Actually, the current good 3D cards just need support for higher 2D resolutions as newer displays become available, not "more 2-D computing power". Basically, 2D performance is primarily limited by 2D fill rate, which in turn is determined largely by (graphics-card) memory bandwidth.
3D cards have continued to push the graphics memory bandwidth curve upwards, so I'm not too concerned that 2D cards "won't be fast enough." Cards nowdays can draw 2D graphics to the frame buffer about 10-1000x faster than the displays can support them using bltblt and similar 2D fill operations. (If you don't believe me, go look at the megapixel fill rates of 2D and 3D cards.) Which brings me to my next point.
There's no competing on 2D because its irrelevant to the consumer. How so? Well, what's the difference between 500 fps 2D and 1000 fps to the naked eye? Answer: nothing, both are faster than any display device (monitor) can support.
Sometimes marketeers try to promote (with the help of ignorant journalists) some artificial 2D performance benchmark comparisons, but I haven't seen any in the last 5 years that made a smidgen of difference in ordinary or even extraordinary human usage scenarios.
I'll agree that Display PDF (and its predecessor Display PostScript) does soak up lots of horsepower, since to display anything means you have to execute an arbitrary program written in a variant of the PostScript language. It'll be interesting to see if any graphics cards attempt to accelerate it rather than just tossing that job to the CPU. Display PDF could make it easier to write graphics applications since it provides a nice library of 2D vector and fill operations, and I'm glad Apple is licensing rather than reinventing the wheel, but you'll never see it take off on the PC because Microsoft is intent on retaining control of those operations within ActiveX.
The article seemed to be set in Conway's office which is on the campus of Princeton University in the US. So I presumed US pennies. UK pennies might very well be different though, true.
Did anyone else check out the "Mathemagician" article about Conway at the bottom of the cited web page?
I did, and it ends in an intriguing claim (and demonstration) from Conway that if one stands pennies on their side on a table, and bumps the table, all the pennies will land heads-up. And that if spun, pennies will land 2/3 of the time tails up. (Appropriate physics reasons are given for the surprising behavior.)
I tried this with a sample of 10-20 pennies from my jar and was not able to duplicate the findings. (In the 2 trials I had patience for, I got heads up 2/3 of the time with both table-thumping and coin-spinning.) I'd have done more trials but I was at work, albeit on a dinner break.;) Has anyone else heard of this or checked it out?
nforce is also the first chipset on Intel I remember seeing with a
crossbar memory architecture, with point-to-point connections between individual memory banks and I/O devices and CPU.
Sun's UPA bus architecture works this way, as do various proprietary SGI, IBM, and HP(?) workstation and server busses with various minor distinctions among them. AGP, in a sense, has kinda provided a "good enough" variant of this by segmenting graphics to a separate bus, but a crossbar approach is more general solution for the same problem- maximizing bandwidth utilization without the data traffic conflicts that arise in bus-based solutions.
Besides being better/faster/cheaper, one aspect of the new nforce chipset is totally novel:
ability to guarantee bandwidth and latency for specific I/O requests (what they're calling "StreamThru"), a feature previously only available on mid-range (Octane) and high-end SGI systems with the XIO bus.
This can be quite handy for things like handling multiple video streams without dropping frames, or mixing video with other I/O requests. I wonder if there are other cool things you could do once you can allocate bandwidth for I/O and have said allocations enforced in hardware?
I've never seen this capability on the Intel platform before. It was a cutting-edge SGI feature back in 1996 or so. Sun/HP/IBM/Intel were never concerned enough about video to implement this on their workstations, but I do recall some discussion about whether it'd be in Infiniband or not (don't remember the outcome).
Dude, you have got to be trolling. But assuming you aren't... Communism is forced sharing ("to each according to his need"), open source is voluntary. Also, the approach of western academia, sharing ideas and peer review, which underlies open source is hardly "communist."
I'd agree with you that building and then selling GPL-based software for a profit is not a particularly attractive business model (Cygnus has done OK, but margins aren't as lucrative as a pure software sale, and ramping up that sort of business means ramping up people (because it's really a service business, not a software business.))
But this ignores a subtle but critical distinction. You may not be able to sell software, per se, but you can sell a software-based service. Which is exactly what legions of dot-coms that use Apache and other open source tools. And which is exactly where Microsoft is headed with.NET.
A software service has equal leverage as a business model to a software sale, and a more predictable revenue stream.
