the command space in the shell is flat, you can access any command directly.
the commands you will want to learn are vast, dozens of commands at least... and if not the flags, you will want to memorize the capabilities and the general way... enough for man to remind you in seconds of details.
but once you have that... you have hundreds of elements of executable behavior at your fingertip, and with piping you can generally integrate these tools on the fly. This is nice. Everything is nearer, and the time saved is worth the time spent learning the cryptic commands. It's more important to remember what tools are available than exactly how they work. The things you are doing often in a given project will become medium term memorized anyway.
PERL is the new standard way to process input and output... but awk is still there. You won't HAVE to convert unless you think there is a reason.
But more than that, to have the generality you want it's best to understand at least one assembly language and/or how computers actually work. They programs and data are actually the same thing, and what the CPU is really doing with memory. And how devices are just memory to the program at the lower levels.
Programming, scripting, etc. is logic. Know the machine and you understand the limitations, or "kind" of logic. Grep won't be there, but some tool for doing grep will be (if not, grep has been ported 9/10 times). You have a problem, you think in terms of searching for text.
I can pretty quickly orient to any environment or machine with this approach.
Having said that, I too am tired of learning different ways of executing the same logic. Unix has been implemented over and over for everything, it has all the tools you need regularly with most of the arcane and rare options implemented for the tools one uses every day. Now, thank to Unix it's getting decent desktops and productivity applications.
(1) The Next Cube was very cool. It did have value. A lot of good machines died because it was news to them that the hardware questioned had been "answered" and that the exploding part of the market didn't care about your much better machine. There was a competitive market keeping PCs cheapest per MIP and everything else had to be niche.
(2) Unix is not a command line technology. The "command-line" in unix is just another program running on your machine, talking to the kernel.
that's really it. I don't mind duplicates much, especially if they are separated by days. But it does start to look like a basic issue of professionalism. Of taking it seriously. But there is a loose ethic involed here in this.com that is still ticking, and that might be ok, because to a degree it's the idea of allowing noise into the signal to reduce cost. You allow as much as you have to to make things easy to manufacture and use cheaper more standard parts. Then you reduce noise from there, with tools, new techniques, whatever. This method not only achieves the technical engineering goals, it ensures a cheap cost of production.
It's somewhat common once a technology becomes standard infrastructure. The consumer of a popularized technology, at first at least, gets something of a lower quality than what was being built in the labs. It's just good enough to get the point across. The quality raises slowly but surely, and ultimately faster than it would have otherwise --- without being cheap and tolerating the lower quality, it would never have been able to become popular, earning $$$ for the application of improving (and always cost effective) methodologies.
Slashdot just hasn't got to the increasing the quality of the article signal yet, in certain respects. In one respect dupes are not that bad of a bias ot the signal. On the other hand, you can't say they are imperceptable, they are easy for a daily reader of slashdot to notice.
No doubt they have a certain formula of the types of stories they post and have worked on making that an appealing recipe, and I guess it must be working for most of us that still read it. Most visibly they have focussed on increasing the quality of the comments you see through the moderation system. The merits of the system overall might be open to debate but certainly it does the job usenet never did of putting the foul mouth rants and flames below the surface while raising the lighting on many of the interesting comments.
I'm not a subscriber. How about this as a PLUM?
Let the subscribers moderate the articles.
[-1 Duplicate]. If as a use I get a personal interpretation of Duplicate posts... I would probalby 0 it. But it would be nice to see it marked duplicate.
[+1 Astounding Revelation]
[-1 Misinformed]
[+1 Well Informed]
[-1 Katz-like]
[+1 Controversial]
You could have these work to just label the article, or to actually affect a score as with posts, allowing users to have their own modification amounts for each category. [+1 Katz-like], [-1 Astounding Revelation].
This would be different than automating how stories are selected. I think it's good for them to do that manually, that basically IS their editorial input... human geek-info sensors fed by a community of geeks, google and the new york times.
'vi' mode for mozilla text edit boxes. That would be a good idea... but I want an "amaya" mode.
And IF it must be a 'vi' mode, at least 'emacs'!!!
But my main point is RIGHT on... richer editing functions from within html forms... it would be a godsend for so many of these web form front ends. (e.g. I've been using Zope for some stuff and I would love this... the problem with an amaya front end being you edit HTML fragments... so a vi or emacs mode would cover more ground.
the whole shebang is based on formal logic... which Arisototle codified two thousand years ago!
