If you have actually looked into the genre, saying that you "hate this stuff" and are convinced it all "looks crappy," isn't sufficient.
Actually, in that scenario, yes, it is.
Unless you can lend some further depth to your remarks, you are simply a troll.
We're discussing taste. Perhaps it's a troll, but that's just because he posted at all, not due to the depth of his remark. It's perfectly ok, for instance, to simply say "I hate the taste of brussels sprouts," and I suspect if you too hated the taste of brussels sprouts you'd be inclined to post "Me Too!" instead of demanding more "depth" to the argument.
You are responding as an offended fan, not with a logical point. Logic does not apply to taste. If parent is a troll YHBH.
Saying "manga looks crappy" is like saying "comic books are for kids."
Here, however, we may apply at least a modicum of logic, as you are juxtaposing the issue of personal taste with one of general classification and thus introducing a strawman into the argument.
A better way of phrasing it, one that might withstand scrutiny, might be "comic books are juvenile," phrasing it as an issue of taste.
And for the most part I happen to think they are. That doesn't mean I won't read one now and again. I read all sorts of juvenile literature, if it's any good.
Why don't we have a network of devices, all independent, that can share data. ..
Where such makes sense this is exactly what I'm suggesting.
. ..and control?
There is no need for my coffee pot to be able to control my furnace. The maximum amount of data it needs is to know what time it is and what time I wish it to turn itself on. That doesn't even require a Z80. A 555 will do nicely. If I wish to control it remotely it simply needs a switch and a jack to connect to to the control device.
Kind of like, oh I dunno, an Internet?
Which is used for distributing data and control so it doesn't all have to reside uniquely wherever you might happen to want it. Your ISP, for instance, runs a mail server so you don't have to. All you need is a mail client. Since I'm never going to use my coffeepot to as a mail client my coffee pot doesn't even need a client. It needs an on/off switch. That on/off switch may well be accesable through the internet, but it doesn't need a general purpose computing device to work the switch.
So you don't want to fix the problem. Nobody's going to take away your rheostats and coil springs...what are you worried about?
Actually, yes, they likely will take away my coil spring and rheostat. At the very least they are actively trying. So yes, I have some worries about that. I can only buy what is offered to the market. I can always build my own, I have the capability, knowledge and as a general rule like building my own things instead of buying them, but coffeepots, toasters and fridges I'm generally more content buying (with certain special case exceptions). I predict that when coffeepots become PCs French Press sales will go up.
Me, I think it would be convenient to have a database of the contents of my fridge and pantry that I can match against my recipe database, and build my grocery list according to what's missing.
What on earth has this got to do with whether or not your fridge has computing capabilities or not? Now of your "counters" address the issue at all. We live in the modern age and intelligence, control and data can be abstracted away from any given physical object. Remember that internet thingy you brought up yourself? You don't need every database you might want to connect to on your own PC. It's "out there." Conversely your fridge doesn't need to contain the database of its contents. They can be kept "out there." All your fridge needs is a few data aquisition sensors and a communication port and it doesn't need to know what the data "means." It only needs to be able to transport raw data.
So your refridgerator, like your coffeepot, doesn't even need the computing ability of a Z80 for you to have your database of contents.
Do you have some special reason for wanting your database stored in your fridge, and your coffeepot, and your TV. . . ?
When I wanted an auto racing timing and scoring device I did not build a new PC. I built a data aquisition interface that pluged into the parallel port and fed my existing PC raw data. The PC itself decided what the data "meant" and input that interpreted data into the relevant database in its memory and on its HD. I only needed to create that capability which my PC didn't already have. The device was, essentially, a network really, really dumb client (all it could do was detect radiation and filter it by frequency).
If I want to have computer control of my beside lamp I don't have to turn it into a computer. I merely have to provide for a control device attached to both the lamp and my existing computing devices.
