"Per dollar of Federal tax collected in 2002, North Dakota citizens received approximately $2.07 in the way of federal spending. "
Sounds terrible right? Try living in California on $25k per year. In ND you can do okay with that. Now look at the federal tax on income (standard across all states). You get more tax breaks the less money you make. People in ND get so many tax breaks because the cost of living is low, and there is a low population density. For reference If you took a dallar from everyone in ND you could buy ONE decent house in LA.
I grew up in ND and generally I figured that you pay into federal taxes and it's the government that decides what to do with it. I mean they could pay the corps of engineers to screw with lake Sakakawea or give it to Florida during a hurricane, it's all the same to me. I think the states need to be less concerned about State money going to other states, and more concerned with State money going to stuff like the war in Iraq for which we see NO return.
I use 2.6 on my desktop machine at home and I'm quite happy with it, but I'm glad I moved from Redhat 7.3 to FreeBSD. At the time it was a tough call between moving to another Linux distro and FreeBSD, but I decided to go with BSD for various reasons. Then 2.6 comes out, fine and dandy. But they keep adding stuff to it and it never stabalizes. Even worse is you finally get a stable version for your situation, and then you need to get a new version for security fixes. Ugh!
Linus needs to branch the tree and get the hell OUT of 2.6 and give us our stability back. Seriously, I don't know why everyone is so scared shitless about incramenting a (minor) version number every year or two. Kernel stability needs to be an absolute priority. We already have enough issues with X, and Window managers and other software crashes in the Linux world, but with no solid foundation to build on, we have a situation not that far from Windows 9x.
Interesting fact: some of the chronology lists of the history of windows - from microsoft's own website - do not list Windows ME at all! I'm thinking that MS will never EOL WinME but instead claim that it never existed.
Which is exactly what anyone using it wishes as well.
Usability, absolutely. Stability, absolutely not. I've got Win3.11 boxes on my network right now with uptimes of YEARS. The default 3.1 install was a good box, which is hardly true of 95. Where 3.1 would become the victim is typically because of user installed programs that would screw everything up. I sort of hate it when these boxes finally die and have to be replaced with Win98.. (95 is too unstable) because then I have to babysit them.
And I doubt anything will be an improvment over 2000, which I still consider to be the best OS MS has created. If they took the security enhancements and some of the back end smarts out of the newer systems you'd have one Killer OS, instead of the crap jellybean orgy we get nowdays from MS
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
I was sort of excited about Monad until I realized much of what you posted. This isn't going to be a shell so much as an interactive Windows Scripting Host session. The real "aha" moment in realizing that this was true was when I decided to just use ZSH for my windows shell. Great until you realize that you can't do things like md(mkdir), dir (directory listing) among many other things. MS took the stand alone programs out and stuffed them into cmd.exe =/ More to come I'm sure where all of the functionality you need is tucked away in some program that's a pain in the ass to access instead of a collection of single purpose programs you can piece together.
And MS can call me when they get a logging fascility that doesn't suck. =P
What you are seeing is something I saw in (I think it was called 'the fall of a republic'). One key element was that a democracy can ony exist until people realize they can vote themselves money out of the tresury.
Most of our countries are democratic republics that vote representitives into offifce. No surprise that in order to get votes to stay there, they do what is popular. When you have an unballence in the generations, this is exactly what can happen. And with the current mentallity of vote for whatever benifits ME instead of whatever benefits my country, the result is pretty much a no-brainer.
Unfortunatly people ALREADY ignore the signals. Take your average person, they start to feel tired. What do they do? DRINK COFFEE. Seriously, we already live in a sleep deprived society (among deprived of other things). Instead of getting adaquate ammounts of rest, people string themselves out with caffine, nicotine, and whatever else keeps them awake. Feeling tired isn't just an inconvinience - our bodies need sleep for a zillion reasons, but people still ignore it.
Many modern health issues stem from really simple fundamental problems: lack of rest, lack of proper diet, lack of exercise. Instead of addressing the problem we have others capitalizing on the issues and creating hysteria about this mess which they "claim" can be fixed from simple pills. I'm sure this pill will help someone out, but for every person it does, there will be 1000 taking it who do not need it.
I think this is how we cope with Slashdot. For instance if we remembered yesterday and the day before, we'd probably notice that half of the stories are dupes. Instead we get to repost on topics and probably post funny and insightful comments that we read previously and think we came up with them on our own.
