You can listen and still ignore what you've heard if you think you're right.;) *shrugs* I've never heard anything from him that'd make me consider him a dick but I can give you stubborn. Still, the BitKeeper experience resulted in a better development tool being made so I can't really call it a loss other than annoying people by making them learn new tools every so often.
A new use for road kill - let your car collect it and use it as fuel. Just watch out for small children. People whine so much if you run over their kids let alone if your car digests them for a fuel source.
I wonder how this compares to other methods such as solar power? Do you have to refuel this? How expensive is it to produce, install, and care for compared to solar panels. Makes me think of the book Distraction - maybe it'd be a good method for people that have time to care for it but not a lot of money?
You know you can probably run out to a massage parlor and get quite the treatment for even the $600 the PS3 cost from the store. You can probably get two or three vaginas and the other connecty parts that make them interesting.
IT'll probably work (downloading now) but it's months late and the best solution they can come up with seems to take about 1.5 GB of hdd space. Damn lot of space for downloading a browser.
If I had to pick geek icons for office I'd like to see Linus as President and RMS as vice president. Mr. Torvalds is a very good leader - he motivates people, he listens to people, he does a good job at picking others to lead under him. He is intelligent, much more ethical than Mr. Gates, and I think a far better leader than Mr. Gates. RMS would be a good VP because he is to crazy to give power to directly but he often has good points and knows how to get his voice out there to actually make a difference in the world.
Sure Linus is from Finland but I'm willing to vote for him - something I'll never do for Mr. Gates. If I can't have Linus then I'd consider people from the EFF or any major American free software hacker. Seriously - I'll vote for you if you run guys. We need a pro consumer and pro science/technology President.
I think I'm scared. What if the election comes down to being between Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates? I'd have to kill myself rather than be around when either of those two takes the lead of our country. Hillary is just an off her rocker lib that's never done anything but spout crap and Bill would slaughter fair use and similar consumer protection and anti-trust laws.
I don't buy products from Microsoft - to often in the past I was burned by their low quality and high cost of support. It'd take a huge effort on their part to earn the trust they've lost from consumers like myself. Besides, Microsoft has never understood good product design so I doubt they'll do it anytime soon. What they do understand is using their monopoly to break into and crush new markets.. no doubt thir reason for dealing with the RIAA.
I hope Apple tells them where they can take their Zune and stick it where the sun won't shine. This is just one more reason not to buy a piece of crap Zune. I certainly won't be trading in my iPod for a Zune EVER.
For just $1600? Of course not. But like any other company I can split that cost among multiple clients. Besides apps of that nature already exist as OSS and they're no worse than the crappy commercial equivilants out there. Not that I think much of them. I've spent a lot of time writing my own software to these purposes but I have no plan to release the software, under opensource or proprietary license, anytime in the future because I don't want to bother supporting it.
I didn't tell you to pray for unrealistic miracles. If you want new apps written from scratch you'll either have to pony up some major cash or motivate someone to do the work for you some other way. You can have major bits of custom work done on most opensource apps for your $1600 though.
They're not trivial but I don't think it's any worse switching from XP to Linux than from XP to Vista is likely to be. Both have a similar learning curve, problems with apps being different or not being available on the new platform, old hardware no longer working in some cases, etc. And you save a lot of money by not having to have as powerful of computers or pay for a bunch of new software licenses.. and again you have more freedom and cotnrol over your destiny. And as someone else pointed out - support from Microsoft is certainly not cheap either.
Have you actually used QB POS? It's crap that doesn't work well at all, is poorly documented, and overall causes more hassles than it solves. Trust me, I've worked with it extensively. I haven't tried M$ POS but I'll assume it's not much better since I've had the bad luck to use a lot of other of Microsoft's crap.
It seems to me that money spent on education tends to pay off all around especially when that education teaches people how to do things without being locked to a certain vendor. Education passes from one person to another whereas buying commercial software locks you to that vendor and is not allowed to pass from person to person. Even if the costs are identical the opensource solution empowers the user more than a commercial solution.
My experience though is that if the tasks you need to do can be done using opensource you will save quite a bit of money. If there are rough spots you need fixed you can spend a little bit of money to hire, or sponsor, an existing developer of that project to make things work the way you need. For what you could spend to buy a few licenses of your average commercial app you could have the opensource equivilant customized to your needs. That is power over your own fate. How much is that worth over years or decades?
