The "most elegant design" would be a big heavy slab of metal with a fat deadbolt. Anything else is pure snake oil. Electronic lock ? Dude, please, if I can rip out a button or smash through the screen, I can short the damn solenoid wires or rotate the gear myself.
Hell, even a bike lock is harder to defeat than these gun "safes".
Not being in a car does not magically make one immune to the other eleventy billion imbeciles on the road.
Not having a gun in the house kind of makes it hard for a kid to shoot himself in the face with your non-existent gun.
I think the fundamental problem is that any safe that protects your kid from a gun, will also prevent you from swiftly retrieving it should you ever need to protect yourself. Or did you think that half-bred gang member was going to wait a few minutes to give you a fair fight ?
Same here. I tried it for two days, ran out of content to watch - I shit you not!
It seems us Canadians only get a few hundred b-movies, incomplete seasons of TV shows (even Trailer Park Boys!), and stuff you can catch for free with an antenna. I am in no way cheap, so it takes one hell of an epic fail for me to deny a company eight measly dollars. Hell, I often drink fancy beers that cost more than that per pint.
Netflix failed hard. I'd rather pay twice as much for Usenet access to download what I want.
Then I guess most Android manufacturers and carriers are Apple fanbois ? Because every single Android we own except the Google ones are stuck on obsolete firmware.
It's not that choice is bad, but Android is so fractured a platform that it negates its open-source benefits.
My partner learned that lesson when she bought her first Android phone: a Motorola Milestone. Piece of shit. Zero software updates, Motorola practically disowned it months after launch. The only option available was to root it and install 3rd party firmware that sort-of worked but was very rough around the edges. Her brand new phone was so bad, she lusted after my tired old iPhone 3GS. When she finally got out of her contract, I steered her toward a Galaxy Nexus. Pimp phone, now I'm the envious one.
Still, it's a bit sad that it took Google this long to deliver a decent phone and OS. Ice Cream Sandwich seems quite nice, as is the hardware, but meanwhile my 3 year old iPhone is still doing fine, despite me being a techie. Her 2 year old Android is a paperweight and she's just a casual user.
Choice isn't bad. Immature software running on cost-cut 3rd-world hardware designs are bad.
I certainly agree with most of your comment, but I do have one big gripe, and I say this as a lifelong PC freak.
One reason I wouldn't get a MacBook - I'd have to pay a premium for things I don't give a damn about, while still missing things that are important to me.
This is where I have to rebut. I've owned, repaired and/or sold just about every PC laptop on the market. When the time came to replace my own aging laptop last year, I looked everywhere for the right fit. There were none. Then someone hired me to write mobile apps so I needed a Mac. I bought a Macbook Pro, and it is the best damned laptop I've ever owned. I still hate the OS, but the hardware is fantastic. Fast, quiet, sturdy, functional, epic battery life. It is everything I want in a laptop. I don't feel like I paid a premium, because high-end PC laptops are just as expensive, yet they're pitched as "desktop replacement" devices, which is a euphemism for "big fragile noisy non-upgradable piece of tethered junk with a built-in UPS". I paid a high-end price for a high-end machine, got exactly what I wanted.
I kid you not, I'm in the PC sales and service business, and for years I've recommended Dell laptops, because hey at least you get a good warranty with your shitty laptop. I still do, because for most people, that's all they need, but for any professional use I try to steer them toward a Macbook. As a freelancer, I quite enjoy the convenience of a full day's work on a single charge. Worst case, if I'm doing compile-heavy stuff, I can quickly top-up during a coffee break, head over to the pub and sip a few pints while logging the other half of the day's billables.
Now, on the converse, I am not at all interested in Mac desktop computers. THAT is paying a premium for run-of-the-mill hardware. I wouldn't even buy an iMac for myself, because I can bolt a mini-ITX box to almost any LCD and have the same small footprint at a quarter of the cost. I sell "luxury" PC desktops (gamers, design nuts etc), and I don't think of Mac Pros as anything even remotely luxurious. Shiny, but not powerful for the money.
That's not sufficient. We have to go all the way and outlaw thinking. It's the only way to be sure no one defeats our puny weapons with their superior intellect.
Sure, EVE is supposed to be great. I played it for a little while, got repeatedly murdered by some griefing douche with a battleship the size of Jupiter, and lost all interest in the game. I deal with enough of that heavy-handed bullshit in the real world. I want the game to be a challenging and rewarding fantasy, not an unwinnable simulation of bullying.
