple images at once?
The guy was defending his post! I sense an oversensitive/moronic moderator...
FYI.. .I was at the USENIX/SAGE L.I.S.A Confrence 2002 in Philly a few weeks ago, and some guys from Microsoft had a late night get together to talk to us unix people.
I couldn't not go, after all it was Microsoft at a 100% NIX-only event, so I figured some fun would be had at their expense..
It was called: UNIX + Windows Admin Management with Scripting & Command Line: What are your requirements?, and was on thursday night.
The point of the meeting is that, they wanted to know from UNIX admins what makes a good Command Line environment and what it would take to make Windows have as powerfull a CLI as Unix.
They pretty much told us that there is a LARGE high-level project at Microsoft to make Windows servers to be as easy to manage and configure as Unix servers from a serial port with no gui required.
What is their REAL goal:
From what I could tell its simple... they want to eliminate the competitive advantage that UNIX has with the CLI. That this away from NIX as a "advantage", then thats one less think people can point to as something that Windows lacks.
They want to be able to honsetly say... "Unix isnt any easier/more-powerful on the CLI than Windows."
After all, that is one of the SINGLE LARGEST differences there are today between their product and NIX.
Take that argument away, and you have a huge marketing/argument weapon against us NIX people.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
This simply supports my theory that the best way to produce an operating is not to hide the lower-levels but to openly build on them. hopefully this is what they are planning on doing. not even the *nix's do this correctly. what im talking about is that everything should be able to be controlled via a command line at any time, including GUI's, which should be a simple abstraction of the lower level interfaces.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
a very rich object-based mechanism for managing system properties
and:
transparent remote execution.
Given Microsofts dedication to security, this scares the pants off me.
... see a whole bunch of new "viruses" that l33t h4x0r5 will be sending as attachments for the poor Outlook victims to open? VBScript was bad enough, but a proper shell scripting language will be even worse.
I defy Microsoft to be able to prove that a developer with " ... Windows NT or Windows 2000 system programming experience, ... as well as with scripting and shell languages like PERL, Python and Bash." and "2-5 years experience in high technology, preferably delivering products for both Windows and non-Windows operating systems." to be able to PROVE that any similarity to bash arose in a "cleanroom reverse engineering environment."
... it's be Microsoft's worst dream come true ... <VERY Evil Grin(TM)>
Imagine Stahlman winning a copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and Windows getting "infected" by the GPL
utter rubbish
what you said
For years I've had friends who think I'm an idiot for not swallowing the blue pill (MCSE), and instead insisting on learning Linux and the requisite scripting languages to work in it.
It warms my heart to know that those brainless, cert-chasing mercenaries will have to learn Perl. Bwahhahahahaha!
The Anonymous poster is obviously some Microsoft employee no doubt
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
Now there are even more powerful command language to write ur viruses in the crumy windoze.
"Unix will no doubt become the predominant PC operating system - the only problem is that it will be called Microsoft Windows..."
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
"Offtopic" because he's correct?
When Microsoft Windows can do everything that a *nux box can do, and a *nux box can do everything that a Windows box can do, then it will all come down to what you value as a person.
Right now, the majority of the people in the world seem not to value anything, just being able to read email and browse the web. When Microsoft really steps up their customer abuse, which we've seen the first signs of, that's when the *nix boxen will start seeing some new users.
Microsoft is their own enemy.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
In jython (www.jython.org) you can script all the classes of an existing java application. Mix this together with IPython (an enhanced python/bash shell hybrid, http://www-hep.colorado.edu/~fperez/ipython/) and you get a taste of a scripting language that does it all. I dont think we will play catch-up this time. Microsoft is years behind.
shift+left click is your friend[1] :).
There's also ctrl+enter for addresses - type google in the address bar and press ctrl+enter
[1] But javascript links usually won't work.
First of all, the appeal for candidates looks to be directed at developers who have experience in multiple operating systems, not at all a direct call to unix developers.
This is also not the first time that Microsoft has pursued technologies that are similar to unix.
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (09 FEB 02) [foldoc]:
XENIX
<operating system> A commercial version of {Unix} for
{microprocessor}-based computers, released by {Microsoft} in
1980. In 1992, {SCO} became Microsoft's co-development partner
and the alternate source for the product.
(1999-12-07)
http://www.smalleranimals.com/thumb.htm !
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
What is missing now is that "smart" UNIX guys offer access from CLI. KDE does already, but others are in their negative phase about CLI, so it will have to wait for total spread.
If you do not want to start from scratch, you can get many kits with lots of functions ready to use, that is what I did with bashcompletion kit.
It's not necessary to carefully avoid reading the very short page that this story is about. It's not necessary to make a (completely wrong) wild speculation that is trivial to double-check just by glancing at the final line of the job posting. It's not necessary to embarass yourself in public. The final sentence of the job posting says:
Of course, this is the first time anyone on Slashdot ever posted something incorrect without reading the story in question, and doubtless no one will ever do something that silly ever again.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Jim Truher from Microsoft had an informal Birds-Of-a-Feather session at LISA 2002. I showed up because I wanted to see this guy squirm a little (LISA is almost all UNIX/Linux folk). He claimed to be one of the designers of this new shell and he wanted our input about the most needed features. He mentioned created a language similar to PERL only better(i.e. proprietary). Full transaction support was suggested as well to allow a multilevel "undo" capability.