Don't even get me started on how old the laws of physics are that these machines are based on... good lord, can't they innovate some new properties for the material world... but no... the best they do is base them on newly discovered laws (quantum computers), and even that's getting long in the tool (what, 70 years I guess withought google's help).
>What capitalism (and conservatism) teach is that complaining about those obstacles will only guarantee that you will continue to have them get in your way.
what history shows that if you blithely ignore the validity of those complaints based on some statistically impossible ideal that All The Poor could just better themselves if they were not so lazy -- that the unfair thing you can explain next is a communist or other revolution. But when they nationalize your property, they can just say, "hey, life's not fair."
-- somone who bettered himself through education and hard work.
Mostly the Sierra adventure would not have made good movies, even the ones that were good games... they borrowed too heavily from classic stories, imnsho. However, the exception would be Space Quest... especially the one that lampoons the computer game industry (IV? or III?). Ostensibly for ken williams' sake it was a parody of Lucas Arts... but, ahem... it about you Ken.
I think they used BSD code. And I think that's the smart thing to have done. Public domain and near public domain is that way for a reason. Commercial companies should feel free to use it.
It's like W's DUI... it's not so much that he had a DUI, it's the denial itself that is the interesting part.
in another reply to you in this thread I too mention a memo. I don't know of a memo. What I know is that there will be a lot of communication on Napster.
Of course the case will come down to the information HW recorded on it's intentions, because without some direct smoking gun culpability the liability of a corporation is limited to the corporation itself and investors are specifically free of liability.
remember that Napster was a service... they were keeping those dynamic indexes... the transfer was peer to peer, but that was just a portion of the whole service which was not peer to peer, but specifically a central directory/index.
oddly enough, the law is based on intent, aka reading the mind of the perpetrator. Like the memoes of HW regarding the Napster investment.
Remember, they were told at certain points they were in violation, and then the court proved that position valid. Apache is not in that situation.
Personally, I agree in general that you can't blame the maker of a tool. But Napster was a service! They put themselves in a central location where they could control this. Apache is just a tool, if apache.org starts hosting copyrighted material illegally, they would be exposing themselves regardless of what web server they chose to run it on.
HW knew this thing wasn't going to thrive as they hoped based on indy music and legal trading and sharing. That's pretty certain. From a money point of view, that possibility doesn't make sense. HW knew this more than anyone else involved! Fanning may have thought that new artists would rise up and fill the gap (sure!), and the client people might really think it's an extension of sharing, and some no doubt stayed legal -- MANY stayed ought-to-be-legal and ended up buying music they tried not to be moral but to suddenly want the disk and the liner notes.
But HW was in it for the money, period. And the money was all based on IP that does happen to belong to the members of the RIAA.
It's my understanding that the limited liability is itself limited. You cannot knowingly break the law or fund such breaking of the law and expect liability limitations, at all. It just rarely happens.
But then it's rare to launch a billion dollar company whose main assets don't belong to them!
Hummer Winblad is a hell of a lot more involved in directing it's investments, and of the business plans of those investments (since that's what they actually invest in) than some 401K stock holder.
Everything is not black and white, and for a VC to be liable in a single case where copyright infringement was obvious to many, says nothing about the rights of small investors in publicly traded stocks!
Slashdot Mirror
yes.
the command space in the shell is flat, you can access any command directly.
the commands you will want to learn are vast, dozens of commands at least... and if not the flags, you will want to memorize the capabilities and the general way... enough for man to remind you in seconds of details.
but once you have that... you have hundreds of elements of executable behavior at your fingertip, and with piping you can generally integrate these tools on the fly. This is nice. Everything is nearer, and the time saved is worth the time spent learning the cryptic commands. It's more important to remember what tools are available than exactly how they work. The things you are doing often in a given project will become medium term memorized anyway.
I agree with you fully except for the part where you imply it might not be the user's fault.
I totally agree about the reliability.
PERL is the new standard way to process input and output... but awk is still there. You won't HAVE to convert unless you think there is a reason.
But more than that, to have the generality you want it's best to understand at least one assembly language and/or how computers actually work. They programs and data are actually the same thing, and what the CPU is really doing with memory. And how devices are just memory to the program at the lower levels.
