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Windows Server 8 Is A Radical Departure From Previous Releases

Julie188 writes "While the world is distracted with the Window 8 client, Microsoft is simultaneously working on Windows Server 8. At BUILD, Microsoft unveiled its next-generation server OS under heavy secrecy to a room full of analysts and product testers. WS8 is radically different than its predecessors. There's an argument to make that it's not actually Windows. The code they saw was pre-beta and an obvious attempt to put an arrow in the heart of former-softie-turned-VMware-CEO Paul Maritz. Windows 8 Server editions are to be run in Server Core format (the GUI will be optional). PowerShell has gotten an overhaul and its command list will exceed 2,300 native commandlets in Windows Server 8. Hyper-V has also been revamped and will become massively scalable in the number of VMs supported and in the size of each VM." In related news, it appears that Java now runs on Microsoft's Azure platform.

347 comments

  1. Azure by recoiledsnake · · Score: 1

    Not surprised that Java runs on Azure now. Even iCloud uses Azure for their backend.

    --
    This space for rent.
    1. Re:Azure by North+Korea · · Score: 0, Troll

      And to be honest, Azure is probably the best cloud platform there is currently. It integrates beautifully with Visual Studio. When you compile your code you can run it directly in Azure and even debug it in the process. You have to test it yourself how easy it is actually is, there's no other platform that makes it so streamlined. If Microsoft does something right it's developing tools for programmers.

    2. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Integration of MS products with MS products is not a reason to call something great. This applies if you replace MS with any other corporation.

    3. Re:Azure by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      Not intuit.

      They're point of sale had massive amounts of problems integrating with quickbooks.

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    4. Re:Azure by sixminuteabs · · Score: 1

      Since when? It works for Apple, and it would certainly be a reason to call a product lousy if it integrated poorly.

    5. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You have to test it yourself how easy it is actually is, there's no other platform that makes it so streamlined.

      Maybe you should try out these "other platforms"? Seems to me every other cloud has plugins for direct-to-cloud deploy, the only difference seems to be that azure locks you into visual studio, whereas the other clouds have plugins for eclipse, visual studio, etc. etc.

    6. Re:Azure by ByOhTek · · Score: 1

      I think his point was that there were companies other than MS that did this. The first (and only) company I can think of that does as good as MS, is Apple

      However, The only two languages I prefer Objective C to, are Perl and Lisp. Hell, I'd rather program Java than Obj C.

      --
      Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    7. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Well, I'm not sure integration was really the problem there. The thing is, if you take one piece of shit and shove another piece of shit into it, no matter how perfectly you mix the two pieces of shit, no matter how well planned your shit mixing is, no matter how homogenous and compatible you make the two pieces of shit, all you'll ever wind up with is a larger pile of shit.

    8. Re:Azure by xyourfacekillerx · · Score: 1

      Now I am a huge Microsoft fan, but North Korea, just about all your comments read like adverts for MS development tools. Just sayin' is all.

    9. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What a waste of manpower to constantly have to change M$ products.

      Nice that M$ is finally getting to standards. sloppy code is finally getting caught by IIS7.

          So how is the weather in Redmond today?

    10. Re:Azure by ByOhTek · · Score: 0

      I second this motion.

      --
      Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    11. Re:Azure by Nadaka · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Visual Studio is great, but Eclipse is just as good as a platform. For some reason, every time I say this, I get modded down.

    12. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not true. http://www.windowsazure4e.org/

    13. Re:Azure by mario_grgic · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, there is. UNIX shell and command line in my opinion is the best development environment ever made. And it's been around for a long time. The usual arguments given why this isn't so all boil down to it takes average developer too long to learn it. But nothing can ever come to the level of productivity you get when you finally do. After you do, IDEs and Visual Studio in particular start being impediments rather than productivity boosters.

      --
      As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
    14. Re:Azure by temcat · · Score: 1

      I agree as someone whose job involves reading lots of MS marketing materials.

    15. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      and the summary..."PowerShell has gotten an overhaul and its command list will exceed 2,300 native commandlets in Windows Server 8".

      Cool. For their next project they can reinvent an IPC that's worth a damn and has half the flexibility of pipes. Let me know when they finally get through reinventing Unix poorly.

    16. Re:Azure by Stormtrooper42 · · Score: 1

      So, when working with a library you've never used before, it is faster for you to switch between the documentation and your code, than to use some sort of auto-complete feature, and to see the available methods along with their documentation right away?

    17. Re:Azure by mario_grgic · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Regularly work with millions of lines of code. My tools scale perfectly well, and for dozens of languages too, not just like VS which works OK for C#, but absolutely sucks for C++ or say Perl, or Eclipse which is good for Java, but sucks for C++ or Haskell for example.

      I think before you make judgement on this, perhaps you owe it to yourself to learn it first, or at least watch someone who knows what they are doing (if you can find someone).

      --
      As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
    18. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You realize that PS passes full blown objects using pipe or stirngs, you can choose....

    19. Re:Azure by EvanED · · Score: 2

      If VS "sucks" for C++, I'm not sure what works well. Probably nothing. Have any suggestions?

      (It certainly doesn't have the level of support that C# has, but IMO VS works way better for C++ than anything else I've tried. In particular, I think it generally works way better than Emacs + Bash + GCC + etc.)

    20. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "as there just isn't any development tools as good as Visual Studio"

      Wow, Ok either you have never used anything besides Visual Studio or you actually are a shill because that is the most ridicule worthy statement I have seen anyone make in a long time.

    21. Re:Azure by binarylarry · · Score: 2

      FUD

      Tell Ballmer I said hi!

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      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    22. Re:Azure by mario_grgic · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Depends on the library. Most libraries I use are open source, reading documentation is reading code and comments. It's really fast to navigate code for about 550 languages that my tools are aware of (VIM with ctags, cscope, clang etc). But if I don't have the source, then reading documentation can also be done quite fast inside the shell, together with editor. I never understood people who hit . or -> in their IDE and then scroll through the list and choose what method they think they want to call. How are you ever going to learn like that. I'm not saying that good tools like VIM/emacs don't have the ability to complete code, by syntax (parse trees for some languages) or by textual analysis on other cases, but this is TYPING aid, not code writing aid.

      If you can't open a notepad and write a simple program (let's say a dialog with a panel, a few text boxes and buttons) without an IDE in a language of your choice, then how good a programmer are you?

      Get rid of mental clutches and start using your brain is my advice. You'd be surprised how much you can learn if your tool doesn't stifle you.

      But this is just the first step. Learning more advanced things, how to search effectively, bend and transform code or text in general to your will, create mini reports of things you are interested in (some of the most basic things like class outline, or call hierarchy are dedicated views in most IDEs, but there are other things you might be interested in that are not) and are all learning aids. And the best thing is this knowledge and tools are applicable and transferable to any kind of programming task, whereas most IDE users would not even consider learning or programming a language their IDE does not support.

      --
      As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
    23. Re:Azure by aix+tom · · Score: 1

      Unless you try do do something "exotic" like copy/paste some results from SQL Server Query Analzer (MS) to Excel (MS).

      Which seems to be pretty much impossible.

    24. Re:Azure by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      Now that Win8 dev preview (which includes VS 11) is out, have a look at what it does for C++. There are a lot of IDE improvements there specifically in that department.

    25. Re:Azure by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      Spend a lot of time in the bathroom, do you?

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    26. Re:Azure by Rary · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The same is true of any set of tools. Someone who takes the time to learn their IDE of choice will be more productive in it than in other environments. Your tools of choice consist of UNIX shell and the command line. This doesn't mean they're better tools, just that they're better tools for you, because you've learned to be productive in them.

      Software development is mostly thinking with a bit of typing thrown in. Tools can help productivity if you're familiar with them, but ultimately what interface a tool uses (ie. CLI vs GUI) is irrelevant. What's relevant in a tool is functionality. What's relevant in a developer is skill and knowledge of their chosen tools.

      --

      "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein

    27. Re:Azure by BlueStraggler · · Score: 2

      IDEs are great if you are working with code generators, stubs, templates, and general-purpose APIs. But please don't pretend that that kind of work is "serious programming". They're called code monkeys for a reason.

    28. Re:Azure by InsertCleverUsername · · Score: 1

      Unless you try do do something "exotic" like copy/paste some results from SQL Server Query Analzer (MS) to Excel (MS).

      Which seems to be pretty much impossible.

      Huh? I think you're doing it wrong. I've never had any issues, going back at least as far as SQL 2000 and Excel 95, if memory serves.

      Make selection, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, done.

      --
      Ask me about my sig!
    29. Re:Azure by Canazza · · Score: 1

      Balmer says Hi, and he gave me this chair.

      He also pointed out how awesome intellisense is in VS2010.

      --
      It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
    30. Re:Azure by cptdondo · · Score: 0

      The thing is, if you take one piece of shit and shove another piece of shit into it, no matter how perfectly you mix the two pieces of shit, no matter how well planned your shit mixing is, no matter how homogenous and compatible you make the two pieces of shit, all you'll ever wind up with is a larger pile of shit.

      On my wall. I wish I had modpoints. Those are words to live by!

    31. Re:Azure by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're lucky -- this is the first time in two weeks I don't have mod points. Are you Ballmer's grandson or something? Do you even know what an "object" is? MS's poo-pooing of text is one of the worst things about MS and one reason so many of us stay away. Text is human-readable, binary is not. If you're passing "objects" as text and your code goes kerflooey you can examine what was passed and easily figure out what went wrong. Not so with binary blobs. Mind explaining why you think passing binary makes more sense and gives more options?

      Have you ever used a single program that didn't come from Redmond? Your posts all make it sound like MS is the best thing since sliced bread, when most of us are fond of saying "the day MS makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they start making vaccuum cleaners" (Well, personally I think Excel is the best spreadsheet and MS mice weren't too bad, and I'd take an Xbox over a Sony any day).

      BTW, freeAVG just told me to reboot (I haven't got Linux on this box yet). Ironically, I don't mind rebooting Linux because it comes back exactly like I left it, but I never have to reboot. If I reboot Windows I have to restart every open program, yet I have to reboot every few days because something needed updating. Tell your dad to fix this, OK? And tell him to get rid of that God damned registry!

      MS is easy to use if you don't know what you're doing. Those of us who have been computing for decades find MS products maddeningly annoying -- the "Redmond way or no way" syndrome.

      I don't like Gnome, but IMO KDE is a far superior interface than Windows.

      Now I have to brush my teeth after biting that shilly troll. Ugh!

    32. Re:Azure by vux984 · · Score: 4, Insightful


      Get rid of mental clutches and start using your brain is my advice.

      Because memorizing API's is what makes a good programmer? Spare me.

    33. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You're lucky -- this is the first time in two weeks I don't have mod points.

      I'm sure he's thanking the fucking stars that you (temporarily) don't have the power to cast imaginary points on a niche website at him.

      My God, you are a douche.

    34. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Almost everyone at Google, and previously Sun, uses either Emacs or Vim to work on projects with millions of lines of code. Even Microsoft has a huge contingent of Vim and Emacs users.

    35. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Quickly find a doctor and pull out whatever is stuck up you ass. Quick!

    36. Re:Azure by cavreader · · Score: 1

      You don't get out of the house very often do you? Some developers actually have to produce working applications that sometimes require a GUI instead of a command line. If you are smart enough to know all the methods,events, and properties of a particular platform and related API's than by all means use Notepad.

    37. Re:Azure by aix+tom · · Score: 1

      Oh, *technically* it does get copy and pasted. Only everything gets pasted into one single cell in Excel. Both in SQL Server 2000 and 2005, with Excel 2000 and 2005.

      It works on an US setup, but it doesn't work under German language settings. Since the data in the clipboard seems to be text/csv, and the German Excel can't handle the text/csv correctly since the "," is the decimal separator.

      On the other hand, it works just fine from our Oracle SQLTools, who decided to use a more robust and language independent clipboard mime format.

    38. Re:Azure by lgw · · Score: 1

      Visual Studio was once worlds better than Eclipse. Now I'd only say the C++ debugging environment is better. VS seems to get a little bit worse with each release (and .NET debugging doesn't really support attaching to a crash dump, which is a major step backwards IMO), and IntelliSense continues to "mostly work" for C++ after so many years. To be fair, IntelliSense is great for C#.

      Meanwhile, Eclipse keeps (slowly) getting better. I still don't like it much for C++, but I can certainly see it eventually passing VS in the years to come. Visual Slick is still pretty good for C++ as well, but never seemed quite finished to me.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    39. Re:Azure by lucm · · Score: 1

      I'd rather chew glass than work every day with Eclipse. I'd rather chew glass and nails than work with Eclipse and Git every day. I'd rather chew glass, nails and barbwire than work with Eclipse, Git and Bugzilla everyday.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    40. Re:Azure by Macka · · Score: 1

      Last time I checked my eyeballs didn't work very well with objects. They handle text perfectly well though. Seriously, you're missing the point. The command line is for running commands and eyeballing text output. Bash functions perfectly for this. It's also perfect for writing small quick scripts that do simple tasks. If I need to do something ore complicated that requires an OO approach, then I have python or ruby to play with. Use the right tool for the job.

    41. Re:Azure by EvanED · · Score: 1

      Text is human-readable, binary is not.

      And conversely, binary is program-readable and text is not. If you're piping from one program to another, this can often matter -- because now your second program will have to reparse the output. And that's often obnoxious at best and wrong at worst. (I debate more about this below.)

      yet I have to reboot every few days because something needed updating.

      What are you doing to your poor computer? I only need to update after each patch Tuesday. Sure, that's really annoying (and to be honest I usually leave it sitting there pleading to shut down and install updates for a few weeks), but it's far from "every few days".

    42. Re:Azure by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but it wasn't a bigger pile of shit, it was two piles of shit connected by diarea splatter.

      Things like differeng rules on field length leading to data curruption without error.

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    43. Re:Azure by scot4875 · · Score: 1

      Get rid of mental clutches and start using your brain is my advice. You'd be surprised how much you can learn if your tool doesn't stifle you.

      This is some asinine advice. It makes about as much sense as telling a carpenter to get rid of the 'crutch' dovetailing jig on his router and go back to manually cutting them using a saw. There is merit to knowing the old methods so you can use them in a pinch; there is NO merit to refusing to use new tools because they make the job easier.

      I use my brain to solve problems; I use my IDE to help me quickly generate the code that implements my solutions.

      --Jeremy

      --
      Jesus was a liberal
    44. Re:Azure by InsertCleverUsername · · Score: 1

      Oh, *technically* it does get copy and pasted. Only everything gets pasted into one single cell in Excel. Both in SQL Server 2000 and 2005, with Excel 2000 and 2005.

      It works on an US setup, but it doesn't work under German language settings. Since the data in the clipboard seems to be text/csv, and the German Excel can't handle the text/csv correctly since the "," is the decimal separator.

      Ah... Apologies. I was operating under the same ethnocentric assumptions as Microsoft apparently. I seem to get tab-delimited data copied to the clipboard from the Query Analyzer grid under US-EN culture settings.