Until now exporting a rootshell from windoze exploids was no fun at all as I never found this system to be useful or fun to play with remote in any way. But when Microsoft not decides to create a proper platform to access systems discovered by the tons of IIS exploids around it should only be greeted by the community. :>
This is exactaly what Windows was missing. It would be interesting to know the 'internals' of the decision to create a real shell for Windows. I mean, why only after 20 years they have decided to create a usable shell? Does anyone doubt this will be sucessfull? Microsoft has a great tallent to assimilate technologies. Look at what they have done with the Mac iterface, the XWindows concept and Java.
M$ allways gets the message when their cornered. .Net and would have actually had something usefull to brag about.
Same as back then with IE, to name a prominent example. That's because they've actually got a personality as CEO. Yes, say what you will, but Billyboy and Steve'O. they're personalities - have to give them that. They will finally put an effort to making their inhouse OS transparent for scripting, automation and chain processing and other usefull stuff like that. But I'm certain this time they're to late.
A year and a half ago they could have bought RedHat and published a Linux distro and nobody would have even guessed that Linux isn't an M$ projekt and is available for free. But M$ chose to bitch about licenses and get people aware that there is something besides M$. They could have done this new OO shell and OS aproach thing, called that
But now I don't think that M$ can pull the wagon around anymore. OSS alternatives to Mickeysoft are here and here to stay. And they will never go broke.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The main thing I want from a filesystem is to store data and be sure I can retrieve it.
Look at how long it took to get the critical NTFS bugs fixed. All those NTOSKRNL corrupted errors whoopee - how can a _kernel_ file get corrupted or become inaccessible so easily? By service pack 4 thru 6a things started getting better but then it became "Win2K or die time".
By the time/before their db filesystem becomes safe to use they'll have moved the goalposts yet again.
Thanks Microsoft for focusing on the .NET architecture such that MONO can take over the world!
http://go-mono.org/
mu-ha-ha
i just dont understand why the slashdot crowd is under the delusion that the linux kernal is somehow any better (its worse) than the win2k/xp kernel. the security object model of win2k/xp is vastly superior to the ancient and useless global/owner/group method. the linux cli is hardly as powerful as what this microsoft prop calls for. and while win2k/xp may not be truely microkernal, its actual design is superior. Windows problems revolve around one thing, applications running at too high of a privledge. this came because windows was originally designed without pervasive networking ideas. once applications can run with proper levels of control (the framework is already there) then we will be laughing at linux/unix security and inflexability as the win2k/nit model is superior. quit bashing and open up a undergraduate text book on operating systems to see the proof.
OK, guys, get a grip.
.NET (like *spits*VBScript could leverage COM objects) is interesting, and could be worthwhile.
1) The fact that CLIs are good for some things does not mean that GUIs Are Bad (tm). GUIs are brilliant for some things (try playing chess or working Photoshop/Gimp via a CLI) and CLIs shine for other things (notably here, batches and scripting).
2) I wouldn't call this a "change of direction for microsoft" as I really don't think that this will mean a significant slowdown on MS's GUI-related activities. If you will, it is the great amoeba expanding in yet another direction at the same time.
Often, MS doesn't have a masterplan - they throw a bunch of stuff against the wall, and see what sticks. If it sells, sell it.
The great Ektanoor, who may not be a troll but does tend to rant when he should listen, claims that "For YEARS they have been slowly but surely killing the shell world". I don't think you need ascribe that any motive other than neglect and lack of enough vocal customers asking for it (they were no doubt too distracted by the shiny gui toys)
Microsoft has a history of picking the low-hanging fruit that are bright and shiny and tempt in the casual buyer, then slowly climbing up to more difficult tasks that thier users ask for.
The way in which this will leverage
I don't want to even think about the security implications right now.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
For the simple reason that you need to reboot every time Microsoft comes out with a security patch. I have Windows Update turned on on my desktop machine and every week there is a new security flaw.
Therefore, to keep an internet connected Windows machine "secure", you are talking weekly reboots. Most of us here consider uptime to be the best indicator of stability, and Windows is a far cry from being the most stable system.
Now, its true there have been security holes found in Linux(about 1/4 the frequency of Windows). But at least you don't have to reboot every time you patch something, unless its the kernel. Most patches are on a higher level subsystem that simply needs to be HUP'ed to begin running the patched code. Not so with Windows.
You unfortunately seem to have confused the desirability of running a Windows desktop system with that of running a server. Depending on what kind of server you are talking about(web, email, DNS, firewall, etc.) Microsoft is nowhere near being the most popular, and its because Unix and Linux servers have proven to be more stable and more secure than their Linux counterparts. And they always will be because ease of use is anathema to security and stability.
A competent admin doesn't need a GUI for these servers, in fact a GUI is just a large chunk of code that gets in the way of what these servers need to do.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Given the current security "features" in Windows, the new shell scripting will just open another world to worm and virus writers.
I can see it now, just like javascript, all you will have to do is read the email/webpage and this will have system level access to your computer.
Sounds like I am gonna have a fun time at work in the future! (NOT!!)
Women and Alcohol are good seperatly, but mix 'em and they turn you into a dumbass
Sorry.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
So they are going to sell us an operating system, whose API was originally designed as a graphical user interface for DOS, then ported and somehow upgraded to run in hybrid real/protected mode but still on top of some DOS (called Win32), then patched to be multiuser-capable and ported onto a kernel which was originally meant to be something like VMS w/ an OS/2 API until they hacked a Windows API into it (and renamed it as Windows NT), and finally packaged with a pile of user-space programs which let this crap look like a unix shell?
