Sorry, I forgot IE was the reference browser for the Internet and Microsoft failed, or wait, it wasn't, and developers only tested with IE? Who's problem was this again?
I wasn't blaming Microsoft, only stating the problem. However, bundling IE with Windows and giving it the dominant marketshare, and breaking as many standards as they did, exacerbated the problem. If IE was mostly compliant, I really wouldn't care -- let people use IE, I'll develop on Firefox, and things will mostly work.
Compare this to standards which actually work -- I hit "print to PDF" or "save as PDF" on Linux, in a browser or an OpenOffice document, open it on Acrobat Reader on Windows, and it works. Take any PDF from the Internet, open it in Okular on Linux, and it works. People who know will tell you ways in which Adobe may have broken the standard, but they generally work. Contrast this to having to test in every browser, and run it through the w3c validator...
Standard file compression, which one, are you serious?
zip is a standard, which is probably why it's used as the container format for everything from Chrome extensions to ODF documents to id software games.
Now, are other compression formats warranted? Sure, but the one that's most visibly included with Windows is zip, and it's interoperable.
ZOMG, Microsoft the monopoly is bundling file compression utilities with Windows, what about WinZip?/sarcasm.
And I don't have a problem with that.
My problem isn't that IE has huge marketshare -- I don't like it, but I can live with it. My problem is that IE has huge marketshare and consistently breaks shit, and I as a web developer have to spend something like 25% of my time supporting it.
Contrast with zip -- I can use the zip commandline tool on Linux, or the Rubyzip library in Ruby, or WinZip on Windows, etc, etc, and they'll all open just fine with "Compressed Folder" on Windows.
Do you see the difference? Microsoft actually got the zip support right.
Gimp isn't RedHat is!1
If you're being serious, you're a moron. If you're being sarcastic, you made my point for me -- what, exactly, does RedHat have a monopoly on?
It's a bit like accusing Apple of abusing their monopoly on desktop computers. Why does nobody care that Safari is the default browser on OS X? Simple: Apple doesn't have the monopoly. Microsoft does, which means they have to play by different rules.
I'm not talking about monopolies, I'm poking fun at the reactions to them. If RedHat were found to be a monopoly, would random ballots make any more sense?
Only if RedHat were actually abusing their monopoly. Even then, I'd only care if they were doing so in a way that actually breaks standards. They want to include Gimp? Fine. They want to include a version of Gimp that makes PNGs that no one else can read? Fuck 'em.
You and I both know that many, many flamewars would end if every distro offered to log you into KDE or Gnome, listed in random order.
Indeed, Ubuntu solves this by making that choice for you. However, this is mitigated by several facts:
You can replace Gnome with KDE, and Ubuntu has never claimed otherwise. You may be able to remove IE now, but Microsoft certainly tried to prevent it, to claim it was impossible.
Kubuntu exists. Where can I download a Firefox-only Windows?
Neither Ubuntu nor Kubuntu is a monopoly.
Gnome and KDE actually cooperate on standards, improving both.
Gnome programs work in KDE, and vice versa.
And so on -- all of which aren't true of browsers. Also, Gnome and KDE both have decent market share of the small market of Linux desktop environments...
And maybe I'm hanging out in the wrong forums, but I don't see Gn
What you're saying is that an 1967 dodge charger "bastardized" EPA regulations from the 1980's, even though it existed long before those regulations existed,
Yes, one issue is that they didn't keep up. Another issue is that they had serious problems with their implementation, as you pointed out:
IE7 became significantly more compliant just by fixing the majority of their current CSS bugs.
I should also point out that Microsoft is a member of the w3c, and has been for awhile. It's not as though they had no input on these standards, or that they should come as a surprise. It's more that from IE6 to Firefox, they really didn't seem to care -- there really was a time when much of the Internet was IE6-only, and broke in weird ways on Mozilla, thus making many sites unusable on Linux.
the billion net users who aren't web developers don't give a shit either.
Much like they "don't give a shit" about driving SUVs, getting their PCs filled up with spyware constantly (and then buying a new, "faster" computer that only feels faster because it's clean)...
Of course, Firefox has been winning by actually being a better product, largely winning users with extensions. But most users, when it's actually explained to them what they're doing, are willing to use an alternate browser if it makes my job easier, as long as it doesn't make things worse for them.
They want to site to work. Period.
Which is generally what happens now -- except it's also going to work faster on other browsers. Unless something's changed recently, IE still comes in dead-last in performance.
NO browser supports all standards.
And all of them except IE support the standards, in general, better than IE. When flaws are pointed out with the Acid tests, all of them fix these flaws faster than IE.
I can build a website in Firefox, and have it work in Opera, Konqueror, Chrome, Safari, Galeon, Epiphany, iCab, every browser, and have it break in IE, taking several hours a week -- on a good week -- to fix.
But if you read my post, you'd know that:
To this day, if I want to be taken seriously as a web developer, I have to spend roughly 10-25% of my time hacking in support for IE6.
Again, I have to ask, are you actually a web developer?
You're just upset because its MS thats at the dominant position.
No, I'm upset because IE, and IE6 in particular, actually severely increases the amount of time I have to spend building a website. It makes my job harder, and the job of pretty much any web developer. It means I have to actually reboot, or fire up a virtual machine, because you know there's going to be something different.
I realize I have to test in every browser anyway, if I'm going to be diligent. Yes, I sometimes find minor differences between them, but nothing like, oh, the difference between the standard box model and IE's box model.
My Grandma doesn't. And shes pretty sane, thank you.
Perhaps I should've said "sane and informed" -- does she actively disagree with me, or does she just not have an opinion at all?
I also said, enough sane people, so your anecdote fails.
Also, it's been awhile since I checked, but I bet my grandma uses Firefox.
Thats how it works.
I didn't ask how it works. I know how it works. I asked how it should work.
You think this is going to stop at Browsers?
Yes, and if you actually read my original post, you'd know why.
Or in other other words if the entry to any market is high you want to government to "level" the playing field
There's a high barrier of entry, which is in itself a problem. And then there's actually abuse of monopoly.
The crux of your argument is stupid. I pointed that out.
Without bothering to register or sign in, thus limiting effective moderation, and making it difficult to carry on a conversation.
I call it like I see it.
That'd be more impressive if you actually saw it -- maybe developed some reading comprehension.
Tthe efficiency and quality gains you make from being able to run a suite of unit tests that confirm that the code still works as intended,
This.
I would take it a step farther -- first, code like a girl. Then, use behavior-driven design. A comment explaining how the code works is well and good, but a human-readable spec which explains what it's supposed to do is, IMO, the best possible example you can provide.
