What's funny is that the smart-growth crowd doesn't call this "ravaging" but rather calls it "ingrowth" and "densification". It also "creates livable, walkable neighborhoods."

I guess Amazon just made the mistake of doing this in Seattle rather than Portland where it's called approved growth planning.

I'm a Chef admin, and there's no way we wholesale change out simple one or two liners in Ruby for the exhaustively verbose PowerShell equivalent.

You missed the point.

This isn't about being able to install PowerShell on Linux as some kind of bash replacement. This is about being able to have an agent on Linux that talks to the same "Desired Configuration Management" system you're already using on Windows servers, and have already scripted things in PowerShell.

This isn't for you, because you clearly aren't using Windows server with Microsoft's DCM solution, and you aren't looking to extend that solution to Linux instances. This is the Microsoft version of Chef or Puppet, with a cross-platform client. Using PowerShell.

Extingush Chef and Puppet - the two open and pre-existing ways to do what DCM does.

Now only if there wasn't a free way to do that before...

$_ is a stolen construct from Perl.

That was one of the things in PowerShell that I actually understood right away, from working with Perl for 10 years.

This is for those shops that do everything in Visual Studio, host their stuff on Azure, and have that one or two pesky Linux box for a solution they just couldn't kluge together on Windows.

Now they can manage those boxes with the rest of their environment.

This isn't a solution for you or me, but in a Microsoft-centric shop, this might be exactly what they are looking for so that they don't have to throw out all their management in a wholesale replacement.

No, but the free tools that have existed for years that also work on Windows are.

This is a Microsoft attempt to provide what Chef and Puppet have been doing for a long time, in their typical embrace / extend / extinguish manner. Now, instead of learning Ruby to work up a Chef cookbook, you can do it with PowerShell and take twice as long to write it while you instantiate .NET objects to do simple tasks! For example, in Chef:

remote_file "/tmp/file.zip" do
    source "http://server/path/to/file.zip"
end

And in PowerShell:

$source = "http://server/path/to/file.zip"
$dest = Join-Path -Path $env:TEMP -ChildPath "file.zip"
$wc = New-Object system.net.webclient
$wc.downloadFile($source,$dest)

That's stupid and annoying. Just give me a wget / curl command please.

Huh. I had no idea that using an IDE that integrates git so that we can version control our scripts and config files is "for beginners."

Seems more like "the right way if you actually work with other people."

Unless you do both at the same time, which is exactly what SolarCity is now offering using the Tesla battery back thing.

Yeah, but getting pissed about stuff on South Park is so last decade. Everyone expects juvenile attention grabs from them now, and is hardly shocked by anything done by that show.

Unfortunately because of distances involved and having phone companies that like to pocket money rather than reinvesting it, the vast majority of true residential high-speed service uses wire that doesn't belong to phone companies. Cable television, predominantly.

What you describe exists in the US on the telephone system - if you go with DSL, you can choose ISPs and they can deal with the phone company that actually owns the wire and provision a circuit. But the cable companies aren't regulated the same way, so they get to run the whole show. This is why you saw such dread about a Comcast / Time Warner merger - two cable companies getting together to try and screw everyone they can by not only being an ISP juggernaut big enough to push around Netflix and the like, but by also being a content producer (NBC Universal) that has an automatic distribution to 1/3 of the country without having to play with anyone else, and that 1/3 really can't choose anyone else.

I've never seen so much evangelizing about a particular subsystem change in Linux before, which makes me think that unlike other past changes, this one needs it rather than having it's own benefits do the selling...

Batteries operate with direct current. Need a particular voltage / AC frequency? Get a proper inverter for your needs. Problem solved.

How else is he supposed to keep enjoying his hot tub while doing laundry and cooking a Thanksgiving feast during a blackout, you insensitive clod?!