IANAGeneticist, but my Bio 101 texts suggested that the (original, biological) purpose of sex was the introduction of variation, not "to normalize genetic traits" as you wrote.
Early lifeforms reproduced asexually by simple cell division, and all offspring were identical clones of their parent organisms untill they were exposed to some mutagen. It appears that males are a wastefull drain on resources, but that the gain in genetic variability created by sexual reproduction offsets males' otherwise reproductively useless consumption of resources. The whole idea is to de-normalize genetic traits and create a diverse range of offspring capable of adapting to environmental/habitat/competitive change.
I think you are also a bit off in calling an inbred animal an abnormal one. There are many natural circumstances that lead to inbred populations: catastrophy, isolated island populations, disease etc. Survivors of such circumstances may be burdened with negative traits but they may also give rise to large populations with great diversity -- e.g. Hom. Sap. Sap. as shown in the work of Ann Gibbons (Science, v.267 1/6/1995).
Alleles have no mechanism for knowing what "normal" is, so introduction of this culturally determined, anthropocentric idea is not going to shed light on the discussion.
Take it as given that many would agree with you but some would not. How do you convince those who are deeply involved in "artificial human systems" like industrial production, globalization, etc. of your view. Just declaring that it is so won't get the job done.
I recently heard an interview with an oil industry PR whore who personified the oposing view. The guy's argument (long and fully of corporate mangement babble about "adding value", "maximising benefits" etc.) could be sumarized as:
"These ecological doomsayers have yet to conclusively proove their point. When we find ourselves living on an uninhabitable palnet, then we'll know they were right. That would be an appropriate time for action, but not before."
To effectively counter this position, you must acknowledge that this argument actually sounds good to people who are heavily invested in polluting the planet, then find a compelling reason to shift their perspective. Any ideas?
The same RH installer is included in the LinuxPPC installer - as is clearly indicated in the install docs... Any Mac user installing any Linux distro would be well-advised to RTFM...regardless of technical sophistication.
Please offer some argument for your "most credible" statement. It's provactive. And wrong. I thoroughly checked out both before deciding on LinuxPPC. The much vaunted Yellow Dog installer was a joke compared to LinuxPPC's X based installer and the code under the hood is mostly the same. Yellow Dog's slick corporate presentation reduced its credibility in my eyes. I had no trouble at all getting LinuxPPC to work on my aging Umax C600 Mac clone... and I had no trouble getting it to recognize the G3 card in the L2 cahce slot. Which version of LinuxPPC did you try?
There are lots of supported 3 button mice. LinuxPPC works beautifully with USB mice and there are many 3 button models available (the Contour Unimouse is my choice).You can still obtain a number of 2 & 3 button mice for ADB Macs from mail order sources, but PCI USB cards are cheap, so why bother? USB has been well suported in LinuxPPC since the 1999 Q3 release.
*Real* Mac Crumudgeons barely accept the novelty of OS 7.1 and have no intention of moving beyond it!
Some part-real part-synthetic Mac Crumudgeons accept 7.5. Only simulated Mac Crumudgeons accept OS 8.1 and/or 8.6. *NO* Mac Crumudgeons of any stripe accept OS 9!
I don't diagree with the general tone of your statement, but please get your facts straight! OS 9 is the up-to-date latest and greatest release OS from Apple. Crumudgeons wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
"..they should have set the price at $20." looks fine to me. Is there any real justification for this usage or is it just the industry language abuse like "form-factor" etc.?
Please don't take this as a flame, I am genuinely curious about this.
You post brings back fond memories of expanding my Apple ][+ from it's capable but confining 48k to a vast and spacious 64k RAM. The process involved pulling the last RAM chip from the motherboards and replacing it with a 16 pin conector attached to a ribbon cable that led to an expansion card that carried all that extra RAM. All that power! And such a cool CLI... Applesoft in ROM... let's see, using your formula (Mhz/4) the Apple II would would need... more RAM!:)
You post brings back fond memories of expanding my Apple ][+ from it's capable but confining 48k to a vast and spacious 64k RAM. The process involved pulling the last RAM chip from the motherboards and replacing it with a 16 pin conector attached to a ribbon cable that led to an expansion card that carried all that extra RAM. All that power! And such a cool CLI... Applesoft in ROM... let's see, using your formula (Mhz/4) the Apple II would would need... more RAM!:)
His sig doesn't say that 50% of engineers are below 'an average' or 'the average'...
