Why, exactly? There are plenty of alternatives for scripting - both by Microsoft (WSH) and of course there's also Python, Perl and everything else. And for interactive usage, the existing cmd.exe is sufficient, to me anyway. Once I figured out how to enable auto-complete I didn't really miss anything from the Unix shells. Hm.
I don't think many of us care that the command names are a little hard to remember. I have just as much trouble remembering stuff from APIs with nice names like Java.
While you might be right about that, long (or nice) names have an additional benefit apart. To borrow terms from general interface design, they have a better discoverability, or in yet different terms, they are somewhat self-documenting. This is extremely powerful: when developing Java an IDE with auto-complete is often enough to figure out what objects to use and which methods do what you want. Obviously this doesn't replace decent documentation, but it helps a lot when you're starting out in a new field.
This is what other have (mis)named intuitive. Long command names aren't exactly intuitive, but they are somewhat self-documenting. Along with shell command line auto-complete (or even just a list of available commands) I'm pretty sure any reasonably experienced user would find something like get-process faster than ps.
PS - I realize this wasn't anything like the main point of your post, sorry for picking out the first paragraph...
Actually, there was a story or comment on Slashdot a while ago where somebody tried formatting/erasing the system partition both in Windows and in Linux. If I recall correctly, both systems were in a non-bootable state after a recursive delete, although they kept running for a while.
When it comes right down to it, though, the Windows developers are not going to begin rewriting all of their software just to make it command line compliant.
That's the cool thing though. First of all a vast amount of software running on a Windows platform is written by Microsoft themselves. But aside from that I think the major advantage platforms with one dominant actor such as Windows or OS X have over an open platform like Linux or the BSDs is that standards set by the central authority typically are adapted by everyone else. This means that Apple can introduce a basic search system and rely on third parties to extend it and it means that MS could introduce something like MSH and rely on others to write compatible applications. It's easier to reach "critical mass" if one party produces so much functionality.
For about ten years since the dawn of Windows 95, Microsoft has spent a fortune downplaying the power of a CLI in favor of the all-powerful GUI. After all, why is it that cmd.exe and family are so incredibly anemic? [...] Everything must interact with the GUI, leaving only limited functionality to the shell.
Actually, I think I have heard/read that since Windows 2000 (and maybe earlier for the NTs), every administration task in Windows was required to be manageable via command line, as well. Something like that, at least - there certainly are a lot of command line apps in/system32 that I never ever came close to using. I don't know what exactly makes cmd.exe anemic - it's perfectly fine, in my opinion. It's not as powerful as bash or the other Unix shells, and the scripting is terrible, but it's just fine for basic interactive file management and the execution of command line apps. It does name completion (command.com didn't), which is basically THE killer feature for me.
There is no clear way to interface with the system, such as with kill -SIG PID (granted, this is because Windows is void of a kill binary); the intent behind this is likely the design philosophy of Windows.
C:\Documents and Settings\ms>taskkill ERROR: Invalid Syntax. Neither/FI nor/PID nor/IM are specified. Type "TASKKILL/?" for usage.
Ships with every Windows post 2000, I think.
As for other interfaces with the systems, like I said, there is a lot more than what you expect. The NET command certainly is well-known and used for about a thousand things, notable starting and stopping services. It certainly beats the rc.d scripts from my point of view, although I guess that's just because I'm used to it.
That said, one of the first things I do in a fresh Windows install is get Cygwin along with some Unix essentials - grep, wget, etc. And ls for the pretty colors.;)
I agree that 190 bucks is a very high price, but you shouldn't be so surprised by mobile gadgets having a dwindling battery life after a year. That's just the way it is with current battery technology. If you don't know that when buying a laptop, well, next time do your research. Caveat emptor. See why everybody says that battery technology is the limiting factor for mobile devices?
