I started when I was around 12 years old, on a Philips VG8010. I believe my friends had 386 PCs at that time. I did not have a lot of games on tape so I started reading the computer user's manual (which teaches programming). The book was a really good introductory material because I managed to learn pretty much everything by myself... well except sprites, which was only a few years later that I actually managed to understood how they worked:P
Nobody gives a damn about 10 MB of their disk space because the program takes it's libraries with it. (...) Disk space is cheap.
What about the huge latency caused by the load of those libraries from teh HDD? What about RAM? Unless everyone has SSDs and plenty of RAM, the performance impact will be quite noticeable. Otherwise, projects like prelink wouldn't ever exited.
This is old news - in these pages itself, the first time they started on it was 2006 [slashdot.org], and last year, too, there was another story [slashdot.org] on their experiment here. Extremadura, Munich and Portugal happen to be pretty unique/ahead in this regard - do a search on their stories over this experiment.
Except the current Portuguese government decided to start replacing some of the machines running GNU/Linux with Windows. There were even some problems in the transition of the government website infrastructure, because the new Microsoft solution could not serve as much client requests as the previous Linux-based one, leading to a massive downtime which lasted weeks [1].
I don't want to speculate but most probably the new team assigned to manage the government website did only have knowledge on Microsoft technologies, so the old previous system had to go.... This is a shame because they did it during an Economical crisis, wasting money on Windows server license keys and all other associated costs which they did not have before (since it was already running Linux).
I've been using Mendeley and I'm quite happy with it. However, I don't use any of the collaborative/social functionalities of Mendeley. What I use and find it very useful is: 1) the autocomplete of bibliographic metadata of papers newly added to the database. 2) generating a single bibtex file for all the papers you have in the Mendeley database. 3) automatic assigning of citation keys for your papers in the database.
So basically when I'm writing a paper I just need to go to Mendeley, search for some keywords (the search engine is good), select the relevant paper and copy-paste the citation key into my latex document. That's it!
I like CLIs, but if you want to have multiple windows that is a GUI, and being able to have multiple windows is incredibly useful. (I know you can "fake" multiple windows in CLI, i've done it before with emacs and such, but it's a pretty limited both in the number of "windows" you can create and in functionality of those windows.) GUIs are much better for multi-tasking, you can have one task going in one window and keep an eye on it while working in another window.
Well if we want to be pedantic, I can also argue that several windows with each containing just a CLI; is the same as having three or four tiled computer screens, with each having its own CLI in fullscreen. No?:P But I get what you mean, CLI alone is less functional than CLI+GUI (for example being able to copy paste data between CLIs using contextual menus), I totally agree.
I realize you're mainly railing against the practice of entering commands and information via pressing GUI buttons as opposed to typing in commands on the keyboard, but you're painting the entire CLI vs GUI thing in very absolute black and white terms, and reality is much more grey. Either you don't like multitasking in windowed environments, even if the windows are all CLIs, which i don't think most people would agree with, or you're defining the features of a GUI as "the parts i don't think are necessary."
I totally agree with you that CLI+GUI promotes the best productivity. My "b/w" comparison was made on purpose to try making the parent poster realize that CLI is very powerful and cannot simply be disregarded as an old fashioned interface for bearded necks. I do love multitasking in windowed environments! In fact I'm currently typing in my left screen (chromium window fullscreen), while the front screen has gvim opened with the source code and the right screen is displaying several terms with python code running:)
GUI's have increased productivity. How simply because instead of paying one UNIX guru to do it in 20 years, you can have 20 people do it in one.
That's a very bold claim! GUIs are only very good at one thing, suggesting context to the user. This is the case when the user does not have a very good idea what he wants to accomplish or how to accomplish it. For example, think on browsing the internet. CLIs are very powerful and orders of magnitude faster than GUIs when you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish and a slight idea on how to accomplish it. This is the case when you are programming, it is the case when you are administrating systems, etc.. Most importantly, CLI allows you to batch repetitive tasks, which doing over a GUI would be time consuming.
I remember seeing some colleagues from my first years of University that used to leave a scientific program running, copy the results into excel once finished, change some parameters in the program, run it again, copy the results into excel.... they did this over 20 times!!!! People that know better just write a couple of lines in bash and go waste their time with something else, while the bash script re-run the program with different parameters and dump the results somewhere for a final pass. Clearly you are not very comfortable with CLIs, otherwise you would acknowledge how powerful they are!
