Cederic is a different poster than me, so using his post to infer things about my perspective is a bit problematic. Regarding how well Apple has served various markets, see my other post-- it has photo examples of the sorts of gouging they do / did. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4603751&cid=45800583
I have screenshots of past "Apple Challenges" Ive done, if youre interested. Heres one from 2011: http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5064/5568018354_6d0b09d595_o.jpg Youll note that the HP has double the RAM, a better processor, and a substantially better video card, and costs $1000 less.
Its generally been like that for some time; the Apple margin has gotten better in some of the more competitive areas, but generally they have been insanely overpriced compared to what you get. And I really dont buy any nonsense about lasting longer, since all of the parts come from the same manufacturers, the same countries, etc.
Heck, you can even look at the Mac Pro from this year. Ignore the graphics card, and all of a sudden the Mac is WAY more expensive than anything comparable: they charge $3000 to UPGRADE the processor to a Xeon which only costs $2400 retail; they charge $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB of ECC RAM; buying the whole 32GB on the market (newegg) would only cost $350. At least in the case of the RAM thats more than a 100% markup over retail. Its generally true that its cheaper to buy the Mac with the base specs, then buy the upgrades you want new off of Amazon or Newegg, and youll not only save substantial money, youll have the base-specced parts as freebies to boot.
To be fair Apple isnt the only one who does this; look at Dell server harddrive or RAM prices, and youll see the same sort of gouging (dell charges ~$400 for $200 WD RE5 drives, etc). Its just that by far Apple has been the worst offender, and theyre the only ones with a contingent of fans who defend their practice.
You mean like pricing a Mac Pro $2k less than you can buy the individual parts for it?
In the last 10 years that is the one example of decent pricing you can give for Apple. In just about every other case Apple's markup over the industry baseline has been about 100%. Asus has a $1000 premium laptop? Apple sells the exact same specs for $2000.
And how much do you think a PC is worth after a year?
"Brand appeal" may explain insane resell value, but it doesnt justify it.
Good luck with the switch but the grass is pretty much DEAD on the other side of the lawn.
Ah, right, because all I have to do is plunk down several thousand dollars and Ill be in Apple nirvana, until the next time I need to upgrade. No thanks, Ill stick with my 8-core / 32GB desktop / lab which I built for $550. Windows 8 is annoying, but its not "thousands of dollars" annoying. Must be nice to have that kind of disposable income though.
There are several good tools, but after about 1 week with it everything will click. The naming convention makes it pretty easy to figure out what command you need, and the built in help tools are quite good.
Generally its "verb-noun" for commands: GET-vm, REMOVE-childitem, SET-naoption, etc. To figure out what command you need, get-command works. It lets you specify what module / namespace you want a listing for too, so it believe "get-command vmware.*" would show all vmware cmdlets currently loaded.
In terms of discovering methods and properties of objects, you can use get-member. For instance: $Printers = get-wmiobject Win32_Printer $Printers | get-member will show you all of the methods that a WMI printer object has, such as delete() or put(), and all of the properties such as name and drivername.
Ive actually found the documentation to be quite good, with extensive examples and different levels of help, ie "Get-Help get-childitem -examples" or "Get-Help get-member -full". MSDN has full documentation on all available types, methods, APIs, etc that you might encounter, as well.
Once you wrap your head around how they do things, its actually pretty easy; if Im working with NetApp and I know they prefix their commands with "NA", and I want information on snaplocks, I can guess that the command to get info on snaplocks is "Get-NASnaplock".
I love the blame shifting towards the media and everyone else for pandering to fears. The reason people pander to fears, is because it works, and it works because people wont retain a grasp on perspective.
Slashdot has this issue particularly bad, actually.
The point is that typically, for the last several years, you could buy or build a PC for around 1/2 the cost of a Mac. This appears to change that, though of course this hardware doesnt ship for 2 months and the graphics cards in question dont appear to be on the market yet.
The only issue I take is that you cant get that Mac "right now", so its a bit misleading to say thats how much the Mac can be built for right now. They ship in 2 months...
Thats a fair response; my point is that youre basically saying youre a unix guy or youre in a mixed environment. If you were in a mostly homogenous Windows + infrastructure environment, powershell would almost certainly be a better tool.
With the environment Im in, I learned powershell just to simplify daily tasks. Ive become familiar with it over the last year or so, and while ive often wondered whether I should take the time to learn Perl or python, there would be basically no benefit here other than personal learning (and thats generally not sufficient for me to really learn something).
What we're both really saying is, use the right tool for the right job.
Yea I did some research and see where youre coming from, and that I was mistaken. It seems like this new gen of Macs may be a pretty good deal-- but only because of the graphics cards, and because they constitute the biggest share of the cost.