It says 50% of engineers are below average... Those three little dots are called an ellipsis and they are often used to indicate an incomplete passage or thought. So he might be implying that 50% of engineers are of below average intelligence,social skills, or personal hygene. Then again he may have been thinking "below average stupidity"... Probably not, though. The ellipsis invites readers to complete the thought themselves.
Back on topic: LinuxPPC runs fine on my old mac. Why does OS X require these vast resources? could it be that they are playing the forced upgrade game, "encouraging" new hardware sales?
In fairness, the original programmers had to figure out how they were goign to accomplish their goals and then create code that actually did it. The hackers had only to observe the workings of the exisiting code and create a work-alike...
Sun and HP don't want to pay Troll, so they go for GNOME... Despite which many, many Linux users will use KDE. Touting corporate support for competing free (in every sense) projects is a bit silly, isn't it.
Surely the only mindshare that counts is among Linux users and it's just a bit early to draw conclusions about that.
Well, I'm a linux newbie and I've found both GNOME and KDE to be a pain in the ass...
I using Linux partly on a machine with 640 X 480 video... When I need to use X, I use GNOME w/enlightenment because I can use the large virtual desktop to let me control x-apps with widgets that fall outside the area of my screen. There may be a way to get kwm to do the same thing, but I'll never know because the KDE designers used a huge settings dailog box with all the import widgets inaccessible off the bottom of the screen.
So I mostly use bash and no X at all -- Which is fine becaus I'm spending most of my time in Linux learning C. I use Vim to create my source files and gcc to compile them and that's getting me where I want to go today.
It would be nice if GNOME was stable and even nicer if KDE wasn't so hostile to users with small displays... Personally, from my limited experiments with GNOME and KDE, I hink KDE looks and "feels" a little more polished, but that's not worth much when it won't deliver basic user functions like window manager configuration.
For what's it's worth, this Mac user sees no reason why both GNOME and KDE shouldn't surpass MacOS in features, usability and basic goodness.
Did you bother to read the story? There are real issues here. These aren;t frivolous lawsuits. The fact is that MS has been a very ruthless competitor. Most of the time that ruthlessness is within the law, but sometimes it isn't. In those circumstances the victims of their illegal tactics are quite right to seek redress in the courts. What is your problem with that?
I didn't find anything that even remotely supported the idea that "Unix has Microsoft running scared" in the article...
It also sounds like this is the middle and not the end of this case, as appeals by MS against this judgement and Bristol against other parts of the earlier Federal case are expected soon.
The question raised in my mind by both this trial and the/. post is: does it really matter whether Microsoft is scared or not?
Linux was developed without attracting much attention of any kind from Microsoft It has rapidly gained popularity despite active attacks by Microsoft as have a few other little projects like Apache, or the web itself (remember the attempts to pass off Microsoft Network as the viable alternative to that flash in the pan world wide web?)...
I use Macs at work every day, as I have since 1989, despite years of really concerted effort by Microsoft to eliminate Apple. I use Linux and MacOS at home, and I'm coming to the conclusion that Microsoft's love, hate, fear, or contempt for a given OS, project or movement is pretty much irrelevant. I'm happy to see Microsoft get taken down a peg (however small a peg) because I have used their software and OS and know it for it what it is. I'm pretty confident that good alternatives to Microsoft will continue to be available and in some sense prevail because smart people are creating and using those alternatives.
cr0sh, I think the fundamental question is clear and the examples you gave unnecessary...
The issue is not really one of technically correct grammar. Nor is it one of pretending to be "less smart" or less educated.