The GUI interface and touchscreen interface is quick and easy. Mcdonalds, Dunkin Donuts, fast food, Heck that chain restaurant down the street are all having massive increases in possibly productivity because Touchscreens and GUI's make the employees have to push less buttons to get more consistent orders.
Agreed. But would a touchscreen+ GUI fit a programmer? What about someone doing CAD? My point is that different jobs need different tools. A programmer needs a keyboard +CLI while someone doing CAD needs a GUI+CLI + a very precise input like a mouse and/or stylus.
That's why I think the idea behind Metro and Gnome 2 is simply retarded. You cannot have a single user interface accepting for multiple input devices and working to perform different kinds of jobs. Each job requires a different tool!
I would love to see you take my order at a restaurant with a command-line interface.
LOL What do you think cash registers and calculators are exactly? Just because the commands are only composed of numerical digits it does not mean they are not a command line interface. Also, try using your shiny touchscreen + GUI in a warehouse with thousands of products and let me know how good it is.
well lets start with the 16 bit color color palette, hard to read, fonts massive over sized non scaling buttons.
Well.. Is that a bad thing? I'm not a user interface expert but in my opinion It provides better contrast between interface elements/controls. http://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/static/Documentation/rostock_paper/gui_main.gif Can't you tell immediately what are the controls and what they do? Now compare that with the interfaces that some software companies started pushing into our throats, where you can't even tell the difference between clickable and non-clickable elements! That and the abusive integration of media and/or distracting UI elements. Everything seems to be geared for content consumption but what about production? Are we supposed to be productive using interfaces designed for content consumption?
Actually the only thing I really miss is focus follows mouse.
Well, pretty much all window managers in Linux allow you to configure them to work that way.
I must admit I recently started looking a lot into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment . I was super happy with Gnome 2, my productivity was never higher! Then, *bam* Gnome 3 up my throat, I actually tried to use it for a month but it was too painful - it was slow as hell, crashing all the time. Now I'm with KDE 4, it is not as fast as Gnome 2 but, feature-wise it is in a entirely different league. Still, I feel I don't use most of its features..
The other day I needed a fancy way to visualize data in a gdb session - that's when I found ddd. The Data Display Debugger http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/ is written in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(widget_toolkit) . I was amazed how responsive and fast the GUI was. I found the GUI very well organized and not confusing at all to use. So I wonder, why are we really moving away from this? Why is everything turning into eye candy bloatware?
Heck, it doesn't even have an update UI built into it. Instead, you have to rely on a third-party addon to update it.
Rely on a third party addon to update it? Really? I'm really sorry but that's the stupidest thing I ever heard! The main reason why people use chromium instead of chrome is because it integrates better with Linux distributions. That is, you use the distro's package manager to update chromium the same way you use it to update anything else in the system. Using a crappy addon to handle the updates totally defeats the purpose!
(Several posts here are talking as if DHCP is a vital stage in setting up a network connection.)
If you have windows, it is! It will show a "limited connection" warning if windows does not get a dhcp offer../troll
Now seriously, one can perfectly clone a MAC address and IP address of someone and do business as usual.. Just setup some iptables rules to drop all incoming packets not related to any connection that originated from your computer and you are gold. Of course this can confuse the shit out of the other computer if it does not have a proper firewall setup too. But yeah, I agree with you. Sounds like some people here don't have any clue about what's going on under the application layer..
the emacs guys implement a emacs compatibility layer for supporting emacs mode on emacs? That way I can edit on emacs inside emacs on emacs on.. [aborted: out of stack neurons]
There is this video from discovery channel which shows the hypothetical furry creature as one of evolutionary steps to mankind, I personally find it interesting:
MS believes: 'By formally introducing children to Windows basics at primary school, we stand a far greater chance of increasing the numbers using it through the rest of their lifes'
Joking.. My first computer was a Philips VG8010 (MSX Basic) and I'm perfectly sane! Now excuse me I need to order all my pencils by length and then do my daily naked run in the streets.
