The rule against splitting infinitives was invented out of whole cloth by someone who liked Latin better. There has never legitimately been any such rule in English.
That being said, it is not advisable to...
Sigh. It was supposed to be a f*ng joke. But since you asked...
This may be/. where ignorance of both history, tradition, and stuff found imprinted on aging and dusty remnants of dead trees are held in such contempt as to merit mod points or badge of some sort (or, perhaps more appropriately, a T-shirt festooned with the word "evolved"), but your characterisation of "by someone who liked Latin better" betrays a knowledge and understanding the breadth of which would fit into a short Wikipedia article with plenty of room to spare.
In fairness to you, allow me to quote from the same article:
Although most English speakers do use split infinitives, it should be noted that some do not, not because they follow a prescriptivist rule but simply because it is not part of the language as they acquired it as children.
You see, your bite-sized editorialising may have some merit: that those of us who did grow up with prescriptive rules a la Fowler's, and who were force-fed Latin and writings by all those Dead English Guys with weird names that few have even heard of but are prominently cited in the article perhaps do insist on continuing The Tradition, unwittingly or otherwise. More importantly, because it was part of the curriculum since Grade 7 for many of us, we can lay claim to knowing a bit more than is summarised in clicky links intended for mass consumption.
Put another way, our disagreement may simply be generational thing. I'm right and you're perhaps too young and unschooled to know the difference. Be happy with that. Many of those Dead English Guys weren't worth reading.
If that doesn't make you feel better, I'll offer to buy you a T-Shirt. Even one that says "To boldly go..."
However, online game-playing has neither the virtue of real interaction (in person) nor direct interaction (where there is no intervening purpose).
Put another way, on-line gaming is the social equivalent of watching television or staring out the window on a first date.
Of course gaming is an escape! No doubt it can be fun for some in the same way that mutual masturbation can be fun. But to the extent such things are a shared experience, they work best when you're with someone with whom you already have a *real* relationship.
Superficial pleasures have their place. Just don't tell my girlfriend I said so.
Good idea. But how do you "reactivate" this feature once a patch is released? I use Ifranview, but I also depend heavily on the thumbnail feature in explorer.
Sigh. I do wish people would offer some information with their click here/type-this instructions so people would understand WTF they're doing.
regsvr32 - This command-line tool registers.dll files as command components in the registry.
regsvr32/u/s/n/i[:cmdline] dllname
/u unregister server /s silent /i call DllInstall passing it an optional cmdline, when
used with/u calls dll uninstall /n do not call DllRegisterServer; this option must be used
with/i
To register (or re-register) the dll:
regsvr32 shimgvw.dll
To run the command, you can use a console window (cmd.exe), or the Run dialog box (accessible from the Start Menu).
If it's beer you're talking about, then one standard pint glass represents a good time, two pints represents a really good time, and three is a party. Anything over three is usual subject to local laws and can get you in trouble with the missus, the neighbours, or otherwise prevent you from finding your way home and, thus can be considered too much.
American beer, for similar reasons, is best served in small glasses, and chilled to the extreme to kill the taste.
That abbreviated sampling doesn't reflect the complexities of the rundll32 interface, or include service names, which, in breaking from the DOS 8-character filename limitation of executables, are bizarre beyond description.
Seems to me that using executables with abbreviated and easy-to-type names, in conjunction with simple ascii files under/etc is more straightforward and easier to learn. And for everything else, you can fashion Grandma-friendly aliases.
These measures will simply monitor law-abiding individuals. How can this possibly be a good thing??
Err, if you were a policeman, wouldn't that be your job? You can offer the argument that there's a difference between monitoring good guys vs. monitoring bad guys, but to law enforcement, monitoring means monitoring the public. How else will they find the bad guys?
You can't blame the guy in uniform for wanting new tools (a euphemism for increased power) to make his job easier. I'd even go so far as to suggest that the increased power, in conjunction with training and weapons adopted over the years from the military makes their dicks hard. But I can't fault them for believing it's all needed or necessary or otherwise taking full advantage of whatever tools they have available.
Ultimately, of course, the real power rests with the citizenry to decide what's acceptable or allowed. Unless of course, they choose not to exercise that power.