The practice of replacing "he" as the generic third person singular came about as the result of a concern with gender-bias in language. A number of writers set out, quite deliberately, to use this idiom to undermine what was perceived to be a masculine bias in the language that served the needs of an oppressive patriarchy. Today, when English speaking people employ the word "they" for the third person singular, it is generally in order to avoid using the masculine "he" and not the result of ignorance.
If someone were to say, "imagine that a user is having trouble installing Linux on their laptop," no one of average intelligence would have any trouble understanding that the hypothetical user is singular and could be male or female. Most readers would understand that if a person chose to use "they" in this way, then they were probably doing it to avoid excluding women from the set of imagined Linux users.
Here's a bit on this topic from an article entitled "She is tired of being a man!" by Aruna Gopakumar:
People may argue that 'he' and 'man' are inclusive and represent humankind. Here is empirical evidence that these terms are not truly neutral. In 1972, two sociologists at Drake University, decided to test the hypothesis that man is generally understood to embrace woman. Some 300 students were asked to select from magazines a variety of pictures that would appropriately illustrate the different chapters of a sociology textbook. Half the students were assigned headings like 'Social Man', 'Industrial Man', and 'Political Man'. The other half was given corresponding headings like 'Society', 'Industrial Life', and 'Political Behaviour'.
Analysis of the pictures selected revealed that in the minds of students of both sexes the use of the word 'man' evoked, to a statistically significant degree, images of males only, filtering out recognition of women's participation in these major areas of life. However, the corresponding headings without 'man' evoked images of both males and females. The authors concluded, "This is rather convincing evidence that when you use the word 'man' generically, people do tend to think male, and not female."
In a journal called MacTech Quarterly, 'she' is used instead of 'he'' as the generic pronoun. It is telling to look at the reactions to MacTech Quarterly's policy. Responses poured in. One of the most interesting positive letters was from a female novice programmer who wrote: "As a woman who is a bit intimidated by her love of math and computers, I deeply appreciate being able to open the MacTech Quarterly and have the articles addressed to me, personally, a woman."
You can find out a lot more than you probably want to about this subject by searching for "language gender bias" at Google.com
Whether you agree with the poltics behind this usage or not, it would be less than smart on your part to go through life acting as if you were unaware of it or assuming that people who use it are stupid.
OK but if you read the Cato or times piecces, ou will see that viruses, shareware, etc. ARE NOT the kind of program that was counted as an application... I think the argument that you make for a large number of vertical apps is plausible, but unsuported. Your 20+ programs may or may not idicate a vast market and may or may not qualify as applications by McKenzie's standards.
A more interesting question would be: in what way does this validate or invalidate his argument? I tend to think that a game of number counting is irrelevant and that he is acting the whore for Microsoft -- but these "there are more apps in my workstation" arguments are vapid, as are the "I can think of lots and lots of programs, so there must be many more" posts.
If we accept the Cato argument (I don't) and grant that it hinges on an approximate count of the number of "applications" that run exclusively under Windows, then 70,000 is a rather large number. I wonder if you really could turn up that number...
If you had bothered to read either the Times article or the Cato swill, you would know that McKenzie was not talking about utilities...nor viruses, and certainly not any executable as others have mindlessly suggested. He sure as shit wasn't talking about "Hello, World!"
Ok, a few thousand shareware and freeware apps, say 10,000 , 8,000+ titles at amazon, 10,000 viruses (I question that it's valid to identify every virus as a program... is every script a program? are Word Macros programs? but, OK, 10,000+), and 3,891 "programs" on your NT machine... So what do we have
10,000 shareware and freeware programs
8,000 Amazon-available programs
10,000 Viruses
4,000 "programs" on your NT "work"station...
32,000 in total.
20,000 vertical market programs (why not be generous)
52,000 in total
Where's the other 18,000?
I find your argument unconvincing without more support.
That's "having" fun. Sorry about the typo. Or, perhaps I meant "Halving" fun... I guess that depends on whether I'm in the "why the $@!# won't this %@$^%ing machine do what I want" phase or the "wow, I can make it do what I want and all this other stuff, too!" phase.