But I do worry a bit when people think all software should be held to the same standard as, say, bridges or medical devices. Unless the software is critical (such as running a medical device, or handling security for a bank, or an OS kernel, etc.), then there is insufficient incentive to make it super reliable and robust. The market would punish you terribly for having less features and more cost.
Well the way I see it, the market could keep costs while, for example, trading "innovation" for stability. Ever wondered what would happen if Microsoft would improve Windows XP's robustness until today, instead of revamping the whole thing at every release?
Software can, in fact, be made as reliable as bridges. But you better be prepared to pay a lot more for your software...
That is the thing.. I don't pay for most software I'm using, it is available to me as opensource. Because I don't pay for it, I cannot demand higher quality standards. Regarding the software I actually pay (well, somewhat, my lab. does), it certainly has higher quality standards (I think it is more expensive too).
The fact is, the market prefers cheap and buggy over expensive and reliable. If that upsets you, preach your message to the users, not the developers. The developers are only giving users what they want.
Well you sure have a point there! In fact I don't even know why this upsets me since I'm not even a client/user in that market!:) Maybe because I have the feeling that the free software I'm using can actually have more quality.. IMHO
here is this car for you to buy, with 5 seats...but you can only use two of the seats because the engine takes the other three...
It is amazing what software companies can escape with, things that in other engineering fields would totally blast them companies with lawsuits. Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
Slashdot Mirror
I started when I was around 12 years old, on a Philips VG8010. I believe my friends had 386 PCs at that time. I did not have a lot of games on tape so I started reading the computer user's manual (which teaches programming). The book was a really good introductory material because I managed to learn pretty much everything by myself ... well except sprites, which was only a few years later that I actually managed to understood how they worked :P
Nobody else here starting with a MSX ??
Nobody gives a damn about 10 MB of their disk space because the program takes it's libraries with it.
(...)
Disk space is cheap.
What about the huge latency caused by the load of those libraries from teh HDD? What about RAM?
Unless everyone has SSDs and plenty of RAM, the performance impact will be quite noticeable. Otherwise, projects like prelink wouldn't ever exited.
and yes.. I run Gentoo :D
What is this? 2008?
This is old news - in these pages itself, the first time they started on it was 2006 [slashdot.org], and last year, too, there was another story [slashdot.org] on their experiment here. Extremadura, Munich and Portugal happen to be pretty unique/ahead in this regard - do a search on their stories over this experiment.
Except the current Portuguese government decided to start replacing some of the machines running GNU/Linux with Windows. There were even some problems in the transition of the government website infrastructure, because the new Microsoft solution could not serve as much client requests as the previous Linux-based one, leading to a massive downtime which lasted weeks [1].
I don't want to speculate but most probably the new team assigned to manage the government website did only have knowledge on Microsoft technologies, so the old previous system had to go.... This is a shame because they did it during an Economical crisis, wasting money on Windows server license keys and all other associated costs which they did not have before (since it was already running Linux).
[1] http://exameinformatica.sapo.pt/web/exameinformatica/noticias/internet/2012-04-04-sistema-de-redundancia-do-portal-do-governo-nao-funcionou;jsessionid=7AE120CAF45F6309EC0DB51D0D8E70D5
I've been wWatching p0rn si8nce my 13 yewars old and Im perfwectly fine!
OPlease don5t minnd my spwelling mistakes, my otyher hand is busy...
When the hell are we going to get HL3?? I don't even ask for that much, a new HL2 episode would be nice!
(pardon moi a bit of internet rage just in case some valve guy is actually reading this)
I've been using Mendeley and I'm quite happy with it. However, I don't use any of the collaborative/social functionalities of Mendeley. What I use and find it very useful is:
1) the autocomplete of bibliographic metadata of papers newly added to the database.
2) generating a single bibtex file for all the papers you have in the Mendeley database.
3) automatic assigning of citation keys for your papers in the database.
So basically when I'm writing a paper I just need to go to Mendeley, search for some keywords (the search engine is good), select the relevant paper and copy-paste the citation key into my latex document. That's it!
Does Zotero provide similar functionality?
I'm EM hypersensitive and I don't wear tin foil hats.
Was your hat really tin? Or aluminum? Was it properly grounded?
whooooooooooooosh! That was the sound of a honey bee flying over your head!
That's exactly how I like windows. Removed, overwritten with zeros, and with a ext4 filesystem built on top of it.
