I agree that vi is a pain in the ass to learn (I don't know anything about emacs, I started on vi and stuck with it). The thing is, now that I've warped my mind enough to use vi semi-productively, I find interfaces like pico, nano, Eclipse's Java editor, etc. to be very unproductive. Granted, a new user probably needs a text editor that is as similar to vi as pink fluff is to a Mac truck, but *if* a new user ever wants to be really productive in a text editor*, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they probably have to learn something like vi or emacs (are there any other cryptic programmer's text editors out there?). Now that I've done the mental contortionist routine that is required to memorize (some of) vi's command set, I find I can do in 1 or 2 keystrokes what takes 5 in most "plain" editors, and being a programmer by trade, that adds up to a lot of key strokes.
In fact, I would argue that vi is not as much of a usability *nightmare* as you claim (perhaps just a bad dream with a happy ending). Like I said above, vi is a royal PITA to learn, and that's a big negative, but if you overcome that difficulty, vi's interface is very consistent. For example, the delete and change commands both take movement modifiers in exactly the same way. Suppose you already know that 'd' means delete and that 'dw' means delete the next word. As soon as you learn 'c' means change, then you can apply your knowledge of 'd' and figure out that 'cw' means change the next word. Also, as soon as you learn that you can prefix 'w' with a number, n, to mean n words, you can apply that to the 'd' and 'c' commands to get 'd2w' and 'c2w' that mean 'delete the next two words' and 'change the next two words', respectively. Yeah, figuring out the first few steps is difficult, but once you immerse yourself, the whole environment is consistent and predictable and each new command that you learn has the potential of exponentially increasing your knowledge. I think there are relatively few interfaces out there that are as internally consistent as vi's.
*I realize there's probably lots of people who will never have to be productive in a text editor. Even if you do a stage 1 install of Gentoo and edit all the config files yourself, you only do that once (or maybe twice if you screw up the first time) and then you're done. No one needs vi to do that. (Although, vim is usually the first thing I emerge when I install Gentoo 'cause I can't stand editing config files in nano.)
Maybe he's scared 'cause if he can do it with one grad student and $200,000, then the next freako bent on destroying the world can do the same thing--only with more money and more grad students he can do evil, instead of good.
You can already do this. In fact, you can do exactly what you suggested: build on one machine, then install binaries everywhere else (with optional testing between build and install). emerge can create a binary package as a side-effect of building a source-package, so you get yourself a server for compilation (or a server farm) and you build/test everything there, and then when you're satisfied that the upgrade won't screw anything up you just tell all the other machines to update themselves from your internal package server. I've never implemented this myself, so I don't know how easy/difficult it would be to manage, but it's easy in theory.
I don't think anybody loosed PJ. She sort of started the whole groklaw thing herself. We may have lost her though. (Sorry, I'm not usually a spelling Nazi, but this double entendre made me laugh.)
True. I'm not trying to say that anything in particular is better than the CLI. I've just seen several comments, here on/. and elsewhere, that try to defend the CLI as the ultimate interface and I don't understand the argument. Now, I like the CLI, and I actively try to learn new tricks to make it more useful for me, but I never fool myself into thinking that it's a newbie-friendly interface. The CLI is only easy to use, or even useful at all, once you have a certain familiarity with it, and that required familiarity only comes through active attempts to find it--at least in my experience.
I happen to like the CLI, but just because you know that
program_name --help
or
man program_name
will give you help doesn't mean that someone who's never used a command line will know that. Also, how do you know which program_name to pick? As another poster pointed out, if you hit <TAB> at a bash prompt, you'll get an offer to list all 2545 options (2447 for me). Which of those 2000+ program_names are you going to plug in to the "man program_name" template in order to learn how to do the job you're trying to do? The grandparent poster is right--CLIs may be "friendly", depending on your definition of friendly, but they sure as hell aren't discoverable, which is probably more important.
We're building a web-based application using lots of JavaScript (lots means ~32k lines or 1,000,000 chars) and Dynamic HTML (boo, hiss goes the crowd) and we have to restart Mozilla once in a while, that is if it doesn't restart itself.... Although, to be fair, IE doesn't exactly manage its memory that well, either.
