Oh, yeah, on MS Windows the GUI *is* a superset of the commandline, and I curse that fact every single time I need to script some simple sysadmin. function so that it can become a regularly scheduled batch job and handed off to the computer instead of me continuing to do boring repetitive manual labor.
Any GUIfied product with no commandline equivalent is only half implemented.
Anyway, there *are* CLI graphic composition programs. Take a look at POV-Ray. There *are* CLI programs for composing beautiful text, such as TeX. Whether you use these, or WYSIWYG products, depends on how you choose to think about the problem.
Many man pages suffer from trying to be too comprehensive. Fully explaining 'cat' doesn't take a lot of text; fully explaining Sendmail could cause someone's head to explode. A system that has worked well for me is to pare down the help to just a quick summary of the program's task, reminders of every little switch's basic meaning, and liberal use of "see the manual for details". In the manual you find copious examples, full discussion of subtleties, and suggestions for use.
Trouble is, on Unix 'man foo' *is* the manual. If we didn't have the silly war between 'man' and 'info', then 'man' could be the reminder help and 'info' could be the manual, each with appropriate styles for their divergent purposes.
perltoc.1 is more than half a megabyte, for cryin' out loud! That's way too large for a man "page".
I will now reveal just how uncool I am by suggesting that you go take a look at the OpenVMS 'HELP' command. The wealth of information in a decent man page is like a revelation from heaven to one who has had to make sense of DOS HELP, but a single massive spew of everything known about some complex program is a little overwhelming even with an outstanding pager to help. VMS HELP documents are hierarchial and are usually chunked fairly nicely.
Where VMS HELP falls down is in full-text searching, though that may have been improved since they took my VMS boxes away. It also needs a much better pager.
'info' is pretty good, but there are a number of very poorly structured texinfo documents to deal with, the style suffers from doing double duty as the revisable form of a book, and somehow I've never reallly become comfortable with the keystroke assignments. OTOH texinfo's structural possibilities are a bit more flexible than the VMS Librarian's HELP mode, and a good document designer can do wondrous things with it -- the problem is the dearth of good document designers and a certain attitude in the community which says that documentation is for those who can't read source.
Traditional paper publications have never needed batteries, work well in low light and extreme glare, and can even function underwater if you're careful when you turn the pages.
People. Materials. Manufactured goods. That "permanent presence" is not a dozen astronauts living in an airtight Quonset hut; it's a bunch of communities forming a self-supporting society. It'll take generations, but I'm convinced that it will happen.
The early European settlers in the Americas didn't bring 21st-century Baltimore or Buenos Aires with them, rolled up *really* small and packed belowdeck. They brought a few essentials, but mostly they brought themselves and the will to make what they needed. The cost was frightful, but there's always a market for "a heap of unexploited resources and the chance to see what I can make of them".
An entire uninhabited world is a pretty big heap of resources.
The same thing could indeed be done "direct to Mars". But the Moon's a lot closer, we already know we can get there, we already know what we'll find, and the kind of *sustained* contact needed to build a functioning society is a lot cheaper when the distance is less. You could also think of a lunar colony as a pilot project for real interplanetary expeditions.
Back to the "standing a mile high" ideas: the big beam has only one point of failure: it falls over every time you let go. The tower has many points of failure, but the failure of one or even a dozen won't bring it down (if it's designed right). It costs a lot more because it's *worth* a lot more: it'll survive long enough to recover its cost. And the tower's complexity is what buys you that fail-soft property. Complexity and expense are not bad things, as long as you get something worth at least what you paid.
I'd be more interested to hear that they plan a version of Flash player that doesn't crash recent releases of Mozilla every single time. (OTOH the little puzzle piece is more interesting and more informative than anything I ever saw in a Flash, so I'm not really suffering now that I've removed the plugin.)
Uh, no. Glenn did three orbits before they got worried about his heat shield and cut the mission short. Prior to that decision he said the ship was "go for at least seven orbits", IIRC.
Who told you that all space vehicles travel at the same speed? "Three days from Moon to Earth" is only true at one speed. To a radio wave (or a giant death-dealing laser, for that matter), the Moon is only 1.3 seconds away.
Indeed, if the goal is to do science on Mars then Moon missions just waste time and money. Why not just go to Mars, poke around, go home, done?
But there are other, perhaps better reasons to establish a permanent presence on the Moon and a regular transport pipeline between here and there. Eventually the same reasons will drive a buildout of solid infrastructure to all of the useful places in the solar system. It's a lot slower and more costly but it's also a lot more sensible.
Think of two ways to stand a mile in the air. One way is to manufacture an I-beam about a mile long, weld rungs to it, and stand it on end. Not very stable or permanent or safe. The other way is to manufacture a thundering lot of I-beams in normal sizes and fit them together into an Eiffel-Tower-like structure, then add elevators. I know which one *I'd* feel safer ascending, and which one I'd expect to still be standing ten, or a hundred, years later.
I didn't go around breaking others' art; I made some of my own.
I was bright enough to figure out that, if I do it the way the teacher wants it done, I don't get hassled. I can always do it my way when I'm doing it for me, and then nobody has the authority to tell me I'm doing it wrong.