I am not saying that you shouldn't have computer command and control of everything your little heart desires. I'm saying that since said command and control can be abstracted away from devices themselves there is no point in every frickin' device being "command central."
At the risk of being redundant (because I've already posted about this more than once before) the old vacuum tube machines were really much better food warmers than modern devices.
The modern PC gives you lukewarm to the edges with a scorched spot in the middle piece of toast, which you have to tape in place or something in the first place.
In the old machines you could slip a piece of toast, or even a whole sandwhich, right down between the tubes. It was almost as if they were made to be a warming rack.
Of course I was a physicist, not an engineer. The engineers could get a bit squirmy over behavior like that for some reason. Peculiar lot.
You miss the point. First off, in the convergence scenario the required number of devices can never be less than two, one to carry with you, one stationary. When your fridge becomes a PC it becomes a PC.
See? Now you have two PCs, your laptop to take with you and the stationary one to stay at home and tend your fridge because you can't carry your fridge with you everywhere you go. Or your furnace.
Now, why does your furnace also have to be a PC when your fridge already is? Just plug the furnace into the fridge. Of course their are reliability issues with this. What if your fridge breaks and you have to send it out? You don't want your furnace, TV, radio, et al to have to go down too, so why don't we move the computer part of the device into its own box?
Ta Da! Back where we started.
Of course that's if you want your fridge to have a PC attached to it at all. Mine has a coil spring and a rheostat to control it. They're outrageously reliable. It ain't broke. I don't feel like fixing it.
Hard to imagine a more general purpose tool than a PC.
Therefore, your refrigerator need not duplicate its capabilities.
I've never seen my PC make toast or drive a nail, although it can keep toast warm after its made.
The problem is not convergence, per se, it's how the idea is being applied. In the current scenario every specialized device is becoming a PC, instead of every specialized device refering to your PC for its control instructions.
They want to sell you a boatload of "smart" appliances, twenty PCs, not one PC. That's the irony of the current "convergence market." The makers of convergence devices are, on the whole, adamantly opposed to the idea of general purpose devices. They don't want your toaster to plug into your PC, they want it to be a PC with its own static ip address and plug directly into the internet, duplicating functionality ad infinitum, not reducing the total number of devices.
KFG
Having one home display device makes sense.
on
Big Bang of Convergence
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Having one home sound reproduction device makes sense.
It saves complication and cost. It's just good engineering to simplify the system by reducing redundency to the optimum (not necessarily the minimum).
Having your toaster call up a website to find out how far up it should turn the rheostat, phone your mom to let her know you're actually eating a good breakfast, tell you the next chess move in that game with your buddy and then starting your car does not reduce complication and cost.
It is a poor solution.
There's nothing wrong with convergence, so long as the convergence makes inherent sense.
And the moral of this story is don't try things that you have sound theoretical and practical reasons to believe will a)not help, at best and b)quite possibly fuck things up worse than they ever were in the first place.
"Let's see, I used to know what a qubit was. Well, don't you worry about that. Just get some particles, build it."
The Wikipedia articles linked to below will certainly get you started, but they will make your head hurt.
To ease the pain in your head I recommend Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality, a popular title, but clear, concise and accurate.
There are a lot of popular works on Quantum Mechanics, but they all play the "pick any two" game with clarity, concision and accuracy. Herbert's is the only one I've found that nails all three.
One of the things that I particularly like about Herbert's book is the way he makes it explicitly clear that various models built upon interpretations of QM are a)interpretations, not QM itself and b)exclusionary.
QM presents certain logical ambiguities and paradoxes when we try to interpret it into the common world of understanding. Various models have been made to to try to deal those issues. Popular "philosophers" like to mix and match these interpretational models, believing they're a)all really the same interpretation and b)Quantum physics.
"So there I was, cruising along faster than light, backwards in time through the multiverse. . . "
But you can't do that, take one from column A and two from column B. Each interpretation is a logical structure unto itself and if you accept the multiverse interpretation adding elements from some other interpretations actually breaks the model's relation to QM.
