This isn't about running OS X apps. This is about having the legendary NextSTEP rapid application development tools and some level of source compatibility between OS X and other Unix. Couldn't give a shit about OS X applications running on Linux personally, but if it means that Unix/Linux can piggyback off the huge numbers of developers learning to code for iOS and OS X, we might actually get some applications written that have a UI worth a damn. Interface builder makes the UI somewhat segregated for the code it is connected to. I.e., you can get a UI guy who actually knows shit from clay with regards to UI design to sort the UI out without needing to write or modify any code.
You do realize, that the cool GNUstep goodness has NOTHING TO DO with the actual UI elements (which can be easily themed as/when needed at a later date), right? It's all about the objective-c frameworks.
... I think having a complete and competent objective-c development platform on Unix/Linux is a very good thing. Even if it is up to OS X 10.6 level - plenty of Mac users still run 10.6 and as far as a platform goes 10.6 is still pretty powerful.
My advice is to learn as many platforms as possible. There are plenty of "unix guys" and there are plenty of "Windows guys". You want to be the guy who knows the ins and outs of both and can sort out the issues between them and/or pick the correct tool for the job. It's not always Windows and its not always Linux either.
Powershell can invoke any.net object's methods. Given that powershell is only really available on Windows, which is where you'll be using it - it is free on that platform, so bash being free doesn't really make any difference if it is a windows box (or network, given that almost all cmdlets can be used on remote machines with the trivial use of -computername parameter) you're administering.
Most of the newer admin tools in 2008 R2 can spit out powershell cmdlets at the end of a wizard, as can exchange 2007 onwards. If you're a unix guy and use windows, try using powershell more than cmd.exe, as a lot of your unix aliases work (ls, forward slashes for paths, etc) and it has similar (even more awesome) tab completion.
If you need to get text out of powershell you can do that to - either CSV or XML.
But if you keep everything within the pipe within powershell, it's all live objects and you don't lose any metadata.
You clearly don't understand what powershell is and what it can do. None of the shells in your package manager are object based. All of them will be doing brainless text munging drugery to import and export data between commands in the pipeline. None of them are transparently remote-machine aware. None of them provide code-signing ability. There is no way to directly interrogate pretty much any object on the operating system, natively, from the shell. None of them have built-in input validation ability for any scripts you write. The list goes on. None of them can run a command against every machine in my domain in one line of code.
And yes, I'm a Unix user since 1995. I do both Unix and Windows in my day job (I simply don't trust Windows outside the firewall). At home I'm all mac/bsd.
It's slow and quirky because it works entirely differently to a traditional unix (or other OS) shell. It's not just running text commands and munging text output to pipe between commands. It's object oriented and can talk to any.net object on the system natively, without any additional utilities or text processing to get the info you want. It takes the Unix concept of "everything is a file" to the next level - everything is an OBJECT, with methods, properties, etc. This is why it is "quirky", because you'll need to re-train your brain to the way powershell works. It's certainly not worse, it's just very different, and you need to change the way you try to do things.
Comparing speed to bash or perl is not really fair because they simply don't offer anywhere near the power or flexibility. And that's not being a massive microsoft fanboy or a shill or whatever, it's simply a fact.
It's definitely not perfect, but it's an entirely new concept which will no doubt evolve over time. I have absolutely zero doubt in my mind that eventually object-based shells will appear on other platforms. Probably implemented a lot cleaner than Powershell too.
But full credit where credit is due - Powershell is one of the more interesting things coming out of Microsoft at the moment. It's a tragedy actually that the Powershell support is so much more complete in Windows 8 as I'm just not sure I can stomach the other changes at work.
Yeah definitely, that's what I'm talking about. And yes, it certainly has its warts, and is definitely not mature. But the way it works vs. say bash or perl is a total paradigm shift. And there's a pretty amazing amount of groundwork that must have been done to enable this all to work.
Unfortunately, as demonstrated here, plenty of people will dismiss it out of hand because it is written by microsoft and the syntax is pretty alien - but I really think the open source world could learn a lot from Powershell, take the ideas that work and make something better.
But its not going to be as simple as just writing a shell unfortunately - there's a heap of operating system ground-work that needs to be done first.
Don't get me wrong, for working with text, unix utilities are awesome. BUT - you're constantly fighting with the (inconsistent, between tools) text representation of data as you pipe it between tools, rather than working with the actual data. There is no grep, cut, awk, etc on Powershell, because you aren't munging text constantly.
In Powershell you can spend far less time faffing about with text munging, and just run queries against objects in the pipeline. You can directly and easily interrogate WMI, and instantiate any.net object on the system.