I showed some promise and was rewarded with more challenging (and interesting) stuff by teachers who cared. That's how you *find* teachers who care.
You can learn the system and get what you want. Or you can turn your back on it and let it hit you from behind. Your choice.
Rather, chaos is the raw material of the creative process. We destroy it when we impose the order of our thoughts; we chip off and throw away the parts that don't look like what we envisioned.
I hope you're writing from Russia. According to the
CIA World Factbook, Russia is almost twice as large as the U.S. (17 million km^2 vs. 9.6 million km^2). I have found no nation larger.
China is ever so slightly smaller than the U.S., in case you wondered if she were larger than Russia. Canada is also a bit larger than the U. S. at just under 10 million km^2.
Well, lots of people running DNS servers *also* shut this so-called "service" down, after the maintainers of various server implementations provided code to allow us to ignore the bogus resolutions.
It's very simple: you signed a contract explicitly empowering them to place these restrictions on your use of their services. If you don't like the deal, don't take the deal; do business with someone offering a deal you think is better.
I see a lot of use of the term "efficiency" in economics with precious little discussion of just what is being made more efficient. I submit that one reason monopolies are so hard to hold together, despite massive advantages, is that what is efficient for the owners is generally inefficient for the customers, and often for the workers.
What your theory misses is that as a free market in X heads toward greater consolidation, the reduction of consumer choice creates opportunities for new players to enter the market with goods/services that the Big Boys cannot or will not offer.
Some of the small fry get bought out, and some grow hugely and become Big Boys themselves. From time to time one of the Big Boys dies off. But the bigger the Big Boys are, the more room there is around them for fresh ideas that they won't adopt. There is probably a steady state, but it almost never is monopoly and it almost never eliminates all possibility of newcomers.
Telephone companies? You mean, the guys who are carrying the packets? Why would they go out of business? The revenue just moves from one division to another.
Nah, it's just because we have so many more computers for the bad guys to zombify. (Or, more or less equivalently, we have so many more clueless computer owners.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes indeedy. Also, since HELP was in the Librarian, which is callable, providing built-in help inside your interactive program consists of:
1. Notice that the verb was HELP.
2. Pass command's argument string to appropriate Librarian function.
TOPS-20 commands had *everything* completion. You can now get Bash add-ons to do some of this.
Oh, yeah, on MS Windows the GUI *is* a superset of the commandline, and I curse that fact every single time I need to script some simple sysadmin. function so that it can become a regularly scheduled batch job and handed off to the computer instead of me continuing to do boring repetitive manual labor.
Any GUIfied product with no commandline equivalent is only half implemented.
Anyway, there *are* CLI graphic composition programs. Take a look at POV-Ray. There *are* CLI programs for composing beautiful text, such as TeX. Whether you use these, or WYSIWYG products, depends on how you choose to think about the problem.
Many man pages suffer from trying to be too comprehensive. Fully explaining 'cat' doesn't take a lot of text; fully explaining Sendmail could cause someone's head to explode. A system that has worked well for me is to pare down the help to just a quick summary of the program's task, reminders of every little switch's basic meaning, and liberal use of "see the manual for details". In the manual you find copious examples, full discussion of subtleties, and suggestions for use.
Trouble is, on Unix 'man foo' *is* the manual. If we didn't have the silly war between 'man' and 'info', then 'man' could be the reminder help and 'info' could be the manual, each with appropriate styles for their divergent purposes.
perltoc.1 is more than half a megabyte, for cryin' out loud! That's way too large for a man "page".
I will now reveal just how uncool I am by suggesting that you go take a look at the OpenVMS 'HELP' command. The wealth of information in a decent man page is like a revelation from heaven to one who has had to make sense of DOS HELP, but a single massive spew of everything known about some complex program is a little overwhelming even with an outstanding pager to help. VMS HELP documents are hierarchial and are usually chunked fairly nicely.
Where VMS HELP falls down is in full-text searching, though that may have been improved since they took my VMS boxes away. It also needs a much better pager.
'info' is pretty good, but there are a number of very poorly structured texinfo documents to deal with, the style suffers from doing double duty as the revisable form of a book, and somehow I've never reallly become comfortable with the keystroke assignments. OTOH texinfo's structural possibilities are a bit more flexible than the VMS Librarian's HELP mode, and a good document designer can do wondrous things with it -- the problem is the dearth of good document designers and a certain attitude in the community which says that documentation is for those who can't read source.
Traditional paper publications have never needed batteries, work well in low light and extreme glare, and can even function underwater if you're careful when you turn the pages.
People. Materials. Manufactured goods. That "permanent presence" is not a dozen astronauts living in an airtight Quonset hut; it's a bunch of communities forming a self-supporting society. It'll take generations, but I'm convinced that it will happen.
The early European settlers in the Americas didn't bring 21st-century Baltimore or Buenos Aires with them, rolled up *really* small and packed belowdeck. They brought a few essentials, but mostly they brought themselves and the will to make what they needed. The cost was frightful, but there's always a market for "a heap of unexploited resources and the chance to see what I can make of them".