The above 'quote' is like saying:
"So, I calculated my trajectory by Newton's Laws, but banged into a crystal sphere of Mars because I neglected one of the epicycles and didn't correct for General Relativistic forces. There's a chance I misread the initial conditions data from the chicken entrails as well."
Anyway, just read the book. It'll make you a better person, or at least a person with a more accurate view of QM than nonphysicits who haven't. Just 250 pages, so it's not even some huge tome that takes a multimonth commitment. Like I said, it's concise. Like a good O'Reilly book.
So within the scope of a year or two, everyone will forget how this man made his fortune, and revere him for his good works helping children.
Well, you know what they say, "Pecunia non olet" and we always have to think of the children.
There are some days, when the cynical side of me has the upper hand, when I start thinking that the surest way to a Nobel Peace Prize is to kill some thousands of people (school children work well here) and then apologize.
It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't at least some supporting evidence for the idea.
I'd like to find a really old radion, you know what I mean, the wooden ones from the 20's or 30's and put a little ITX
I like your radio idea. Never occured to me. I've got a 1920s floor model. I could put a 20 inch TV in it with room to spare. In fact, I could probably put an ATX board in it without disturbing the radio itself. Maybe two.:) Most of the space is empty, open backed speaker enclosure.
I think I'll leave well enough alone for now though.
I must admit that after reading the first few comments I was rather disappointed when I actually got to see the thing. Not my taste. I'm more of a mahogany and brass sort of guy. A Chinese tea chest case might be rather nice, or something in the style of a Japanese kitchen chest.
Still, there's no denying the work that went into this thing, so I'll give him brownie points for that.
dude, you'd be amazed how small some projects start out.
I decided to play around with robotics a bit, just play mind you, so I decided to build a robot mouse. I call him Algernon, of course. I'm a geek. Sue me.
At the moment he's about 15 feet tall and weighs about 5 tons. Tomorrow I hope to fit the Krup L/56 88mm cannon onto his nose.
I might have let the project get a bit out of hand.
I'm not sure you grasp the scale of his idea. He lives across the street from a Borders, a Starbucks and a Pizzaria Uno. He wants to stick an antenna on his windowbox and serve content to the patrons of said establishments.
One access point. This Old Box. Some pages. A forum. A chat room so guys can try to pick up that cute girl three tables down without actually having to approach and talk to her. Maybe some Trade Wars.
A browser based BBS for people standing next to him. That's it.
I would also recommend Feynman's Six Easy Pieces and Six Not So Easy Pieces.
Six CDs apiece, with companion books. Hear the man himself giving the undergraduate lectures in physics at CalTech which resulted, ultimately, in the classic three volume text The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
"For those who never had the opportunity to hear Feynman expound on physics, this is an opportunity too good to pass up. In these lectures everything you've ever heard about Feynman's wit and genius comes true."
That OSS offers something different because you CAN contribute to it
Yes, which is why it will always be moving in 1001 different directions at the same time.
I mean, that's really the only reason TO use Linux.
Well, no. The fact that it can be obtained with no financial outlay is quite relevant, despite the shouts of "free as in speach," as is the fact that it is free of license encumberance if you never add a line to it.
The fact that it's Unix may also be quite relevant because. ..
It's not like it's a more robust product that offers fewer time wasting hassles.
. ..this is a relative statement, not an abosolute, depending entirely on who you are, what you do with it, and how you go about doing it.
Let's follow Apple's lead and push the desktop onto the graphics card. Let's follow Be's lead and make the GUI something integral to the system, AS important as the CLI, and not just a "front end" for CLI commands.
On the other hand, no, let's not. I don't see any reason to have to support the overhead for something I'm never going to use.
Ah, well, that brings us right back the post you are responding to, doesn't it?
