> If you've only got telnet/ssh, you're probably screwed. Actually, sam (the other editor out of the same family) accepts ssh session (i.e. ssh the files across or something like this). Check the man, I'm sure it's in there. (in plan9port)
The color scheme is actually nice and based on the concept that light colors (that can be found in nature for example --not much Black or White, or really strong colors/contrasts there) are actually a better environment to look at for days. It's actually the theory followed by some artists (ever looked at Paul Klee paintings?).
As for the spartiat look of the window manager (rio), it's a choice. No window border, no icons. It's VERY minimal, not to be confused with feature-lacking.
I've been a plan9port user for few years now, and it's my favorite Unix environment. I use rio, sam, 9term, and acme on a regular basis. The environment has a learning curve, but somehow its strong philosophical design choice tend to stick. I really love it.
As for the mouse vs. keyboard, I find the mouse a more natural and less 'tense' way to work on things.
Conclusion: you can't just look at a Mondrian and say 'ah! my 3 year old son can do the same'... get into it, try to get the idea behind it and you might end up discovering something great.
There are tons of editors on all platforms. Emacs and vi are the most popular on unix flavors, but hardly the only ones. Pico is the perfect example of an editor requiring no learning curve, so is notepad. Hardly the best tool for programming, but the students should grow out of them naturally (to either emacs, vi, jedit, ultraedit, eclipse, netbeans, or whatever they like). Let them use what they want, they should figure out what env work the best for them.
Sure, the 'meat machine' argument stands. But in this case the robot dog (even if it was perfect) would not match the relation a human and a real dog would have because (here's the key), the human knows he's dealing with a robot.
Yes, but people can actually afford ipods over other music players, and ibooks over dell (for example) laptops. I agree with your quality analogy but the thing is that much more people can afford a mac than a BMW since the average difference in price between them and the competition is something people actually can spend.
Sure the Flash memory are growing in size at some rate r per year, but at the same time the need for more and more disk space is also growing at some rate r'. I can't say if r > r' so much that in the course of the next few years we'll see HD disapear... I doubt it.
Do you do your job better because you get help from your smart clothes?
Aside from that, I completely agree, there is NO correlation between how someone dresses and the quality of hir work. This is total common sense but seems lost to some people.
> If you are doing a job that involves work that interest you, or > chalanges you, then is not the path to "bettering oneself" ?.
Well, some people are multi-dimensional in their interests and like to learn about other things too. I don't think my manager would appreciate me staying late reading Kafka or Nietzsche --though I would be 'bettering myself' doing so. Same at things related to work, I don't think it's fair for me to stay late at work to work on my personal LISP project when it has nothing to do with what the company's paying me to do.
For many people, bettering oneself (simply put: following your many interests) usually takes them away from pure-work related topics.
And I haven't even touched on the topic of familly and the responsability it entails. My advice to you is to read back history of workers right and understand what created the birth of the current work laws. There's a reason we don't work 7 days a week, 15 hours a day ; and they might not be bad reasons.
I agree, Scheme's a really clean start. "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" is a great book to learn programming. And it uses Scheme! And it's online: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
> Visual Studio and MS office are more than enough > to make linux irrelevant. that's because you use it as a desktop tool, I don't think google's talking about what tool is best to develop c code. They probably care about servers processing huge amounts of data. as for linux on the desktop, it's another topic all together.
?? I'd rather read the lisp, there's just one thing to read: 'this' whereas the xml has all those numbers, and they have to match, and they have to be in order, what matters 'this' is now buried and do not stand out whatsoever; what the?
Sure, I don't want to count parenthesis, that is why the editor takes care of it; a tool to do a boring repetitive task, nothing new here. Also, not unlike Python, you somewhat need to indent your lisp code to make it readable (correct in python). It's really not unlike xml, pretty unreadable if not indented properly. So all in all, the parenthesis issue is really not worth getting scared of, and is usually bypassed after a day or two.
> How's today any different from the communist/german/(insert > super power here) scare of last century? or withcraft-hunting/ > inquisitions of centuries ago? or Roman/Mongol/Turks > invasions of recent history?
Ah! Easy! They didn't have any computers back then and couldn't be l33t hax0rz!!!!!!!!!!!
I think this is the worse misconception around. When you think that more than 50% of all projects do not see the light of the day, and for those who get completed, only a fraction are considered a success ; how can one just say 'oh it's a commodity'.
The pc hardware is for sure, but I really don't think the software's there at all. I don't understand why people keep repeating this when it's obviously wrong.
Don't be so quick opposing the computer science theory and software engineering techniques (why would they be mutually exclusive anyway?). You would be surprised how much knowledge of "turing machines" (finite state machines are used in many algorithms), "functional languages" (what's wrong with them?) or "planar graph" (graph and other data structures knowledge might be the difference between a problem solved elegantly and the same problem solved with a clumsy solution) can actually help in the construction of software.