Are you kidding? He obviously knows about the phrase-feature - doesn't everybody? - the problem he describes is that it doesn't really work properly. Try the example queries he quotes. Result 2 when searching for exact matches on "montana mountain ranges" is indeed Montana's Mountain Ranges (put in bold so there is no doubt it's this phrase that triggers the hit).
Of course, this isn't so much a bug as a documented feature - Google automatically searches for morphologically similar keywords. But what typically is useful can be annoying when you really do want exact matches and nothing else.
Of course, the K5 story was probably inspired by the Slashdot comment posted on May 29th which the story links to. Or maybe some Slashdot reader submitted the story after reading the comment.
They were a few days ago (remember all those AC messages about cuba?), which, I guess, is why they enabled the feature. Why do you care anyway, it's only required for posting as an AC after all.
Yup, flaming other posters for acting stupid is way less pathetic than being involved in a petty quarrel which language is more or less "brain-damaged". Now, if you had actually written up an insightful argument why English does not suck" besides "duh English is like open source" and "French is gay because it has gender", things would have been different.
Just in case you're not just inventing excuses - if you're just editing and redistributing documents that don't need (or maybe aren't even supposed) to be edited on the other end of the line, saving as PDF is pretty useful.
It's not ludicrous at all. If (say, hypothetically) big stores could get small prices by unethical means such as paying their workforce extremely low wages, it's a fairly logical step to chose not to buy stuff there. The question, of course, is whether the big stores are acting unethical, which is both a question of what your ethics are and what the big stores are actually doing. I don't think it's ludicrous to assume that there are many persons who'd consider the actions of most large store chains unethical - if they knew about them, anyway.
Christ how pathetic. I've seen German and French folks get all riled up over which language is "better", but you're the first speaker of English I've seen that feels the need to trash-talk other "brain-damaged" languages. The English linguists I know certainly don't. Quaint.
Look for yourself, if you are on Windows anyway. Open the device manager, check "show hidden devices" in the view menu and look at the new devices that appear. Especially the ones in the "Non-Plug and Play Drivers" category. Some examples from my system include "Creative AC3 software decoder" (along with half a dozen more drivers the Audigy installs), "StyleXP helper" (Window skinning), "mnmdd" (no clue). And this is a fairly clean system, apart from Style XP maybe. Most of these would make sense as services, but device drivers? Not that there is a shortage of services on a typical Win XP system!
(Note that the sentence in my sig isn't my creation, Slashdot user 122843 posted it here on Slashdot in a comment.)
Re:Could someone please explain how this works?
on
Four GPU Motherboard
·
· Score: 1
Despite the fact that SLI is currently seen to be sorta frivolous by many, it's quite possible that SLI (or multi-GPU cards) will become common in the future, and will in fact be required to play modern games.
Graphics cards already are massively parallel. The level of parallelisation will only increase, but I think there are more efficient ways of increasing performance than duplicating everything - for instance, it's just extremely wasteful to have individual memory per card. It's necessary for running dual-cards, and this necessity is inherited when running two SLI'd GPUs on one card, but this is one of those things that will prevent SLI from ever gaining mainstream interest. As for multi-GPU, well, where do you draw the line. Either today's GPUs already are multi-GPU in a way - they certainly duplicate pretty much everything doing work -, or there are no multi-GPU cards and there likely won't ever be in mainstream usage because of the reasons outlined above.
You don't explicitly say so yourself, but clearly in hindsight it would have been a good idea to rip into a lossless container in the first place. There are plenty of choices - APE, Shorten or FLAC. Since you probably compressed at a fairly high bitrate anyway, the loss of space isn't extreme, either.
No. Spanish is a Romance Language, ie. a decendant of the Latin language and consequentially uses the Latin alphabet, with a few accented letters. Okay, arguably the alphabet is different because of the accented letters, but it's not like we're talking Cyrillic here.
