make it obvious to another programmer what it does The point of comments is not to say WHAT you're doing...as you say, that's obvious. The point is to say WHY you're doing it.
d:= d*360/400;
x=gsin(d);
d:= d*400/360;
Any programmer can see that I'm mangling d and calling a function. It might be useful to add the following comment, though...
// gsin function requires argument in gradients
// convert d from degrees to gradients before
// calling the function, then convert it back
Now, when you're trying to improve performance or figure out why d changes value subtly in this routine, you can rewrite the code as
x=gsin(d*360/400);
Comments are good things - you should use them copiously to explain your thinking. Any compiler can figure out WHAT you're doing; a human being can thus do likewise. Only a sentient being can determine WHY you're doing it. Use your comments to communicate with sentient beings. It may take a paragraph to explain a single line of code. A page of code may require only a single line of comment. Use your own judgement, but always remember that your target audience is someone completely inexperienced with your project somewhat inexperienced with the language you're using.
Yes there is. Congressional land grants in the 1800s were dependent on your improving the land. If you didn't improve the land, you didn't get to keep the land. So you go to the registrar (Congress) and request your domain name (parcel of land). You receive it and don't post any actualy content (build structures / farm the land). You lose the domain (the land grant).
This was also the legal justification for taking lands from the American natives - they had not improved the land. They had a Biblical imperative to farm or work the land; since they weren't doing so, they had no right to the land.
I am a firm believer in the principle that if you don't use a scarce resource to benefit everyone, and if someone else will, then they should be the owner. Property ownership is not natural; it is the product of the laws of our civilization. The laws should benefit everyone and not a select few individuals.
Consider ethernet at 10 million bits per second. Those don't all arrive at the end of the second. They arrive in 1500 byte chunks, each of which takes 12 ms to transmit.Yet we do not describe ethernet as having a bandwidth of 1500 bytes/12 ms.
I would conclude that the bandwidth in question is not 5 exabytes/3 days.
And as David Drake said in one of his novels (though I doubt it was original to him), "All human endeavour is political. Those who don't think they're playing politics are merely playing politics badly."
I also understand perfectly. People who don't stand up to the corps consider ONLY the consequences to themselves. They act without regard to the consequences for others. Their inaction causes problems for others, just as in the classic example of the tragedy of the commons (ie owning one extra cow) individuals actions cause problems for others.
We must think how our actions/inactions affect everyone. Failure to do so is blatant selfishness. Doing the right thing is not easy.
P.S. Had Felten gone ahead and published, he'd still have won. The RIAA would NOT have backed down otherwise. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. I applaud his decision to ultimately pursue the case, but wish he'd either called the RIAA's bluff, proving it to be a bluff, or let them take irrevocable action that could have formed the basis of a case.
Right...it's that fear that prevents people from standing up to the big corps. I suppose if they accused you of murder you'd roll over and give up, too...worst case is about the same. When you roll over and let the corps do what they will to you, you are tacitly giving them permission to do that to EVERY OTHER HUMAN BEING IN THE WORLD, and you become complicit in their actions.
We're in a battle here. In a battle, some people die so that others can live. Worst case in a war is that you'll die. Does that justify running away? I don't think so.
But what if there's a glitch in your cash flow or other SNAFU situations? If a company goes out of business (the worst case SNAFU), should its IP perish? One of my favorite old games (Armada 2525) was published by a company that died and vanished shortly after its publication. The game disappeared. This is a silly and unimportant example, but I believe it is typical.
Patents and copyrights were intended to benefit the public by giving incentive to inventors and authors. In other words, in exchange for a brief monopoly, you agree to benefit the public. The public should not have to bear the brunt of your mismanagement of your business; if you fail to benefit the public by producing your product, it becomes the property of the public.
As long as you are selling the book, you own the IP. Should you run out of books AND cash, and you no longer have the book available for sale, it is in the public domain. If I make a good-faith effort to locate a seller of new or original product and am unable to find any, I may freely reproduce it for sale to others.
Also, you should allow increase in price to match inflation at the very least. Of course...didn't want to go into too much detail in the original post.
BTW, the barrier against price increase springs from the following. TSR's role-playing game "Star Frontiers." They stopped producing this in order to market their "Buck Rogers" game. Fans of the former were left out in the cold. A more recent and topical example (as well as more useful and less silly), of course, would be Win 3.1. Microsoft stops selling it in order to market Win 9x. Under my proposed structure, neither MS nor TSR should be allowed to say "Yeah, the product's still for sale...got a billion dollars?"
