But to further clarify, our context was mass administration, which actually requires substantial Powershell knowledge to do...pretty much at all.
Bzzzt. A Windows admin at a medium sized org can get by doing mass administration with just Active Directory/GPO clickity clicks. It's not as efficient, but it works.
you're living in another world if you think *nix admins are some sort of gods when compared to their Windows counterparts
Apparently you didn't read my first post in this thread. A competent 'doze admin is on par with a competent *nix admin. But the *nix admin *has* to do things the command line way for mass-admining, because the GUI just isn't there.
And just so we're clear, I've managed (as an admin not a user) numerous versions of Windows (starting with 98se through 2012), Unices (including HP-UX, Solaris, and IRIX), Linux (RedHat, RHEL, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse, SLE[S/D], Mandrake...), and Macintosh (not counting OSX which is rolled into the Unix bunch). I will admit that there were a lot of GUIfied admin tools for Solaris and IRIX, but nothing like AD's "click a check box and every machine tied to a computer object in tbe OU now has the following mandatory setting that a local admin can't modify".
this "low cost, low skill" Windows admin myth drives me insane
To be fair, it's not a myth (in the colloquial or academic sense). Windows is "easy", allowing for low cost, low skill "admins" who do everything via GUI and one machine at a time (or maybe many if you include AD and GPOs). Same with OSX (with ARD and OpenDirectory for the "mass-admining"). I've known guys that get paid more than myself who didn't want to understand any command line stuff.
But in the *nix world, if you don't know a shell, you're not even a user, let alone a sysadmin.
The last nail in the coffin was when I trained a "more qualified" H1-b about "what those asterisks mean in C programming".
He was just asking for a few pointers.
I (an American) just went on a vacation where I entered Russia, then France, then Russia, then the US on my way home. It went like this:
Russia: "What plane did you get off of?" "OK, [stamp]"
France: "Welcome! [stamp]"
Russia: "Welcome back, Tovarish! [stamp]"
US: "Spread 'em, Cocksucker. What's this in your bag? Get in this line - no, the other line! Papers, please! Is this your family? Who packed your suitcase? Look into the camera. Make your wife look into the camera. Submit to bacterial scanning. Put your bags in the X-Ray machine and leave them there until they start to smoke. OK, Meatwad, we'll let you in, but consider this a warning!"
This place has gotten so xenophobic it's silly.
It's not xenophobia. It's eleutherophobia. I'd almost say fear of fellow citizens, but that's just paranoia, and not entirely accurate.
so that users do not have to Google, tweak and retweak things to get a game to run
Minus Google, that was three quarters of the game back in the 90's!
I'm amazed at how much effort is placed on limiting researchers' misuse of computers at the expense of other researchers
FTFY
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek