Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: And you're all missing the loody obvious...

Type of lizard.

Re: "You mean Amazon?" @h4rm0ny

>>"The bit I wanted to purchase wasn't. Do you want a list?"

Whether what YOU wanted is available or not is immaterial to this argument. The question is whether the overwhelming majority of what is pirated is available - which it is because most piracy is current and popular media. YOU not being able to find a particular piece you wanted is not a justification of the overwhelming majority of piracy. And yet you present your personal minority case as a counter-argument to the far larger general case. That is where your logic is flawed. As already explained, but apparently not understood.

>>"Nice that you're so well catered for - anybody with different tastes can whistle, eh?"

Not remotely what I said. "See previous point" refers you to the fact that again, you are making a counter-argument to a vast majority case based on a personal, minority case.

>>"Ooh, you got me! I'd better rush home and put a drill through that hard-drive full of ill-gotten gains."

Why shouldn't you? It's people's work that you refused to pay for.

Re: "You mean Amazon?" @h4rm0ny

>>"Have you ever tried to buy a CD/DVD and found that it's no longer available, or not available in the appropriate region for your player? I have."

Yep. Are you attempting to use this as a counter-argument to piracy when the huge, huge majority of it IS available for purchase? Or are you just randomly trying to argue for this case even though it has little to do with what I wrote?

>>"Ever tried to get around the above problem buy purchasing the album/film as a digital download, instead of physical media, only to find that it's not available as a digital download? I have."

Not that I recall, see previous point.

>>"Ever purchased a DVD with the intent to use the UltraViolet digital copy, only to find that the code inside the case has expired? I have."

No. Maybe you bought a second-hand one? Did you take it back and ask for a refund or a copy that is correct. Or is the correct response to a faulty product now to steal it.

>>"Mind you, I have been know to borrow CDs and DVDs from other people and then make copies for my own use before returning the originals! I should probably go to jail."

Well, if poor logic and argument in bad faith were a crime, perhaps...

Re: @h4rm0ny

>>"How much is the MPAA paying you? Seriously?"

I'm not recompensed by anyone in any form for making these posts. They're just what I believe. Ad hominem, much?

>>"(1) IT IS NOT STEALING! You can only steal something that physically exists"

People call taking something without permission stealing. And so do I. It's not the legal thing you would be charged with in court, but then law has specialized and explicitly defined terminology for a reason. You can steal information, have you really never heard anyone say that? If you want to correct someone who says a person was charged with theft and say the sentence was actually for larceny, be my guest. But you're not going to re-define common usage just because you don't want something you like to sound bad. The insistence on trying to get other people not to use words like theft and stealing is just PR / marketing. And I've never much been a fan of PR people. If you don't like your taking something without permission to be called stealing, tough, it's going to keep happening.

>>(2) Who is advocating that copyright infringement is acceptable? Not me.

Yet you respond with disagreements to someone who says it is and write extensively on the reasons why content producers are "kicking customers in the groin" and "make it impossible to enjoy their product" and begin your reply to me by accusing me of being a shill. It certainly sounds like you are justifying piracy.

>>"Here is what I want: A movie free of DRM so that I can rip to a hard drive so that I can watch on my computer, my TV, my tablet, whatever anytime I want. I want a movie that goes straight to the movie or straight to the menu without exception. I want a menu that goes away immediately when I press play. And when I press play, I want the movie to begin immediately, without any anti-piracy warnings or company logos or anything else. In short, I want to be able to do what I want, except illegally share my movie, with my legally purchased movie and I don't want to spend 5 minutes trying to watch my legally purchased movie."

I want those things too. I find commercials on a disc I have bought extremely annoying. But I will continue to maintain that piracy is wrong in the huge majority of cases. And if a content producer makes a product so bad that it is no longer of interest to me, then I will not buy it, rather than rip them off.

Re: freetard apprently

>>"I'm one of those supposed freetards in that I do not think a download = 1 lost sale. I know people who download everything they can movies tv music you name it, if you took away all the downloads the simply would not have enough disposable income to buy even a fraction of all the content they download. So take away all the downloads will not give you an equivolent boost in sales."

Indeed not. But that doesn't mean you can argue as if some portion of the downloaded content would not have been paid for.

>>"While I am sure there are people out there who if they couldnt get a certain media item via downloading would go and buy it I certainly think its a far smaller percentage as some people would have you belive."