Well-written specs don't really even need comments, if you provide descriptive names -- though that's not an excuse for leaving the original code uncommented.
...My favorite is pack left/right/up/down. Does Windows 7 have anything like that?
No, it's not an instant "go to the other screen" button, but it's a bit more generic, and it's never more than two or three taps of it to get to the other screen.
At the time it came out, IE6 was considerably more compliant than its main competitor, Netscape 4.
Granted. And I'm not sure to what extent I really care about the IE-vs-Netscape legal issue -- though I do find it interesting that the DOJ dropped the case pretty much immediately after the Bush administration was elected.
However, that was like 8 years ago.
Right. It was about five years of IE6 before IE7 was released, and it's been about three years since then. It may be getting to where we can forget IE6 and just focus on IE7 and IE8 -- but both still break standards in weird ways, to the point where some people advocate never upgrading IE -- just use IE6 for the few pages that need IE6 compatibility mode, maybe use it in IETab in Firefox or Chrome, and use a better browser (Firefox or Chrome) for everything else.
I still say, yes, use it that way, but upgrade it. IE6-only websites will mostly still work, but you'll have some security enhancements, and it's yet another step in dragging the IE6 world kicking and screaming into this century.
My attitude might change if IE actually got to the point where I could sanely develop an entire web app, and have it tested in Firefox, Chrome, and Konqueror, and when it was all finished, spend less than an hour testing in Safari and IE. At that point, it would no longer make my life miserable that people use IE.
And no, that's not unreasonable -- I can currently expect to develop an app in Firefox alone, and when it's all finished, spend maybe an hour making it work in Safari, if I stick to web standards. I never test in Opera, and it'll generally work there. And that is useful, because I develop on Linux, and neither Safari nor IE are available natively. It is telling when an app developed in Firefox will pretty much just work, maybe with a few five-minute one-line changes, in every browser except IE, and then require massive hacks in IE.
I'm getting to the point where if anyone wants me to develop a serious web app -- you know, something that's actually an application, like a game, an Excel clone, etc -- I'll want to require Chrome Frame for IE users. Hey, it's better than Flash.
You're advocating government intervention when the software that *YOU* think isn't good, dominates the marketshare.
It's software that demonstrably breaks the Web. It isn't just a matter of it being bad for end-users, it is bad for everyone.
Not everybody agrees with you.
Fortunately, enough sane people do. Please read the rest of my post for an explanation of why it's a problem.
Of course, those who are informed enough to have an opinion will be perfectly capable of choosing IE at the ballot screen, and those who install another browser and later decide it's a mistake will be perfectly capable of downloading IE.
If browser makers want their own browser to be the default on PCs, the let them cut deals with OEMs like how the thousands of other shovel-ware and trial-ware companies do.
Do you really think the default software in a PC should be decided based on who makes the best deal with the OEM?
And notice that if you don't at least force Microsoft to remove IE from Windows, the job does become harder for everyone else, because if no one manages to strike a deal with the OEMs, they'll just leave IE on there as the default.
This is about getting free advertisement and a free ride through government strong-arming Microsoft to promote their own competitors.
In other words, it's a way for the government to lessen Microsoft's monopoly. One way is to sanction Microsoft directly, and another is to actually level the playing field with their competitors, by again, removing any possibility of a default.
If you'd read my post before calling me a moron, you might notice that I would actually support letting the OEMs decide. I'm uneasy about it, but I'm also uneasy about the ballot process, as it does look like it's starting to impose far too many weird restrictions.
But instead, you just knee-jerk replied as AC. I wonder why I bother...
We could breath new life into the text editor market, casual picture editing market, file compression market, file browser market, music player market, etc.
Do you understand why IE is a problem?
IE bastardized the web standards it supports, and failed to support any decent new ones, for about a decade. After dropping support for other platforms, it effectively meant that many web pages were Windows-only. This was sometimes through no fault of their own, simply because they tested it with IE and assumed that worked. Sometimes it was deliberate -- why waste time supporting less than 5% of the population, when 95% can view your page?
Only when Firefox started seriously threatening its marketshare did IE start to improve, and it has done so incredibly slowly, compared to any of its rivals.
Yet even now, the damage has been done. To this day, if I want to be taken seriously as a web developer, I have to spend roughly 10-25% of my time hacking in support for IE6.
To compound this problem, you do kind of need a web browser to download another web browser. So even if I wanted to make a conscious choice to use, say, Firefox, I'd have to visit the Firefox download page from IE. It isn't as though Microsoft can reasonably be expected to ship an OS without a browser, unless we leave it up to the manufacturers, as most users would not know how to use ftp at the commandline to get Firefox.
So this is a sane solution to a real problem.
Compare this to your other examples. It isn't as though Notepad royally screws up text -- recent versions probably even handle Unicode properly, and even if we all adopt the defacto Microsoft standard of CRLF, it's not hurting anything -- nor is there a significant monopoly problem with text editors. And if notepad isn't there, you can download something else.
Same with casual picture editing. Download Paint.net or Gimp, and even if you don't, it's not as though there's some scandal with the png and jpeg file formats that makes them a nightmare to work with because some asshat breaks the standard every chance they get.
File compression? Standards work, there isn't a monopoly problem, and you don't need a file compression utility to download a file compression utility.
And so on.
Where do I sign up to have the VB 3 based browser I wrote in 8th grade added?... GIMP/MyFirstPictureEditor
What's the marketshare of your browser? How well does it support standards? Where's the indication that it's a legitimate choice?
Is there any indication that Gimp is a monopoly of anything, or that it's abused that monopoly power?
randomly populate lopsided projects like Gnome/KDE... MySQL/Postgres, vi/emacs
Because that's so lopsided right now. Also, what standards has Gnome created that KDE breaks? They seem to cooperate pretty well. MySQL and PostgreSQL seem to both support standard SQL, and vi/emacs seem to both support Unicode well enough.
Linux/*BSD/OpenSolaris/Hurd
This is the only analogy that comes close to making sense -- yet all of these seem to support POSIX and X11 decently well.
On a serious note, when has choice in Linux ever been randomized?
When has any needed to be? Come to think of it, when has Linux, or anything currently running on Linux, ever abused monopoly power, or had a monopoly of anything to abuse?
On a serious note, I actually think it would be a bit easier to simply force Windows to ship without a browser, and let the OEMs sort it out, but I don't have much of a problem with the "random ballot" -- other than that it's going to lead to the best marketing winning, not the best software.