      --
      Ask me about my sig!
    45. Re:Azure by Kevin+Stevens · · Score: 1

      Its nowhere near close. Maybe if you are comparing Eclipse for java and not C++. CDT feels bolted on, and poorly at that. I find most eclipse plugins are buggy as hell, and I think the whole view/perspective system is just unintuitive- one wrong move and now your whole screen is deranged. Eclipse over X is hardly functional.

      I haven't used 2010 much as I have been on a linux only platform the last two years, but I miss VS tons. The debugger is the biggest thing I miss really. DDD just isn't as smooth, and not having to leave the editor is just one of those things that really improves your flow.

      Not that VS doesn't have it's warts... I wish MS would stop their apple-like crusade and just support makefiles.

    46. Re:Azure by Kevin+Stevens · · Score: 1

      Templates and general purpose API's aren't serious programming?

    47. Re:Azure by exomondo · · Score: 1

      the only difference seems to be that azure locks you into visual studio

      How so?

    48. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well Emacs and Vim aren't the are shell and a command line. Emacs wants so badly to be (everything.) but its not there yet

    49. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So you do use some crutches. In my day we used a very small magnet to write directly to disk (once they were invented), otherwise it was a big magnet to the core memory.

    50. Re:Azure by Heir+Of+The+Mess · · Score: 1

      Awesome until you code in C++/CLI, which missed out on intellisense this time round, which is a total pain in the arse.

      But Eclipse blows for C++ development.

      --
      Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
    51. Re:Azure by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

      And seriously, it's almost 2012 and Linux shells still pass data as text, when passing objects would make so much more sense and give a lot more options.
      You realize your comparing coding to commandline scripting and simple shell commands, right?
      Once you get into code, it's all objects of some form or another.

      --
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    52. Re:Azure by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

      Serious programming is a team getting together, engineering exactly what's needed, certain components of that are segmented out to individuals, and from the bottom up they either individually or in groups of 2 work on those components with the guidelines given.

      At that point, the very idea of templates just falls off the map.

      --
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    53. Re:Azure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lets go directly to the core of the parents argument: only API-less programming is serious programming. An ideal, serious system is a black box, taking in electricity and converting it to a lots of heat. Only jocular systems have side-effects in the system.

    54. Re:Azure by Xest · · Score: 1

      "For some reason, every time I say this, I get modded down."

      Probably because it's bullshit, although in this case you seem to have at least caught the attention of the anti-Microsoft lobby that mod up Microsoft haters no matter how wrong they are. You can't honestly say that if you've ever actually spent any decent amount of time with both IDEs and if you are a professional developer that has to get involved with things like unit testing, database integration, refactoring and so forth.

      If all you do is write some basic programs, hobbyist type stuff then you're right in that you'll probably not notice the difference (although even there Eclipse is just that much slower and more buggy it's hard to believe), but if you're a professional developer and have worked on proper projects in both that use the typical professional developer's toolset then Visual Studio is simply years ahead of Eclipse. The gap widens even further if you're working with other Microsoft technologies like Team Foundation Server, and MS SQL Server. I understand many people here don't like Microsoft, and particularly the idea of Microsoft products tying in together so closely, but those arguments must be separated when objectively evaluating IDEs and when objectively evaluating them it's hard to see how you can realistically suggest Eclipse is as good as Visual Studio.

      Eclipse has too many issues, it's slow, it's buggy, it's plugin system barely works often requiring multiple installations of the whole thing if you want to work with different languages and to top it all off it just lacks some pretty fucking useful features that Visual Studio has. Eclipse is somewhat more comparable with Visual Studio Express, but professional? It just doesn't come close.

      The problem is Eclipse is often cited as the great saviour in the face of Visual Studio, it's the FOSS community's golden boy for IDEs, but even as a competing IDE it's not even the best. IMO things like NetBeans, JDevelop, and hell even Qt Creator as niche as it is have a lot of benefits that Eclipse lacks even, which is why when someone touts Eclipse as a competitive alternative to Visual Studio I can't help but think they're basically screaming "lack of experience", or "fanboy" because there are other IDEs out there that put Eclipse to shame other than just Visual Studio, and that would hence be better suggested as an alternative to Visual Studio.

    55. Re:Azure by Xest · · Score: 1

      "Most libraries I use are open source, reading documentation is reading code and comments"

      Sorry, let me get this straight, when you have to work with a new library you take time out to read the actual source code itself and memorise the functions available? Seriously? That's about the most unproductive thing I've ever heard.

      With intellisense you can jump straight into a new API and presuming it has used intelligent function names you can basically type code with the function name you'd expect the API to provide to do what you want and intellisense will pop it up.

      I'm not saying that API documentation isn't important, and that it's not a good idea to read it sometimes to avoid unexpected issues, but in many cases you really can just jump in and get to work by just using intellisense, and besides, when you highlight a function with intellisense, the IDE tends to pop up relevant code comments alongside the function anyway.

      People using intellisense aren't really doing anything different to you - they're just letting the IDE find the functions they need when they need them, rather than reading through a ton of code to find them and try and memorise them all. They're still learning those functions despite your claim to the contrary - they're just doing it in a more efficient manner than you are. They're getting stuff done whilst learning it.

    56. Re:Azure by mcgrew · · Score: 1

      And conversely, binary is program-readable and text is not.

      Of course it is. A computer can translate text to binary easily; the programming to do so is trivial. How do you think a chatbot works?

      What are you doing to your poor computer? I only need to update after each patch Tuesday.

      Running FreeAVG since the McAfee that came with it slowed it to a crawl. It's asked for reboots twice since I installed it last week. It should never need a reboot at all unless the kernel is updated.

    57. Re:Azure by Nadaka · · Score: 1

      I have spent years with each professionally and I like them both. I write java for a living and c# at a previous job. They are different, but both are excellent IDE's.

      I have only rarely had problems with Eclipse, possibly twice in the last 3 years and those were caused by a poor choice of plugins. Eclipse definitely has the better unit test integration with junit while visual studio has for so long required an external program like Gallio to run unit tests. It also has a superior search option and more intuitive keyboard shortcuts. Visual studio does have a better default view and intellisense. And if you are doing GUIs there is no competition for VS drag and drop system, but in my experience stringing together GUI elements is a very minor part of the work I do.

    58. Re:Azure by Nadaka · · Score: 1

      I do use eclipse almost exclusively for java, afraid c++ was a school/hobby only thing for me. For me the only gripes I have left with eclipse are that startup and switching to debug can be a little slow.

    59. Re:Azure by EvanED · · Score: 1

      A computer can translate text to binary easily; the programming to do so is trivial.

      If it's so easy, why do people so often get it wrong? How many shell scripts or commands break if you have even spaces in your file names, let alone weirder characters. (For example, if you've used xargs without the non-standard -0 flag, it was almost certainly wrong.)

    60. Re:Azure by mcgrew · · Score: 1

      If it's so easy, why do people so often get it wrong?

      Many reasons. Lack of programming skill, laziness, lack of proper testing, rushing products out of the door, etc. The same reasons that software always needs patching, while things like TVs, cars, etc seldom do.

  2. ...but does it have Edlin? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Windows is not done if it doesn't have Edlin, the world's greatest text editor.

    1. Re:...but does it have Edlin? by couchslug · · Score: 1
      --
      "This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
    2. Re:...but does it have Edlin? by RoverDaddy · · Score: 1

      *1,5L
      1: Edlin
      2: still
      3: gives
      4: me
      5: nightmares.
      *

      --
      RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
  3. Server cold war by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Microsoft isn't saying anything about linux, however this is a direct attack against linux and unix in general, it is what microsoft does without mentioning linux that needs to be watched

    1. Re:Server cold war by vux984 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Microsoft isn't saying anything about linux, however this is a direct attack against linux and unix in general

      Its real competition, not "an attack". This is a good thing.

    2. Re:Server cold war by jfruhlinger · · Score: 2

      Actually, it seems like Microsoft sees VMware as its actual competition.

    3. Re:Server cold war by North+Korea · · Score: 1

      PowerShell is much more powerful than bash. Bash is pretty much just running linux commands with a few logical structures built-in. PowerShell is a lot more like an actual programming language, with real objects, functions and data handling.

    4. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      And is overkill for about 99% of the scripting I do. If I want a real programming language, there are far better ones out than the PowerShell. It's too much for a command scripting language, and too little for heavy duty work. As usual, Microsoft foists another ginormous tool on admins, instead of taking the more rational minimalist approach. But that's alright. I expect 90% of Windows admins are terrified of the CLI anyways.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    5. Re:Server cold war by shadowsurfr1 · · Score: 1

      Agreed on the BASH part. FTA: "[Powershell is] literally an OS itself. You can do anything in it," In other words, MS is saying, "Look at what we have! a command prompt you can administrate the computer through!" How non exciting when the same thing has been available in Linux/other OSes for a long, long time.

    6. Re:Server cold war by bonch · · Score: 2

      On Slashdot, competing with Linux is an "attack" and makes you evil.

    7. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I just don't understand why Microsoft can't just make a good BASH variant for Windows, so us folks who administrate heterogeneous networks can create a common stock of admin scripts, and a common scripting language to do them in. Microsoft still can't get over the fact that it isn't the only boy in town in the server world, and making proper integration tools, as opposed to trying to force itself on us at every turn, should take precedence.

      Yes, I know there's Cygwin, but it's huge and a major pain in the ass and I consider the ugliest of hacks.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    8. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Personally, I think PowerShell is a lot closer to the ideal shell for today than Bash is (and I'm typing this on Linux). PS is kind of maddening to use because of some things like the tab completion differences (I've tried to give it a fair shot, but I really don't like it) and the god-awful "terminal emulator" that it runs in.

      But I strongly feel that if the Linux folks would take a step back and acknowledge that it's no longer 1970, they'd see that have programs set up to pass objects around instead of text can be hugely beneficial.

      (I'm open to some textual serialization of objects, such as JSON or similar.)

    9. Re:Server cold war by cayenne8 · · Score: 1
      Yeah...when reading the synopsis, my first thoughts were..."Hey...windows server is becoming Unix".

      And if they do tthat....why bother with windows, when there are more mature Unix type OSes out there?

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    10. Re:Server cold war by North+Korea · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So you are bashing PowerShell for allowing you to do more than what you need with it? Seriously? You don't need to use those extra features if you don't want to, but for anyone actually doing some work it's a great tool (you know, for those that actually do something else than play around with their wardrobe servers).

      I don't think you have even used PowerShell, you just want to hate on it because it's Windows-based and that "ooh Windows admins must be stupid!" line makes it even more visible. The hard cold truth is that Windows Server is used on around 50% of servers, and is usually much better choice for certain things than Linux based server, especially in corporate environments. Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work, but the real world still uses Windows Server a lot.

    11. Re:Server cold war by North+Korea · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Why you blame Microsoft for it? What about we turn it around and ask why can't Linux folks just make a good PowerShell variant for Linux distros?

    12. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

      And yet, for all of that, the SH-variants have an enormous body of code behind them. I'm willing to concede there are aspects of Powershell that might be desirable, but it's a fucking nightmare to code in, and for scripting, I don't really want to code anyways. The whole point behind sh and all its children wasn't so that you could have some full blown programming language, but rather that you could automate tasks, and at that, the sh family works remarkably well, and has done so for decades.

      I have no problem with choice, but I would love it if a properly integrated bash variant was available on Windows. Not one that requires some awful layer like Cygwin, but one that runs natively without some ghastly compatibility layer.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    13. Re:Server cold war by RotateLeftByte · · Score: 1

      Coz if they did MS would sue, sue and sue again.

      Anyway, what's wrong with bash then?

      --
      I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
    14. Re:Server cold war by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What about we turn it around and ask why can't Linux folks just make a good PowerShell variant for Linux distros?

      Because no one actually wants that.

    15. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      Is there some reason that PowerScript is needed on *nix, which has a tool set far beyond anything Microsoft has ever produced.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    16. Re:Server cold war by 0123456 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work, but the real world still uses Windows Server a lot.

      The real world uses Linux and other Unix variants. While Windows may be fine for print servers and other non-critical business functions, no-one in ther right mind puts a Windows server up on the Internet where it can be attacked.

    17. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      And yet, for all of that, the SH-variants have an enormous body of code behind them

      And yet, Windows has lots of legacy apps despite it being in many ways inferior to *nixs. (I believe in the last bit of that rather less than your typical /.er.) Popularity isn't particularly good evidence of not being sucky.

      it's a fucking nightmare to code in

      As opposed to sh? ...but rather that you could automate tasks, and at that, the sh family works remarkably well, and has done so for decades

      And a more PS-like shell could do it far better in many cases.

      (Okay, in some sense I'm lumping way too much in with the shell, and am considering the common utilities like ls in there too. Really, a new suite of utilities without a new shell could do more than a new shell with the same old utilities.)

      I would love it if a properly integrated bash variant was available on Windows. Not one that requires some awful layer like Cygwin, but one that runs natively without some ghastly compatibility layer.

      Now I actually agree with you there.

    18. Re:Server cold war by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 1

      But I strongly feel that if the Linux folks would take a step back and acknowledge that it's no longer 1970, they'd see that have programs set up to pass objects around instead of text can be hugely beneficial.

      The advantage here being...? It sounds like a cool feature, but what would I be doing where I would actually want to have object oriented programming in my shell?

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    19. Re:Server cold war by Hatta · · Score: 1

      Exactly. Powershell is not a replacement for bash, but for perl, python, or whatever other scripting language you like. Bash is a UI with some programming features thrown in to make it more powerful. Powershell is a programming language with some UI features thrown in as an afterthought.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    20. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 0

      Unix based OSs have been around nearly twice as long. And I love how your invoking that questionable vulnerability metric.

      Can you confirm my hunch that you're a Microsoft employee? Even your fellow MS-fans here think you're way over the top.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    21. Re:Server cold war by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hello 0123456. It appears you have time travelled from about 10 years ago. How are you liking the present day? You have a lot to learn though. Things have changed.

    22. Re:Server cold war by beuges · · Score: 1

      It's only a nightmare to you because you are familiar with bash etc and you are not familiar with PS.

      I still don't understand why you are hating PS for having more functionality that you need. If it didn't do some particular task, then you'd be all over it for being incomplete or lacking or not up to production standards, but now it does everything you need and more and you still find something to complain about?

      Your problem is simply that PS is not BASH, not that PS sucks in any way, but because all you know is BASH, PS therefore sucks. You've made about half a dozen comments in this thread moaning about how PS is not BASH, and how Windows should rather include BASH instead of PS, and how PS is pointless and garbage because it's not BASH.

      And then you paradoxically say you have no problem with choice, as long as the choice is BASH.

      I think the problem is actually with you.

    23. Re:Server cold war by Bert64 · · Score: 2

      The problem is the complexity, dumping users, especially windows users who have little or no CLI experience into a powerful environment like powershell is not a good approach.. Especially when it's something completely new, rather than a logical extension of something users will already have been familiar with.