And what percentage is it that some people believe? And what percentage is it that you believe is accurate? And what makes you believe that people who are accustomed to downloading anything they want for free are not inclined to do that in lieu of payment? Everyone I know who torrents has done it in preference to paying. It's only online that I find people with this bizarre desire to justify what they do as a good thing or their right to do so.

>>"If someone in the next country over can watch something for free online then why am I, in my country, required to sign up for a yearly subscription (min cost: $849) to view that content?"

Where is this specific example that the producers give their content for free to the people of one country but charge you $849 for it? For example, the BBC charge for their content in America, but the British public pay for it through licence fees. A show may air on TV in one country because advertisers pay for it in return for the commercials they air, whilst in another country it might be sold through a cable package. I'm most curious to know where content producers wilfully give it without recompense to some people but not others. And then I'd be even more curious to know how that case goes on to justify more widespread piracy of popular and current movies.

Re: I would suggest that for the cast majority of pirates

>>"Let me counter. And let me further disappoint you by providing an argument that you have not 'guessed'."

Actually, last line of my post - I did reference different broadcast times between regions. These are getting less and less, happily, and all signs point toward releases being pretty much simultaneous around the world. Computer games do it, and movies are quickly converging. Age of Ultron, (if you ignore a premiere event which you should), released across Western Europe, Australia and North and South America at the same time. Some parts of Eastern Europe and Asia got it one or two weeks later. This is not isolated.

TV is starting to converge as well with differences typically down to a few weeks. There's a reason for that - TV is still typically sold to broadcasters who need to fit it into the schedules at an appropriate time. And oddly enough, your flagship example that you wrote multiple paragraphs about, received a single world-wide release day for the latest season.

Your problem isn't differences in release schedule (which are slowly going away as direct sales start to become financially equal to broadcasters buying them for TV), but that you were outbid by Fox who wanted it to be a selling point for their cable service. That truly sucks, but when I'm writing about mass piracy of movies, you finding some odd sub-set where something is only sold as part of a bundle by Fox, doesn't refute what I wrote. At best it makes a case for why it might be okay to pirate this TV series, assuming that one buys the copies when they're available for sale later on.

But even then, the ethics are exceedingly grey. HBO sold the rights in Australia to Fox because that is what made best business sense to them. Are you really entitled to steal it just because you really, really want it? Perhaps if there were less piracy and more people willing to buy it directly, the balance would shift to Fox [b]not[/b] being the best deal for HBO, anymore. Regardless of how you feel on this last argument, you must recognize your response doesn't apply to the vast majority of piracy that takes place.

Re: @h4rm0ny

>>"Big media companies : provide a method that people can get quality media, at a time of their choosing, in a convenient way, paying for it once."

You mean Amazon? Or is the logic - I will have to wait a couple of days for this / plan ahead, therefore I must steal it.

>>"+1. I stopped buying any media after the DeCSS fuss"

DeCSS was the decryption tool. CSS was the protection-measure. And assuming that it really was your inability to install libdvdcss that prevented you watching things, you realize that it's entirely possible for you to still pay for it even if you watched a ripped version? You could have still bought the DVD anyway. But of course you didn't do that so we can conclude that not paying for the content was something you wanted to do, rather than it being a technical difficulty that stopped you.

Re: I would suggest that for the cast majority of pirates

>>"it's a case of "can't" (as in there is no mechanism to) pay, won't pay."

I would think if you have access to torrents, you also have access to Amazon.

EDIT: Oh wait, I've already guessed the responses. They're going to be some variant on either someone not having a DVD drive and therefore having to pirate, or that waiting 1-3 days for something / planning ahead is so monstrous that the only alternative left is to steal it.

To both those points, I'd point people at paid streaming services of which there are several, but I know that despite the overwhelming majority of piracy being current and popular media, people will insist it's no good because pirates want obscure titles that these providers don't have.

Of course there's the difference in regional release dates, but that is already on its way to becoming a thing of the past with differences getting smaller all the time.

>>"I think all but the most hardened freetard will accept the piracy reduces sales"

I have frequently heard it argued by piracy-proponents online that piracy does not affect sales. In contradiction to your optimism, we have two posters on here already stating that it doesn't affect sales and at least two variants that it only affects sales of things they don't enjoy or that it only affects sales because content producers "don't do enough". As suspected, the parts of the report they like are held up as an opportunity to wave the piracy flag, and the parts inconvenient simply ignored.