Well, here's one way. There was a shell program on MacOS (Pre-X) called MPW. This software had a feature called Commando. You would type in the command you wanted,
So in other words, it's a really nice commandline. It still doesn't solve the initial problem of not even knowing which command you want, which seems to be the major complaint most people have -- after all, 'man' is useless if you don't know about it and the name of the command you want.
So, for your scripted process, you would execute each command individually, once, using the commando gui to build the command lines.
Would it support pipes? The scripted process I described depends pretty heavily on pipes, and it's the main reason I chose it, because I have yet to see a GUI that facilitates this -- largely because it involves combining several separate programs, and the only way I know of that GUIs currently support thisi s with drag and drop.
I've often thought it would be a great project to do something like this for the linux commandline. The goal would be to have the commando interface read the output of --help to determine the parameters and build the gui window. This would, of course, require that all of the --help output be standardized.
Yeah, that's not going to happen. Rather, you should work from the documentation, and maybe look at or share some of the work that's been done for bash-completion. For example, it seems to know every commandline argument to mplayer, including something of their expected values.
And there's still two other things to consider: First, is Bash really the best shell for this? It might make more sense to build this as its own shell, or build on other shells. And second, how will you handle commands which don't behave? You can't count on a command even behaving properly when you call --help; for all you know, that command doesn't recognize options at all, and will begin writing to a file called --help. You'd need to support generic commands which you know nothing about.
Oh, and it's still not really a GUI in the way GP wanted. It's very interesting, and would probably make the commandline much friendlier, but it's still a commandline.
All in all, it sounds interesting. Probably way more UI work than I'd want to do, though. For example, would it be at all possible to make this a real replacement for existing commandline users? It wouldn't fly to have to highlight a line, I'd have to be able to type something and hit a simple keystroke (probably enter) to execute it -- I don't know about others, but I do a lot of 'cd', 'ls', 'find', 'du', and so on -- lots of interactive use. This sounds too much like a commandline IDE -- useful for developing scripts, but not so much for interactive use.
the filesystem could simply report if anything under that directory were being accessed and what the call stack was like,
...only if they managed to exercise all of the code. So, you couldn't actually download and execute code remotely, but I bet you could trigger something based on a date, or on some web service.
Based on how randomly they seem to accept and reject apps these days, I wouldn't be surprised if a few made it through.
When I send a DNS request to 8.8.8.8 and comcast redirects that request to their DNS servers which reply as you say, how comcast chooses.
I'm still seeing roughly the same thing. For example, it's possible to order parental protection, which includes intercepting all outbound port 80 traffic and filtering the content.
So while I'd hope network neutrality legislation makes this illegal, right now it just makes them bastards.
Teaching someone to fish is all well and good, but if they don't manage to eat in the meantime, it's not really going to work.
That's the purpose of LMGTFY, or a gentler alternative -- I'm still getting them what they need, but I'm also showing them how I did it, so they're more likely to be able to solve similar problems in the future.
Don't forget, LMGTFY is still sarcastic in its presentation.
Yes, I realize it's obnoxious, and I said so.
The problem is not knowing *how* to use Google - it's pretty obvious that you type text in a box and click the button, and sarcastically asking "Was that so hard?" is going to put people off. The problem is knowing what words to use, and sometimes that's *not* obvious to people.
In any case where I'd actually use LMGTFY, it's quite obvious -- something like two or three words taken verbatim from the question they posed to the list.
if someone is at the command line of Linux and needs help, they may well enter "Linux help" in Google rather than being more specific.
That is true, but the solution to that is not to add a big question mark button in the corner of every Linux terminal. The solution is to train users to be more specific. When I open a terminal, it says "bash" at the top of the window -- what does that mean? Googling "bash" isn't likely to help, but "Linux bash", "Ubuntu bash", "Konsole bash", and "Terminal bash" are all likely to help.
The lesson here is, if I can find search terms inside your question, you could probably have figured it out yourself.
Now, it's true, there are questions that aren't necessarily answered by Google. Smart questions do exist. But if Google doesn't find them, chances are documentation won't contain them either -- and if the documentation does, Google has probably indexed that documentation. If you're actually at this point, hitting F11 isn't going to help you -- this is where you actually need to ask a human for help.
We don't correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network.
They'd get them from domains on which they don't (yet) advertise.
That is, suppose I go from Google.com to Wikipedia, and then hit several pages on Wikipedia. To my knowledge, Wikipedia has no advertising, no beacons, nothing -- Google doesn't necessarily even know that I clicked the Wikipedia link, much less where I went after that.
With DNS queries, they'd at least know I went from Google to Wikipedia, and from there to some other domain. They wouldn't get the URLs, but they'd get overall patterns between domains, which would supplement what they've got from their actual ads/beacons.
But all of this is pure speculation. We really have no idea what they're doing.
I don't know about you, but if I were new to Linux, 'man' wouldn't exactly be the first command I'd think of if I wanted help.
I don't mean that it's a good choice for a command name. I mean that the concept works -- if you've been told about man and apropos, they work well.
If you haven't been told, I suppose the question is, how did you end up at the commandline as a complete newbie without any direction at all? We don't sit someone down in a car and expect them to just know where the gearshift is (or what it does), or how the turn signal works, or which pedal is the break and which is the gas.
So the first thing you say to a newbie command-line user needing help is 'JFGI'?
No, I would say 'LMGTFY' -- maybe obnoxious, but it's at least informative. I try not to tell them to Google it unless I'm sure they'll actually find what they're looking for that way.
On the other hand, it really is the responsibility of the person asking the question to at least make an effort to solve it themselves before asking me -- especially when they are perfectly capable of Googling it themselves. It's kind of rude to ask me to do that for them.
No wonder people don't like it.
It's part of being self-sufficient. Google is a way to access the sum total of human knowledge, so hell yes, that's going to be the first place I send someone asking obvious questions about any system.
Actually, the first place I'll send them is here -- but the idea is the same. It only takes a tiny amount of effort to learn to do this, and the payoff is enormous.
Teach a man to fish...
Yes, I realize people don't like that, in the short term. The number of times I hear people say, "I just want to do X! Why does this have to be so complicated?" But it pays off in the long run.
Now, if I was being paid to handhold them through every process, things might be different. But chances are, this is IRC or a forum, so try to meet us halfway.
when it comes to GNU info, I can't stand the thing. It's damnably non-intuitive. Whenever I see "the full documentation for this application is in the info page", I just shudder.
I agree, info sucks. It took awhile to learn it properly.
But when you think about it, info pages are essentially hypertext pages. They make sense as HTML, and there are tools to turn them into HTML. And that concept, in general, I find easier to navigate than the raw text of a manpage.
The trick is learning info, or finding a GUI info browser.