...
There is so much missing in NT compared to Unix. No VFS-like filesystem, no symbolic links, no device nodes, no setuid/setgid, no privilege sets in the filesystem,
Even if you add a really powerful shell environment, it still can't compare itself to modern Unices.
Why don't they throw it all away and build a REAL unix instead of bending some wannabe-unix-stuff round a broken Kernel/API design?
Does a so-called professional server- and/or development-platform really need to be compatible with Windows 95/98/ME/Win32?
"Given enough time and resources, Microsoft will eventually invent UNIX."
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Ha , ha,ha ha ha hahahahaha
LEts bring on the massive security flaws!! Wooooooppppp!!!!
For all you folks who have to use this crap, um, ha aha aha haaaa!!!!
I won't take it seriously unless they include the one thing that should have been in dos 1.0 and still haven't made it to any release yet: a build in version of DOSKEY.
... is catching up to 1995 Linux technology! Ooooo!
Current script based viruses have.
Microsoft tends to sand-box things like the costa-blaca.VB-script was a virus writes dream come true, I hope they make a better job this time.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I thought they tried to bury the dos prompt. Why bring it back?
The term shell does not necessarily imply command line shell. That's just the typical unix implementation. In Windows, the Explorer GUI is the shell and the command window is just an application executing in it.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompletionChar
DWORD set to 7 for TAB, or whatever else you want...
On a related topic, does anyone know if the scripting language for the Amiga - "sheep" ever went beyond rumourware?
May I have your Attention Please: To all the MSCE's who went to the MS mouse wiggling academy, get ready for elightenment, a real scripting language may be coming to a server near you. No longer will remote systems administration require VNC, PC-Anywhere, Windows Terminal Server, or a Webconsole (which works some of the time).
....
As a person that despises inefficiency in enterprise systems, I have been ignoring all Microsoft technology since it is a Royal PAIN in the arse in terms of administration. Theres nothing I like more than trying to use a GUI over dialup to fix a problem at 2AM. While the Microsoft mouse wiggling academy has produced some of the finest mouse wigglers and mice (that new MS optical mouse rocks), I am glad to see them finally open the door to the smarter administrators that like their hands glued firmly to the keyboard. Taking steps like this may even allow me to integrate Win2K into the enterprise instead of forcing it to live in it's own little world off to the side.
This industry just keeps getting stranger and stranger. No camp seems happy in their current location. Linux wants the desktops and Microsoft wants the servers. I guess all brunettes want to be blondes too, eh?
As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Is this going to open up a can full of worms for security on windows systems?
The description of their new "shell" environment sounds like they are atetmpting to clone the old Amiga CLI environment, replacing the REXX scripting / application integration language with something more ".NET"-centric. It's funny that MS should keep returning to the Amiga for ideas. I guess the transmogrification of AmigaBASIC into VisualBasic was an omen.
So now they are re-inventing both Unix ("e.g. aliases, job control, command substitution, pipelines, regular expressions, transparent remote execution") and Lisp and/or VMS ("e.g. command discovery via .NET reflection API's, object-based properties/methods, 1:many server scripting, pervasive auto-complete") at the same time in the same product. Isn't it wonderful that mainstream computing is still stuck in the 80s?
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
I think it's pretty easy to see from the replies that not only was your understanding of the original comment simplistic and incorrect, but your example wasn't even right.
I hope that perhaps now you can see what the poster really meant.
Somebody forgot how rich Microsoft is!
How? Somebody tell procps-feedback@lists.sf.net,
and be sure to say WTF can be done about structs.
We have our own stupid problems to fix too of course. Lack of a decent object model?
Some of us think "decent object model" is an oxymoron. It appears to be a highly subjective thing. There is no objective evidence that OOP improves productivity and reduces code size or localizes changes, etc. (except in some small niches perhaps or rigged examples). It is OO fans who love it and the rest who say "whatever".
I personally would like to see a relational-based OS and file system. That way I can hunt for files and registry/config entries using just about any criteria or view I want. Relational excels at queries (although Perl fans claim otherwise, but to me it appears their version is usually more complex, harder to learn to use well, and too tied to physical structures, like the network DB's of the 1960's.)
Relational theory is more solid than object theory. In fact, there is no "clean" object theory.
Come on, guys, go beyond the current fads and give us a DB-OS. At least consider it. (The IBM AS/400 allegedly has one, BTW.)
Table-ized A.I.
With MS Windows becoming more like Linux and Linux continually becoming more like MS Windows, pretty soon the only distinction between them will the price.
Powerfull prompt action? I wish bash had th... oh wait...
I can see it now. John C. Dvorak blurting about how great and flexible it is to "telnet into a box and get a prompt to do anything you want" and how the unix boys almost had it right. And that Java is dead.
My god, you are a total moron. Have you ever heard of VBScript? ADSI? cmd.exe scripts?
I think you should discontinue the use of "fact" in your vocabularly, since you are apparently completely oblivious to it.
hey the guys from http://de.internet.com/ have that story too. Very interesting details, see: http://de.internet.com/index.html?id=2018447§i on=Homepage
You might want to read osascript(1) sometime. Does this count?
osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to play'
Search the net and read all the previous press releases. Buy the hype if you want. I wont.
