Windows PowerShell vs. bash examples

On Nov 8, 9:14*am, Mart van de Wege <mvdwege.use...@wanadoo.nl> wrote:[color=blue]
> There is also an obvious 'OH, SHINY!' mentality.[/color]

Ha ha - that's a good one. It's quite true at some level but I have
to tell you - things are getting a ton better. As we get more and
more into running our own software as a service - a lot of that
nonsense is going away. I've seen some of the biggest "OH, SHINY!"
guys get converted into very pragmatic people after trying to stand up
a service using their software. (there's another Microsoft phrase for
you - "Stand up" a service)

Again, it will take us a couple of cycles but we the right people
experiencing the right pain for the right things to happen going
forward. It is not a coincidence that the folks that are doing this
are some of the biggest fans of PowerShell (duh!). We've been working
closely with some teams standing up services and they have been
driving much of our V2 work. A lot of V2 is catch up work to have the
things you Unix guys take for granted but there is also quite a bit of
new stuff that I think you might find interesting (maybe not).

V3 will probably focus on catching up with VMS and AS400 :-)

I couldn't resist the tease - Unix is great and you should be proud of
your communities accomplishments but the fact of the matter is that
those technologies are great as well. Those superstar engineers
deserve credit and admiration for their great achievements as well.
Credit and respect are not a zero sum games. Respecting other
communities does not take away from your ability to boast about your
accomplishments. Publicly acknowledging the contributions of other
technical communities honors our grand adventure of moving the ball
forward and creating the technologies which are changing the world.

A while ago I heard something about the IBM guys saying how well
positioned they were to take advantage of the move to virtualized
environments saying, "whenever a tough problem comes up, we're able to
walk down the hall and describe the problem to our guys and ask, 'how
did you solve this 30 years ago?'"

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows Management Partner Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: [url]http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell[/url]
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at:
[url]http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx[/url]

[email]jsnover13@hotmail.com[/email] wrote:[color=blue]
> On Nov 8, 9:14 am, Mart van de Wege <mvdwege.use...@wanadoo.nl> wrote:[color=green]
>> There is also an obvious 'OH, SHINY!' mentality.[/color]
>
> Ha ha - that's a good one. It's quite true at some level but I have
> to tell you - things are getting a ton better. As we get more and
> more into running our own software as a service - a lot of that
> nonsense is going away. I've seen some of the biggest "OH, SHINY!"
> guys get converted into very pragmatic people after trying to stand up
> a service using their software. (there's another Microsoft phrase for
> you - "Stand up" a service)
>
> Again, it will take us a couple of cycles but we the right people
> experiencing the right pain for the right things to happen going
> forward. It is not a coincidence that the folks that are doing this
> are some of the biggest fans of PowerShell (duh!). We've been working
> closely with some teams standing up services and they have been
> driving much of our V2 work. A lot of V2 is catch up work to have the
> things you Unix guys take for granted but there is also quite a bit of
> new stuff that I think you might find interesting (maybe not).
>
> V3 will probably focus on catching up with VMS and AS400 :-)
>
> I couldn't resist the tease - Unix is great and you should be proud of
> your communities accomplishments but the fact of the matter is that
> those technologies are great as well. Those superstar engineers
> deserve credit and admiration for their great achievements as well.
> Credit and respect are not a zero sum games. Respecting other
> communities does not take away from your ability to boast about your
> accomplishments. Publicly acknowledging the contributions of other
> technical communities honors our grand adventure of moving the ball
> forward and creating the technologies which are changing the world.
>
> A while ago I heard something about the IBM guys saying how well
> positioned they were to take advantage of the move to virtualized
> environments saying, "whenever a tough problem comes up, we're able to
> walk down the hall and describe the problem to our guys and ask, 'how
> did you solve this 30 years ago?'"
>
> Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
> Windows Management Partner Architect
> Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:
> [url]http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell[/url] Visit the Windows PowerShell
> ScriptCenter at:
> [url]http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx[/url][/color]


Nice post Jeff.