You should dump /dev/random into the hdd, instead of writing zeros - just to be safe :p
I like CLIs, but if you want to have multiple windows that is a GUI, and being able to have multiple windows is incredibly useful. (I know you can "fake" multiple windows in CLI, i've done it before with emacs and such, but it's a pretty limited both in the number of "windows" you can create and in functionality of those windows.) GUIs are much better for multi-tasking, you can have one task going in one window and keep an eye on it while working in another window.
Well if we want to be pedantic, I can also argue that several windows with each containing just a CLI; is the same as having three or four tiled computer screens, with each having its own CLI in fullscreen. No? :P
But I get what you mean, CLI alone is less functional than CLI+GUI (for example being able to copy paste data between CLIs using contextual menus), I totally agree.
I realize you're mainly railing against the practice of entering commands and information via pressing GUI buttons as opposed to typing in commands on the keyboard, but you're painting the entire CLI vs GUI thing in very absolute black and white terms, and reality is much more grey. Either you don't like multitasking in windowed environments, even if the windows are all CLIs, which i don't think most people would agree with, or you're defining the features of a GUI as "the parts i don't think are necessary."
I totally agree with you that CLI+GUI promotes the best productivity. My "b/w" comparison was made on purpose to try making the parent poster realize that CLI is very powerful and cannot simply be disregarded as an old fashioned interface for bearded necks. :)
I do love multitasking in windowed environments! In fact I'm currently typing in my left screen (chromium window fullscreen), while the front screen has gvim opened with the source code and the right screen is displaying several terms with python code running
GUI's have increased productivity. How simply because instead of paying one UNIX guru to do it in 20 years, you can have 20 people do it in one.
That's a very bold claim! GUIs are only very good at one thing, suggesting context to the user. This is the case when the user does not have a very good idea what he wants to accomplish or how to accomplish it. For example, think on browsing the internet.
CLIs are very powerful and orders of magnitude faster than GUIs when you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish and a slight idea on how to accomplish it. This is the case when you are programming, it is the case when you are administrating systems, etc..
Most importantly, CLI allows you to batch repetitive tasks, which doing over a GUI would be time consuming.
I remember seeing some colleagues from my first years of University that used to leave a scientific program running, copy the results into excel once finished, change some parameters in the program, run it again, copy the results into excel.... they did this over 20 times!!!!
People that know better just write a couple of lines in bash and go waste their time with something else, while the bash script re-run the program with different parameters and dump the results somewhere for a final pass. Clearly you are not very comfortable with CLIs, otherwise you would acknowledge how powerful they are!
The GUI interface and touchscreen interface is quick and easy. Mcdonalds, Dunkin Donuts, fast food, Heck that chain restaurant down the street are all having massive increases in possibly productivity because Touchscreens and GUI's make the employees have to push less buttons to get more consistent orders.
Agreed. But would a touchscreen+ GUI fit a programmer? What about someone doing CAD? My point is that different jobs need different tools. A programmer needs a keyboard +CLI while someone doing CAD needs a GUI+CLI + a very precise input like a mouse and/or stylus.
That's why I think the idea behind Metro and Gnome 2 is simply retarded. You cannot have a single user interface accepting for multiple input devices and working to perform different kinds of jobs. Each job requires a different tool!
I would love to see you take my order at a restaurant with a command-line interface.
LOL What do you think cash registers and calculators are exactly? Just because the commands are only composed of numerical digits it does not mean they are not a command line interface.
Also, try using your shiny touchscreen + GUI in a warehouse with thousands of products and let me know how good it is.
well lets start with the 16 bit color color palette, hard to read, fonts massive over sized non scaling buttons.
Well.. Is that a bad thing? I'm not a user interface expert but in my opinion It provides better contrast between interface elements/controls.
http://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/static/Documentation/rostock_paper/gui_main.gif
Can't you tell immediately what are the controls and what they do? Now compare that with the interfaces that some software companies started pushing into our throats, where you can't even tell the difference between clickable and non-clickable elements! That and the abusive integration of media and/or distracting UI elements.
Everything seems to be geared for content consumption but what about production? Are we supposed to be productive using interfaces designed for content consumption?
Actually the only thing I really miss is focus follows mouse.