One feature I'd like to see is something that'd make it easier for me to write a script to parse the main page and extract information about the stories there. While RSS XML lets me see story title, I'd like to be able to easily parse a few other things like the date the story was posted (this may be there now, I forget), the number of comments on the story posted so far, and preferrably, the number of comments rated at a certain moderation level.
That's what *I* see when I go to the main slashdot page. But that's not what RSS gives me and it turns out to be kludgy to write a client tool that does all the right pattern matching for all other slash-based but not slashdot sites.
I have one of those permanent college addresses. To avoid lifetime spam, I only hand it out personally to acquaintances or friends I would like to hear from anytime in the future, but who I don't expect to keep track of my potentally changing main email addresses.
Seems like it'd also be a useful weak authentication tool- to prove to employers or whoever that you really did go to the school you claim to be from...
What I find amusing that neither Mundie nor Cox quite point out is the difference between a software sales (or software rental) business model (Microsoft and its many ISVs) and a software development service model (as Cox advocates). It's not just selling versus giving away code. It's about selling software versus selling services. Could someone explain to me why selling services is a better business for a person or business wanting to develop software? My mental internal set of tradeoffs looks more like so:
Software sales- write once, sell a zillion copies, further revenue depends on reproducing bits and selling more of them which is relatively easy, high leverage, high revenues per employee, high return on capital
Software development- write once, paid once, further revenue depends on the ability to write and ship more code-- something notoriously difficult and full of uncertainty, low leverage, revenues per employee capped by individual programmer productivity and billable hours, marginal return on capital.
To sum up, it's a lot better business to sell millions of copies of the same thing than to go try to develop millions of one-off pieces of software. Right? And open source software-development-as-a-service Cox is talking about sure seems to me to be the latter.
I haven't seen an open source advocate compellingly address this issue.
--LinuxParanoid, paranoid that Linux has some rough road ahead...
there's plenty of scientists out there much smarter than I am who are embarassed to try to even explain how we're missing out on the action in the higher echelons of dimentionality...
Look, I agree with you in theory, but I'm afraid that practically speaking, you're kinda wrong.
Screenshots only work if the OS doesn't clamp down on the ability to make them. And there aren't many OS manufacturers to convince to get your policy adopted by 90+% of consumers...
And don't expect those input/output jacks in your computer to remain sacrosanct for long if there's big bucks on the table. Go do a search on "Macrovision" to see what's already adopted in millions of VCR jacks for preventing that sort of thing. For bonus points, cross-reference Firewire. Sure you can take photographs of your screen or tape-record your speakers. But that's not the point.
It's all about barriers-to-entry. Or in this case barriers-to-copy, barriers-to-distribute, and barriers-to-publicize.
Remember the following simple table, bulletized since/. doesn't let me do HTML tables:
Barriers-to-copy: Copyright? Check. DMCA-no-reverse-engineering? Check. Increase the proportion of technology components protecting copying by requiring reverse engineering? Ongoing, minor consumer resistance at best sighted so far, marketing and upgrades will take care of the rest...
Barriers-to-distribute: Suing webserver owners? Check. Shutting down napster? Check. Shutting down gnutella/freenet? Umm, working on that but if all else fails street-fight with denial of service- pay someone to pollute popular servers with bad content.
Barriers-to-publicize: Contributory-copyright-infringement law? Check. Intimidate press by suing people who link to workarounds like 2600? Check. Shut down highly publicized services with said law like napster? Check. Fragment any potential successor networks so no one approach gets too much publicity? In progress (but if network effects overrides these efforts, must insure other barriers are up)
Checkmate. Game over man, game over.
"Freedom for one" is not "freedom for all". And freedom for only a repressive-law-disobeying techno-elite is no freedom at all. We are destined to lose it very soon if we don't organize to make our voices heard very big and very fast. Do something. I'd start with the EFF and your congressperson.
--LinuxParanoid, thinking about adding a new alias, RIAAParanoid...
"only the paranoid survive"... and I don't think most Linux proponents are paranoid enough
Is there a URL with any details on the results from your interoperability lab? Or a description of what VC, VP stand for and might refer to? (And hints about how to find values for a DSL-ISP you are considering using?)
Basic (1X) AGP has the same bandwidth as 66 MHz 64-bit PCI, as found in servers and stuff; ~0.5 GBps.
Minor technical correction: Basic (1x) AGP is ~266 MB/sec, while the now-standard AGP 2x is ~533 MB/sec and the AGP 4x/AGP Pro is ~1000 MB/sec. For brief but nice technical details, check here.