This statement - "Respecting other communities does not take away from your
ability to boast about your accomplishments." - will fall on deaf ears
around here, as Linux users are by far the most disrespectful people in all
of IT, even though most of them make their living with Windows.

[snips]

On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:07:54 +0100, Steve Townsend wrote:
[color=blue]
> You are blustering. You were wrong. xargs exists for a reason.[/color]

Yes, it does - among other things, to overcome limits on command line
sizes - which simply doesn't apply here.

[snips]

On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:30:21 +0100, Steve Townsend wrote:
[color=blue]
> More lies. I do not work for MS. I have no love for Windows. I do
> however know how to administer Linux and Windows machines.[/color]

If you did, you'd know the difference between a *line length* limit and a
*command line length* limit. Chris pointed out awk can handle very large
lines; you responded with irrelevant nonsense about xargs.

[snips]

On Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:45:42 +0100, Steve Townsend wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> And you haven't read COLA for the obligatory 3 months yet, judging by
>> your ignorance.[/color]
>
> I did not have to do a "obligatory anything" you big headed arsehole.[/color]

I take it you're new to usenet. Usenet has been around a hell of a long
time, and it is established protocol that one follows a newsgroup for a
period of time - suggested is about three months - to learn issues of
topicality, tone, posting styles and so forth.

No, it's not obligatory. Neither is washing one's hands after
defecating. It is simply a protocol adopted for the betterment of usenet
for all users.
[color=blue][color=green]
>> 1) Apologise to Chris, then see 2) below.[/color]
>
> Apologise for what? For correcting him?[/color]

For incorrectly correcting him, perhaps. For getting your knickers in a
twist over something you got wrong. I refer, in particular, to the bit
about awk line lengths.
[color=blue][color=green]
>> Here you have to EARN credibility and PROVE who you are FIRST, and no
>> amount of whining and insulting will achieve anything.[/color]
>
> prove who I am? What the hell are you raving about? Are you insane?[/color]

If you want to be taken seriously by the Linux users here, you're
failing. If you want to be taken seriously by the Wintrolls here, you're
succeeding. If that's what you want to accomplish, you'll forgive us for
regarding you as a wintroll yourself.

[snips]

On Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:41:26 +0100, Steve Townsend wrote:
[color=blue]
> The point is that one MUST use xargs in a lot of bash commands/scripts
> since the tools bash allows you to use can not have unlimited input
> commands.[/color]

Correct. Also completely, totally and absolutely irrelevant in the
context in which you brought it up.

On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:37:42 -0500, Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
[color=blue]
> On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:19:54 -0600, Terry Porter wrote:
>[color=green]
>> I'm taking issue with Erik the Wintroll who claimed that Powershell is
>> superior to Linux Bash, and to me *one* example is enough to prove him
>> wrong.[/color]
>
> That's because you can't possibly understand set theory.
>
> If there's 2000 examples that prove me right, but one that proves me
> wrong, in your eyes, i'm wrong.[/color]

Which is a correct summation of the problem as you state it, to wit,
"Powershell is superior to Linux bash". A single example suffices to
show that the absolutist form offered by you is incorrect. A more
general form, such as "Powershell is generally superior to Linux bash"
would, however, remain true.

That said, I think it's a bit weird to be quibbling about "2000 versus 1"
when you've failed to post the 2000 cases it's supposedly better in.
[color=blue][color=green]
>> Why would I bother understanding Windows Powershell, I only use Linux,
>> and this is a Linux advocacy group ?[/color]
>
> Know thy enemy? Get ideas to copy? Lament your wish that Linux had
> something like it?[/color]

"Thy enemy" here is, fundamentally, Wintrolls. As to ideas to copy, one
might point out that MS has, historically, had the *worst* ideas in
computing rather than the best. Executable emails, for example. Or
"I'll run anything, if the filename's right - and I'll hide the bit that
matters." Or this nonsense notion of OneCare - adding bandages to
provide security, rather than fixing the OS. Need we mention such items
as Bob?