I do think that Hotmail and Yahoo revolutionized the world back in the day when they unveiled "FREE EMAIL" for everyone. That was around 1998. Before that, you had to pay. All of a sudden, there was no excuse to not have and use an email address.
Sorry, but the advertising footers that go out with most such "free" email services suggests to me that as a recipient, I'm the one paying for it.
Gmail, well.. It's really cool and they were the first major player to give 1GB of space.
Yes, but... There's an inevitability to that which reminds me of why I have a medium-sized garbage can sitting underneath my mailbox outside. The unsolicited rubbish that I receive doesn't ever seem fit into my mailbox. Unfair? Perhaps. Consider the typical 3 or 4 line message from a Do You Yahoo! user with 2+ lines of advertising. Cut out the advertising footer, and your space savings approaches 50%. If you receive a lot of email and/or subscribe to multiple mailing lists or otherwise need to archive correspondence, that trivial saving adds up dramatically.
Nothing is free in this world, and there is most always a price associated with convenience, so my guess is that personal rants aside, the dinner talk was less about what was on the menu or what the wife and kids were doing, and more about how to make someone somewhere pay more for it all.
Although the information that can be extracted from the analysis of mitochondrial DNA can be more informative as to lineage and evolutionary cladistics.
You can't have an omelette and keep the eggs. You can't have the wolf fed and the sheep alive.
Dunno about the eggs, but the wolf and sheep, yes can.
Stop me if you didn't hear this from someone in the Vassilev family when growing up...
"You're one side of a river with a small boat. You need to bring across safely to the other side a wolf, a lamb, and some cabbage. How do you do it in the least amount of trips?"
The DMCA is silly. Don't our Federal Agents have better ppl to track down? Like maybe the terrorists?
Nope!
You wish.
The Immigration folks, as well as those in Customs, are now part of the Department of Homeland Security. So, you see this is about fighting the terrorists.
There are shells, including bash, csh and others, easily installable on Windows. And you can install the Interix/SFU thing if you want a full posix environment to work within.
Been there and done that. You don't seem to be familiar with the limitations of what you're suggesting, and you haven't wasted as much time with the Interix "thing" as much as I have, so I'll save you the trouble and sum it up this way: don't bother.
Cygwin is a kludge. It's a bunch of wonking stuff that resides in Win32.dll files. The Interix subsystem is an entire separate API that runs alongside Win32.
No one denies it's a kludge, yet it gets the job done. And we use the same toolset on our Windows servers that we use elsewhere. Why wouldn't we want to make as much of use of it as possible? Admittedly, managing a Cygwin repository and bothering with all the installation issues is a PIA, but to put it in context, it's the first thing I do.
You don't seen to know that much about how Windows is arranged, how the NT Kernel interoperates with the various user layer subsystems you can plug into it, let along how an NT Server is administered.
WTF? The pros and cons of administering our servers using an emulation layer provided by the Cygwin dll is a different topic, as is my kernel programming abilities. The point was, and remains, that Windows servers cannot be administered without a GUI. That goes for everything from NT4 to the present. Nothing you've said has any relevance to that, or offers any evidence to the contrary.
Here's a different approach. If anyone hasn't yet seen it, I'd suggest trying it out. I never made any use of it (the conclusion from everyone who's tried it and loved it), but it was one of the few programs I've ever tried that seemed to make any headache from staring at a computer screen too long just go away.
That said, I doubt anything will come of any new approaches for years to come. We still have offices, and in those offices we'll work at desks to generate paper which we'll put into labelled folders, which in turn will get stored in file cabinets.
Those desks, files, folders and file cabinets aren't going anywhere, and neither are the metaphors, least of all for the reason that irrespective of whatever new metaphor one creates and implements, someone still has to manage and administer it all. So, short of some revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence and a corresponding increase in processing power, files and folders it stays, leaving some body responsible for doing the requisite work. Google afficonados, of course, keen on their next web application will be free to continue to pretend otherwise, and not bother concerning themselves with such things.