Isn't neccesarily as good as it sounds. I went to NDSU (not in SD but whatever) and each dorm had a T1. Sound good? Immagine the year 1999 with 250 punks in my dorm using napster over the single T1. Well they said it was a T1, I immagine it was a 100Mbit cable with T1 throttled bandwith to the outside. Either way I was glad to get home to my 33.6 Modem connection after the school year.
Unless you're referring to some other Kia. I have been to south korea though. About the most interesting thing I remember is going to an OB Bears baseball game. Didn't occure to me later that the "OB" was from the "OB" beer. We like to hide behind the fact that our sports teams are owned by not naming them the Pepsi Eagles for instance, but it's still there.
If you don't need CIFS (the newer smb networking) you can block off port 445 with TCP filtering. Just go to the advanced part of IP networking in the network options. Find the "options" tab, and add only needed networking options. If no one on your local network needs to connect to your pc, you can leave "permit only" blank and deny all connections (that aren't established).
Well if you want a case just not to cut yourself, then a Lian Li case is vast overkill. I need to build the computers at work and I've settled on the Antec SLK1650. A good case with a decent power supply at like ~$60.
At home I have an uber full tower Lian Li case. I've tried to skimp on cases over and over and over but always had problems. Stuff ended up mounted wrong, couldn't cool the hard drives, metal was so thin it vibrated because of the fan, on and on. The Lian Li case will definatly be the last case I buy while I can stuff parts that fit in it. The case is built much more solid which reduces vibration. Good attention to detail in almost every aspect. You pay too much for it, but what the hell. If you want a nice elegent case that doesn't look like it needs Type-R stickers all over it and is well built, you don't have many options to choose from.
I'd say it goes something like the code mantra: You can have a case that is: well built, looks nice, is cheap - pick any two... but you're lucky if you even get one.
Since you installed 2004.1 you obviously had to go through all the hoops (why from stage 1 I'm not sure...). But it seems as though people abstract this stuff in a gui that we're sort of losing a big portion of the learning experience with Gentoo. If I screw up any part of the install (filesystem aside) I'm totally confident that I can just pop in the CD and Fix it, or at least bootstrap my system from the CD - and pretty much every Gentoo user should be able to do that. Can't say I ever learned that from RedHat/SuSE/Fedora.
Basically now we're getting back to the point where Gentoo becomes FreeBSD. An installer does a lot of the work for you, then lets you recompile the system or additional packages.
Personally I'd be happier if gentoo just stuck the install documentation stuff in a man page you could read during an install. THAT would be handy. Well that and getting rid of the useless -D flag for emerge. Not sure why I'd want to keep some software up to date, but not the dependancies. I got my system into a decent bind that way.
Does anyone know if they ever changed the Open Server kernel so you don't have to recompile to change the domain name? Or add a disk drive? Or a tape drive?
Heh, I was sort of an administrator for a SCO box for about 2 months before it got switched with Linux (around 2001). I keep thinking back with thoughts like "did I really have to recompile the kernel do that? No.. I must be making stuff up in my head". Nice to read your post and know I'm not senile (yet).
Now if I could get rid of that crappy SCO terminal emulator and stop it from blasting port 177 on the broadcast address I'd be happy *sigh*.... hah, and I bet people think SCO only makes crappy Unix software. No, their Windows software is really bad too.
I shop at Wegmans quite often but I actually stopped using my shoppng card. I assumed you needed it to get "regular prices" (ala price chopper) but on an average $40 worth of groceries I usually save about 24 cents. If they'd like to collect all of this data, they should at least give us an incentive for us giving it to them.
A friend of mine used to say you could tell the intelligence of a computer's users by how many mouse buttons they had.
1 button for least intelligent apple users 2 for mediochre windows users 3 for intelligent unix users.
I'm wondering what this would mean using this scheme now. I guess Apple users have trancended the intelligence heirarchy?
But actually his theory is sort of bogus anyway. I mean Apple now uses Unix, and can use multi-button mice as well. Most windows users SHOULD only have one mouse button, and many others have no clue what the right button actually does or how to use it. Unix users have to screw with xorg.conf to set the mouse protocol to get their scroll-wheels to work... does that strike you as being more intelligent?;)
You know what's sad about that link, is that MS makes a big deal about the cryptic error message that says "an error occured" and then goes on about how Vista will make your life easier. No where does it talk about what I.T. people REALLY want:
1) errors that actually tell you about what in the hell happened. 2) a logging facility that actualy DOES something.