One might point out the most glaringly obvious potential flaw in
PowerShell. I've not used it, I'm simply going by what's being said
here, but as I understand it, PS relies on a lot of COM interfaces to do
things - compressing and decompressing files, say - for which there
aren't direct shell commands available.

Bash, by contrast, does exactly the opposite - what it ain't got
internally, it spawns sub-commands for. Shell commands. Programs one
_can_ run directly.

Which means that to migrate even a hairy bash shell to another platform
means ensuring bash and the other relevant tools are available,
Powershell is, like VB, essentially designed to tie one to a specific OS
- you can't just copy the shell, port PS itself and port a hatful of
associated cli tools; you have to port the relevant COM interfaces
instead, which is liable to be considerably more effort, or you have to
rewrite the PS script to use those cli tools - which means it no longer
does the right thing in its native environment.

This, to me, is not a good thing. It smacks too much of the endlessly
repeated "We got some tool - Excel, IIS, whatever - we wrote a mess of
code specific to it, now we can't afford to switch platforms or tool
sets."
[color=blue][color=green]
>> You can argue the fine points all day long, but surely the advocacy of
>> the Windows Powershell belongs in another Usenet group where *Windows
>> Advocacy* is welcome ?[/color]
>
> Who's advocating anything?[/color]

Someone around here is apparently trying to convince us that PS is better
than bash; that definitely sounds like an advocacy-type comment.
[color=blue]
> I responded to the false comments about how
> Windows lacks a decent shell or scripting, I proved him wrong.[/color]

Okay, you say it has a decent shell and scripting. So tell us where, on
a typical user's XP machine, we find Powershell - plus all the cli tools
needed to do all the little tasks one generally uses such things for.
Tools such as grep.

Last I checked, PS simply wasn't on most people's XP machines, and from
what I'm hearing here, even if you do have PS on your machine, you still
don't have the cli tools to make it a really sensible scripting
environment.

Do feel free to show me wrong, though... just tell me where I find this
PS thing on Joe Sixpack's XP machine and where all those other little cli
tools - compressors and decompressors and pattern matching and string
replacement and on and on and on - all live.
[color=blue][color=green]
>> I'm here to *ESCAPE* Windows, not to learn any more about it, what I
>> know about Windows drove me to Linux in 1997.[/color]
>
> Yet somehow you can't seem to stop participating in threads in which
> Windows and Linux are compared[/color]

He's in a Linux advocacy newsgroup, one to which, for some unexplained
reason, certain Windows-loving sorts persist in posting. The fault lies
with them spewing their drivel where it isn't topical, not with him for
discussing Linux's strengths in such threads.

[snips]

On Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:05:42 -0800, Tim Smith wrote:
[color=blue]
> Now let's take the second paragraph. I do call Terry a stupid troll,[/color]

Which is an ad hominem statement.
[color=blue]
> but not to discredit an argument of Terry's[/color]

Which would make it an ad hominem fallacy - had you done that. The fact
the former is not an ad hominem fallacy does not mean it is not an ad
hominem statement; it just means it is an offence only against
politeness, not against sound argument.

On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:00:21 -0500, Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
[color=blue]
> On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:10:41 +0100, Mart van de Wege wrote:
>[color=green]
>> There is no confusion. Erik specified Powershell as the most powerful
>> scripting *environment*. When pressed how it would stack up to the
>> scripting environment on a typical *nix box, he shifted the goalposts
>> to a comparison of shells only.[/color]
>
> What is a scripting environment? A shell. Duh.[/color]

You're confusing a tool with an environment.

What's an IDE - you know, "Integrated Development Environment"? It's not
just an editor. It's usually either a combination of, or at least a
front end for, an editor, a compiler, a linker, a debugger, possibly a
profiler and possibly many more tools.

bash is a shell - a tool. It is not an environment. The environment is
the collective set of tools, utilities, shell scripts and so forth which
bash can call on, just as the IDE can call on the compiler, the editor,
the debugger.

