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Command Line Life Partner Wanted
emj writes "Craiglist offers an interesting approach to finding a life partner , summmary: "There is a sad truth to the world today. I am part of a dying breed of people known as "shell users." ... Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix."."
I think that to some extent we are a dying breed. I'm only 23, and I'm still old enough that when I first started using a computer all we had was shell (dos, apple II). So I was forced to use CLI and am more comfortable using it as a result. My little brothers have never seen a shell...for them problems on a computer are fixed with lots and lots of clicking in the "control panel".
I'm not saying that CLI is going to fade away, because IMO it still has lots of advantages, just saying that only unix geeks will think to use it.
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
Shift-Right click will bring up a shell anywhere, even on the desktop. I've been using it to install the Enthought Tool System (ETS) and it works great. I know there used to be a Powertoy that did this but I don't think it was as powerful.
I also use the prompt for burning bootable DVD's. I download Server Tools and use the dvdburn.exe utility. Shells are on their way back.
Yes training a child a birth to use a command line is no promise they will grow up using it... Especially growing up and realizing the GUI have some major advantages over command lines for Many uses....
The problem with GUIs is that they are not practical, at least not the ones that are created. I just have had to calculate about 500 Shapiro-Wilk statistics and p-values using R (statistical analysis package), I use Rkward GUI because it make things a whole lot easier, however, it would be plainly stupid to try to calculate all those values (from series with about 1000 samples) by importing, and selecting the statistics via a menu, it would have taken hours.
Instead, a simple Bash script using awk, sed, grep and a custom prgoram to run R scripts allowed me to make it automatically *and* to format the results in a way I liked.
GUIs are *easy* to use, but they are very impractical. It would be a nice argument to prove if all of them are like that or if it is only that GUIs are usually made that way (i.e., the irfanView batch converting is really good! and easy compared to some linux command line equivalents... and there is no Linux GUI equivalent of that).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
to agree to allow me to teach them binary math first.. I wanted to teach them how to count to 1023 on their fingers (4, 128, and 132 are a scream)
I gotta lotta hell no.. but imagine it-- if your kids intuitively knew binary-- or hex-- imagine the abilitys for a future programmer..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
its already been done, just take the video and play back with aalib or libcaca in mplayer!
And in case you were wondering, yes, it's authentic.