But, yeah, it'd need to be fleshed out more. What if demand goes sky-high but there's limited product availability? I've thought about this a bit and think that mandatory licensing would be necessary. The cost license for producing one copy of the product could be set at the retail cost of one copy of the product; this would allow other producers to meet demand while allowing the original producer to retain IP ownership and profitability. If you have any interesting thoughts, I'd be interested. Of course, since you're an AC you'll probably never read this...but it's been mildly useful to write it.
If the framers of the Constitution had wanted to grant copyrights and patents for anything at all, that clause would not have been necessary.
You missed the tenth amendment. Any powers not SPECIFICALLY given to the Federal government in the constitution or amendments is reserved to the states. Had that clause not been in the constitution, we'd currently be looking at 50 patent and copyright offices.
Your observation about useful arts is intriguing...I must go think on this...
EULA is based on copyright. Copyrighted information IS intellectual property, aka IP. Lanham I know nothing about. Do its provisions require enforcement?
Right. Everyone will believe you if you say it. Perhaps you can also say that you are from Mars and you will be famous. (For the sarcasm impaired - saying so don't make it so.)
It is obvious that Felten had published in academic journals before and that intended to do so with this research. If you publish something in an academic journal, you won't get prosecuted for it...that's the precedent I see. The solution is not to prepend silly disclaimers but to do the hard work required to place yourself in a position where you can hack to your heart's content and publish your results in prestigious peer-reviewed academic journals.
Easy answers are never correct.
P.S. OJ showed the ignorant in this country that. It has always been the case that money wins, not justice or truth.
The problem here is that it's perfectly legal for large corporations to strong-arm the little guy with threatening letters, and subsequently fail to follow through with the threat.
It is legal for roughly the same reasons that few children are ever punished for threatening to tell (as in "ohm, I'm gonna tell...you're gonna get in in truhhhh-ble!") mom, the teacher, etc. It is also legal to threaten to call the cops in a situations that aren't criminal. Unfortunately, it is rarely the case that one side has an overwhelming legal advantage in cases like this.
I see this as being a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons. Individuals who are threatened by major corporations fold rather than fight the battle that would prevent the corp from similarly threatening other individuals. The corp then goes on to threaten other individuals, who behave likewise. One, or a few, who stood up and fought would stop such behavior. Unfortunately, people prefer convenience to honor.
"The Congress shall have power...To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries..."
Copyright has long been recognized by legal authorities as a limitation on free speech. It is considered an acceptable compromise.
I would like to see the following idea added to IP law, though. You either make your IP available to the people or you lose your exclusive rights. In other words, if you want to prevent someone else from publishing it, you must be publishing it. Do you think there's no longer profit in publishing this game? Fine. It's in the public domain, now. You set an initial price for your IP product; the price can never increase, only decrease. As long as you offer the IP product for that price or less, thus making it available to people, you retain copyright on it. The day you fail to make the product available, it enters the public domain.
You are confusing trademark law with copyright/patent law. Trademarks must be defended or lost. Copyrights and patents need NEVER be defended. Recall the GIF compression patent fiasco - the patent holder did not enforce their patent for 15 years. Everyone who dealt with GIFs was vioating their patent. For 15 years. And then they started enforcing it.
I hereby sentence both you and your moderators to read "The Intellectual Property FAQ." Search for it on google...
"acting nice" while in front of the crowd and then went completely feral backstage
I don't buy that; these people are TELEVISION actors. They understand that the studio audience is largely irrelevant - they're a live laugh/applause track. The actors understand that they are performing for the TELEVISION audience. Her blowing a kiss and her comments were all for the camera. Whether she meant them or not is open to interpretation.
He mentioned it after the taping before the show had aired. I personally think she was messing with his head. Wil Wheaton can dish it out but he doesn't seem to be able to take it. On the other hand, when someone that you don't know dises you, it's hard to know where they're coming from.
Maybe it's because the Red Freakin' Cross has so much money they don't know what to do with it. Maybe it's because any dolt can understand "it's for the children!" and see the point in supporting it. Maybe it's because so few people GET how important the EFF is and Wil wanted to point that out. Maybe it's because he was playing for what was important to him...his freedom. Note that all the things you note (homeless shelters, havens for abused people, etc.) are large recipients of governmental funds. Maybe he picked the EFF instead of one of those other charities because no one is trying to pass any bills in Congress to make it easier to harass women or abuse children but a whole bunch of people just voted to eliminate some of your electronic freedoms.