Which means the Linux scripting environment, in all but pathological
cases, will have at a minimum such tools as grep, awk, sed, xargs, find,
cut, perl, bash and a largish hatful of other goodies.
[color=blue]
> The environment is what the script runs in[/color]

You're confusing the script interpreter with the environment.
[color=blue]
> As an example, wscript is also a scripting environment[/color]

No, it's a script interpreter, which is but part of the scripting
environment.
[color=blue]
> The shell *IS* the scripting environment.[/color]

It is part of it; it is not the whole thing.

[snips]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2008 04:19:22 -0800, jsnover13 wrote:
[color=blue]
> That said, the thing I love most about Microsoft is that we are
> incapable of sustained error[/color]

Okay, which one of you Linux geeks is pretending to be a Windows
PowerShell architect?

I don't think even Hadron could have uttered the line above with a
straight face.

On Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:55:39 -0800, jsnover13 wrote:
[color=blue]
> On Nov 8, 9:14Â*am, Mart van de Wege <mvdwege.use...@wanadoo.nl> wrote:[color=green]
>> There is also an obvious 'OH, SHINY!' mentality.[/color]
>
> Ha ha - that's a good one. It's quite true at some level but I have to
> tell you - things are getting a ton better.[/color]

Oh? Explain Vista, then.
[color=blue]
> Again, it will take us a couple of cycles[/color]

A "cycle" being the 6+ years from XP to Vista? So we can expect to see
something sane out of Redmond sometime in, oh, 2026?
[color=blue]
> A while ago I heard something about the IBM guys saying how well
> positioned they were to take advantage of the move to virtualized
> environments saying, "whenever a tough problem comes up, we're able to
> walk down the hall and describe the problem to our guys and ask, 'how
> did you solve this 30 years ago?'"[/color]

And in some respects, that's accurate - many of the issues in computing
were solved 30 years ago. How to manage security in a multi-user,
networked environment for example. Which explains why so many OSen use
fundamentally similar approaches, where Microsoft persist in doing
something different - and giving us a world where something like 100
million viruses, worms and assorted bits of malware rule the roost.

If Microsoft would stop trying to play the "We're the greatest, we're the
prettiest" game and focus on delivering the simple combination of
reliability and usability, they'd gain a lot of respect from people who
have been bitten by their current approach, and they *wouldn't* be in the
position of having to offer downgrade packages, extending "end of
lifecycle" dates and the like.

They won't, though; they're far too enamoured of the "not invented here"
syndrome.

[snips]

On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:05:24 -0800, Tom Shelton wrote:
[color=blue]
> In windows, you have basically 2 types of api's. The typical C/C++
> library type api's, packaged as dll's in windows - these are not
> directly accessible to powershell (well, actually you can use them with
> a little work using the dynamic assembly generation functionality of
> .net - there are lots of examples of doing this on the net, just Google
> "powershell p/invoke"). Though, it is again trivial to create a cmdlet
> that can handle calling these functions if you need them.
>
> But, there is another class of api's that utilize com, that are directly
> and easily callable from powershell. These cover things like the
> windows task scheduler, bits, cd/dvd burning, media player, sending
> faxes, and manipulating zip archives. This isn't even counting
> automation interface provided by such applications as Microsoft Office.
> Seriously, if you can write a wsh script to automate it, you can use it
> from powershell.[/color]

Which *really* bugs me.

It's an invitation to lock-in. It's a way to ensure maximal use of a
mechanism which effectively blocks any future attempt to migrate the
scripts elsewhere: once you've expended significant effort into using the
"easy" approach, you're now well and truly screwed should you ever change
your mind.

Yes, MS *could* have chosen to make the cli environment richer and more
flexible by providing cli tools to do all those little jobs, but if they
did, PowerShell would end up effectively being a bash clone; while this
would make it easy (or at least, easier) to migrate bash-based scripts to
Windows, it would *also* make it easier to migrate Windows tools to
another platform.