Hardcore PVP isn't for everyone. If there were a slightly nerfed variant where more PVE types like myself could safely explore with less chance of some asshole invalidating hundreds of hours of effort, then maybe it would catch on a bit more. I like competing with my fellow man, but I have no desire to start over from scratch, every time someone decides to bounce me around like a freakin' soccer ball. Even Hardcore Diablo isn't that insulting.
Depends. Are you Athene ? Do you have a group of 24 sycophants willing to do all the work while you take the credit ? Will you be posting youtube videos of your exploits ?
If you answered yes to all of those, please go jump under a bus.
Realistically, it will probably take about 30 hours for most people to hit the cap, less if you use any of the popular questing addons, like QuestHelper or Carbonite. When Cata was launched, I was taking a few months off work at the time, so I just powered through it in a straight 20 hour marathon. Then I had to wait for enough no-lifers in the guild to catch up. I didn't even run any dungeons during that time, just quests.
Perhaps the greatest benefit in capping early is you get a head-start on all the gold farmers. For a week or two, you can actually make a fortune on the AH by selling new crafting mats, gems and whatnot.
Yep. I just wish they didn't have to do this at the expense of us hardcore players. The funny thing is I used to think of myself as a casual player, in a casual guild. Then the game got incredibly easy after a few patches, and I'm now considered hardcore, just because I spent a few minutes reading EJ and min-maxing my toon with automated theorycrafting tools. I put so little effort into it, that I am amazed to find people who still suck at this game. Snubbing those underachievers has resulted in me being labeled "too hardcore". Go figure!
There used to be a great sense of accomplishment in leading a 40-man raid to victory. These days if the dumbest of the dumb can't down the final boss and get free BiS gear, people shit bricks and whine on every forum they can find.
This was true when Wrath came out, I know because I was one of the 40 or so guys out of 300 who showed up to work that day. That was a long-ass time ago and people actually fought over the Tuesday morning shift, because that's when WoW would be down for maintenance every goddamned week. Most people wanted to work during those hours, so they could get home early and play the new content before everyone else.
Today, though, the ratio is reversed. Probably just a handful of hardcore weenies will actually bother to call in sick. Sure, if I have absolutely nothing to do that day, I'll log in and kick the tires like most people, but it's no longer this big overhyped nerdgasm. We all know the first 30 minutes of quest drops will obsolete all our legendary gear, and we'll ding 80 before bedtime thanks to every aspect of the game getting dumbed down. Then we'll go back to being called "fat gay niggers" on Xbox Live.
This would be most impressive if they went all Big Brother and featured a bunch of talentless bimbos trying to get famous by flashing their tits in the hot tub.
Now, reread that sentence without thinking of Steve Ballmer.
Having said that, the best thing about winning this would be the pleasure of being able to say "no thanks"
You almost made me want to move to the states and participate. Almost...
And yes, I know full well how stack ranking destroys morale. I briefly worked at a company that used that system, got berated at my first review because I ranked near the bottom. The next month, I shot up to #1 with a huge lead over the next guy, and stayed there until they shuttered our regional office, a few years later. Sure, I was really good at what I did, but I had not changed the quality of my work, nor was I cheating in any way, I just figured out how the ranking system worked. Instead of logging big, logical chunks of work, I itemized everything into bite-sized pieces. Instead of showing one big fixed applied to multiple systems, they'd get logged as separate incidents. This stuffed the stats calculation, and pleased my ignorant managers because it looked like I was getting more done. Realistically, yeah I was probably in the top 10, but certainly not 3-4 times more "productive" than the next guy like the stats implied.
When other employees asked how I could log 100 completions in a day, next to their 12, I'd simply offer a shy grin and a shrug; "I guess I just have a gift".
I don't like WAMP stacks either, and I used to do exactly what you do, a Linux host with Windows in a small VM, but in recent years I've reversed that arrangement. I run Win7, with a bunch of Linux VMs to handle all my dev needs. The main benefits are that I can accurately replicate the live environment, and the VMs are portable. I can even copy the whole thing to my Macbook and go "work" on a sunny patio. If I'm really lazy (read: efficient), I can clone that same VM to the ESXi host and flip it live.
One key motivator is that I was never really happy with any Linux IDE. I take on lots of odd freelancing jobs, so I often wind up working with very messy setups like direct FTP edits or SFTP as root (!). Working within clients' budgets means I don't always have the luxury of fixing those messes, sometimes you just have to tiptoe around the filth, do your thing, get paid and get the fuck out. I don't need nor want an IDE dictating my workflow in those situations, often resorting to Textmate(Mac) or even plain old FlashFXP and Notepad2 on Windows.