The totally flawed premise is that A) interruption-based advertising will somehow lead to higher click-throughs than banner ads-- why would that be true? And B) that Flash ads on a computer are like commercials on TV. Nope! Sorry, people like me who are impatient will just pop open another browser window and start loading/reading something else. Unlike TV, I don't even risk losing what I wanted to see when "changing channels" aka "popping new web pages".
Sigh. More dumb wishful thinking. What the Internet ad guys should really do is get better tracking stats of how much time users's eyes spend viewing paper-based magazine ads or newspaper ads. Then do a nice correlation concluding that Internet ads get you nearly as many eyeball-seconds/impressions for a much lower cost.
A registry setting allowing one to go over 56k doesn't exactly comfort me. Once content controls are built and integrated into Microsoft products, the controls are no longer in my hands but in Microsoft's.
Microsoft can easily, once the basic mechanism is coded and in place, at any time and with any "Windows Update" patch (now automated?) change the underlying DLLs or OS code to reject registry settings above, say, 56k if its in their interest to do so.
The Peer-to-Peer compute-cycle companies have already started folding. (And I don't mean proteins.) The number of commercial businesses that could rake in more dough if they just had more compute cycles (aka a Beowulf cluster or these more loosely coupled P2P variants) is not too many.
For example, Popular Power seems to have closed their company and website sometime in the last few weeks. A shame too, as their UI allowed you to easily choose what percentage of your CPU cycles were for-profit and what were for non-profit projects.
SGI's graphics libraries used to be called "GL" (and also "IrisGL") before they were modified slightly and opened up to become "OpenGL". I think all the function names begin with gl_.
I don't see any signs that SGI is going anybody with the word "Open" in their name. It looks like they are pursuing "Open[A-Z]L", due in part to being the prime creators of OpenGL and OpenML. And in all fairness, when I first saw OpenAL come out, it did seem like people were trying to portray it as "like OpenGL (i.e. in coolness, ubiquity, useful-abstraction-ness) but for audio". I wouldn't say that it was *confusing*, but it was trying a bit to play off someone else's already-established reputation. I don't claim to understand what the legal thresholds for similarity are.
Something to keep in mind before you bash SGI.
--LP, who has used SGI machines in past work but has no other connection with them
Well, perhaps my expectations have dropped too low given problems I've had in the past, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Telocity (my ISP on top of Northpoint) had, within 3 days, managed to get a contract with a national dial-up provider so that customers like me could still get on the 'net. Unlimited dial-up, no extra charge and they aren't charging us until they get DSL back up. Good thing, too, since my backup dialup access method only provides 10 hrs/month without those pesky hourly fees...
They say they'll have another DSL carrier for us in 3 weeks or so.
Why did you change the name from 'UO2?' It's a sequel to Ultima Online, right?
Actually, 'Ultima Worlds Online: Origin' is not a sequel to Ultima Online. It is a very different product, blending medieval, ancient and futuristic civilizations in a really cool and bizarre 3D world. The combat and motion capture technology is really outstanding, and we have monsters co-designed by Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn.
One wonders whether, when Richard Garriot left in March 2000 he took some rights to the "Ultima" trademark with him...
...George cannot expect to send private email through government network.
I'm skeptical- this can't be the sole issue... If it was just the government-owns-the-network problem, I'm sure for any politician at that level, it'd be worth their time to work around that.
For example, couldn't George pay for his own phone line and simply dialup AOL on his own personal laptop? That's not a government network by any stretch of the imagination.
Perhaps the issue is that any actions he conducts on governmental premises fall under some legal restrictions (perhaps the Hatch Act that Gore violated but claimed no-controlling-legal-authority under)? Anyone know what's really going on here, legally?
The article started talking in ambiguous way about certain conveniences (such as "!!") without clearly saying whether or not they were unique to zsh. ("!!" is available in many shells.) Then it went on to talk about various types of tab completion, some of which at least used to be unique to zsh. (I'm not sure if tcsh or ksh have copied them all yet.) When I first used zsh 7 years ago, it basically mimicked and combined all the best ideas from other shells and added quite a few new ones (Rprompt mentioned in the article was new i think, and nice things like ** recursive directory expansion which wasn't mentioned, etc.) Since then, other shells have copied some ideas back. I'm not really sure where it all stands now, and you are correct, that article didn't really address that point.
You are stuck on the "picture is worth a 1000 words" meme. It's not necessarily true. This is why people manipulate spoken and written text rather than using pictures all the time. Each has their place.