Yeah, it's "easy". Getting that first dose of crack is easy, too; it's
kicking the habit or feeding it that's the problem.

[snips]

On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:35:49 -0500, Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
[color=blue]
> If you insist, here's the powershell version of that command.
>
> tar cvzf - /wwwdata | ssh ssh user@host "dd of=/path/wwwdata.tar.gz"[/color]

Hmm. I have an XP box here. Well, okay, it's a virtual machine, but
it'll suffice for testing purposes.

One slight problem with your example: neither tar nor ssh exists on the
machine.

I decided, based on your statement that the powershell equivalent was
indeed the same. Oddly, I keep running across references to something
called "/N software", apparently a third-party add-on for powershell, and
to Cygwin, as it seems powershell doesn't include an ssh client.

Microsoft's technet, when asked about ssh functionality, offered that
remoting would be available in the next version, but who knows what it's
going to contain?

So, since the XP box doesn't _have_ powershell (where virtually any Linux
box in existence _will_ have bash) and even if it did, it wouldn't have
ssh. Nor, apparently, tar, unless I overlooked something.

So, yes, your powershell equivalent may well look the same, it just
doesn't seem to work the same - the lack of tar and ssh would seem to be
something of a problem. Hmm, tar and ssh, two tools virtually guaranteed
to be on almost any Linux box you'll run across.

Sorry, *where* was this equivalence coming from?

[color=blue]
> But these stupid examples do nothing to show the power or flexibility of
> PowerShell, since they're just duplicating functionality on Linux.[/color]

Er... what, you'd rather compare apples and watermelons? Showing us how
Powershell accomplishes the very tasks we need done is a perfect way for
Powershell to strut its stuff. If the best it can manage is to duplicate
what we already have, then it's, oh, 30 years too late to be interesting.

I don't use LDAP much, so can't be arsed to sort that one out.
[color=blue]
> # Display all the titles from the front page of Slashdot. ([xml]
> (new-object
> System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString("http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/[/color]
slashdot")).RDF.Item|[color=blue]
> select title
>
> Can you do that in one line in bash, without shelling out to other
> tools?[/color]

You "shelled out" to another tool, the system.net.webclient. The fact
that you used an API call rather than a process launch is no more "doing
it in powershell" than if you'd printed the string "Please type in the
titles from slashdot" and waited for user input.

So let's see you do it, in PowerShell, without shelling out to other
tools - which means no riding on .NET's coattails and the like.
[color=blue]
> How about this:
>
> # Sort all the items in a text file and write to a new file get-content
> sort.txt | sort-object | out-file new.txt
>
> Again, one line, no shelling to other scripting environments.[/color]

No shelling to other scripting _environments_? Easy:

cat file.txt | sort > outfile

Now, if you'd meant something like "without invoking other applications",
you might have had a point, except that were that the case, I'd simply
note that sort can do all that itself: sort < infile > outfile - voila,
one app, no calling anything else.

Now perhaps you're trying to suggest that powershell has the sorting
functionality built right in, to which the appropriate response might be
"Who in the name of all that's holy dreamed up *that* abomination?"

Linux builds upon small tools to accomplish larger tasks. Need something
sorted? Pipe it through sort. Need something searched? Pipe it through
grep. And so forth.

There are three advantages to this:

1) Each tool tends to be relatively simple, meaning a lesser likelihood
of bugs.
2) Each tool tends to be efficient, doing its one particular task well,
meaning reduced runtimes.
3) Each tool can be trivially replaced without having to touch a line of
scripting code relying on the tool.

So, for example, if I find that overall, sorting is just too damned slow
and the reason is that the sort utility is using a shell sort instead of
a stable merge sort, I can replace the algorithm without mucking up - or
even looking at - a single script relying on it.

So, for the sake of comparison, how do you replace PowerShell's
presumably built-in sort? Note that sort-object, whatever it is, must in
fact be built right into PowerShell - i.e. not be a cmdlet - or your
entire question falls apart, but that in turn means that to replace it,
you have to modify powershell itself, no? Okay, fine, how do you do it?
[color=blue]
> So what's the big deal about shelling to other scripts? Nothing[/color]

Yet you seem to have an issue with it.