Yes, because I don't presume that everyone else will see things the way I do.
last I checked MacOS has given up on the commandline,
You obviously didn't check very thoroughly. Look under Applications/Utilities/Terminal. Among other things, recent versions of OS X include all sorts of interesting developer toys, like Ruby on Rails, which are available at the commandline.
Yes, that's right, they include these things. Not as a separate install, they're actually already there.
Linux still has to catchup on some things(Wireless, Graphics, Standards).
Wireless -- show me a wireless card without a native Linux driver (not easy, these days) and I'll show you a wireless card which supports ndiswrapper. When comparing the "ease of use" of this process, keep in mind that most laptops will ship with wireless enabled -- if you truly want an apples-to-apples comparison, buy a Laptop with Ubuntu preloaded and tell me what part Linux needs to "catch up on".
Graphics -- nVidia shares their driver base between all OSes, and Linux is actually used on a majority of high-end CAD workstations.
Standards -- big giant citation needed. Which standards, in particular, are you talking about?
Double-click and shortcuts beat commandline any day,
Oh, where to begin?
Single-click beats double-click, first of all. Even Microsoft is starting to realize this.
And by what measure? I specified exactly what I think the commandline is better at, and what I think the GUI is better at.
whatever though you are arguing about using the commandline for like.002% who actually need to get that deep.
Those ".002%" -- actually much larger, I would guess -- are also the people who write the software which makes things easier for you. Making it easier for us, the developers, is a Good Thing.
If you have to use commandline for anything more than roughly 2% of your use, than you have failed.
Or I've found a really interesting 2%. Again, you're making vast, unfounded assumptions.
Adobe and Office have improved the GUI to make it more affective
But hey, while you're at it, if you can't even tell the difference between affective and effective, you've failed.
as things become more automated you will see less and less of the commandline or the need for that IT guy to get into those deep settings to fix stuff.
And just who do you think is creating that automation to begin with?
But hey, let's actually check some assumptions, since you mentioned a study. Here's an interesting one:
I don't think anyone would argue that learning keyboard shortcuts is faster than using the mouse to navigate and learn a program. Clearly it isn't -- it's quite painful, as anyone who has ever been stranded at a Unix command prompt can probably tell you.
However, as Tog himself notes, when the keyboard shortcut is already memorized and well understood, it's a clear productivity win.
In other words, once you've learned it, the keyboard wins, even in a GUI app. Once you've learned the commandline, I'd argue it's often much faster than a GUI.
Not to feed the trolls or anything, but this isn't just pointless flamebait (what does correlation have to do with sexual orientation?), it's demonstrably wrong.
This is, in fact, one of two posts I see which make that point. Most of the others are complaining about the fact that the results are self-selected.
I think you could make a justified complaint about that. Then again, I'm guessing you did, in fact, sign a written contract, and that's what's going to be legally binding.
I'm not defending Comcast's choices here, but I don't think they're actually illegal... yet.
I guess the biggest reason I replied is, there are entirely too many people who would read that and believe it, without understanding what it all means. Routing everything through Google's proxies isn't that far-fetched.
If that's the case, why is it not possible to create a system which separates the ink cartridge from those? Or a system which allows an ink cartridge to be refilled?
I'd argue that sending the uncompressed file is faster, because you don't need to waste half an hour writing an elaborate program.
Try 2-5 minutes. And it's then reusable. By now, I know that sequence of commands well enough I could probably do it in 30 seconds to a minute.
And it is actually meaningful here. The sooner I can get that image taken, the sooner I can wipe the drive, and the sooner I can get the machine back in the hands of the customer -- or myself, for that matter. The server can then sit there crunching for days, if I want -- and lrzip will take days.
AND it's non-user friendly.
Yes, it is. It's a non-user-friendly way of doing something for which a user-friendly way doesn't exist, anywhere, that I know of. That's the point -- again, if there's a GUI that'll do the same job, that is better for the average user. But having a commandline available is better than nothing at all.
And again, you need the commandline version anyway. Another example -- suppose I'm responsible for maintaining a large network, so I need to be able to do things like this automatically. That is, walk up to a machine, have it boot from the network (or from a CD), into a system which automatically sends an image to the backup server, then wipes it with a clean image -- then the backup server can have a cron job to flush old images after a week or so, when we're reasonably sure the user doesn't need any files from them.
Now, how would I build a scheme like that from a GUI? You could argue that it'd be nice to have a GUI tool to configure the netboot server, or build a CD image for me, but ultimately, such a tool is easier to write if it can just add a few commands to a boot script -- and even if such a tool doesn't exist, a half hour of my time to build that system once will pay for itself many times over, when multiplied over a network.
Replacing the CLI with a mouse improves usability.
It improves discoverability, hands-down. That's what commandlines suck at. This is a good point, right here:
without memorizing the commands or digging through a manual.
But that is not about usability, it's about discoverability and learning curve, which is only part of usability. For example: I already know how to navigate my filesystem with the commandline, move files around, etc -- it took me longer to learn to do this, and things like 'cd' and 'ls' aren't right there in my face to find, I had to read some tutorials, etc. Tab-completion isn't obvious, either -- these are all things I had to be taught in some way or other.
The result is, I'm faster with the commandline than I am with the mouse. Really. Using cd and ls, with tab-completion, is faster than pointing and clicking on icons of folders. And once I've navigated to where my iso is, typing 'wodim foo.iso' is much faster than right-clicking on the image, looking for an option to burn, and clicking through a wizard.
And that's without even considering scripts. Taking the above example, I usually do something like 'wodim -dao -eject foo.iso' -- if this ever got annoying to type, I could easily make a new, shorter command which would do just that.
Now, that's not universally true. I've used lynx, and I wish I had better keyboard control in my browser, but a web browser is still much better in a GUI. I certainly wouldn't argue that photo editing or 3D modeling would be better done with a commandline. Each has its usefulness.
I also agree that if you're trying to do something simple, you shouldn't need a commandline. And this is mostly true on a modern Linux. Plug in your digital camera, and the appropriate software pops up -- that's even easier than on Windows, which makes you wait while it installs drivers, last I checked.
But to say that any need for the commandline is an indication of something broken is demonstrably wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I forgot IE was the reference browser for the Internet and Microsoft failed, or wait, it wasn't, and developers only tested with IE? Who's problem was this again?
I wasn't blaming Microsoft, only stating the problem. However, bundling IE with Windows and giving it the dominant marketshare, and breaking as many standards as they did, exacerbated the problem. If IE was mostly compliant, I really wouldn't care -- let people use IE, I'll develop on Firefox, and things will mostly work.
