The difference is this: in the FSF/Corel case, Corel was using software that belongs to the people to create something they were trying to claim as their own. In this case, Corel was raiding the public larder, trying to make money off a social movement it didn't understand. Corel had *proven* they broke the license agreement; the evidence was there for all to see.
In Microsoft's case, MS is merely using draconian measures to raid a place simply because it wants to. The *police* can't even do that, for Christ's sake. Microsoft is *assuming* guilt, and demanding the customer prove innocence.
That's the difference, and it is so large I don't see how you missed it.
I see. You're right-- we *were* apparently arguing different things.
He was asked about licensing, and closed vs. open source compatibility/morallity. He rendered his opinion based on the general nature of the question, and not the specifics-- just as "Don't take baths with plugged-in kitchen appliances" is good advice, no matter which appliance we are discussing.
Anyway, that's the point I was trying to make-- that he doesn't need to know about the specifics to render a good judgement.
not what will appease some egomaniac with a cult following.
Excellent! By directing the argument away from whether morality has anything to do with software, you've managed to avoid the sticky question of whether RMS is right.
Freedom does come with the GNU label. It also comes with other labels. RMS is not forcing you to choose the GNU path-- he just wants people to choose the right path. The path to Freedom.
Sorry-- the perjorative "Commie" is used to describe socialists, not communists. The term arose during the cold war, and was used to label anyone who didn't subscribe to the ultra-right's ideals of "America, Right or Wrong!"
Stallman believes that the most good can come when we contrbute something lasting-- and the only way to contribute something lasting in the computer industry is to make it available to everyfuckingbody. Otherwise, your contribution dies when the copyright owner dies.
How many programs have just gone away? Remember WordStar? What would have happened if that code had been released after the company died? And WS is just one example of many.
"Sharing" is not a communistic ideal. It's not even anti-capitalist. It's just anti-greed. So RMS abhores greed. So what? Name one good aspect of greed.
Anyway, RMS is hardly a "commie." He might have communistic ideas, but remember, there has never been a true communistic government. True communism would give you something like the world described in the SF short story, "And Then There Were None." I forget the author.
Well, it would give us a world like that if people weren't so goddamned selfish and short sighted.
So RMS ignores non-free software. Big deal. I'm completely out-of-touch with pop music. Does that mean I'm no longer a musician? I don't pay attention to the latest fashion trends. Does that mean I'm suddenly poorly-dressed?
Why should we pay that much attention to things like game consoles (unless we are gamers ourselves) or what Microsoft is doing? That's like saying, "Giavani is dressing everyone in scotch tape this year! Let's outdo him and use duct tape!"
We have a choice-- we can either copy everything we see (in which case it is important to know everything about the closed-source world), or we can do our own innovation. Yes, it's still important to know about the important ideas of the closed-source industry, but DirectX and game consoles are not important innovative ideas themselves. (DirectX is merely a marketting term used to describe a graphics API. And I'm sure RMS knows about graphics APIs, at least in concept.)
RMS is usually quite lucid. Remember, he is a strongly moral person, and feels that he is fighting an uphill battle. Most people do not have the moral fiber to fight for Freedom, nor the backbone to sacrifice convenience for their beliefs. If he sometimes seems a bit strident, it is perhaps because he feels he must shout to be heard. (I am being presumptuous, of course, ascribing motivations to another person. I present this as merely one *possible* explaination.)
Without moral certainty, the Free Software movement has nothing. The Open Source movement was created to deal with situational ethics-- "We can sacrifice our freedoms to convenience in some circumstances."
And then, there are those who are only along for the ride, "F1rst POsts" and all. Since they contribute nothing, morally or technically, they are nothing.
Ralph is too young, though his IQ is about right. No, I think we need someone with integrity, someone with intelligence, someone with a crush on Mr. Burns.
In my opinion, Mr. Brin must be a toadie for the Gore campaign.
Nope. Mr. Brin is a libertarian by nature, as are many intelligent (and not-so-intelligent) people. His support of Gore is an interesting twist, but I can't blame him. Given Geo. W. Bush's history, and the Republican's hypocritical acceptance of his historical drug use (remember how they lambasted Clinton for "I didn't inhale."?), I find Bush's candidacy ludicrous, and evidence of the republican party's current state of disarray.