Well, pretty much all window managers in Linux allow you to configure them to work that way.
I must admit I recently started looking a lot into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment . I was super happy with Gnome 2, my productivity was never higher! Then, *bam* Gnome 3 up my throat, I actually tried to use it for a month but it was too painful - it was slow as hell, crashing all the time. Now I'm with KDE 4, it is not as fast as Gnome 2 but, feature-wise it is in a entirely different league. Still, I feel I don't use most of its features..
The other day I needed a fancy way to visualize data in a gdb session - that's when I found ddd. The Data Display Debugger http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/ is written in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(widget_toolkit) . I was amazed how responsive and fast the GUI was. I found the GUI very well organized and not confusing at all to use. So I wonder, why are we really moving away from this? Why is everything turning into eye candy bloatware?
You forget one:
- autoupdating
Heck, it doesn't even have an update UI built into it. Instead, you have to rely on a third-party addon to update it.
Rely on a third party addon to update it? Really? I'm really sorry but that's the stupidest thing I ever heard! The main reason why people use chromium instead of chrome is because it integrates better with Linux distributions. That is, you use the distro's package manager to update chromium the same way you use it to update anything else in the system. Using a crappy addon to handle the updates totally defeats the purpose!
You can also go with chromium..
Why would he even send a DHCP request?
(Several posts here are talking as if DHCP is a vital stage in setting up a network connection.)
If you have windows, it is! It will show a "limited connection" warning if windows does not get a dhcp offer.. /troll
Now seriously, one can perfectly clone a MAC address and IP address of someone and do business as usual.. Just setup some iptables rules to drop all incoming packets not related to any connection that originated from your computer and you are gold. Of course this can confuse the shit out of the other computer if it does not have a proper firewall setup too.
But yeah, I agree with you. Sounds like some people here don't have any clue about what's going on under the application layer..
Sir, you deserve a medal! How did you managed to get up moderated with this wonderful piece of Astroturfing?
the emacs guys implement a emacs compatibility layer for supporting emacs mode on emacs? That way I can edit on emacs inside emacs on emacs on .. [aborted: out of stack neurons]
Besides that, everyone is free to invest their time and efforts in whatever they want.
I choose to invest my time and efforts in useles$%#&%_%%%
For video, I've yet to see a HTML5 player that works as well as Flash.
Youtube's? In fact, youtube switches to html5 everytime when it can, guess what? I don't even notice.
There is this video from discovery channel which shows the hypothetical furry creature as one of evolutionary steps to mankind, I personally find it interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwxCnV2PL2k
MS believes: 'By formally introducing children to Windows basics at primary school, we stand a far greater chance of increasing the numbers using it through the rest of their lifes'
Joking.. My first computer was a Philips VG8010 (MSX Basic) and I'm perfectly sane! Now excuse me I need to order all my pencils by length and then do my daily naked run in the streets.
But I do worry a bit when people think all software should be held to the same standard as, say, bridges or medical devices. Unless the software is critical (such as running a medical device, or handling security for a bank, or an OS kernel, etc.), then there is insufficient incentive to make it super reliable and robust. The market would punish you terribly for having less features and more cost.
Well the way I see it, the market could keep costs while, for example, trading "innovation" for stability. Ever wondered what would happen if Microsoft would improve Windows XP's robustness until today, instead of revamping the whole thing at every release?
Software can, in fact, be made as reliable as bridges. But you better be prepared to pay a lot more for your software...
That is the thing.. I don't pay for most software I'm using, it is available to me as opensource. Because I don't pay for it, I cannot demand higher quality standards. Regarding the software I actually pay (well, somewhat, my lab. does), it certainly has higher quality standards (I think it is more expensive too).
The fact is, the market prefers cheap and buggy over expensive and reliable. If that upsets you, preach your message to the users, not the developers. The developers are only giving users what they want.
Well you sure have a point there! In fact I don't even know why this upsets me since I'm not even a client/user in that market! :) Maybe because I have the feeling that the free software I'm using can actually have more quality.. IMHO
it is more like:
here is this car for you to buy, with 5 seats...but you can only use two of the seats because the engine takes the other three...
It is amazing what software companies can escape with, things that in other engineering fields would totally blast them companies with lawsuits.
Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!