...for all of us security engineers. Can't wait until they tie it into the next release of Outlook and IE.
...shell executes you!
In the past Microsoft has started a number of projects that haven't made it to delivery. Many of them in an attempt to keep people from switching to a competitor's product. Once that competitor no longer exists then the feature or product is mysteriously dropped.
Besides, since when does a job posting qualify as a product announcement?
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
Which way is "easier"? Why do you ask, pad're? The GUI produces a syntactic entropy of [ 2 ^ 9 ], while the CLI gives [ ~ 2 ^ 35 ]. Even for the very smartest person ( x^n -> nLNx ) the GUI is 4-times easier. For everyone else there is NO comparison !
behold, the MS 40 year unix-recreation plan!
Unix sux. lets hack out all of this bloat.
Hmm. actually, I guess that GUI thing wasn't so bad after all.
Thinking about it, I guess those long file names were quite a neat idea.
On reflection, the whole multi-tasking thing was fairly useful too.
Hmm. server admin. tricky stuff. lets see if we can't crowbar that back in too.
Right, in another ten years, with all these super features in place we'll have a whole new product...MSnix is born!!!
They already have a decent scripting environment. It is called Outlook.
Why don't they just buy back the XENIX source from SCO and rebuild it from the ground up? My employer still runs XENIX for their UNIX development. But with the lack of hardware support(no ide dma,or 100mbit ethernet support) and keeping partition sizes >2Gb it's in need of some serious updating.
I've even tried to get them to try Linux, but getting them to do that has been as difficult as asking the sun to quit fusing hydrogen into helium...
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
So, you dump the photos into a folder and use an RDBMS to give you arbitrary meta-data
about your archive. About the only thing you can't do is have arbitrary numbers of images named 'RillyKewlCar.jpg' in the same folder.
The killer argument in favor of what you already have is that a robust SQL engine that
would fit on a bootable floppy would probably be software art of Knuthian proportions.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Now, Microsoft feels extremely threatened by Linux, both on the client and on the server, and they are desparately trying to clone the essence of Linux so that their servers won't become completely irrelevant.
"the essence of Linux" is certainly much more than a few command shells!
I think you ascribe too much of Microsoft's reaction to the contemporary server market to a reaction to Linux. Command shells have been around for ages. Perhaps user demand or the increasing complexity of Microsoft's products finally demanded a better shell than cmd.exe?
Leaving aside the question of what a "very solid GUI" might be or whether Microsoft can even remotely be argued to have one
You didn't leave it aside, so I won't.
I find that the win32 GUI internally-consistant and the userland stuff works well enough that about 95 per cent of its features are congruant with Apple's and Sun's GUI widget behavior specifications. None of the three has come up with something widely accepted as better so far.
Microsoft responds to the market like a leaf in the wind... Java clone.
Is it bad that they are building on the scientific and technical knowledge of others in their field? Is it bad that they're reacting to competitors?
Whether there is a long-term plan or not, responding to current models that work by making your product compatible with those models is a part of the game at all levels from device drivers up to UI details. Advancement doesn't generally happen in isolation and like it or not, Microsoft is a part of the computer industry.
and the usual geek attitude of "if we implement it, it will be better". Nothing could be further from the truth, of course.
The OpenOffice people, the Mozilla people, the KDE people, the GIMP people, etc would probably beg to differ.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
- Having both Gnome and KDE is good because the competition will cause both to get better
- Having a Linux/UNIX desktop environment is good because the competition (with Windows) will cause both to get better
I've seen these kinds of arguments spouted repeatedly by purveyors of the Slashdot party line, and I've even made a few myself. What we have here is a confirmation of the underlying idea: that competition improves products.Plan and simple, Microsoft is competing. They've acknowledged a strength in a competitor's product and are (finally) going to tackle it head-on instead of with shady business, cash, and lawyers. They're going to try to build a better product. This is what we've wanted all along, isn't it?
I wish Microsoft's programmers the best of luck in creating these new features. They will most likely be a great improvement to the Windows platform. Likewise, I wish the Linux/UNIX communities the best of luck in creating new features to greatly improve Linux/UNIX. I believe that competition between the two groups will significantly advance the start of the art in software. Microsoft is ready to play serious but fair ball, and it's up to the rest of us to build a winning team and play the game. Humanity stands only to gain.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
After 25 years, Mr. William Gates III has finally found out what that funny thing he never understood on his Altair was for. It took some work to convince Balmer, but the promise that the @ symbol in the prompt will be animated and provide the user with a constant stream of "you seem to want to run a command, may I assist?" hints in addition to morphing into a dancing monkey whenever there are too many CPU cycles not being wasted on something else finally did the trick.
.NOT ^H^H^H NET implementation of vi, or if they'd rather copy emacs. Maybe just to piss off RMS. (they got away with stealing 90% of what windos is today, surely they could care less about RMS taking them to court).
I just wonder if they will also create a
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The point of shell scripting in UNIX (and I dare say, period) is to patch together a bunch of pre-existing programs so that you don't have to build the functionality of each one from the ground up every time you want to use it.
/var/log/bar | wc
/var/log/bar)$ x)
.NET framework, or VB, or whatever, because it's missing the entire point. The point here shouldn't be to create a huge behemoth to perform small tasks, it's to create an army of mice to work together to perform big tasks. Make programs in such a way that you can take one program, glue it to another, and make it into something completely different. Also, the entire raison d'etre should be that the sysadmin should be able to build these constructs in seconds, not hours or days.