On a sidenote, after closing OOo Writer a subsequent start only took 8 instead of the original 30 seconds. Opening Calc (for the first time since booting) with Writer already open also takes about 8 seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
How about this: Microsoft Windows XP - Command-line reference A-Z
Why, exactly? There are plenty of alternatives for scripting - both by Microsoft (WSH) and of course there's also Python, Perl and everything else. And for interactive usage, the existing cmd.exe is sufficient, to me anyway. Once I figured out how to enable auto-complete I didn't really miss anything from the Unix shells. Hm.
I don't think many of us care that the command names are a little hard to remember. I have just as much trouble remembering stuff from APIs with nice names like Java.
While you might be right about that, long (or nice) names have an additional benefit apart. To borrow terms from general interface design, they have a better discoverability, or in yet different terms, they are somewhat self-documenting. This is extremely powerful: when developing Java an IDE with auto-complete is often enough to figure out what objects to use and which methods do what you want. Obviously this doesn't replace decent documentation, but it helps a lot when you're starting out in a new field.
This is what other have (mis)named intuitive. Long command names aren't exactly intuitive, but they are somewhat self-documenting. Along with shell command line auto-complete (or even just a list of available commands) I'm pretty sure any reasonably experienced user would find something like get-process faster than ps.
PS - I realize this wasn't anything like the main point of your post, sorry for picking out the first paragraph...
Actually, there was a story or comment on Slashdot a while ago where somebody tried formatting/erasing the system partition both in Windows and in Linux. If I recall correctly, both systems were in a non-bootable state after a recursive delete, although they kept running for a while.
When it comes right down to it, though, the Windows developers are not going to begin rewriting all of their software just to make it command line compliant.
That's the cool thing though. First of all a vast amount of software running on a Windows platform is written by Microsoft themselves. But aside from that I think the major advantage platforms with one dominant actor such as Windows or OS X have over an open platform like Linux or the BSDs is that standards set by the central authority typically are adapted by everyone else. This means that Apple can introduce a basic search system and rely on third parties to extend it and it means that MS could introduce something like MSH and rely on others to write compatible applications. It's easier to reach "critical mass" if one party produces so much functionality.
Actually, I think I have heard/read that since Windows 2000 (and maybe earlier for the NTs), every administration task in Windows was required to be manageable via command line, as well. Something like that, at least - there certainly are a lot of command line apps in
I don't know what exactly makes cmd.exe anemic - it's perfectly fine, in my opinion. It's not as powerful as bash or the other Unix shells, and the scripting is terrible, but it's just fine for basic interactive file management and the execution of command line apps. It does name completion (command.com didn't), which is basically THE killer feature for me.
There is no clear way to interface with the system, such as with kill -SIG PID (granted, this is because Windows is void of a kill binary); the intent behind this is likely the design philosophy of Windows. Ships with every Windows post 2000, I think.
As for other interfaces with the systems, like I said, there is a lot more than what you expect. The NET command certainly is well-known and used for about a thousand things, notable starting and stopping services. It certainly beats the rc.d scripts from my point of view, although I guess that's just because I'm used to it.
That said, one of the first things I do in a fresh Windows install is get Cygwin along with some Unix essentials - grep, wget, etc. And ls for the pretty colors.
The two systems aren't mutually exclusive, you know?
There wouldn't be a reason to get angry if this was true to mostly the same degree for all cars, and a fairly well-known fact to boot.
I agree that 190 bucks is a very high price, but you shouldn't be so surprised by mobile gadgets having a dwindling battery life after a year. That's just the way it is with current battery technology. If you don't know that when buying a laptop, well, next time do your research. Caveat emptor. See why everybody says that battery technology is the limiting factor for mobile devices?
Are you kidding? He obviously knows about the phrase-feature - doesn't everybody? - the problem he describes is that it doesn't really work properly. Try the example queries he quotes. Result 2 when searching for exact matches on "montana mountain ranges" is indeed Montana's Mountain Ranges (put in bold so there is no doubt it's this phrase that triggers the hit).