Feel free to think Wil's wrong...I don't want to invalidate your opinion; just wanted to give you some food for thought. You work for what you think is important and the rest of us will do likewise and hopefully we can make the world a little better. I just hate to see everyone's efforts concentrated on the obvious problems. We've got 6 billion people in the world...it's not like we don't have enough effort to go around.
I seriously believe that infections like this should start becoming yardsticks that system administrators are hired and fired against.
Another poster has indicated that sometimes stupid management decisions prevent you from doing what you know is optimal. If YOU know something's stupid, but your manager tells you to do it anyway, get it in writing (or at least in email). Do NOT do anything potentially harmful to your company unless you have it in writing. Claim that it's part of your documentation procedures, that all non-vendor recommended configurations must be documented.
If your boss refuses to provide direction in writing, send a memo or email confirming your conversation and letting the boss know that you're going to do what he said. When you're done, send another one saying so, reminding the boss that the situation is nonoptimal and encouraging him to provide you with the resources or permission to optimize things again. Be sure to keep a hard copy of this communication. If your boss is a big enough weenie, you might want to keep a copy at home.
Keep in mind that a good email admin can alter emails on the server and leave no tracks, so if you're the email admin, instructions in email are irrelevant. Same is true (but for a different reason) if the email admin is in the boss's pocket.
This advice is probably not applicable to a lot of readers who are already job-hopping and don't care if they do more. Good for you. Some of us, though, (myself included), like our positions and stay in them, and therefore must learn to weather a succession of pointy-haired bungee-boss types. So far I've outlasted three in two years.
Finally, remember this:
All human endeavors are political. Those who don't think they're playing politics are merely playing politics badly.
Here's my evidence:
Computers break.
Bosses want them fixed RIGHT FREAKING NOW.
Here's your anecdotal evidence:
"My computer didn't break."
Read my other comments; it boils down to making a system as self-documenting as possible so that the poor schmuck who has to fix it has as easy a time of it as possible.
You are assuming that because you personally have never observed a problem with this software then the problem does not exist. I, on the other hand, am assuming that this software is like all other software I've seen - it is imperfect. If I am to be responsible for administering a system, I want to be prepared for every part of it to break.
Right. And everybody has heard of someone else's grampa or uncle who smoked three packs a day and drank a quart of whiskey and died at the ripe old age of 103.
In other words, anecdotal evidence is pointless. No matter how overwhelming the evidence against some behavior might be, the bell curve practically guarantees that some people will be able to engage in that behavior and get away with it.
You could theoretically (and actually, too, since you've got the sources:) glom ALL your files together in / with no problem. When you mount another file system, all the files within that system are added to the pile in/. Why not do that? Because there are benefits to a hierarchical file structure. There are benefits to hierarchies at every level, though it is possible to take it to an extreme.
If everything works, there's actually no problem in glomming everything together in/. The problem is when something breaks and a HUMAN BEING has to analyze what's on the system. This is less of a problem on hackers' personal systems, used and administered by solitary individuals at their own whim, than it is on a business server, used and administered by many. You want as much as possible of your system to be obvious to human eyeballs when most everything on the system is broken.
This, BTW, is why I am fundamentally morally opposed to binary storage of configuration data (a la the win32 registry) versus plain-text storage. Binary is easier for the computer to handle, which is great as long as things work. Plain text is easier for me to handle, which is useful only when things break. Since the computer can work with either, plain text is preferable.
When things break, I must have the ability to go from zero knowledge about a broken system's configuration to a fully functional system as quickly as possible. Well-organized files that take full advantage of a hierarchical file structure, and plain-text config files, are much helpful in this situation.
(It just occurred to me that referring to the root directory as "/" at the end of a sentence produces an ambigous symbol; suffice to say I don't mean slashdot.org by "/.")