Its an entirely different kettle of fish, and works completely differently to any unix shell.
Whether or not it is "better" is open to dispute (to get your head around the way it works is certainly a bit mind-bending initially), but if you need to administer WINDOWS systems, then you'd do well to learn it, because Microsoft are pushing it hard and you can do things on Windows with powershell that are just extremely tedious or practically impossible with other shells (random example: interrogating battery status - including USB connected UPS is a one liner)
And no, nothing similar will ever happen on a Unix platform until there is a universal framework for interrogating or instantiating system objects.
Dude... Powershell is already coming up 7 years old, and the core concepts are still the same, there are just more cmdlets available. If you're even comparing to Ruby, Bash or Python you clearly have no idea how powershell operates or what it can do and have not spent any real time playing with it.
And as you have not spent any time playing with it, your opinion is entirely uninformed, and you're just shitting on it because it is written by Microsoft.
Maintaining the status quo because this is how we've always done things is retarded.
So, check it out or don't. Not really concerned. But yourself, and the open source world in general would be well advised to check out anything new by any commercial developer, including microsoft - and profit from the mistakes and successes made without reinventing the wheel yourself and making the same mistakes.
I'll grant you bash is more mature and intuitive, sure - but you can do things in powershell that just either aren't possible with bash without writing helper applications in a non-scripting language or are exceedingly convoluted.
The big difference is the object pipeline which takes a little to get your head around, but enables you to do far more processing on data than text manipulation with sed, grep, awk and friends.
I'd suggest opening your mind a little and giving it a shot. If you don't administer windows boxes, fair enough its pretty pointless, as the whole point is interfacing to.net objects which don't exist on Linux.
But if you DO need to deal with Windows boxes, you'd be doing yourself a dis-service to write Powershell off.
I suspect the BSD ip stack would give it a good run, given that it is in every i-device, every mac, Windows, Juniper, Netapp, some Cisco devices, etc. It also formed the core of the original Linux IP stack.
Not really true. I've seen Linux boxes administered by muppets, and back in the day when I was 20, I was one of those muppets in charge of looking after a fleet of Linux boxes. Just because someone can use google and click their way through a redhat installer, doesn't mean they have a clue.
Platform choice is pretty irrelevant as far as judging competency goes actually, IMHO being a competent administrator/architect is more about change management (i.e., how do we get from A to B without fucking everyone over), engineering resiliency into your designs, being proactive about security and using the best tool for the job, in a platform agnostic manner.
Trade-offs will be involved (this is essentially what engineering is). If (for example) running a Windows web server makes it 10x easier for your internal web development guys, and it can be secured by spending a little more time than an apache box, then you run a Windows web server, and stick whatever content-aware firewall you deem appropriate in front of it.
In other situations (e.g., DNS servers, firewalls, mail relays, etc) - Linux, BSD or other unix platform of choice may be more appropriate.
+1. Powershell is quirky. It is prettty excruciatingly slow. There are bugs. But it really is pretty neat, and nothing similar exists in the Unix world as yet. If you need to admin Windows boxes, you'd definitely be well advised to learn powershell.
Be that as it may (I hate the IIS administration interface as well), for an enterprise who runs microsoft on the desktop, microsoft SQL, and other microsoft services, IIS integrates far easier into that environment.
And I suspect this is where it is winning share - the web isn't static pages any more.
Sure, Apache can do this, but the environment is totally foreign to your average corporate type.
And as usual, security is probably some way down the priority list.
Also. Corporations do not have morals. They have legal obligations to make the best financial decisions for their shareholders. Morality has FUCK ALL to do with this. If you're up in arms regarding Apple's "morals" you should also be going after Lockheed, General Dynamics, Narus, Boeing, Raetheon, Monsanto, BP, etc. - who are responsible for FAR more "morally" "evil" decisions than a tech company.
They're not refusing to pay taxes, they are paying what is legally required within the confines of the law that YOUR GOVERNMENT has set up. Don't like it? Get the law changed. Apple are not the only ones doing this by a huge stretch.
Back in the day, sneaker net was all we had. On floppies. The bandwidth of a 4tb hard drive being hand carried is a lot higher than your typical dsl or cable connection by the way.
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SO you mean, about 15 years ahead of where KDE and Gnome are today? I'm not actually trolling here. This is where NEXT application development was in 1992.