Running Linux (O'Reilly) really is a great book. I am a clueless newbie, but I am haveing fun with LinuxPPC on my Umax Mac Clone thanks to this book. I read it, didn't think it was telling me as much as I would like to know and then found that it has answers that help me to solve most of the problems I run into. I use it in conjunction with Linux in a Nutshell (also from O'Reilly) which provides a quick reference for most of the commands I've been learning.
I'm teaching myself C, and was very frustrated when I couldn't execute the first program (Hello, World!) that I compiled... The file was there, but Bash was telling me it didn't exist! There it was in the "Commands" section of Running Linux -- some distributions don't put the current directory in the deafult path... So export PATH=$PATH:. did the trick... and then (drummroll) "hello" produced "Hello, World!" (well, it was exciting for me, but I guess you had to be there...)
This experience lead me to explore.bash_profile and.bashrc... and, to make a long story short, I'm learning many new things every day, which keeps me happy.
I highly recommend Running Linux but you have to take an experimental, acitivist approach to get the most out of it. Poke around your system, try things out -- you'll learn a lot and words that would otherwise be read and forgotten will become useful information. I hope you enjoy it as much as I am.
You must be thinking of "grammarian's English," a rare dialect in favor among pedants.
In "living English," "they" is a perfectly good subsitute for he or she. One can be the sort of anal twit who pretends not to understand the vernacular or one can just get on with life. Ain't no two ways about it!
Langauge is power. Absolute language corrupts absolutely. Would you rather be a human being or a Command Line Interpreter?
Sounds like a bit of inferiority complex coming out here...
Let's just get this right, OK? The United Kingdom leads the way in the oppressive use of technology!
The feebleminded yanks have a "bill of rights", a "Freedom of information" law, etc. In the British Isles, all symbolic gestures like "devolution" and "home rule" aside, the subjects are given robust, manly laws like "the Official Secrets Act". The UK leads the way in pervasive video surveillance, and while the yanks may have "Echelon" they have to pretend not to use against their own citizens! If you say it in the UK, on the phone or in the street, it's probably being recorded and ignored by a dozing copper in a central monitoring station. Add to that the fine disregard for soft nonsense like "human rights" that Her Majesty's chosen men have developed in Northern Ireland and you have team that cannot be beaten!
...oozes across the pond a couple of years later to the 51st state
(sneering in disgust at this obvious Stalinist Tony Bennite) A couple of years? The 51st State? In their wildest dreams the most totalitarian yanks don't stand a chance of benefitting from the kind of efficient police/military/industrial system that supports the fine life available in Britain today.
England is way ahead, not years behind!Britannia Rules!
Slashdot Mirror
IANAGeneticist, but my Bio 101 texts suggested that the (original, biological) purpose of sex was the introduction of variation, not "to normalize genetic traits" as you wrote.
.
Early lifeforms reproduced asexually by simple cell division, and all offspring were identical clones of their parent organisms untill they were exposed to some mutagen. It appears that males are a wastefull drain on resources, but that the gain in genetic variability created by sexual reproduction offsets males' otherwise reproductively useless consumption of resources. The whole idea is to de-normalize genetic traits and create a diverse range of offspring capable of adapting to environmental/habitat/competitive change.
I think you are also a bit off in calling an inbred animal an abnormal one. There are many natural circumstances that lead to inbred populations: catastrophy, isolated island populations, disease etc. Survivors of such circumstances may be burdened with negative traits but they may also give rise to large populations with great diversity -- e.g. Hom. Sap. Sap. as shown in the work of Ann Gibbons (Science, v.267 1/6/1995)
Alleles have no mechanism for knowing what "normal" is, so introduction of this culturally determined, anthropocentric idea is not going to shed light on the discussion.
Take it as given that many would agree with you but some would not. How do you convince those who are deeply involved in "artificial human systems" like industrial production, globalization, etc. of your view. Just declaring that it is so won't get the job done.
I recently heard an interview with an oil industry PR whore who personified the oposing view. The guy's argument (long and fully of corporate mangement babble about "adding value", "maximising benefits" etc.) could be sumarized as: "These ecological doomsayers have yet to conclusively proove their point. When we find ourselves living on an uninhabitable palnet, then we'll know they were right. That would be an appropriate time for action, but not before."