Command.com (and cmd.exe) already has the functionality to do this. There's just a tiny little problem with doing it with all windows programs and most DOS-based programs too. They were never built to be scripted.
Here's a perfect example. Say that as a sysadmin you want to check to see how many times "foo" shows up in your system logs on a daily basis. And since you administer 20 such servers, you don't want to have to log into each of them every day and search the logs yourself. Here's how you'd do that in Unix:
(no, I haven't tested this, and undoubtedly my syntax is wrong. It's called pseudocode.)
Place a line in the crontab like this:
(every day, 3pm) mail -s "system report" edunbar93@youknowhere grep foo
Yes, there are better, more elegant ways of doing this. This is the simplest. In windows, you'd have to somehow do the following, assuming the default toolset that comes with windows 2000:
Get the "Find files or folders" program to somehow spit out only the line that says how many results were found, somehow get that information into Outlook Express, and somehow get OE to send it automatically.
Of course, the first person that accomplishes this feat will win a Nobel prize in computer science, because it's nearly impossible.
Of course, you could "just" make a scripting language that would make the process easier. For instance, you could make function calls/objects for mailto(), grep(), and wordcount(). Not to mention any number of other function calls that might be needed, which would undoubtedly be added by future include files, patches, and upgrades. It's still a far cry from a one liner, because your program would now look like this:
#include grep
#include wordcount
#include mail
$x = grep("foo",
$x = wordcount($x)
mailto("edunbar@youknowwhere.com",
And, it's worth noting, you're also still a far cry from a scripting language. This is closer to perl than it is to sh. Why bother at all, when you can just use perl? It doesn't matter if you're using the
Microsoft's operating system works on the basis of complexity. Unix works on the concept of simplicity. Guess which one is better at doing simple things, and always will be better at doing simple things.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Unfortunately the core Windows architects and designers have never administered a server. They may be smart and have degrees from all the major bussiness and technical institutions but they assumed that a server oriented operating systems just means a great kernel that can scale across high end hardware. Bill Gates himself said OS/2NT aka WindowsNT is just os/2 with a better kernel and api. I do not think they understood the power of "everything is a file" paradigm of Unix and Plan9.
In Unix everything and I mean everything is a file. Even the processes are files that can be edited. Combine this and hundreds of simple programs that work well with each other in a advanced shell that is programmable and an administrator can move mountains! Perl is even better and is quite popular to doing alot of maintance work.
Linux is appealing not just in price but because of its flexibility. The metabase of IIS sucks and apache rules. Infact Microsoft is abandoning the metabase for a xml configuration files. This is a good move. I however prefer simple ascii text but this is a step in the right direction.
The problems I see are...
1.)Will future apps use text or xml files or will they still use the registry to store information?
2.)How is remote managability? Are any command line programs being ported for there gui equilivants? This makes easier to adminstrate and saves alot of network bandwith over a vnc.
3.)Will an administrator interact with programs by manipulating objects or by editing ascii or xml files? If its all manipulating objects then this shell will not be a big deal. All the advanced programmability is useless if you can't edit anything. VBscript does object manipulation quite well.
4.) Where will these files be stored? In most unix system everything is stored in
It seems Microsoft needs more work then just adding a shell. They need to find a way to make sure applications write default config files so they can be edited and be stored in a central location. This will make life easier for an admin.
http://saveie6.com/
Does this mean that we'll finally be able to turn off GDI and get a system that is still meaningful? I think that would take more than a new shell to happen, though.
That's one of the things I really like about linux: servers don't have to run X.
M$ doesn't have legions of pissed off customers because most people don't realize that there is a better way. For 96+% of people, Windoze is what came on their box and they will never bother to experience anything different.
When I first installed Linux in '95 or '96, I was amazed at how stable it was. I was used to win3.1 crashing my 386 two or three times a day, and it was a shock to me that I now had an OS that could stay up overnight (or for weeks, for that matter). I now realize that I should have expected that along from my box, but M$ has it such that the average consumer just expects computing to be an exercise in frustration.
It'd be nice if the OEMs would start bundling other OS's (ie BeOS, linux, BSD) with windoze....especially with the recent rulings that M$ isn't allowed to harass OEMs into installing only windoze. Of course, discriminating like that has been illegal since about 1914....can't remember the law's name but it's in my econ book ;-).
I thought Microsoft licenses disallowed use of open source/GPL software. How is it that they are involved in a development project that uses perl?
A completely homogeneous software environment is a bad thing. Just think of what would happen if every machine were vulnerable to a crippling virus/worm.
Many folks have commented that this is just a command line, when it sounds like much more. It reminds me of the scriptable capabilities of KDE though the dcopclient utility. In other words, it provides dynamic and manipulative access to running systems without prior knowledge of their interfaces.
Sure, bash + vi + kill -HUP is provides some level of dynamic configuration, but it assumes prior knowledge of configuration file formats and whatnot. Also, there appears to be a desire for trans-network discovery as well.
eh?
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
Ha, ha: only serious...
Just in case you were working on something to solve a shell problem, just stop, because you can't compete. I mean, this is Microsoft, and nobody will believe that you can put out something that works better than theirs.
Even if you do actually accomplish that feat. Even still, Microsoft will trace the API calls your shell makes and pull the rug out from underneath you in the next automated .NET framework service-pack.