Compare this to standards which actually work -- I hit "print to PDF" or "save as PDF" on Linux, in a browser or an OpenOffice document, open it on Acrobat Reader on Windows, and it works. Take any PDF from the Internet, open it in Okular on Linux, and it works. People who know will tell you ways in which Adobe may have broken the standard, but they generally work. Contrast this to having to test in every browser, and run it through the w3c validator...
Standard file compression, which one, are you serious?
zip is a standard, which is probably why it's used as the container format for everything from Chrome extensions to ODF documents to id software games.
Now, are other compression formats warranted? Sure, but the one that's most visibly included with Windows is zip, and it's interoperable.
ZOMG, Microsoft the monopoly is bundling file compression utilities with Windows, what about WinZip? /sarcasm.
And I don't have a problem with that.
My problem isn't that IE has huge marketshare -- I don't like it, but I can live with it. My problem is that IE has huge marketshare and consistently breaks shit, and I as a web developer have to spend something like 25% of my time supporting it.
Contrast with zip -- I can use the zip commandline tool on Linux, or the Rubyzip library in Ruby, or WinZip on Windows, etc, etc, and they'll all open just fine with "Compressed Folder" on Windows.
Do you see the difference? Microsoft actually got the zip support right.
Gimp isn't RedHat is!1
If you're being serious, you're a moron. If you're being sarcastic, you made my point for me -- what, exactly, does RedHat have a monopoly on?
It's a bit like accusing Apple of abusing their monopoly on desktop computers. Why does nobody care that Safari is the default browser on OS X? Simple: Apple doesn't have the monopoly. Microsoft does, which means they have to play by different rules.
I'm not talking about monopolies, I'm poking fun at the reactions to them. If RedHat were found to be a monopoly, would random ballots make any more sense?
Only if RedHat were actually abusing their monopoly. Even then, I'd only care if they were doing so in a way that actually breaks standards. They want to include Gimp? Fine. They want to include a version of Gimp that makes PNGs that no one else can read? Fuck 'em.
You and I both know that many, many flamewars would end if every distro offered to log you into KDE or Gnome, listed in random order.
Indeed, Ubuntu solves this by making that choice for you. However, this is mitigated by several facts:
And so on -- all of which aren't true of browsers. Also, Gnome and KDE both have decent market share of the small market of Linux desktop environments...
And maybe I'm hanging out in the wrong forums, but I don't see Gn
What you're saying is that an 1967 dodge charger "bastardized" EPA regulations from the 1980's, even though it existed long before those regulations existed,
Yes, one issue is that they didn't keep up. Another issue is that they had serious problems with their implementation, as you pointed out:
IE7 became significantly more compliant just by fixing the majority of their current CSS bugs.
I should also point out that Microsoft is a member of the w3c, and has been for awhile. It's not as though they had no input on these standards, or that they should come as a surprise. It's more that from IE6 to Firefox, they really didn't seem to care -- there really was a time when much of the Internet was IE6-only, and broke in weird ways on Mozilla, thus making many sites unusable on Linux.
Thats just your opinion. I don't agree
Are you a web developer?
the billion net users who aren't web developers don't give a shit either.
Much like they "don't give a shit" about driving SUVs, getting their PCs filled up with spyware constantly (and then buying a new, "faster" computer that only feels faster because it's clean)...
Of course, Firefox has been winning by actually being a better product, largely winning users with extensions. But most users, when it's actually explained to them what they're doing, are willing to use an alternate browser if it makes my job easier, as long as it doesn't make things worse for them.
They want to site to work. Period.
Which is generally what happens now -- except it's also going to work faster on other browsers. Unless something's changed recently, IE still comes in dead-last in performance.
NO browser supports all standards.
And all of them except IE support the standards, in general, better than IE. When flaws are pointed out with the Acid tests, all of them fix these flaws faster than IE.
I can build a website in Firefox, and have it work in Opera, Konqueror, Chrome, Safari, Galeon, Epiphany, iCab, every browser, and have it break in IE, taking several hours a week -- on a good week -- to fix.
But if you read my post, you'd know that:
To this day, if I want to be taken seriously as a web developer, I have to spend roughly 10-25% of my time hacking in support for IE6.
Again, I have to ask, are you actually a web developer?
You're just upset because its MS thats at the dominant position.
No, I'm upset because IE, and IE6 in particular, actually severely increases the amount of time I have to spend building a website. It makes my job harder, and the job of pretty much any web developer. It means I have to actually reboot, or fire up a virtual machine, because you know there's going to be something different.
I realize I have to test in every browser anyway, if I'm going to be diligent. Yes, I sometimes find minor differences between them, but nothing like, oh, the difference between the standard box model and IE's box model.
My Grandma doesn't. And shes pretty sane, thank you.
Perhaps I should've said "sane and informed" -- does she actively disagree with me, or does she just not have an opinion at all?
I also said, enough sane people, so your anecdote fails.
Also, it's been awhile since I checked, but I bet my grandma uses Firefox.
Thats how it works.
I didn't ask how it works. I know how it works. I asked how it should work.
You think this is going to stop at Browsers?
Yes, and if you actually read my original post, you'd know why.
Or in other other words if the entry to any market is high you want to government to "level" the playing field
There's a high barrier of entry, which is in itself a problem. And then there's actually abuse of monopoly.
The crux of your argument is stupid. I pointed that out.
Without bothering to register or sign in, thus limiting effective moderation, and making it difficult to carry on a conversation.
I call it like I see it.
That'd be more impressive if you actually saw it -- maybe developed some reading comprehension.
Tthe efficiency and quality gains you make from being able to run a suite of unit tests that confirm that the code still works as intended,
This.
I would take it a step farther -- first, code like a girl. Then, use behavior-driven design. A comment explaining how the code works is well and good, but a human-readable spec which explains what it's supposed to do is, IMO, the best possible example you can provide.
Well-written specs don't really even need comments, if you provide descriptive names -- though that's not an excuse for leaving the original code uncommented.
...My favorite is pack left/right/up/down. Does Windows 7 have anything like that?
No, it's not an instant "go to the other screen" button, but it's a bit more generic, and it's never more than two or three taps of it to get to the other screen.
At the time it came out, IE6 was considerably more compliant than its main competitor, Netscape 4.
Granted. And I'm not sure to what extent I really care about the IE-vs-Netscape legal issue -- though I do find it interesting that the DOJ dropped the case pretty much immediately after the Bush administration was elected.
However, that was like 8 years ago.