To effectively counter this position, you must acknowledge that this argument actually sounds good to people who are heavily invested in polluting the planet, then find a compelling reason to shift their perspective. Any ideas?
The same RH installer is included in the LinuxPPC installer - as is clearly indicated in the install docs... Any Mac user installing any Linux distro would be well-advised to RTFM...regardless of technical sophistication.
Please read "Provocative" for "provactive" in the comment above.
Please offer some argument for your "most credible" statement. It's provactive. And wrong. I thoroughly checked out both before deciding on LinuxPPC. The much vaunted Yellow Dog installer was a joke compared to LinuxPPC's X based installer and the code under the hood is mostly the same. Yellow Dog's slick corporate presentation reduced its credibility in my eyes. I had no trouble at all getting LinuxPPC to work on my aging Umax C600 Mac clone... and I had no trouble getting it to recognize the G3 card in the L2 cahce slot. Which version of LinuxPPC did you try?
There are lots of supported 3 button mice. LinuxPPC works beautifully with USB mice and there are many 3 button models available (the Contour Unimouse is my choice).You can still obtain a number of 2 & 3 button mice for ADB Macs from mail order sources, but PCI USB cards are cheap, so why bother? USB has been well suported in LinuxPPC since the 1999 Q3 release.
*Real* Mac Crumudgeons barely accept the novelty of OS 7.1 and have no intention of moving beyond it!
Some part-real part-synthetic Mac Crumudgeons accept 7.5. Only simulated Mac Crumudgeons accept OS 8.1 and/or 8.6. *NO* Mac Crumudgeons of any stripe accept OS 9!
I don't diagree with the general tone of your statement, but please get your facts straight! OS 9 is the up-to-date latest and greatest release OS from Apple. Crumudgeons wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
Why use "price point" instead of "price"?
"..they should have set the price at $20." looks fine to me. Is there any real justification for this usage or is it just the industry language abuse like "form-factor" etc.?
Please don't take this as a flame, I am genuinely curious about this.
You post brings back fond memories of expanding my Apple ][+ from it's capable but confining 48k to a vast and spacious 64k RAM. The process involved pulling the last RAM chip from the motherboards and replacing it with a 16 pin conector attached to a ribbon cable that led to an expansion card that carried all that extra RAM. All that power! And such a cool CLI... Applesoft in ROM... let's see, using your formula (Mhz/4) the Apple II would would need... more RAM!:)
You post brings back fond memories of expanding my Apple ][+ from it's capable but confining 48k to a vast and spacious 64k RAM. The process involved pulling the last RAM chip from the motherboards and replacing it with a 16 pin conector attached to a ribbon cable that led to an expansion card that carried all that extra RAM. All that power! And such a cool CLI... Applesoft in ROM... let's see, using your formula (Mhz/4) the Apple II would would need... more RAM!:)
His sig doesn't say that 50% of engineers are below 'an average' or 'the average'...
It says 50% of engineers are below average... Those three little dots are called an ellipsis and they are often used to indicate an incomplete passage or thought. So he might be implying that 50% of engineers are of below average intelligence,social skills, or personal hygene. Then again he may have been thinking "below average stupidity"... Probably not, though. The ellipsis invites readers to complete the thought themselves.
Back on topic: LinuxPPC runs fine on my old mac. Why does OS X require these vast resources? could it be that they are playing the forced upgrade game, "encouraging" new hardware sales?
In fairness, the original programmers had to figure out how they were goign to accomplish their goals and then create code that actually did it. The hackers had only to observe the workings of the exisiting code and create a work-alike...
They admit that the drivers were created by reverse engineering. How then is this their IP?
Sun and HP don't want to pay Troll, so they go for GNOME... Despite which many, many Linux users will use KDE. Touting corporate support for competing free (in every sense) projects is a bit silly, isn't it.
Surely the only mindshare that counts is among Linux users and it's just a bit early to draw conclusions about that.