Libertarians are not Objectivists, though many objectivists are libertarians. Personally, I tend toward libertarianism myself, but can't stand objectivism in the least. Nor can I stand the federal support of our burgeoning fuedal system we call corporatism, nor the Ponzi scheme that is the stock market.
The basic idea of libertarianism can be summed up with, "TANSTAAFL!" (Read "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress," cobber. You'll be glad you did.)
Contact the lawyer mentioned at the end of the "I won arbitration" page. Since he has already done the research, he will only have to get your individual records from E*Trade.
I wrote him a letter tonight; if you like, contact me at tonyt@ptialaska.net and I will let you know if he picks up my case.
Or, you can retain a lawyer from your own town, and give him the name of the law firm used in this case. Let the lawyers do the work, since they are trained to twist the rules to your advantage.
The article sez, "..the world's tallest mountain, Mount Everest!"
Wrong! Wrongwrongwrong! Mt. Everest is the highest mountain. Denali (Mt. McKinley, to all you cheechakos) is the tallest mountain.
Everest is a mere 11,000 feet tall, a mineral midget in the mountain menagerie. No, Denali is definitely the dominant (word for mountain that starts with 'D'), at 17,000 feet (base-to-peak).
So, what's the rating on that ski, anyway? Double-diamond?
Yeah, I noticed it said, "About to spam everyone you know. Continue? [Yes, I'm an idiot] [No]" I'm glad it warned me it was about to send spam, instead of just letting people know my new address.
The difference is this: Hotmail attaches their spam to the bottom of every message you send-- it doesn't automatically mass-mail everyone in your address book with that as the only content.
Plus, the Hotmail stuff is attached to something you wrote-- so it isn't all spam. It's more like a spam sandwich; or eggs, spam, bacon and spam; or spam, spam, beans, and spam. It's not the same thing at all.
Shouldn't you have been complaining about that before this?
Mister, I've been complaining about it since 19-aught-28, when Sears & Roebuck started sending out catalogs. And I've been complaining about the email spam since '89. So bite me.
Of course, I'm told I complain a lot, anyway. Whiner.
Loki seems to think its worth the cost of porting games. ID didn't do too badly porting games (of course, they developed their games on the NeXT, originally, so a Unix port was straight-forward).
You are right-- there are other possible reasons for their change of plans. However, in this respect, I think the most obvious explaination is the correct one. Historically, MS has purchased other companies for no other reason than to shut down competition. I don't see why they wouldn't do it in this case, either.
Don Quixote took on windmills, imagining they were giants; the Linux crowd (of which I am a joyful member) takes on a giant, imagining it a windmill. It is important, sometimes, to play that we are on the side of the just (we are, IMNSHO); these little news items remind us that the giant is just as nearsighted and self-absorbed as we are.
MS suffers from Not-Invented-Here. So do we. Microsoft would like everyone to use their OS. So do we (wish that people would use our OS). The giant is obsessed with world domination, with controlling how our Euros are spent, and how our information is traded-- and they are obsessed with making sure *they* control the information. So are w... okay, maybe not.
...this is no longer the best forum to raise your concerns.
Heh. You, sir, are completely correct. I did *not* mean that software issues are the only (or even the most) important issues around. Corporatism and corporate manifest destiny are certainly the larger, scarier parent issue; and social issues such as education and health care are certainly more fundamentally important.
/. is certainly more focused on the computer-tech end of the social issues because that is the nature of/. However, there are few other issues with such wide-reaching influence; software issues affect both education and health care, for instance. That's why I got a bit defensive. Sorry about that.
In any case, I think you are right-- fighting strictly for software rights is fighting the symptoms, not the disease.
It's just software. It is not the end of the world. there are more important things in life than this. Really.
How much of US society today is unworkable without software? Yes, I realize this is a US-centric view, but the world shows every indication of following suit.
It's not just software-- it's our future. Society develops in what is called "punctuated equilibrium" in evolutionary circles-- long periods of stasis in which things evolve slowly, interrupted by short, frantic periods in which things change drastically and quickly. During those periods of rapid change, little things can make a big difference in the final outcome (chaos theory). Those who control the change control the outcome.
We are building our future society right now, in more ways than you can imagine. Corporations are struggling to control the genie-out-of-the-bottle that is the Internet; the only way to control the Internet is to control the software with which people access the Internet. Note the recent DeCSS and Napster rulings. We'll see more and more patent wars between corporations, with our rights being collateral damage; eventually, it will become almost impossible to even write programs because every little thing will be a patent infringement.