Right. It was about five years of IE6 before IE7 was released, and it's been about three years since then. It may be getting to where we can forget IE6 and just focus on IE7 and IE8 -- but both still break standards in weird ways, to the point where some people advocate never upgrading IE -- just use IE6 for the few pages that need IE6 compatibility mode, maybe use it in IETab in Firefox or Chrome, and use a better browser (Firefox or Chrome) for everything else.
I still say, yes, use it that way, but upgrade it. IE6-only websites will mostly still work, but you'll have some security enhancements, and it's yet another step in dragging the IE6 world kicking and screaming into this century.
My attitude might change if IE actually got to the point where I could sanely develop an entire web app, and have it tested in Firefox, Chrome, and Konqueror, and when it was all finished, spend less than an hour testing in Safari and IE. At that point, it would no longer make my life miserable that people use IE.
And no, that's not unreasonable -- I can currently expect to develop an app in Firefox alone, and when it's all finished, spend maybe an hour making it work in Safari, if I stick to web standards. I never test in Opera, and it'll generally work there. And that is useful, because I develop on Linux, and neither Safari nor IE are available natively. It is telling when an app developed in Firefox will pretty much just work, maybe with a few five-minute one-line changes, in every browser except IE, and then require massive hacks in IE.
I'm getting to the point where if anyone wants me to develop a serious web app -- you know, something that's actually an application, like a game, an Excel clone, etc -- I'll want to require Chrome Frame for IE users. Hey, it's better than Flash.
You're advocating government intervention when the software that *YOU* think isn't good, dominates the marketshare.
It's software that demonstrably breaks the Web. It isn't just a matter of it being bad for end-users, it is bad for everyone.
Not everybody agrees with you.
Fortunately, enough sane people do. Please read the rest of my post for an explanation of why it's a problem.
Of course, those who are informed enough to have an opinion will be perfectly capable of choosing IE at the ballot screen, and those who install another browser and later decide it's a mistake will be perfectly capable of downloading IE.
If browser makers want their own browser to be the default on PCs, the let them cut deals with OEMs like how the thousands of other shovel-ware and trial-ware companies do.
Do you really think the default software in a PC should be decided based on who makes the best deal with the OEM?
And notice that if you don't at least force Microsoft to remove IE from Windows, the job does become harder for everyone else, because if no one manages to strike a deal with the OEMs, they'll just leave IE on there as the default.
This is about getting free advertisement and a free ride through government strong-arming Microsoft to promote their own competitors.
In other words, it's a way for the government to lessen Microsoft's monopoly. One way is to sanction Microsoft directly, and another is to actually level the playing field with their competitors, by again, removing any possibility of a default.
If you'd read my post before calling me a moron, you might notice that I would actually support letting the OEMs decide. I'm uneasy about it, but I'm also uneasy about the ballot process, as it does look like it's starting to impose far too many weird restrictions.
But instead, you just knee-jerk replied as AC. I wonder why I bother...
Actually, it also involved the lowest prices and the most cutthroat business tactics.
I think Google, Mozilla, and Opera can give them a run for their money on "lowest prices" and "best marketing" both.
There go my mod points...
We could breath new life into the text editor market, casual picture editing market, file compression market, file browser market, music player market, etc.
Do you understand why IE is a problem?
IE bastardized the web standards it supports, and failed to support any decent new ones, for about a decade. After dropping support for other platforms, it effectively meant that many web pages were Windows-only. This was sometimes through no fault of their own, simply because they tested it with IE and assumed that worked. Sometimes it was deliberate -- why waste time supporting less than 5% of the population, when 95% can view your page?
Only when Firefox started seriously threatening its marketshare did IE start to improve, and it has done so incredibly slowly, compared to any of its rivals.
Yet even now, the damage has been done. To this day, if I want to be taken seriously as a web developer, I have to spend roughly 10-25% of my time hacking in support for IE6.
To compound this problem, you do kind of need a web browser to download another web browser. So even if I wanted to make a conscious choice to use, say, Firefox, I'd have to visit the Firefox download page from IE. It isn't as though Microsoft can reasonably be expected to ship an OS without a browser, unless we leave it up to the manufacturers, as most users would not know how to use ftp at the commandline to get Firefox.
So this is a sane solution to a real problem.
Compare this to your other examples. It isn't as though Notepad royally screws up text -- recent versions probably even handle Unicode properly, and even if we all adopt the defacto Microsoft standard of CRLF, it's not hurting anything -- nor is there a significant monopoly problem with text editors. And if notepad isn't there, you can download something else.
Same with casual picture editing. Download Paint.net or Gimp, and even if you don't, it's not as though there's some scandal with the png and jpeg file formats that makes them a nightmare to work with because some asshat breaks the standard every chance they get.
File compression? Standards work, there isn't a monopoly problem, and you don't need a file compression utility to download a file compression utility.
And so on.
Where do I sign up to have the VB 3 based browser I wrote in 8th grade added?... GIMP/MyFirstPictureEditor
What's the marketshare of your browser? How well does it support standards? Where's the indication that it's a legitimate choice?
Is there any indication that Gimp is a monopoly of anything, or that it's abused that monopoly power?
randomly populate lopsided projects like Gnome/KDE... MySQL/Postgres, vi/emacs
Because that's so lopsided right now. Also, what standards has Gnome created that KDE breaks? They seem to cooperate pretty well. MySQL and PostgreSQL seem to both support standard SQL, and vi/emacs seem to both support Unicode well enough.
Linux/*BSD/OpenSolaris/Hurd
This is the only analogy that comes close to making sense -- yet all of these seem to support POSIX and X11 decently well.
On a serious note, when has choice in Linux ever been randomized?
When has any needed to be? Come to think of it, when has Linux, or anything currently running on Linux, ever abused monopoly power, or had a monopoly of anything to abuse?
On a serious note, I actually think it would be a bit easier to simply force Windows to ship without a browser, and let the OEMs sort it out, but I don't have much of a problem with the "random ballot" -- other than that it's going to lead to the best marketing winning, not the best software.
Well, here's one way. There was a shell program on MacOS (Pre-X) called MPW. This software had a feature called Commando. You would type in the command you wanted,
So in other words, it's a really nice commandline. It still doesn't solve the initial problem of not even knowing which command you want, which seems to be the major complaint most people have -- after all, 'man' is useless if you don't know about it and the name of the command you want.
So, for your scripted process, you would execute each command individually, once, using the commando gui to build the command lines.
Would it support pipes? The scripted process I described depends pretty heavily on pipes, and it's the main reason I chose it, because I have yet to see a GUI that facilitates this -- largely because it involves combining several separate programs, and the only way I know of that GUIs currently support thisi s with drag and drop.