      Bash is simple yet flexible, and builds on the bourne shell which has been around for many years... You don't need to learn anything new in order to get on with it, and bash is very good for the majority of people's tasks.
      For the small subset of people who need something more powerful, there are a large number of existing scripting or full on programming languages available.

      The same can be said of ACLs, windows only provides acls while unix provides both acls and regular unix permissions... Windows also provides different APIs for adjusting registry and driver ACLs, while unix uses the same filesystem APIs for both.
      Unix permissions are less flexible, but provide everything that 99% of users require. The complexity of windows ACLs and the multiple different APIs for setting permissions in different places however discourage people from using them, so you get lots of users with weak permissions on their files, device drivers with weak permissions and programs that set poor permissions on their installation files or configuration.

      You need simple but flexible for 99% of users by default, and an optional more powerful system for the 1% who need it.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    24. Re:Server cold war by 0123456 · · Score: 1

      Sorry, I forgot to check the user ID before I posted. If I'd realised it was him I'd have ignored it.

    25. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      The biggest problem is that you often need to parse (and reparse, and reparse...) data because.... it's in a textual format. Most of the time it's easy parsing, like extracting a column, but it's still obnoxious. ("Does it start at column 40? No? 45? No? How' bout 43?" Or you write a "ruler" script.)

      Parsing file names in particular is... "interesting". It's basically never worth it to get it actually correct, which should tell you that something in the toolchain is doing it wrong.

    26. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

      It might come in handy, I suppose, in processing XML-based configs, but those still make a pretty small chunk of all the conf files in existence. For any heavy duty processing like that you always have awk or Perl if you want a full-blown language. Heck, I remember writing a ten or fifteen line awk script that processed some weirdo mainframe style inventory list of about 100,000 items into a csv file using awk.

      The issue here, I think, is that *nix doesn't really use objects at all for base OS interaction. That's a Windows thing. So maybe Powershell really is a Windows necessity, though, as I said, even in my Windows scripting, I can't really think of any occasions where I need it desperately. At the end of the day, the underlying Windows configuration system still is largely name-value pairs, no matter how much OOP veneer Microsoft chooses to put on top of it.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    27. Re:Server cold war by Monoman · · Score: 2

      And I still can't quite figure out how exactly VMWare is a threat to MS. VMWare made it easier for shops to run more MS servers by combining them.

      Besides how long is it going to take MS to release the next server OS with the features they are advertising?

      I hope in the long run they do VMs like they do Terminal Servers. MS isn't putting Citrix out of business by providing some basic TS capabilities built into the product. If you need more then what MS provides then you go to a vendor that goes beyond the basics. Citrix for TS and VMWare for VMs.

      --
      Keep the Classic Slashdot.
    28. Re:Server cold war by amliebsch · · Score: 1

      http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/bash/

      You're welcome.

      Oh, what's that? You mean you really wanted Bash + the entire toolchain? And also the same OS conventions and the same security model?

      --
      If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
    29. Re:Server cold war by North+Korea · · Score: 0

      And you're a good example of how deluded some Linux geeks are, and cannot accept the fact that Microsoft actually makes good products, especially for businesses and companies. As much as I generally hate Internet Explorer, it's a good example of how open source developers just don't get what the real world requirements and needs are. IE is still the only browser that is easily mass-deployed with site wide policies and settings. I personally use Opera and Chrome, but those would be hell to deploy on a larger scale on some corporate network.

      What Microsoft does get is what actual, real world businesses need. They also get what real world programmers need, and they get what enterprise servers need. Linux is great, but it misses many of those features - for example, how do you connect to a remote PC with bash and run your commands there? Oh, you can't. With PowerShell you can easily do that.

    30. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      I'm not saying get rid of powershell, I'm saying put a native variant of a shell scripting language that has been around for longer than Bill Gates has been in the computer industry. That way, there is a proper choice.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    31. Re:Server cold war by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 2

      Probably because sh-derivatives like bash are common on more operating systems that GNU/Linux, and because bash itself is frequently used on other Unix-like OSes. It is also the case that bash has been around for a long time, and there are a lot of bash scripts that IT guys have lying around that they would love to use on Windows.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    32. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      Thanks for that link to an unmaintained build whose latest file is from 2000.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    33. Re:Server cold war by nschubach · · Score: 1

      I'm just flabbergasted by 2300 "commandlets" in PowerShell... they couldn't abstract and simplify the system enough to reduce that?

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
    34. Re:Server cold war by North+Korea · · Score: 0

      No I'm not a Microsoft employee. Why does everyone always think you have to work for some company if you give positive comments about them? Besides, I think most people don't really comment about the company they work. I'm sure slashdot has lots of Google, Microsoft, Apple and so on employees reading this site, but they stay out of the discussions about their company.

    35. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      You don't need to learn anything new in order to get on with it

      Uh, if you already know it.

      while unix uses the same filesystem APIs for both.

      Meanwhile chmod modifies traditional Unix permissions, while acl_* functions modify the ACLs. From the user's perspective, chmod and ls -l is used for traditional permissions, but setfacl and getfacl are used for ACLs. I'm not sure why you're trying to argue that Unix is consistent on this matter...

      Unix permissions are less flexible, but provide everything that 99% of users require.

      Whereas if they don't, you're totally screwed. Want to share a file with just one or two other people, but don't have root (to create a group)? Have fun with traditional Unix permissions.

      (In undergrad, when I worked on a group project, our security was "gee, I hope no one guesses the name of this directory.")

    36. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      I'm in the real world, you fucking prick. I actually run an AD-network with Linux member servers. I administrate a wide-area network made of multiple locations running site-based AD.

      Quit your sales pitch. *nix has been running in the real world longer than you've likely been alive. All you've done is demonstrate how fucking stupid, ignorant and idiotic you Redmond shills really are.

      This idea that somehow Windows is the only solution, that somehow running *nix makes you some pimple-faced geek sitting in his parents basement is absurd. So fuck you again, you contemptible arrogant product whore.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    37. Re:Server cold war by thelexx · · Score: 1

      That you Baghdad Bob? We love you!

      --
      "Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
    38. Re:Server cold war by amliebsch · · Score: 1

      So grab the source and build it yourself, instead of whining that somebody else, especially Microsoft of all entities, isn't porting it for you.

      --
      If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
    39. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      If you're using any OS permissions system just to set up access for one or two users, then you're doing it wrong. I've literally seen guys who have set up server shares where folders and files have permissions for individual users.

      Oh, and we've had POSIX ACLs for how long now?

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    40. Re:Server cold war by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 1

      "Does it start at column 40? No? 45? No? How' bout 43?"

      What exactly have you been doing with your shell? I have never had anything that approaches this sort of problem; on a few occasions I wind up forgetting which of a handful of columns from the output of "ps" or "ls -l" is the one I want to sort by. Even if you wind up having dozens of columns, I fail to see how object oriented programming is going to help you, since you are still stuck having to remember dozens of fields for whatever class you are dealing with.

      Parsing file names in particular is... "interesting". It's basically never worth it to get it actually correct,

      Do you have an actual example that you could share? Again, this is a problem that I have never encountered, and I have been using GNU for a long time.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    41. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      So why do you assume I'm some Linux geek who runs a home network in his basement? I've been in this business for over 20 years, and have set up and administered networks all the way to LANManager-based networks running Lantastic and Windows for Workgroups, as well as Xenix, FreeBSD and Linux systems, not to mention NT 3.51/4/Windows 2000/Server 2003/Server 2008, along with Exchange 95/2003/2007, and currently have a network with eight servers divided between six locations, with AD domains and in particular using site-based GPOs.

      You have this bizarre idea about *nix and its users that does not resemble reality at all.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    42. Re:Server cold war by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You could... or you could take all of the little settings you could only do via the UI or other (often non remotable) cmdline tools and make sure that a cmdlet can call them in an intelligent way.

    43. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      Crap, I using *nix variants like Xenix that didn't even have the GNU toolset, and was based on older variants, and I've never had that problem. I've done a LOT of text processing under various *nix variants, and to be honest with you, I've actually dropped Windows compiles of tools like awk, sed and Perl into my servers just to get the level of processing power those tools can provide.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    44. Re:Server cold war by North+Korea · · Score: 0

      Probably because you seem to assume lots of things too. I run Linux servers myself too, and I think they're better in some situations. At the same time I can also see and understand that there's also lots of Windows Servers around and they also do better job at some things. The fact is 50% of servers run Windows Server, and you can't get around that. Personally, I use the best tool for the job and don't really care about all the evangelist bullshit.

    45. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

      I'm still trying to figure out what good it would do. Powershell, like its antecedents (WMI, Vbscript, etc.) is accessing exposed elements of the Windows API and various APIs for other systems like Active Directory and Exchange. *nix has never had those particular problems, because it's always stuck to a minimalistic approach.

      I'm still waiting for someone to point out what advantage a powershell-like shell would do in a *nix system.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    46. Re:Server cold war by amliebsch · · Score: 1

      Extensibility. By using objects, you don't have to worry about forward and backward breakage to nearly the same degree. Reflection is also a big win.

      --
      If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
    47. Re:Server cold war by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Don't bite the troll, don't bite the troll.... *fingers twitching*.

      For future reference: it's not the praising of Windows or aspects of Microsoft products that gets you down-modded, since there's many things to praise (these days at least). It's the overreaching statements, the over-the-top claims, and the half-truths. Not to mention the odd lie here and there. Yes, I've looked through your comment history.

    48. Re:Server cold war by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      Because bash and by extension the bourne shell came first, and has already been the standard on pretty much every OS except windows. There are already a large number of people familiar with it, and a large number of already written scripts for it.

      That's like me creating a non standard power socket carrying a non standard voltage, and then demanding that you install it in your house and replace all the existing appliances you have.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    49. Re:Server cold war by Alex+Belits · · Score: 2

      No I'm not a Microsoft employee.

      Yes, you are. If you are not Microsoft employee, you work for some astroturfer-for-hire outfit that works for Microsoft.

      --
      Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
    50. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      "Best tool for the job" assumes infinite budgets to pay for it. I'd probably be less allergic to Windows if I had unlimited budgets, but I don't, and worse, even if I got a big budget to move a bunch of the stuff I do now over to Windows, in five or six years when Microsoft is clearly pushing for upgrades, I get to spend that all over again.

      Our main file server is running Samba. Not because Samba's better than Windows. In a lot of ways, it's a big pain in the ass, and Posix ACL mapping to Windows ACLs is pretty imperfect at the best of times. But I can upgrade to the next version of Samba for the cost of my time, and not have to try to eek out a huge budget to buy a new operating system that will likely require new hardware, and will come waited with a whole bunch of CALs. As I said, I run a very mixed network.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    51. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      Can you give us an example of where you would need this in a *nix environment. Something specific here.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    52. Re:Server cold war by ryanov · · Score: 3, Informative

      50% is a made up number.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems

      You won't find 50% here for MS, except the revenue counting channel, which doesn't count OS' properly that you don't have to buy.

    53. Re:Server cold war by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      Because bash and by extension the bourne shell came first, and has already been the standard on pretty much every OS except windows. There are already a large number of people familiar with it, and a large number of already written scripts for it.

      Well, FORTRAN was also created before C, and has been a standard for a long time before C appeared. But, sometimes there really is a better way to do things.

      In any case, if you want bash on Windows, it has been available for ages in MSYS or Cygwin. Portable scripts will still be a chore because of e.g. filesystem differences, though.

    54. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      What exactly have you been doing with your shell? I have never had anything that approaches this sort of problem; on a few occasions I wind up forgetting which of a handful of columns from the output of "ps" or "ls -l" is the one I want to sort by.

      Hmm, some examples looking back through my history:

      I've got things like:

      • grep processor /proc/cpuinfo | cut -d: -f2 | tail -n1 to extract the number of processors (after which I decided it would be better to replace the cut/tail with wc -l). You could replace cut -d: -f2 with something like select Number.
      • There was the time I tried to get a list of all files that were transitively included by some file, so I tried a few variations of gcc -fsyntax-only -H sharedptr.cc | cut -f2 "-d " before giving up and using sed. If GCC gave objects as output, I could have said select FileName or something instead.
      • There was the time I wanted to send a signal to some occurrences of a process, so I had something like ps | (some greps) | cut -c10-15 | xargs -n1 kill -sCONT.

      I sort of feel like "replace cut" is a typical example of this, but it's not the only one. I'm not sure what else to look for in my history though.

      you are still stuck having to remember dozens of fields for whatever class you are dealing with.

      Which is easier? Remembering "the PID is in the column named

      Pid

      " or remembering "the PID is in columns 10-15. Oh, unless the width of the first column depends on the maximum username length being displayed, in which case it might change."

      And even if you forget, you could run ps and it would tell you, as opposed to you having to count fields.

      Do you have an actual example that you could share? Again, this is a problem that I have never encountered, and I have been using GNU for a long time.

      If you want a full discussion of the problems you can face, see here. (My executive summary is that "if you've used xargs, you've probably used something that is broken -- or at least not general.")

    55. Re:Server cold war by Massacrifice · · Score: 1

      And I still can't quite figure out how exactly VMWare is a threat to MS

      Because MS makes money on licensing OS shipped pre-installed on machines. New servers are so powerful that partitioning makes sense, and VMWare is now an alternative OS to Windows Server when you order a new server. VMWare is actually a customized Linux + virtualization tools. The tools & services shipped with with VMWare have started exceeding the classic definition of VM host, they now have partitioned Java containers running directly on the host. In a short time, they'll have native VMWare business applications (DB, Web servers) running in soft partitions (jails) that don't require a guest OS to run, turning VMWare into a full fledged server OS. Which means no more Windows. Oops.

      --
      -- Home is where you eat your heart out.
    56. Re:Server cold war by Hooya · · Score: 1

      > The hard cold truth is that Windows Server is used on around 50% of servers

      Yeah? where did you pull that number from?

      > Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work

      'some' real work? are you kidding me? You're right. Hobbyist stuff. The same hobbyist stuff that's been paying my bills for over 12 years now.

    57. Re:Server cold war by Hooya · · Score: 2

      > how do you connect to a remote PC with bash and run your commands there? Oh, you can't. With PowerShell you can easily do that.

      man ssh

      specifically the part about "if command is specified, it is executed on the remote host instead of a login shell".

      Your move, chief.

    58. Re:Server cold war by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You don't need to be an employee to be a shill.

      Kindly fuck off.

    59. Re:Server cold war by Junta · · Score: 1

      My top issue is that while PowerShell does a better-than-most job at having powerful capabilities *without* the syntactic burden of an equivalent language (like Python/Perl), it *still* (necessarily) compromises somewhat. The fancy piping sometimes has unanticipated oddness in certain scenarios (easiest example, do 'ps', looks sane enough, now, do 'ps|cat', and suddenly you see the hard-to-manage man behind the curtain that can crop up in various situations). In general, it's largely able to work due to MS implementing everything top-to-bottom, but I just don't see it scaling in the same way as Linux/Unix does with respect to third party development all co-existing in bourne shell.

      Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work, but the real world still uses Windows Server a lot.