>>"Contrast this with Cliff's law where 60s sound recordings suddenly had their life extended under heavy lobbying by the Music Monopolies from 50 to 70 years absolute"

Then I take it the most popular titles on torrent sites are all old movies and 60's sound recordings as part of a deliberate rejection of overly-longed copyright terms. And not, as I had foolishly thought, all but entirely recent and current movies released over the last few years that this argument would not apply to in the least.

Who would have thought!

>>"The accountability for the travesty that is DRM lies squarely on big media"

It's amazing how so many people can consider content producers to be greedy and money-obsessed beyond belief, and yet think they spend tens of millions on DRM methods or turn down sales models just for the Hell of it. The reason they put so much money into DRM (and remember, it's not only the technology but all the administrative work that goes with it), is because of piracy. When your work gets shared in the millions online without you getting paid for it, looking for counter-measures is inevitable.

>>"Buy renting it you're not saving anything, regardless of it you watch it once or download it the same amount of bandwidth has been used."

So? Do you think bandwidth is where all the costs of production come from? People who want to get a little use out of something, contribute a little towards it, those who want to get much more use out of it, contribute a bit more. Seems fair to me. What has bandwidth got to do with it?

>>"Movie rentals don't make sense in a digital world."

Why not? They produce something I want to watch, but probably wont want to watch over and over, so I give them money and I watch what they've made. Seems a fair exchange to me.

If you don't want to rent movies then don't rent movies. But don't tell the rest of us that we can't even have the ability to do so.

Re: Reminder

They mean, as you perfectly well know, that you can run the same program on the Deskop version, phones and on tablets. Which is a significant technical achievement. But yes, let's condemn them for not running on Windows XP which was released fourteen years ago, Or an exclusively phone OS like BB10 which doesn't have multiple form-factors.

We need an 'Emperor' icon for "let the hate flow..."

Re: What good will it do?

Good for Dropbox. I know of two significant cases where US companies have lost out on deals because of lack of trust that the US government wont just take the data. I'm honestly starting to think that the US government wont be satisfied until they have driven all data business offshore.

In response to the OP's question about what good it will do, it's a legal commitment from the company to protect your data so you have assurance that they're not handing it over to the US government. They COULD hand it over, but just because the US government tells them to, wont mean that they aren't breaking laws in Europe to transfer that data over. It's a pretty clear statement from a company as to what they will and wont do. It's the difference between saying "we make no promises" and "we're making a promise and it will severely damage our business if you catch us breaking it and you can probably sue us for it, too".

Worst case scenario if US government plays really hard, is to take their ball and go home (to Europe). MS would find that really painful as well as it damaging relations with the US government so for them it would be an absolute last resort that I don't know they'd ever do (though they're fighting extremely hard to keep from handing over data so credit to them). A company like Dropbox? Yes - they could relocate.

Re: Like grep? sed? awk?

>>"find" is doing the same thing as "DIR"

Yes and no. They both can recurse through a file system, but find is returning just text. DIR is returning an array of actual file objects. The latter is inherently more capable because (a) text is a subset of objects and (b) it obviates the need to put any formatting tools in the command itself. You needed to add -print0 as a special switch to the find command so that it would terminate its strings with something that the next item in the sequence could accept. With Powershell, you have consistency of input and outputs between different commands.

>>xargs stat -c "%U" is donig the same thing as "Get-Acl | Select-Object Owner"

Not really. stat -c "%U" is doing the same thing as the Powershell part (with the same provisos as in the last case about text vs. objects of course). The xargs part exists purely as glue to deal with the fact that stat can't take the output of find via pipeline. xargs is essentially a tool to build a new command line. It's something that is not necessary in Powershell. It's actually a storming example of the inconsistency in the GNU/Linux approach. Sometimes you can pipe directly to the next command, sometimes you need to xargs to build a new command line for you from standard input. It's why I feel that my example was actually kinder to GNU/Linux than yours, but as I said, I'm happy to go with yours if you wish. Anway, the OUTPUT of the two is the same (ignoring text vs. objects) but what they are doing is conceptually very different.

>>sort | uniq" is doing the same thing as "Select -Unique

Pretty much.