IF everything always worked, there would be no advantage to . You could eliminate the path statem
So...a hierarchical file structure under usr is pointless. Why then have ANY hierarchical file structure at all? Why not have one big directory? There is no reason you can come up with that doesn't counter your own arguemnt against a hierarchical structure under usr.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of comments is not to say WHAT you're doing...as you say, that's obvious. The point is to say WHY you're doing it.Any programmer can see that I'm mangling d and calling a function. It might be useful to add the following comment, though...Now, when you're trying to improve performance or figure out why d changes value subtly in this routine, you can rewrite the code asComments are good things - you should use them copiously to explain your thinking. Any compiler can figure out WHAT you're doing; a human being can thus do likewise. Only a sentient being can determine WHY you're doing it. Use your comments to communicate with sentient beings. It may take a paragraph to explain a single line of code. A page of code may require only a single line of comment. Use your own judgement, but always remember that your target audience is someone completely inexperienced with your project somewhat inexperienced with the language you're using.
Yes there is. Congressional land grants in the 1800s were dependent on your improving the land. If you didn't improve the land, you didn't get to keep the land. So you go to the registrar (Congress) and request your domain name (parcel of land). You receive it and don't post any actualy content (build structures / farm the land). You lose the domain (the land grant).
This was also the legal justification for taking lands from the American natives - they had not improved the land. They had a Biblical imperative to farm or work the land; since they weren't doing so, they had no right to the land.
I am a firm believer in the principle that if you don't use a scarce resource to benefit everyone, and if someone else will, then they should be the owner. Property ownership is not natural; it is the product of the laws of our civilization. The laws should benefit everyone and not a select few individuals.
Consider ethernet at 10 million bits per second. Those don't all arrive at the end of the second. They arrive in 1500 byte chunks, each of which takes 12 ms to transmit.Yet we do not describe ethernet as having a bandwidth of 1500 bytes/12 ms.
I would conclude that the bandwidth in question is not 5 exabytes/3 days.
What a strange and charming anecdote...
And as David Drake said in one of his novels (though I doubt it was original to him), "All human endeavour is political. Those who don't think they're playing politics are merely playing politics badly."
Slashdot's clock is correct. They've moved to an off-shore data haven on a floating platform about 400 miles east of Nantucket.
I also understand perfectly. People who don't stand up to the corps consider ONLY the consequences to themselves. They act without regard to the consequences for others. Their inaction causes problems for others, just as in the classic example of the tragedy of the commons (ie owning one extra cow) individuals actions cause problems for others.
We must think how our actions/inactions affect everyone. Failure to do so is blatant selfishness. Doing the right thing is not easy.
P.S. Had Felten gone ahead and published, he'd still have won. The RIAA would NOT have backed down otherwise. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. I applaud his decision to ultimately pursue the case, but wish he'd either called the RIAA's bluff, proving it to be a bluff, or let them take irrevocable action that could have formed the basis of a case.
Right...it's that fear that prevents people from standing up to the big corps. I suppose if they accused you of murder you'd roll over and give up, too...worst case is about the same. When you roll over and let the corps do what they will to you, you are tacitly giving them permission to do that to EVERY OTHER HUMAN BEING IN THE WORLD, and you become complicit in their actions.
We're in a battle here. In a battle, some people die so that others can live. Worst case in a war is that you'll die. Does that justify running away? I don't think so.
But what if there's a glitch in your cash flow or other SNAFU situations?
If a company goes out of business (the worst case SNAFU), should its IP perish? One of my favorite old games (Armada 2525) was published by a company that died and vanished shortly after its publication. The game disappeared. This is a silly and unimportant example, but I believe it is typical.
Patents and copyrights were intended to benefit the public by giving incentive to inventors and authors. In other words, in exchange for a brief monopoly, you agree to benefit the public. The public should not have to bear the brunt of your mismanagement of your business; if you fail to benefit the public by producing your product, it becomes the property of the public.
As long as you are selling the book, you own the IP. Should you run out of books AND cash, and you no longer have the book available for sale, it is in the public domain. If I make a good-faith effort to locate a seller of new or original product and am unable to find any, I may freely reproduce it for sale to others.
Also, you should allow increase in price to match inflation at the very least.
Of course...didn't want to go into too much detail in the original post.
BTW, the barrier against price increase springs from the following. TSR's role-playing game "Star Frontiers." They stopped producing this in order to market their "Buck Rogers" game. Fans of the former were left out in the cold. A more recent and topical example (as well as more useful and less silly), of course, would be Win 3.1. Microsoft stops selling it in order to market Win 9x. Under my proposed structure, neither MS nor TSR should be allowed to say "Yeah, the product's still for sale...got a billion dollars?"