      Just flamebait. Considering most public-facing servers are not microsoft, it's fairly silly.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    60. Re:Server cold war by Junta · · Score: 1

      Their answer is doing all kinds of convoluted stuff in WS-MAN. They don't grasp the concept of simplicity.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    61. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      If you're using any OS permissions system just to set up access for one or two users, then you're doing it wrong. I've literally seen guys who have set up server shares where folders and files have permissions for individual users.

      Um, so what exactly should I have done?

      Oh, and we've had POSIX ACLs for how long now?

      Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that *nix is still deficient in this matter, just address the insinuation that because they aren't used all that much means they aren't important.

    62. Re:Server cold war by Rary · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Coz if they did MS would sue, sue and sue again.

      Pure FUD. The PowerShell specification was released under the Community Promise specifically so it could be implemented on other platforms.

      --

      "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein

    63. Re:Server cold war by sniperu · · Score: 1

      OMG ! You have EIGHT servers ! When "your" servers gets into the thousands then come back and post about enterprise software.

    64. Re:Server cold war by Bert64 · · Score: 2

      Your chances of already knowing bourne shell, which has been around for many years are much higher than knowing powershell which is a lot newer, and not an extension of anything existing.

      You have chmod for traditional permissions, and setfacl/getfacl for advanced permissions (ACLs), you can use these same commands/functions for files, configuration (which are also files) and device drivers (which have files in /dev).

      On windows you only have advanced permissions, and no simple option. You then have a set of functions for filesystem permissions, a different set for registry permissions and another set for driver permissions.

      If you don't think this is a problem, take a look at digit-labs.org where there are privilege escalation exploits for a number of vulnerabilities in windows drivers where the vulnerable function never needs to be called by an unprivileged user anyway.

      If unix permissions don't provide what you need, then chances are your needs are quite advanced and you are in a tiny niche, in which case you can learn how to use ACLs because modern unixes have these too. For the other 99% of users you can use a simple system instead of being forced to learn a complex one.

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    65. Re:Server cold war by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Power shell can be good but..

      I used PS scripts to build an 8 node cluster on 2008R2 Datacenter core for a HyperV project. It was interesting and the MS stuff was not hard to figure out and replicate. The problem was getting the other required vendor software and drivers properly installed and configured on the servers. We have HP servers connected to EMC SANs. The HP NIC teaming tools, Navisphere, Powerpath, our monitoring software etc.. was NOT as easy to get on there and configure without a GUI. Some just flat out had problems with no easy workaround. Vendors were not as "core server" aware as they should be. I've done a few more similar setups since and vendor support is getting better but don't be surprised if a few issues pop up with no immediate fix. Hopefully they are not show stoppers. On a side note, we have built more similar 8 node HyperV clusters and we did not use server core. In my opinion, this is the best of both worlds, you can still use your PS scripts for automation for the bulk of the setup and then use the GUI for the problem 3rd party support. Our HyperV clusters are not pushed to the limit so we don't notice any performance difference between core and the full GUI install.

    66. Re:Server cold war by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

      And I still can't quite figure out how exactly VMWare is a threat to MS

      They're doing something in the computer field and it's popular and not Microsoft. Look at the Zune - why did Microsoft need to be in the music player business? Only because Apple was and succeeding and they were jealous. How much time and energy did they waste on that?

      Granted, they seem to be less viscous without Gates around to throw fits about stuff like this.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    67. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      You have chmod for traditional permissions, and setfacl/getfacl for advanced permissions (ACLs), you can use these same commands/functions for files, configuration (which are also files) and device drivers (which have files in /dev). On windows you only have advanced permissions, and no simple option. You then have a set of functions for filesystem permissions, a different set for registry permissions and another set for driver permissions.

      I agree that this is a problem, but at the same time, it's just inconsistency on a different axis.

      If unix permissions don't provide what you need, then chances are your needs are quite advanced and you are in a tiny niche, in which case you can learn how to use ACLs because modern unixes have these too.

      Maybe I'm biased because of my position in academia (as a grad student), but it seems to me that the need to be able to manage your own groups and use them for file system permissions is reasonably common (a-couple-times-a-semester common), and that this need is shared from undergrads through professors. Undergrads would need to do it more common, professors less (at least if you can assume that groups like "the members of my class" are administered formally).

      May not be the common case overall, but I wouldn't exactly tall that a "tiny niche".

    68. Re:Server cold war by Yunzil · · Score: 2

      Your argument is literally "Powershell sucks compared to bash because it's more than I need."

    69. Re:Server cold war by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You clearly seem to have already made up your mind, so why fake being open-minded? Administering unix and just the userland in general is heavily oriented towards parsing strings/plain-text files. This approach works well because the tools are well maintained by competent people. However string parsing in general is a very brittle way to interface tools because one space or tab character or a typo and your string matching code will not work rendering your scripts unusable. Re-creating bash on windows is stupid because the windows API is entirely object oriented. You require an objected oriented approach to interface with COM/WMI/AD etc. For some tasks the GUI is better and for others the CLI is better. You pick the best tool for the job. If powershell does not help you then um... don't use it.

      You ask people to read your mind and give you something powershell does better. Nobody can do that without knowing what your usecase is and what you're currently doing. The only response you will get is some bored person will give you a generalized answer for you to say "that doesnt help me"

    70. Re:Server cold war by amliebsch · · Score: 1

      easiest example, do 'ps', looks sane enough, now, do 'ps|cat', and suddenly you see the hard-to-manage man behind the curtain that can crop up in various situations

      I don't really understand your example. You piped a binary object to cat - surely this is expected behavior? The only reason it seems unintuitive to you is that you don't expect ps to emit a binary object, right? Why would you ever pipe to cat in Powershell, anyways?

      --
      If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
    71. Re:Server cold war by amliebsch · · Score: 1

      Well, for one, it would allow you to improve and add functionality to basic utilities like ls without adding dozens of options and/or breaking large numbers of script.

      --
      If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
    72. Re:Server cold war by amliebsch · · Score: 1

      Granted, they seem to be less viscous without Gates

      Yes, Gates could be awfully thick about things. Fortunately, in such fluid times, MS is better able to go with the flow.

      --
      If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
    73. Re:Server cold war by 0123456 · · Score: 1

      Granted, they seem to be less viscous without Gates around to throw fits about stuff like this.

      No, just less competent. They still want to own everything, but can't produce a product that people prefer over the competition; the closest they've got is the Xbox, and that's swallowed billions that it has yet to pay back.

    74. Re:Server cold war by Tanktalus · · Score: 1

      There are a lot of not-sane admins out there. Some of them are our customers. *sigh*

    75. Re:Server cold war by somersault · · Score: 2

      I really doubt you're using the best tools for your jobs. You didn't even know that you can connect into UNIX machines remotely. You have no credibility in a discussion about servers or networking.

      --
      which is totally what she said
    76. Re:Server cold war by Junta · · Score: 1

      The point is in Unix, what you see is what you get. If ps did output binary, the user would see binary and an app downstream of a pipe would see binary. Since it outputs in text, the user sees text and a program would see text. In PowerShell, what you see has had some secret magic pre-applied, and thus things like 'awk '{print $4}' become meaningless (you get some selectors with more power, but not as open-ended). 'ps|cat' is a bit synthetic, but it is illustrative of the *sort* of issues that will crop up when you get fancier than the basics, but not wanting to step up to write your own cmdlets in a more sophisticated language. When you stray from the menu of MS pre-fabbed stuff, things get hairy fast. This is why the divide exists between structured languages (which are every bit as powerful as powershell) and shell scripting (which makes straightforward stuff simple, and doesn't particularly scale up beyond that). The former has capability at the expense of more complex syntax and the latter sacrifices capability for absolute transparency.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    77. Re:Server cold war by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 1
      My point was not that I never saw a table, it is that you are exaggerating when you claim that it is a matter of remember which of nearly 50 columns has the data one is looking for. I have never seen the number of columns exceed 10, and I doubt that you would ever see a well designed class with more than 10 or so fields, or perhaps "groups of fields" (e.g. for ACLs you might have numerous fields, but they are all part of the same logical group; of course, a good object oriented programmer would say that such a logical group would belong in a separate class entirely).

      If you want a full discussion of the problems you can face, see here. (My executive summary is that "if you've used xargs, you've probably used something that is broken -- or at least not general.")

      Point taken -- I do actually remember an occasion where I accidentally created a file with a very strange name, and had to spend a few minutes coming up with a way to remove the file. The problem, though, is more relevant to allowable filenames than to shells -- as the article points out, simply forbidding files with malformed names would go a long way toward solving the problem, and there is no good reason for a filename to contain things like control characters or to have a hyphen as its first character.

      I can grant this, though: having command instructions in a separate channel from input is a good idea. Although this filenames issue is not quite as bad as SQL injection, it is the same type of problem.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    78. Re:Server cold war by batzo · · Score: 2

      But I strongly feel that if the Linux folks would take a step back and acknowledge that it's no longer 1970, they'd see that have programs set up to pass objects around instead of text can be hugely beneficial.

      The advantage here being...? It sounds like a cool feature, but what would I be doing where I would actually want to have object oriented programming in my shell?

      Ok, how about:
      Boss comes to you and says something like:
      "Can you tell me what version of windows is running on all of our machines, and what service pack they are on?"
      "...and can I have that as a CSV?"

      You:
      gc machines.txt | % { gwmi win32_operatingsystem -computer $_ } | select __SERVER,Name,OSArchitecture,ServicePackMajorVersion,ServicePackMinorVersion | export-csv .\report.csv
      Boss: Actually, can I have that in html? I need to put that up in a web site
      You: OK..here you go
      gc machines.txt | % { gwmi win32_operatingsystem -computer $_ } | select __SERVER,Name,OSArchitecture,ServicePackMajorVersion,ServicePackMinorVersion | convertto-html > report.html

      I find that you can do things in PS that are a pain in bash (e.g. get a list of processes started within the last hour)

    79. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      The point is in Unix, what you see is what you get. If ps did output binary, the user would see binary and an app downstream of a pipe would see binary.

      Well, that's only sort of true. What about the programs that autodetect whether they are running on a terminal? Why is the output from ls different from ls | cat? You could easily have a situation where you run some command, look at the output, then pipe it into awk '{print $4}', and have it not do what you expect.

      Granted, this in some sense a lot less extreme, but in another sense it's even worse. I can tell if the PS example is going to "malfunction" by looking at whether each command is a PowerShell command or not; you can only tell whether the ls | cat-like example is going to malfunction by looking at the code to ls (or by trying it).

      (That being said, I tried ps | cat in the probably-old version of PowerShell I have installed on my laptop (2.0) and it basically crashed the console. I'd like to see more smarts here.)

    80. Re:Server cold war by MightyMartian · · Score: 0

      Okay, what functionality would that be?

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    81. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      My point was not that I never saw a table, it is that you are exaggerating when you claim that it is a matter of remember which of nearly 50 columns has the data one is looking for.

      Oh, I see. No, when I said "column 50" I was referring to character column numbers, which you'd pass to cut -c##. I haven't had much luck with -f specifiers for typical output. Maybe I'm just stupid or something, but I can't figure out how to make it treat several spaces in a row (there so columns line up visually) as a single separator.

      as the article points out, simply forbidding files with malformed names would go a long way toward solving the problem, and there is no good reason for a filename to contain things like control characters or to have a hyphen as its first character.

      Sure, but a lot of present solutions even break if you have spaces in file names -- and prohibiting that is, in my strong opinion, neither desirable nor realistic.

    82. Re:Server cold war by amliebsch · · Score: 1

      I don't think anyone would argue that Powershell is a different paradigm, but I don't think it's that hard to understand. The only bit of "magic" is that whatever pops out the end of the pipe is formatted to text before being printed to the console. You don't need to do 'awk print $4}' when you can just do 'select-object name,description'. How is this less powerful or open-ended? That's what I'm not understanding. Especially because you can pipe the text output if you really want to with a .ToString().

      --
      If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
    83. Re:Server cold war by Targen · · Score: 2

      You really need to read this essay about filenames, as well as these two bits about parsing the outputs of ls and ps. In short: correct and secure work with filenames is made difficult by certain features of shells and their default configuration, and the output format of common tools (including ls) makes their output literally impossible to parse in a correct and secure manner. Parsing the output of ps is a very bad idea for similar reasons. It's fine if you're just doing one-liners for simple, everyday interactive work in the shell, but if you write shell scripts and don't understand these issues, you've likely been writing buggy, incorrect, insecure and exploitable code.

      I've personally never used PowerShell. My solution to these difficulties has always been to learn to do things properly regardless of the difficulty. While I don't know enough about it to be convinced that it would be a proper solution, I can imagine many ways in which the idea of passing objects instead of text may make things easier. If you can't see why, you need to learn a lot more about shells and their issues. I'm not trying to be patronizing here or anything; it's just that shell scripting is a lot more complex than people typically realize, and such misconceptions cause security holes.

    84. Re:Server cold war by md65536 · · Score: 1

      Sorry, but nothing microsoft does is a "good thing".
      Even if they do something that seems good or even is short-term kinda nice, as soon as they can use it to strangle competition, they will.
      If you get into bed with microsoft just because they have a van that says "candy" on it, you're going to wake up with a sore ass.
      You can call me unfair, but I've seen it happen too many times to care, and I just can't listen to "I'll change baby! Promise!" any more.

    85. Re:Server cold war by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 1

      No, when I said "column 50" I was referring to character column numbers, which you'd pass to cut -c##. I haven't had much luck with -f specifiers for typical output. Maybe I'm just stupid or something, but I can't figure out how to make it treat several spaces in a row (there so columns line up visually) as a single separator.

      I usually just use awk here; I never did like cut much myself, and the amount of awk that one would need to use is pretty simple:

      awk '{print $5}'

      Which for example will print the 5th field of every input line. I am sure, however, that there will be cases where this will not do what you want e.g. if you need to change the delimiter or something to that effect (awk has a field separator variable and a record separator variable that can be used to control this, which by default match the common case: fields separated by spaces and tabs, records by newlines). I suppose one could argue that if you are using a programming language like awk, you are "cheating," but I would say that awk is really designed to be used in these sorts of situations. It may be the case that this is non-portable -- I only use GNU awk -- but one could potentially use perl if portability is an issue:

      perl -ane 'print @F[5]'

      a lot of present solutions even break if you have spaces in file names -- and prohibiting that is, in my strong opinion, neither desirable nor realistic.

      Agreed, though the article points out an easy solution to that also: a nonbreaking space should be the default for filenames that have spaces (users should not see any difference, although I cannot say with confidence that there are no UIs out there that would display nonbreaking spaces as something other than whitespace).

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    86. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      I am sure, however, that there will be cases where this will not do what you want e.g. if you need to change the delimiter or something to that effect

      Or if your column can have spaces. :-)

      Agreed, though the article points out an easy solution to that also: a nonbreaking space should be the default for filenames that have spaces

      Actually, I kind of like that solution (especially paired with a kernel modification to translate between nonbreaking spaces being presented to the outside world and normal spaces on disk -- to promote interoperability), but it's only "easy" in a pretty strange sense of that word considering that it isn't backwards compatible and there's not a good way to type a NBSP.