[snips]

On Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:35:40 -0800, Tom Shelton wrote:
[color=blue]
> The things that makes powershell powerfull is it's object oriented
> nature. If you want a fair evaluation of powershell vs bash, take a
> look at this article from Linux magazine:
>
> [url]http://w3.linux-magazine.com/issue/78/Bash_vs._Vista_PowerShell.pdf[/url][/color]

I looked. Take listing 3 as an example. After some setup, it calls New-
Object System.Net.WebClient, which it then uses to retrieve some data
from a remote site.

Well, jolly good, that shows us the power and flexibility of .NET, but we
weren't talking about .NET, now were we? No, we were talking about
PowerShell. If we wanted to compare development toolsets, we'd have to
include gnome's libraries and kde's libraries and perl - including all of
CPAN - and php and about 10,000 libraries available for Linux.

That tells us the richness of the environments, such as perl's ability to
pull in and parse XML data and so forth, but it tells us *bugger all*
about the utility of the thing driving the process, that is, PowerShell.

Well, no, it does tell us one thing about PowerShell. Doing it "the
Linux way", the results can be trivially ported - complete with PHP and
Perl and CPAN at the least - to other platforms, including Windows.
Doing it the PowerShell way, that is, the way you're presenting it, seems
to indicate that it cannot be thus ported, that the interfaces, at the
very least, will have to be rewritten.

For vendor lock-in, this seems good. For sensible development practises,
this seems not so good.

Kelsey Bjarnason wrote:
[color=blue]
> [snips]
>
> On Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:45:42 +0100, Steve Townsend wrote:
>[color=green][color=darkred]
>>> And you haven't read COLA for the obligatory 3 months yet, judging by
>>> your ignorance.[/color]
>>
>> I did not have to do a "obligatory anything" you big headed arsehole.[/color]
>
> I take it you're new to usenet. Usenet has been around a hell of a long
> time, and it is established protocol that one follows a newsgroup for a
> period of time - suggested is about three months - to learn issues of
> topicality, tone, posting styles and so forth.
>
> No, it's not obligatory. Neither is washing one's hands after
> defecating. It is simply a protocol adopted for the betterment of usenet
> for all users.
>[color=green][color=darkred]
>>> 1) Apologise to Chris, then see 2) below.[/color]
>>
>> Apologise for what? For correcting him?[/color]
>
> For incorrectly correcting him, perhaps. For getting your knickers in a
> twist over something you got wrong. I refer, in particular, to the bit
> about awk line lengths.
>[color=green][color=darkred]
>>> Here you have to EARN credibility and PROVE who you are FIRST, and no
>>> amount of whining and insulting will achieve anything.[/color]
>>
>> prove who I am? What the hell are you raving about? Are you insane?[/color]
>
> If you want to be taken seriously by the Linux users here, you're
> failing. If you want to be taken seriously by the Wintrolls here, you're
> succeeding. If that's what you want to accomplish, you'll forgive us for
> regarding you as a wintroll yourself.[/color]

He is one.
He is Hadron Quark. Tried a flatish routine. And failed
--
Never argue with an idiot. He brings you down to his level, then beats
you with experience...

[snips]

On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:12:32 +0100, Steve Townsend wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> Why wouldn't I be? I, personally, would really have a hard time
>> dealing /only/ with Windows systems. Much prefer Linux.
>>
>> Hell, I'd rather spend all my time on Solaris than on Windows.[/color]
>
> What do you use computers for that you can use Linux all the time?[/color]

Can't say for him, but for myself...

My workaday job is at an ISP. For them I do network administration,
server management, hardware support, software engineering, monitoring,
etc, etc, etc. I'm also heading up the rollout of our entire VOIP
service.

On top of that, I occasionally deal with customer service, I have to
compose and update documents composed by coworkers, the usual office
overhead.

