Actually from the description it sounds like BOURNE to me.
bash is great, but make sure all your scripts are plain vanilla Bourne. And if you do need something only bash provides, don't be a moron and use #!/bin/sh. That's just Evil.
Shell scripts are wickedly cool. Much better than C, C++ or Java. Almost as cool as Ruby!
No one expects you to comment your shell scripts. No one expects you to account for corner cases. If they don't work you can blame bash and insist they install ksh instead. And people won't think you're a real programmer, so they won't assign that nasty driver bug to you. And you can obfuscate them almost as much as Perl!
but it doesn't explain that it has been happening for hundreds of years all over the world.
Of course it doesn't explain it. It can't, because it hasn't been happening for hundreds of years all over the world.
Irregular unpatterned crop "circles" can be formed by normal weather. I've seen it *happen* myself. But no one today calls these evidence of UFOs, aliens or other twaddle. But in the past it might have been different, and there may have been some silly reports of "strange devilish circles in me barley." Similar reports were made of unnatural fairy rings.
However, instances of regular patterned crop circles are recent history, and have an unusual propensity to being within twenty miles of universities populated by bored students.
Do not underestimate the power of the bored imagination, or the bored practical joker. Before 1945, all UFO "sightings" were cigar shaped. After that they were all saucer shaped. Crop circles didn't become fashionable until after the public grew weary of hearing about cattle mutilations. The trends are obvious.
The people who invented the crop circle came forward and explained how it was done.
Not only did they come forward, they presented a video of themselves making the crop circles.
One ufologist said before seeing the film that it was impossible for humans to create this particular crop circle because of the "woven" stalks, lack of footprints, etc. Then after being shown the film, she said "well that may explain this one, but it can't possibly explain all of the other unexplainable circles!"
On a serious note, Windows fdisk is really different, because it does not work!
Oh, it does work. In much the same way that a tricycle works as a mass transportation vehicle. DOS/Windows fdisk has got to be the stupidest fdisk ever created. Do you want to dual boot two different versions of Windows? Forget the native fdisk and go download a Linux or BSD LiveCD.
Of course, only an insane (or truly desperate) person ever uses these by hand. I had to do this once, and my coworkers called the ambulance because I broke out into a shaking sweat and started gibbering.
Or the "RAM doubler", that supposedly compressed RAM like other programs did file systems. Some products actually had technology that would do this, but the benefits were so grossly inflated they were never worth the price or CPU hit. Most of them though didn't do anything at all, for only a mere $29.95.
Most European nations have hated France as policy for decades if not centuries. It's the national pastime in Britain and Germany. But just let the US make a joke about freedom fries, and suddenly it's "go away and find your own moron to pick on, this one is ours."
Comcast is cutting these people off and basically walking them through the process of using their computer like they're helpless small children because, frankly, when it comes to computing, they are.
I'm so glad my company doesn't go through Comcast. We would be cut off, because our IT departments, whether local, national or international, are all a bunch of children.
We don't want to sue in the US either... except for the lawyers and those they've suckered into being clients. Oh, and those that watch Oprah, read the Enquirer. Er, and those who live in Orem, Pedukah and Simi Valley...
Acording you your logic, most of the news stories out there would be "Conjecture and Hypothesis".
Actually it's true. Most news stories out there are utter crap. I can't trust the newspapers, radio or television. And I certainly can't trust the internet or slashdot! Instead I have to pick out those few phrases here or there that aren't padded with weasel words, remove all adjectives, and still continue to doubt them without further substantiation.
The news lies to you. The New York Times lies to you. CBS, NBC, and ABC lies to you. CNN and Fox lie to you. Rush and Drudge and NPR lie to you. And if you haven't figured it out by now, the editors of Slashdot couldn't tell you the truth if they had a gun held to their heads.
Just one example. When the same news sources reported that 5.6% unemployment under Clinton Good, but currently report that 5.6% unemployment under Bush is Bad, they're liars. Plain and simple. Don't trust them. It doesn't matter what your political ideology is, don't trust them.