Slightly OT, I suppose, but you can already achieve the getURL() functionality with both Mozilla and IE in plain HTML + JavaScript pages (I don't know about Opera or Konqueror, or any other non-Gecko based browsers). IE exposed an ActiveX object to its script engine called XmlHttpRequest in about version 5.0 or so, and the Mozilla crew have cloned its functionality.
You can also use the DOM-standard createDocument method that takes a URI as an argument if you don't want to or can't use the Microsoft-inspired XmlHttpRequest but this approach only allows GETs and not POSTs, and it forces the return to be XML, whereas the poorly named XmlHttpRequest gives you access to the entire HTTP response so you can read the plain text if you want to.
The author suggests that for a thing to be called a planet, it should be massive enough for gravity to have made it round, and not massive enough for gravity to have ignited nuclear fusion (that would make it a star). He argues his pointly succinctly, but well, I think.
It goes something like this: "If I have seen further than most, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" - Sir Isaac Newton
ie. I'm not really all that brilliant--I benefit from the previous work of lots of brilliant people. Your (or my, or his, or her) latest patch to the Linux kernel that fixes some buffer overflow, or whatever, probably isn't brilliant, but lots of little patches like that add up to a brillian kernel that scales from some tiny ARM processor up to a huge 128-way NUMA system. (I'm pulling numbers out of the air, but I think you get the point.) Whether you agree or disagree with the overall gist of the article, I think you have to agree with this point in particular, although there's no reason a large, relatively old company like Microsoft can't garner the same benefit from its code base. I read a commentary somewhere on the leaked Windows code and apparently the code quality improves as you get to newer stuff. It would seem today's microserfs are standing on the shoulders of yesterday's.
On my 20th birthday I happened to meet my grade 3-5 teacher in a restaurant over lunch and he remarked how I had survived the social experiment that was my 'gifted class'. It wasn't until I managed to find and keep a girlfriend that I found out I was an arrogant ass-hole (why she's with me I'll never know). Since learning about social skills from my gf, I've discovered that the praise culture that develops in gifted classrooms leads to egomania among the students. Gifted students learn faster/better, but that doesn't make them special. They have other failings that average students may not have. I still have ego problems (I'll do just about anything for praise, and I have real problems internalizing criticism) but I'm better than I was. I don't know how any of what I've said answers your original question, but I guess I'm trying to say that teaching and raising 'gifted' kids is definitely not a solved problem.
I think humbleness is sorely lacking amongst people with talent. When you match humbleness with talent, you get people like Linus Torvalds. Check out this article at Wired. It was linked from the front page of Slashdot a while back but I'm too lazy to look for the link. The first sentence of the article is "Linus Torvalds wants me to believe he's too boring for this story." I kinda doubt someone like ESR would ever be the subject of an article that started out that way. Arrogance is a real problem amongst the geek culture, and I think it's arrogance that stands between many geeks and a thriving social life. I work as a co-op student at a local software company, and I'm fortunate to work with a few bright people--all graduates of computer programmes at a fairly prestigious university. The social lives of my co-workers are just about inversly proportional to their level of arrogance.
Perhaps it is the socially-skilled people who curtail their arrogance, and not the humble people who garner lots of friends--I can't determine causation from correlation--but it's obvious to me that the two attributes go hand in hand, and I think it's telling that my circle of friends has a rather narrow radius whereas my ego sometimes gets stuck on the doorframe.
I agree with your sentiment (saying 'Upgrade' is pretty normal) but your example is flawed. Marc-Christian Petersen just release version 2.2.26 of the Linux kernel. To quote his news post
I am very proud to announce this because it fixes several of security bugs including the last mremap() bug, the longer known hashing exploit possibility in the network stack and/dev/rtc leakage.
Frankly I think this is BS. English didn't come prewritten with words for CD or hyperthreading. Someone made up new words and then explained them to their friends. Other languages do the same thing. There's no fundamental reason that Chinese, Kurdish, or Urdu couldn't expand to explain things like quarks or spam or anything else (assuming they haven't already, which I realise is pretty short-sighted of me). Language is a fairly spontaneous mapping of arbitrary symbols to meaning. There are no restrictions on what language can do.
There's also no reason to believe we'd ever end up with only one language. Perhaps increased mobility and ease of communication will reduce the total number of languages in use, but even in Canada or the US there are significant linguistic differences between neighbouring provinces or states, and the majority of people speak English in both countries. I would even venture to say that people from rural areas in Newfoundland speak nearly a different language than people from rural areas in Louisiana but they'd both tell you they're speaking English. Even as languages converge on each other, there are elements within each language that spin out from the centre and introduce new variations. I don't believe there's any reason to expect that to stop.
