Till you see their ridiculous FSF statement at the bottom saying they hate man pages and to check the info page... as if anyone would want to do that. I spent some time trying to find one just now but didn't. Sad face. The ln man page is close to what I was looking for: The full documentation for ln is maintained as a Texinfo manual.
Absolutely. Sometime around 1999 or so I bought a RedHat 5.2 distribution. I had no internet. No existing friends base who also used Linux. Just my AMD K6-2, a 10GB hard drive, an unsupported video card, and the manual that came with RH. Now, that manual wasn't "bad" it just wasn't a great first time ever tutorial. I was stuck on things like "the root partition" - equating that to "/" took a while. Simple things like that, or simple now, took a while to figure out. But having no easily working GUI made me stick it out. Eventually I bought a Matrox G-400 which fixed that aspect of my user experience, moved on to FreeBSD and BeOS and back to FreeBSD and ever since then it has continually been Linux the easier way.
This whole thing has started to seem odd to me. (Back to initial portions of this sad event.) The US constitution seems to first grant/protect free speech, and then grant/protect the right to bear arms. These are both dangerous and can have consequences. At one point in time, they were deemed to be vital - so vital they were the first and second things mentioned when creating the written laws of the new country's government. Some are now using their free speech to redefine the extent to which others should be able to keep and bear arms. I really don't know how to go about this discussion. Guns are weapons, they can do certain things, and quickly. That is why they exist, true. But isn't that why they exist? Our forefathers used the most modern and powerful weapons of their day to revolt against a very powerful military force, public opinion seems to be suggesting we the people should not now have the "capability" to do the same as the "costs" while waiting till doing so are too great.
My personal opinion is that we should eliminate the corporate tax rate, removing the shenanigans altogether. Make up for this by making dividends and capital gains taxable as income.
This position is no longer at all acceptable since they have been given (political) free speech rights. Thus, as such a "person", tax them.
The truth is that people who don't care much about computers and use them mostly as content-consumption devices are already flocking to tablets and smartphones. On these devices, a simplistic UI is fine – but the corollary is that the desktop market will be more dominated by content creators and power users, who aren't satisfied with the limitations of portable devices. So offering customizability and giving power users what we want on the desktop is more important, not less. Anyone who tries to go after both the tablet and desktop market with a lowest-common-denominator strategy is likely going to lose both.
Completely agree...The answer to the "intrusion" of tablets into the computing world is not to ruin the personal computer when used as such. Further when someone purchases a 27" all in one computer, is it really the same thing as a 10" tablet? Even if it has touch support? Do those two uses need to live under the same constraints? Does the classic - and predominant - set of hardware need to be heavily comprimised to please that 27" touch screen that likely still sits on a desk 3 feet away from the user? Would it be better if we all just went to sleep for five years and woke up, why do these processes which affect us all so much have to be handled so badly?
Synicism and sarcasm are not healthy or very constructive: I still use Unity and Gnome Shell but I want them to work better, for more people, not less.
Unity is by far the most widely used shell on Ubuntu, despite the depressed-hipster "can't live with unity" meme.
This is very condescending. Caveat: I use it somewhat currently, but I do not like it.
And second, there was a cultural shift. Ubuntu shifted towards leadership rather than simply integration. We thought design was important, we talked to the folks responsible for all the current DEs at the time, and they didn't seem to understand what was going to be the reality of personal computing - a highly mobile oriented world. So we led, and I'm glad we did, even though it is hard to do that.
So you talked to other desktop environment groups about it, they said no thanks, and you've pushed on anyways? That seems fairly understandable actually. Thanks for the leadership?
Purpose built platforms work, well. When Unity and Gnome shell strip things like sensor and weather applets, they provide less value. When Ubuntu adds the new software center application that does software searches worse, they provide less value. When Gnome (3) provides less options for showing themes and options (oooh its in this barely known hack and install this thingy and edit this javascript) they provide less value. Providing more examples would just be depressing.
But, remember the articles after thanksgiving of everyone buying the cheap laptops? Imagine some kid getting a Gateway Pentium $300 Windows 8 laptop: the initial excitement grows as the laptop sized box turns into a laptop, only to be dashed when he realizes it was a black friday special that can't play any of his favorite games acceptably and runs the new OS for Squares.
I frequently remark to my colleagues how bizarre it seems to me that after 50 years or so of software engineering, we're still building awful crap. If we were architects, we'd be unveiling skyscrapers built using favela techniques of plugging any old crap together, in the mud, next to a river.