An entire uninhabited world is a pretty big heap of resources.
The same thing could indeed be done "direct to Mars". But the Moon's a lot closer, we already know we can get there, we already know what we'll find, and the kind of *sustained* contact needed to build a functioning society is a lot cheaper when the distance is less. You could also think of a lunar colony as a pilot project for real interplanetary expeditions.
Back to the "standing a mile high" ideas: the big beam has only one point of failure: it falls over every time you let go. The tower has many points of failure, but the failure of one or even a dozen won't bring it down (if it's designed right). It costs a lot more because it's *worth* a lot more: it'll survive long enough to recover its cost. And the tower's complexity is what buys you that fail-soft property. Complexity and expense are not bad things, as long as you get something worth at least what you paid.
I'd be more interested to hear that they plan a version of Flash player that doesn't crash recent releases of Mozilla every single time. (OTOH the little puzzle piece is more interesting and more informative than anything I ever saw in a Flash, so I'm not really suffering now that I've removed the plugin.)
"suborbital flight".
Uh, no. Glenn did three orbits before they got worried about his heat shield and cut the mission short. Prior to that decision he said the ship was "go for at least seven orbits", IIRC.
Who told you that all space vehicles travel at the same speed? "Three days from Moon to Earth" is only true at one speed. To a radio wave (or a giant death-dealing laser, for that matter), the Moon is only 1.3 seconds away.
Indeed, if the goal is to do science on Mars then Moon missions just waste time and money. Why not just go to Mars, poke around, go home, done?
But there are other, perhaps better reasons to establish a permanent presence on the Moon and a regular transport pipeline between here and there. Eventually the same reasons will drive a buildout of solid infrastructure to all of the useful places in the solar system. It's a lot slower and more costly but it's also a lot more sensible.
Think of two ways to stand a mile in the air. One way is to manufacture an I-beam about a mile long, weld rungs to it, and stand it on end. Not very stable or permanent or safe. The other way is to manufacture a thundering lot of I-beams in normal sizes and fit them together into an Eiffel-Tower-like structure, then add elevators. I know which one *I'd* feel safer ascending, and which one I'd expect to still be standing ten, or a hundred, years later.
Hmmm, the quote's from _Goldfinger_, but the plot seems to be _Moonraker_.
Indeed, boiling down the quoted argument a bit, what I read between the lines is this:
"IBM Corporation don't know enough about computers to do a good job of porting."
One word: hahahahahahahahaha!
Yeah, I been there, but with differences.
I didn't go around breaking others' art; I made some of my own.
I was bright enough to figure out that, if I do it the way the teacher wants it done, I don't get hassled. I can always do it my way when I'm doing it for me, and then nobody has the authority to tell me I'm doing it wrong.
I showed some promise and was rewarded with more challenging (and interesting) stuff by teachers who cared. That's how you *find* teachers who care.
You can learn the system and get what you want. Or you can turn your back on it and let it hit you from behind. Your choice.
"If I just pour some ink on the page, make a big ol' ink blob...that isn't poetry."
Nope, it's modern art. Ask Jackson Pollock.
"If I crumple up some paper in a big ball, that isn't poetry."
Nope, it's an Origami Boulder. (URL lost; search engine will find it for you.)
"If I run naked through my back yard, it isn't poetry."
Nope, it's performance art. JJ Doonesbury will probably sue you for plagiarism.
See also recent writings on something called "moetry".
Rather, chaos is the raw material of the creative process. We destroy it when we impose the order of our thoughts; we chip off and throw away the parts that don't look like what we envisioned.
China is ever so slightly smaller than the U.S., in case you wondered if she were larger than Russia. Canada is also a bit larger than the U. S. at just under 10 million km^2.
Well, lots of people running DNS servers *also* shut this so-called "service" down, after the maintainers of various server implementations provided code to allow us to ignore the bogus resolutions.
I fixed all of my servers -- did you fix yours?
It's very simple: you signed a contract explicitly empowering them to place these restrictions on your use of their services. If you don't like the deal, don't take the deal; do business with someone offering a deal you think is better.
I see a lot of use of the term "efficiency" in economics with precious little discussion of just what is being made more efficient. I submit that one reason monopolies are so hard to hold together, despite massive advantages, is that what is efficient for the owners is generally inefficient for the customers, and often for the workers.
What your theory misses is that as a free market in X heads toward greater consolidation, the reduction of consumer choice creates opportunities for new players to enter the market with goods/services that the Big Boys cannot or will not offer.
Some of the small fry get bought out, and some grow hugely and become Big Boys themselves. From time to time one of the Big Boys dies off. But the bigger the Big Boys are, the more room there is around them for fresh ideas that they won't adopt. There is probably a steady state, but it almost never is monopoly and it almost never eliminates all possibility of newcomers.
Telephone companies? You mean, the guys who are carrying the packets? Why would they go out of business? The revenue just moves from one division to another.
The Samba Team have already taken a position on this. Read all about it at their site.
Nah, it's just because we have so many more computers for the bad guys to zombify. (Or, more or less equivalently, we have so many more clueless computer owners.)