I've heard similar arguments against teaching rules of spelling and grammar. Not doing so is how we fall into horrible forms of slang that nobody outside a very small region of time, space, and culture can understand. People are taught to read, write, and do basic math because it's useful to society that they should be educated and follow the same set of rules. I agree that it's good to keep doing research into making computers easier to use but I still think that it is beneficial to teach people to use the tools their lifes require.
I've read many books about how mankind reaches the point where the tools are so intelligent that people forget how the tools work and gradually become dimwitted slaves to their own machines. To me, that is what we experience when people are to lazy or stupid to learn to use their tools. You may not need to know how to build your own car but it's usually considered good to know not only how to drive but also to do basic maintenence on your car. To get under the hood. I think the same is true of any tool we use, including computers.
People are slaves to their computers. Computers seem like a mystical blackbox where we have no control over our own lives. I don't think that is a pleasent experience for people and it certainly doesn't make them more productive. People certainly don't need to all understand every step of how their computer works and shouldn't have to have degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. They should be able to do basics like cause a script to rename all files in a given directory.
I once let the company I worked for pay a friend of mine $10/hr to rename thousands of files because my manager (of the programming department) didn't think to use a script (would take about two minutes to write and run). His lack of basic computer knowledge cost the company hundreds of dollars.. made funnier because he accidently deleted the renamed files when the process was done.
Re:Solid but takes some tweaking.
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
A distro exists to provide packages that are pre-tested and done right. Fedora is one of the most important distros and they don't feel like doing it right because it's more work?
I am a coder. There is nothing wrong with compile-time configuration except that it results in bloated, unflexible, crappy messes. Yes, lets just go ahead and hard compile every module we might need into the kernel because heck that's easier. Or why not compile in every possibly Apache module? Who cares if that wastes resources and is more prone to problems because it's easier to do it that way. Something as loosly coupled as a database engine has no need to be compiled in. It doesn't make sense to do it that way. Being able to compile optional components in is good as it lets you streamline your system. Being forced to do so is bad because then you end up with a lot of cruft compiled in. Packaged software that forces you to install a whole database solution that you aren't going to use is just stupid. What if you had to install MS SQL Server just so you could install iTunes? That's how stupid it is.
I just don't see a point in building everything myself or having a distro that throws in random garbage because they are to lazy to do it right. The whole reason for using a distro is to have things done right without having to do it all myself. Having the creators of my distro just do a shitty job because it's easier makes me wonder if I should change to a different distro.
But is that something that really improves productivity? Simple tasks are pretty fast with any interface. It's conveying complex tasks and getting the computer to do them that increases productivity. Sure you can do simple tasks with natural language. You can even do a limited number of reasonable complex tasks. I used to have a bot that you could ask to lookup information for you and it'd do so and present it when it was done. It was amussing but I'd have trouble claiming it really made looking up that information significantly faster or easier than say using wget with a couple of dumb scripts or a GUI attached to it. The only real benefit was that I'd already coded the hard parts so that a few natural language commands could activate that function. If you wanted a different function though you were out of luck. So it wasn't adaptable.
Re:You are living my dream.
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
It doesn't really cost that much in time or money to use flash media. The 4GB CF card and the adapter to make it act like a hdd cost under $200 even if you get good quality. For your flash you just want to be sure to get one that is really flash and not a micro-drive and check it's reliability and speed before buying. Then it's just plugging it in like a normal hdd. I made mine the root drive and use a ramdisk for/tmp and and/var and/home are on a normal hdd. Setting your CF drive to have no atime tracking and be read-only is about the only special consideration and some flash adapters let you set it read only with a physical switch so the software version is just an extra safe guard (or good for systems you want to update on a regular basis).
I have a makefile I use to remove packages I don't want but I have to update it for every new distro which is sort of a pain. It'd be nicer if they'd just make their distros not install software that isn't needed at last for a minimal install. To me that is what a minimal install means. I probably should do something to make using the flash drive easier to setup. My biggest issue with that is that I have to configure the ramdisk and format it each time the computer boots which I do using some changes to rc.sysinit. Unfortunately this script isn't really stable as they change it now and then which makes me redo my changes. Putting my changes in rc.local or a similar file doesn't work well because I need my changes to take place between certain existing steps in the process. A minor annoyance. I guess eventually I'll probably end up breaking rc.sysinit down into several sub-scripts for easier management.
Stripping out RPM would be a good way to save extra space for the boxes I keep hardware read only. Most I do just in software and update about once a week for security reasons mostly.