    87. Re:Server cold war by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 1

      if you write shell scripts and don't understand these issues, you've likely been writing buggy, incorrect, insecure and exploitable code.

      I generally assume that shell scripts are insecure / exploitable anyway, and I would not expose a shell script to every random thing that might be thrown at me from a malicious person (i.e. one that was obtained from the net). Also, most of what I use my shell for are files that were created either by me or by people in my group (who I can generally assume would not try to attack me in this fashion, since we all have sudo privileges on each others' systems anyway).

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    88. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      And, of course, regarding awk; it's still usually easier to remember that, e.g., ls will give you the mtime in the LastWriteTime field as opposed to fields 6-8.

    89. Re:Server cold war by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why does everyone always think you have to work for some company if you give positive comments about them?

      Because that's all you appear to post! Go pick a science article, or one on politics, or anything that doesn't involve software and ask an interesting question; I mod those up just as much as the replies.

    90. Re:Server cold war by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 1

      Actually, I kind of like that solution (especially paired with a kernel modification to translate between nonbreaking spaces being presented to the outside world and normal spaces on disk -- to promote interoperability), but it's only "easy" in a pretty strange sense of that word considering that it isn't backwards compatible and there's not a good way to type a NBSP.

      I think the idea was that system calls like stat() or open() would automatically convert all spaces to nonbreaking spaces, and thus nobody would have to be aware of the difference (unless for some reason there was a program that actually broke because it expected 0x20 in filenames -- which I would say is a bug and an edge case).

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    91. Re:Server cold war by theArtificial · · Score: 1

      Linux is great, but it misses many of those features - for example, how do you connect to a remote PC with bash and run your commands there? Oh, you can't. With PowerShell you can easily do that.

      One way to remotely execute a program (gkrellm) on another host, this example assumes you're using passwordless authentication via public key:

      ssh -X USER@192.168.1.100 -p 2222 gkrellm


      Using PowerScript:

      $wsman = new-pssession -computername -port -authentication default -credential $cred
      $output = invoke-command -session $wsman -scriptblock {get-process}
      remove-pssession -session $wsman (not required)

      --
      Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
    92. Re:Server cold war by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

      IE is still the only browser that is easily mass-deployed with site wide policies and settings

      And is the only browser which many corporate users are still stuck on a 10 year old version of because Microsoft deliberately made it difficult to migrate away from. Way to consider business needs.

      for example, how do you connect to a remote PC with bash and run your commands there?

      You, sir, are a dumbass.

    93. Re:Server cold war by terjeber · · Score: 1

      Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work

      You are either clueless or drunk on cool-aid, and I say that as someone who has been accused of being an MS shill a lot lately (just because I like WP7 a lot better than my iPhone). Linux is an excellent operating system for a wide variety of things. A huge portion of the WWW runs entirely on Linux, and that is saying something. Also, some of the virtualized stuff IBM does with Linux is astonishing.

    94. Re:Server cold war by terjeber · · Score: 1

      no-one in ther right mind puts a Windows server up on the Internet where it can be attacked

      You are, sadly, as ignorant, stupid and cool-aid drinking as is North Korea. He's in love with Redmond and you are in love with Linus. Neither of you are half-way rational or knowledgeable. Just dumb shills with nothing to offer.

    95. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      Hmm, so now that I remember more about what he said (I read that article about a month ago), it may not be as big of a problem as I was thinking. As long as opening a file would work with both spaces and NBSPs, I think it would be fine.

      (Though again I would slightly refine the idea and suggest doing a translation on both sides: on open translate NBSP to 0x20, and store it as 0x20 on disk, then on readdir and such translate 0x20 to NBSP. This would go a long way to preserving compatibilities with other systems.)

    96. Re:Server cold war by m50d · · Score: 1

      Yup, and that's what makes it much worse for shell usage - it's like using tcl or perl as your shell. Worse is better.

      --
      I am trolling
    97. Re:Server cold war by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Bash works on Unix because there are lots of little support programs. Every service has an extensive set of command line options.

      On windows you don't have that stuff so you couldn't just, for example, port a cron script to use Task Scheduler.

      I like the Amiga way. The Arexx scripting language combined the best aspects of shell scripting, GUI apps and an interpreted programming environment.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    98. Re:Server cold war by Guspaz · · Score: 1

      Netcraft's web server market share stats are similar, although a bit more extreme. They show Microsoft's IIS at a bit under 16% marketshare, compared to the market leader, Apache's httpd, at about 65%.

    99. Re:Server cold war by Monoman · · Score: 1

      I would not say VMWare is an alternative OS to Windows Server. VMWare doesn't have any apps that can compete with Windows apps. VMWare (ESXi) lets customers run multiple OSs concurrently. Some customers run Windows, some run Linux and other OSs.

      VMWare isn't really a customized version of Linux either. IIRC ESX uses a linux kernel just to load the VMWare kernel. Linux was used in the past to provide the console to interface with the VMWare kernel as well.

      Anything about future features is really just speculation.

      As always, I do reserve the right to be wrong. ;-)

      --
      Keep the Classic Slashdot.
    100. Re:Server cold war by sapphire+wyvern · · Score: 2

      Not needing to do text parsing on the results of commands?

      I find PowerShell's use of an actual object model as opposed to text streams to be quite convenient.

    101. Re:Server cold war by alcourt · · Score: 1

      awk instead of cut. How many people have gotten used to

      ps -ef | awk '/foo/ { print $1,$4}'

      And that's not even fancy awk scripting.

      It also has the advantage of being standardized (Always use /usr/xpg4/bin/awk on Solaris, not /usr/bin/awk)

      --
      "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
    102. Re:Server cold war by RobbieThe1st · · Score: 1

      *snip*
      do 'ps', looks sane enough, now, do 'ps|cat', and suddenly you see the hard-to-manage man behind the curtain that can crop up in various situations).
      *snip*

      Um... I just did this on my N900 running a debian-based system and busybox's ash.
      I get the exact same output for both. And it looks fine.
      I just installed bash 4.2, and tried again. Same thing.

      Please elaborate what I *should* have gotten?

    103. Re:Server cold war by Junta · · Score: 1

      I meant that in powershell.

      On a win7/win2k8r2 system, run powershell, type 'ps|cat' In linux, they look the same. In windows, ps|cat prints binary data to the screen instead of the text you get with 'ps'

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    104. Re:Server cold war by Junta · · Score: 1

      It requires a script writer to be a bit more 'programmer' when outputting data. Most admins understand text data like a basic spreadsheet. Good admins can program correctly, but the notion that you throw things like '.toString' in betrays how it's not quite as straightforward as shell.

      PowerShell is neat in its own way, but it doesn't excuse MS's 'not invented here' as they have *continually* failed to just include a damn bourne shell and ssh access (the wrapping remote cli invocation in unwieldy WS-Man is just absolutely insane next to ssh, powershell hides it from you but under the covers it is nasty and you don't get to ignore that cross-platform). MS can offer differentiation without precluding compatibility, and this failure to pursue that is what ticks me off very much.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    105. Re:Server cold war by Junta · · Score: 1

      Ok, so some commands detect if stdout is a terminal and strip formatting and *could* do more drastic things. I don't see how it's any more intuitive to recognize whether every component in a pipe chain is backed by a win32 exe or a cmdlet versus memorizing some commands strip out color codes when piped (I can't think of an example that does something more drastic than stripping color codes, and I can forgive that since the ANSI codes would appear as 'data' counter-intuitively to pipe consumers, it's making the output more like the plaintext that the user sees, not less.

      Even the most recent PowerShell terminal is restricted in silly ways (won't let me make it wider than a certain bound, and I have no idea why). Between not having a plain old bourne shell, not doing ssh, and still having text terminals that behave in boneheaded ways, I get frustrated.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    106. Re:Server cold war by RobbieThe1st · · Score: 1

      Ah. I must have misread.

    107. Re:Server cold war by EvanED · · Score: 1

      I don't see how it's any more intuitive to recognize whether every component in a pipe chain is backed by a win32 exe or a cmdlet versus memorizing some commands strip out color codes when piped

      I'm not saying it's more intuitive, I'm saying it's possible. If you don't remember whether something is an exe or a cmdlet, you can find that out easily. If you want to know whether a program behaves differently when piping or attached to a console, there's no way to figure that out. Maybe it says in the man page. Maybe you can test it (but will one test be representative, or will that very depending on your command line flags and environment variables?). The only real way to know is go look at the code.

      I can't think of an example that does something more drastic than stripping color codes

      Personally I think that ls displaying columns (dir /w style) or not is more drastic, but that's just me. I actually have aliases that force color codes on for ls and grep so that they aren't stripped out and I can pass them around, so having to work around commands that do this mode switching isn't just some theoretical problem for me. (I also have less aliased to less -R and a decolor script to strip the escapes when I don't want them.)

      Even the most recent PowerShell terminal is restricted in silly ways (won't let me make it wider than a certain bound, and I have no idea why).

      Because the Windows terminal is an awful piece of software. You might take a look at PoshConsole. In a quick experiment, that seems to behave better on that front. I haven't used it enough to thoroughly evaulate though, but it seems to have some features that I think should be picked up my more terminals. (I like some of the thinking that went into this, though I'm not sure if I agree with many of the specific choices he made.)

      (You do know that you can actually change the screen buffer size in preferences though, right? I am still limited to 210 characters, but it's better than 80.)

    108. Re:Server cold war by ge7 · · Score: 1

      Ssh only allows you to execute a list of pre-defined commands (made before you connect). With PowerShell you can interactively work with remote computer.

    109. Re:Server cold war by Douglas+Goodall · · Score: 1

      It is too obvious you have never used ssh. Working interactively is exactly what t does. I can't believe I have allowed a troll to drag me into this :-(

    110. Re:Server cold war by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

      No it doesn't, what the fuck...

      If you want an SSH session (a shell) on the remote host, you just connect to it.

      Why do I feel like I'm talking to someone who just learned about computers and is in the 9th grade all of a sudden?

      --
      -- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
    111. Re:Server cold war by Douglas+Goodall · · Score: 1

      beuges doesn't really exist, he(it) is just a powerscript running on a windows box.

    112. Re:Server cold war by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

      OH wow... I'm totally backing away from this fresh meat. I know others are just waiting to taste....

      I'll just say that exchange is great for internal use, but anybody halfway (even a quarter) intelligent puts an smtp buffer or some form between the exchange cluster and the internet when it comes to email.

      At one of my last job in 2005, a qmail server worked nicely to perform spam classifications/etc before handing it to exchange ;)
      There are appliances for this nowadays.

      I'm glad most places still keep important things on Unix platforms, and these "all uber cool large business are doing it!" ideas aren't true. Sure, sharepoint, exchange, and other Microsoft products are Windows, but that in no way means they Pwn the datacenter.

      --
      -- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
    113. Re:Server cold war by benjymouse · · Score: 1

      The advantage here being...? It sounds like a cool feature, but what would I be doing where I would actually want to have object oriented programming in my shell?

      1. Because you don't need to format as text and parse again. This is cumbersome and brittle process. Scripts based on formatting and reparsing are error prone. All sorts of issues can crop up, like the locale set differently (causing the parsing to misinterpret dates or numbers), distro differences in tool default settings, subtle changes to output formats with new versions or sensitivity to spaces, quotes or other special characters in filenames etc. When you pass objects in PowerShell, datetime values are strongly typed datetime values and consumed as such in the next tool on the pipeline. Filters need not use grep expressions which risk matching more (or less) than intended.
      2. Objects can represent more complex structures, like trees or even graphs of objects. While you *could* come up with a text representation of a tree of objects, in reality only 2 dimensional (rows + columns) are workable with text serialization.
      3. PowerShell is actually intended for more than CLI. The cmdlets pass in-memory objects. Unlike bash, all cmdlets on a PS pipeline execute within the host process can consume, manipulate and produce in-memory objects of the host objects. This is huge, as this enables PS cmdlets and entire pipelines to be the basis of automation in GUI processes. Exchange Server uses this since 2007. In that case it is actually the Exchange Server GUI admin tool which is the PowerShell host. Upon issuing a command in the GUI, it will tell you what the PS pipeline looks like. And you can copy-and-paste it for later execution in a PowerShell CLI.
      4. Most of Windows API is already object-oriented (COM, WMI, .NET). While this is arguably only an advantage on Windows, it does mean that PS can consume and manipulate such objects rather than predominantly monolithic stream-in-out tools. Think how wget can download a page, multiple pages or an entire site, but it is not scriptable during the process. If you want a script to make decisions during the download you will author the script to issue more wget commands based on the output from the previous. If the wget was an object (Net.WebClient in PowerShell) your script can interact with the object while the state is carried over from method invocation to method invocation.

      These are just some of the advantages of using objects. There are more, and also some disadvantages, to be sure. But on the whole it allows for much more robust and readable scripting.

      --
      Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
    114. Re:Server cold war by Robert+Zenz · · Score: 1

      Linux is great, but it misses many of those features - for example, how do you connect to a remote PC with bash and run your commands there? Oh, you can't. With PowerShell you can easily do that.

      Yeah, right...UNIX, 30+ years, enough said.

    115. Re:Server cold war by shinzawai · · Score: 1

      VMware is not a customised Linux. Please educate yourself.

    116. Re:Server cold war by pnutjam · · Score: 1

      Too true!

      The only reason I learned linux is because I like to play with computers and I can't afford to play with expensive proprietary stuff. So I mucked around with Linux and discovered how well it suited many of the day to day tasks I perform. I have always managed majority Windows, or all Windows networks. One of the first things I do at a new job, is find an old pc to setup as a headless linux server. It gives me access to a wealth of tools that are just not available on Windows, or if they are would blow my budget.
      I can ssh in, start a screen session, and pull those big downloads into my Samba share. I can sniff network traffic and look for arp problems. I can run a wiki to quickly document things. I also windows imaging from my linux box.
      I wouldn't know half the things I know today if I had never learned linux. Maybe that's why all these MS only admins seem like such halfwits to me.

    117. Re:Server cold war by pnutjam · · Score: 1

      User's can't create groups in windows either. They could add individual accounts to each folders permissions, however in every company I've worked at this was discouraged, or disallowed. Users usually have read/write, but they could not modify permissions, otherwise they usually add people to their personal shared folder and forget about it.
      The proper way to do this would usually be to request a share or a group be created by the box's admin or root user.

    118. Re:Server cold war by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      Look at the Zune - why did Microsoft need to be in the music player business? Only because Apple was and succeeding and they were jealous.

      Yes, because that's how large corporations are run, not on the basis that there is a clear market opportunity present in an associated field to your own. If Apple could make billions of dollars from MP3 players, and others like Sony, Phillips et al tried to as well, why shouldn't Microsoft have a go?

      Pre-iPod, Apple were just a computer company too, like Microsoft.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    119. Re:Server cold war by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      Pre-iPod, Apple were just a computer company too, like Microsoft.