Of course, this isn't so much a bug as a documented feature - Google automatically searches for morphologically similar keywords. But what typically is useful can be annoying when you really do want exact matches and nothing else.
Of course, the K5 story was probably inspired by the Slashdot comment posted on May 29th which the story links to. Or maybe some Slashdot reader submitted the story after reading the comment.
They were a few days ago (remember all those AC messages about cuba?), which, I guess, is why they enabled the feature. Why do you care anyway, it's only required for posting as an AC after all.
Yup, flaming other posters for acting stupid is way less pathetic than being involved in a petty quarrel which language is more or less "brain-damaged". Now, if you had actually written up an insightful argument why English does not suck" besides "duh English is like open source" and "French is gay because it has gender", things would have been different.
Hope your bad day day gets better.
Just in case you're not just inventing excuses - if you're just editing and redistributing documents that don't need (or maybe aren't even supposed) to be edited on the other end of the line, saving as PDF is pretty useful.
all other sources are "evil" (which is ludicrous)
It's not ludicrous at all. If (say, hypothetically) big stores could get small prices by unethical means such as paying their workforce extremely low wages, it's a fairly logical step to chose not to buy stuff there. The question, of course, is whether the big stores are acting unethical, which is both a question of what your ethics are and what the big stores are actually doing. I don't think it's ludicrous to assume that there are many persons who'd consider the actions of most large store chains unethical - if they knew about them, anyway.
Christ how pathetic. I've seen German and French folks get all riled up over which language is "better", but you're the first speaker of English I've seen that feels the need to trash-talk other "brain-damaged" languages. The English linguists I know certainly don't. Quaint.
Inline cache? Forget getting another proxy, get another ISP!
Look for yourself, if you are on Windows anyway. Open the device manager, check "show hidden devices" in the view menu and look at the new devices that appear. Especially the ones in the "Non-Plug and Play Drivers" category. Some examples from my system include "Creative AC3 software decoder" (along with half a dozen more drivers the Audigy installs), "StyleXP helper" (Window skinning), "mnmdd" (no clue). And this is a fairly clean system, apart from Style XP maybe. Most of these would make sense as services, but device drivers? Not that there is a shortage of services on a typical Win XP system!
What a coincidence! ;) Verbing weirds language...
(Note that the sentence in my sig isn't my creation, Slashdot user 122843 posted it here on Slashdot in a comment.)
Despite the fact that SLI is currently seen to be sorta frivolous by many, it's quite possible that SLI (or multi-GPU cards) will become common in the future, and will in fact be required to play modern games.
Graphics cards already are massively parallel. The level of parallelisation will only increase, but I think there are more efficient ways of increasing performance than duplicating everything - for instance, it's just extremely wasteful to have individual memory per card. It's necessary for running dual-cards, and this necessity is inherited when running two SLI'd GPUs on one card, but this is one of those things that will prevent SLI from ever gaining mainstream interest.
As for multi-GPU, well, where do you draw the line. Either today's GPUs already are multi-GPU in a way - they certainly duplicate pretty much everything doing work -, or there are no multi-GPU cards and there likely won't ever be in mainstream usage because of the reasons outlined above.
In Quake 3, anyway.
You don't explicitly say so yourself, but clearly in hindsight it would have been a good idea to rip into a lossless container in the first place. There are plenty of choices - APE, Shorten or FLAC. Since you probably compressed at a fairly high bitrate anyway, the loss of space isn't extreme, either.
No. Spanish is a Romance Language, ie. a decendant of the Latin language and consequentially uses the Latin alphabet, with a few accented letters. Okay, arguably the alphabet is different because of the accented letters, but it's not like we're talking Cyrillic here.
Yeah, I know. Many people don't - notable the casual users I referred to, though, and to them it is a killer feature.
On a sidenote, after closing OOo Writer a subsequent start only took 8 instead of the original 30 seconds. Opening Calc (for the first time since booting) with Writer already open also takes about 8 seconds.