I'm excited for the new hybrid drives to come out. I had been considering using a ram drive to get extra speed out of the filesystem for certain things such as file caching - probably just for/var. Instead maybe I'll switch to hybrid drives that should let the disks idle more and keep more data in their own internal caches. I'm not sure if 1GB of cache is really enough though. For servers under heavy load several gigs might be needed although I suppose that servers are prone to using multiple drives and RAID which might work out to the same thing. I'm drooling for 1TB hybrid drives so I can build a good array of them.:) After they reach that stage I'd like to see them start working on building RAID arrays into the form factor of a single drive - make the drives small enough that more than one can fit in the space of a single drive now. Most of the hosting companies I've worked with only have space for one or two drives per server which makes a good RAID set-up difficult. I usually end up having to get multiple servers and use one for backup which isn't as sweet.
I'd probably say we need a semi-intellegent scripting language. Programming such things through natural language commands is likely to get you results other than what you wanted and programming them through a graphical interface is very limiting. Probably the best results would come from allowing the agents to be given commands through either of those methods but also to make programming them easy enough that non-programmers can do so without feeling over their heads. It should be as easy as writing HTML in 1994. Something like starting a bot that runs until you tell it to stop with abilities to gather information online or from files and apps on your computer and to do useful things with that information over time. Say you have a scheduling calendar - it should be easy to tell the program to watch your calendar and to set your phone's alarm to go off an hour before any meetings. This should be able to happen without having to tell it how to access your calendar or your phone and should work even if someone later adds a meeting to your calendar without telling you.
Concepts like how important something is don't really require very much intelligence in most cases. Mail filters can rank mail based on keyword relationships, who the sender is, etc. Picking out patterns of how the user reads their mail shouldn't be any harder than filtering spam if the mail program would bother to record such data and think about it. For web pages it could be similar although it'll be easier as we shift towards a web built on information rather than layout. In that case if you tend to look at blocks of data marked as discussions with an overall karma rating of 3 or higher per message then your browser could automatically pull those out for you. These things would improve productivity but I don't think they'd make a huge jump although the little jumps would combine to possibly make a huge productivity jump over time. The main point of an agent scripting-language would be to easily be able to work with this information outside of the application you'd usually use. Maybe it could scan your mail when you didn't have your email app open and let you know if there was something important waiting or catch emailed requests for meetings and consider those along with your calendar. That sort of thing.
Things that aren't needed are just one more thing to break or cause a security problem. It's best to not put them in.
Besides I run my own servers off 4GB flash drives (read only) because it makes them faster and more stable so it does make a difference. Even my hosted servers often only come with 40GB of hdd space and space does become an issue so saving a couple gigs of space does matter to me. For your average bumpkin that just uses their computer to play Minesweeper sure it doesn't matter but to serious users that push their resources to the limit it can make a difference. I have terabytes of file storage but I'm still constantly out of space so why waste any.
You can use basic scripting tools to enable you to do almost any repetitive task quicker and easier. Very few people have jobs that don't deal largely in repetitive tasks. These are tools that are very flexible, not tied to specific systems, and not difficult to learn.
Have you ever actually tried communicating complex problems in a human language? It's much slower and more difficult than communicating in a more rigid language such as most programming uses. There are to many places where human language can be confussing or misunderstood even between humans let alone by some machine. I think AI can be a useful tool but I don't think processing complex spoken orders is going to help productivity. Just look at how fast people can type compared to how fast they can get Dragon Naturally Speaking or a similar program to properly input what they are saying or try to explain to someone how to drive across town. Natural language is just not effecient for conveying details.
I don't like Perl either but it's good for some light tasks. Unless you'd rather go to teaching awk/sed. IMO every computer user these days needs to know the basics of the three P's.. Perl, Python, and PHP to have a good grounding in rapid scripting for different purposes.
Re:Solid but takes some tweaking.
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
It'd seem logical to always provide a minimal version of each package and to use an add-on package to add the kitchen sink. To some extent it may be a problem because of badly written programs that don't have an easy way to add and remove features without a recompile. Amarok comes to mind since installing it in Fedora also forces installing things such as MySQL that the default options don't even make use of.
Re:Solid but takes some tweaking.
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
I've suffered that problem and it does seem an issue with LVM especially if you're like me and take the drives out and put them, unmarked, in a box for a couple months before trying to figure out how to put them back together. In the end my general solution is to just use proper RAID configurations as it's easier than rebuilding a complex filesystem.