Well, I'm a linux newbie and I've found both GNOME and KDE to be a pain in the ass...
I using Linux partly on a machine with 640 X 480 video... When I need to use X, I use GNOME w/enlightenment because I can use the large virtual desktop to let me control x-apps with widgets that fall outside the area of my screen. There may be a way to get kwm to do the same thing, but I'll never know because the KDE designers used a huge settings dailog box with all the import widgets inaccessible off the bottom of the screen.
So I mostly use bash and no X at all -- Which is fine becaus I'm spending most of my time in Linux learning C. I use Vim to create my source files and gcc to compile them and that's getting me where I want to go today.
It would be nice if GNOME was stable and even nicer if KDE wasn't so hostile to users with small displays... Personally, from my limited experiments with GNOME and KDE, I hink KDE looks and "feels" a little more polished, but that's not worth much when it won't deliver basic user functions like window manager configuration.
For what's it's worth, this Mac user sees no reason why both GNOME and KDE shouldn't surpass MacOS in features, usability and basic goodness.
Did you bother to read the story? There are real issues here. These aren;t frivolous lawsuits. The fact is that MS has been a very ruthless competitor. Most of the time that ruthlessness is within the law, but sometimes it isn't. In those circumstances the victims of their illegal tactics are quite right to seek redress in the courts. What is your problem with that?
I didn't find anything that even remotely supported the idea that "Unix has Microsoft running scared" in the article...
/. post is: does it really matter whether Microsoft is scared or not?
It also sounds like this is the middle and not the end of this case, as appeals by MS against this judgement and Bristol against other parts of the earlier Federal case are expected soon.
The question raised in my mind by both this trial and the
Linux was developed without attracting much attention of any kind from Microsoft It has rapidly gained popularity despite active attacks by Microsoft as have a few other little projects like Apache, or the web itself (remember the attempts to pass off Microsoft Network as the viable alternative to that flash in the pan world wide web?)...
I use Macs at work every day, as I have since 1989, despite years of really concerted effort by Microsoft to eliminate Apple. I use Linux and MacOS at home, and I'm coming to the conclusion that Microsoft's love, hate, fear, or contempt for a given OS, project or movement is pretty much irrelevant. I'm happy to see Microsoft get taken down a peg (however small a peg) because I have used their software and OS and know it for it what it is. I'm pretty confident that good alternatives to Microsoft will continue to be available and in some sense prevail because smart people are creating and using those alternatives.
cr0sh, I think the fundamental question is clear and the examples you gave unnecessary...
The issue is not really one of technically correct grammar. Nor is it one of pretending to be "less smart" or less educated.
The practice of replacing "he" as the generic third person singular came about as the result of a concern with gender-bias in language. A number of writers set out, quite deliberately, to use this idiom to undermine what was perceived to be a masculine bias in the language that served the needs of an oppressive patriarchy. Today, when English speaking people employ the word "they" for the third person singular, it is generally in order to avoid using the masculine "he" and not the result of ignorance.
If someone were to say, "imagine that a user is having trouble installing Linux on their laptop," no one of average intelligence would have any trouble understanding that the hypothetical user is singular and could be male or female. Most readers would understand that if a person chose to use "they" in this way, then they were probably doing it to avoid excluding women from the set of imagined Linux users.
Here's a bit on this topic from an article entitled "She is tired of being a man!" by Aruna Gopakumar:
You can read the whole thing here.
You can find out a lot more than you probably want to about this subject by searching for "language gender bias" at Google.com
Whether you agree with the poltics behind this usage or not, it would be less than smart on your part to go through life acting as if you were unaware of it or assuming that people who use it are stupid.
OK but if you read the Cato or times piecces, ou will see that viruses, shareware, etc. ARE NOT the kind of program that was counted as an application... I think the argument that you make for a large number of vertical apps is plausible, but unsuported. Your 20+ programs may or may not idicate a vast market and may or may not qualify as applications by McKenzie's standards.