You have to decide for yourself which drawer is appropriate to store your socks in, or even whether storing them in a drawer is appropriate at all.-KFG
Yes, but on the other hand "~/socks" might be enough instead of the "/house/bedroom/left_closet/undies/socks" (I sure use(d) this system).
That isn't "the other hand," it's what you just quoted me as saying.
It really depends on what you're doing. For something as mature as Samba, you should be able to get docs. ..
He didn't say he couldn't find docs. He explictly said he found lots of docs.
Finding docs is worthless if they all suck.
In my early Linux days I floundered around for a couple weeks just trying to find basic information. I'm no command line novice either, going back to the days when we typed it, on a typewriter. Finally a simple diagram of the generic file system printed in Linux Journal (that's right, even Linux for Dummies didn't bother to even show me a diagram of the file system, and this is enough editions back that it was still command line centric) and a copy of Kernighan and Pike had me whizzing along in about half an hour.
Because Kernighan and Pike writing generically decades ago wrote better Linux documentation than what was available for Linux, and even better Red Hat documentation than that which came with my boxed set with triple the page count. I would have been better off if Red Hat had just tossed me a copy of TUPE with a note on saying,"Best we can do, you'll have to figure the rest out by yourself."
Because Kernighan and Pike know how to write documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have actually looked into the genre, saying that you "hate this stuff" and are convinced it all "looks crappy," isn't sufficient.
Actually, in that scenario, yes, it is.
Unless you can lend some further depth to your remarks, you are simply a troll.
We're discussing taste. Perhaps it's a troll, but that's just because he posted at all, not due to the depth of his remark. It's perfectly ok, for instance, to simply say "I hate the taste of brussels sprouts," and I suspect if you too hated the taste of brussels sprouts you'd be inclined to post "Me Too!" instead of demanding more "depth" to the argument.
You are responding as an offended fan, not with a logical point. Logic does not apply to taste. If parent is a troll YHBH.
Saying "manga looks crappy" is like saying "comic books are for kids."
Here, however, we may apply at least a modicum of logic, as you are juxtaposing the issue of personal taste with one of general classification and thus introducing a strawman into the argument.
A better way of phrasing it, one that might withstand scrutiny, might be "comic books are juvenile," phrasing it as an issue of taste.
And for the most part I happen to think they are. That doesn't mean I won't read one now and again. I read all sorts of juvenile literature, if it's any good.
And if it doesn't look crappy.
KFG
Why don't we have a network of devices, all independent, that can share data. . .
.and control?
Where such makes sense this is exactly what I'm suggesting.
. .
There is no need for my coffee pot to be able to control my furnace. The maximum amount of data it needs is to know what time it is and what time I wish it to turn itself on. That doesn't even require a Z80. A 555 will do nicely. If I wish to control it remotely it simply needs a switch and a jack to connect to to the control device.
Kind of like, oh I dunno, an Internet?
Which is used for distributing data and control so it doesn't all have to reside uniquely wherever you might happen to want it. Your ISP, for instance, runs a mail server so you don't have to. All you need is a mail client. Since I'm never going to use my coffeepot to as a mail client my coffee pot doesn't even need a client. It needs an on/off switch. That on/off switch may well be accesable through the internet, but it doesn't need a general purpose computing device to work the switch.
So you don't want to fix the problem. Nobody's going to take away your rheostats and coil springs...what are you worried about?
Actually, yes, they likely will take away my coil spring and rheostat. At the very least they are actively trying. So yes, I have some worries about that. I can only buy what is offered to the market. I can always build my own, I have the capability, knowledge and as a general rule like building my own things instead of buying them, but coffeepots, toasters and fridges I'm generally more content buying (with certain special case exceptions). I predict that when coffeepots become PCs French Press sales will go up.
Me, I think it would be convenient to have a database of the contents of my fridge and pantry that I can match against my recipe database, and build my grocery list according to what's missing.