I guess this brings us back to the venerable command-line. In the future, I don't doubt that Microsoft will implement for their users some sort of speech recognition facility so that instead of clicking and pointing, users can grunt or shout at their icons, but the rest of us? We'll be doing productive work at a prompt by pressing keys on a keyboard.
When was the last time you met a Windows admin who was able to completely administrate a Windows server from the command line? I have met a few very competent Windows specialists who were deeply knowledgable of the Windows commandline interface, they do exist, but even these guys had tasks that they could only perform via some lame GUI even after installing a whole slew of Microsoft and third party add-on commandline utilities. The typical Windows admin is ususally lost without a GUI and some seem to be downright scared to death of the Windows commandline.
Someone modded this troll? AFAIC, this deserves a +5 Informative if for nothing else than to offer a reminder that the basic truth underlying all these discussions is that Windows simply cannot be installed, managed or administered to any effective degree without resorting to a GUI. And no, an MMC snap-in for this or that feature, or using any of the one-off utilities found in the Resource Kit or elsewhere doesn't count.
The other fundamental truth is that contrary to the marketing hype offered up with the introduction of Windows 2000 that still gets repeated, there do not exist command-line tools in a any Windows installation (with or without the miscellaney from a Resource Kit, etc.) for performing tasks, even those done on a typical day-to-basis.
So, yes, typical Windows admins are afraid of the command-line and perhaps it's just as well. The cmd.exe is hardly what anyone would call a terminal, and relying on the ad hoc collection of tools provided is an exercise in frustration. In fact, I'd go so far as to say without something like a Cygwin installation to provide a terminal, a shell, and the requisite toolkit and interpreters found in any *nix installation, no one is going to be able to ssh into a box and get anything done in a productive manner, so making use of RDP is perhaps the only sane option -- to the extent point and clicking your the day while relying on a GUI that shouldn't be necessary and is often in the way can be considered sane.
My favorite thing about Slashdot is that the article summaries are so objective.
I think the I can't begin to imagine why. is less an editorial than an attempt to be funny. Not "ha ha" funny, but funny in the style of El Reg. If the article submitter had succeeded in fashioning something clever, sub rosa opinions or an agenda would be overlooked (it's easy to value a good laugh over a well-reasoned argument). As it stands, the statement is both lame and inappropriate.
I call bullshit. What are you doing to get your registry corrupted?
Indeed. The phrase is bandied about so often that I wonder if it ever meant anything. From my own experience, it's always analogous to "I did [something] and I assume unwanted settings were [written to|deleted from] the registry and now I can't fix [problem] or have any idea what to do."
Granted, it's not as transparent as text files, and while there's excellent arguments describing how the approach is somewhere between inconvenient and ridiculous, the registry is hardly the black box buried in the engine compartment people make it out to be.
For anyone who doesn't know, you become a Microsoft MPV largely by being an unemployed loser - the more time you can waste away providing pro-Microsoft answers on Microsoft's message boards...
The MCSE jokes on/. are admittedly funny at times, but this is as unfunny as it is unfair. First, only web weenies would refer to news groups as message boards. Second, those groups are an invaluable resource, being freely available, active, and representing a wide cross section of experience, they're one fo the few places where you can find honest and up-to-date information. And third, while Microsoft does offer a pseudo subscription-based pricing for "guaranteed responses" (from the MVPs, among others), most posts are the result of volunteer efforts.
Perhaps the next time you send a question off to debian-users, for example, hoping for an answer from one of the "regulars", you avoid suggesting that any of them must be an unemployed loser for bothering to respond. Unless playing the part of a troll is somehow more rewarding.
If it sounds like I'm pissed off, yeah, I am. Having to defend something Microsoft related on/. is annoying enough without being forced to justify the efforts of those trying to help others, irrespective of the venue or their individual capacity.
As for anyone else using Windows and is unfamiliar with usenet, I'd suggest exploring the ms.public hierarchy with whatever news client you have available, and get into the habit of reading a few of them before applying the latest patch or service pack, or are otherwise trying to resolve an issue or trying to learn something. The top posting is murder, but the information is free and unlikely to be available to the same extent anywhere else.
I'd be careful of anything involving dyhdrogen monoxide.