Personally, I would like to see a patent system that allows anyone to use any patent under a GPL-compatible license. That way, corporations can keep other corporations from making a buck off their patent, but it allows fair use of the patent for citizens who will not profit from use of the patent.
In any case, corporations will not be satisfied until they can force us to hand over our money. They will use any means necessary, including infringing on our rights. Ten years from now, this will have settled down into equilibrium-- the time for them to act is now. The time for us to stop them is now.
Our future depends on it.
Unix is *very* user friendly
on
Think Unix
·
· Score: 3
Did I say MB was based on Freud's ideas? No. I compared the two only in that *neither one is disprovable.* I was simply drawing a parallel.
Yes, analytical psychology is based on science. However, not all research done in the name of analytical psychology is science.
I'm sorry if I led you to believe I think MB is disprovable because Freud is disprovable. MB is disprovable because *there's always an exception* to cover anything or anyone who doesn't fit they MB pattern. That's the same way Freud made psychoanalysis fit everyone-- he always had an obscure explaination for why that person really *did* fit his model.
MB is not science-- it is pop psychology. It is useful in reducing the complexity of human variability to a few simple variables (that is, it makes it easy to categorize people).
For MB to be science, it must be disprovable. Please, explain how MB can be disproved, and then explain why that cannot happen.
While it is axiomatic, it bears repeating here that emotions and political fashion can change, but reality and scientific fact remain unchanging.
Myers-Briggs is not based in science in any way, shape, or form. Science is merely a method of developing models (called "theories") based on evidence; one of the key attributes of all scientific theories is that they must be disprovable. If you have a model that cannot be disproven, you cannot apply the scientific method.
Freud's theories are not disprovable, and so Freudian analysis is not scientific. Myers-Briggs is not disprovable, and so is not scientific. Please do not mis-use an already misunderstood word ("science") in support of Myers-Briggs.
Now. With that said, psychoanalysis is useful. So is the MBTI. There are many models that are not scientifically provable that are still useful.
Windows Good.
This premise is based on the fact that the Microsoft coders are paid good money to play by the rules and code efficiently and securely, whatever the cost in time and headaches. Hence, the higher overall quality of Windows programs coded in C/C++.
I agree with what you say, but what you say also applies to Solaris, and many other good proprietary (read: closed-source) Unixes. And Metcalfe was specifically talking about Free software-- and not just Linux.
I happen to disagree with him. Free software has typically had better staying power than closed source alternatives. That's why Sendmail is still around and going strong, as is tcl/Tk, Perl, Bind, Linux, and even Unix in general, while NT has gone through 2 major re-writes since its introduction-- the last amounting to over 75% of the codebase.
In any case, I believe Metcalfe is wrong. Very, very wrong.
What I can't seem to explain to Linux users is that in Windows, you don't NEED any of those, so it makes not one bit of difference if they are not implemented in the same way as in linux.
In MS-Windows, you don't have them, you mean. I don't know how many times I've tried to do simple things in MS-Windows, and been stymied, and had to do it the tedious CTRL-click selection route.
I could very well come back and say: "But Linux sux because it doesn't have a visual file explorer tool!"
Really, I've not found any tool that comes with MS-Windows that doesn't have an equivelent graphical tool for Linux over this last year. KFM is a damned fine browser every bit as capable as MS-Explorer.
Of course, the answer is that it doesn't need it, the command line tools are sufficient. However, I still prefer to shift-select 100 files and drag them with the mouse to writing a ten mile long command to select those (and only those!) files I want copied.
What's so hard about
cp *ego*.c../ego/src
In a directory of mixed names in which you only want to move certain types of files, the command line is 100000 times faster than a graphical tool.
Now, suppose you wish to move all your mp3s, which are scattered all through your various subdirectories, into a common directory. You could go hunting for them with a graphical find tool, and moving them one at a time, or you can just type:
find . -name \*.mp3 -exec mv {} ~/music \;
Granted, that requires a bit of knowledge of your tools. But I will pit myself at a command line (which MS-Windows does not even have to any great extent) to someone running a graphical browser, for any but the most trivial file manipulation tasks.