A more interesting question would be: in what way does this validate or invalidate his argument? I tend to think that a game of number counting is irrelevant and that he is acting the whore for Microsoft -- but these "there are more apps in my workstation" arguments are vapid, as are the "I can think of lots and lots of programs, so there must be many more" posts.
If we accept the Cato argument (I don't) and grant that it hinges on an approximate count of the number of "applications" that run exclusively under Windows, then 70,000 is a rather large number. I wonder if you really could turn up that number...
If you had bothered to read either the Times article or the Cato swill, you would know that McKenzie was not talking about utilities...nor viruses, and certainly not any executable as others have mindlessly suggested. He sure as shit wasn't talking about "Hello, World!"
What point is it that yo think you are making?
Ok, a few thousand shareware and freeware apps, say 10,000 , 8,000+ titles at amazon, 10,000 viruses (I question that it's valid to identify every virus as a program... is every script a program? are Word Macros programs? but, OK, 10,000+), and 3,891 "programs" on your NT machine... So what do we have
10,000 shareware and freeware programs
8,000 Amazon-available programs
10,000 Viruses
4,000 "programs" on your NT "work"station...
32,000 in total.
20,000 vertical market programs (why not be generous)
52,000 in total
Where's the other 18,000?
I find your argument unconvincing without more support.
That's "having" fun. Sorry about the typo. Or, perhaps I meant "Halving" fun... I guess that depends on whether I'm in the "why the $@!# won't this %@$^%ing machine do what I want" phase or the "wow, I can make it do what I want and all this other stuff, too!" phase.
Running Linux (O'Reilly) really is a great book. I am a clueless newbie, but I am haveing fun with LinuxPPC on my Umax Mac Clone thanks to this book. I read it, didn't think it was telling me as much as I would like to know and then found that it has answers that help me to solve most of the problems I run into. I use it in conjunction with Linux in a Nutshell (also from O'Reilly) which provides a quick reference for most of the commands I've been learning.
I'm teaching myself C, and was very frustrated when I couldn't execute the first program (Hello, World!) that I compiled... The file was there, but Bash was telling me it didn't exist! There it was in the "Commands" section of Running Linux -- some distributions don't put the current directory in the deafult path... So export PATH=$PATH:. did the trick... and then (drummroll) "hello" produced "Hello, World!" (well, it was exciting for me, but I guess you had to be there...)
This experience lead me to explore .bash_profile and .bashrc... and, to make a long story short, I'm learning many new things every day, which keeps me happy.
I highly recommend Running Linux but you have to take an experimental, acitivist approach to get the most out of it. Poke around your system, try things out -- you'll learn a lot and words that would otherwise be read and forgotten will become useful information. I hope you enjoy it as much as I am.You must be thinking of "grammarian's English," a rare dialect in favor among pedants.
In "living English," "they" is a perfectly good subsitute for he or she. One can be the sort of anal twit who pretends not to understand the vernacular or one can just get on with life. Ain't no two ways about it!
Langauge is power. Absolute language corrupts absolutely. Would you rather be a human being or a Command Line Interpreter?
Sounds like a bit of inferiority complex coming out here...
Let's just get this right, OK? The United Kingdom leads the way in the oppressive use of technology!
The feebleminded yanks have a "bill of rights", a "Freedom of information" law, etc. In the British Isles, all symbolic gestures like "devolution" and "home rule" aside, the subjects are given robust, manly laws like "the Official Secrets Act". The UK leads the way in pervasive video surveillance, and while the yanks may have "Echelon" they have to pretend not to use against their own citizens! If you say it in the UK, on the phone or in the street, it's probably being recorded and ignored by a dozing copper in a central monitoring station. Add to that the fine disregard for soft nonsense like "human rights" that Her Majesty's chosen men have developed in Northern Ireland and you have team that cannot be beaten!
(sneering in disgust at this obvious Stalinist Tony Bennite) A couple of years? The 51st State? In their wildest dreams the most totalitarian yanks don't stand a chance of benefitting from the kind of efficient police/military/industrial system that supports the fine life available in Britain today.
England is way ahead, not years behind!Britannia Rules!