This isn't about running OS X apps. This is about having the legendary NextSTEP rapid application development tools and some level of source compatibility between OS X and other Unix. Couldn't give a shit about OS X applications running on Linux personally, but if it means that Unix/Linux can piggyback off the huge numbers of developers learning to code for iOS and OS X, we might actually get some applications written that have a UI worth a damn. Interface builder makes the UI somewhat segregated for the code it is connected to. I.e., you can get a UI guy who actually knows shit from clay with regards to UI design to sort the UI out without needing to write or modify any code.
GNUStep is nothing to do with UI elements. It's a collection of frameworks for objective-C to develop applications with.
You do realize, that the cool GNUstep goodness has NOTHING TO DO with the actual UI elements (which can be easily themed as/when needed at a later date), right? It's all about the objective-c frameworks.
... I think having a complete and competent objective-c development platform on Unix/Linux is a very good thing. Even if it is up to OS X 10.6 level - plenty of Mac users still run 10.6 and as far as a platform goes 10.6 is still pretty powerful.
My advice is to learn as many platforms as possible. There are plenty of "unix guys" and there are plenty of "Windows guys". You want to be the guy who knows the ins and outs of both and can sort out the issues between them and/or pick the correct tool for the job. It's not always Windows and its not always Linux either.
Powershell can invoke any .net object's methods. Given that powershell is only really available on Windows, which is where you'll be using it - it is free on that platform, so bash being free doesn't really make any difference if it is a windows box (or network, given that almost all cmdlets can be used on remote machines with the trivial use of -computername parameter) you're administering.
Most of the newer admin tools in 2008 R2 can spit out powershell cmdlets at the end of a wizard, as can exchange 2007 onwards. If you're a unix guy and use windows, try using powershell more than cmd.exe, as a lot of your unix aliases work (ls, forward slashes for paths, etc) and it has similar (even more awesome) tab completion.
If you need to get text out of powershell you can do that to - either CSV or XML.
But if you keep everything within the pipe within powershell, it's all live objects and you don't lose any metadata.
You clearly don't understand what powershell is and what it can do. None of the shells in your package manager are object based. All of them will be doing brainless text munging drugery to import and export data between commands in the pipeline. None of them are transparently remote-machine aware. None of them provide code-signing ability. There is no way to directly interrogate pretty much any object on the operating system, natively, from the shell. None of them have built-in input validation ability for any scripts you write. The list goes on. None of them can run a command against every machine in my domain in one line of code.
And yes, I'm a Unix user since 1995. I do both Unix and Windows in my day job (I simply don't trust Windows outside the firewall). At home I'm all mac/bsd.
It's slow and quirky because it works entirely differently to a traditional unix (or other OS) shell. It's not just running text commands and munging text output to pipe between commands. It's object oriented and can talk to any .net object on the system natively, without any additional utilities or text processing to get the info you want. It takes the Unix concept of "everything is a file" to the next level - everything is an OBJECT, with methods, properties, etc. This is why it is "quirky", because you'll need to re-train your brain to the way powershell works. It's certainly not worse, it's just very different, and you need to change the way you try to do things.
Comparing speed to bash or perl is not really fair because they simply don't offer anywhere near the power or flexibility. And that's not being a massive microsoft fanboy or a shill or whatever, it's simply a fact.
It's definitely not perfect, but it's an entirely new concept which will no doubt evolve over time. I have absolutely zero doubt in my mind that eventually object-based shells will appear on other platforms. Probably implemented a lot cleaner than Powershell too.
But full credit where credit is due - Powershell is one of the more interesting things coming out of Microsoft at the moment. It's a tragedy actually that the Powershell support is so much more complete in Windows 8 as I'm just not sure I can stomach the other changes at work.
At home I'm Mac/BSD all the way.
Yeah definitely, that's what I'm talking about. And yes, it certainly has its warts, and is definitely not mature. But the way it works vs. say bash or perl is a total paradigm shift. And there's a pretty amazing amount of groundwork that must have been done to enable this all to work.
Unfortunately, as demonstrated here, plenty of people will dismiss it out of hand because it is written by microsoft and the syntax is pretty alien - but I really think the open source world could learn a lot from Powershell, take the ideas that work and make something better.
But its not going to be as simple as just writing a shell unfortunately - there's a heap of operating system ground-work that needs to be done first.
Don't get me wrong, for working with text, unix utilities are awesome. BUT - you're constantly fighting with the (inconsistent, between tools) text representation of data as you pipe it between tools, rather than working with the actual data. There is no grep, cut, awk, etc on Powershell, because you aren't munging text constantly.
In Powershell you can spend far less time faffing about with text munging, and just run queries against objects in the pipeline. You can directly and easily interrogate WMI, and instantiate any .net object on the system.