That works until you're clour-blind, or blind. If we're supporting unicode characters in our URL bar to make the web more accessible, we can't leave out the people who can't see/hear properly.
Ian
The default colour scheme is black-on-white. The body element's onload event initiates the JavaScript, which converts it to white-on-white, and then fades the text back to black. If you have JavaScript turned off, you'll get black-on-white with no fade-in, so I'd say the accessibility problem is finding someone to invite you in.
The developers may even jump in the cars and drive North a bit. Canada doesn't seem to have any problems with FOSS, and Americans tend to blend in reasonably well in Canada--at least better than in India or China. The entire American software industry could move to a FOSS-friendly country in a day or two if all it took was a drive across the border.
For my regular browsing I use Firebird, but I find developing a web site easier in Mozilla.
I'm working on a project that makes _heavy_ use of JavaScript, and we're pretty much abusing the DOM and CSS specs to stretch the browser. The DOM Inspector and the Venkman Debugger have both been invaluable tools, but they don't seem to work very well, if at all, in Firebird. I would drop Mozilla in a second if Firebird could support me in this way, though.
I going to assume you're not a Canadian, in which case I don't know if you can get Roots equipment, but if you can, I have to recommend the Roots laptop backpack. I don't know if it would do an especially good job of protecting your laptop if you dropped the thing, but it does do an excellent job of preventing you from dropping it in the first place.
Unfortunately, I can't find a link to a website with a pic, but just check out the nearest place that sells Roots stuff. I got mine at a Radio Shack, but Radio Shack's website doesn't mention it in any search results. My bag has lots of pockets, a sleave in the main compartment for my laptop, and, I think most importantly, really comfortable, really durable shoulder straps. I almost never find myself carrying it on one shoulder 'cause it's so much more comfortable on two. Also, the straps are attached so securely that I can't imagine them wearing out before I'm too big and fat to wear the bag. I usually carry around my laptop, a mouse, a mousepad, my power adapter, a 10- or 15-foot network cable, and several schoolbooks. There's plenty of room left for a whack of CDs, a digital camera, or maybe even a USB keyboard so you can skip the tiny laptop keyboard. It's an excellent bag and I'll never carry my laptop in anything but a backback (and hopefully this backpack).
Well, I have a 1.3 GHz Pentium-M laptop now, and OpenOffice only takes a couple of hours (2-3), so I don't mind waiting.
Actually, I might be using a compiler farm with 4+ machines--all the computers in the house are running Gentoo, distcc, and ccache! I forgot about that....
In response to your side note: probably not. I was using Mandrake circa summer of 2002, and whatever kernel was shipping at the time. Gentoo's whole philosophy is 'the sooner the better', so once I put Gentoo on the machine, I was using the latest version of 2.4 that was available (2.4.18, or 2.4.19, I think).
You know, I'm beginning to regret opening my fat mouth in the first place. I've seen quite a few flame wars back and forth between Gentoo users and Gentoo detractors about the usefulness of from-source distros, and the benefits (or lack thereof) of machine-specific optimizations. I just wanted to put my two cents in and say that I'm a Gentoo user, but my reasons have nothing to do with any belief that my system is running millions of times faster than your average RH or Mandrake install--I just like the environment that Gentoo provides, and they have the best damn forum I've ever used. I think there's a possibility that compiling everything with -march=pentium3 -mmmx -Os -etc makes a small difference, but if you go get Mandrakes i686 binaries, are the differences measureable? When you're using bash, and it spends 99% of its time blocked on I/O, do you care that it's blocking as fast as possible? For your average home user, hard drive and memory latencies probably have more impact on the performance of your system than the optimization settings with which you compiled your kernel/shell/window manager/mp3 player, so whether you optimized pretty well with gcc, or as well as humanly possible with icc, what's the difference?
Then there's the whole debate of whether it's worth your time compiling everything in the first place. I recently bought a new machine, so I'm not feeling the pain as much as I used to, but installing a binary is a hell of a lot faster than compiling a tarball. Given my doubts about speed improvements, I have to wonder if I'm just making the compile time back, amortized over the time that I use the software. On my PII 266MHz with 350 meg of RAM, it took over 20 hours to compile OpenOffice! Even if I use OpenOffice everyday for the rest of my life, and my magic compiler has squeezed every last ounce of performance out of OpenOffice, I doubt I'll ever make those 20 hours back. And you can forget about upgrading to version 1.1.