Agree 100%, I'm in a very similar situation. I picked up a Macbook Pro last year, because my boss needed me to write iPhone apps. I absolutely love the hardware, but hate Mac OS, because it hates the keyboard. Sure, the fancy touchpad is quite hip and responsive, but it's still slower to swipe and drag and tap, than it is to instinctively hit three keys in the middle of a furious typing marathon. It is indeed pretty, but that's all it is: a thin veneer covering up some seriously fucked up code. When it does break, oh man, I'm far from any help. The Apple forums are utterly useless, and the OS itself is incredibly bad at telling me what is actually broken. Sometimes the system log nudges me in the right direction, but it is obvious that nobody spends any significant time in there, because the messages are ambiguous and often misleading.
That said, I've taken a liking to Objective C. It, too, is a bit sloppy under the hood, but for developing GUI apps I think its object/message model makes my life a lot easier than C++ or.Net. It is an order of magnitude less frustrating than writing X apps, that's for sure.
I do miss my lovingly-tuned Gentoo/KDE3 setup, which ran on my old workstation and laptop, but like you, I no longer have the time nor patience to make alternative desktops not suck. I must have spent close to 100 hours tweaking that distro just the way I wanted it, with my own overlay patches and everything. Today, I consider my time far more valuable and would rather spend 2 hours getting Windows 80% of the way there, with the remaining 98 hours logged as billable, or doing other things. Hacking is still fun, but I guess I've grown out of the obsessive vanity that is a Linux desktop.
I get stuff done on all three platforms, but these days Windows is where I feel the most productive. Years ago I was all about KDE 3.5, but then KDE 4 made me want to strangle puppies. The Mac is still new to me after a year, and it seems I spend more time mousing than typing, thanks to some serious deficiencies in the keyboard shortcut department.
Windows by itself is pretty useless, but it has some very mature applications the other platforms lack. For example, I've been using the same FTP client for 14 years. It is still updated with subtle but useful features, without ever disrupting my workflow. It isn't free, but for my uses it runs circles around Filezilla. On the Mac, it's even worse with Cyberduck, that thing behaves so mysteriously that I'd rather copy files to my Fusion VM and FTP via Windows.
Linux runs on every other machine I own, except for the one vCenter host, and I regularly berate VMware for that irksome requirement. The problem with Linux, is that I only use it for network admin stuff anymore. KDE is dead to me, Gnome was never a contender, and I occasionally run Fluxbox over VNC for those rare tasks that require X or a Java GUI.
I hate to say it, but for most of my work, Windows is where it's at. It's far from perfect, but it seems every other platform does it even worse.
That's the problem: it's too much.Net at the expense of basic functionality. Sure, it can do just about anything, but for everyday file-based sysadmin tasks, I find the syntax way too verbose. It certainly has its purpose, but it is too codey for what I have in mind. As a programmer, if I want.Net, I'm quite happy to fire up MSVC and write a proper app. I just need a simple, fast, scriptable shell for the basic stuff.
I cut my teeth on Irix back in the 90's, so on my DOS machines, I had an extensive set of Pascal and C utilities to replicate some of that Unix functionality. Perl and PHP have replaced many of those old scraps, but I think part of the problem is that I'm a classic programmer. I expect the shell to handle the occasional loop or conditional statement with some degree of nimbleness, particularly when managing directories. In my mind, it's a half-step down from proper scripting.
Powershell to me feels nonsensical. I like the concept on paper, but it becomes far too verbose to do even basic things like launching Explorer on a folder. I think of it more as a weird GUI-less VB.Net dialect than a proper shell. If I wanted to write proper code, I'd fire up MSVC and go to town...
Dude, get out. This is 2012. All the intelligent commenters have fucked off already. If you ever find one, please be a sport and send up a flare so I can find them too.
I bet most of the people still here weren't even born when MS-bashing was still cool.
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I allow neither guns nor kids in this house, so I'm practically invincible!
The "most elegant design" would be a big heavy slab of metal with a fat deadbolt. Anything else is pure snake oil. Electronic lock ? Dude, please, if I can rip out a button or smash through the screen, I can short the damn solenoid wires or rotate the gear myself.
Hell, even a bike lock is harder to defeat than these gun "safes".