Dihydrogen Monoxide is not believed to be carcinogenic, although it is known to be a component of a number of cancer-causing agents. Additionally, the cause of approximately 20 percent of all cancers is not known, and there is reason to suspect that DHMO may play some role in these as well. Clearly, more research is needed before DHMO's role is fully enumerated.
More information is available from the main website
What OS a person starts out with when young will have ZERO impact on what OS they stay with. OS'es are not like McDonalds, we will not keep going to them into our 30's just because we had lunch there when 7 years old.
I started off with DOS (many years of Wordperfect included), and spent most of the successive years working almost exclusively Windows systems. Today, I spend all my time in a terminal window, and my documents are written with LaTeX.
OS'es are more like a tool, like a hammer. We will go and get the best one we can find for the job.
Took a few years, but I eventually discovered the fallacy of that argument. Computers are not hammers, or toasters, and despite the advances in GUI design to give the illusion of simplicity, they remain complicated beasts.
You might as well try and predict what wrist watch a person will wear at age 30 based on what watch they wear in the fourth grade. Or calculator. Or anything. It is just a tool.
True story. My first watch was an antique given to me by grandfather when I was about 12. Regrettably I lost it soon after I turned 18. Now (I'm over 30) I wear an even older but more expensive Patek Phillipe (I bought it because it looked similar) that doesn't tell time as accurately as all the digital watches I've owned, or is as maintenance free. I've also recently put aside the habit of buying safety razors with disposable blades and now use an old single blade, the kind I first started using. Why? Nostalgia is part of it, of course. The bigger reason is that with a bit of extra work, I get a better shave, and for less money. As for the watch, it reminds me that life is really analog.
If linux is to get more of a market share, then linux needs to improve. Just targeting kids to use linux will not make it more used later in life.
I'd suggest an alternate approach. Teach kids how what computers really are, how they work and give them a chance to learn some programming, even at a rudimentary level. That knowledge will take them farther, but more to the point, it will lead them in the opposite direction from Windows. Apple with Unixy goodness may offer a nice compromise with lots of feel good benefits for some, but for everyone else, especially for any kid interested in learning, the only viable option at present is Linux. And if preparing kids for a world where computers and technology play and increasingly imporant role is the motivating factor, I'd go so far as to suggest we have an obligation to see to it they start with an O/S that comes with a compiler, a standardised toolset, and variety of programming languages.
Seems to me that the bones, innards and other parts of farm animals such as cattle, pigs or chickens that Canadians do not eat are the yummiest, at least necessary to make stock (the basis of any proper kitchen) in which you can cook your vegetables, make your soups, use as a base for your sauces and equally important, give Rover some real marrow to eat as opposed to frustrating him with emptied, or worse, plastic bones. In most markets, the only place one can find bones, etc. is from the near-extinct local butcher, a sympathetic farmer, or from US Chinatowns where freshly slaughtered poultry can be purchased whole (i.e., everything but the feathers).
It could be that the most Canadians demographic they're referring to are those folks who grew up shopping in supermarkets not knowing any different. I doubt it applies to the French, or any other group still in touch with their ethnic roots. As an illustrative example, I'm Canadian but my dogs will be enjoying the discarded turkey carcases donated by friends and family for the next few months, while I can enjoy Turkey-based soups and sauces.
Recycling fast food frying oil made from soybeans as mentioned in the article, on the other hand, makes perfect sense. Personally, I think fresh soybean oil should go straight to the gas tank.
I use mutt and vim for email. Other than emacs, it doesn't get more powerful than that. I think they probably meant easy-to-use.
Agreed, but I think it would be more correct to say "easy-to-learn" and "easy-to-configure". Given the limited feature set of a typical email client (web-based, included), those are givens.
Slashdot Mirror
The rule against splitting infinitives was invented out of whole cloth by someone who liked Latin better. There has never legitimately been any such rule in English.
...
...
/. where ignorance of both history, tradition, and stuff found imprinted on aging and dusty remnants of dead trees are held in such contempt as to merit mod points or badge of some sort (or, perhaps more appropriately, a T-shirt festooned with the word "evolved"), but your characterisation of "by someone who liked Latin better" betrays a knowledge and understanding the breadth of which would fit into a short Wikipedia article with plenty of room to spare.