Then, they'll link their knowledgebase to promos of their product so when your customers search for a solution to why your shell started behaving badly (just after the ServicePack was applied), they will see "use the Microsoft shell". Next, your boss will get a letter explaining that Microsoft is attempting to purchase the rights to your project, and all your boss has to do is kill your project to collect more money than they've ever paid you (and prolly some killer seats at _insert_big_sports_event_here_).
Next, you'll probably end up contributing code to some consulting firm that agreed to make the Microsoft shell do what yours already did. It'll cost 20 times as much, and it'll be 1 year past the delivery date you would have made, and by then you'll be sick of dealing with the problems your shell intended to solve.
You'll try to move on to something else, but every where you go, no matter what you try to get into, the same old shell scripting problems will stymie you because NOBODY solved the problems that Microsoft promised their shell would solve. It will haunt you until you completely switch fields or commit suicide, or some other depressing and too-boring-to-enumerate possibility.
There is no monopoly in Unix implementation. Stick to Unix if you don't want to hire (or be) a staff of service-retarting, server-rebooting, reinstalling monkeys to do boring repetitive click-and-drool tasks at the console of a server , in what was *supposed* to be a lights-out data center, checking blanks on the left margin of of a mainframe-era "run book" as they (you) go.
Happy new year!
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Ahem. I appear to have "remembered my form values" via mozilla at some point, which means that "what about the helios" got inserted for me based on a post several months ago
Score: -5, OffTopic Subject Line
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
WSH ships as part of Win98 and above. Of course, you wouldn't know that being a Linux only user...
thumbit.vbs:
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
WshShell.run "c:\progra~1\paints~1\psp.exe", 1
WScript.Sleep 100
WshShell.AppActivate "Paint Shop Pro"
WshShell.SendKeys "{ENTER}"
Set MyPics = fso.GetFolder("c:\tmp")
For each Image in MyPics.Files
WScript.Sleep 100
WshShell.SendKeys "^o" & Image & "{ENTER}" 'open file
WScript.Sleep 1000
WshShell.SendKeys "+s" 'open resize dialog
WScript.Sleep 100
WshShell.SendKeys "100 {ENTER}" 'maintain aspect is set so only enter width
WScript.Sleep 100
WshShell.SendKeys "^s" 'save file
WScript.Sleep 1000
Next
Another proof comes from that site:
:-)
You can download the huge current tree in standard gzipped tar format, but be warned: it's about a megabyte right now.
IIRC, Microsoft didn't warn us explicitly before downloading the 100 Mb Service Pack for Windows XP.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I mean, it's so much clearer to type things like:
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
than:
convert -resize 128x128 $i thumbnail/$i
I think this is the converse of the Linux "emacs is better than microsoft word" fanaticism. Don't sit here and claim with a straight face that scripting on Windows is anywhere near as easy as it is on Linux.
You wrote your script wrong, it should be:
mkdir thumbnail
for %i in (*.jpg) do D:\imagemagick\convert -resize 128x128 %i thumbnail\%i
I used the path to the imagemagick conversion program because NT also has a convert command, and I don't wish to mistake them. You could also rename the imagemagick convert to imgconvert or something.
Now let's say you want to take 35 different bitmaps and for each one create 32 different rotational views. Now you could try to use Imagemagick, but your results will be unsatisfactory as it doesn't do rotations at other than right angles well.
So now you have something like Paintshop Pro, which is entirely GUI based. Your process is:
1. Load original bitmap
2. Rotate X degrees
3. Save bitmap
Now why on earth would you want to do this over 1,000 times? A better solution is to automate Paintshop Pro by sending keystroke events to it using a scripting tool like Winbatch. Unless of course the GUI tool already includes scripting capabilities(many if not most do).
Again, you could do the same with your image resize problem. This gives you a great deal of functionality in the event that Imagemagick doesn't produce very good results(which is unfortunately quite common).
In 2003, shell was beginning...
Gates: Main CLI turn on.
(etc)
Ok, let's see how to copy a file...
v e1:> File fDest = new File("test2.txt");
System.LocalDrives.Drive1:> copy test.txt test2.txt
copy: Unknown namespace
System.LocalDrives.Drive1:> System.IO.Copy("test.txt", "test2.txt");
System.IO.Copy: Type mismatch at parameter 1: expecting System.IO.File
System.LocalDrives.Drive1:> using System.IO;
System.LocalDrives.Drive1:> File fSource = GetLocalFile("test.txt");
System.LocalDrives.Dri
System.LocalDrives.Drive1:> Copy(fSource, fDest);
Wohoo, I did it!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Why not just use the addusers.vbs script that comes with the Resource Kit?
This lack of knowledge about Windows really annoys me. Instead of criticizing products, why not use google.com to search for ways to solve your problem, or just ask someone else how you might do this.
Only someone who's got experience with NT and "non-Windows" operating systems would know what kind of portablility the new .NeT should have. It will resemble the famous Korn shell of NT and be at least as portable as NT was. Ah yes, the new CEMENT OS is on the way.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Wasnt it Microsoft who left all development of the CLI back in 90? They have since claimed it useless and worthless. If they decide to implement it now they will be atleast 10 years behind in security. That is, if they dont look at others source code and doesnt reinvent the wheel again. Either they will be up the creek without security or they will "borrow" code and knowledge from the unix world. Either way they are in for a rough ride. I suggest that we keep a close eye out for any similaritys.
I have a strong feeling that they wont go at this from scratch. That would make them implement numerous bugs into windows, again.
