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Why not go whole-hog? http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm... I know I've spent hours rolling on the floor laughing and developing goosebumps reading that. And speaking of whole-hog: http://steve-parker.org/articl...

Yes, this is beautifully described in http://steve-parker.org/articles/others/stephenson/holehawg.shtml

That's what makes the *NIX command line even worse as a tool (not saying the Windows command line is better, but you needn't use it) is that commands are all kinds of random abbreviations.

They are abbreviations, but they aren't random. Neal Stephenson explained the "why" of this in his essay In the Beginning Was The Command Line :

Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

That's what makes the *NIX command line even worse as a tool (not saying the Windows command line is better, but you needn't use it) is that commands are all kinds of random abbreviations.

They are abbreviations, but they aren't random. Neal Stephenson explained the "why" of this in his essay In the Beginning Was The Command Line :

Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

Save your breath. Most of the folks here have their hand shoved knuckle-deep up the corporate feudal/vassal system, and they like the way it feels as their hand is sliding in up to the wrist. They haven't figured out that the wet sucking sound means they are trapped in a situation where they may "contract" something they don't want.

The old timers here have watched, and known for some time, that the noose would be tightened. The younger the generation, the more likely they will give up their freedom and privacy for a bit of comfort. Under 27 thinks it's the "easy way", and I have yet to meet anyone under 18 that even understands the bullshit that is happening to them. They're pretty much Eloi being fattened up and readied for a feast in a few years from now.

If you have offspring, teach them about the rights that they have now, and the rights that they should have but are slowly being taken from them. Pass it on to them, so at least they may be free and safe of this crap. After all, you can't save the passengers on the Titanic that are convinced that the ship won't sink, so why bother educating the friggin' Eloi aboit the peril they are in?

You appear to have missed the fact that Microsoft is going CLI only again. They have introduced powershell and the recent exchange releases require the use of the CLI for certain things. The CLI is here to stay. If you still don't believe it, read the good old essay In The Beginning Was The Command Line.

If people were this committed to, say hammers or forstner bits -- you'd think they were completely insane.

But if people had a strong opinion as to the utility of a regular drill vs. a hole hawg, that's pretty reasonable.

Here is a reference to that but Microsoft made sure the original articles got scrubbed off the Internet. There were things Microsoft did to GEOS, GEM, the Amiga, the Atari ST, Vision, Desqview, etc to discourage OEMS and hardware and software makers from supporting them and only supporting Microsoft products like MS-DOS and Windows instead. Microsoft did the same thing to IBM over OS/2. But most of the articles about that Microsoft had scrubbed off the Internet.

The history of the Amiga clearly shows its 8-bits roots with the Atari 2600 and Atari 400/800 series that evolved into the Amiga eventually, parallel to the Macintosh.

In the 1990's PC OEMS were fighting over the Amiga, but were loyal to Microsoft. But Microsoft used the same tactics against the Amiga that they used against DR-DOS, and killed the Amiga by leveraging what OEMS could and could not do and then Gateway had to sell the Amiga division to make Microsoft happy.

"The press attention to the Microsoft case reveals their relationship with Gateway. Jim Von Holle, a former Gateway employee, describes how the company tried to punish Gateway for the type of software they shipped. Although largely in the background, it became increasingly clear why Gateway chose to develop an alternative to the Windows market. Unfortunately, just a few months later Gateway's relationship with Microsoft regarding their set-top box would have a dramatic effect upon Amiga's plans. Who could have guessed Microsoft would play a major role in the Amigas downfall?"

I have said it before, but my comments got rated down as troll, by rapid Apple and Microsoft fanboys who hate the Amiga. This time I found the links that prove it.

It was not just DR-DOS that Microsoft murdered, but the Amiga as well. Apple had a hand in it by forcing Apple dealers to lose their license if they sold Amiga computers as well as Macintoshes. Then later Apple killed the Apple Dealers and did the store within a store and web store to sell Macintoshes as revenge on Apple dealers that still tried to sell Amiga One and Classic Amiga computers along with Macs.

Geek fatigue is real friend.

I have a ms publisher file that I would like to open, what program would you suggest I try?

According to what I have googled there is no Linux program that understands publisher files.

Not ideal but if the text is sufficient you could do this:

strings file.pub|more

"strings" extracts anything that looks like text from a binary file.

This guy is working on something better but he's only just started.

---

Monopolies = Industrial feudalism

I won't stand for that, so the simple fix is to remove the "WEBSITE" input from the form. If "WEBSITE" gets POSTed along with the other data, I know it's a robot and post a message to kindly go away. Genuine users can edit their profile once the account is activated, if they want to plug their website.

Many years ago I wrote an article (which I never got around to properly finishing) and RMS was kind enough to reply to my queries about this.
My Question
RMS's First Reply
RMS's Follow-up
I think that was pretty clear back in early 2001

Many years ago I wrote an article (which I never got around to properly finishing) and RMS was kind enough to reply to my queries about this.
My Question
RMS's First Reply
RMS's Follow-up
I think that was pretty clear back in early 2001

Many years ago I wrote an article (which I never got around to properly finishing) and RMS was kind enough to reply to my queries about this.
My Question
RMS's First Reply
RMS's Follow-up
I think that was pretty clear back in early 2001

Many years ago I wrote an article (which I never got around to properly finishing) and RMS was kind enough to reply to my queries about this.
My Question
RMS's First Reply
RMS's Follow-up
I think that was pretty clear back in early 2001

ME: I modify GPL code - eg a CGI library - to suit my own needs for use on a publicly-available web server. This code is being run, by the general public, on my web server. Should I, in this case, make the code available? Under the GPL, must I?