..."
That being said, it is not advisable to
Sigh. It was supposed to be a f*ng joke. But since you asked
This may be
In fairness to you, allow me to quote from the same article:
Although most English speakers do use split infinitives, it should be noted that some do not, not because they follow a prescriptivist rule but simply because it is not part of the language as they acquired it as children.
You see, your bite-sized editorialising may have some merit: that those of us who did grow up with prescriptive rules a la Fowler's, and who were force-fed Latin and writings by all those Dead English Guys with weird names that few have even heard of but are prominently cited in the article perhaps do insist on continuing The Tradition, unwittingly or otherwise. More importantly, because it was part of the curriculum since Grade 7 for many of us, we can lay claim to knowing a bit more than is summarised in clicky links intended for mass consumption.
Put another way, our disagreement may simply be generational thing. I'm right and you're perhaps too young and unschooled to know the difference. Be happy with that. Many of those Dead English Guys weren't worth reading.
If that doesn't make you feel better, I'll offer to buy you a T-Shirt. Even one that says "To boldly go
shouldn't that be "to boldly glue what no man has glued before" ?
... resist ... grammar ... !!!
Must
Correctly, it should be to glue boldy what no man has glued before.
Or is splitting an infinitive just splitting hairs?
However, online game-playing has neither the virtue of real interaction (in person) nor direct interaction (where there is no intervening purpose).
Put another way, on-line gaming is the social equivalent of watching television or staring out the window on a first date.
Of course gaming is an escape! No doubt it can be fun for some in the same way that mutual masturbation can be fun. But to the extent such things are a shared experience, they work best when you're with someone with whom you already have a *real* relationship.
Superficial pleasures have their place. Just don't tell my girlfriend I said so.
Good idea. But how do you "reactivate" this feature once a patch is released? I use Ifranview, but I also depend heavily on the thumbnail feature in explorer.
Sigh. I do wish people would offer some information with their click here/type-this instructions so people would understand WTF they're doing.To register (or re-register) the dll:To run the command, you can use a console window (cmd.exe), or the Run dialog box (accessible from the Start Menu).
Do you mean by "drink too much??"
If it's beer you're talking about, then one standard pint glass represents a good time, two pints represents a really good time, and three is a party. Anything over three is usual subject to local laws and can get you in trouble with the missus, the neighbours, or otherwise prevent you from finding your way home and, thus can be considered too much.
American beer, for similar reasons, is best served in small glasses, and chilled to the extreme to kill the taste.
A quick reference sheet is an excellent tool for beginners. But that goes for most any subject, doesn't it?
Except Windows.
Windows insists on a full blown multi-page GUI and prevents you from remembering anything.
That abbreviated sampling doesn't reflect the complexities of the rundll32 interface, or include service names, which, in breaking from the DOS 8-character filename limitation of executables, are bizarre beyond description.
Seems to me that using executables with abbreviated and easy-to-type names, in conjunction with simple ascii files under /etc is more straightforward and easier to learn. And for everything else, you can fashion Grandma-friendly aliases.
The Sherman Act gives state AGs the power to sue on behalf of its affected citizens as parens patriae.
Lol. If you're going impress us with Latin, the correct form of the plural would help: state Attorneys General.
Abusus non tollit usum.
... it had something to do with the cheese?
These measures will simply monitor law-abiding individuals. How can this possibly be a good thing??
Err, if you were a policeman, wouldn't that be your job? You can offer the argument that there's a difference between monitoring good guys vs. monitoring bad guys, but to law enforcement, monitoring means monitoring the public. How else will they find the bad guys?
You can't blame the guy in uniform for wanting new tools (a euphemism for increased power) to make his job easier. I'd even go so far as to suggest that the increased power, in conjunction with training and weapons adopted over the years from the military makes their dicks hard. But I can't fault them for believing it's all needed or necessary or otherwise taking full advantage of whatever tools they have available.