Cute to say "it's more stable" and "crashing is a thing of the past", we've heard it all before. Typical MS I guess. Instead of giving us the tools and information to really fix problems, they pat us on the head and say _they_ will take care of everything for us... just as they have during previous buggy releases.
FreeBSD memory disks allow you to use RAM with pretty much no additional effort. You just add an entry to fstab and mount it. This also means it's automatic at boot time.
I've tried to get the same thing in Linux and I haven't been able to figure out how to do it exactly. tmpfs requires you set aside space, then format it, then mount it. If you know how to get/tmp mounted with tmpfs in Linux automatically please let me know, I've been trying to get it working in Linux with little success.
I wouldn't say either solution is superior, since it isn't clear that either solution had the same goal. Linux lets you put files in ram - done. FreeBSD lets up put files in ram, and acting basically the same as a disk, but with the memory backed to disk (optional) - done. Was tmpfs even made with the intent of using it as a real world filesystem (like/usr), I doubt it.
Actually I think the freebsd memory disks would be superior to this anyway. Although mounting things like/tmp as a memory disk is okay, obviously you will lose everything on reboot. Thus there are also memory systems that are backed up to disk as well. With a freebsd memory disk system you could add more space easily and allocate more or less as needed with not too much work. This thing looks like you're stuck with whatever you put in it once it's up (correct me if I'm wrong).
Moving parts suck, but they're usually pretty reliable - and certainly worth while as a backup for a ram based system like this.
I was thinking the same thing, but keep in mind that this thing is actually acting like a SATA drive. I'm sure they're hitting the limitations of SATA, not the limitations of ram. Until they come up with a _standard_ configuration for this type of memory disk that talks as fast as the ram allows instead of following ide/scsi/sata standards, we're stuck with these speeds for compatibility reasons I'm thinking.
Ada is not really a 'wacky' programming language, just not as common. The language itself is quite sensable and manageable. It was designed to be a robust language as well as encourage robust code. When you have mission criticle situations where programming / code errors are not an option, then what else will you use? C? C++? Perl? They couldn't find an acceptable solution so they came up with their own (keep in mind this language was first drafted over 20 years ago).
I don't much like Ada myself, but it has as many pro's and cons as any other language. With features such as concurrent execution and very good exeption handling built into the language, I don't think they had much of a choice considering only recently have those two things really recieved much attention from modern languages.
I'm also sort of surprised there is no way to restrict web access aside from mis-configuring proxy settings. Being able to do this client side would be a big help to people like me who work with smaller clients.
or for those of us happy with a $14 phone bill. They have a cell plan that cheap? Didn't think so. It doesn't make sense that many of us would flee working technology because some spam vendors decide it's their right to harrass us.
You aren't required to use a hot corner either. I have expose linked to the center mouse button. Just grab the file, hit the center button (while holding the other down) and it works just fine.
I think one of the problems with the way windows scripting works is that it's too much into programming. Scripting things on your system should be simple and natural. I can go on a Unix machine and at a terminal and type 'cp f1 f2', and no surprise but I can do exactly the same thing on a script. With Windows Scripting host you need to create a shell object, etc. That's strait programming, and is sort of bad that you have to be a strait out programmer to automate anything.
I use windows script (jscript - the language MS halfway supports) all the time, but trying to do crap like change the permissions on a file is mind boggling compaired to useing chmod/chflags. And there are quite a few instances where WSH cannot do system administration tasks (ex, set permissions on registry keys).
The third problem is addon programs in windows. There is no way to control them without crap like sendkeys (which works but isn't what I would call reliable or the way it SHOULD be done). Applescript is of course a work of art. You can drive just about anything in KDE with dcop. Windows? Half the time you have widgets that don't even allow shortcut keys so you have to freaking tab through crap using sendkeys.
So why wouldn't I learn scripting on windows? Well why would I attempt to use a tool that is already blunted in it's capabilities, is an entirely new jobset that really doesn't have much to do with my task, and may not even be capable of doing what I need it to?