>>You could argue that 'xargs stat -c "%U"' is somewhat more complex than "Get-Acl | Select-Object Owner"

I do. I don't think it is reasonable to claim otherwise. The charges were that Powershell had unmemorable names and inconsistent outputs. Do you think I haven't proven that wrong, yet?

>>in this particular example, but only to the extent that I had to use xargs, which is a command which unix admins are very familiar with.

Again, familiarity is not equivalent to simplicity. I started out as a C programmer and have never used Ruby. That does not mean that C is simpler than Ruby. Xargs is not something you will ever have to use in Powershell - it is simply not needed conceptually. It exists only because GNU/Linux is reliant on unstructured text for communication between programs.

>>"Yes I had to use -c "%U"', but Get-Acl had to use Select-Object and specify the parameter "Owner". It's very difficult to argue that stat is more complex because I used a parameter when you also had to specify a parameter for Select-Object"

But I don't argue that it is more complex because you had to use a parameter. I argue that it is more complex because no matter what program I am using to produce my array of objects, and whether those objects are files, access control lists, databases or user records, I will always be able to just type:

Select-Object <object I want>

Whereas -c "%U" is a formatting command built into the stat program which is different to the formatting command built into find which is different to the one in ls which is different to the one in printf and so on.

And that wasn't even the crux of my argument. It's the complexity that results when you want to join the command up with others that is the problem - for example, the necessity of xargs or awk to get things talking to each other.

>>"If you wanted to include arbitrary text in the MS PowerShell output, then I suspect the result would be even more complex again."

Actually it isn't. You can see my example earlier. It's inherently more capable because the formatting tool isn't part of the stat program itself, you can select from a variety of specialised formatting tools as you wish. Format-List, Format-Table, Write-Output, ConvertTo-Json, whatever.

>>"For either stat or Select-Object I would have to look up the documentation, since I seriously doubt I could remember all the available parameters for either."

Actually, because Powershell supports command metadata (names, positions, types, validation rules) which it exposes to the shell, Powershell editors have auto-complete and auto-suggestions. This doesn't have to be added to the shell itself, it just reads the metadata from the cmdlet. So you don't actually have to go and look up the documentation to find out what the parameters for Select-Object are, you get a pop-up list as you type. Or at least it's there for the terminal to use and any proper editor / environment has this built in. You can't do that with Bash because there's no way for programs to expose that to Bash. It could only build an incomplete library into the terminal itself which is why you don't see that with Bash.

>>"So comparing like to like even with your own hand picked example I don't see any real advantage for Powershell in terms of ease of use."

Okay. You pick an example. Something non-trivial so we can have a realistic discussion about which environment has the most memorable names and the most consistent output. I.e. not just one command, something that takes a few. If you feel I'm being unfair, be my guest...

Re: Like grep? sed? awk?

>>"While you may find xargs to be difficult to understand"

What did I ever do that indicated I was having difficulty understanding xargs. I said that this:

find . -print0 | xargs -0 stat -c "%U"

was less intuitive than this:

DIR -Recurse | Get-Acl | Select-Object Owner

That isn't me having trouble understanding xargs, it's me making a correct statement. I replied to someone who criticized Powershell for having unmemorable names and inconsistent output. And you took up their cause. You're honestly trying to make the case that to someone new to both systems, your example has easier to remember names and that unstructured text that varies from command to command is more consistent than a consistent array of objects? Please drop all the snide little comments about what I am and am not familiar with. I have been using UNIX and then GNU/Linux for around fifteen years. And that's really your problem - you're trying to argue the case with someone who is familiar with BOTH and can therefore make informed comparisons. Whilst you appear to have little familiarity with Powershell. That's fair to ask, isn't it? You don't have much familiarity with Powershell, do you?

>>"Yes stat has a lot of formatting options, but the alternative would be dozens of individual commands which I would have to remember which still wouldn't be able to as much."

Well, no. The alternative would be that it returns an object and allows the caller to decide what to do with that. Why do find, ls, stat, printf all have their own and different formatting options? Doesn't it make a great deal more sense to have all your different commands pipe an object to the same formatting tool and thus be more consistent and flexible? Basically, do one thing and do it well. Not create a drawer-full of swiss army knives.