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You can listen and still ignore what you've heard if you think you're right. ;) *shrugs* I've never heard anything from him that'd make me consider him a dick but I can give you stubborn. Still, the BitKeeper experience resulted in a better development tool being made so I can't really call it a loss other than annoying people by making them learn new tools every so often.
A new use for road kill - let your car collect it and use it as fuel. Just watch out for small children. People whine so much if you run over their kids let alone if your car digests them for a fuel source.
Hey, for a geek, at least it means you've gotten laid at some point in your life.
I wonder how this compares to other methods such as solar power? Do you have to refuel this? How expensive is it to produce, install, and care for compared to solar panels. Makes me think of the book Distraction - maybe it'd be a good method for people that have time to care for it but not a lot of money?
You know you can probably run out to a massage parlor and get quite the treatment for even the $600 the PS3 cost from the store. You can probably get two or three vaginas and the other connecty parts that make them interesting.
IT'll probably work (downloading now) but it's months late and the best solution they can come up with seems to take about 1.5 GB of hdd space. Damn lot of space for downloading a browser.
Here it is, faces of people as they find out they don't have to use Windows. The pain they obviously feel over their years of suffering is only bearable as you'll see their sudden relief to finally be rid of Windows.
If I had to pick geek icons for office I'd like to see Linus as President and RMS as vice president. Mr. Torvalds is a very good leader - he motivates people, he listens to people, he does a good job at picking others to lead under him. He is intelligent, much more ethical than Mr. Gates, and I think a far better leader than Mr. Gates. RMS would be a good VP because he is to crazy to give power to directly but he often has good points and knows how to get his voice out there to actually make a difference in the world.
Sure Linus is from Finland but I'm willing to vote for him - something I'll never do for Mr. Gates. If I can't have Linus then I'd consider people from the EFF or any major American free software hacker. Seriously - I'll vote for you if you run guys. We need a pro consumer and pro science/technology President.
I think I'm scared. What if the election comes down to being between Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates? I'd have to kill myself rather than be around when either of those two takes the lead of our country. Hillary is just an off her rocker lib that's never done anything but spout crap and Bill would slaughter fair use and similar consumer protection and anti-trust laws.
I don't buy products from Microsoft - to often in the past I was burned by their low quality and high cost of support. It'd take a huge effort on their part to earn the trust they've lost from consumers like myself. Besides, Microsoft has never understood good product design so I doubt they'll do it anytime soon. What they do understand is using their monopoly to break into and crush new markets.. no doubt thir reason for dealing with the RIAA.
I hope Apple tells them where they can take their Zune and stick it where the sun won't shine. This is just one more reason not to buy a piece of crap Zune. I certainly won't be trading in my iPod for a Zune EVER.
For just $1600? Of course not. But like any other company I can split that cost among multiple clients. Besides apps of that nature already exist as OSS and they're no worse than the crappy commercial equivilants out there. Not that I think much of them. I've spent a lot of time writing my own software to these purposes but I have no plan to release the software, under opensource or proprietary license, anytime in the future because I don't want to bother supporting it.
I didn't tell you to pray for unrealistic miracles. If you want new apps written from scratch you'll either have to pony up some major cash or motivate someone to do the work for you some other way. You can have major bits of custom work done on most opensource apps for your $1600 though.
They're not trivial but I don't think it's any worse switching from XP to Linux than from XP to Vista is likely to be. Both have a similar learning curve, problems with apps being different or not being available on the new platform, old hardware no longer working in some cases, etc. And you save a lot of money by not having to have as powerful of computers or pay for a bunch of new software licenses.. and again you have more freedom and cotnrol over your destiny. And as someone else pointed out - support from Microsoft is certainly not cheap either.
Have you actually used QB POS? It's crap that doesn't work well at all, is poorly documented, and overall causes more hassles than it solves. Trust me, I've worked with it extensively. I haven't tried M$ POS but I'll assume it's not much better since I've had the bad luck to use a lot of other of Microsoft's crap.
It seems to me that money spent on education tends to pay off all around especially when that education teaches people how to do things without being locked to a certain vendor. Education passes from one person to another whereas buying commercial software locks you to that vendor and is not allowed to pass from person to person. Even if the costs are identical the opensource solution empowers the user more than a commercial solution.
My experience though is that if the tasks you need to do can be done using opensource you will save quite a bit of money. If there are rough spots you need fixed you can spend a little bit of money to hire, or sponsor, an existing developer of that project to make things work the way you need. For what you could spend to buy a few licenses of your average commercial app you could have the opensource equivilant customized to your needs. That is power over your own fate. How much is that worth over years or decades?