Programming, scripting, etc. is logic. Know the machine and you understand the limitations, or "kind" of logic. Grep won't be there, but some tool for doing grep will be (if not, grep has been ported 9/10 times). You have a problem, you think in terms of searching for text.
I can pretty quickly orient to any environment or machine with this approach.
Having said that, I too am tired of learning different ways of executing the same logic. Unix has been implemented over and over for everything, it has all the tools you need regularly with most of the arcane and rare options implemented for the tools one uses every day. Now, thank to Unix it's getting decent desktops and productivity applications.
Unix wins.
-former VMS lover
>Sort of like people chose Windows now, because it is now better for getting real work done than the alternatives, right ?
yes. People that need Word, Excel, and Project to get real work done are buying Windows.
Quality doesn't matter. Price and available tools are more important.
> Windows 3.1 was a toy O/S that did not even pretend to be a serious contender.
;- goodbye fair VMS.
I know you thought that, but you should have figured you were wrong my now. That toy did pretend it was a contendor, and it was.
Perhaps VMS wasn't!
Is this a troll? Not that I care.
(1) The Next Cube was very cool. It did have value. A lot of good machines died because it was news to them that the hardware questioned had been "answered" and that the exploding part of the market didn't care about your much better machine. There was a competitive market keeping PCs cheapest per MIP and everything else had to be niche.
(2) Unix is not a command line technology. The "command-line" in unix is just another program running on your machine, talking to the kernel.
But I'm more of a Woz zealot.
this is excellent. The troll fairy christens this a good Troll Post for every duplicate! much better than that Dupe of Earl tripe.
- Dupe of Earl
that's really it. I don't mind duplicates much, especially if they are separated by days. But it does start to look like a basic issue of professionalism. Of taking it seriously. But there is a loose ethic involed here in this .com that is still ticking, and that might be ok, because to a degree it's the idea of allowing noise into the signal to reduce cost. You allow as much as you have to to make things easy to manufacture and use cheaper more standard parts. Then you reduce noise from there, with tools, new techniques, whatever. This method not only achieves the technical engineering goals, it ensures a cheap cost of production.
It's somewhat common once a technology becomes standard infrastructure. The consumer of a popularized technology, at first at least, gets something of a lower quality than what was being built in the labs. It's just good enough to get the point across. The quality raises slowly but surely, and ultimately faster than it would have otherwise --- without being cheap and tolerating the lower quality, it would never have been able to become popular, earning $$$ for the application of improving (and always cost effective) methodologies.
Slashdot just hasn't got to the increasing the quality of the article signal yet, in certain respects. In one respect dupes are not that bad of a bias ot the signal. On the other hand, you can't say they are imperceptable, they are easy for a daily reader of slashdot to notice.
No doubt they have a certain formula of the types of stories they post and have worked on making that an appealing recipe, and I guess it must be working for most of us that still read it. Most visibly they have focussed on increasing the quality of the comments you see through the moderation system. The merits of the system overall might be open to debate but certainly it does the job usenet never did of putting the foul mouth rants and flames below the surface while raising the lighting on many of the interesting comments.
I'm not a subscriber. How about this as a PLUM?
Let the subscribers moderate the articles.
[-1 Duplicate]. If as a use I get a personal interpretation of Duplicate posts... I would probalby 0 it. But it would be nice to see it marked duplicate.
[+1 Astounding Revelation]
[-1 Misinformed]
[+1 Well Informed]
[-1 Katz-like]
[+1 Controversial]
You could have these work to just label the article, or to actually affect a score as with posts, allowing users to have their own modification amounts for each category. [+1 Katz-like], [-1 Astounding Revelation].
This would be different than automating how stories are selected. I think it's good for them to do that manually, that basically IS their editorial input... human geek-info sensors fed by a community of geeks, google and the new york times.
oh I see... you're saying it adds a biased noise element to the signal.
'vi' mode for mozilla text edit boxes. That would be a good idea... but I want an "amaya" mode.
And IF it must be a 'vi' mode, at least 'emacs'!!!
But my main point is RIGHT on... richer editing functions from within html forms... it would be a godsend for so many of these web form front ends. (e.g. I've been using Zope for some stuff and I would love this... the problem with an amaya front end being you edit HTML fragments... so a vi or emacs mode would cover more ground.
insightful? can't you tell he's being sarcastic?
the whole shebang is based on formal logic... which Arisototle codified two thousand years ago!