It's very hard to automate repeated actions in a GUI, but easy to say "do this action 1000 times with this variation" on a command line.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the current good 3D cards just need support for higher 2D resolutions as newer displays become available, not "more 2-D computing power". Basically, 2D performance is primarily limited by 2D fill rate, which in turn is determined largely by (graphics-card) memory bandwidth.
3D cards have continued to push the graphics memory bandwidth curve upwards, so I'm not too concerned that 2D cards "won't be fast enough." Cards nowdays can draw 2D graphics to the frame buffer about 10-1000x faster than the displays can support them using bltblt and similar 2D fill operations. (If you don't believe me, go look at the megapixel fill rates of 2D and 3D cards.) Which brings me to my next point.
There's no competing on 2D because its irrelevant to the consumer. How so? Well, what's the difference between 500 fps 2D and 1000 fps to the naked eye? Answer: nothing, both are faster than any display device (monitor) can support.
Sometimes marketeers try to promote (with the help of ignorant journalists) some artificial 2D performance benchmark comparisons, but I haven't seen any in the last 5 years that made a smidgen of difference in ordinary or even extraordinary human usage scenarios.
I'll agree that Display PDF (and its predecessor Display PostScript) does soak up lots of horsepower, since to display anything means you have to execute an arbitrary program written in a variant of the PostScript language. It'll be interesting to see if any graphics cards attempt to accelerate it rather than just tossing that job to the CPU. Display PDF could make it easier to write graphics applications since it provides a nice library of 2D vector and fill operations, and I'm glad Apple is licensing rather than reinventing the wheel, but you'll never see it take off on the PC because Microsoft is intent on retaining control of those operations within ActiveX.
--LP, formerly a graphics hardware analyst
The article seemed to be set in Conway's office which is on the campus of Princeton University in the US. So I presumed US pennies. UK pennies might very well be different though, true.
(laugh) oops!
I did, and it ends in an intriguing claim (and demonstration) from Conway that if one stands pennies on their side on a table, and bumps the table, all the pennies will land heads-up. And that if spun, pennies will land 2/3 of the time tails up. (Appropriate physics reasons are given for the surprising behavior.)
I tried this with a sample of 10-20 pennies from my jar and was not able to duplicate the findings. (In the 2 trials I had patience for, I got heads up 2/3 of the time with both table-thumping and coin-spinning.) I'd have done more trials but I was at work, albeit on a dinner break. ;) Has anyone else heard of this or checked it out?
--LP
- crossbar memory architecture, with point-to-point connections between individual memory banks and I/O devices and CPU.
Sun's UPA bus architecture works this way, as do various proprietary SGI, IBM, and HP(?) workstation and server busses with various minor distinctions among them. AGP, in a sense, has kinda provided a "good enough" variant of this by segmenting graphics to a separate bus, but a crossbar approach is more general solution for the same problem- maximizing bandwidth utilization without the data traffic conflicts that arise in bus-based solutions.--LP
- ability to guarantee bandwidth and latency for specific I/O requests (what they're calling "StreamThru"), a feature previously only available on mid-range (Octane) and high-end SGI systems with the XIO bus.
This can be quite handy for things like handling multiple video streams without dropping frames, or mixing video with other I/O requests. I wonder if there are other cool things you could do once you can allocate bandwidth for I/O and have said allocations enforced in hardware?I've never seen this capability on the Intel platform before. It was a cutting-edge SGI feature back in 1996 or so. Sun/HP/IBM/Intel were never concerned enough about video to implement this on their workstations, but I do recall some discussion about whether it'd be in Infiniband or not (don't remember the outcome).
--LP
Dude, you have got to be trolling. But assuming you aren't... Communism is forced sharing ("to each according to his need"), open source is voluntary. Also, the approach of western academia, sharing ideas and peer review, which underlies open source is hardly "communist."
Community and communism are not the same thing.
--LP
I'd agree with you that building and then selling GPL-based software for a profit is not a particularly attractive business model (Cygnus has done OK, but margins aren't as lucrative as a pure software sale, and ramping up that sort of business means ramping up people (because it's really a service business, not a software business.))
.NET.
But this ignores a subtle but critical distinction. You may not be able to sell software, per se, but you can sell a software-based service. Which is exactly what legions of dot-coms that use Apache and other open source tools. And which is exactly where Microsoft is headed with
A software service has equal leverage as a business model to a software sale, and a more predictable revenue stream.