Ultimately, of course, the real power rests with the citizenry to decide what's acceptable or allowed. Unless of course, they choose not to exercise that power.
To boot Knoppix, I'm going to have to wait 5 minutes?
Yeah but now you can multi-boot using rundll32 interface while running Windows.
Or something like that.
I do think that Hotmail and Yahoo revolutionized the world back in the day when they unveiled "FREE EMAIL" for everyone. That was around 1998. Before that, you had to pay. All of a sudden, there was no excuse to not have and use an email address.
... There's an inevitability to that which reminds me of why I have a medium-sized garbage can sitting underneath my mailbox outside. The unsolicited rubbish that I receive doesn't ever seem fit into my mailbox. Unfair? Perhaps. Consider the typical 3 or 4 line message from a Do You Yahoo! user with 2+ lines of advertising. Cut out the advertising footer, and your space savings approaches 50%. If you receive a lot of email and/or subscribe to multiple mailing lists or otherwise need to archive correspondence, that trivial saving adds up dramatically.
Sorry, but the advertising footers that go out with most such "free" email services suggests to me that as a recipient, I'm the one paying for it.
Gmail, well.. It's really cool and they were the first major player to give 1GB of space.
Yes, but
Nothing is free in this world, and there is most always a price associated with convenience, so my guess is that personal rants aside, the dinner talk was less about what was on the menu or what the wife and kids were doing, and more about how to make someone somewhere pay more for it all.
Although the information that can be extracted from the analysis of mitochondrial DNA can be more informative as to lineage and evolutionary cladistics.
;-)
Sentence fragment.
Come on folks, this is junior high biology.....
And that was grade school English.
You can't have an omelette and keep the eggs.
...
You can't have the wolf fed and the sheep alive.
Dunno about the eggs, but the wolf and sheep, yes can.
Stop me if you didn't hear this from someone in the Vassilev family when growing up
"You're one side of a river with a small boat. You need to bring across safely to the other side a wolf, a lamb, and some cabbage. How do you do it in the least amount of trips?"
The DMCA is silly. Don't our Federal Agents have better ppl to track down? Like maybe the terrorists?
Nope!
You wish.
The Immigration folks, as well as those in Customs, are now part of the Department of Homeland Security. So, you see this is about fighting the terrorists.
There are shells, including bash, csh and others, easily installable on Windows. And you can install the Interix/SFU thing if you want a full posix environment to work within.
.dll files. The Interix subsystem is an entire separate API that runs alongside Win32.
Been there and done that. You don't seem to be familiar with the limitations of what you're suggesting, and you haven't wasted as much time with the Interix "thing" as much as I have, so I'll save you the trouble and sum it up this way: don't bother.
Cygwin is a kludge. It's a bunch of wonking stuff that resides in Win32
No one denies it's a kludge, yet it gets the job done. And we use the same toolset on our Windows servers that we use elsewhere. Why wouldn't we want to make as much of use of it as possible? Admittedly, managing a Cygwin repository and bothering with all the installation issues is a PIA, but to put it in context, it's the first thing I do.
You don't seen to know that much about how Windows is arranged, how the NT Kernel interoperates with the various user layer subsystems you can plug into it, let along how an NT Server is administered.
WTF? The pros and cons of administering our servers using an emulation layer provided by the Cygwin dll is a different topic, as is my kernel programming abilities. The point was, and remains, that Windows servers cannot be administered without a GUI. That goes for everything from NT4 to the present. Nothing you've said has any relevance to that, or offers any evidence to the contrary.
Here's a different approach. If anyone hasn't yet seen it, I'd suggest trying it out. I never made any use of it (the conclusion from everyone who's tried it and loved it), but it was one of the few programs I've ever tried that seemed to make any headache from staring at a computer screen too long just go away.
That said, I doubt anything will come of any new approaches for years to come. We still have offices, and in those offices we'll work at desks to generate paper which we'll put into labelled folders, which in turn will get stored in file cabinets.
Those desks, files, folders and file cabinets aren't going anywhere, and neither are the metaphors, least of all for the reason that irrespective of whatever new metaphor one creates and implements, someone still has to manage and administer it all. So, short of some revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence and a corresponding increase in processing power, files and folders it stays, leaving some body responsible for doing the requisite work. Google afficonados, of course, keen on their next web application will be free to continue to pretend otherwise, and not bother concerning themselves with such things.