MS had a chance to fix this with MSH but again seems to have let that one fall on it's face. Although I have the unfortunate suspition that it's just going to be ANOTHER programming language instead of the scripting language we need on windows. Well there's zsh til then I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
"Per dollar of Federal tax collected in 2002, North Dakota citizens received approximately $2.07 in the way of federal spending. "
Sounds terrible right? Try living in California on $25k per year. In ND you can do okay with that. Now look at the federal tax on income (standard across all states). You get more tax breaks the less money you make. People in ND get so many tax breaks because the cost of living is low, and there is a low population density. For reference If you took a dallar from everyone in ND you could buy ONE decent house in LA.
I grew up in ND and generally I figured that you pay into federal taxes and it's the government that decides what to do with it. I mean they could pay the corps of engineers to screw with lake Sakakawea or give it to Florida during a hurricane, it's all the same to me. I think the states need to be less concerned about State money going to other states, and more concerned with State money going to stuff like the war in Iraq for which we see NO return.
I use 2.6 on my desktop machine at home and I'm quite happy with it, but I'm glad I moved from Redhat 7.3 to FreeBSD. At the time it was a tough call between moving to another Linux distro and FreeBSD, but I decided to go with BSD for various reasons. Then 2.6 comes out, fine and dandy. But they keep adding stuff to it and it never stabalizes. Even worse is you finally get a stable version for your situation, and then you need to get a new version for security fixes. Ugh!
Linus needs to branch the tree and get the hell OUT of 2.6 and give us our stability back. Seriously, I don't know why everyone is so scared shitless about incramenting a (minor) version number every year or two. Kernel stability needs to be an absolute priority. We already have enough issues with X, and Window managers and other software crashes in the Linux world, but with no solid foundation to build on, we have a situation not that far from Windows 9x.
Interesting fact: some of the chronology lists of the history of windows - from microsoft's own website - do not list Windows ME at all! I'm thinking that MS will never EOL WinME but instead claim that it never existed.
Which is exactly what anyone using it wishes as well.
Usability, absolutely. Stability, absolutely not. I've got Win3.11 boxes on my network right now with uptimes of YEARS. The default 3.1 install was a good box, which is hardly true of 95. Where 3.1 would become the victim is typically because of user installed programs that would screw everything up. I sort of hate it when these boxes finally die and have to be replaced with Win98.. (95 is too unstable) because then I have to babysit them.
And I doubt anything will be an improvment over 2000, which I still consider to be the best OS MS has created. If they took the security enhancements and some of the back end smarts out of the newer systems you'd have one Killer OS, instead of the crap jellybean orgy we get nowdays from MS
I was sort of excited about Monad until I realized much of what you posted. This isn't going to be a shell so much as an interactive Windows Scripting Host session. The real "aha" moment in realizing that this was true was when I decided to just use ZSH for my windows shell. Great until you realize that you can't do things like md(mkdir), dir (directory listing) among many other things. MS took the stand alone programs out and stuffed them into cmd.exe =/ More to come I'm sure where all of the functionality you need is tucked away in some program that's a pain in the ass to access instead of a collection of single purpose programs you can piece together.
And MS can call me when they get a logging fascility that doesn't suck. =P
What you are seeing is something I saw in (I think it was called 'the fall of a republic'). One key element was that a democracy can ony exist until people realize they can vote themselves money out of the tresury.
Most of our countries are democratic republics that vote representitives into offifce. No surprise that in order to get votes to stay there, they do what is popular. When you have an unballence in the generations, this is exactly what can happen. And with the current mentallity of vote for whatever benifits ME instead of whatever benefits my country, the result is pretty much a no-brainer.
Unfortunatly people ALREADY ignore the signals. Take your average person, they start to feel tired. What do they do? DRINK COFFEE. Seriously, we already live in a sleep deprived society (among deprived of other things). Instead of getting adaquate ammounts of rest, people string themselves out with caffine, nicotine, and whatever else keeps them awake. Feeling tired isn't just an inconvinience - our bodies need sleep for a zillion reasons, but people still ignore it.
Many modern health issues stem from really simple fundamental problems: lack of rest, lack of proper diet, lack of exercise. Instead of addressing the problem we have others capitalizing on the issues and creating hysteria about this mess which they "claim" can be fixed from simple pills. I'm sure this pill will help someone out, but for every person it does, there will be 1000 taking it who do not need it.
How could I forget yesterday so quickly?
I think this is how we cope with Slashdot. For instance if we remembered yesterday and the day before, we'd probably notice that half of the stories are dupes. Instead we get to repost on topics and probably post funny and insightful comments that we read previously and think we came up with them on our own.