Don't even get me started on how old the laws of physics are that these machines are based on... good lord, can't they innovate some new properties for the material world... but no... the best they do is base them on newly discovered laws (quantum computers), and even that's getting long in the tool (what, 70 years I guess withought google's help).
Hey kids... The Who is OLDER THAN 30 now.
>What capitalism (and conservatism) teach is that complaining about those obstacles will only guarantee that you will continue to have them get in your way.
what history shows that if you blithely ignore the validity of those complaints based on some statistically impossible ideal that All The Poor could just better themselves if they were not so lazy -- that the unfair thing you can explain next is a communist or other revolution. But when they nationalize your property, they can just say, "hey, life's not fair."
-- somone who bettered himself through education and hard work.
Not Ken Lay. Not the purpetrators. You don't HAVE to be poor to get stomped, of course.
Fact is, some people are poor because they got stomped. Also, some people do not have the opportunity to succeed that you think they do.
If a few people make it from poverty to wealth, that doesn't mean there is room in the system for EVERY poor person to do that.
not redundant... a dangerous feedback loop!
run... the movie is going to electrocute your mind.
that would be good.
Actually so would Day of the Tenticle.
Mostly the Sierra adventure would not have made good movies, even the ones that were good games... they borrowed too heavily from classic stories, imnsho. However, the exception would be Space Quest... especially the one that lampoons the computer game industry (IV? or III?). Ostensibly for ken williams' sake it was a parody of Lucas Arts... but, ahem... it about you Ken.
the comparison is apples to apples, the differences are special.
The point... if you want to use GNU software, you are bound by the GPL. (untested in court)
If you want to use MS software, you are bound by the products EULA. (also untested in court)
Like to like, i.e. "what you must agree to in order to use the software".
possible.
I think they used BSD code. And I think that's the smart thing to have done. Public domain and near public domain is that way for a reason. Commercial companies should feel free to use it.
It's like W's DUI... it's not so much that he had a DUI, it's the denial itself that is the interesting part.
While your advice is sound... thank god people don't follow it... much of history would be lost.
but why are the holes round... oh forget it... good answer, you're hired!
in another reply to you in this thread I too mention a memo. I don't know of a memo. What I know is that there will be a lot of communication on Napster.
Of course the case will come down to the information HW recorded on it's intentions, because without some direct smoking gun culpability the liability of a corporation is limited to the corporation itself and investors are specifically free of liability.
remember that Napster was a service... they were keeping those dynamic indexes... the transfer was peer to peer, but that was just a portion of the whole service which was not peer to peer, but specifically a central directory/index.
At least, that was my impression of their system.
oddly enough, the law is based on intent, aka reading the mind of the perpetrator. Like the memoes of HW regarding the Napster investment.
Remember, they were told at certain points they were in violation, and then the court proved that position valid. Apache is not in that situation.
Personally, I agree in general that you can't blame the maker of a tool. But Napster was a service! They put themselves in a central location where they could control this. Apache is just a tool, if apache.org starts hosting copyrighted material illegally, they would be exposing themselves regardless of what web server they chose to run it on.
HW knew this thing wasn't going to thrive as they hoped based on indy music and legal trading and sharing. That's pretty certain. From a money point of view, that possibility doesn't make sense. HW knew this more than anyone else involved! Fanning may have thought that new artists would rise up and fill the gap (sure!), and the client people might really think it's an extension of sharing, and some no doubt stayed legal -- MANY stayed ought-to-be-legal and ended up buying music they tried not to be moral but to suddenly want the disk and the liner notes.
But HW was in it for the money, period. And the money was all based on IP that does happen to belong to the members of the RIAA.
It's my understanding that the limited liability is itself limited. You cannot knowingly break the law or fund such breaking of the law and expect liability limitations, at all. It just rarely happens.
But then it's rare to launch a billion dollar company whose main assets don't belong to them!
Hummer Winblad is a hell of a lot more involved in directing it's investments, and of the business plans of those investments (since that's what they actually invest in) than some 401K stock holder.
Everything is not black and white, and for a VC to be liable in a single case where copyright infringement was obvious to many, says nothing about the rights of small investors in publicly traded stocks!