But, yeah, it'd need to be fleshed out more. What if demand goes sky-high but there's limited product availability? I've thought about this a bit and think that mandatory licensing would be necessary. The cost license for producing one copy of the product could be set at the retail cost of one copy of the product; this would allow other producers to meet demand while allowing the original producer to retain IP ownership and profitability. If you have any interesting thoughts, I'd be interested. Of course, since you're an AC you'll probably never read this...but it's been mildly useful to write it.
If the framers of the Constitution had wanted to grant copyrights and patents for anything at all, that clause would not have been necessary.
You missed the tenth amendment. Any powers not SPECIFICALLY given to the Federal government in the constitution or amendments is reserved to the states. Had that clause not been in the constitution, we'd currently be looking at 50 patent and copyright offices.
Your observation about useful arts is intriguing...I must go think on this...
EULA is based on copyright. Copyrighted information IS intellectual property, aka IP. Lanham I know nothing about. Do its provisions require enforcement?
Right. Everyone will believe you if you say it. Perhaps you can also say that you are from Mars and you will be famous. (For the sarcasm impaired - saying so don't make it so.)
It is obvious that Felten had published in academic journals before and that intended to do so with this research. If you publish something in an academic journal, you won't get prosecuted for it...that's the precedent I see. The solution is not to prepend silly disclaimers but to do the hard work required to place yourself in a position where you can hack to your heart's content and publish your results in prestigious peer-reviewed academic journals.
Easy answers are never correct.
P.S. OJ showed the ignorant in this country that. It has always been the case that money wins, not justice or truth.
The problem here is that it's perfectly legal for large corporations to strong-arm the little guy with threatening letters, and subsequently fail to follow through with the threat.
It is legal for roughly the same reasons that few children are ever punished for threatening to tell (as in "ohm, I'm gonna tell...you're gonna get in in truhhhh-ble!") mom, the teacher, etc. It is also legal to threaten to call the cops in a situations that aren't criminal. Unfortunately, it is rarely the case that one side has an overwhelming legal advantage in cases like this.
I see this as being a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons. Individuals who are threatened by major corporations fold rather than fight the battle that would prevent the corp from similarly threatening other individuals. The corp then goes on to threaten other individuals, who behave likewise. One, or a few, who stood up and fought would stop such behavior. Unfortunately, people prefer convenience to honor.
US Constitution, Article III, Section 8
"The Congress shall have power...To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries..."
Copyright has long been recognized by legal authorities as a limitation on free speech. It is considered an acceptable compromise.
I would like to see the following idea added to IP law, though. You either make your IP available to the people or you lose your exclusive rights. In other words, if you want to prevent someone else from publishing it, you must be publishing it. Do you think there's no longer profit in publishing this game? Fine. It's in the public domain, now. You set an initial price for your IP product; the price can never increase, only decrease. As long as you offer the IP product for that price or less, thus making it available to people, you retain copyright on it. The day you fail to make the product available, it enters the public domain.
You are confusing trademark law with copyright/patent law. Trademarks must be defended or lost. Copyrights and patents need NEVER be defended. Recall the GIF compression patent fiasco - the patent holder did not enforce their patent for 15 years. Everyone who dealt with GIFs was vioating their patent. For 15 years. And then they started enforcing it.
I hereby sentence both you and your moderators to read "The Intellectual Property FAQ." Search for it on google...
A stable operating system allows you to keep operating the system when an application crashes. If an application can crash the OS, it ain't stable.
"acting nice" while in front of the crowd and then went completely feral backstage
I don't buy that; these people are TELEVISION actors. They understand that the studio audience is largely irrelevant - they're a live laugh/applause track. The actors understand that they are performing for the TELEVISION audience. Her blowing a kiss and her comments were all for the camera. Whether she meant them or not is open to interpretation.
He mentioned it after the taping before the show had aired. I personally think she was messing with his head. Wil Wheaton can dish it out but he doesn't seem to be able to take it. On the other hand, when someone that you don't know dises you, it's hard to know where they're coming from.
Maybe it's because the Red Freakin' Cross has so much money they don't know what to do with it. Maybe it's because any dolt can understand "it's for the children!" and see the point in supporting it. Maybe it's because so few people GET how important the EFF is and Wil wanted to point that out. Maybe it's because he was playing for what was important to him...his freedom. Note that all the things you note (homeless shelters, havens for abused people, etc.) are large recipients of governmental funds. Maybe he picked the EFF instead of one of those other charities because no one is trying to pass any bills in Congress to make it easier to harass women or abuse children but a whole bunch of people just voted to eliminate some of your electronic freedoms.