She would ask everyone she knew for help, not just me. All her kids, sons-in-law, neighbors etc.
So let them do all of her support tasks. When my mom got bad advice from her neighbor and trashed her harddrive, she came to me to fix it. I finally had to "law down the law". I don't fix mistakes made by her friends, neighbors or relatives. She looked hurt, but I made it stick. She's stopped asking me for support.
So if you buy your mom a Mac, and her neighbors say to get Windows, then make her neighbors provide her with technical support.
Load up Control Center some time--you've got like a hundred items in there, grouped within groups.
Awesome! Nothing like keeping all of these configuration options all in one place and out of the way. That's real usability IMHO. If you want a "dumbed down" configuration, may I suggest you use the Desktop Settings Wizard, and pretend the Control Center doesn't exist?
Gnome has a seperate Applications pull down menu for programs, and an Actions menu for logging out, restarting, and so forth.
The default 'K' menu contains four "actions". FOUR. If that's too many options for you to handle, make sure you never take a look at the Windows XP menu, or your brain might explode.
Actually, one of those actions is "Run Command...", and I'm not sure if this counts as an action in the sense you mean.
This is a non-issue. In fact, most of the Gnome-HIG-Advocacy talking points are non-issues.
I find it hilarious that people bitch when Microsoft integrates Internet Explorer but find it perfectly acceptable that Konquerer be integrated into KDE. What happened to the whole "but newbies will use what's already there by default, and that flies in the face of choice" argument that we always hear against Windows?
From day one I always considered that argument against Internet Explorer to be silly and ill-thought. Of course, most arguments against Windows are silly and ill-thought. Integrating the browser, file manager and desktop together is a really good idea, and KDE shows to what heights one can take a good idea. What made it bad in Microsoft's case was: their monopoly status; unfinished integration; and using a crappy browser.
If you don't want to use Konqueror as a browser, you don't have to use Konqueror as a browser. And if you don't want to use it as a file manager, you don't have to use it as a file manager. Heck, you don't even have to use it at all! No one's going to sue you.
not to mention that things like Cancel should be on the left, Save and Quit in the middle, Exit on the right, and the buttons should not be equally spaced
Okay, let me put this another way. I have a home network server with 160Gigs of unused harddrive space. So I decide to do automated backups of the clients to it. If everything on the network is either Linux or FreeBSD, why should I use Samba instead of NFS v4, when everything is local behind a firewall?
I can understand wanting to use Samba in networks with a bunch of Windows shares. And I realize that the MCSE certification process involved a form of lobotomization. But beyond it's Microsoft-ness, what advantage does CIFS have over NFS and other network filesystems?
I've heard of Linux-only networks that used Samba, and for the life of my I can't figure out why.
The trouble with logos and brands on "commodity" systems is that they tend to get attached to stuff they shouldn't. Like people in Texas calling every brand of soft drink "coke".
Example one: "Ooh, I see you're using Linux!" "No I'm not, I'm using FreeBSD." "But there's a 'K' in the corner of your screen..."
Example two [actually heard in a class]: "You'll be glad to know that Solaris runs many of your favorite Linux applications, like the GNU compiler, Gnome and even vi."
In my experience, I see that newbies get along better with the CLI than with the GUI. Perhaps this is because they "know" the CLI is hard, they pay attention, but because they "know" the GUI is easy, they think they're stupid when it's not.
But another reason is that GUIs have an infinite number of states, whereas when he see a command line prompt, you know exactly what state the system is in.
I gave me parents my old 8086 running DOS. They had no problems with it. When I told them what to do, they wrote down the instructions step-by-step. Now my mom has a Windows system, and she's as confused as I've ever seen her. I can't give her step-by-step instructions, because one can never know the exact state of the system to start from. If the order of the menu items change she gets lost. If she installs a new program the icons on the desktop change position and she gets lost. I've even had her accuse me of breaking the computer when I forget to remaximize the Internet Exploder window after I was done using it. Since it wasn't maximized she didn't recognize it, and wanted me to put the system back the way it was.