Ian, a happy, only slightly optimized, Gentoo user
My point was that I attribute the snappiness of my Gentoo box to the lack of extra services that I have running, rather than the fact it's all been compiled from source. Since I don't think compiling from source (with gcc) has much to do with improved performance, I concluded that substituting another, possibly better compiler wouldn't make much of a difference, either.
Admittedly, my "conclusions" are not based on any real facts, so there's a pretty good chance I'm wrong, but even if I am, what does -march have to do with that?
I've not tried it, but there is a USE flag to use icc instead of gcc if you have it, so it's supposed to be drop-in-and-tweak-a-flag. As for benefits, who knows? I know my gentoo box feels snappier than the same box running Mandrake or RedHat, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's only snappier 'cause it's running fewer deamons--I doubt that source-based distros really get you much more performance, but I have no numbers to back up either side of the argument--so if compiling from source with gcc doesn't give you any benefits, I doubt using icc would be any better.
To be honest with you, I don't remember OS9. I've only used Macs in art class in highschool (most recently about 5 or 6 years ago now). They sucked, but it was because the teachers didn't know what they were doing, and the program was underfunded, so there was no chance the machines could be properly configured. I don't think I have ever used a Mac in a fair trial. I was merely commenting on Windows' inability to stay booted for any significant amount of time--although it was with tongue in cheek--I've heard XP and 2000 can stay up and stable for a reasonable length of time. I started on DOS 2.x, then DOS 3.2, then Windows 3.1, then Windows 95, then Windows 98, and now GNU/Linux. I'm much happier now.... Although, if I had several grand lying around, I'd probably investigate getting a Mac of some sort. OSX looks damn pretty, and I love the way it's supposed to "just work".
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that vi is a pain in the ass to learn (I don't know anything about emacs, I started on vi and stuck with it). The thing is, now that I've warped my mind enough to use vi semi-productively, I find interfaces like pico, nano, Eclipse's Java editor, etc. to be very unproductive. Granted, a new user probably needs a text editor that is as similar to vi as pink fluff is to a Mac truck, but *if* a new user ever wants to be really productive in a text editor*, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they probably have to learn something like vi or emacs (are there any other cryptic programmer's text editors out there?). Now that I've done the mental contortionist routine that is required to memorize (some of) vi's command set, I find I can do in 1 or 2 keystrokes what takes 5 in most "plain" editors, and being a programmer by trade, that adds up to a lot of key strokes.
In fact, I would argue that vi is not as much of a usability *nightmare* as you claim (perhaps just a bad dream with a happy ending). Like I said above, vi is a royal PITA to learn, and that's a big negative, but if you overcome that difficulty, vi's interface is very consistent. For example, the delete and change commands both take movement modifiers in exactly the same way. Suppose you already know that 'd' means delete and that 'dw' means delete the next word. As soon as you learn 'c' means change, then you can apply your knowledge of 'd' and figure out that 'cw' means change the next word. Also, as soon as you learn that you can prefix 'w' with a number, n, to mean n words, you can apply that to the 'd' and 'c' commands to get 'd2w' and 'c2w' that mean 'delete the next two words' and 'change the next two words', respectively. Yeah, figuring out the first few steps is difficult, but once you immerse yourself, the whole environment is consistent and predictable and each new command that you learn has the potential of exponentially increasing your knowledge. I think there are relatively few interfaces out there that are as internally consistent as vi's.
*I realize there's probably lots of people who will never have to be productive in a text editor. Even if you do a stage 1 install of Gentoo and edit all the config files yourself, you only do that once (or maybe twice if you screw up the first time) and then you're done. No one needs vi to do that. (Although, vim is usually the first thing I emerge when I install Gentoo 'cause I can't stand editing config files in nano.)
Ian
Maybe he's scared 'cause if he can do it with one grad student and $200,000, then the next freako bent on destroying the world can do the same thing--only with more money and more grad students he can do evil, instead of good.