>>"And let's be honest here, "Get-Acl" also has loads of parameters to choose from. It's inherent to the problem domain"

Then you're missing the point. It's not about how many parameters Get-Acl has, it's that all of them apply to what it's actually designed for and none of them are for text-mangling to fudge its ability to pass on its results to the next item in the pipeline. You had to use xargs to effectively build a new command line because stat wont accept the output of the previous command directly. And you had to alter that previous command based on knowing that the next command wouldn't be able to handle its output. You had to add a special switch so that it would terminate elements with a null rather than whitespace, purely because you knew the next command wanted it that way. And if you changed the next command in the sequence you might have to set a different flag. Whereas whilst Get-Acl has a number of parameters, none of them are to do with trying to get it to talk to another command via text mangling. It has only what it needs to do its job. That is what makes it simpler.

>>"The advantage of using a formatting string is that I can do more than just things like "%U". I can combine the codes (more than 2 dozen just for files, plus more for devices) in multiple ways, and even include arbitrary text in the output"

Text is a subset of objects. You can do all the same with cmdlets in Powershell so your:

"stat -c "%U some random stuff %a" *"

becomes

Get-Acl * | %{Write-Output "$_.Owner some random stuff $_.Group"}

It's not particularly complicated. The chief differences are (a) that rather than remember special switches that are specific to the stat command (such as %a being octal permissions), you just refer to the actual properties of the object; and (b), you're piping to a dedicated formatting command that is consistent between all programs that you choose to use it with.

>>I might be piping this output directly into a report which is to be read by someone rather than using it as input to more system administration scripts

All the more reason to have that separation between formatting and the tool itself, then. Instead of the string I used above, you could just as well pipe the output of Get-Acl to Format-Table, ConvertTo-Csv or whatever else you wished. I wouldn't have to change anything about the Get-Acl command. Remember we're dealing with very simple examples here. If one person had written a powershell script that returned a specific array of file objects according to some criteria, I would want to just pipe the output to my own formatting choice, not worry about what data they included as part of its textual output.

Basically, it's that consistency of outputs that we keep coming back to. Unstructured text simply doesn't have that.

>>To be honest, I would have to dig through a lot of documentation and examples to even figure out how your bash example even works. Yes I can see that you are chopping up the output of "ls", but you are doing it in ways that I've never seen, let alone tried.

The output of ls -l is in the format

-rwxrwxrwx number_of_links owner group bytes last_updated filename

awk '{print $3}' gets the third column of the textual output, which is owner.

To be honest, given that you are arguing so much for the superiority of Bash, I'm surprised you're not more familiar with awk.

>>"The problem with your example is that you are comparing apples to oranges."

No, I'm not. I'm comparing two solutions for achieving exactly the same thing.

>>In your MS PowerShell example you are using the standard command for getting file information and processing the output of that, but in your bash example you used a command which was not intended for that instead of using the correct one, which is "stat".

Nope, I happily switched to the one you asked me to use when you proposed it, and have been using it as my basis for comparison ever since. As you can see from my posts. The only reason I used the one I did originally was because I actually think it is clearer to read and thus actually fairer to the Bash case. But it doesn't matter - the instant that you said it would be better a different way, I resumed my argument in every post since using your own one that you were happy with.

>>>I've hit the maximum post length so I'm carrying on my reply in the next post.

Re: Like grep? sed? awk?

>>"Just to make something clear, I'm not here to bash (no pun intended) MS PowerShell. It has a narrower focus than unix-type shells (including bash) which are intended to be more general purpose than PowerShell."

I'm unclear why you think Powersell has a "narrower focus" than UNIX shells. Firstly, I can't think of anything that you can do in Bash that you can't do in Powershell. Secondly, every part of the Windows OS is an object and every configurable part of it is exposed as an object that you can manipulate from Powershell. Thirdly, Powershell has many extra capabilities that Bash does not. Does that not inherently make it broader in use cases? Want your powershell script to interact with a database server? Get-ChildItem not only works on directory structures (files and directories are child objects of a path) but retrieve and work with databases (which are child objects of a database server). Powershell has multi-mode authentication meaning it interacts with smart cards, tokens, etc. for access privileges... I could go on for a dozen features that open up new areas of suitability. Powershell works with anything that can expose usable objects. It is, I would say, used widely in MORE areas than Bash.