That's like saying an apple is an orange.
Not being in a car does not magically make one immune to the other eleventy billion imbeciles on the road.
Not having a gun in the house kind of makes it hard for a kid to shoot himself in the face with your non-existent gun.
I think the fundamental problem is that any safe that protects your kid from a gun, will also prevent you from swiftly retrieving it should you ever need to protect yourself. Or did you think that half-bred gang member was going to wait a few minutes to give you a fair fight ?
Amen, brother.
Same here. I tried it for two days, ran out of content to watch - I shit you not!
It seems us Canadians only get a few hundred b-movies, incomplete seasons of TV shows (even Trailer Park Boys!), and stuff you can catch for free with an antenna. I am in no way cheap, so it takes one hell of an epic fail for me to deny a company eight measly dollars. Hell, I often drink fancy beers that cost more than that per pint.
Netflix failed hard. I'd rather pay twice as much for Usenet access to download what I want.
Then I guess most Android manufacturers and carriers are Apple fanbois ? Because every single Android we own except the Google ones are stuck on obsolete firmware.
It's not that choice is bad, but Android is so fractured a platform that it negates its open-source benefits.
My partner learned that lesson when she bought her first Android phone: a Motorola Milestone. Piece of shit. Zero software updates, Motorola practically disowned it months after launch. The only option available was to root it and install 3rd party firmware that sort-of worked but was very rough around the edges. Her brand new phone was so bad, she lusted after my tired old iPhone 3GS. When she finally got out of her contract, I steered her toward a Galaxy Nexus. Pimp phone, now I'm the envious one.
Still, it's a bit sad that it took Google this long to deliver a decent phone and OS. Ice Cream Sandwich seems quite nice, as is the hardware, but meanwhile my 3 year old iPhone is still doing fine, despite me being a techie. Her 2 year old Android is a paperweight and she's just a casual user.
Choice isn't bad. Immature software running on cost-cut 3rd-world hardware designs are bad.
I certainly agree with most of your comment, but I do have one big gripe, and I say this as a lifelong PC freak.
One reason I wouldn't get a MacBook - I'd have to pay a premium for things I don't give a damn about, while still missing things that are important to me.
This is where I have to rebut. I've owned, repaired and/or sold just about every PC laptop on the market. When the time came to replace my own aging laptop last year, I looked everywhere for the right fit. There were none. Then someone hired me to write mobile apps so I needed a Mac. I bought a Macbook Pro, and it is the best damned laptop I've ever owned. I still hate the OS, but the hardware is fantastic. Fast, quiet, sturdy, functional, epic battery life. It is everything I want in a laptop. I don't feel like I paid a premium, because high-end PC laptops are just as expensive, yet they're pitched as "desktop replacement" devices, which is a euphemism for "big fragile noisy non-upgradable piece of tethered junk with a built-in UPS". I paid a high-end price for a high-end machine, got exactly what I wanted.
I kid you not, I'm in the PC sales and service business, and for years I've recommended Dell laptops, because hey at least you get a good warranty with your shitty laptop. I still do, because for most people, that's all they need, but for any professional use I try to steer them toward a Macbook. As a freelancer, I quite enjoy the convenience of a full day's work on a single charge. Worst case, if I'm doing compile-heavy stuff, I can quickly top-up during a coffee break, head over to the pub and sip a few pints while logging the other half of the day's billables.
Now, on the converse, I am not at all interested in Mac desktop computers. THAT is paying a premium for run-of-the-mill hardware. I wouldn't even buy an iMac for myself, because I can bolt a mini-ITX box to almost any LCD and have the same small footprint at a quarter of the cost. I sell "luxury" PC desktops (gamers, design nuts etc), and I don't think of Mac Pros as anything even remotely luxurious. Shiny, but not powerful for the money.
That's not sufficient. We have to go all the way and outlaw thinking. It's the only way to be sure no one defeats our puny weapons with their superior intellect.
Sure, EVE is supposed to be great. I played it for a little while, got repeatedly murdered by some griefing douche with a battleship the size of Jupiter, and lost all interest in the game. I deal with enough of that heavy-handed bullshit in the real world. I want the game to be a challenging and rewarding fantasy, not an unwinnable simulation of bullying.
Hardcore PVP isn't for everyone. If there were a slightly nerfed variant where more PVE types like myself could safely explore with less chance of some asshole invalidating hundreds of hours of effort, then maybe it would catch on a bit more. I like competing with my fellow man, but I have no desire to start over from scratch, every time someone decides to bounce me around like a freakin' soccer ball. Even Hardcore Diablo isn't that insulting.