At home, I do all the usual things - some gaming, though not a hell of a
lot - email, web browsing, news reading, software development,
networking, etc, etc, etc.

I have one machine more or less dedicated now to media; it has a Hauppage
WinTV-PVR 500 in it which has an onboard splitter and two onboard tuners
and hardware encoders, the result of which is I can record two
simultaneous shows off cable and store them as any format I wish; I
generally leave them as their default MPEG-2 stream, but I process them
to strip out ads. The resultant files are then broadcast, wirelessly, to
a DLINK DSM-320 in the bedroom (that being the only place we watch much
TV, as we tend to put something on and fall asleep to it.)

My box at home - as my box at work - has a variety of servers on it,
including Postgres, MySQL and Apache, as I use these to test web code
before using it in a production setting.

Of course, there's the other usual crud. I have a good-sized mp3
collection which I manage and play with Amarok, which also happily talks
to the Sony MP3 player I got her for her birthday last year - just tell
Amarok which tunes you want to drop onto the device, it sorts out what
goes where and how.

Oh, and there's always the IM issue. I'm typically running two MSN and
two Yahoo accounts, an ICQ account and a Jabber account, all via Kopete,
plus Skype.

And then there's email. Yeah, I know, Windows does email, all well and
good, but how does it handle spam? Right now, client-side, I've got
crm114, bsfilter, bogofilter, spambayes and spamassassin (daemon) filters
churning over the inbound emails - and while I get a *hell* of a lot of
spam, I get *very* damned little in my inbox. Oh, I suppose I should
point out that each and every one of those lives in the repository - no
need to hunt the web for them, just search the database, quickly and
efficiently.

I'll grant that five filters is overkill, but then I'm using the spams I
encounter to train a central filter as well - meaning I like to be a
little more exposed to incoming spam than most, which in turn means
maximizing the detection rates by using the strengths of several tools
rather than just one.

I run leafnode, for purposes of archiving as well as purposes of
filtering - why download dross I don't want in the first place? This
makes news reading somewhat more pleasant. Also somewhat more efficient;
even if I'm not actively reading news, it gets polled every 15 minutes or
so, so when I do go to read it, it's always up to date.

So, basically, everything Joe Sixpack uses his computer for and more, I
do in Linux. There are only three times I touch Windows:

1) When fixing someone's Windows computer.
2) When provisioning or maintaining a Windows server at work.
3) When using our CRM program at work, which is Windows-specific and
hasn't yet been upgraded to the newer version with the web interface - at
which point I can cease using Windows _at all_ except for fixing existing
Windows systems or provisioning new Windows servers. The former of which
is distressingly common, the latter of which is happily fading out.

Or, in short, barring a *damned* few exceptions, anything I can do in
Windows, I can do in Linux - but I can do so on my terms, in whatever
manner I wish, without "benefit" of restrictive licenses, enforced DRM,
my computer trying to dictate what I'm allowed to do with it, without the
"benefit" of anti-virus and anti-hijack and anti-spyware tools and other
such pointless, resource-draining nonsense.

Why, what did you *think* we did with Linux?

[snips]

On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:39:08 -0500, Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> We just ignore Wintrolls.[/color]
>
> Because you prefer to bask in your ignorance.[/color]

Now that's rich - the notion that a *troll* is going to cure ignorance.

No, Erik, if we wish to reduce our ignorance, there are people we will
indeed listen to. Trolls are not among those people, as trolls, more or
less by definition, *promote* ignorance.

[email]jsnover13@hotmail.com[/email] writes:
[color=blue]
> On Nov 8, 9:14Â*am, Mart van de Wege <mvdwege.use...@wanadoo.nl> wrote:[color=green]
>> There is also an obvious 'OH, SHINY!' mentality.[/color]
>
> Ha ha - that's a good one. It's quite true at some level but I have
> to tell you - things are getting a ton better.[/color]

It's not that I don't believe (I do), but I have to go with what
actually gets released and marketed.