>>"Someone has written a unix shell which uses JSON as the serialization format (as opposed to XML which PowerShell uses as its wire format), but it saw very little interest. It just didn't solve any problems which people felt needed solving"

Both are used with Powershell and I think that is because Powershell crops up in a wider range of scenarios. Suppose you have some objects you want to convert to a particular format (I'll just use Get-Date to generate something with lots of attributes for example):

Get-Date | Select-Object -Property * | ConvertTo-Json

Get-Date | Select-Object -Property * | ConvertTo-Html

Get-Date | Select-Object -Property * | ConvertTo-Xml

Get-Date | Select-Object -Property * | ConvertTo-Csv

In each case you would get the object converted to the chosen format. This is actually quite common in Powershell.

>>I can understand why Microsoft went the way they did with PowerShell. They couldn't have ported a unix shell as is to Windows and expected it to work. While unix was designed right from the beginning to pipe text around and for everything to work together, Microsoft had to deal with the huge legacy issue of third party tools which didn't work in a consistent way. Their solution was to provide an "out of band" pipeline behind the scenes which third parties could hook into. They couldn't use the "in band" stdin and stdout (copied from unix) because too many third parties were spaffing random crap into those streams already. All in all, they took pretty much the only route open to them

This is, quite frankly, made up nonsense. I have no idea where you got it. MS created an Object-Orientated scripting environment that plugged into the very successful and popular .NET framework as well as fit in perfectly with the OO environment that is Windows 7 onwards. The above reads as if MS wanted to copy Bash but couldn't. Why would they? They copied the best bits and the rest they re-did in a more capable way. Text-mangling is a terrible way for programs to communicate with each other. We're not even talking a sensible text-based format such as XML, we're talking actual text in whatever the author of a particular tool happened to like the look of. Run ls, you get lines of file names. Run ls -l to get the extra information you want, now the lines of text are all changed around and you have to manually specify which column you want to get your data. Whereas DIR will always just return an array of objects that the receiving program can handle how it wishes.

Complete nonsense when you write "MS couldn't just use stdin and stdout". Why in the modern era would any programmer choose unstructured text as the glue between different programs? I don't know if you've just read this somewhere or, I suspect, just made this up because it sounds sensible to you. But it is complete nonsense with no historical basis to it. It's a jumble of facts hammered into a false narrative.

I'm going to carry on my reply to your post in a separate response because I'm going to move on to your technical points next and that's better in its own post.

Re: End of Days

>>"I do have an anecdote, however."

Thank you. I appreciate someone actually responding to the question asked. Yes, that is a good anecdote. I would point out, as I'm sure you're anticipating, that the scenario you're talking about is very different to the enterprise. If any of our sysadmins left a box without security updates being installed for a year, they would be in a lot of trouble. I could similarly turn off updates on a Window Server box and whilst I'm not certain whether it would sit there for two years without trouble, I think there's a reasonable chance it might. I honestly wouldn't want either connected to the Internet without regular patching.

Anyway, I appreciate the response. I'm not interested in an argument that either is absolutely best and that's not where I'm coming from. I'm just shooting down a company cuts its maintenance resource down to 2-3% by using GNU/Linux instead of Windows. I'm not even convinced in the Enterprise it is any better in that regard.

Re: Like grep? sed? awk?

>>"It's simpler and orders of magnitude faster. Stat has loads of options to give you information on just about anything about a file."

Granted, it's significantly faster, but I was actually being kind to the GNU/Linux version by using my version. I've never said anything about comparable speed, I was responding to someone who said that Powershell had inconsistent outputs and unmemorable names. What I'm doing is pointing out what a terrible choice of attack they had made. xargs highlights like nothing else the inconsistency of the GNU/Linux versions. I'll illustrate, but first I'm going to clear something up because you're making false assumptions:

>>You might find [...] easier because you're used to it, but Linux administrators would see "find", "xargs", "stat", "sort", and "uniq" to be familiar to them.