It took her the longest time to realize that the purpose of moving the mouse was to reposition the mouse cursor. For a while she was wondering why moving it two inches to the left and clicking didn't always bring up the menu.
My mother is not stupid, she just hasn't groked the underlying, unwritten and unexplained paradigms behind the GUI. She doesn't think of the computer as something to interact with, but as a machine you issue commands to. Hmmm, she is pretty smart after all...
I can't stand posters like you. Why respond with such a negative attitude?
Negative attitude? You're the one who started off negative with: "you don't have a choice. You're stuck paying the MS tax." All I am doing is telling you that you *DO* have a choice.
If you don't want my huge order of 10,000 Optiplex systems, I will gladly take my business elsewhere. Apparently my previous orders of 200,000 systems over the past decade mean nothing to you. I understand.
Now you may be chuckling to yourself that I'll get the same unservice everywhere. That may be so. But I intend to find out on my own. Glad to have done business with you in the past, and I hope my future business with one of your competitors will be as fruitful.
Have you seen the average social skills of a roleplayer? They're worse than computer geeks'! Get them outside of their little roleplaying group and they fall to pieces when faced with the daunting task of trying to start a conversation.
"Hey, that cute chick over there keeps glancing your way!"
Yes, please stick with administering Windows networks. I've seen how my IT department administers Windows networks, and the last thing I want them to do is to leave their little fiefdom and start messing up the rest of the network.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually from the description it sounds like BOURNE to me.
bash is great, but make sure all your scripts are plain vanilla Bourne. And if you do need something only bash provides, don't be a moron and use #!/bin/sh. That's just Evil.
If I knew the formula, I could WRITE the script before OpenOffice finished loading...
Shell scripts are wickedly cool. Much better than C, C++ or Java. Almost as cool as Ruby!
No one expects you to comment your shell scripts. No one expects you to account for corner cases. If they don't work you can blame bash and insist they install ksh instead. And people won't think you're a real programmer, so they won't assign that nasty driver bug to you. And you can obfuscate them almost as much as Perl!
but it doesn't explain that it has been happening for hundreds of years all over the world.
Of course it doesn't explain it. It can't, because it hasn't been happening for hundreds of years all over the world.
Irregular unpatterned crop "circles" can be formed by normal weather. I've seen it *happen* myself. But no one today calls these evidence of UFOs, aliens or other twaddle. But in the past it might have been different, and there may have been some silly reports of "strange devilish circles in me barley." Similar reports were made of unnatural fairy rings.
However, instances of regular patterned crop circles are recent history, and have an unusual propensity to being within twenty miles of universities populated by bored students.
Do not underestimate the power of the bored imagination, or the bored practical joker. Before 1945, all UFO "sightings" were cigar shaped. After that they were all saucer shaped. Crop circles didn't become fashionable until after the public grew weary of hearing about cattle mutilations. The trends are obvious.
The people who invented the crop circle came forward and explained how it was done.
Not only did they come forward, they presented a video of themselves making the crop circles.
One ufologist said before seeing the film that it was impossible for humans to create this particular crop circle because of the "woven" stalks, lack of footprints, etc. Then after being shown the film, she said "well that may explain this one, but it can't possibly explain all of the other unexplainable circles!"
On a serious note, Windows fdisk is really different, because it does not work!
Oh, it does work. In much the same way that a tricycle works as a mass transportation vehicle. DOS/Windows fdisk has got to be the stupidest fdisk ever created. Do you want to dual boot two different versions of Windows? Forget the native fdisk and go download a Linux or BSD LiveCD.
There is both fdisk and disklabel in FreeBSD.
fdisk -- PC slice table maintenance utility
bsdlabel -- read and write disk pack label
Of course, only an insane (or truly desperate) person ever uses these by hand. I had to do this once, and my coworkers called the ambulance because I broke out into a shaking sweat and started gibbering.
