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Raesan

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What I thought was most interesting was the statement at the very end: "The poetic nature of writing in grievance in Arabic is much more effective than in English." Differences between languages are so interesting to me. Anyone here know Arabic and feel the same way as the author? What makes Arabic different in that sense?

Pretty much all APIs at Amazon , internal and external, are either defined using this or its precursor and then per-language clients and server stub implementations are autogenerated based on the model. That’s true of boto3. Not sure how much the of CLI is autogenerated, but the CLI uses boto(core) under the hood so it’s involved one way or the other.

It is! I’ve been watching a bunch of Asian TV shows lately and I’ve seen that phrase crop up in both Thai and Taiwanese shows. I had the same question so I asked a friend who’s Thai about it. She said it’s equivalent to “I should get going”, “I’m going to head out”, or something of that nature.

Yeah, PS remoting is basically a no-go before server 2012, and even then it's just barely functional enough to be occasionally useful. They're planning on adding SSH support though, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

I don't think something like Python would have been a good choice to use instead of PS. While I'm sympathetic to the complaint that PS is more of a programming language than a shell, that's even more true of Python. I use PS as a shell far more often than I use it for complicated scripting, and as much as I like Python, I just can't see using it as a shell.

I see your point, but I think it's increasingly rare to find sysadmins who haven't been exposed to OOP. A little programming has become less and less optional to be successful at the job. At my job, I'm pretty sure even the entry level helpdesk staff have been exposed to a bit of Java, C#, or the like.

When powershell comes up, someone always gripes about how they can't do this or that like they can in bash. I'm not going to deny that grep is nicer to use that the powershell equivalent (Select-String). But you don't configure Windows and other software in the Microsoft ecosystem by messing around with text. For example, if you had a new user and you wanted to set up an account, email address, and phone number (so AD, Exchange, and Lync/Skype for Business in Microsoft land), it wouldn't just be hard using something like Cygwin, it would probably be impossible. There is just no way to talk to those programs text streams or config files.

I guess what I always want to know when people complain about powershell is what they were actually trying to do. I think it's an excellent tool for system administration in a Microsoft environment. When you start moving away from that use case, it gets less and less useful.

PowerShell has "providers" that let you interact with things as if they were a file system, which is what is going on in your example. I agree that it's not a great way to expose IIS settings.

The other place you see providers in use is when you use PS to edit the registry, but it's HKLM:\ (or whatever other hive) instead of IIS:\, and it makes a lot more sense there since people naturally think of the registry in a filesystem sort of way.

More info if you're curious about providers:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/%5Clibrary/Ee126186(v=VS...

Yeah, that really bothered me coming from bash. I agree it's not as good from a discoverability perspective. Having said that, it's not the kind of thing that has continued to bother me over time. I've gotten used to it.

I took a few CS classes at the University of Washington in the 08–09 academic year. The intro CS classes had recently been redesigned [1] to be more effective. Anecdotally: I talked four of my friends into taking one or both of the intro classes (split evenly between science/non-science majors), and they all did well and really enjoyed them. I think how programming is taught at colleges is definitely a fixable problem.

[1] http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/reges/sigcse/

I did something similar with Google Voice. I created a new voicemail greeting of the tone and calls from the apartment's callbox are sent straight to voicemail with that greeting.

You have to hold your phone next to the speakers on my computer and record the greeting by playing the tone since the tone you get from pressing the number on your phone isn't picked up by Google Voice, for whatever reason.