      Microsoft hasn't ever been a computer company, that I recall. Apple always has, so the iPod wasn't a big deal for them. Microsoft has re-branded some mice and keyboards but to the best of my knowledge has always been a software company. Both iPods and Zunes are computers, just small ones. It's a different skillset - one that Apple had 25 years of experience with at the time.

      Apple also makes operating systems and office software, but Sony makes computers and also makes cameras, lab equipment, and movies. This doesn't mean Microsoft or Apple should start a movie studio or start making lab equipment.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    120. Re:Server cold war by konohitowa · · Score: 1

      for example, how do you connect to a remote PC with bash and run your commands there? Oh, you can't.

      Wrong. I use ssh for that these days, although in the past the uu- and r- commands were used. Do you really think that Microsoft is the only company that realized that remote administration is a good thing? My God -- they were the last ones to the party.

    121. Re:Server cold war by konohitowa · · Score: 1

      Doh! I responded with the same info before reading this (although your response was a lot better than mine).

    122. Re:Server cold war by konohitowa · · Score: 1

      By the way, I would think exchange and email servers are quite critical for business functions

      Sadly they are critical. That's why we lost so many thousands of man-hours in productivity at my previous job due to the Exchange servers randomly dying. I don't doubt that you'll dismiss the IT guys as being a bunch of noobs, etc. but it was the largest Exchange installation in the world at the time, so that seems unlikely. During the 10 years I worked there, you could count on Exchange going down for at least an hour during any quarter and you could expect to lose connectivity for several minutes at a time during any week. There's no way they could ever make a claim anywhere close to 5 9's with it.

  4. How is this a radical departure? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    These just sound like incremental improvements. I'm not complaining but adding extra commandlets and features isn't a "radical departure". Plus, the GUI is optional on the current version of Windows Server.

    1. Re:How is this a radical departure? by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      It's not optional in the true sense of the word, the system boots up and initialises its video drivers, a window manager and then displays a graphical login prompt. After logging in, you still have a window manager and now have a cli based interface running in a window.

      A true non gui environment would have a full screen cli interface in text mode (i.e. no unnecessary loading of video drivers), and this interface would also be available over a serial console (serial consoles work much better remotely on slow links and over lights out systems, HP for instance supply CLI access for free and charge extra for video/keyboard redirection).

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    2. Re:How is this a radical departure? by QuantumRiff · · Score: 1

      Kind of, but if I remember right, Server 2008 core (without the gui) is missing Powershell, which is a massive hinderance to maintaining it..

      --

      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
    3. Re:How is this a radical departure? by ceswiedler · · Score: 1

      Did you read any of the stuff about how it's basically a VMWare competitor now, complete with the ability to migrate logical servers between hardware? I skimmed the article and I at least got that much.

    4. Re:How is this a radical departure? by afidel · · Score: 1

      Windows has had that capability since 2003, it's called EMS and the Special Administration Console.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    5. Re:How is this a radical departure? by zach_the_lizard · · Score: 1

      I don't know about Server 2008, but Server 2008 R2 core has powershell installed.

      --
      SSC
    6. Re:How is this a radical departure? by DavidRawling · · Score: 1

      This was absolutely true for Windows 2008, and they wised up to their utter stupidity in R2 (seriously, MS, how do you promote using PowerShell as the next big thing for administration, then leave it out of half the platform)? The problem was that there were elements of the .NET Framework (on which PowerShell is built) that would not run on Core.

      And I say this as someone who has deployed MS solutions for long enough that I figure they are effectively, but indirectly, paying my salary (I generally work for MS partners).

  5. Shhh! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is heavy secrecy?
    ROTFLMAObbq

  6. BUT THEY ALWAYS SAY THAT! by roc97007 · · Score: 5, Funny

    C'mon, Bill, do you really expect us to fall for that AGAIN?

    (Of course, some will... I'm depressed now...)

    --
    Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    1. Re:BUT THEY ALWAYS SAY THAT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      As usual, you're barking up the wrong tree.
      Bill Gates hasn't worked at Microsoft since 2006.

    2. Re:BUT THEY ALWAYS SAY THAT! by roc97007 · · Score: 1

      I guess I was yelling at the little icon to the right of the article, Mister Pedantic.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    3. Re:BUT THEY ALWAYS SAY THAT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Remember how in the past, each and every time, all the innovative sounding promised new features weren't in the actual shipped product, except for maybe an evil or annoying one?

      Sorry, but when reading MS press releases, I switch to politician mode.

      Rule 7783: If it exists, it's a lie! ^^

    4. Re:BUT THEY ALWAYS SAY THAT! by S77IM · · Score: 3, Funny

      FYI, that icon to the right of the article is not Mister Pedantic, it's Bill Gates.

        -- 77IM

      --
      Student: Is it true that the foundation of the universe is paradox?
      Master: Well, yes and no.
    5. Re:BUT THEY ALWAYS SAY THAT! by jazman_777 · · Score: 1

      C'mon, Bill, do you really expect us to fall for that AGAIN?

      Lucy, football, Charlie Brown. It must be fall.

      --
      Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
    6. Re:BUT THEY ALWAYS SAY THAT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second rate technology, led them into it in the first place, and continues to do so today." --Douglas Adams

      Swap in Steve Ballmer instead of Gates, and that statement is just as true today as it was back in 1995

    7. Re:BUT THEY ALWAYS SAY THAT! by roc97007 · · Score: 1

      Ok, that was funny.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    8. Re:BUT THEY ALWAYS SAY THAT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      C'mon, Bill, do you really expect us to fall for that AGAIN?

      (Of course, some will... I'm depressed now...)

      Who is Bill? Are you talking about the guy that stepped down as CEO 11 years ago and left the company completely 3 years ago? From still talking about Bill Gates to still joking about blue screens and DOS, seems /. perception of MS is woefully out of date.

    9. Re:BUT THEY ALWAYS SAY THAT! by roc97007 · · Score: 1

      Exactly. Or it's a feature that was already in the previous product with a new marketing spin. Or it is a new feature but it's implemented in a way that makes it not useful. Or it's a mushy "feature" (like "improved security", "improved stability") that regular users lack the resources to test.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    10. Re:BUT THEY ALWAYS SAY THAT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sure, it was a complete new code. It's a Linux Base with Wine improved to run MS aplications. :-)

  7. Heh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Windows Server. It's like military intelligence.

  8. Re:Integration is a powerful tool by alinuxguruofyore · · Score: 1

    Integration of MS products with MS products is not a reason to call something great. This applies if you replace MS with any other corporation.

    A products move from good to great is strongly based on its coupling and cohesion with other solutions. This is true for a software package, a hardware package, or a process. For example, Google Apps and Picassa have very little to no coupling and cohesion. Visual Studio and Azure have a very functional level of coupling and cohesion. Each is greater than the sum of their parts.

  9. Re:as an alternative by ByOhTek · · Score: 1

    *hands the troll a bone*

    Windows has been perfectly intuitive for me. Moreso than MacOS. I found Ubuntu and FreeBSD more intuitive than MacOS, sadly. Admittedly with FreeBSD, I had someone point me to the handbook first thing. What is "most intuitive" very much depends on the user.

    Oh, and I didn't need to install cards for printers on any of them. Usually I don't even need to download drivers separately (unless you count installing CUPS in FreeBSD).

    --
    Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
  10. O.o by lennier1 · · Score: 1

    Someone in Redmond realized that a server doesn't necessarily need a GUI???

    1. Re:O.o by bloodhawk · · Score: 1, Informative

      To be fair they did come to this realisation several years ago now. products like Exchange, DPM and even many windows commands are only fully accessible through CLI/powershell and current versions of win server can run headless for many tasks.

    2. Re:O.o by dave562 · · Score: 1

      They realized it a few years, but it looks like they are now thinking about making it mandatory.

      See "Windows Server Core"

    3. Re:O.o by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I get nothing from running headless systems. There is no reason not to have a gui to configure your web/app/streaming pron server

    4. Re:O.o by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sadly, since just about ANY FRIGGIN APPLICATION from any third party does, this means nothing for many years to come. This is also nothing new as there already exists headless versions of Windows since Windows 2003. They took something old that never took off, dusted it off and some people go all "shiny!!!" when its just the same old.

    5. Re:O.o by Locutus · · Score: 1

      this is what they learned from the Microsoft Linux Lab. It takes Microsoft about 10 years to figure stuff out and in the mean time, they just use marketing material like "Windows Server 8 is a Radical Departure From Previous Releases". There are so many PHB's who dictate technology based on this crap it's probably worth 30% of their revenue.

      LoB

      --
      "Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
    6. Re:O.o by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What happened to easy to use GUI i/f?

  11. the circle is complete by tverbeek · · Score: 1

    VMS -> WNT -> W2K -> W2003 -> W2008 -> VMS.

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
    1. Re:the circle is complete by tigersha · · Score: 1

      Getta Byte, Getta Byte, Getta Byte Byte Byte!

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
    2. Re:the circle is complete by Dekonega · · Score: 0

      With exception that Windows NT was not based on VMS but the OS/2.

    3. Re:the circle is complete by drsmithy · · Score: 1

      With exception that Windows NT was not based on VMS but the OS/2.

      Windows NT was designed by the same people who designed OpenVMS.

      It is no way related to OS/2 other than originally being built as a replacement for it.

  12. ... and the hype continues... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 1
    While the world is distracted with the Window 8 client

    .
    "The world"? Probably the funniest thing I read all day.

    1. Re:... and the hype continues... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The only thing I thought, "WTF is Windows 8 client?" Sooo, I'm with you there!

    2. Re:... and the hype continues... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, it was pretty inconsiderate of them to forget about the 1000 people who use Macs and the 10 people who use Linux.

  13. Workstationable? by Erelas · · Score: 1

    Will it still be able to be converted to a workstation OS like server2008 and R2, and, as a workstation, will it be a more seamless transition for users from Windows 7 than 8 proper?

    1. Re:Workstationable? by blair1q · · Score: 2

      Apparently, desktop versions will be more pad-like than windows-like.

      Server version with "GUI optional" implies you install the GUI package and get on with your workstationy stuff.

      As for 7 to 8, it looks like a whole new paradigm. Windows 7 is still, in look and feel, a windows-on-a-desktop-analog GUI in the Xerox PARC mold. The pad paradigm is a whole new kettle of fishsticks, even if you're using a mouse and keyboard instead of your digits.

  14. Doesn't that already exist? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Where have I heard of this before? Lets see... A server OS that has the option to be command line only and has in exceed of 2,300 command line functions.... Oh yeah... Unix/Linux.

    1. Re:Doesn't that already exist? by danbuter · · Score: 1

      MS is finally catching up. It's only 20 years behind! I know several "IT guys" who will be lost if the UI goes away, though.

    2. Re:Doesn't that already exist? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh.. your car has four wheels too? We must have the same car ! Isn't that amazing?

    3. Re:Doesn't that already exist? by the+linux+geek · · Score: 1

      Where have I heard of this before? A server OS that has the option to run on the PDP-10, is designed for interactive rather than batch operation, and supports applications from a variety of vendors..... Oh yeah... TENEX/TWENEX.

    4. Re:Doesn't that already exist? by exomondo · · Score: 1

      I know several "IT guys" who will be lost if the UI goes away, though.

      You aren't going to be able to do much without a UI. The GUI will be optional though.

  15. Who Cares. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Who cares? Does anyone still use their bug ridden, virus prone, products?

  16. PowerShell by danbuter · · Score: 1

    I'm glad PowerShell is getting an upgrade. It's already very good, but little tweaks can easily make it much better.

  17. LOL Windows... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anybody else still have nightmares about back when they used to run that shoddy OS?

    Slashdot: news for nerds, stuff that matters and Microsoft Windows stories?

    Can we please get back to bashing Apple now?

  18. Catch up by mixmasta · · Score: 1

    And with that Windows catches up with the late 70's. :P

    --
    #6495ED - cornflower blue
    1. Re:Catch up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      and other still need to catch up with what is being offered in the Microsoft ecosystem with Windows 8. Only an idiot and ignorant fool will make a statement like this, and has no clue what has been achieved by Microsoft and shared in the last 2 days

  19. How? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How would you do anything? You can't buy apps from the Azure store without a GUI. This will never work.

    Remember! a GUI is like a fancy menu. Menus make easy things simple and hard things imposable

  20. feature creep? by blair1q · · Score: 1

    its command list will exceed 2,300 native commandlets

    Holy fuck. I don't even know how to process that number of commands to remember.

    1. Re:feature creep? by dino2gnt · · Score: 1

      As long as it has tab completion, you won't.

      --
      Future events such as these may affect you in the future!
    2. Re:feature creep? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 1

      One of the things that made Unix so powerful was that you only really had to understand 20 or so commands, which could be composed in arbitrary ways to get you the behavior you needed. I would guess that many of those 2300 commands are just hard-coded implementations of commonly used compositions of other commands, or that the same tasks could be accomplished by composition.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    3. Re:feature creep? by tgd · · Score: 2

      Thats how PowerShell works, too...

      2300 "commands" really means there are a few hundred objects with some number of operations you can take on them, and you do so by chaining them together like named pipes. Imagine, if you will, that every config file on your Unix system was an object that you could pipe commands in and out of. That's how you have to compare it to Unix.

      So, in some ways its easier. Rather than having to do piping through grep/sed/whatever to switch some setting in a config file, you just call an operation on that object in PowerShell, then you can pipe that object to something else to do another action.

    4. Re:feature creep? by Hatta · · Score: 1

      For comparison, English has about 500,000 words.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    5. Re:feature creep? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep, I envision:

      c:> powershell
      PS C:> Get- ......

      A hundred times before figuring out which command I need. The really need to start grouping the powershell cmdlets somehow, like:

      PS C:> exchangemgmt Get-

      To quickly home in on the command you need.

    6. Re:feature creep? by blair1q · · Score: 1

      so every config file object inherits an interface with grep/sed/whatever on it?

      it better, or i'm going to have to hack around it

    7. Re:feature creep? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Luckily, you don't have to.

      Everything is queriable through the magic of reflection. Data comes back as structured objects, too, which you can consume without parsing and even use tab completion on properties.

    8. Re:feature creep? by blair1q · · Score: 1

      name them

    9. Re:feature creep? by necrogram · · Score: 1

      thats not that many once you think about. with all the snap-ins they have already that ship with os and the few products i use that have their own, i'm sitting at over 1,100. one of powershell's biggest advantages is the standardization of cmdlet names. plus you dont have to remember all the cmdlets, get-command is your friend

    10. Re:feature creep? by JonySuede · · Score: 1

      powershell is an object oriented command-line shell based on introspection so you can always know the command available on the object you have selected using the get-command call so 2300 commands is not that bad if they are not 2300 globally visible commands.

      --
      Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
    11. Re:feature creep? by nschubach · · Score: 1

      Part of the simplicity of those 20 commands revolve around the everything-as-a-file architecture of *nix though.

      I'm sure the 2300 commandlets involve everything from interacting with files to registry settings to services...

      Would it have been so hard for them to deprecate the registry interface by making it look like a folder to the command line?