Big deal, do people believe there is still 1 system that is so intrinsically perfect it cannot turn to the complete horror of autoritarian totalitarism? I think what Orwell was depicting is Human Nature! It is UNIVERSAL and that is why it can touch us all. Of course the setting is particular, but the moral and point of the story is general... why do lefties are righties feel the need to basically highjack the book to throw it at the face of their natural opposites, when really they should reflect upon it.
> XX / XY still holds, as far as I know. (Pretty much binary, > although some malfunctions do happen)
There's also XXY once in a while I believe. Also, how can something be "pretty much binary", either it is or it is not. In this case not. "It's either true or false...or sometimes in between";)
> What can you program in Unix that you can't in Windows.
Right, effectively nothing. At the same time, you could also ask what can you program in Unix that you can't in a UTM? Well, nothing. Now what the original poster was refering to was the _philosophy_ behind the 2 programming environment offered by Unix & Windows. Unix follows the "do 1 thing and 1 thing well" then pipe-it up, shell-it up, awk-it up and 40 lines later you have what would have taken months of C, Java, C++ ; or $1000s. You could be really surprised by the power behind this.
You can read about it more in this seminal paper by Unix gurus Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan: "Cat -v considered harmful" It's mostly about "managing complexity" aka keeping things simple so they can fit in our brains:) http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doc/84/kp.ps.gz
Another example I like to use is Editors. For example, most unix editor allow you to run a command on a selection of text. The text editor do not have to implement anything about sorting, indenting, this, that and grow and grow and grow... there is a Elegance in this approach (see the latest editor sam for example).
Your bird can probably count to 6 or so, he just can't express it in a human-understandable way. I'm saying this because I read a while back an experiment where a crow was able to count up to 6 (I assume your bird can do the same). How did they do it?
The scientists put food in a tunnel-type thing. They let 1-6 cats enter the tunnel. The crow sees them go in. Then the cats leave after a while, one by one. The crow was able to realise when all cats were out when n_cats <= 6. For higher numbers of cats, the crow just randomly go in the tunnel, even if some cats are still in there. So apparently the crow was able to keep track of up to 6 things.
Slashdot Mirror
> If you've only got telnet/ssh, you're probably screwed.
Actually, sam (the other editor out of the same family) accepts ssh session (i.e. ssh the files across or something like this). Check the man, I'm sure it's in there. (in plan9port)
The color scheme is actually nice and based on the concept that light colors (that can be found in nature for example --not much Black or White, or really strong colors/contrasts there) are actually a better environment to look at for days. It's actually the theory followed by some artists (ever looked at Paul Klee paintings?).
... get into it, try to get the idea behind it and you might end up discovering something great.
As for the spartiat look of the window manager (rio), it's a choice. No window border, no icons. It's VERY minimal, not to be confused with feature-lacking.
I've been a plan9port user for few years now, and it's my favorite Unix environment. I use rio, sam, 9term, and acme on a regular basis. The environment has a learning curve, but somehow its strong philosophical design choice tend to stick. I really love it.
As for the mouse vs. keyboard, I find the mouse a more natural and less 'tense' way to work on things.
Conclusion: you can't just look at a Mondrian and say 'ah! my 3 year old son can do the same'
There are tons of editors on all platforms. Emacs and vi are the most popular on unix flavors, but hardly the only ones. Pico is the perfect example of an editor requiring no learning curve, so is notepad. Hardly the best tool for programming, but the students should grow out of them naturally (to either emacs, vi, jedit, ultraedit, eclipse, netbeans, or whatever they like).
Let them use what they want, they should figure out what env work the best for them.
Sure, the 'meat machine' argument stands. But in this case the robot dog (even if it was perfect) would not match the relation a human and a real dog would have because (here's the key), the human knows he's dealing with a robot.
Yes, but people can actually afford ipods over other music players, and ibooks over dell (for example) laptops.
I agree with your quality analogy but the thing is that much more people can afford a mac than a BMW since the average difference in price between them and the competition is something people actually can spend.
my $.02.
Sure the Flash memory are growing in size at some rate r per year, but at the same time the need for more and more disk space is also growing at some rate r'. ... I doubt it.
I can't say if r > r' so much that in the course of the next few years we'll see HD disapear
Do you do your job better because you get help from your smart clothes?
Aside from that, I completely agree, there is NO correlation between how someone dresses and the quality of hir work. This is total common sense but seems lost to some people.
> If you are doing a job that involves work that interest you, or
> chalanges you, then is not the path to "bettering oneself" ?.
Well, some people are multi-dimensional in their interests and like to learn about other things too. I don't think my manager would appreciate me staying late reading Kafka or Nietzsche --though I would be 'bettering myself' doing so.
Same at things related to work, I don't think it's fair for me to stay late at work to work on my personal LISP project when it has nothing to do with what the company's paying me to do.
For many people, bettering oneself (simply put: following your many interests) usually takes them away from pure-work related topics.
And I haven't even touched on the topic of familly and the responsability it entails. My advice to you is to read back history of workers right and understand what created the birth of the current work laws. There's a reason we don't work 7 days a week, 15 hours a day ; and they might not be bad reasons.