Or maybe I'm more senile then everyone else...
Isn't neccesarily as good as it sounds. I went to NDSU (not in SD but whatever) and each dorm had a T1. Sound good? Immagine the year 1999 with 250 punks in my dorm using napster over the single T1. Well they said it was a T1, I immagine it was a 100Mbit cable with T1 throttled bandwith to the outside. Either way I was glad to get home to my 33.6 Modem connection after the school year.
Umm... Hyundai owns Kia
Unless you're referring to some other Kia. I have been to south korea though. About the most interesting thing I remember is going to an OB Bears baseball game. Didn't occure to me later that the "OB" was from the "OB" beer. We like to hide behind the fact that our sports teams are owned by not naming them the Pepsi Eagles for instance, but it's still there.
If you don't need CIFS (the newer smb networking) you can block off port 445 with TCP filtering. Just go to the advanced part of IP networking in the network options. Find the "options" tab, and add only needed networking options. If no one on your local network needs to connect to your pc, you can leave "permit only" blank and deny all connections (that aren't established).
Well if you want a case just not to cut yourself, then a Lian Li case is vast overkill. I need to build the computers at work and I've settled on the Antec SLK1650. A good case with a decent power supply at like ~$60.
At home I have an uber full tower Lian Li case. I've tried to skimp on cases over and over and over but always had problems. Stuff ended up mounted wrong, couldn't cool the hard drives, metal was so thin it vibrated because of the fan, on and on. The Lian Li case will definatly be the last case I buy while I can stuff parts that fit in it. The case is built much more solid which reduces vibration. Good attention to detail in almost every aspect. You pay too much for it, but what the hell. If you want a nice elegent case that doesn't look like it needs Type-R stickers all over it and is well built, you don't have many options to choose from.
I'd say it goes something like the code mantra: You can have a case that is: well built, looks nice, is cheap - pick any two... but you're lucky if you even get one.
Since you installed 2004.1 you obviously had to go through all the hoops (why from stage 1 I'm not sure...). But it seems as though people abstract this stuff in a gui that we're sort of losing a big portion of the learning experience with Gentoo. If I screw up any part of the install (filesystem aside) I'm totally confident that I can just pop in the CD and Fix it, or at least bootstrap my system from the CD - and pretty much every Gentoo user should be able to do that. Can't say I ever learned that from RedHat/SuSE/Fedora.
Basically now we're getting back to the point where Gentoo becomes FreeBSD. An installer does a lot of the work for you, then lets you recompile the system or additional packages.
Personally I'd be happier if gentoo just stuck the install documentation stuff in a man page you could read during an install. THAT would be handy. Well that and getting rid of the useless -D flag for emerge. Not sure why I'd want to keep some software up to date, but not the dependancies. I got my system into a decent bind that way.
Does anyone know if they ever changed the Open Server kernel so you don't have to recompile to change the domain name? Or add a disk drive? Or a tape drive?
Heh, I was sort of an administrator for a SCO box for about 2 months before it got switched with Linux (around 2001). I keep thinking back with thoughts like "did I really have to recompile the kernel do that? No.. I must be making stuff up in my head". Nice to read your post and know I'm not senile (yet).
Now if I could get rid of that crappy SCO terminal emulator and stop it from blasting port 177 on the broadcast address I'd be happy *sigh*.... hah, and I bet people think SCO only makes crappy Unix software. No, their Windows software is really bad too.
I shop at Wegmans quite often but I actually stopped using my shoppng card. I assumed you needed it to get "regular prices" (ala price chopper) but on an average $40 worth of groceries I usually save about 24 cents. If they'd like to collect all of this data, they should at least give us an incentive for us giving it to them.
A friend of mine used to say you could tell the intelligence of a computer's users by how many mouse buttons they had.
;)
1 button for least intelligent apple users
2 for mediochre windows users
3 for intelligent unix users.
I'm wondering what this would mean using this scheme now. I guess Apple users have trancended the intelligence heirarchy?
But actually his theory is sort of bogus anyway. I mean Apple now uses Unix, and can use multi-button mice as well. Most windows users SHOULD only have one mouse button, and many others have no clue what the right button actually does or how to use it. Unix users have to screw with xorg.conf to set the mouse protocol to get their scroll-wheels to work... does that strike you as being more intelligent?