      Services could technically be placed in the same boat using file links: (I have to confess, I don't know if this is even possible in *nix. It's pretty much off the cuff thinking.)
      /windows/services/enabled/some.exe
      /windows/services/active/some.exe
      ... where 'del /active/some.exe' would trigger the application to end if permissions allowed and remove the link from that folder (Removing it from enabled would disable it.) And in that case, all you need to worry about is file permissions.

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
    12. Re:feature creep? by Bucky24 · · Score: 1

      http://dictionary.reference.com/
      There's a link at the bottom to browse by letter.

      --
      All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
    13. Re:feature creep? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'll get you started.

      A

      Now you can do the rest.

    14. Re:feature creep? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      While UNIX only has 20 or so important commands, each of those have at least 10 --flags that need to be in your head as well for them to be useful. Also keep in mind that as a UNIX admin, "perl" is one of those 20 commands. I'd say that the new powershell just might come close to being as useful as what us UNIX folks are used to having at our fingertips. Hell, I might even try it out.

      If I were to guess at how many UNIX "commands" that I need to know about, my guess would be it's over 2000. Stuff like "grep -i error /var/log/important/* | tail -f" or "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get install build-essential apache2-mpm-prefork php5 mysql-server && /etc/init.d/apache2 stop" to me counts as one command, but Microsoft is stupid enough to make all of that stuff different commands instead of just a few --flags or intuitive modes (update, install..).

    15. Re:feature creep? by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 1

      Yes and that is why there are whole books written on regular expressions. If you try to do anything non-trivial in *nix on the command line that you haven't done before chances are you will spend 30min googling to find an example and someone will have a really cool 15 character way of doing it with sed or something. You'll get there, you'll get better at regex etc and need help less but non-trivial things are just that non-trivial and take a lot of thought an knowledge to do well.

    16. Re:feature creep? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You missed a few already...

    17. Re:feature creep? by Chokolad · · Score: 1

      Would it have been so hard for them to deprecate the registry interface by making it look like a folder to the command line?

      Registry actually looks like a folder to Powershell command-line, since about Vista/Win2008 server times.

    18. Re:feature creep? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Since *nix is file based, pipes and awk like commands make sense--it's file based operations.

      Powershell is more like a faster (and better in some cases) version of Python for windows.

    19. Re:feature creep? by blair1q · · Score: 1

      But does it load like a true directory structure, or does it load like one big file?

      I mean, if you're going to change one value at the end of a long registry path, does your disk spool for a tenth of a second or for 30 seconds?

    20. Re:feature creep? by blair1q · · Score: 2

      But it assumes the command name is sufficient to understand what it operates on.

      Probably 70% as useful as "man -k" ever was.

    21. Re:feature creep? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Honestly, it is kind of awesome, and I hope something similar shows up for non-MS OSes.

    22. Re:feature creep? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I haven't used powershell but my understanding of it is the same. It seems much more context aware of the data moving through pipes. The only downside i saw was manipulating data between programs? You would have to use a tool that was also context aware. Where as with linux it is all plain text and human readable. The downside of linux would be that you are often forced to manipulate the data between programs because the programs aren't context aware.

    23. Re:feature creep? by Guspaz · · Score: 1

      Studies actually put it over a million now, but the core set of English words needed to communicate clearly are far smaller. VOA Special English contains about 1500 words, and is sufficient for Voice of America to use it for news broadcasts in parts of the world. Text written in Special English might seem simple or childlike to a native speaker, but it's hard to argue that it doesn't succeed in conveying the information despite representing a tiny fraction of the English language.

    24. Re:feature creep? by JonySuede · · Score: 1

      You got it backward, you select an object first, then you ask it what operations does it knows.

      and if you need help on a specific method, function or alias, you call get-help <thing you want help on>
       

      --
      Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
    25. Re:feature creep? by DavidRawling · · Score: 1

      C:> powershell
      PS C:> Get-Command *foo*

      e.g.:
      PS C:> Get-Command *cert*
      Lists all commands (functions, extensions etc) containing "cert".

    26. Re:feature creep? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Get-Command -Module exchangemgmt

      There you go, all the commands in the exchangemgmt module.

      There's also a best practice that your cmdlets be named Verb-XyNoun, where Xy is a common two-letter prefix for your product (Exchange's powershell API pre-dates that practice, though). So you could also do:

      Get-Command *-Xy*

      to get all the commands with the prefix you care about.

    27. Re:feature creep? by spiralx · · Score: 1

      The former given that the registry is basically just a database.

    28. Re:feature creep? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't even know how to process that number of commands to remember.

      Then you're really going to love these. 2,300 easy to use commands like:

      Unregister-PSSessionConfiguration
      ConvertTo-HTML -Property Name, Size > C:\mystuff.htm
      Reset-ComputerMachinePassword -server DC64

    29. Re:feature creep? by spiralx · · Score: 1

      All PS shell commands have a regular forum of Verb-Noun, common verbs are Get, Set, New, Out, Write, Invoke, Format, Add and Remove. So Get-Location and Set-Location, Get-ChildItem, Invoke-History and Remove-Item - which are in turn aliased to pwd, cd, ls, r and rm. So you can be fairly sure what New-WebServiceProxy or Get-DhcpServer does.

    30. Re:feature creep? by blair1q · · Score: 1

      how do i find Get-DhcpServer when all I know is "find me how to get a DHCP server".

      "man -k dhcp" will get me 85% of the way there.

    31. Re:feature creep? by blair1q · · Score: 1

      A database that's in one big file. And takes forever to load. It's the main reason Windows PCs slow down as they age and you add stuff to them, even if you don't add stuff to your startup. Software that stored thousands of items in the registry has a big footprint in your boot time.

    32. Re:feature creep? by spiralx · · Score: 1

      Type get-dh and press Tab? Having a regular naming convention means it's easy to guess what a command will be, and there's always get-command *dhcp* if you're really stumped for what the command is, and help get-dhcpserver for help (actually, help get-dh would probably be enough to uniquely identify the command). Under linux you've got chmod vs. ls -l (or stat), or cd vs pwd to set and get permissions and working directory respectively, which is fine once you've learnt a command, but doesn't help in guessing what the command is, nor what it's opposite is.

    33. Re:feature creep? by blair1q · · Score: 1

      i was playing with PowerShell today, and discovered "get-alias", and within its output discovered that "man" is one of the default aliases. "man whatever" does what "man -k whatever" would do.

      i need to dig at it some more, see what it can do

    34. Re:feature creep? by blair1q · · Score: 1

      better:

      i was playing with PowerShell today, and discovered "get-alias", and within its output discovered that "man" is one of the default aliases. "man dhcp" doesn't return much, but it looks like it returns just what "man -k dhcp" should

      i need to dig at it some more, see what it can do

    35. Re:feature creep? by JonySuede · · Score: 1

      Powershell is awesome to automate the administrative tasks in outlook 2010 server and for general automation in windows 7 and windows server 2008 R2.
      If you are interested the best place to start is http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee332526.aspx .

      By the way, I am a java architect, not an Microsoft shills, but between 10% to 20% of my time at job is officially dedicated to the wonderful role called 'technology scout' and when I see a good tech I do not care from who it came even though it is still weird to recommend a Microsoft solution...

      --
      Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
  21. quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer

  22. three year delay in copying Apple by peter303 · · Score: 0

    An improvement over Windows which took nine years to copy properly

    1. Re:three year delay in copying Apple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yes, it took them 9 years to copy Apple's awesome server. I mean I don't even know a single person or business that doesn't think of Apple, when they think server. Thankfully when Jobs came back he said "we're going to focus on servers and stick it to Microsoft."

    2. Re:three year delay in copying Apple by greed · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Worse than that: They're copying OS/2, which they helped write. (OS/2 could boot to a non-GUI text console for servers and ATMs.)

      Heck, they're copying one of their own SAFE MODE boots.

      Or maybe, They're copying DOS.

    3. Re:three year delay in copying Apple by Bucky24 · · Score: 1

      The company I work for doesn't think of Apple. We run FreeBSD and more recently Centos on our servers. Though maybe that's just because our CEO is a UNIX fan...

      --
      All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
    4. Re:three year delay in copying Apple by gubers33 · · Score: 1

      Apple server is horrible on the enterprise level, anyone who works in a data center will tell you that. The security and the features just are not there. Linux and Windows Servers are best suited for enterprise needs. Windows Server has had a a light weight version which boots into command line text called Server Core. I realize you are an Apple fan-boy and probably and probably never touched a server, but do some research before you post.

      --
      Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
    5. Re:three year delay in copying Apple by gubers33 · · Score: 1

      Windows has had a version of server called Server Core, where it boots into the command line only to save resources and minimize attack space. Quit being an ignorant fan boy and do some research.

      --
      Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
    6. Re:three year delay in copying Apple by terjeber · · Score: 1

      Wow, that is the clueless statement of the year. Windows server is a copy of something Apple has done? Really? What? Does Apple even have a server OS? The answer to that is clearly a big resounding "no" since, when Apple needed a huge server infrastructure to support their iCloud initiative, they turned to Microsoft and Amazon for help. You do know that iCloud is running on Windows and Azure, don't you?

    7. Re:three year delay in copying Apple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Woosh!

  23. SendMessage and WinProc by PimpDawg · · Score: 1

    I'll believe it when these functions quit working. The whole thing is still heavily based on the windows message pump and a HUGE legacy C API that does everything under the windows hood. On top of that there's a COM layer and on top of those there's now a .NET layer. But the foundation is still the same 9 gazillion C calls and WM_ messages.

  24. Radical departure... by EmagGeek · · Score: 2

    ... by turning a PC into an oversized, user-unfriendly smart phone.

    1. Re:Radical departure... by gubers33 · · Score: 1

      Servers are not supposed to be user friendly with a nice interface they are supposed to be workhorses. Adding more tasks into Powershell so you can script them is the right thing to do.

      --
      Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
  25. Focus of Win8 is on developer productivity by davide+marney · · Score: 1

    MS has put a lot of effort into developer productivity in Windows 8, especially when crossing boundaries between the client, server, and cloud. Visual Studio is now buttressed with a new version of Expression Blend that edits both HTML5 and XAML. The editor has a live preview that lets you navigate a site with an inboard browser, then dive into the code on a single rendered element, even if it is dynamically generated. Likewise, there are new remote debugging tools that lets the developer go from a running web app to the output of the server to the code that generates the output, all in one view. There are single-click deployment tools for publishing to server, app store, and cloud.

    This all goes /way/ beyond what Eclipse can do. Very impressive; tooling has always been a strength for MS.

    --
    "We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
  26. Re:as an alternative by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    *hands the troll a bone*

    Don't. Just don't. It only pushes other comments further down the page. The thing to do with trolls is ignore them; we have moderation for a reason.

    There are few things that make me facepalm more than seeing an obvious troll with dozens of comments attached to it. Yes, I'm quite aware that I just added one myself.

  27. Not all video chipsets have a text mode by tepples · · Score: 1

    A true non gui environment would have a full screen cli interface in text mode (i.e. no unnecessary loading of video drivers)

    Which would require the hardware to support a text mode. Not all video chipsets on all platforms do. But if only enough driver is loaded to support a terminal emulator, and the operating system still supports old-skool serial consoles, I agree with you.

    1. Re:Not all video chipsets have a text mode by Rutulian · · Score: 1

      Uh...what combination of hardware do you know of that Windows Server runs on (Intel-based) that doesn't support a text mode?

      If it's really a problem, you can just use the framebuffer to draw a console without loading an entire graphics subsystem, which is what many linux distributions currently do.

    2. Re:Not all video chipsets have a text mode by tepples · · Score: 1

      Uh...what combination of hardware do you know of that Windows Server runs on (Intel-based) that doesn't support a text mode?

      I was under the impression that Macintosh computers with Intel CPU didn't have a text mode. Or do they have a hidden text mode that's accessible only from Boot Camp?

    3. Re:Not all video chipsets have a text mode by Rutulian · · Score: 1

      Well, the Mac Pro uses standard ATI and NVidia video cards, so a text mode is definitely supported by the card. The operating system and bootloader don't support a text mode, but the hardware does. So if you get a different operating system on there it will be able to switch to a text mode just fine. Linux distributions have been doing this for ages, although there has been recent favor to using the framebuffer instead of a raw text mode for the console in distributions like Ubuntu.

  28. Re:as an alternative by gubers33 · · Score: 0

    Use a Mac with no security at all and you can have your server hacked into in a heartbeat. Also Apple is no where near Microsoft in terms of virtualization, not saying Microsoft is best at it VMware would probably take the cake there especially with their integration with the Cisco UCS blades. Microsoft servers are great for certain business needs with different tastes of Linux for others, but I would never ever want a Mac server in my Data Center.

    --
    Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
  29. Hyper-V improvements are somewhat appealing. by Mordermi · · Score: 2

    Their claims of performance enhancements seem promising and I think the Live Storage Migration feature could really come in handy.

    Of course I won't jump on board right away, but it's definitely something I'll try to get a hold of to set up in a test environment.

  30. Not tring to be flamebait but.. by stackOVFL · · Score: 1

    Why doesn't Apple take advantage of M$'s decision to go batshit stupid? If Apple marketed their desktop OS for PC's in general they could earn even more insane amounts of money. I know it would be difficult to support all the different configurations out there but still it just looks SO f'n tempting. They could even call the next Apple OS "Couching tiger, hidden bitch slap".

    1. Re:Not tring to be flamebait but.. by gubers33 · · Score: 2

      Because Mac's are not built with the Administrators in mind, nor the business market. Microsoft has more viruses, that could be because of Mac's obscurity or it could be because Microsoft is easily to write viruses for we may never know nor will I debate you on that. But Mac's have more security holes in them than Windows. I am not talking about viruses, I am talking holes and exploits which is what Pwn2Own is all about and why Mac's lose every year. Also Windows are easier to manage and deploy because Microsoft developed the tools for Windows such as WDS. Mac's are good on the personal user level, but not on the enterprise level. Plus the price would be tool high for any company to want to touch especially when you can just run little thin clients for Windows if the user is not doing anything that needs heavy processing power.

      --
      Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
    2. Re:Not tring to be flamebait but.. by amliebsch · · Score: 1

      Is a couching tiger one that lays on the sofa all day watching daytime television?

      --
      If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
  31. Except for a huge missing feature... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    To this day, a server on a Windows NT/AD network still completely lacks the ability to give me a fucking list of who all is logged onto the (whole) network right now and where they're logged in from and what the timestamp was when they logged in. In a large Windows Active Directory network, it's always been a big fucking mystery who all is on your network at any given point in time. Since day one of VMS,even before it ever DecNET or TCP/IP or Pathworks, and was just a single multiuser computer, right up until today's can't-kill-it-therefore-it-must-be-a-zombie OpenVMS running on Itanic hardware of today,.you can type in a simple command and get a list of all your logged-on users.

    True, a Windows AD network is composed of multiple, almost-peer-like workstations and servers, but if AD would've been designed correctly in the first place, it would've included a master database that contained all workstation/session logon and logoff records, and some kind of heartbeat system that detected workstations/sessions that got the rug pulled out from under them in a disorderly fashion and generated the appropriate logoff records, and that you could get a simple listing of who's on the network right now, from any domain controller.