Depends. Are you Athene ? Do you have a group of 24 sycophants willing to do all the work while you take the credit ? Will you be posting youtube videos of your exploits ?
If you answered yes to all of those, please go jump under a bus.
Realistically, it will probably take about 30 hours for most people to hit the cap, less if you use any of the popular questing addons, like QuestHelper or Carbonite. When Cata was launched, I was taking a few months off work at the time, so I just powered through it in a straight 20 hour marathon. Then I had to wait for enough no-lifers in the guild to catch up. I didn't even run any dungeons during that time, just quests.
Perhaps the greatest benefit in capping early is you get a head-start on all the gold farmers. For a week or two, you can actually make a fortune on the AH by selling new crafting mats, gems and whatnot.
Yep. I just wish they didn't have to do this at the expense of us hardcore players. The funny thing is I used to think of myself as a casual player, in a casual guild. Then the game got incredibly easy after a few patches, and I'm now considered hardcore, just because I spent a few minutes reading EJ and min-maxing my toon with automated theorycrafting tools. I put so little effort into it, that I am amazed to find people who still suck at this game. Snubbing those underachievers has resulted in me being labeled "too hardcore". Go figure!
There used to be a great sense of accomplishment in leading a 40-man raid to victory. These days if the dumbest of the dumb can't down the final boss and get free BiS gear, people shit bricks and whine on every forum they can find.
This was true when Wrath came out, I know because I was one of the 40 or so guys out of 300 who showed up to work that day. That was a long-ass time ago and people actually fought over the Tuesday morning shift, because that's when WoW would be down for maintenance every goddamned week. Most people wanted to work during those hours, so they could get home early and play the new content before everyone else.
Today, though, the ratio is reversed. Probably just a handful of hardcore weenies will actually bother to call in sick. Sure, if I have absolutely nothing to do that day, I'll log in and kick the tires like most people, but it's no longer this big overhyped nerdgasm. We all know the first 30 minutes of quest drops will obsolete all our legendary gear, and we'll ding 80 before bedtime thanks to every aspect of the game getting dumbed down. Then we'll go back to being called "fat gay niggers" on Xbox Live.
Just because millions of idiots want something, doesn't mean it should be done.
Beer cans with tits on them ?
Shotguns with bluetooth ?
Lawnmowers with a TV ?
Me, I want an expansion that undoes all the dumbing-down that's befallen WoW over the years. I would gladly pay $60 if it made the game fun again.
You're right.
Now if the reality show was to land a job at Blizzard for Diablo 3, all they'd get are a bunch of indians from elance.
This would be most impressive if they went all Big Brother and featured a bunch of talentless bimbos trying to get famous by flashing their tits in the hot tub.
Now, reread that sentence without thinking of Steve Ballmer.
Having said that, the best thing about winning this would be the pleasure of being able to say "no thanks"
You almost made me want to move to the states and participate. Almost...
And yes, I know full well how stack ranking destroys morale. I briefly worked at a company that used that system, got berated at my first review because I ranked near the bottom. The next month, I shot up to #1 with a huge lead over the next guy, and stayed there until they shuttered our regional office, a few years later. Sure, I was really good at what I did, but I had not changed the quality of my work, nor was I cheating in any way, I just figured out how the ranking system worked. Instead of logging big, logical chunks of work, I itemized everything into bite-sized pieces. Instead of showing one big fixed applied to multiple systems, they'd get logged as separate incidents. This stuffed the stats calculation, and pleased my ignorant managers because it looked like I was getting more done. Realistically, yeah I was probably in the top 10, but certainly not 3-4 times more "productive" than the next guy like the stats implied.
When other employees asked how I could log 100 completions in a day, next to their 12, I'd simply offer a shy grin and a shrug; "I guess I just have a gift".
They all suck. AMD, Nvidia, Matrox, Intel... the only stable display drivers are the VMware emulated ones.
I don't like WAMP stacks either, and I used to do exactly what you do, a Linux host with Windows in a small VM, but in recent years I've reversed that arrangement. I run Win7, with a bunch of Linux VMs to handle all my dev needs. The main benefits are that I can accurately replicate the live environment, and the VMs are portable. I can even copy the whole thing to my Macbook and go "work" on a sunny patio. If I'm really lazy (read: efficient), I can clone that same VM to the ESXi host and flip it live.