I started out on UNIX and have worked professionally on UNIX or Linux for over a decade. I didn't even start using Windows until Windows 7. It is nothing to do with familiarity, I'm saying that the Powershell version is more intuitive and consistent. Getting back to proving that, just look at your attempt to solve the problem vs. the Powershell attempt:

DIR -Recurse | Get-Acl | Select-Object Owner | Select -Unique

find . -print0 | xargs -0 stat -c "%U" | sort | uniq

(I'm happy to use your preferred example, btw)

Each step of the Powershell one is almost self-explanatory (ACLs are permissions on Windows) and they connect via a straight-forward pipe in each case because they all use objects. In the Linux version you're now using the fiddle of xargs to deal with the fact that stat can't have output of find pushed directly to it. You have to pass the stat command as a parameter to xargs so it can use it as some sort of call back. That's not consistent nor memorable (the charges that were levelled at Powershell). You accused me of letting familiarity affect my judgement (I did not, I've actually used Bash and GNU tools far longer than I have Powershell), why don't you look at all the little things you've thrown in without much thought that trip up new people:

-0 parameter to xargs. You've thrown that in to tell xargs that the input list is terminated by nulls, not whitespace. Something which is hardly intuitive or easy to remember.

-print0 parameter to find. Otherwise it will terminate each output with a newline so you have to use a special switch to get it to terminate with nulls so that it will fit with the next item in your pipeline.

-c switch for stat followed by "%U" to format the output as just usernames. Why does a utility for getting file parameters come with its own built in formatting tool? In Powershell, you get an object output which you pass to a dedicated formatting tool. Want your output as a table? No problem - you don't have to change the previous item in the pipeline based on what the later one wants, you just pass the object array on to the Format-Table cmdlet which will have access to all attributes of the file object. It's consistent and it is more importantly the separate stages of the pipeline are discrete, not having to look forward to later stages in the pipeline.

xargs was, honestly, a terrible example to pick. Yes it is faster than my own example significantly (and about 10% faster than the Powershell one though it's harder to do a like for like comparison there so take that as unscientific). HOWEVER, it is a wonderful example of the inconsistency of the GNU/Linux version. It exists purely as a work around for the fact that you're handling everything with text and different command handle piping in different ways. Neither is true on Powershell.

>>"I have to admit though that you've come up with a unique way of solving the problem. I doubt that I would have ever thought of trying it that way."

Well the argument is about memorability and consistency, so I was trying to come up with a way that just illustrated the differences between Powershell and Bash / GNU tools and my example is a bit clearer with regards to what is actually going on. It's not faster than using stat, nor shorter in terms of characters. But it's simpler for someone to understand which is what we're comparing the environments on so it's actually fairer to GNU/Linux, imo.

Bash and the GNU tools evolved over time and never had consistent oversight of design. People just added whatever doohickey they happened to need as they needed it. Just look at how find has its own built in print tools (which use different formatting instructions to printf). find has had everything people wanted rolled into it at some point. Whereas Powershell follows the UNIX philosophy of do one thing and do it well. Perhaps more significantly, the GNU/*NIX environment grew up before OO was big. Powershell is a modern design, planned out and designed to that plan, with the opportunity to learn from all its predecessors mistakes and for a mature OS (came in with Windows 7 and integrates fully with .NET). Are you not open to the possibility that it might be better than Bash?

Re: End of Days

>>"First, you stated 2% out of the blue."

No, I didn't and you're now simply trying to argue that you're not wrong as it's not your fault you didn't understand what I wrote. Which wouldn't make you right even if true. The OP proposed that 90% of the of the servers (the GNU/Linux ones) accounted for only 20% of the total work. Immediately after that post is my reply asking them to justify their statement that the Linux boxes only take 2% the support work. That figure isn't out of nowhere, I did a quick multiplication in my head and realized it was between 2% and 3% and put down 2% as it really didn't matter whether the OP was claiming Linux boxes used 3% of a WIndows box's resource or 2%.

The fact that someone thought 20% of total work translates into 20% efficiency despite it coming from only 10% of their machines is not my fault because I was not their maths teacher and their ignorance isn't on my head. Then you come along and weigh in (still failing to remotely answer the actual question I asked which was about justifying such outrageous claims, btw) and completely failed to understand the point by stating that the number of machines was irrelevant. Which it plainly isn't if you're trying to compare efficiency which is what the OP was doing.

>>"Then, you stated 2.5% based on a loose association of the values "90%" and "20%" with no explanation for the math involved"

I didn't realize an explanation was necessary. I put the slightly more precise figure because it was becoming an (irrelevant to the point) thing you were hung up on. But I can explain the maths to you happily if that will help you. There are different ways you could do it but the easy to get version is to just think of how much total work there is and solve it as an equation:

Type L computers comprise 90% of the total computers.

Type W computers comprise 10% of the total computers.

Type L computers account for 20% of the resource spent.

Type W computers account for 80% of the resource spent.