Or the "RAM doubler", that supposedly compressed RAM like other programs did file systems. Some products actually had technology that would do this, but the benefits were so grossly inflated they were never worth the price or CPU hit. Most of them though didn't do anything at all, for only a mere $29.95.
Most European nations have hated France as policy for decades if not centuries. It's the national pastime in Britain and Germany. But just let the US make a joke about freedom fries, and suddenly it's "go away and find your own moron to pick on, this one is ours."
Comcast is cutting these people off and basically walking them through the process of using their computer like they're helpless small children because, frankly, when it comes to computing, they are.
I'm so glad my company doesn't go through Comcast. We would be cut off, because our IT departments, whether local, national or international, are all a bunch of children.
We don't want to sue in the US either... except for the lawyers and those they've suckered into being clients. Oh, and those that watch Oprah, read the Enquirer. Er, and those who live in Orem, Pedukah and Simi Valley...
Come to think of it, you may be right.
Calling something "good" or "bad" is an opinion, not a fact.
Precisely! The news outlets are reporting opinions as facts.
Acording you your logic, most of the news stories out there would be "Conjecture and Hypothesis".
Actually it's true. Most news stories out there are utter crap. I can't trust the newspapers, radio or television. And I certainly can't trust the internet or slashdot! Instead I have to pick out those few phrases here or there that aren't padded with weasel words, remove all adjectives, and still continue to doubt them without further substantiation.
The news lies to you. The New York Times lies to you. CBS, NBC, and ABC lies to you. CNN and Fox lie to you. Rush and Drudge and NPR lie to you. And if you haven't figured it out by now, the editors of Slashdot couldn't tell you the truth if they had a gun held to their heads.
Just one example. When the same news sources reported that 5.6% unemployment under Clinton Good, but currently report that 5.6% unemployment under Bush is Bad, they're liars. Plain and simple. Don't trust them. It doesn't matter what your political ideology is, don't trust them.
She would ask everyone she knew for help, not just me. All her kids, sons-in-law, neighbors etc.
So let them do all of her support tasks. When my mom got bad advice from her neighbor and trashed her harddrive, she came to me to fix it. I finally had to "law down the law". I don't fix mistakes made by her friends, neighbors or relatives. She looked hurt, but I made it stick. She's stopped asking me for support.
So if you buy your mom a Mac, and her neighbors say to get Windows, then make her neighbors provide her with technical support.
And that says just exactly how bad Linux NFS really is, that someone opted to write SAMBA rather than use it.
According to the Samba guys, they wrote it to interoperate with Window networks.
Historically, Linux's NFS code sucked so bad that it was conventional wisdom to use Samba instead
Historically, Samba didn't even exist...
Load up Control Center some time--you've got like a hundred items in there, grouped within groups.
Awesome! Nothing like keeping all of these configuration options all in one place and out of the way. That's real usability IMHO. If you want a "dumbed down" configuration, may I suggest you use the Desktop Settings Wizard, and pretend the Control Center doesn't exist?
Gnome has a seperate Applications pull down menu for programs, and an Actions menu for logging out, restarting, and so forth.
The default 'K' menu contains four "actions". FOUR. If that's too many options for you to handle, make sure you never take a look at the Windows XP menu, or your brain might explode.
Actually, one of those actions is "Run Command...", and I'm not sure if this counts as an action in the sense you mean.
This is a non-issue. In fact, most of the Gnome-HIG-Advocacy talking points are non-issues.
I find it hilarious that people bitch when Microsoft integrates Internet Explorer but find it perfectly acceptable that Konquerer be integrated into KDE. What happened to the whole "but newbies will use what's already there by default, and that flies in the face of choice" argument that we always hear against Windows?
From day one I always considered that argument against Internet Explorer to be silly and ill-thought. Of course, most arguments against Windows are silly and ill-thought. Integrating the browser, file manager and desktop together is a really good idea, and KDE shows to what heights one can take a good idea. What made it bad in Microsoft's case was: their monopoly status; unfinished integration; and using a crappy browser.