What on earth has this got to do with whether or not your fridge has computing capabilities or not? Now of your "counters" address the issue at all. We live in the modern age and intelligence, control and data can be abstracted away from any given physical object. Remember that internet thingy you brought up yourself? You don't need every database you might want to connect to on your own PC. It's "out there." Conversely your fridge doesn't need to contain the database of its contents. They can be kept "out there." All your fridge needs is a few data aquisition sensors and a communication port and it doesn't need to know what the data "means." It only needs to be able to transport raw data.
So your refridgerator, like your coffeepot, doesn't even need the computing ability of a Z80 for you to have your database of contents.
Do you have some special reason for wanting your database stored in your fridge, and your coffeepot, and your TV. . . ?
When I wanted an auto racing timing and scoring device I did not build a new PC. I built a data aquisition interface that pluged into the parallel port and fed my existing PC raw data. The PC itself decided what the data "meant" and input that interpreted data into the relevant database in its memory and on its HD. I only needed to create that capability which my PC didn't already have. The device was, essentially, a network really, really dumb client (all it could do was detect radiation and filter it by frequency).
If I want to have computer control of my beside lamp I don't have to turn it into a computer. I merely have to provide for a control device attached to both the lamp and my existing computing devices.
I am not saying that you shouldn't have computer command and control of everything your little heart desires. I'm saying that since said command and control can be abstracted away from devices themselves there is no point in every frickin' device being "command central."
That might not be convenient to you.
At the risk of being redundant (because I've already posted about this more than once before) the old vacuum tube machines were really much better food warmers than modern devices.
The modern PC gives you lukewarm to the edges with a scorched spot in the middle piece of toast, which you have to tape in place or something in the first place.
In the old machines you could slip a piece of toast, or even a whole sandwhich, right down between the tubes. It was almost as if they were made to be a warming rack.
Of course I was a physicist, not an engineer. The engineers could get a bit squirmy over behavior like that for some reason. Peculiar lot.
KFG
You miss the point. First off, in the convergence scenario the required number of devices can never be less than two, one to carry with you, one stationary. When your fridge becomes a PC it becomes a PC.
See? Now you have two PCs, your laptop to take with you and the stationary one to stay at home and tend your fridge because you can't carry your fridge with you everywhere you go. Or your furnace.
Now, why does your furnace also have to be a PC when your fridge already is? Just plug the furnace into the fridge. Of course their are reliability issues with this. What if your fridge breaks and you have to send it out? You don't want your furnace, TV, radio, et al to have to go down too, so why don't we move the computer part of the device into its own box?
Ta Da! Back where we started.
Of course that's if you want your fridge to have a PC attached to it at all. Mine has a coil spring and a rheostat to control it. They're outrageously reliable. It ain't broke. I don't feel like fixing it.
KFG
How much money was behind Dr. Johnson's dictionary, and how many volunteers did it take to produce it?
Not every project can be improved by increasing the budget and the manpower.
Some of them are distinctly degrades by it.
When it comes to textbooks only the quality of minds is an issue, not their quantity.
KFG
Hard to imagine a more general purpose tool than a PC.
Therefore, your refrigerator need not duplicate its capabilities.
I've never seen my PC make toast or drive a nail, although it can keep toast warm after its made.
The problem is not convergence, per se, it's how the idea is being applied. In the current scenario every specialized device is becoming a PC, instead of every specialized device refering to your PC for its control instructions.
They want to sell you a boatload of "smart" appliances, twenty PCs, not one PC. That's the irony of the current "convergence market." The makers of convergence devices are, on the whole, adamantly opposed to the idea of general purpose devices. They don't want your toaster to plug into your PC, they want it to be a PC with its own static ip address and plug directly into the internet, duplicating functionality ad infinitum, not reducing the total number of devices.
KFG
Having one home sound reproduction device makes sense.
It saves complication and cost. It's just good engineering to simplify the system by reducing redundency to the optimum (not necessarily the minimum).