I'd say you can't do step 4: dividing by (x-y) to lead to x+y=y since (x-y)=0 [can't divide by 0]
oops, the last if is really:
if ($bar eq "open") {
return "spend money";
}
return "take home paycheck";
I agree, Scheme's a really clean start.
"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" is a great book to learn programming. And it uses Scheme! And it's online: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
> Visual Studio and MS office are more than enough
> to make linux irrelevant.
that's because you use it as a desktop tool, I don't think google's talking about what tool is best to develop c code. They probably care about servers processing huge amounts of data.
as for linux on the desktop, it's another topic all together.
you nailed it.
hold on, you're saying that reading:
<1><2><3><4><5>this</5></4></3></2></1>
is easier than reading:
(((((this)))))
??
I'd rather read the lisp, there's just one thing to read: 'this' whereas the xml has all those numbers, and they have to match, and they have to be in order, what matters 'this' is now buried and do not stand out whatsoever; what the?
Sure, I don't want to count parenthesis, that is why the editor takes care of it; a tool to do a boring repetitive task, nothing new here.
Also, not unlike Python, you somewhat need to indent your lisp code to make it readable (correct in python). It's really not unlike xml, pretty unreadable if not indented properly. So all in all, the parenthesis issue is really not worth getting scared of, and is usually bypassed after a day or two.
> How's today any different from the communist/german/(insert
> super power here) scare of last century? or withcraft-hunting/
> inquisitions of centuries ago? or Roman/Mongol/Turks
> invasions of recent history?
Ah! Easy! They didn't have any computers back then and couldn't be l33t hax0rz!!!!!!!!!!!
(might have got the spelling wrong!)
Lauging my ass off...
> Face it; software is now a commodity business
I think this is the worse misconception around. When you think that more than 50% of all projects do not see the light of the day, and for those who get completed, only a fraction are considered a success ; how can one just say 'oh it's a commodity'.
The pc hardware is for sure, but I really don't think the software's there at all. I don't understand why people keep repeating this when it's obviously wrong.
Don't be so quick opposing the computer science theory and software engineering techniques (why would they be mutually exclusive anyway?).
;)
You would be surprised how much knowledge of "turing machines" (finite state machines are used in many algorithms), "functional languages" (what's wrong with them?) or "planar graph" (graph and other data structures knowledge might be the difference between a problem solved elegantly and the same problem solved with a clumsy solution) can actually help in the construction of software.
I'm not sure how Goedel fits in there though
Big deal, do people believe there is still 1 system that is so intrinsically perfect it cannot turn to the complete horror of autoritarian totalitarism? I think what Orwell was depicting is Human Nature! ... why do lefties are righties feel the need to basically highjack the book to throw it at the face of their natural opposites, when really they should reflect upon it.
It is UNIVERSAL and that is why it can touch us all.
Of course the setting is particular, but the moral and point of the story is general
my $.02
> XX / XY still holds, as far as I know. (Pretty much binary,
;)
> although some malfunctions do happen)
There's also XXY once in a while I believe.
Also, how can something be "pretty much binary", either it is or it is not. In this case not. "It's either true or false...or sometimes in between"
> That being said, it's deviant behavior and it's wrong.
> Wrong from both a biological and a psychological standpoint.
You might be correct on the first sentence. You are wrong on the second. It is only wrong on _your_ moral standpoint.
Laughing my ass off! TWO 30" monitors!?!?!? Where's the company that gives this kind of setup? I'll sign today!
"UNIX programs tend to solve general problems rather than special cases."
Brian K. & Rob P.
> What can you program in Unix that you can't in Windows.
:)
... there is a Elegance in this approach (see the latest editor sam for example).
Right, effectively nothing. At the same time, you could also ask what can you program in Unix that you can't in a UTM? Well, nothing. Now what the original poster was refering to was the _philosophy_ behind the 2 programming environment offered by Unix & Windows. Unix follows the "do 1 thing and 1 thing well" then pipe-it up, shell-it up, awk-it up and 40 lines later you have what would have taken months of C, Java, C++ ; or $1000s.
You could be really surprised by the power behind this.
You can read about it more in this seminal paper by Unix gurus Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan: "Cat -v considered harmful"
It's mostly about "managing complexity" aka keeping things simple so they can fit in our brains
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doc/84/kp.ps.gz
Another example I like to use is Editors. For example, most unix editor allow you to run a command on a selection of text. The text editor do not have to implement anything about sorting, indenting, this, that and grow and grow and grow
Your bird can probably count to 6 or so, he just can't express it in a human-understandable way.
I'm saying this because I read a while back an experiment where a crow was able to count up to 6 (I assume your bird can do the same).
How did they do it?
The scientists put food in a tunnel-type thing. They let 1-6 cats enter the tunnel. The crow sees them go in. Then the cats leave after a while, one by one.
The crow was able to realise when all cats were out when n_cats <= 6. For higher numbers of cats, the crow just randomly go in the tunnel, even if some cats are still in there.
So apparently the crow was able to keep track of up to 6 things.