If you don't want to use Konqueror as a browser, you don't have to use Konqueror as a browser. And if you don't want to use it as a file manager, you don't have to use it as a file manager. Heck, you don't even have to use it at all! No one's going to sue you.
not to mention that things like Cancel should be on the left, Save and Quit in the middle, Exit on the right, and the buttons should not be equally spaced
To reiterate: non-issues. Get a life.
Gnome isn't perfect
I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!
Okay, let me put this another way. I have a home network server with 160Gigs of unused harddrive space. So I decide to do automated backups of the clients to it. If everything on the network is either Linux or FreeBSD, why should I use Samba instead of NFS v4, when everything is local behind a firewall?
I can understand wanting to use Samba in networks with a bunch of Windows shares. And I realize that the MCSE certification process involved a form of lobotomization. But beyond it's Microsoft-ness, what advantage does CIFS have over NFS and other network filesystems?
I've heard of Linux-only networks that used Samba, and for the life of my I can't figure out why.
The trouble with logos and brands on "commodity" systems is that they tend to get attached to stuff they shouldn't. Like people in Texas calling every brand of soft drink "coke".
Example one: "Ooh, I see you're using Linux!" "No I'm not, I'm using FreeBSD." "But there's a 'K' in the corner of your screen..."
Example two [actually heard in a class]: "You'll be glad to know that Solaris runs many of your favorite Linux applications, like the GNU compiler, Gnome and even vi."
In my experience, I see that newbies get along better with the CLI than with the GUI. Perhaps this is because they "know" the CLI is hard, they pay attention, but because they "know" the GUI is easy, they think they're stupid when it's not.
But another reason is that GUIs have an infinite number of states, whereas when he see a command line prompt, you know exactly what state the system is in.
I gave me parents my old 8086 running DOS. They had no problems with it. When I told them what to do, they wrote down the instructions step-by-step. Now my mom has a Windows system, and she's as confused as I've ever seen her. I can't give her step-by-step instructions, because one can never know the exact state of the system to start from. If the order of the menu items change she gets lost. If she installs a new program the icons on the desktop change position and she gets lost. I've even had her accuse me of breaking the computer when I forget to remaximize the Internet Exploder window after I was done using it. Since it wasn't maximized she didn't recognize it, and wanted me to put the system back the way it was.
It took her the longest time to realize that the purpose of moving the mouse was to reposition the mouse cursor. For a while she was wondering why moving it two inches to the left and clicking didn't always bring up the menu.
My mother is not stupid, she just hasn't groked the underlying, unwritten and unexplained paradigms behind the GUI. She doesn't think of the computer as something to interact with, but as a machine you issue commands to. Hmmm, she is pretty smart after all...
I can't stand posters like you. Why respond with such a negative attitude?
Negative attitude? You're the one who started off negative with: "you don't have a choice. You're stuck paying the MS tax." All I am doing is telling you that you *DO* have a choice.
Dear Dell,
If you don't want my huge order of 10,000 Optiplex systems, I will gladly take my business elsewhere. Apparently my previous orders of 200,000 systems over the past decade mean nothing to you. I understand.
Now you may be chuckling to yourself that I'll get the same unservice everywhere. That may be so. But I intend to find out on my own. Glad to have done business with you in the past, and I hope my future business with one of your competitors will be as fruitful.
Sincerely,
Julius Dithers.
Have you seen the average social skills of a roleplayer? They're worse than computer geeks'! Get them outside of their little roleplaying group and they fall to pieces when faced with the daunting task of trying to start a conversation.
"Hey, that cute chick over there keeps glancing your way!"
"Uh... I draw my sword!"
Yes, please stick with administering Windows networks. I've seen how my IT department administers Windows networks, and the last thing I want them to do is to leave their little fiefdom and start messing up the rest of the network.