If I had to guess, theyre getting special pricing on those parts (which, as I understand it, are glorified and slightly tweaked 7970s) which helps Apple (because they get this exclusive pricing on parts that are guaranteed supported by AutoCAD etc), and helps AMD (because theyre selling what are basically 7970s for close to their FirePro markup),
The one thing I wonder is whether the pricing on all of these parts will change in the next 2 months-- the first Mac Pros apparently dont ship till february, and Ive seen no indication that you can buy actual D500 / D700s yet. But nevertheless Im a bit impressed / intrigued by this.
There are a lot of reasons to criticize powershell (startup time for one, memory usage for another), but sadly the ones here basically amount to "I hate closed source" or "I gave it 5 minutes and I didnt like it" or "im a unix guy and see no need for it". Those may be true, but theyre not faults with powershell
I wasnt aware that you could administer VMWare with Perl or Bash. Either way, Id recommend you take some time to learn powershell: its not going away, and as it sounds like you have to deal with windows at times, you might as well learn to use the native scripting language
That is completely not true. Creating your own powershell modules does not require anything to be blackboxed, and it doesnt require anyone else to do it for you. Theres a huge community of folks writing modules and scriptlets for powershell.
If youre arguing that having utilities is useless without the source, Im going to guess theres no way I can convince you that, practically speaking, it is not useless. But suffice it to say I can get a lot more done with the NetApp and VMWare powershell modules than I can by SSHing into those boxes and working with them.
You sound like you have a gigantic axe to grind with Powershell. Rather than fuming about how much you hate closed source software, you would be better served to educate yourself on what the relative strengths of this particular tool are so you can understand when it is useful and when it is not. Youre gonna have to accept that Microsoft is a huge player in enterprise, and VMWare is the biggest dog in virtualization out there; both are best administered by powershell, and theres just no way around that.
The GUI is not Windows only: since 5.0 (at least) there has been the option for a web interface, and since 5.5 it has been there by default. But thats not terribly relevant; the point is that there are a lot of things that Powershell can do that bash cannot because of vendor support, and because simply producing a set of cmdlets allows you to integrate them with any workflow you have. All of the output from all cmdlets is objects, so when I do a get-vm it returns an array of objects with their own methods and properties, which could easily be passed around to another cmdlet.
I dont disagree, but one of the reasons I love powershell is because there is so much vendor support for it. Rather than having to use crappily written vendor provided scripts, or learn a new set of syntax and instructions for everything, you can just use one set of cmdlets to manage everything. For example, managing storage units, virtual infrastructure, and networking (if you were using Cisco UCS for example) would involve a unified set of syntax and command structure (verb-noun-- GET-nacifsshare; REMOVE-cluster), with output that can easily be manipulated and passed around. Everything is an object; everything can be piped into get-member to discover its methods, properties, and data types.
Obviously it will depend on what platform youre on; if your work involves primarily *nix boxes I imagine you would want to stick with bash. But Ive found that it is incredibly rewarding to work with powershell in a windows environment just because of how easy it is to take knowledge from one task and apply it to many others, and how easy it is to get your bearings in an unfamiliar task.
I cant speak to whether there are things that bash does that Powershell does not, but I get the feeling you havent actually used powershell or understood what it can do.
Clicking 3 pixels to the left in a GUI rarely causes you to hose your SAN. Hitting a letter 3 to the left in a command can easily do something like that.
Remember the old "rm -rf/...{hits enter}" Whoops, slip of your finger just cost you your whole root directory structure.
Yea, you dont know what youre talking about. Windows Powershell is often MORE capable than Unix, in practical terms.
Examples:
* Getting NetApp Volume information ---Windows: Connect-NAController ctrlr1.dom.local; Get-NAVol ---Unix: Fire up SSH, connect to the controller head, and dust off your NetApp CLI manual * Working with VMWare vCenter ---Windows: Connect-VIServer vcenter01.dom.local; Get-VM | where numcpu -gt 2 | sort Name ---Unix: no real commandline access; web interface, or SSH (for maintenance tasks only)
Im not trying to knock bash, but youd have to have been under a rock for the past 7 years to not know about powershell or understand its strengths.
Slashdot Mirror
Cederic is a different poster than me, so using his post to infer things about my perspective is a bit problematic. Regarding how well Apple has served various markets, see my other post-- it has photo examples of the sorts of gouging they do / did.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4603751&cid=45800583
I have screenshots of past "Apple Challenges" Ive done, if youre interested. Heres one from 2011:
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5064/5568018354_6d0b09d595_o.jpg
Youll note that the HP has double the RAM, a better processor, and a substantially better video card, and costs $1000 less.
Its generally been like that for some time; the Apple margin has gotten better in some of the more competitive areas, but generally they have been insanely overpriced compared to what you get. And I really dont buy any nonsense about lasting longer, since all of the parts come from the same manufacturers, the same countries, etc.