I've often thought it would be a great project to do something like this for the linux commandline. The goal would be to have the commando interface read the output of --help to determine the parameters and build the gui window. This would, of course, require that all of the --help output be standardized.
Yeah, that's not going to happen. Rather, you should work from the documentation, and maybe look at or share some of the work that's been done for bash-completion. For example, it seems to know every commandline argument to mplayer, including something of their expected values.
And there's still two other things to consider: First, is Bash really the best shell for this? It might make more sense to build this as its own shell, or build on other shells. And second, how will you handle commands which don't behave? You can't count on a command even behaving properly when you call --help; for all you know, that command doesn't recognize options at all, and will begin writing to a file called --help. You'd need to support generic commands which you know nothing about.
Oh, and it's still not really a GUI in the way GP wanted. It's very interesting, and would probably make the commandline much friendlier, but it's still a commandline.
All in all, it sounds interesting. Probably way more UI work than I'd want to do, though. For example, would it be at all possible to make this a real replacement for existing commandline users? It wouldn't fly to have to highlight a line, I'd have to be able to type something and hit a simple keystroke (probably enter) to execute it -- I don't know about others, but I do a lot of 'cd', 'ls', 'find', 'du', and so on -- lots of interactive use. This sounds too much like a commandline IDE -- useful for developing scripts, but not so much for interactive use.
the filesystem could simply report if anything under that directory were being accessed and what the call stack was like,
...only if they managed to exercise all of the code. So, you couldn't actually download and execute code remotely, but I bet you could trigger something based on a date, or on some web service.
Based on how randomly they seem to accept and reject apps these days, I wouldn't be surprised if a few made it through.
When I send a DNS request to 8.8.8.8 and comcast redirects that request to their DNS servers which reply as you say, how comcast chooses.
I'm still seeing roughly the same thing. For example, it's possible to order parental protection, which includes intercepting all outbound port 80 traffic and filtering the content.
So while I'd hope network neutrality legislation makes this illegal, right now it just makes them bastards.
Teaching someone to fish is all well and good, but if they don't manage to eat in the meantime, it's not really going to work.
That's the purpose of LMGTFY, or a gentler alternative -- I'm still getting them what they need, but I'm also showing them how I did it, so they're more likely to be able to solve similar problems in the future.
Don't forget, LMGTFY is still sarcastic in its presentation.
Yes, I realize it's obnoxious, and I said so.
The problem is not knowing *how* to use Google - it's pretty obvious that you type text in a box and click the button, and sarcastically asking "Was that so hard?" is going to put people off. The problem is knowing what words to use, and sometimes that's *not* obvious to people.
In any case where I'd actually use LMGTFY, it's quite obvious -- something like two or three words taken verbatim from the question they posed to the list.
if someone is at the command line of Linux and needs help, they may well enter "Linux help" in Google rather than being more specific.
That is true, but the solution to that is not to add a big question mark button in the corner of every Linux terminal. The solution is to train users to be more specific. When I open a terminal, it says "bash" at the top of the window -- what does that mean? Googling "bash" isn't likely to help, but "Linux bash", "Ubuntu bash", "Konsole bash", and "Terminal bash" are all likely to help.
The lesson here is, if I can find search terms inside your question, you could probably have figured it out yourself.
Now, it's true, there are questions that aren't necessarily answered by Google. Smart questions do exist. But if Google doesn't find them, chances are documentation won't contain them either -- and if the documentation does, Google has probably indexed that documentation. If you're actually at this point, hitting F11 isn't going to help you -- this is where you actually need to ask a human for help.
the 24-48 hour limit on the temporary logs which do contain your IP is for *each request*
Right. The permanent logs don't have that.
there's no language exempting them from correlating that data with their other data mining efforts.
From their privacy policy:
We don't correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network.
They'd get them from domains on which they don't (yet) advertise.
That is, suppose I go from Google.com to Wikipedia, and then hit several pages on Wikipedia. To my knowledge, Wikipedia has no advertising, no beacons, nothing -- Google doesn't necessarily even know that I clicked the Wikipedia link, much less where I went after that.
With DNS queries, they'd at least know I went from Google to Wikipedia, and from there to some other domain. They wouldn't get the URLs, but they'd get overall patterns between domains, which would supplement what they've got from their actual ads/beacons.
But all of this is pure speculation. We really have no idea what they're doing.
I don't know about you, but if I were new to Linux, 'man' wouldn't exactly be the first command I'd think of if I wanted help.
I don't mean that it's a good choice for a command name. I mean that the concept works -- if you've been told about man and apropos, they work well.
If you haven't been told, I suppose the question is, how did you end up at the commandline as a complete newbie without any direction at all? We don't sit someone down in a car and expect them to just know where the gearshift is (or what it does), or how the turn signal works, or which pedal is the break and which is the gas.
So the first thing you say to a newbie command-line user needing help is 'JFGI'?
No, I would say 'LMGTFY' -- maybe obnoxious, but it's at least informative. I try not to tell them to Google it unless I'm sure they'll actually find what they're looking for that way.
On the other hand, it really is the responsibility of the person asking the question to at least make an effort to solve it themselves before asking me -- especially when they are perfectly capable of Googling it themselves. It's kind of rude to ask me to do that for them.
No wonder people don't like it.
It's part of being self-sufficient. Google is a way to access the sum total of human knowledge, so hell yes, that's going to be the first place I send someone asking obvious questions about any system.
Actually, the first place I'll send them is here -- but the idea is the same. It only takes a tiny amount of effort to learn to do this, and the payoff is enormous.
Teach a man to fish...
Yes, I realize people don't like that, in the short term. The number of times I hear people say, "I just want to do X! Why does this have to be so complicated?" But it pays off in the long run.
Now, if I was being paid to handhold them through every process, things might be different. But chances are, this is IRC or a forum, so try to meet us halfway.
when it comes to GNU info, I can't stand the thing. It's damnably non-intuitive. Whenever I see "the full documentation for this application is in the info page", I just shudder.
I agree, info sucks. It took awhile to learn it properly.
But when you think about it, info pages are essentially hypertext pages. They make sense as HTML, and there are tools to turn them into HTML. And that concept, in general, I find easier to navigate than the raw text of a manpage.
The trick is learning info, or finding a GUI info browser.
when you use "help" on the command line.
help is a Bash builtin on my system.
I, I, I, me, me, me....
Yes, because I don't presume that everyone else will see things the way I do.
last I checked MacOS has given up on the commandline,
You obviously didn't check very thoroughly. Look under Applications/Utilities/Terminal. Among other things, recent versions of OS X include all sorts of interesting developer toys, like Ruby on Rails, which are available at the commandline.