--LP
One feature I'd like to see is something that'd make it easier for me to write a script to parse the main page and extract information about the stories there. While RSS XML lets me see story title, I'd like to be able to easily parse a few other things like the date the story was posted (this may be there now, I forget), the number of comments on the story posted so far, and preferrably, the number of comments rated at a certain moderation level.
That's what *I* see when I go to the main slashdot page. But that's not what RSS gives me and it turns out to be kludgy to write a client tool that does all the right pattern matching for all other slash-based but not slashdot sites.
Just my $0.02.
--LP
I have one of those permanent college addresses. To avoid lifetime spam, I only hand it out personally to acquaintances or friends I would like to hear from anytime in the future, but who I don't expect to keep track of my potentally changing main email addresses.
Seems like it'd also be a useful weak authentication tool- to prove to employers or whoever that you really did go to the school you claim to be from...
Software sales- write once, sell a zillion copies, further revenue depends on reproducing bits and selling more of them which is relatively easy, high leverage, high revenues per employee, high return on capital
Software development- write once, paid once, further revenue depends on the ability to write and ship more code-- something notoriously difficult and full of uncertainty, low leverage, revenues per employee capped by individual programmer productivity and billable hours, marginal return on capital.
To sum up, it's a lot better business to sell millions of copies of the same thing than to go try to develop millions of one-off pieces of software. Right? And open source software-development-as-a-service Cox is talking about sure seems to me to be the latter.
I haven't seen an open source advocate compellingly address this issue.
--LinuxParanoid, paranoid that Linux has some rough road ahead...
Along these lines, you might want to check out a scientist bold enough to consider the non-3+1-dimension alternatives and attempt to explain why they wouldn't 'work' for universes containing observers. I wouldn't consider it proof, but I found it to be a cool provocative paper explaining perhaps why we have 3 spacial and 1 temporal dimension. --LP
Screenshots only work if the OS doesn't clamp down on the ability to make them. And there aren't many OS manufacturers to convince to get your policy adopted by 90+% of consumers...
And don't expect those input/output jacks in your computer to remain sacrosanct for long if there's big bucks on the table. Go do a search on "Macrovision" to see what's already adopted in millions of VCR jacks for preventing that sort of thing. For bonus points, cross-reference Firewire. Sure you can take photographs of your screen or tape-record your speakers. But that's not the point.
It's all about barriers-to-entry. Or in this case barriers-to-copy, barriers-to-distribute, and barriers-to-publicize.
Remember the following simple table, bulletized since /. doesn't let me do HTML tables:
Barriers-to-copy: Copyright? Check. DMCA-no-reverse-engineering? Check. Increase the proportion of technology components protecting copying by requiring reverse engineering? Ongoing, minor consumer resistance at best sighted so far, marketing and upgrades will take care of the rest...
Barriers-to-distribute: Suing webserver owners? Check. Shutting down napster? Check. Shutting down gnutella/freenet? Umm, working on that but if all else fails street-fight with denial of service- pay someone to pollute popular servers with bad content.
Barriers-to-publicize: Contributory-copyright-infringement law? Check. Intimidate press by suing people who link to workarounds like 2600? Check. Shut down highly publicized services with said law like napster? Check. Fragment any potential successor networks so no one approach gets too much publicity? In progress (but if network effects overrides these efforts, must insure other barriers are up)
Checkmate. Game over man, game over.
"Freedom for one" is not "freedom for all". And freedom for only a repressive-law-disobeying techno-elite is no freedom at all. We are destined to lose it very soon if we don't organize to make our voices heard very big and very fast. Do something. I'd start with the EFF and your congressperson.
--LinuxParanoid, thinking about adding a new alias, RIAAParanoid...
"only the paranoid survive" ... and I don't think most Linux proponents are paranoid enough
Is there a URL with any details on the results from your interoperability lab? Or a description of what VC, VP stand for and might refer to? (And hints about how to find values for a DSL-ISP you are considering using?)
Minor technical correction: Basic (1x) AGP is ~266 MB/sec, while the now-standard AGP 2x is ~533 MB/sec and the AGP 4x/AGP Pro is ~1000 MB/sec. For brief but nice technical details, check here.
--LP
The totally flawed premise is that A) interruption-based advertising will somehow lead to higher click-throughs than banner ads-- why would that be true? And B) that Flash ads on a computer are like commercials on TV. Nope! Sorry, people like me who are impatient will just pop open another browser window and start loading/reading something else. Unlike TV, I don't even risk losing what I wanted to see when "changing channels" aka "popping new web pages".