Heck, you can even look at the Mac Pro from this year. Ignore the graphics card, and all of a sudden the Mac is WAY more expensive than anything comparable: they charge $3000 to UPGRADE the processor to a Xeon which only costs $2400 retail; they charge $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB of ECC RAM; buying the whole 32GB on the market (newegg) would only cost $350. At least in the case of the RAM thats more than a 100% markup over retail. Its generally true that its cheaper to buy the Mac with the base specs, then buy the upgrades you want new off of Amazon or Newegg, and youll not only save substantial money, youll have the base-specced parts as freebies to boot.
To be fair Apple isnt the only one who does this; look at Dell server harddrive or RAM prices, and youll see the same sort of gouging (dell charges ~$400 for $200 WD RE5 drives, etc). Its just that by far Apple has been the worst offender, and theyre the only ones with a contingent of fans who defend their practice.
Yea! Remember that time when democracy starved 40 million people? And when Freedom did a mass genocide in Cambodia?
The capitalists dont tend to leave tens of millions dead of starvation in their wake. Lets please not gloss that over, its sort of a big deal.
You mean like pricing a Mac Pro $2k less than you can buy the individual parts for it?
In the last 10 years that is the one example of decent pricing you can give for Apple. In just about every other case Apple's markup over the industry baseline has been about 100%. Asus has a $1000 premium laptop? Apple sells the exact same specs for $2000.
And how much do you think a PC is worth after a year?
"Brand appeal" may explain insane resell value, but it doesnt justify it.
Good luck with the switch but the grass is pretty much DEAD on the other side of the lawn.
Ah, right, because all I have to do is plunk down several thousand dollars and Ill be in Apple nirvana, until the next time I need to upgrade. No thanks, Ill stick with my 8-core / 32GB desktop / lab which I built for $550. Windows 8 is annoying, but its not "thousands of dollars" annoying. Must be nice to have that kind of disposable income though.
And the past 6 years have led you to believe that Obama is terribly concerned with the fair rule of law?
There are several good tools, but after about 1 week with it everything will click. The naming convention makes it pretty easy to figure out what command you need, and the built in help tools are quite good.
Generally its "verb-noun" for commands: GET-vm, REMOVE-childitem, SET-naoption, etc. To figure out what command you need, get-command works. It lets you specify what module / namespace you want a listing for too, so it believe "get-command vmware.*" would show all vmware cmdlets currently loaded.
In terms of discovering methods and properties of objects, you can use get-member. For instance:
$Printers = get-wmiobject Win32_Printer
$Printers | get-member
will show you all of the methods that a WMI printer object has, such as delete() or put(), and all of the properties such as name and drivername.
Ive actually found the documentation to be quite good, with extensive examples and different levels of help, ie "Get-Help get-childitem -examples" or "Get-Help get-member -full". MSDN has full documentation on all available types, methods, APIs, etc that you might encounter, as well.
Once you wrap your head around how they do things, its actually pretty easy; if Im working with NetApp and I know they prefix their commands with "NA", and I want information on snaplocks, I can guess that the command to get info on snaplocks is "Get-NASnaplock".
Who is that even supposed to be a criticism of, and why is it insightful?
Are you aware that the tsunami which generated the 2011 Japan tsunami occurred out in the middle of the ocean?
Its not the seismic activity you need to stop, its the wall of water caused by said seismic activity.
Dude, what dont you understand? Metamaterials can bends soundwaves, tsunamis are just big waves, therefore metamaterials can bend tsunamis.
SCIENCE!
I love the blame shifting towards the media and everyone else for pandering to fears. The reason people pander to fears, is because it works, and it works because people wont retain a grasp on perspective.
Slashdot has this issue particularly bad, actually.
The point is that typically, for the last several years, you could buy or build a PC for around 1/2 the cost of a Mac. This appears to change that, though of course this hardware doesnt ship for 2 months and the graphics cards in question dont appear to be on the market yet.
The only issue I take is that you cant get that Mac "right now", so its a bit misleading to say thats how much the Mac can be built for right now. They ship in 2 months...
Thats a fair response; my point is that youre basically saying youre a unix guy or youre in a mixed environment. If you were in a mostly homogenous Windows + infrastructure environment, powershell would almost certainly be a better tool.
With the environment Im in, I learned powershell just to simplify daily tasks. Ive become familiar with it over the last year or so, and while ive often wondered whether I should take the time to learn Perl or python, there would be basically no benefit here other than personal learning (and thats generally not sufficient for me to really learn something).
What we're both really saying is, use the right tool for the right job.