One last quiestion, do they think all that is linux is the CLI? What about price, freedom and developers etc? Either way, the users of windows are the real winners here. Damnit, all of you that love windows, support linux and get better windows. It should be pretty obvious by now.
HTTP/1.1 400
make a worthwhile shell. It's why MS has what must be one of the worse shells ever. Or is iut because MS wants to keep the users to stupid to take advantage of all the holes.....in windows?
I can't believe how silly the comments on this topic are. I have seen maybe one or 2 that actually say what should be said: MS is trying to improve. Now they are definatly not the most honest company we all know this, but this looks promising. Maybe you MS bashers could hold your "it's a virus haven" and "they will screw it up" trolling until we actually see some of thier new stuff? Oh wait I forgot it's /. so the reader should just assume the pro-linux comments are correct. Gotta sell that ad space and all.. and nothing here on /. gets readers more then a chance to bash a Microsoft idea. Mod me whatever way you want at least I don't decide something is bad without trying it.
This looks like a blatant attempt to copy AppleScript. On OS X, one can send high-level object-oriented messages to applications, extract data and then manipulate the info with bash or perl scripts. And, you can wrap your AppleScript program with a nice GUI if you so choose.
You'll want to read this page : http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc-3.2/c++-abi.ht ml
1) run Oracle in command line mode to write the query result into a plain text file.
2) Use sed/perl/whatever to surround the output with xml tags for headers, footers, bold fonts, whizbang stuff.
3) If you need to do the same thing tomorrow, copy the two shell commands in 1) and 2) into a script file and make it executable. Write an entry in you crontab file to call up the script every day at 8:05am sharp. Write another crontab entry to email you at 8:03am sharp, reminding you to go get a cup of coffee.
Not only that, "coherent and well-integrated" is just stupid in this context.
Okay, if someone whips up a Linux system with a mixture of KDE apps and GNOME apps (and doesn't use null) and uses some Athena apps too...then things aren't going to be that consistent from a UI perspective. MS has their own UI consistency warts, like one-of-a-kind widgets in Outlook, non-OS-derived widgets in Office, and the Start menu and task bar. However, this is all in the GUI. Once you move to the CLI, MS's degree of consistency is really, really, really bad. The current collection of CLI utilities that MS ships sometimes uses UNIX switches (-), sometimes MS ones (\). Ping uses -, dir uses \. There are a few fairly standardized switches in the UNIX world -- -h for help, -v for verbose. MS's software doesn't have even this.
As for "well-integrated"...well, "integration" usually refers to non-modularly engineered software, with a dose of MS hype about why this is good. It also doesn't really penetrate the CLI world, where utilities pretty much stand on their own.
May we never see th
Sadly I don't. Not a bad idea though.
I'm pretty sure if a nice easy to use Linux distribution...
But that's precisely what Windows is: Nice and easy to use. Is it as elegant as NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/OSX? No. Is it as stable as OS390? No. Does it have the n-9's uptime of VMS clustering? No. Is it nice and is it easy to use? Can you turn it on and it works? Can you copy from one application and paste to another with a reasonable expectation that you'll get what you intended? Hell yes. Do you need a PhD in obfuscated Korn shell nonsense just to be productive? HELL NO!!!
I guess most of you knew that you could and still can crash NT4 by printing a sequence of tabs and backspaces to the console. Just run this:
void main(){for(;;)printf("\t\b\b\b\b\b\b");}
and be prompted with a blue background "hello world! This is my register dump".
Now after they obviously fixed this bug in W2K and as it didn't pop up in XP either, the shared memory (aka text mode screen) is open to be encountered by next generation apps.
OK, I have to reply--- anonymous coward and all ---- FIRST, shell scripts rock, and it's about time M$ is at least acknowledging that... cripes, look at id's "return to castle wolfenstein" linux install script. Super amazingly cool.
SECOND, this business about Windows being hard to remotely admin has to be taken with a grain of salt -- I mean, doesn't anybody remember BackOrifice???... I mean, really!!!! That seemed to have no trouble doing remote admin. Perhaps the problem is the "remote desktop" focus of these other tools, and perhaps a more basic approach is needed.
THIRD, I agree that a lower level basic approach might be tough for Windows.... but again, check out the BO2K code... really an eye opener for programmers weaned on Win32 SDK stuff, very interesting approach to solving this particular problem...
it will include the attributes of competitors' shells (e.g. aliases, job control, command substitution, pipelines, regular expressions, transparent remote execution)
Good thing sh isn't patented, eh?
LadyStar - Your Magical and Mysterious Adventure Awaits
i was invited by microsoft to participate in a rather detailed and lengthy online survey that seemed to be geared towards sysadmin requirements with regards to automating repetitive tasks with scripting. got me a free copy of office xp, though those bastards have still not shipped it @%&@@!
Seems interesting that Windows is trying to continue to emulate what Unix already does. Thanks, but no thanks. For my DOSsy needs I'll stick with 'old DOS and lay on top of it JPSoft's 4DOS or 4NT and run with that as needed.
Otherwise many scripts I have for use with tcsh/bash today are +15 years old and still working just fine.
Wow, a sig from Groundhog Day? Never thought I'd see the day
Yeah I'm primitive as hell right? I'm smart enough to know you dont beat the competition by copying them, then again maybe thats Why Microsoft always beat Apple, they dont innovate they copy.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
>>>
Huh? Can you open up the word processor in Star Office and build a document based upon data you pulled from an Oracle query, complete with various layout features from a Unix shell script?