I've heard similar arguments against teaching rules of spelling and grammar. Not doing so is how we fall into horrible forms of slang that nobody outside a very small region of time, space, and culture can understand. People are taught to read, write, and do basic math because it's useful to society that they should be educated and follow the same set of rules. I agree that it's good to keep doing research into making computers easier to use but I still think that it is beneficial to teach people to use the tools their lifes require.
I've read many books about how mankind reaches the point where the tools are so intelligent that people forget how the tools work and gradually become dimwitted slaves to their own machines. To me, that is what we experience when people are to lazy or stupid to learn to use their tools. You may not need to know how to build your own car but it's usually considered good to know not only how to drive but also to do basic maintenence on your car. To get under the hood. I think the same is true of any tool we use, including computers.
People are slaves to their computers. Computers seem like a mystical blackbox where we have no control over our own lives. I don't think that is a pleasent experience for people and it certainly doesn't make them more productive. People certainly don't need to all understand every step of how their computer works and shouldn't have to have degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. They should be able to do basics like cause a script to rename all files in a given directory.
I once let the company I worked for pay a friend of mine $10/hr to rename thousands of files because my manager (of the programming department) didn't think to use a script (would take about two minutes to write and run). His lack of basic computer knowledge cost the company hundreds of dollars.. made funnier because he accidently deleted the renamed files when the process was done.
A distro exists to provide packages that are pre-tested and done right. Fedora is one of the most important distros and they don't feel like doing it right because it's more work?
I am a coder. There is nothing wrong with compile-time configuration except that it results in bloated, unflexible, crappy messes. Yes, lets just go ahead and hard compile every module we might need into the kernel because heck that's easier. Or why not compile in every possibly Apache module? Who cares if that wastes resources and is more prone to problems because it's easier to do it that way. Something as loosly coupled as a database engine has no need to be compiled in. It doesn't make sense to do it that way. Being able to compile optional components in is good as it lets you streamline your system. Being forced to do so is bad because then you end up with a lot of cruft compiled in. Packaged software that forces you to install a whole database solution that you aren't going to use is just stupid. What if you had to install MS SQL Server just so you could install iTunes? That's how stupid it is.
I just don't see a point in building everything myself or having a distro that throws in random garbage because they are to lazy to do it right. The whole reason for using a distro is to have things done right without having to do it all myself. Having the creators of my distro just do a shitty job because it's easier makes me wonder if I should change to a different distro.
But is that something that really improves productivity? Simple tasks are pretty fast with any interface. It's conveying complex tasks and getting the computer to do them that increases productivity. Sure you can do simple tasks with natural language. You can even do a limited number of reasonable complex tasks. I used to have a bot that you could ask to lookup information for you and it'd do so and present it when it was done. It was amussing but I'd have trouble claiming it really made looking up that information significantly faster or easier than say using wget with a couple of dumb scripts or a GUI attached to it. The only real benefit was that I'd already coded the hard parts so that a few natural language commands could activate that function. If you wanted a different function though you were out of luck. So it wasn't adaptable.
It doesn't really cost that much in time or money to use flash media. The 4GB CF card and the adapter to make it act like a hdd cost under $200 even if you get good quality. For your flash you just want to be sure to get one that is really flash and not a micro-drive and check it's reliability and speed before buying. Then it's just plugging it in like a normal hdd. I made mine the root drive and use a ramdisk for /tmp and and /var and /home are on a normal hdd. Setting your CF drive to have no atime tracking and be read-only is about the only special consideration and some flash adapters let you set it read only with a physical switch so the software version is just an extra safe guard (or good for systems you want to update on a regular basis).
/var. Instead maybe I'll switch to hybrid drives that should let the disks idle more and keep more data in their own internal caches. I'm not sure if 1GB of cache is really enough though. For servers under heavy load several gigs might be needed although I suppose that servers are prone to using multiple drives and RAID which might work out to the same thing. I'm drooling for 1TB hybrid drives so I can build a good array of them. :) After they reach that stage I'd like to see them start working on building RAID arrays into the form factor of a single drive - make the drives small enough that more than one can fit in the space of a single drive now. Most of the hosting companies I've worked with only have space for one or two drives per server which makes a good RAID set-up difficult. I usually end up having to get multiple servers and use one for backup which isn't as sweet.