Yea I did some research and see where youre coming from, and that I was mistaken. It seems like this new gen of Macs may be a pretty good deal-- but only because of the graphics cards, and because they constitute the biggest share of the cost.
If I had to guess, theyre getting special pricing on those parts (which, as I understand it, are glorified and slightly tweaked 7970s) which helps Apple (because they get this exclusive pricing on parts that are guaranteed supported by AutoCAD etc), and helps AMD (because theyre selling what are basically 7970s for close to their FirePro markup),
The one thing I wonder is whether the pricing on all of these parts will change in the next 2 months-- the first Mac Pros apparently dont ship till february, and Ive seen no indication that you can buy actual D500 / D700s yet. But nevertheless Im a bit impressed / intrigued by this.
Its almost sad to me that so many techies are falling back into the "I dont understand it so I hate it" mentality.
StackExchange has a pretty good explanation of the whole Powershell vs Bash thing, with the takeaway being, they have different designs and are good at different things.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/573623/is-powershell-ready-to-replace-my-cygwin-shell-on-windows
There are a lot of reasons to criticize powershell (startup time for one, memory usage for another), but sadly the ones here basically amount to "I hate closed source" or "I gave it 5 minutes and I didnt like it" or "im a unix guy and see no need for it". Those may be true, but theyre not faults with powershell
I wasnt aware that you could administer VMWare with Perl or Bash. Either way, Id recommend you take some time to learn powershell: its not going away, and as it sounds like you have to deal with windows at times, you might as well learn to use the native scripting language
That is completely not true. Creating your own powershell modules does not require anything to be blackboxed, and it doesnt require anyone else to do it for you. Theres a huge community of folks writing modules and scriptlets for powershell.
If youre arguing that having utilities is useless without the source, Im going to guess theres no way I can convince you that, practically speaking, it is not useless. But suffice it to say I can get a lot more done with the NetApp and VMWare powershell modules than I can by SSHing into those boxes and working with them.
You sound like you have a gigantic axe to grind with Powershell. Rather than fuming about how much you hate closed source software, you would be better served to educate yourself on what the relative strengths of this particular tool are so you can understand when it is useful and when it is not. Youre gonna have to accept that Microsoft is a huge player in enterprise, and VMWare is the biggest dog in virtualization out there; both are best administered by powershell, and theres just no way around that.
The GUI is not Windows only: since 5.0 (at least) there has been the option for a web interface, and since 5.5 it has been there by default. But thats not terribly relevant; the point is that there are a lot of things that Powershell can do that bash cannot because of vendor support, and because simply producing a set of cmdlets allows you to integrate them with any workflow you have. All of the output from all cmdlets is objects, so when I do a get-vm it returns an array of objects with their own methods and properties, which could easily be passed around to another cmdlet.
Is there such a thing as a "quick glance at the source" with the Linux kernel?
I dont disagree, but one of the reasons I love powershell is because there is so much vendor support for it. Rather than having to use crappily written vendor provided scripts, or learn a new set of syntax and instructions for everything, you can just use one set of cmdlets to manage everything. For example, managing storage units, virtual infrastructure, and networking (if you were using Cisco UCS for example) would involve a unified set of syntax and command structure (verb-noun-- GET-nacifsshare; REMOVE-cluster), with output that can easily be manipulated and passed around. Everything is an object; everything can be piped into get-member to discover its methods, properties, and data types.
Obviously it will depend on what platform youre on; if your work involves primarily *nix boxes I imagine you would want to stick with bash. But Ive found that it is incredibly rewarding to work with powershell in a windows environment just because of how easy it is to take knowledge from one task and apply it to many others, and how easy it is to get your bearings in an unfamiliar task.
I cant speak to whether there are things that bash does that Powershell does not, but I get the feeling you havent actually used powershell or understood what it can do.
Clicking 3 pixels to the left in a GUI rarely causes you to hose your SAN. Hitting a letter 3 to the left in a command can easily do something like that.
Remember the old "rm -rf /...{hits enter}" Whoops, slip of your finger just cost you your whole root directory structure.
Youre missing out. How on earth do you manage huge batch jobs like modifying 100 print queues or getting reports on your VMs?
Yea, you dont know what youre talking about. Windows Powershell is often MORE capable than Unix, in practical terms.
Examples:
* Getting NetApp Volume information
---Windows: Connect-NAController ctrlr1.dom.local; Get-NAVol
---Unix: Fire up SSH, connect to the controller head, and dust off your NetApp CLI manual
* Working with VMWare vCenter
---Windows: Connect-VIServer vcenter01.dom.local; Get-VM | where numcpu -gt 2 | sort Name
---Unix: no real commandline access; web interface, or SSH (for maintenance tasks only)
Im not trying to knock bash, but youd have to have been under a rock for the past 7 years to not know about powershell or understand its strengths.