Ian
You can already do this. In fact, you can do exactly what you suggested: build on one machine, then install binaries everywhere else (with optional testing between build and install). emerge can create a binary package as a side-effect of building a source-package, so you get yourself a server for compilation (or a server farm) and you build/test everything there, and then when you're satisfied that the upgrade won't screw anything up you just tell all the other machines to update themselves from your internal package server. I've never implemented this myself, so I don't know how easy/difficult it would be to manage, but it's easy in theory.
Ian
I don't think anybody loosed PJ. She sort of started the whole groklaw thing herself. We may have lost her though. (Sorry, I'm not usually a spelling Nazi, but this double entendre made me laugh.)
True. I'm not trying to say that anything in particular is better than the CLI. I've just seen several comments, here on /. and elsewhere, that try to defend the CLI as the ultimate interface and I don't understand the argument. Now, I like the CLI, and I actively try to learn new tricks to make it more useful for me, but I never fool myself into thinking that it's a newbie-friendly interface. The CLI is only easy to use, or even useful at all, once you have a certain familiarity with it, and that required familiarity only comes through active attempts to find it--at least in my experience.
Ian
I happen to like the CLI, but just because you know that
or will give you help doesn't mean that someone who's never used a command line will know that. Also, how do you know which program_name to pick? As another poster pointed out, if you hit <TAB> at a bash prompt, you'll get an offer to list all 2545 options (2447 for me). Which of those 2000+ program_names are you going to plug in to the "man program_name" template in order to learn how to do the job you're trying to do? The grandparent poster is right--CLIs may be "friendly", depending on your definition of friendly, but they sure as hell aren't discoverable, which is probably more important.Ian
We're building a web-based application using lots of JavaScript (lots means ~32k lines or 1,000,000 chars) and Dynamic HTML (boo, hiss goes the crowd) and we have to restart Mozilla once in a while, that is if it doesn't restart itself.... Although, to be fair, IE doesn't exactly manage its memory that well, either.
Slightly OT, I suppose, but you can already achieve the getURL() functionality with both Mozilla and IE in plain HTML + JavaScript pages (I don't know about Opera or Konqueror, or any other non-Gecko based browsers). IE exposed an ActiveX object to its script engine called XmlHttpRequest in about version 5.0 or so, and the Mozilla crew have cloned its functionality.
Some marketroids have called this 'inner browsing'.
Check out Microsoft's documentation on the XmlHttpRequest object, or Mozilla's version of the same thing.
Also see this document entitled Using the XML HTTP Request object.
You can also use the DOM-standard createDocument method that takes a URI as an argument if you don't want to or can't use the Microsoft-inspired XmlHttpRequest but this approach only allows GETs and not POSTs, and it forces the return to be XML, whereas the poorly named XmlHttpRequest gives you access to the entire HTTP response so you can read the plain text if you want to.
Ian
Did you even RTFA?
Ahh yes. I must be new.
The author suggests that for a thing to be called a planet, it should be massive enough for gravity to have made it round, and not massive enough for gravity to have ignited nuclear fusion (that would make it a star). He argues his pointly succinctly, but well, I think.
Ian
It goes something like this:
"If I have seen further than most, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" - Sir Isaac Newton
ie. I'm not really all that brilliant--I benefit from the previous work of lots of brilliant people. Your (or my, or his, or her) latest patch to the Linux kernel that fixes some buffer overflow, or whatever, probably isn't brilliant, but lots of little patches like that add up to a brillian kernel that scales from some tiny ARM processor up to a huge 128-way NUMA system. (I'm pulling numbers out of the air, but I think you get the point.) Whether you agree or disagree with the overall gist of the article, I think you have to agree with this point in particular, although there's no reason a large, relatively old company like Microsoft can't garner the same benefit from its code base. I read a commentary somewhere on the leaked Windows code and apparently the code quality improves as you get to newer stuff. It would seem today's microserfs are standing on the shoulders of yesterday's.
Ian
On my 20th birthday I happened to meet my grade 3-5 teacher in a restaurant over lunch and he remarked how I had survived the social experiment that was my 'gifted class'. It wasn't until I managed to find and keep a girlfriend that I found out I was an arrogant ass-hole (why she's with me I'll never know). Since learning about social skills from my gf, I've discovered that the praise culture that develops in gifted classrooms leads to egomania among the students. Gifted students learn faster/better, but that doesn't make them special. They have other failings that average students may not have. I still have ego problems (I'll do just about anything for praise, and I have real problems internalizing criticism) but I'm better than I was. I don't know how any of what I've said answers your original question, but I guess I'm trying to say that teaching and raising 'gifted' kids is definitely not a solved problem.