0.9L = 0.2

0.1W = 0.8

L = 0.222

W = 8.000

L / W = 0.028 = 2.8%

So there you go, the OP stated that GNU/Linux boxes only take 2.8% of the administrative resource that Windows boxes do. Now that the maths has been explained to you, would you like to take a stab at justifying such an astounding claim? I mean you're joining in with this argument in trying to shoot down my posts so would you like to take a crack at the actual topic?

No-one has actually tried to support the OP's wild claims as yet, which says something by itself. The only thing in that vein posted so far is you saying "not every environment is the same", that you "don't give two furry fucks if I prefer WIndows" and a (not very) helpful link to search for "benefits of linux over windows".

Really what is the point - you take issue with me challenging the OP's hyperbolic claims but when asked for any reason why the OP would be right to make them you paste in a Google search link for advantages of Linux. This is nothing.

Re: End of Days

>>"Well, last time the rest of us checked, 20% of required labor is still 20%, not 2.5%. The number of systems involved ultimately doesn't enter the equation, since the discussion is about labor costs."

Go back and read what they actually wrote. If 90% of the machines (type A) only require 20% of the total labour and the remaining 10% of the machines (type B) require 80% of it, that means the former machines are way, way more efficient than just 20% the labour cost. That IS what they wrote. Check it before replying.

It's interesting how I asked the simple question of someone to support their amazing claim that Linux boxes were so much more efficient than Windows boxes to administer and so far all I have had in response is one weak joke and two people who can't multiply. I'm beginning to suspect, hard though this is to believe, that the OP can't actually back up what they say. But feel free to take a shot at it. Even if you want to take the order of magnitude higher figure you arrived at by misreading their post, I'd still love to know what you think makes GNU/Linux boxes take only 20% of the administration that Windows boxes take.

It can't be Puppet because I've used that. ;)

Re: End of Days

>>"Well, they can generally tell the difference between 2 and 20 for a start..."

Before criticizing others, make sure one's own comprehension is correct. They wrote 90% of the servers are GNU/Linux but only take 20% of the work. That's 2.5%, isn't it? It's unfortunate that some people's go to reaction when they see something they don't get is to assume that the other person is wrong rather than question whether they might have made a mistake.

Re: End of Days

Actually, I'm not a sysadmin at all, though I have a few I work with. And they're all GNU/Linux sysadmins. I don't actually know any Windows Sysadmins, though I'm familiar with some of the technology. OP made a claim that GNU/Linux was something like fifty times more efficient to administer. That doesn't mesh with what I've heard / read, so I asked for some support of that.

Still waiting, in fact...

Re: Ha! Ha! Ha!

>>"That's an appalling way to speak to someone who just got the wrong end of the stick.

You're talking about the person who titled this thread "Ha! Ha! Ha!" and thought that MS had released a tool for Linux that they'd never actually tried installing on Linux? When someone crows about someone else's idiocy they've invited others to treat them the same way they treated their victim, really.

>>"Huh? So OO languages aren't worthwhile on Linux?"

No, that's an entirely separate thing (and obviously they are). The thing I alluded to is that Windows is itself structured in an OO manner. There's practically nothing in it that isn't exposed as an object. GNU/Linux is very different - it's primarily text oriented. Piles of configuration files in text format, the standard tools all work via text. Etc. One of the great things about Powershell is that it has Object Pipelining. So the output of the DIR command isn't a textual list of files and directories, but an array of file objects. Of course they convert automatically to text if you output them to screen, but you can pipe them to other applications as objects which is hugely useful. The output of the ls command in GNU/Linux is text, however. If you wanted to extract, for example, a list of file sizes, you do it by knowing where in the output the bytes column is and ripping it out with awk or equivalent. Similarly, you can configure any parts of Windows as objects. For example, file permissions are actually part of the ACL model which you can query and modify as objects.

So the hugely useful object pipelining of Powershell is largely wasted in a GNU/Linux environment. That's what I was saying. It's nothing to do with OO languages not running or being useful on GNU/Linux, but that the environment itself isn't OO.

Re: Jackboots and Jodhpurs anyone?

"TBH, the fate of foxes is the least of my worries for this country over the next five years."

Maybe so, but if your new boss said one of the first things they wanted to do was to let some of your office mates tear apart a living animal with dogs, it wouldn't be a good sign, would it?