    1. Re:Except for a huge missing feature... by DavidRawling · · Score: 1

      You want to replicate a continually changing list of console sessions for tens or even hundreds of thousands of workstations, across a global network, for a report that no-one will ever read? I mean seriously, a report of some sort showing 200,000 people logged onto 250,000 devices (workstations, multiple logons, terminal servers, admin sessions etc) - what the hell are you going to do with it? Think enterprise scale here, not small business.

      OK and now what are you going to do about the site that got disconnected because the WAN went down for 12 hours? Are those users still online? What happens when the 2Mbps link comes back up and you have to replicate 200,000 changes from the rest of the world? Lots of enterprises can't get 100Mbps WAN links for every site for tuppence a week - or indeed, for any price.

      What will you do about notebooks not connected to the LAN? It's still a current logon. Someone is still accessing corporate information.

      What about sessions that have been idle for 15 minutes? Is that still a logon? What about a session idle for a day? Over a weekend? (Don't give me that crap about "logging out is the policy" because users don't and won't do it).

      The whole concept of having a single database with all current sessions, up to date, in a form that is usable, went out the door with NetWare (oh, and NetWare/VMS never told you who was on the network, it was about who was on the server). In case you didn't notice, there's a small difference. The horse has bolted, found a mare, had multiple foals, died, been picked clean, and its bones are now bleached in the sun. There's no point locking the barn door.

  32. Objects are shit by mangu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Linux shells still pass data as text, when passing objects would make so much more sense and give a lot more options

    Sorry, but no, passing data as objects sucks.

    Text is the one and only universal interface. Passing data as objects limits you to one system. If you have powershell objects you need a powershell environment to use them.

    When I want to get data from a website into my database text is the only format that both sides understand. Putting it into more general terms, when I want to get data from X to put it into Y text is the only format that both sides understand.

    I can scan and OCR text from old books and newspapers. I can print text. I can edit text in any machine from a PDP-11 to a smart phone. When I'm limited to a slow and/or high latency connection text is the only format that works. I can use vi to edit a data file in a remote Unix system using a 300 bps modem if I need to. I can speak text on a phone for someone else to type it at the other end.

    When I'm managing an important system that *must* keep running under emergency situations only text will do.

    Object oriented system administration is bullshit.

    1. Re:Objects are shit by Your.Master · · Score: 2

      Text is merely a special case of object-oriented data passing. There's really no reason the data cannot be marshalled to text at the endpoints (both on the way into, and out of, powershell).

      After all, in most situations what passing text is, is marshalling the data in every application, both on the way in and on the way out. The program is under no obligation to keep it in textual form within its own processing and for many applications that would be absurd.

      You're even implying that when you talk about OCR-ing text and printing text. That's marshalling between non-electronic forms and electronic forms, at the endpoints.

      Besides, text isn't all that universal when you step out of the English and English-like Latin languages. Dealing with mixed RTL and LTR text is pretty much a nightmare, every time.

    2. Re:Objects are shit by AstrumPreliator · · Score: 1

      So tell me, what happens if EBCDIC characters are passed when ASCII/UTF-8/Unicode characters are expected?

    3. Re:Objects are shit by mzs · · Score: 1

      $ man dd

    4. Re:Objects are shit by godefroi · · Score: 1

      If only there were some system, some abstraction layer, that would allow objects to be represented as text. Hmm.

      Maybe in the future.

      --
      Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
  33. Re:I agree ! by 0123456 · · Score: 1

    Those stupid people on kernel.org using IIS. No wonder they got hacked. Morons !!

    As far as I'm aware, Kernel.org was hacked using compromised user credentials. Kind of hard to protect a server which lets users log in remotely if said users lose the credentials required to log in and don't even realise they did so.

  34. Bash runs real objects by mangu · · Score: 1

    I think you have no idea of what the Unix shell does, you are just parroting M$ marketese.

    Bash can pass objects from one module to the other, that's what the pipe is for. The Unix shell is perfectly compatible with any feature of any language that has a Unix version because it can run anything that runs on the system.

    For example, you need some feature that Perl has but the shell lacks?

    cat test.dat | perl -p -e "s/PowerShell is great/PowerShell is a piece of shit/g"

    A shell language isn't meant to have everything plus the kitchen sink built in. The Unix shell runs on servers that may be embedded into a wide range of hardware, you shouldn't assume you'll have all the CPU, memory, and storage capacity to run an object oriented system with thousands of built-in commands.

    1. Re:Bash runs real objects by vux984 · · Score: 1

      Bash can pass objects from one module to the other, that's what the pipe is for.

      I think you have no idea what "objects" are, and are just parroting linux fanboism.

      Piping a character stream from one program to the next is not "passing objects".

      And the windows shell runs on things that have, at the very least Windows Embedded, and you can assume there will be a certain threshold of minimum specs. Powershell isn't not going to push you over the top.

  35. Has anyone noticed.... by Hasai · · Score: 1

    Server Core, PowerShell . . . . Has anyone noticed how Windows has been looking more and more like Linux as of late?

    --

    Regards;

    Hasai

    1. Re:Has anyone noticed.... by gubers33 · · Score: 1

      Isn't that a good thing?

      --
      Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
    2. Re:Has anyone noticed.... by EvanED · · Score: 1

      PowerShell (and it's "cmdlets") is one of those places where I wish Linux looked more like Windows...

    3. Re:Has anyone noticed.... by will_die · · Score: 1

      That has been the case since Server 2008, look at IIS 7.

  36. Screenshot! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here's a screenshot of the NEW Windows 8.
    (You'll have to use your imagination a little here....)

    PS C:\>

    Tada!!!

  37. I am amused by Toreo+asesino · · Score: 2

    Every time there's a new article about Windows/Microsoft anything, ever, no matter what the subject 90% of the posts try and just poo-poo it. In the meantime, the real world will (normally) pick the right tool for the job and ignore the petty politics & gripes that gets in the way of real discussion which seems to be common-place here.

    IMHO Windows does try to "be" linux as Linux is so flexible as to run on anything from $20 routers to incredably scalable multi-CPU servers. There is some overlap of course, by largely the two technologies service different needs IMO.

    So calm down kids, we can all be friends, see? Some of us like MS toys, some of us prefer others. Let's try and not flame-war each other ok?

    --
    throw new NoSignatureException();
    1. Re:I am amused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      IMHO Windows does try to "be" linux

      They're gonna make it free??

    2. Re:I am amused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Every time there's a new article about Windows/Microsoft anything, ever, no matter what the subject 90% of the posts try and just poo-poo it. In the meantime, the real world will (normally) pick the right tool for the job and ignore the petty politics & gripes that gets in the way of real discussion which seems to be common-place here.

      IMHO Windows does try to "be" linux as Linux is so flexible as to run on anything from $20 routers to incredably scalable multi-CPU servers. There is some overlap of course, by largely the two technologies service different needs IMO.

      So calm down kids, we can all be friends, see? Some of us like MS toys, some of us prefer others. Let's try and not flame-war each other ok?

      Thats all okay.. the problem which people face is dealing with the hypocrisy. Call command line shells stupid ignoring them and then adopt the concept calling it a radical departure.

    3. Re:I am amused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Every time there's a new article about Windows/Microsoft anything, ever, no matter what the subject 90% of the posts try and just poo-poo it. In the meantime, the real world will (normally) pick the right tool for the job and ignore the petty politics & gripes that gets in the way of real discussion which seems to be common-place here.

      You almost had me there, in the real world IT is tied to enterprise license agreements. Every company I've worked for has had some sort of MS license agreement that assures that MS gets millions in each year, while IT is stuck using it. It's not entirely bad though, because these same guys aren't comfortable in *nix and that's job security for the rest of us.

      IMHO Windows does try to "be" linux as Linux is so flexible as to run on anything from $20 routers to incredably scalable multi-CPU servers. There is some overlap of course, by largely the two technologies service different needs IMO.

      Yes and no. Windows Server is actually quite good in terms of Domain/user/email management. I have yet to run into any windows server machine in an environment where every second counts, such as highly-time accurate simulations (IRIG-run), or any other instance where stability and timeliness are a necessity. And from the summary:

      PowerShell has gotten an overhaul and its command list will exceed 2,300 native commandlets in Windows Server 8

      So, MS is tired of getting blown away by *nix in the server market and finally decided "if you can't beat them, join them"? This really sounds like MS has finally caught on to what *nix server setups have known for years, you don't need bloat eating processor cycles. I don't really give a crap about a weather widget on a machine that likely doesn't even have a dedicated monitor. I also want to be able to use some sort of simple display, a keyboard, and be able to do any configuration tweaks/setup necessary. Sorry, but MS-DOS just won't cut it, at least PowerShell is a step in the right direction, even if it is cumbersome, verbose, and not as powerful as a simple Bash/Csh/Ksh shell. I find IO redirection to be a necessity, last I could tell MS still hasn't caught on there.

    4. Re:I am amused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Let's try and not flame-war each other ok?

      No.

    5. Re:I am amused by overlordofmu · · Score: 1

      No flaming, but it would seem that you and I would both likely concede that the "real world" will pick that with which it is familiar, not that which is the right tool for the job.

      Until the right tools are being chosen and not the familiar one, the flaming is actually valid criticism of people that only know hammers thinking and therefore seeing all problems as nails.

      Consider this a retaliatory flame to your pre-emptive flame against flames.

  38. Re:I agree ! by amliebsch · · Score: 1

    Not root credentials. Yet the server was rooted...

    --
    If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
  39. Neither windows nor unix by jmkrtyuio · · Score: 2

    Its not very windows like lately that to accomplish typical normal useful system administration on a windows machine requires copy and pasting arcane powershell gibberish from KB articles.

    1. Re:Neither windows nor unix by gewalker · · Score: 2

      Google comparison

      "powershell sucks" => 138 results
      "perl sucks" => 7,780 results
      "bash sucks" =-> 3,630
      "zsh sucks" => 48 results

      PowerShell is looking competitive

      "awk sucks" 486 results -- Does this imply PowerShell sucks 28% as much as awk? Probably should avoid from PowerShell then.

      I have found awk useful in the past (though would normal perl today), I rarely find PowerShell useful, but then again, I don't admin Windows servers -- I've written lots of Windows software and lots of Unix software (many flavors) -- But I give regular thanks to God that I don't ever have to admin a bunch of Windows servers.

  40. Not Windows but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There's an argument to make that it's not actually Windows.

    Instead it is now OS X.

  41. Is it still £200 per licence? :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nothing, and I mean NOTHING will save Micro$oft from an ultimate demise if they do not slash their price for home users. It's that simple. You can make it do AMAZING things, but people will a)not upgrade to it b)install illegal copies of it and c)be more inclined to consider other o/s that are 1/10th of the price (for example MacOS)... I am not remotely interested in upgrading to Windows 8. I have an iPhone and run Windows 7. I don't want a Mac either. What I want is to be able to pay Micro$haft $29.99 for the latest version of it's operating system, get a 5 user licence like the Mac crowd do, and I am sure there are many more like me... and that would also kill piracy of Windows in the western world.

  42. Re:as an alternative by terjeber · · Score: 1

    I would never ever want a Mac server in my Data Center

    And neither would Apple it seems, at least not for big stuff like their new Cloud platform, which runs on Azure (Windows) and AWS (Linux I presume, but do not know)

  43. Unix like? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So it's becoming more Unix like? Quick job there Bill, welcome to the 60's

  44. OH SV8 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So now that the Caldera-Darl-thingy-Novell-WhatEverOSisUnixOrLinuxIsOurs is over M$ feels sticky free to release a SV5/Windows8 server since Sum Microsystems was bought by Oracle and savaged and no longer exists least the bones.

    Lordy lordy LoL.

    Me thinks I just might shuffle my tired old sh feet over to GrokLaw and waite to see what words do erupt.

    Toodles

    --//??//[][]

  45. Re:as an alternative by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No cards to install for printers.

    you're doing it wrong.

  46. Re:as an alternative by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

    I use Mac, PC, Linux, Unix at work and at home.

    When it comes to virtualization, VMWare infrastructure is the better way to go. No need to worry about the underlying OS licensing/etc. Otherwise, there are VMWare versions for both Mac & Windows. Parallels is also an option.

    The fact that you state that Microsoft servers are great for certain business needs (insinuating that you have them in your dat center), but then in the same virtual breath state that you'd never want a Mac server in your data center tells me you a) know nothing about it (so why have it) or b) are a biased asshat.

    Choose your poison.

    --
    -- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
  47. Re:Match the qulity and the price point. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It will be like Xbox, MS will have to pay people to use it.

    oh of course you mean like every other console maker starts by doing.

    IMHO, the sooner MS runs out of money the better off all of will be.

    naturally you're too retarded to install a different operating system so you need the demise of microsoft just so another option has to present itself.

  48. Still using Windows XP - why should I care by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Still using Windows XP, why should I care about Windows 8

  49. Text is no different than objects. by master_p · · Score: 1

    Text is not a magical thing that just works out of the blue. Text requires as much support as objects do. Text requires encoding specifications, fonts that reflect those encoding specifications, editors that understand those encoding specifications and use that fonts, etc.

    Even if text is simple ASCII, you still need a program to print those bytes to the console. You still need ASCII, in the first place, to be understood by all subsystems in the same way. If you had two computers or two programs that used a different encoding, they couldn't talk to each other, even if text was all they exchanged. You still need a font. You still need a console display.

    It just happens that text was there first before objects, and therefore the infrastructure to support text is already up and running. Had objects been invented first, you would not have said that text is the universal interface; you would have said that objects is the universal interface, because everyone would understand objects.

  50. So what about remote access? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So you strip out the GUI now without terminal services how do you remote to the box? Telnet??? Gee isn't that secure!

  51. Yeah, get to re-learn where the put everything by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I just love having to figure out where they put everything, again.

    They change add/remove programs to programs, they change from OS to OS where system restore is, they change and now have two 'property' selections for printers. This is just stuff off the top of my head.

    Try leaving a path for the classic style and leave well enough alone. I have having to support XP/Vista/Win7 and remember where one thing is on one OS vs another.

  52. Re:as an alternative by gubers33 · · Score: 1

    Why it is is because large scale management for Microsoft servers are not that there for some tasks. I said Microsoft servers are good for certain tasks not all tasks. And the virtual servers we have are all running on VMware ESX, not Microsoft. There is some test servers set up using HyperV, but they aren't used for anything other than testing. On the security end, many critical issues with Mac OS take longer to be fixed than that of Linux or Microsoft with Linux probably being the fastest. Example being with the certs from about two weeks ago, Linux and Microsoft removed them nearly a full week before Apple. The Certs issue was unique because you could remove them yourself, but I expect faster response on such an issue. If you wanted to use a server that you would typically use Windows for a Citrix XenApp Server, it would not be possible nor would it be possible for the clients. Yes, Citrix has a client for Mac, BUT no USB support our company uses PnP devices. Could you uses a Mac Server as a file server without an issues, probably, but why diversify my data center more than needed?

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    Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.