I think humbleness is sorely lacking amongst people with talent. When you match humbleness with talent, you get people like Linus Torvalds. Check out this article at Wired. It was linked from the front page of Slashdot a while back but I'm too lazy to look for the link. The first sentence of the article is "Linus Torvalds wants me to believe he's too boring for this story." I kinda doubt someone like ESR would ever be the subject of an article that started out that way. Arrogance is a real problem amongst the geek culture, and I think it's arrogance that stands between many geeks and a thriving social life. I work as a co-op student at a local software company, and I'm fortunate to work with a few bright people--all graduates of computer programmes at a fairly prestigious university. The social lives of my co-workers are just about inversly proportional to their level of arrogance.
Perhaps it is the socially-skilled people who curtail their arrogance, and not the humble people who garner lots of friends--I can't determine causation from correlation--but it's obvious to me that the two attributes go hand in hand, and I think it's telling that my circle of friends has a rather narrow radius whereas my ego sometimes gets stuck on the doorframe.
Ian
I agree with your sentiment (saying 'Upgrade' is pretty normal) but your example is flawed. Marc-Christian Petersen just release version 2.2.26 of the Linux kernel. To quote his news post
Ian
Frankly I think this is BS. English didn't come prewritten with words for CD or hyperthreading. Someone made up new words and then explained them to their friends. Other languages do the same thing. There's no fundamental reason that Chinese, Kurdish, or Urdu couldn't expand to explain things like quarks or spam or anything else (assuming they haven't already, which I realise is pretty short-sighted of me). Language is a fairly spontaneous mapping of arbitrary symbols to meaning. There are no restrictions on what language can do.
There's also no reason to believe we'd ever end up with only one language. Perhaps increased mobility and ease of communication will reduce the total number of languages in use, but even in Canada or the US there are significant linguistic differences between neighbouring provinces or states, and the majority of people speak English in both countries. I would even venture to say that people from rural areas in Newfoundland speak nearly a different language than people from rural areas in Louisiana but they'd both tell you they're speaking English. Even as languages converge on each other, there are elements within each language that spin out from the centre and introduce new variations. I don't believe there's any reason to expect that to stop.
Ian
That's not valid XML, so I doubt they'd sue you over it....
...but isn't it theorems that are proven correct and theories that might be wrong?
That works until you're clour-blind, or blind. If we're supporting unicode characters in our URL bar to make the web more accessible, we can't leave out the people who can't see/hear properly.
Ian
The default colour scheme is black-on-white. The body element's onload event initiates the JavaScript, which converts it to white-on-white, and then fades the text back to black. If you have JavaScript turned off, you'll get black-on-white with no fade-in, so I'd say the accessibility problem is finding someone to invite you in.
Ian
The developers may even jump in the cars and drive North a bit. Canada doesn't seem to have any problems with FOSS, and Americans tend to blend in reasonably well in Canada--at least better than in India or China. The entire American software industry could move to a FOSS-friendly country in a day or two if all it took was a drive across the border.
Ian
For my regular browsing I use Firebird, but I find developing a web site easier in Mozilla.
I'm working on a project that makes _heavy_ use of JavaScript, and we're pretty much abusing the DOM and CSS specs to stretch the browser. The DOM Inspector and the Venkman Debugger have both been invaluable tools, but they don't seem to work very well, if at all, in Firebird. I would drop Mozilla in a second if Firebird could support me in this way, though.
Ian
I going to assume you're not a Canadian, in which case I don't know if you can get Roots equipment, but if you can, I have to recommend the Roots laptop backpack. I don't know if it would do an especially good job of protecting your laptop if you dropped the thing, but it does do an excellent job of preventing you from dropping it in the first place.
Unfortunately, I can't find a link to a website with a pic, but just check out the nearest place that sells Roots stuff. I got mine at a Radio Shack, but Radio Shack's website doesn't mention it in any search results. My bag has lots of pockets, a sleave in the main compartment for my laptop, and, I think most importantly, really comfortable, really durable shoulder straps. I almost never find myself carrying it on one shoulder 'cause it's so much more comfortable on two. Also, the straps are attached so securely that I can't imagine them wearing out before I'm too big and fat to wear the bag. I usually carry around my laptop, a mouse, a mousepad, my power adapter, a 10- or 15-foot network cable, and several schoolbooks. There's plenty of room left for a whack of CDs, a digital camera, or maybe even a USB keyboard so you can skip the tiny laptop keyboard. It's an excellent bag and I'll never carry my laptop in anything but a backback (and hopefully this backpack).