I guess this brings us back to the venerable command-line. In the future, I don't doubt that Microsoft will implement for their users some sort of speech recognition facility so that instead of clicking and pointing, users can grunt or shout at their icons, but the rest of us? We'll be doing productive work at a prompt by pressing keys on a keyboard.
When was the last time you met a Windows admin who was able to completely administrate a Windows server from the command line? I have met a few very competent Windows specialists who were deeply knowledgable of the Windows commandline interface, they do exist, but even these guys had tasks that they could only perform via some lame GUI even after installing a whole slew of Microsoft and third party add-on commandline utilities. The typical Windows admin is ususally lost without a GUI and some seem to be downright scared to death of the Windows commandline.
Someone modded this troll? AFAIC, this deserves a +5 Informative if for nothing else than to offer a reminder that the basic truth underlying all these discussions is that Windows simply cannot be installed, managed or administered to any effective degree without resorting to a GUI. And no, an MMC snap-in for this or that feature, or using any of the one-off utilities found in the Resource Kit or elsewhere doesn't count.
The other fundamental truth is that contrary to the marketing hype offered up with the introduction of Windows 2000 that still gets repeated, there do not exist command-line tools in a any Windows installation (with or without the miscellaney from a Resource Kit, etc.) for performing tasks, even those done on a typical day-to-basis.
So, yes, typical Windows admins are afraid of the command-line and perhaps it's just as well. The cmd.exe is hardly what anyone would call a terminal, and relying on the ad hoc collection of tools provided is an exercise in frustration. In fact, I'd go so far as to say without something like a Cygwin installation to provide a terminal, a shell, and the requisite toolkit and interpreters found in any *nix installation, no one is going to be able to ssh into a box and get anything done in a productive manner, so making use of RDP is perhaps the only sane option -- to the extent point and clicking your the day while relying on a GUI that shouldn't be necessary and is often in the way can be considered sane.
My favorite thing about Slashdot is that the article summaries are so objective.
I think the I can't begin to imagine why. is less an editorial than an attempt to be funny. Not "ha ha" funny, but funny in the style of El Reg. If the article submitter had succeeded in fashioning something clever, sub rosa opinions or an agenda would be overlooked (it's easy to value a good laugh over a well-reasoned argument). As it stands, the statement is both lame and inappropriate.
Somehow I don't think he was VOTED out of his office.
No, but I bet he left a paper trail.
I call bullshit. What are you doing to get your registry corrupted?
Indeed. The phrase is bandied about so often that I wonder if it ever meant anything. From my own experience, it's always analogous to "I did [something] and I assume unwanted settings were [written to|deleted from] the registry and now I can't fix [problem] or have any idea what to do."
Granted, it's not as transparent as text files, and while there's excellent arguments describing how the approach is somewhere between inconvenient and ridiculous, the registry is hardly the black box buried in the engine compartment people make it out to be.
For anyone who doesn't know, you become a Microsoft MPV largely by being an unemployed loser - the more time you can waste away providing pro-Microsoft answers on Microsoft's message boards ...
/. are admittedly funny at times, but this is as unfunny as it is unfair. First, only web weenies would refer to news groups as message boards. Second, those groups are an invaluable resource, being freely available, active, and representing a wide cross section of experience, they're one fo the few places where you can find honest and up-to-date information. And third, while Microsoft does offer a pseudo subscription-based pricing for "guaranteed responses" (from the MVPs, among others), most posts are the result of volunteer efforts.
/. is annoying enough without being forced to justify the efforts of those trying to help others, irrespective of the venue or their individual capacity.
The MCSE jokes on
Perhaps the next time you send a question off to debian-users, for example, hoping for an answer from one of the "regulars", you avoid suggesting that any of them must be an unemployed loser for bothering to respond. Unless playing the part of a troll is somehow more rewarding.