Sigh. More dumb wishful thinking. What the Internet ad guys should really do is get better tracking stats of how much time users's eyes spend viewing paper-based magazine ads or newspaper ads. Then do a nice correlation concluding that Internet ads get you nearly as many eyeball-seconds/impressions for a much lower cost.
--LP
A registry setting allowing one to go over 56k doesn't exactly comfort me. Once content controls are built and integrated into Microsoft products, the controls are no longer in my hands but in Microsoft's.
Microsoft can easily, once the basic mechanism is coded and in place, at any time and with any "Windows Update" patch (now automated?) change the underlying DLLs or OS code to reject registry settings above, say, 56k if its in their interest to do so.
--LP
A better term is "telepresence", not "teleportation".
--LP
The Peer-to-Peer compute-cycle companies have already started folding. (And I don't mean proteins.) The number of commercial businesses that could rake in more dough if they just had more compute cycles (aka a Beowulf cluster or these more loosely coupled P2P variants) is not too many.
For example, Popular Power seems to have closed their company and website sometime in the last few weeks. A shame too, as their UI allowed you to easily choose what percentage of your CPU cycles were for-profit and what were for non-profit projects.
--LPSGI's graphics libraries used to be called "GL" (and also "IrisGL") before they were modified slightly and opened up to become "OpenGL". I think all the function names begin with gl_.
I don't see any signs that SGI is going anybody with the word "Open" in their name. It looks like they are pursuing "Open[A-Z]L", due in part to being the prime creators of OpenGL and OpenML. And in all fairness, when I first saw OpenAL come out, it did seem like people were trying to portray it as "like OpenGL (i.e. in coolness, ubiquity, useful-abstraction-ness) but for audio". I wouldn't say that it was *confusing*, but it was trying a bit to play off someone else's already-established reputation. I don't claim to understand what the legal thresholds for similarity are.
Something to keep in mind before you bash SGI.
--LP, who has used SGI machines in past work but has no other connection with them
Well, perhaps my expectations have dropped too low given problems I've had in the past, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Telocity (my ISP on top of Northpoint) had, within 3 days, managed to get a contract with a national dial-up provider so that customers like me could still get on the 'net. Unlimited dial-up, no extra charge and they aren't charging us until they get DSL back up. Good thing, too, since my backup dialup access method only provides 10 hrs/month without those pesky hourly fees...
They say they'll have another DSL carrier for us in 3 weeks or so.
--LP
Why did you change the name from 'UO2?' It's a sequel to Ultima Online, right?
Actually, 'Ultima Worlds Online: Origin' is not a sequel to Ultima Online. It is a very different product, blending medieval, ancient and futuristic civilizations in a really cool and bizarre 3D world. The combat and motion capture technology is really outstanding, and we have monsters co-designed by Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn.
One wonders whether, when Richard Garriot left in March 2000 he took some rights to the "Ultima" trademark with him...
--LP
I'm skeptical- this can't be the sole issue... If it was just the government-owns-the-network problem, I'm sure for any politician at that level, it'd be worth their time to work around that.
For example, couldn't George pay for his own phone line and simply dialup AOL on his own personal laptop? That's not a government network by any stretch of the imagination.
Perhaps the issue is that any actions he conducts on governmental premises fall under some legal restrictions (perhaps the Hatch Act that Gore violated but claimed no-controlling-legal-authority under)? Anyone know what's really going on here, legally?
--LP
The article started talking in ambiguous way about certain conveniences (such as "!!") without clearly saying whether or not they were unique to zsh. ("!!" is available in many shells.) Then it went on to talk about various types of tab completion, some of which at least used to be unique to zsh. (I'm not sure if tcsh or ksh have copied them all yet.) When I first used zsh 7 years ago, it basically mimicked and combined all the best ideas from other shells and added quite a few new ones (Rprompt mentioned in the article was new i think, and nice things like ** recursive directory expansion which wasn't mentioned, etc.) Since then, other shells have copied some ideas back. I'm not really sure where it all stands now, and you are correct, that article didn't really address that point.
--LP
You are stuck on the "picture is worth a 1000 words" meme. It's not necessarily true. This is why people manipulate spoken and written text rather than using pictures all the time. Each has their place.
It's very hard to automate repeated actions in a GUI, but easy to say "do this action 1000 times with this variation" on a command line.
--LP