Feel free to think Wil's wrong...I don't want to invalidate your opinion; just wanted to give you some food for thought. You work for what you think is important and the rest of us will do likewise and hopefully we can make the world a little better. I just hate to see everyone's efforts concentrated on the obvious problems. We've got 6 billion people in the world...it's not like we don't have enough effort to go around.
I seriously believe that infections like this should start becoming yardsticks that system administrators are hired and fired against.
Another poster has indicated that sometimes stupid management decisions prevent you from doing what you know is optimal. If YOU know something's stupid, but your manager tells you to do it anyway, get it in writing (or at least in email). Do NOT do anything potentially harmful to your company unless you have it in writing. Claim that it's part of your documentation procedures, that all non-vendor recommended configurations must be documented.
If your boss refuses to provide direction in writing, send a memo or email confirming your conversation and letting the boss know that you're going to do what he said. When you're done, send another one saying so, reminding the boss that the situation is nonoptimal and encouraging him to provide you with the resources or permission to optimize things again. Be sure to keep a hard copy of this communication. If your boss is a big enough weenie, you might want to keep a copy at home.
Keep in mind that a good email admin can alter emails on the server and leave no tracks, so if you're the email admin, instructions in email are irrelevant. Same is true (but for a different reason) if the email admin is in the boss's pocket.
This advice is probably not applicable to a lot of readers who are already job-hopping and don't care if they do more. Good for you. Some of us, though, (myself included), like our positions and stay in them, and therefore must learn to weather a succession of pointy-haired bungee-boss types. So far I've outlasted three in two years.
Finally, remember this:
All human endeavors are political. Those who don't think they're playing politics are merely playing politics badly.
I can't read any more...the article breaks my mind!
Here's my evidence:
Computers break.
Bosses want them fixed RIGHT FREAKING NOW.
Here's your anecdotal evidence:
"My computer didn't break."
Read my other comments; it boils down to making a system as self-documenting as possible so that the poor schmuck who has to fix it has as easy a time of it as possible.
You are assuming that because you personally have never observed a problem with this software then the problem does not exist. I, on the other hand, am assuming that this software is like all other software I've seen - it is imperfect. If I am to be responsible for administering a system, I want to be prepared for every part of it to break.
Right. And everybody has heard of someone else's grampa or uncle who smoked three packs a day and drank a quart of whiskey and died at the ripe old age of 103.
In other words, anecdotal evidence is pointless. No matter how overwhelming the evidence against some behavior might be, the bell curve practically guarantees that some people will be able to engage in that behavior and get away with it.
The problem is when it DOESN'T just work.
:) glom ALL your files together in / with no problem. When you mount another file system, all the files within that system are added to the pile in /. Why not do that? Because there are benefits to a hierarchical file structure. There are benefits to hierarchies at every level, though it is possible to take it to an extreme.
/. The problem is when something breaks and a HUMAN BEING has to analyze what's on the system. This is less of a problem on hackers' personal systems, used and administered by solitary individuals at their own whim, than it is on a business server, used and administered by many. You want as much as possible of your system to be obvious to human eyeballs when most everything on the system is broken.
You could theoretically (and actually, too, since you've got the sources
If everything works, there's actually no problem in glomming everything together in
This, BTW, is why I am fundamentally morally opposed to binary storage of configuration data (a la the win32 registry) versus plain-text storage. Binary is easier for the computer to handle, which is great as long as things work. Plain text is easier for me to handle, which is useful only when things break. Since the computer can work with either, plain text is preferable.
When things break, I must have the ability to go from zero knowledge about a broken system's configuration to a fully functional system as quickly as possible. Well-organized files that take full advantage of a hierarchical file structure, and plain-text config files, are much helpful in this situation.
(It just occurred to me that referring to the root directory as "/" at the end of a sentence produces an ambigous symbol; suffice to say I don't mean slashdot.org by "/.")
IF everything always worked, there would be no advantage to . You could eliminate the path statem
So...a hierarchical file structure under usr is pointless. Why then have ANY hierarchical file structure at all? Why not have one big directory? There is no reason you can come up with that doesn't counter your own arguemnt against a hierarchical structure under usr.