MS-Windows makes the job prettier. It doesn't make it easier. I know. I've used both extensively.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is this: in the FSF/Corel case, Corel was using software that belongs to the people to create something they were trying to claim as their own. In this case, Corel was raiding the public larder, trying to make money off a social movement it didn't understand. Corel had *proven* they broke the license agreement; the evidence was there for all to see.
In Microsoft's case, MS is merely using draconian measures to raid a place simply because it wants to. The *police* can't even do that, for Christ's sake. Microsoft is *assuming* guilt, and demanding the customer prove innocence.
That's the difference, and it is so large I don't see how you missed it.
I see. You're right-- we *were* apparently arguing different things.
He was asked about licensing, and closed vs. open source compatibility/morallity. He rendered his opinion based on the general nature of the question, and not the specifics-- just as "Don't take baths with plugged-in kitchen appliances" is good advice, no matter which appliance we are discussing.
Anyway, that's the point I was trying to make-- that he doesn't need to know about the specifics to render a good judgement.
IMNSHO, at least.
Oh great poster with an ID in the 700s. Please lend me some more insight.
Certainly.
Never order the fish special on Monday.
May I kiss the jewel in your golden ring?
No. You have cooties.
not what will appease some egomaniac with a cult following.
Excellent! By directing the argument away from whether morality has anything to do with software, you've managed to avoid the sticky question of whether RMS is right.
Freedom does come with the GNU label. It also comes with other labels. RMS is not forcing you to choose the GNU path-- he just wants people to choose the right path. The path to Freedom.
Sorry-- the perjorative "Commie" is used to describe socialists, not communists. The term arose during the cold war, and was used to label anyone who didn't subscribe to the ultra-right's ideals of "America, Right or Wrong!"
Stallman believes that the most good can come when we contrbute something lasting-- and the only way to contribute something lasting in the computer industry is to make it available to everyfuckingbody. Otherwise, your contribution dies when the copyright owner dies.
How many programs have just gone away? Remember WordStar? What would have happened if that code had been released after the company died? And WS is just one example of many.
"Sharing" is not a communistic ideal. It's not even anti-capitalist. It's just anti-greed. So RMS abhores greed. So what? Name one good aspect of greed.
Anyway, RMS is hardly a "commie." He might have communistic ideas, but remember, there has never been a true communistic government. True communism would give you something like the world described in the SF short story, "And Then There Were None." I forget the author.
Well, it would give us a world like that if people weren't so goddamned selfish and short sighted.
So RMS ignores non-free software. Big deal. I'm completely out-of-touch with pop music. Does that mean I'm no longer a musician? I don't pay attention to the latest fashion trends. Does that mean I'm suddenly poorly-dressed?
Why should we pay that much attention to things like game consoles (unless we are gamers ourselves) or what Microsoft is doing? That's like saying, "Giavani is dressing everyone in scotch tape this year! Let's outdo him and use duct tape!"
We have a choice-- we can either copy everything we see (in which case it is important to know everything about the closed-source world), or we can do our own innovation. Yes, it's still important to know about the important ideas of the closed-source industry, but DirectX and game consoles are not important innovative ideas themselves. (DirectX is merely a marketting term used to describe a graphics API. And I'm sure RMS knows about graphics APIs, at least in concept.)
RMS is usually quite lucid. Remember, he is a strongly moral person, and feels that he is fighting an uphill battle. Most people do not have the moral fiber to fight for Freedom, nor the backbone to sacrifice convenience for their beliefs. If he sometimes seems a bit strident, it is perhaps because he feels he must shout to be heard. (I am being presumptuous, of course, ascribing motivations to another person. I present this as merely one *possible* explaination.)
Without moral certainty, the Free Software movement has nothing. The Open Source movement was created to deal with situational ethics-- "We can sacrifice our freedoms to convenience in some circumstances."
And then, there are those who are only along for the ride, "F1rst POsts" and all. Since they contribute nothing, morally or technically, they are nothing.
Ralph is too young, though his IQ is about right. No, I think we need someone with integrity, someone with intelligence, someone with a crush on Mr. Burns.
I say, Smithers for VP.
In my opinion, Mr. Brin must be a toadie for the Gore campaign.
Nope. Mr. Brin is a libertarian by nature, as are many intelligent (and not-so-intelligent) people. His support of Gore is an interesting twist, but I can't blame him. Given Geo. W. Bush's history, and the Republican's hypocritical acceptance of his historical drug use (remember how they lambasted Clinton for "I didn't inhale."?), I find Bush's candidacy ludicrous, and evidence of the republican party's current state of disarray.