RMS: The GPL does not require it. But is not very good for the community when people do this, so I am looking at a way that GPL 3 could require publication in this case.

ME: I modify GPL code - eg a CGI library - to suit my own needs for use on a publicly-available web server. This code is being run, by the general public, on my web server. Should I, in this case, make the code available? Under the GPL, must I?

RMS: The GPL does not require it. But is not very good for the community when people do this, so I am looking at a way that GPL 3 could require publication in this case.

Same here, except most of my code has always been GPL 2 without the suggested boilerplate text of "or later". FWIW, the Linux kernel also avoids this "or later" suggestion. As a later poster mentions, including the "or later" text could mean that your code ends up under any license known generally as "the GPL" - whether RMS goes insane (okay, some might want to argue the future tense, I'm not one of them), the FSF is bought-out by Microsoft, etc, etc - not likely, but you don't want to put work into code on the basis that "whoever calls themselves the administrator of GPL can control the license to my software retrospectively" really, would you? http://steve-parker.org/speedtouchconf/

If you want to follow links from a Google-cached item which doesn't exist, just enter the URL you want to follow into google.com and choose the "cache" option.

Eg - if you want to view Google's cache of http://steve-parker.org/sh/sh.shtml, then just type "http://steve-parker.org/sh/sh.shtml" into Google, and select the "Show Google's cache of ..." option.

If you can bot that, then you've got it botted (is that a word?!)

I would never do evening PC support - keeping my parents reasonably safe is hard enough; neighbours and church members are another (occasional) burden. I'd rather pay myself for spending time at home with my family, than spend all day at work, all evening fiddling with Windows PCs, and not see my precious family.

The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor.

During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we were putting up, climbed up to the second-story level, and used the Hole Hawg to drill a hole through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one and only imperative, kept going. It spun the worker's body around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder down. Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained lodged in the wall, and he simply dangled from it and shouted for help until someone came along and reinstated the ladder.

Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. ... After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.

The red herring
When Connolly first put up his Furthermore demo site, he noticed that his server logs showed that a perceived competitor had downloaded about 20MB worth of data from his site. Connolly immediately interpreted this as wholesale code theft when, in fact, he had no reason to believe that any theft had taken place. The competitor was in the process of designing a site around Mambo OS and, like Furthermore, also employed the lead story block.

However, LiberatiGroup says:

The code committed to Mambo was done under contract and paid for by the Literati Group. The contract stipulates that "Upon finished project all copyright rights to code written by [Sakic] will belong to literatigroup.com."

How does the GPL's use of "linking" relate here? That is, of course, for lawyers and (good) expert witnesses. But it's pretty clear that if I put a "virtual(http://yoursite.example.com/yourlibrary.p hp) line into "my" code, that I'm linking to your library. In C terms, it a static or dynamic link?

LiteratiGroup dismiss a Newsforge explanation of GPL with:

-- This confuses copyright and GPL. GPL does not automatically rob one of their copyrights.

LiteratiGroup replies:

BOTTOM LINE: THERE IS NO DUTY TO REDISTRIBUTE MODIFIED GPL CODE.

I asked RMS about this quite directly back in 2001, as a hypothetical question about webhosted software: http://steve-parker.org/articles/lego/rms1.shtml

Steve Bourne calls them shell procedures not shell scripts. I figure since he created the shell named after him, he should know. So I call them that too.

cat hacker_logo.pic | pic2graph | cat > hacker_logo.png

pic2graph hacker_logo.pic > hacker_logo.png

M$ will be beaten by its own game.
Neil Stephenson, a true visionair IMHO, made an
excellent analysis of the OS situation. Please
read
"In the beginning, there was the command line"

It sums up as:
"But it is the fate of operating systems to become free."

This will end M$ windows domination as we know it.

Bram

Thanks, slashdot. Since I can't post it here, check http://steve-parker.org/zd.txt instead.

Actually, my parents pay 59$ CDN per month including the 14$ extra for static IP and a small increase in upload speed - this is DSL (and canadian too), not a commercial service. Seriously, they get a potential of 864Gb (~100GB) and a limit of 150MB. IMHO, that really, really sucks. 1.5*60*60*24 is 15.8GB per day, and I can use all of it - I could download over 24 ISOs in 24 hours (and I have downloaded entire CDs in under an hour each), whereas the "10Mbps" service mentioned above would allow you to do that if you took a whole month. Not to mention that my server would break their upload cap a few times every day...

I don't know what he is paying, but it's probably equal to me or more. He gets 150MB per day, I get 16GB per day. In the end, he can probably download approximately as much as he could on dialup (considering that 56K*60*60*24 is 590MB, and 150MB is what you would get if you used full 56K bandwith for a few hours each day), but he gets it a lot faster - that's all. I'm not sure I can consider that broadband at all. (My current sig is, by some strange coincidence, applicable to this if you replace the OSes being compared there with the services being compared here.)

#include <stddiscl.h>