You know what's sad about that link, is that MS makes a big deal about the cryptic error message that says "an error occured" and then goes on about how Vista will make your life easier. No where does it talk about what I.T. people REALLY want:
1) errors that actually tell you about what in the hell happened.
2) a logging facility that actualy DOES something.
Cute to say "it's more stable" and "crashing is a thing of the past", we've heard it all before. Typical MS I guess. Instead of giving us the tools and information to really fix problems, they pat us on the head and say _they_ will take care of everything for us... just as they have during previous buggy releases.
FreeBSD memory disks allow you to use RAM with pretty much no additional effort. You just add an entry to fstab and mount it. This also means it's automatic at boot time.
/tmp mounted with tmpfs in Linux automatically please let me know, I've been trying to get it working in Linux with little success.
/usr), I doubt it.
I've tried to get the same thing in Linux and I haven't been able to figure out how to do it exactly. tmpfs requires you set aside space, then format it, then mount it. If you know how to get
I wouldn't say either solution is superior, since it isn't clear that either solution had the same goal. Linux lets you put files in ram - done. FreeBSD lets up put files in ram, and acting basically the same as a disk, but with the memory backed to disk (optional) - done. Was tmpfs even made with the intent of using it as a real world filesystem (like
Actually I think the freebsd memory disks would be superior to this anyway. Although mounting things like /tmp as a memory disk is okay, obviously you will lose everything on reboot. Thus there are also memory systems that are backed up to disk as well. With a freebsd memory disk system you could add more space easily and allocate more or less as needed with not too much work. This thing looks like you're stuck with whatever you put in it once it's up (correct me if I'm wrong).
Moving parts suck, but they're usually pretty reliable - and certainly worth while as a backup for a ram based system like this.
I was thinking the same thing, but keep in mind that this thing is actually acting like a SATA drive. I'm sure they're hitting the limitations of SATA, not the limitations of ram. Until they come up with a _standard_ configuration for this type of memory disk that talks as fast as the ram allows instead of following ide/scsi/sata standards, we're stuck with these speeds for compatibility reasons I'm thinking.
Ada is not really a 'wacky' programming language, just not as common. The language itself is quite sensable and manageable. It was designed to be a robust language as well as encourage robust code. When you have mission criticle situations where programming / code errors are not an option, then what else will you use? C? C++? Perl? They couldn't find an acceptable solution so they came up with their own (keep in mind this language was first drafted over 20 years ago).
I don't much like Ada myself, but it has as many pro's and cons as any other language. With features such as concurrent execution and very good exeption handling built into the language, I don't think they had much of a choice considering only recently have those two things really recieved much attention from modern languages.
I'm also sort of surprised there is no way to restrict web access aside from mis-configuring proxy settings. Being able to do this client side would be a big help to people like me who work with smaller clients.
or for those of us happy with a $14 phone bill. They have a cell plan that cheap? Didn't think so. It doesn't make sense that many of us would flee working technology because some spam vendors decide it's their right to harrass us.
You aren't required to use a hot corner either. I have expose linked to the center mouse button. Just grab the file, hit the center button (while holding the other down) and it works just fine.
I think one of the problems with the way windows scripting works is that it's too much into programming. Scripting things on your system should be simple and natural. I can go on a Unix machine and at a terminal and type 'cp f1 f2', and no surprise but I can do exactly the same thing on a script. With Windows Scripting host you need to create a shell object, etc. That's strait programming, and is sort of bad that you have to be a strait out programmer to automate anything.
I use windows script (jscript - the language MS halfway supports) all the time, but trying to do crap like change the permissions on a file is mind boggling compaired to useing chmod/chflags. And there are quite a few instances where WSH cannot do system administration tasks (ex, set permissions on registry keys).
The third problem is addon programs in windows. There is no way to control them without crap like sendkeys (which works but isn't what I would call reliable or the way it SHOULD be done). Applescript is of course a work of art. You can drive just about anything in KDE with dcop. Windows? Half the time you have widgets that don't even allow shortcut keys so you have to freaking tab through crap using sendkeys.
So why wouldn't I learn scripting on windows? Well why would I attempt to use a tool that is already blunted in it's capabilities, is an entirely new jobset that really doesn't have much to do with my task, and may not even be capable of doing what I need it to?
MS had a chance to fix this with MSH but again seems to have let that one fall on it's face. Although I have the unfortunate suspition that it's just going to be ANOTHER programming language instead of the scripting language we need on windows. Well there's zsh til then I guess.