Having your toaster call up a website to find out how far up it should turn the rheostat, phone your mom to let her know you're actually eating a good breakfast, tell you the next chess move in that game with your buddy and then starting your car does not reduce complication and cost.
It is a poor solution.
There's nothing wrong with convergence, so long as the convergence makes inherent sense.
KFG
So you want to hear these lame proposals so you can scoff at them and feel superior?
If it can play any role in keeping them from being implimented -- yes.
KFG
I'm glad that they haven't jumped in headfirst
And the moral of this story is don't try things that you have sound theoretical and practical reasons to believe will a)not help, at best and b)quite possibly fuck things up worse than they ever were in the first place.
Obviously the government is off it's game.
KFG
"Let's see, I used to know what a qubit was. Well, don't you worry about that. Just get some particles, build it."
The Wikipedia articles linked to below will certainly get you started, but they will make your head hurt.
To ease the pain in your head I recommend Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality, a popular title, but clear, concise and accurate.
There are a lot of popular works on Quantum Mechanics, but they all play the "pick any two" game with clarity, concision and accuracy. Herbert's is the only one I've found that nails all three.
One of the things that I particularly like about Herbert's book is the way he makes it explicitly clear that various models built upon interpretations of QM are a)interpretations, not QM itself and b)exclusionary.
QM presents certain logical ambiguities and paradoxes when we try to interpret it into the common world of understanding. Various models have been made to to try to deal those issues. Popular "philosophers" like to mix and match these interpretational models, believing they're a)all really the same interpretation and b)Quantum physics.
"So there I was, cruising along faster than light, backwards in time through the multiverse. . . "
But you can't do that, take one from column A and two from column B. Each interpretation is a logical structure unto itself and if you accept the multiverse interpretation adding elements from some other interpretations actually breaks the model's relation to QM.
The above 'quote' is like saying:
"So, I calculated my trajectory by Newton's Laws, but banged into a crystal sphere of Mars because I neglected one of the epicycles and didn't correct for General Relativistic forces. There's a chance I misread the initial conditions data from the chicken entrails as well."
Anyway, just read the book. It'll make you a better person, or at least a person with a more accurate view of QM than nonphysicits who haven't. Just 250 pages, so it's not even some huge tome that takes a multimonth commitment. Like I said, it's concise. Like a good O'Reilly book.
KFG
So within the scope of a year or two, everyone will forget how this man made his fortune, and revere him for his good works helping children.
Well, you know what they say, "Pecunia non olet" and we always have to think of the children.
There are some days, when the cynical side of me has the upper hand, when I start thinking that the surest way to a Nobel Peace Prize is to kill some thousands of people (school children work well here) and then apologize.
It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't at least some supporting evidence for the idea.
KFG
To each theor own
:) Most of the space is empty, open backed speaker enclosure.
Absolutely.
I'd like to find a really old radion, you know what I mean, the wooden ones from the 20's or 30's and put a little ITX
I like your radio idea. Never occured to me. I've got a 1920s floor model. I could put a 20 inch TV in it with room to spare. In fact, I could probably put an ATX board in it without disturbing the radio itself. Maybe two.
I think I'll leave well enough alone for now though.
KFG
I must admit that after reading the first few comments I was rather disappointed when I actually got to see the thing. Not my taste. I'm more of a mahogany and brass sort of guy. A Chinese tea chest case might be rather nice, or something in the style of a Japanese kitchen chest.
Still, there's no denying the work that went into this thing, so I'll give him brownie points for that.
KFG
dude, you'd be amazed how small some projects start out.
I decided to play around with robotics a bit, just play mind you, so I decided to build a robot mouse. I call him Algernon, of course. I'm a geek. Sue me.
At the moment he's about 15 feet tall and weighs about 5 tons. Tomorrow I hope to fit the Krup L/56 88mm cannon onto his nose.
I might have let the project get a bit out of hand.