>>>
Yes. For more than a decade now if you count RTF and the editors that support it (and surely since tag based file formats became popular if you don't). This is not really a difficult problem, if that is the point you wanted to make.
To get at objects, any objects, you just need a command line program for manipulating them. Again, not too hard, and the function was actually considered in the design of most major Linux GUI/toolkits. It seems to me there is more than enough ignorance to go around (or something...).
This is really something they should have done years ago, but were too busy trying to shed the "DOS" image and bury the command line ("If I could be like Mac...").
Yay! What's old is new again!
...yellow number five, yellow number five, yellow number five...
Type "set /?" on a Win2K/XP box. There's a set /a switch which does rudimentary math. Lots of stuff is actually in the 2K/NT shell. It has blocked if-then-else, subroutines, decent for statement (includes directory recursion), string relational operations, delayed variable expansion, better parameter/variable expansion etc. Parsing is still iffy and not as refined as under bash.
I'm sorry, but 4NT coupled with the correct ports of whatever unix utilities you use blows the pants of cygwin.
Few will believe me, and I'm sure my karma will be killed by this post, but I gotta be me.
Go to JPSoft.com for more info.
Honestly though, until you develop a good INI, set of aliases, and 4START.BAT, it's not that great. But compared to command.com it is the difference between zsh and sh. Totally.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
KDE's dcop command line client offers access to all exported objects in KDE applications from the command line. It's great to be able to tell applications to do stuff from a script. It's not like this is a new feature or anything.
A solution to the problem with music today
All this talk of shells is getting to my head. I read that as /bin/cash. The Courne Again Shell, another ksh replacement?
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
I find it disgusting that the only time Microsoft adopts a good idea is when they can make an implementation stuffed with some irrelevant crap to the limit and far beyond.
The job of a shell is to talk to the user, call programs and run scripts. It is not to mess with the network or have giant builtin pieces such as dotnet interface. If they wanted to do something reasonable they could've just distribute bash and a wrapper utility to call whatever they want in dotnet.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I misread this as "The Microsoft Next Generation Shill.."
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
"...message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just an exercise in computer science masturbation. It may feel good, but you don't actually get anything done."
- Linus Torvalds (from Tigran Aivazian's Linux Kernel 2.4 Internals)
It's my understanding that the tiny windows kernel core's only job is message passing between OS objects. And I think you're over-generalizing when you speak of UNIX's purpose as the paradigm for the Linux (kernel) design.
Developers: We can use your help.
Marvellous. It's only taken them 20 years to produce something Unix has had for nearly 30. Their mothers must be proud.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
The shit hits the fan another time in 2003.
/\/\1Cr0$$$Of6 r0x0r$$$."
While Microsoft is agressively trying to overcome its poor OS-design they are fooling their customers with alleged _new_ technologies.
And the bad part (diarrhea hits the fan) comes last:
Their customers believe that shit. They never heard of things like shell scripting, cli administration... 'efficient' ways of administer their servers. Now they get introduced to stuff and think: "WOW! GREAT! HEY MS, CAN I LICK YOUR ASS YOU ARE SOOO GOOD. LINUX IS SHAREWARE AND
Ignorance is a wide-spread malfunctions of human beings that can't be ignored.
I have to admit, that there are some possibilities of administer a windows box, but does john doe know shit about scripting?
Scripting involves the act of thinking and solving (sometimes complex, sometimes not so complex) problems, the GUI cant handle. If its not implemented in the GUI (read as: Microsoft didnt know shit about their own code (the Excel average problem, remember that?), john doe is disappointed, _ignores the problem_, later blames microsoft and moves on (in that exact order).
Bla, bla, bla, I'm ranting and what browser am I using atm? Mozilla 1.2.1 for Win32.
*sigh*
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Wow! Will tis stupidity ever end?
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
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The funny thing is, from a certain point of view, this looks like both a validation & cancellation of what Apple has managed to do with OSX. Once OSX came out, Windows was the only remaining family of mainstream operating systems that wasn't either Unix based or, if nothing else, had a robust layer for using Unix tools (BeOS wasn't really Unix/Posix, but it was glose enough for many purposes; everything else is even closer & usually at a pretty deep level).
Legions of Unix fans were able to boast that they could take their shell skills to any other platform painlessly. The Macintosh found a whole new audience that had in the past mostly ignored it. And aside from efforts like Cygwin (which is imperfect at best and, besides, isn't available out of the box), Windows users were left out of the party. Not that that bothered most Unix fans.
Unfortunately, it seems like Microsoft was paying attention to all of this. If the really do get something like the Unix command shell running as a native capability of some near-future version of Windows, you're right -- much of Unix's unique strength won't be quite so unique any more, and again you're right -- Unix unfortunately doesn't have as much to fall back on as one would maybe hope. As much as *I* would hope, anyway...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
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So now all those worms and viruses will be able to even further disrupt my system by using a spiffier console! Like .net wouldn't enable it enough already!
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The source of innovation is not money. It's talent and creativity. Open source has adequate supplies of both.
To belabor the point, money gets you Bob and Clippy. Talent gets you efficient, stable code. Creativity gets you the occasional inspired perk. For really brilliant insights, you need genius. Other than their business tactics, I have seen nothing from Microsoft that resembles genius.
-AC
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