So... you know: we should stop calling it software engineering, and stop calling those attempting it software engineers. At least until it has been earned.
Solid red stater here who tries to vote against the prevailing party line as much as possible to restore a little balance... The things mentioned here are absolutely a road to the bottom. These resources are important and help to aid in the over all build of our nation and as such are important but they are on their own poverty level. Having a strong farming and range land mixture in years like we have had lately can be a strong stabilizing force. The last recession barely hit many parts of the midwest. In the town I live in housing prices were stabilized by a university, a couple bigger businesses that did not need layoffs, and a surrounding farming industry that has been buoyed by good production and prices (this summers drought was not overly harsh on the area.)
Now we all have lots of guns and (hopefully ammo) but I always joke with people that say such things: "Yes but how many of us own a first aid kit?" Such talk is thus very silly. No one here wants to turn into Syria, but that is one area where Obama is wrong. He said in (the last?) debate that our streets are not a warzone and we thus do not need assault weapons - but sometimes streets do turn into warzones... That said I still preferred Obama over Romney for lots of reasons, just not enough to vote for him over Johnson. In the state of South Dakota I am happy to "throw" away my vote on someone with ideals.
I agree. Another law that's wrong is the one that punishes people for things their parents did, like where their mothers decided to drop them onto this planet. If you fell out of your mother's vagina on the wrong side of a line, the US racist, fucked up laws say you have to stay where you were, and suffer and die, even though we have plenty of room here, because of a quota system that was designed to "Keep America White".
As a "White American", with a family tree that had immigrants in it at several points, I do believe that the immigration system here needs some updating to allow for proper opportunity and not just to those who are doctors or fit nicely within the quota system we think is fair now. However lost in the discussion of immigration is the reasons why it is occuring: why does a country like Mexico get let off the hook? Shouldn't they have a strong desire to improve? Shouldn't their people want that? Shouldn't we as a neighbor want that? What is keeping them from a greatly enhanced standard of living? Couldn't it be the case in the near future that "White Americans" wanted to move there for a job?
I think you are wrong though about abolishing the system, I believe in "nations" and pride in them. I also believe it should be fair for Mexicans to want to take pride in "Mexico" too.
AMD "fan" here... When I built my current tower build in January of 2010 I asked myself what I really needed out of it, and what things I did, and what I wanted to pay. I purchased an Athlon II x2 240 for $60. I had a few different times where I wished I could do some multi-threaded programming/testing on a quad core instead but ultimately it wasn't necessary. My at work i7 860 was sufficient to test with to see what would happen with OMG amazing multi-threading potential. Maybe some day I will upgrade to a Phenom II x4 965, or go down the FX-6300 route, or something like that but I do not "need" to yet.
I am not sure what the NVIDIA blob driver supports, but you "should" be wrong. According to wikipedia:
Launched on April 14, 2004, the GeForce 6 family introduced PureVideo post-processing for video, SLI technology, and Shader Model 3.0 support (compliant with Microsoft DirectX 9.0c specification and OpenGL 2.0).
There are occasional indications that there is not "much" effort put into desktop linux, this is one of them. I recently tried running Ubuntu 12.04 on an AMD64 x2 with an AGP NVIDIA 6800, it didn't work, much as suggested here. I had not known there would be such a problem, now I know. So it is either an older Linux (maybe with NVIDIA blob support), newer BSD without proper graphics driver support, or Windows. Now I would personally feel that that machine is not horribly out of date, it has SATA, 2 GB of memory, etc...
Here are a set of benchmarks that are more centered on the Linux world from phoronix and are thus a little less prone to intel compiler discrimination. The results seem more realistic: better and worse and similar to an i7 at different work, still hard on power usage, low purchase price.
Why doesn't Apple push its pricing lower, is suppliers are reducing their cost?
Consumers lack the power (or more appropriately the acumen) to act on their own to push their "supplier(s)" to lower their costs. Typically companies do this for us "customers" by competing with other suppliers for space in the market. Such as if multiple Android tablet companies were sparring for customers and driving prices lower on each other. Did I fall into a land of the obtuse? Do I need to even continue?