KFG
I'm not sure you grasp the scale of his idea. He lives across the street from a Borders, a Starbucks and a Pizzaria Uno. He wants to stick an antenna on his windowbox and serve content to the patrons of said establishments.
One access point. This Old Box. Some pages. A forum. A chat room so guys can try to pick up that cute girl three tables down without actually having to approach and talk to her. Maybe some Trade Wars.
A browser based BBS for people standing next to him. That's it.
KFG
Is that 5GB in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
.
Well, now that you mention it, several of the pictures I have on this drive are pictures of you -- and a pony, that I found on some website.
It seems your Xboyfriend had an X10 camera and. .
Welcome to the world of ubiquitous data, sweet thing.
KFG
I would also recommend Feynman's Six Easy Pieces and Six Not So Easy Pieces.
Six CDs apiece, with companion books. Hear the man himself giving the undergraduate lectures in physics at CalTech which resulted, ultimately, in the classic three volume text The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
"For those who never had the opportunity to hear Feynman expound on physics, this is an opportunity too good to pass up. In these lectures everything you've ever heard about Feynman's wit and genius comes true."
-John Horgan, author of The End of Science
No self-respecting geek should be without them.
KFG
On the other hand they destroyed New Jersey, so it wasn't all bad.
KFG
Burning Man for stuffed suits. Nothing to see here. Literally.
KFG
That OSS offers something different because you CAN contribute to it
.
.this is a relative statement, not an abosolute, depending entirely on who you are, what you do with it, and how you go about doing it.
Yes, which is why it will always be moving in 1001 different directions at the same time.
I mean, that's really the only reason TO use Linux.
Well, no. The fact that it can be obtained with no financial outlay is quite relevant, despite the shouts of "free as in speach," as is the fact that it is free of license encumberance if you never add a line to it.
The fact that it's Unix may also be quite relevant because. .
It's not like it's a more robust product that offers fewer time wasting hassles.
. .
KFG
Maybe market forces will drive things toward a workable model after all.
If it drives them to $13 per month view on demand subscription model for digital cable television, spiffy.
It it drives them to Real or WMP -- they can piss off.
KFG
YOU wouldn't have to use it
Oddly enough, that was my point.
And of course anyone who thinks that OSX and BeOS are moving in the right direction are free to use/contribute to those as well.
KFG
Let's follow Apple's lead and push the desktop onto the graphics card. Let's follow Be's lead and make the GUI something integral to the system, AS important as the CLI, and not just a "front end" for CLI commands.
On the other hand, no, let's not. I don't see any reason to have to support the overhead for something I'm never going to use.
Ah, well, that brings us right back the post you are responding to, doesn't it?
KFG
You have to decide for yourself which drawer is appropriate to store your socks in, or even whether storing them in a drawer is appropriate at all.-KFG
Yes, but on the other hand "~/socks" might be enough instead of the "/house/bedroom/left_closet/undies/socks" (I sure use(d) this system).
That isn't "the other hand," it's what you just quoted me as saying.
KFG
It really depends on what you're doing. For something as mature as Samba, you should be able to get docs. . .
He didn't say he couldn't find docs. He explictly said he found lots of docs.
Finding docs is worthless if they all suck.
In my early Linux days I floundered around for a couple weeks just trying to find basic information. I'm no command line novice either, going back to the days when we typed it, on a typewriter. Finally a simple diagram of the generic file system printed in Linux Journal (that's right, even Linux for Dummies didn't bother to even show me a diagram of the file system, and this is enough editions back that it was still command line centric) and a copy of Kernighan and Pike had me whizzing along in about half an hour.
Because Kernighan and Pike writing generically decades ago wrote better Linux documentation than what was available for Linux, and even better Red Hat documentation than that which came with my boxed set with triple the page count. I would have been better off if Red Hat had just tossed me a copy of TUPE with a note on saying,"Best we can do, you'll have to figure the rest out by yourself."
Because Kernighan and Pike know how to write documentation.
KFG