If it sounds like I'm pissed off, yeah, I am. Having to defend something Microsoft related on
As for anyone else using Windows and is unfamiliar with usenet, I'd suggest exploring the ms.public hierarchy with whatever news client you have available, and get into the habit of reading a few of them before applying the latest patch or service pack, or are otherwise trying to resolve an issue or trying to learn something. The top posting is murder, but the information is free and unlikely to be available to the same extent anywhere else.
I'd be careful of anything involving dyhdrogen monoxide.
Dihydrogen Monoxide is not believed to be carcinogenic, although it is known to be a component of a number of cancer-causing agents. Additionally, the cause of approximately 20 percent of all cancers is not known, and there is reason to suspect that DHMO may play some role in these as well. Clearly, more research is needed before DHMO's role is fully enumerated.
More information is available from the main website
What OS a person starts out with when young will have ZERO impact on what OS they stay with. OS'es are not like McDonalds, we will not keep going to them into our 30's just because we had lunch there when 7 years old.
I started off with DOS (many years of Wordperfect included), and spent most of the successive years working almost exclusively Windows systems. Today, I spend all my time in a terminal window, and my documents are written with LaTeX.
OS'es are more like a tool, like a hammer. We will go and get the best one we can find for the job.
Took a few years, but I eventually discovered the fallacy of that argument. Computers are not hammers, or toasters, and despite the advances in GUI design to give the illusion of simplicity, they remain complicated beasts.
You might as well try and predict what wrist watch a person will wear at age 30 based on what watch they wear in the fourth grade. Or calculator. Or anything. It is just a tool.
True story. My first watch was an antique given to me by grandfather when I was about 12. Regrettably I lost it soon after I turned 18. Now (I'm over 30) I wear an even older but more expensive Patek Phillipe (I bought it because it looked similar) that doesn't tell time as accurately as all the digital watches I've owned, or is as maintenance free. I've also recently put aside the habit of buying safety razors with disposable blades and now use an old single blade, the kind I first started using. Why? Nostalgia is part of it, of course. The bigger reason is that with a bit of extra work, I get a better shave, and for less money. As for the watch, it reminds me that life is really analog.
If linux is to get more of a market share, then linux needs to improve. Just targeting kids to use linux will not make it more used later in life.
I'd suggest an alternate approach. Teach kids how what computers really are, how they work and give them a chance to learn some programming, even at a rudimentary level. That knowledge will take them farther, but more to the point, it will lead them in the opposite direction from Windows. Apple with Unixy goodness may offer a nice compromise with lots of feel good benefits for some, but for everyone else, especially for any kid interested in learning, the only viable option at present is Linux. And if preparing kids for a world where computers and technology play and increasingly imporant role is the motivating factor, I'd go so far as to suggest we have an obligation to see to it they start with an O/S that comes with a compiler, a standardised toolset, and variety of programming languages.
Seems to me that the bones, innards and other parts of farm animals such as cattle, pigs or chickens that Canadians do not eat are the yummiest, at least necessary to make stock (the basis of any proper kitchen) in which you can cook your vegetables, make your soups, use as a base for your sauces and equally important, give Rover some real marrow to eat as opposed to frustrating him with emptied, or worse, plastic bones. In most markets, the only place one can find bones, etc. is from the near-extinct local butcher, a sympathetic farmer, or from US Chinatowns where freshly slaughtered poultry can be purchased whole (i.e., everything but the feathers).
It could be that the most Canadians demographic they're referring to are those folks who grew up shopping in supermarkets not knowing any different. I doubt it applies to the French, or any other group still in touch with their ethnic roots. As an illustrative example, I'm Canadian but my dogs will be enjoying the discarded turkey carcases donated by friends and family for the next few months, while I can enjoy Turkey-based soups and sauces.
Recycling fast food frying oil made from soybeans as mentioned in the article, on the other hand, makes perfect sense. Personally, I think fresh soybean oil should go straight to the gas tank.
I use mutt and vim for email. Other than emacs, it doesn't get more powerful than that. I think they probably meant easy-to-use.
Agreed, but I think it would be more correct to say "easy-to-learn" and "easy-to-configure". Given the limited feature set of a typical email client (web-based, included), those are givens.