That was something that troubled me about the debates last night. Neither candidate supports the ownership of automatic weaponry, they (I think it was Obama) say that our streets are not battlegrounds. As Syria shows, sometimes they do become a battleground. And the people (on either side of that battle) deserve to be honored the right to be able to defend themselves, their families, and the positions they wish to take up. To do so often demands the appropriate weaponry. Now - semiautomatic assault weapons will probably be sufficient - but shouldn't "the people" also be able to own rocket propelled grenade launchers? Arial drones for surveillance/intelligence purposes? As Syria is proving out, we should never be too trustworthy of either our government or the intergovernmental world leadership. My.02 cents...
And the kicker is that the schools, where all of this is going on at, are jacking up their rates on all the poor undergrads to the point where soon they will all be going to a trade school. Especially since that is where "the jobs" are at.
I personally think we should stop referring to any possible abuse of freedom of speech. If there is to be an unabridged and unfiltered freedom of speech then it allows anything. That is what freedom does. In such a way we can then defend any speech, by anyone, about anything. The free world can then defend the ability for Muslims to protest against the "harmful" speech of others. We can even defend our "political leadership" for not properly defending freedom of speech! This should be a regional problem, where the Muslim world can decide what they want to do with freedom of speech. But for the western world, we should have already made up our mind and we should be ready to say what we support. We should be past the point of apologizing, and now be in full support of the freedom of speech. It is the basis for any other freedom. Oh yea, see my.sig for a very old critique of the Muslim (Berber) world near the founding of the USA. The critique of any area, at any time, should be defended!
To reply to myself: I have often wanted to put up a camera to scan all cars driving by, and post publicly the route timings of police cars. I wonder how well that would go over... It _should_ be public knowledge. After all it could just as easily be accomplished by someone sitting there doing it in person so legally it should be no different when done by a camera - according to any realistic thought process. After all it is public information since we can all _see_ that cop car driving around. If "the man" can start pulling these stunts on us, we should be able to do so on them. Further more there should then be a citizen collective of drones flying to watch the watchers. Fair? It should be.
And any idea of what my legal rights are to videotape or record
FFS people, if the police can do it, so can we. These are "public" areas with no expectation of privacy rights! Right? Some days I just do not understand the world we live in...
Slashdot Mirror
Till you see their ridiculous FSF statement at the bottom saying they hate man pages and to check the info page... as if anyone would want to do that. I spent some time trying to find one just now but didn't. Sad face. The ln man page is close to what I was looking for:
The full documentation for ln is maintained as a Texinfo manual.
Absolutely. Sometime around 1999 or so I bought a RedHat 5.2 distribution. I had no internet. No existing friends base who also used Linux. Just my AMD K6-2, a 10GB hard drive, an unsupported video card, and the manual that came with RH. Now, that manual wasn't "bad" it just wasn't a great first time ever tutorial. I was stuck on things like "the root partition" - equating that to "/" took a while. Simple things like that, or simple now, took a while to figure out. But having no easily working GUI made me stick it out. Eventually I bought a Matrox G-400 which fixed that aspect of my user experience, moved on to FreeBSD and BeOS and back to FreeBSD and ever since then it has continually been Linux the easier way.
This whole thing has started to seem odd to me. (Back to initial portions of this sad event.) The US constitution seems to first grant/protect free speech, and then grant/protect the right to bear arms. These are both dangerous and can have consequences. At one point in time, they were deemed to be vital - so vital they were the first and second things mentioned when creating the written laws of the new country's government. Some are now using their free speech to redefine the extent to which others should be able to keep and bear arms. I really don't know how to go about this discussion. Guns are weapons, they can do certain things, and quickly. That is why they exist, true. But isn't that why they exist? Our forefathers used the most modern and powerful weapons of their day to revolt against a very powerful military force, public opinion seems to be suggesting we the people should not now have the "capability" to do the same as the "costs" while waiting till doing so are too great.
I played a lot of Carmageddon in high school. I had better just hand my keys in...
My personal opinion is that we should eliminate the corporate tax rate, removing the shenanigans altogether. Make up for this by making dividends and capital gains taxable as income.
This position is no longer at all acceptable since they have been given (political) free speech rights. Thus, as such a "person", tax them.
My first thought: "$1200 for an underpowered Intel server chip? Sounds about right."
AMD cpus really are dead, market place confirms.
The truth is that people who don't care much about computers and use them mostly as content-consumption devices are already flocking to tablets and smartphones. On these devices, a simplistic UI is fine – but the corollary is that the desktop market will be more dominated by content creators and power users, who aren't satisfied with the limitations of portable devices. So offering customizability and giving power users what we want on the desktop is more important, not less. Anyone who tries to go after both the tablet and desktop market with a lowest-common-denominator strategy is likely going to lose both.