Its an entirely different kettle of fish, and works completely differently to any unix shell.
Whether or not it is "better" is open to dispute (to get your head around the way it works is certainly a bit mind-bending initially), but if you need to administer WINDOWS systems, then you'd do well to learn it, because Microsoft are pushing it hard and you can do things on Windows with powershell that are just extremely tedious or practically impossible with other shells (random example: interrogating battery status - including USB connected UPS is a one liner)
And no, nothing similar will ever happen on a Unix platform until there is a universal framework for interrogating or instantiating system objects.
Dude... Powershell is already coming up 7 years old, and the core concepts are still the same, there are just more cmdlets available. If you're even comparing to Ruby, Bash or Python you clearly have no idea how powershell operates or what it can do and have not spent any real time playing with it.
And as you have not spent any time playing with it, your opinion is entirely uninformed, and you're just shitting on it because it is written by Microsoft.
Maintaining the status quo because this is how we've always done things is retarded.
So, check it out or don't. Not really concerned. But yourself, and the open source world in general would be well advised to check out anything new by any commercial developer, including microsoft - and profit from the mistakes and successes made without reinventing the wheel yourself and making the same mistakes.
I'll grant you bash is more mature and intuitive, sure - but you can do things in powershell that just either aren't possible with bash without writing helper applications in a non-scripting language or are exceedingly convoluted.
The big difference is the object pipeline which takes a little to get your head around, but enables you to do far more processing on data than text manipulation with sed, grep, awk and friends.
I'd suggest opening your mind a little and giving it a shot. If you don't administer windows boxes, fair enough its pretty pointless, as the whole point is interfacing to .net objects which don't exist on Linux.
But if you DO need to deal with Windows boxes, you'd be doing yourself a dis-service to write Powershell off.
I suspect the BSD ip stack would give it a good run, given that it is in every i-device, every mac, Windows, Juniper, Netapp, some Cisco devices, etc. It also formed the core of the original Linux IP stack.
Not really true. I've seen Linux boxes administered by muppets, and back in the day when I was 20, I was one of those muppets in charge of looking after a fleet of Linux boxes. Just because someone can use google and click their way through a redhat installer, doesn't mean they have a clue.
Platform choice is pretty irrelevant as far as judging competency goes actually, IMHO being a competent administrator/architect is more about change management (i.e., how do we get from A to B without fucking everyone over), engineering resiliency into your designs, being proactive about security and using the best tool for the job, in a platform agnostic manner.
Trade-offs will be involved (this is essentially what engineering is). If (for example) running a Windows web server makes it 10x easier for your internal web development guys, and it can be secured by spending a little more time than an apache box, then you run a Windows web server, and stick whatever content-aware firewall you deem appropriate in front of it.
In other situations (e.g., DNS servers, firewalls, mail relays, etc) - Linux, BSD or other unix platform of choice may be more appropriate.
+1. Powershell is quirky. It is prettty excruciatingly slow. There are bugs. But it really is pretty neat, and nothing similar exists in the Unix world as yet. If you need to admin Windows boxes, you'd definitely be well advised to learn powershell.
I'd say its a bit misleading. Sure, Windows is easier to make work, but to actually secure and keep maintained is a pain in the arse.
Other types of web developer are exceedingly rare.
Be that as it may (I hate the IIS administration interface as well), for an enterprise who runs microsoft on the desktop, microsoft SQL, and other microsoft services, IIS integrates far easier into that environment.
And I suspect this is where it is winning share - the web isn't static pages any more.
Sure, Apache can do this, but the environment is totally foreign to your average corporate type.
And as usual, security is probably some way down the priority list.
Also. Corporations do not have morals. They have legal obligations to make the best financial decisions for their shareholders. Morality has FUCK ALL to do with this. If you're up in arms regarding Apple's "morals" you should also be going after Lockheed, General Dynamics, Narus, Boeing, Raetheon, Monsanto, BP, etc. - who are responsible for FAR more "morally" "evil" decisions than a tech company.
They're not refusing to pay taxes, they are paying what is legally required within the confines of the law that YOUR GOVERNMENT has set up. Don't like it? Get the law changed. Apple are not the only ones doing this by a huge stretch.
The exports of heavy machinery pale in comparison to the export of currency and treasury bills.
The USA is a rogue state with irresponsible leadership and ego issues.
Back in the day, sneaker net was all we had. On floppies. The bandwidth of a 4tb hard drive being hand carried is a lot higher than your typical dsl or cable connection by the way.