One key motivator is that I was never really happy with any Linux IDE. I take on lots of odd freelancing jobs, so I often wind up working with very messy setups like direct FTP edits or SFTP as root (!). Working within clients' budgets means I don't always have the luxury of fixing those messes, sometimes you just have to tiptoe around the filth, do your thing, get paid and get the fuck out. I don't need nor want an IDE dictating my workflow in those situations, often resorting to Textmate(Mac) or even plain old FlashFXP and Notepad2 on Windows.
Agree 100%, I'm in a very similar situation. I picked up a Macbook Pro last year, because my boss needed me to write iPhone apps. I absolutely love the hardware, but hate Mac OS, because it hates the keyboard. Sure, the fancy touchpad is quite hip and responsive, but it's still slower to swipe and drag and tap, than it is to instinctively hit three keys in the middle of a furious typing marathon. It is indeed pretty, but that's all it is: a thin veneer covering up some seriously fucked up code. When it does break, oh man, I'm far from any help. The Apple forums are utterly useless, and the OS itself is incredibly bad at telling me what is actually broken. Sometimes the system log nudges me in the right direction, but it is obvious that nobody spends any significant time in there, because the messages are ambiguous and often misleading.
That said, I've taken a liking to Objective C. It, too, is a bit sloppy under the hood, but for developing GUI apps I think its object/message model makes my life a lot easier than C++ or .Net. It is an order of magnitude less frustrating than writing X apps, that's for sure.
I do miss my lovingly-tuned Gentoo/KDE3 setup, which ran on my old workstation and laptop, but like you, I no longer have the time nor patience to make alternative desktops not suck. I must have spent close to 100 hours tweaking that distro just the way I wanted it, with my own overlay patches and everything. Today, I consider my time far more valuable and would rather spend 2 hours getting Windows 80% of the way there, with the remaining 98 hours logged as billable, or doing other things. Hacking is still fun, but I guess I've grown out of the obsessive vanity that is a Linux desktop.
I get stuff done on all three platforms, but these days Windows is where I feel the most productive. Years ago I was all about KDE 3.5, but then KDE 4 made me want to strangle puppies. The Mac is still new to me after a year, and it seems I spend more time mousing than typing, thanks to some serious deficiencies in the keyboard shortcut department.
Windows by itself is pretty useless, but it has some very mature applications the other platforms lack. For example, I've been using the same FTP client for 14 years. It is still updated with subtle but useful features, without ever disrupting my workflow. It isn't free, but for my uses it runs circles around Filezilla. On the Mac, it's even worse with Cyberduck, that thing behaves so mysteriously that I'd rather copy files to my Fusion VM and FTP via Windows.
Linux runs on every other machine I own, except for the one vCenter host, and I regularly berate VMware for that irksome requirement. The problem with Linux, is that I only use it for network admin stuff anymore. KDE is dead to me, Gnome was never a contender, and I occasionally run Fluxbox over VNC for those rare tasks that require X or a Java GUI.
I hate to say it, but for most of my work, Windows is where it's at. It's far from perfect, but it seems every other platform does it even worse.
That's the problem: it's too much .Net at the expense of basic functionality. Sure, it can do just about anything, but for everyday file-based sysadmin tasks, I find the syntax way too verbose. It certainly has its purpose, but it is too codey for what I have in mind. As a programmer, if I want .Net, I'm quite happy to fire up MSVC and write a proper app. I just need a simple, fast, scriptable shell for the basic stuff.
This thing looks really interesting. I'll give it a try later, thanks for the rec!
I cut my teeth on Irix back in the 90's, so on my DOS machines, I had an extensive set of Pascal and C utilities to replicate some of that Unix functionality. Perl and PHP have replaced many of those old scraps, but I think part of the problem is that I'm a classic programmer. I expect the shell to handle the occasional loop or conditional statement with some degree of nimbleness, particularly when managing directories. In my mind, it's a half-step down from proper scripting.
Powershell to me feels nonsensical. I like the concept on paper, but it becomes far too verbose to do even basic things like launching Explorer on a folder. I think of it more as a weird GUI-less VB.Net dialect than a proper shell. If I wanted to write proper code, I'd fire up MSVC and go to town...
Dude, get out. This is 2012. All the intelligent commenters have fucked off already. If you ever find one, please be a sport and send up a flare so I can find them too.
I bet most of the people still here weren't even born when MS-bashing was still cool.