Completely agree...The answer to the "intrusion" of tablets into the computing world is not to ruin the personal computer when used as such. Further when someone purchases a 27" all in one computer, is it really the same thing as a 10" tablet? Even if it has touch support? Do those two uses need to live under the same constraints? Does the classic - and predominant - set of hardware need to be heavily comprimised to please that 27" touch screen that likely still sits on a desk 3 feet away from the user? Would it be better if we all just went to sleep for five years and woke up, why do these processes which affect us all so much have to be handled so badly?
Synicism and sarcasm are not healthy or very constructive: I still use Unity and Gnome Shell but I want them to work better, for more people, not less.
Unity is by far the most widely used shell on Ubuntu, despite the depressed-hipster "can't live with unity" meme.
This is very condescending. Caveat: I use it somewhat currently, but I do not like it.
And second, there was a cultural shift. Ubuntu shifted towards leadership rather than simply integration. We thought design was important, we talked to the folks responsible for all the current DEs at the time, and they didn't seem to understand what was going to be the reality of personal computing - a highly mobile oriented world. So we led, and I'm glad we did, even though it is hard to do that.
So you talked to other desktop environment groups about it, they said no thanks, and you've pushed on anyways? That seems fairly understandable actually. Thanks for the leadership?
Purpose built platforms work, well. When Unity and Gnome shell strip things like sensor and weather applets, they provide less value. When Ubuntu adds the new software center application that does software searches worse, they provide less value. When Gnome (3) provides less options for showing themes and options (oooh its in this barely known hack and install this thingy and edit this javascript) they provide less value. Providing more examples would just be depressing.
But, remember the articles after thanksgiving of everyone buying the cheap laptops? Imagine some kid getting a Gateway Pentium $300 Windows 8 laptop: the initial excitement grows as the laptop sized box turns into a laptop, only to be dashed when he realizes it was a black friday special that can't play any of his favorite games acceptably and runs the new OS for Squares.
I frequently remark to my colleagues how bizarre it seems to me that after 50 years or so of software engineering, we're still building awful crap. If we were architects, we'd be unveiling skyscrapers built using favela techniques of plugging any old crap together, in the mud, next to a river.
So... you know: we should stop calling it software engineering, and stop calling those attempting it software engineers. At least until it has been earned.
The single greatest reason to fear climate change. I'm all in, lets fix this!
Solid red stater here who tries to vote against the prevailing party line as much as possible to restore a little balance... The things mentioned here are absolutely a road to the bottom. These resources are important and help to aid in the over all build of our nation and as such are important but they are on their own poverty level. Having a strong farming and range land mixture in years like we have had lately can be a strong stabilizing force. The last recession barely hit many parts of the midwest. In the town I live in housing prices were stabilized by a university, a couple bigger businesses that did not need layoffs, and a surrounding farming industry that has been buoyed by good production and prices (this summers drought was not overly harsh on the area.)
Now we all have lots of guns and (hopefully ammo) but I always joke with people that say such things: "Yes but how many of us own a first aid kit?" Such talk is thus very silly. No one here wants to turn into Syria, but that is one area where Obama is wrong. He said in (the last?) debate that our streets are not a warzone and we thus do not need assault weapons - but sometimes streets do turn into warzones... That said I still preferred Obama over Romney for lots of reasons, just not enough to vote for him over Johnson. In the state of South Dakota I am happy to "throw" away my vote on someone with ideals.
No, no, you see: he used the words "Russian peacekeeper force" so, you know, that changes everything!
I agree. Another law that's wrong is the one that punishes people for things their parents did, like where their mothers decided to drop them onto this planet. If you fell out of your mother's vagina on the wrong side of a line, the US racist, fucked up laws say you have to stay where you were, and suffer and die, even though we have plenty of room here, because of a quota system that was designed to "Keep America White".
As a "White American", with a family tree that had immigrants in it at several points, I do believe that the immigration system here needs some updating to allow for proper opportunity and not just to those who are doctors or fit nicely within the quota system we think is fair now. However lost in the discussion of immigration is the reasons why it is occuring: why does a country like Mexico get let off the hook? Shouldn't they have a strong desire to improve? Shouldn't their people want that? Shouldn't we as a neighbor want that? What is keeping them from a greatly enhanced standard of living? Couldn't it be the case in the near future that "White Americans" wanted to move there for a job?