Ian
Well, I have a 1.3 GHz Pentium-M laptop now, and OpenOffice only takes a couple of hours (2-3), so I don't mind waiting.
Actually, I might be using a compiler farm with 4+ machines--all the computers in the house are running Gentoo, distcc, and ccache! I forgot about that....
Ian
In response to your side note: probably not. I was using Mandrake circa summer of 2002, and whatever kernel was shipping at the time. Gentoo's whole philosophy is 'the sooner the better', so once I put Gentoo on the machine, I was using the latest version of 2.4 that was available (2.4.18, or 2.4.19, I think).
You know, I'm beginning to regret opening my fat mouth in the first place. I've seen quite a few flame wars back and forth between Gentoo users and Gentoo detractors about the usefulness of from-source distros, and the benefits (or lack thereof) of machine-specific optimizations. I just wanted to put my two cents in and say that I'm a Gentoo user, but my reasons have nothing to do with any belief that my system is running millions of times faster than your average RH or Mandrake install--I just like the environment that Gentoo provides, and they have the best damn forum I've ever used. I think there's a possibility that compiling everything with -march=pentium3 -mmmx -Os -etc makes a small difference, but if you go get Mandrakes i686 binaries, are the differences measureable? When you're using bash, and it spends 99% of its time blocked on I/O, do you care that it's blocking as fast as possible? For your average home user, hard drive and memory latencies probably have more impact on the performance of your system than the optimization settings with which you compiled your kernel/shell/window manager/mp3 player, so whether you optimized pretty well with gcc, or as well as humanly possible with icc, what's the difference?
Then there's the whole debate of whether it's worth your time compiling everything in the first place. I recently bought a new machine, so I'm not feeling the pain as much as I used to, but installing a binary is a hell of a lot faster than compiling a tarball. Given my doubts about speed improvements, I have to wonder if I'm just making the compile time back, amortized over the time that I use the software. On my PII 266MHz with 350 meg of RAM, it took over 20 hours to compile OpenOffice! Even if I use OpenOffice everyday for the rest of my life, and my magic compiler has squeezed every last ounce of performance out of OpenOffice, I doubt I'll ever make those 20 hours back. And you can forget about upgrading to version 1.1.
Ian, a happy, only slightly optimized, Gentoo user
I don't understand your post.
My point was that I attribute the snappiness of my Gentoo box to the lack of extra services that I have running, rather than the fact it's all been compiled from source. Since I don't think compiling from source (with gcc) has much to do with improved performance, I concluded that substituting another, possibly better compiler wouldn't make much of a difference, either.
Admittedly, my "conclusions" are not based on any real facts, so there's a pretty good chance I'm wrong, but even if I am, what does -march have to do with that?
Ian
I've not tried it, but there is a USE flag to use icc instead of gcc if you have it, so it's supposed to be drop-in-and-tweak-a-flag. As for benefits, who knows? I know my gentoo box feels snappier than the same box running Mandrake or RedHat, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's only snappier 'cause it's running fewer deamons--I doubt that source-based distros really get you much more performance, but I have no numbers to back up either side of the argument--so if compiling from source with gcc doesn't give you any benefits, I doubt using icc would be any better.
To be honest with you, I don't remember OS9. I've only used Macs in art class in highschool (most recently about 5 or 6 years ago now). They sucked, but it was because the teachers didn't know what they were doing, and the program was underfunded, so there was no chance the machines could be properly configured. I don't think I have ever used a Mac in a fair trial. I was merely commenting on Windows' inability to stay booted for any significant amount of time--although it was with tongue in cheek--I've heard XP and 2000 can stay up and stable for a reasonable length of time. I started on DOS 2.x, then DOS 3.2, then Windows 3.1, then Windows 95, then Windows 98, and now GNU/Linux. I'm much happier now.... Although, if I had several grand lying around, I'd probably investigate getting a Mac of some sort. OSX looks damn pretty, and I love the way it's supposed to "just work".
Ian