So it'll take a few releases to get me to be a mite less skeptical.
[color=blue]
> I couldn't resist the tease - Unix is great and you should be proud
> of your communities accomplishments but the fact of the matter is
> that those technologies are great as well. Those superstar
> engineers deserve credit and admiration for their great achievements
> as well. Credit and respect are not a zero sum games.[/color]

I never said so. Even if it is good software, I probably will not like
Microsoft software, because of the way things are implemented, but
that's a matter of *taste*. I am more than willing to acknowledge good
things can come out of Redmond. *I*, and quite a few others with me in
this group, am not playing a zero-sum game.

However, the fanboys like Erik do. And they'll get hammered for their
hyperbole. Nothing to do with the relative merits of MS software, but
everything to do with the idiocy of some of your fanboys. Not your
fault, but at least you know why some people here get a decidedly less
friendly treatment than you.

Mart


--
"We will need a longer wall when the revolution comes."
--- AJS, quoting an uncertain source.

Mart van de Wege <mvdwege.usenet@wanadoo.nl> writes:
[color=blue]
> [email]jsnover13@hotmail.com[/email] writes:
>[color=green]
>> On Nov 8, 9:14Â*am, Mart van de Wege <mvdwege.use...@wanadoo.nl> wrote:[color=darkred]
>>> There is also an obvious 'OH, SHINY!' mentality.[/color]
>>
>> Ha ha - that's a good one. It's quite true at some level but I have
>> to tell you - things are getting a ton better.[/color]
>
> It's not that I don't believe (I do), but I have to go with what
> actually gets released and marketed.
>
> So it'll take a few releases to get me to be a mite less skeptical.
>[color=green]
>> I couldn't resist the tease - Unix is great and you should be proud
>> of your communities accomplishments but the fact of the matter is
>> that those technologies are great as well. Those superstar
>> engineers deserve credit and admiration for their great achievements
>> as well. Credit and respect are not a zero sum games.[/color]
>
> I never said so. Even if it is good software, I probably will not like
> Microsoft software, because of the way things are implemented, but
> that's a matter of *taste*. I am more than willing to acknowledge good
> things can come out of Redmond. *I*, and quite a few others with me in
> this group, am not playing a zero-sum game.
>
> However, the fanboys like Erik do. And they'll get hammered for their
> hyperbole. Nothing to do with the relative merits of MS software, but
> everything to do with the idiocy of some of your fanboys. Not your
> fault, but at least you know why some people here get a decidedly less
> friendly treatment than you.
>
> Mart[/color]

Allowing for the fact that you are an obvious sock, would you like to
post links to this "fanboy" posts from Erik? I have never seen them. It
strikes me that all he does is point out the lies and stupidity of the
likes of Mark Kent, Roy and Terry "The Big I Am" Porter.

Hadron <hadronquark@gmail.com> writes:
[color=blue]
> Mart van de Wege <mvdwege.usenet@wanadoo.nl> writes:[/color]

<snip>[color=blue][color=green]
>> However, the fanboys like Erik do. And they'll get hammered for their
>> hyperbole. Nothing to do with the relative merits of MS software, but
>> everything to do with the idiocy of some of your fanboys. Not your
>> fault, but at least you know why some people here get a decidedly less
>> friendly treatment than you.
>>
>> Mart[/color]
>
> Allowing for the fact that you are an obvious sock,[/color]

Interesting. What makes you think that?
[color=blue]
> would you like to post links to this "fanboy" posts from Erik? I
> have never seen them. It strikes me that all he does is point out
> the lies and stupidity of the likes of Mark Kent, Roy and Terry "The
> Big I Am" Porter.
>[/color]
Uhuh.

I guess you missed Erik's "Powershell blows all Unix scripting
environments away".

Troubles with your reading comprehension? Or memory troubles? Or are
you just plain *stupid*?

Mart

--
"We will need a longer wall when the revolution comes."
--- AJS, quoting an uncertain source.