I think you are wrong though about abolishing the system, I believe in "nations" and pride in them. I also believe it should be fair for Mexicans to want to take pride in "Mexico" too.
AMD "fan" here... When I built my current tower build in January of 2010 I asked myself what I really needed out of it, and what things I did, and what I wanted to pay. I purchased an Athlon II x2 240 for $60. I had a few different times where I wished I could do some multi-threaded programming/testing on a quad core instead but ultimately it wasn't necessary. My at work i7 860 was sufficient to test with to see what would happen with OMG amazing multi-threading potential. Maybe some day I will upgrade to a Phenom II x4 965, or go down the FX-6300 route, or something like that but I do not "need" to yet.
Launched on April 14, 2004, the GeForce 6 family introduced PureVideo post-processing for video, SLI technology, and Shader Model 3.0 support (compliant with Microsoft DirectX 9.0c specification and OpenGL 2.0).
There are occasional indications that there is not "much" effort put into desktop linux, this is one of them. I recently tried running Ubuntu 12.04 on an AMD64 x2 with an AGP NVIDIA 6800, it didn't work, much as suggested here. I had not known there would be such a problem, now I know. So it is either an older Linux (maybe with NVIDIA blob support), newer BSD without proper graphics driver support, or Windows. Now I would personally feel that that machine is not horribly out of date, it has SATA, 2 GB of memory, etc...
Here are a set of benchmarks that are more centered on the Linux world from phoronix and are thus a little less prone to intel compiler discrimination. The results seem more realistic: better and worse and similar to an i7 at different work, still hard on power usage, low purchase price.
Why doesn't Apple push its pricing lower, is suppliers are reducing their cost?
Consumers lack the power (or more appropriately the acumen) to act on their own to push their "supplier(s)" to lower their costs. Typically companies do this for us "customers" by competing with other suppliers for space in the market. Such as if multiple Android tablet companies were sparring for customers and driving prices lower on each other. Did I fall into a land of the obtuse? Do I need to even continue?
That was something that troubled me about the debates last night. Neither candidate supports the ownership of automatic weaponry, they (I think it was Obama) say that our streets are not battlegrounds. As Syria shows, sometimes they do become a battleground. And the people (on either side of that battle) deserve to be honored the right to be able to defend themselves, their families, and the positions they wish to take up. To do so often demands the appropriate weaponry. Now - semiautomatic assault weapons will probably be sufficient - but shouldn't "the people" also be able to own rocket propelled grenade launchers? Arial drones for surveillance/intelligence purposes? As Syria is proving out, we should never be too trustworthy of either our government or the intergovernmental world leadership. My .02 cents...
And the kicker is that the schools, where all of this is going on at, are jacking up their rates on all the poor undergrads to the point where soon they will all be going to a trade school. Especially since that is where "the jobs" are at.
freedoms they abuse
I personally think we should stop referring to any possible abuse of freedom of speech. If there is to be an unabridged and unfiltered freedom of speech then it allows anything. That is what freedom does. In such a way we can then defend any speech, by anyone, about anything. The free world can then defend the ability for Muslims to protest against the "harmful" speech of others. We can even defend our "political leadership" for not properly defending freedom of speech! This should be a regional problem, where the Muslim world can decide what they want to do with freedom of speech. But for the western world, we should have already made up our mind and we should be ready to say what we support. We should be past the point of apologizing, and now be in full support of the freedom of speech. It is the basis for any other freedom. Oh yea, see my .sig for a very old critique of the Muslim (Berber) world near the founding of the USA. The critique of any area, at any time, should be defended!
Yeah, I have to really wonder about Ballmer. I've never seen him where he wasn't at least somewhat off his rocker.
It would only be fitting, if in his last great act: he falls out of a chair.
To reply to myself: I have often wanted to put up a camera to scan all cars driving by, and post publicly the route timings of police cars. I wonder how well that would go over... It _should_ be public knowledge. After all it could just as easily be accomplished by someone sitting there doing it in person so legally it should be no different when done by a camera - according to any realistic thought process. After all it is public information since we can all _see_ that cop car driving around. If "the man" can start pulling these stunts on us, we should be able to do so on them. Further more there should then be a citizen collective of drones flying to watch the watchers. Fair? It should be.
And any idea of what my legal rights are to videotape or record
FFS people, if the police can do it, so can we. These are "public" areas with no expectation of privacy rights! Right? Some days I just do not understand the world we live in...