I have a makefile I use to remove packages I don't want but I have to update it for every new distro which is sort of a pain. It'd be nicer if they'd just make their distros not install software that isn't needed at last for a minimal install. To me that is what a minimal install means. I probably should do something to make using the flash drive easier to setup. My biggest issue with that is that I have to configure the ramdisk and format it each time the computer boots which I do using some changes to rc.sysinit. Unfortunately this script isn't really stable as they change it now and then which makes me redo my changes. Putting my changes in rc.local or a similar file doesn't work well because I need my changes to take place between certain existing steps in the process. A minor annoyance. I guess eventually I'll probably end up breaking rc.sysinit down into several sub-scripts for easier management.
Stripping out RPM would be a good way to save extra space for the boxes I keep hardware read only. Most I do just in software and update about once a week for security reasons mostly.
I'm excited for the new hybrid drives to come out. I had been considering using a ram drive to get extra speed out of the filesystem for certain things such as file caching - probably just for
I'd probably say we need a semi-intellegent scripting language. Programming such things through natural language commands is likely to get you results other than what you wanted and programming them through a graphical interface is very limiting. Probably the best results would come from allowing the agents to be given commands through either of those methods but also to make programming them easy enough that non-programmers can do so without feeling over their heads. It should be as easy as writing HTML in 1994. Something like starting a bot that runs until you tell it to stop with abilities to gather information online or from files and apps on your computer and to do useful things with that information over time. Say you have a scheduling calendar - it should be easy to tell the program to watch your calendar and to set your phone's alarm to go off an hour before any meetings. This should be able to happen without having to tell it how to access your calendar or your phone and should work even if someone later adds a meeting to your calendar without telling you.
Concepts like how important something is don't really require very much intelligence in most cases. Mail filters can rank mail based on keyword relationships, who the sender is, etc. Picking out patterns of how the user reads their mail shouldn't be any harder than filtering spam if the mail program would bother to record such data and think about it. For web pages it could be similar although it'll be easier as we shift towards a web built on information rather than layout. In that case if you tend to look at blocks of data marked as discussions with an overall karma rating of 3 or higher per message then your browser could automatically pull those out for you. These things would improve productivity but I don't think they'd make a huge jump although the little jumps would combine to possibly make a huge productivity jump over time. The main point of an agent scripting-language would be to easily be able to work with this information outside of the application you'd usually use. Maybe it could scan your mail when you didn't have your email app open and let you know if there was something important waiting or catch emailed requests for meetings and consider those along with your calendar. That sort of thing.
Things that aren't needed are just one more thing to break or cause a security problem. It's best to not put them in.
Besides I run my own servers off 4GB flash drives (read only) because it makes them faster and more stable so it does make a difference. Even my hosted servers often only come with 40GB of hdd space and space does become an issue so saving a couple gigs of space does matter to me. For your average bumpkin that just uses their computer to play Minesweeper sure it doesn't matter but to serious users that push their resources to the limit it can make a difference. I have terabytes of file storage but I'm still constantly out of space so why waste any.
You can use basic scripting tools to enable you to do almost any repetitive task quicker and easier. Very few people have jobs that don't deal largely in repetitive tasks. These are tools that are very flexible, not tied to specific systems, and not difficult to learn.
Have you ever actually tried communicating complex problems in a human language? It's much slower and more difficult than communicating in a more rigid language such as most programming uses. There are to many places where human language can be confussing or misunderstood even between humans let alone by some machine. I think AI can be a useful tool but I don't think processing complex spoken orders is going to help productivity. Just look at how fast people can type compared to how fast they can get Dragon Naturally Speaking or a similar program to properly input what they are saying or try to explain to someone how to drive across town. Natural language is just not effecient for conveying details.
I don't like Perl either but it's good for some light tasks. Unless you'd rather go to teaching awk/sed. IMO every computer user these days needs to know the basics of the three P's.. Perl, Python, and PHP to have a good grounding in rapid scripting for different purposes.
It'd seem logical to always provide a minimal version of each package and to use an add-on package to add the kitchen sink. To some extent it may be a problem because of badly written programs that don't have an easy way to add and remove features without a recompile. Amarok comes to mind since installing it in Fedora also forces installing things such as MySQL that the default options don't even make use of.
I've suffered that problem and it does seem an issue with LVM especially if you're like me and take the drives out and put them, unmarked, in a box for a couple months before trying to figure out how to put them back together. In the end my general solution is to just use proper RAID configurations as it's easier than rebuilding a complex filesystem.
So who is going to play Cowboy Neal? When does casting for the Slashdot movie start?