Yes, that's right, they include these things. Not as a separate install, they're actually already there.
Linux still has to catchup on some things(Wireless, Graphics, Standards).
Wireless -- show me a wireless card without a native Linux driver (not easy, these days) and I'll show you a wireless card which supports ndiswrapper. When comparing the "ease of use" of this process, keep in mind that most laptops will ship with wireless enabled -- if you truly want an apples-to-apples comparison, buy a Laptop with Ubuntu preloaded and tell me what part Linux needs to "catch up on".
Graphics -- nVidia shares their driver base between all OSes, and Linux is actually used on a majority of high-end CAD workstations.
Standards -- big giant citation needed. Which standards, in particular, are you talking about?
Double-click and shortcuts beat commandline any day,
Oh, where to begin?
Single-click beats double-click, first of all. Even Microsoft is starting to realize this.
And by what measure? I specified exactly what I think the commandline is better at, and what I think the GUI is better at.
whatever though you are arguing about using the commandline for like .002% who actually need to get that deep.
Those ".002%" -- actually much larger, I would guess -- are also the people who write the software which makes things easier for you. Making it easier for us, the developers, is a Good Thing.
If you have to use commandline for anything more than roughly 2% of your use, than you have failed.
Or I've found a really interesting 2%. Again, you're making vast, unfounded assumptions.
Adobe and Office have improved the GUI to make it more affective
But hey, while you're at it, if you can't even tell the difference between affective and effective, you've failed.
as things become more automated you will see less and less of the commandline or the need for that IT guy to get into those deep settings to fix stuff.
And just who do you think is creating that automation to begin with?
But hey, let's actually check some assumptions, since you mentioned a study. Here's an interesting one:
I don't think anyone would argue that learning keyboard shortcuts is faster than using the mouse to navigate and learn a program. Clearly it isn't -- it's quite painful, as anyone who has ever been stranded at a Unix command prompt can probably tell you.
However, as Tog himself notes, when the keyboard shortcut is already memorized and well understood, it's a clear productivity win.
In other words, once you've learned it, the keyboard wins, even in a GUI app. Once you've learned the commandline, I'd argue it's often much faster than a GUI.
Not to feed the trolls or anything, but this isn't just pointless flamebait (what does correlation have to do with sexual orientation?), it's demonstrably wrong.
This is, in fact, one of two posts I see which make that point. Most of the others are complaining about the fact that the results are self-selected.
You have more than their word for that?
Please provide an example of a resolver which would provide more than someone's word for that.
A big US corporation would never lie, even in the service of compliance with national security and law enforcement directives which require them to.
And what about the actual legal requirement that they do what their privacy policy says?
I'd also like to ask if you have any evidence of Google in particular lying.
any way to PROVE this?
Given that not doing so would be illegal, that's the best proof you're going to get.
Any way to PROVE your ISP isn't doing the same thing? Or, for that matter, that your ISP doesn't datamine and/or alter all your non-SSL web traffic?
Thought so.
Then why do you trust your ISP with these things?
Probably for the same reason you could trust Google here -- explicit, written privacy policies that would prevent it.
I think you could make a justified complaint about that. Then again, I'm guessing you did, in fact, sign a written contract, and that's what's going to be legally binding.
I'm not defending Comcast's choices here, but I don't think they're actually illegal... yet.
Maybe. I still don't get why it's funny...
I guess the biggest reason I replied is, there are entirely too many people who would read that and believe it, without understanding what it all means. Routing everything through Google's proxies isn't that far-fetched.
If that's the case, why is it not possible to create a system which separates the ink cartridge from those? Or a system which allows an ink cartridge to be refilled?
I'd argue that sending the uncompressed file is faster, because you don't need to waste half an hour writing an elaborate program.
Try 2-5 minutes. And it's then reusable. By now, I know that sequence of commands well enough I could probably do it in 30 seconds to a minute.
And it is actually meaningful here. The sooner I can get that image taken, the sooner I can wipe the drive, and the sooner I can get the machine back in the hands of the customer -- or myself, for that matter. The server can then sit there crunching for days, if I want -- and lrzip will take days.
AND it's non-user friendly.
Yes, it is. It's a non-user-friendly way of doing something for which a user-friendly way doesn't exist, anywhere, that I know of. That's the point -- again, if there's a GUI that'll do the same job, that is better for the average user. But having a commandline available is better than nothing at all.
And again, you need the commandline version anyway. Another example -- suppose I'm responsible for maintaining a large network, so I need to be able to do things like this automatically. That is, walk up to a machine, have it boot from the network (or from a CD), into a system which automatically sends an image to the backup server, then wipes it with a clean image -- then the backup server can have a cron job to flush old images after a week or so, when we're reasonably sure the user doesn't need any files from them.
Now, how would I build a scheme like that from a GUI? You could argue that it'd be nice to have a GUI tool to configure the netboot server, or build a CD image for me, but ultimately, such a tool is easier to write if it can just add a few commands to a boot script -- and even if such a tool doesn't exist, a half hour of my time to build that system once will pay for itself many times over, when multiplied over a network.
Replacing the CLI with a mouse improves usability.
It improves discoverability, hands-down. That's what commandlines suck at. This is a good point, right here:
without memorizing the commands or digging through a manual.
But that is not about usability, it's about discoverability and learning curve, which is only part of usability. For example: I already know how to navigate my filesystem with the commandline, move files around, etc -- it took me longer to learn to do this, and things like 'cd' and 'ls' aren't right there in my face to find, I had to read some tutorials, etc. Tab-completion isn't obvious, either -- these are all things I had to be taught in some way or other.
The result is, I'm faster with the commandline than I am with the mouse. Really. Using cd and ls, with tab-completion, is faster than pointing and clicking on icons of folders. And once I've navigated to where my iso is, typing 'wodim foo.iso' is much faster than right-clicking on the image, looking for an option to burn, and clicking through a wizard.
And that's without even considering scripts. Taking the above example, I usually do something like 'wodim -dao -eject foo.iso' -- if this ever got annoying to type, I could easily make a new, shorter command which would do just that.
Now, that's not universally true. I've used lynx, and I wish I had better keyboard control in my browser, but a web browser is still much better in a GUI. I certainly wouldn't argue that photo editing or 3D modeling would be better done with a commandline. Each has its usefulness.
I also agree that if you're trying to do something simple, you shouldn't need a commandline. And this is mostly true on a modern Linux. Plug in your digital camera, and the appropriate software pops up -- that's even easier than on Windows, which makes you wait while it installs drivers, last I checked.
But to say that any need for the commandline is an indication of something broken is demonstrably wrong.