Libertarians are not Objectivists, though many objectivists are libertarians. Personally, I tend toward libertarianism myself, but can't stand objectivism in the least. Nor can I stand the federal support of our burgeoning fuedal system we call corporatism, nor the Ponzi scheme that is the stock market.
The basic idea of libertarianism can be summed up with, "TANSTAAFL!" (Read "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress," cobber. You'll be glad you did.)
Yes, but the wealthiest 10% hold 50% of the wealth-- so they are not being taxed enough. They should be contributing 50% of the taxes.
Contact the lawyer mentioned at the end of the "I won arbitration" page. Since he has already done the research, he will only have to get your individual records from E*Trade.
I wrote him a letter tonight; if you like, contact me at tonyt@ptialaska.net and I will let you know if he picks up my case.
Or, you can retain a lawyer from your own town, and give him the name of the law firm used in this case. Let the lawyers do the work, since they are trained to twist the rules to your advantage.
The article sez, "..the world's tallest mountain, Mount Everest!"
Wrong! Wrongwrongwrong! Mt. Everest is the highest mountain. Denali (Mt. McKinley, to all you cheechakos) is the tallest mountain.
Everest is a mere 11,000 feet tall, a mineral midget in the mountain menagerie. No, Denali is definitely the dominant (word for mountain that starts with 'D'), at 17,000 feet (base-to-peak).
So, what's the rating on that ski, anyway? Double-diamond?
Yeah, I noticed it said, "About to spam everyone you know. Continue? [Yes, I'm an idiot] [No]" I'm glad it warned me it was about to send spam, instead of just letting people know my new address.
The difference is this: Hotmail attaches their spam to the bottom of every message you send-- it doesn't automatically mass-mail everyone in your address book with that as the only content.
Plus, the Hotmail stuff is attached to something you wrote-- so it isn't all spam. It's more like a spam sandwich; or eggs, spam, bacon and spam; or spam, spam, beans, and spam. It's not the same thing at all.
Shouldn't you have been complaining about that before this?
Mister, I've been complaining about it since 19-aught-28, when Sears & Roebuck started sending out catalogs. And I've been complaining about the email spam since '89. So bite me.
Of course, I'm told I complain a lot, anyway. Whiner.
Loki seems to think its worth the cost of porting games. ID didn't do too badly porting games (of course, they developed their games on the NeXT, originally, so a Unix port was straight-forward).
You are right-- there are other possible reasons for their change of plans. However, in this respect, I think the most obvious explaination is the correct one. Historically, MS has purchased other companies for no other reason than to shut down competition. I don't see why they wouldn't do it in this case, either.
Let's see. Bungie *was* going to develop Halo for BeOS and Linux. Since it has been acquired by MS, it is not. Coincidence? I don't think so.
Sounds like a load of MS-BS, to me.
Don Quixote took on windmills, imagining they were giants; the Linux crowd (of which I am a joyful member) takes on a giant, imagining it a windmill. It is important, sometimes, to play that we are on the side of the just (we are, IMNSHO); these little news items remind us that the giant is just as nearsighted and self-absorbed as we are.
MS suffers from Not-Invented-Here. So do we. Microsoft would like everyone to use their OS. So do we (wish that people would use our OS). The giant is obsessed with world domination, with controlling how our Euros are spent, and how our information is traded-- and they are obsessed with making sure *they* control the information. So are w... okay, maybe not.
...this is no longer the best forum to raise your concerns.
/. However, there are few other issues with such wide-reaching influence; software issues affect both education and health care, for instance. That's why I got a bit defensive. Sorry about that.
Heh. You, sir, are completely correct. I did *not* mean that software issues are the only (or even the most) important issues around. Corporatism and corporate manifest destiny are certainly the larger, scarier parent issue; and social issues such as education and health care are certainly more fundamentally important.
/. is certainly more focused on the computer-tech end of the social issues because that is the nature of
In any case, I think you are right-- fighting strictly for software rights is fighting the symptoms, not the disease.
It's just software. It is not the end of the world. there are more important things in life than this. Really.
How much of US society today is unworkable without software? Yes, I realize this is a US-centric view, but the world shows every indication of following suit.
It's not just software-- it's our future. Society develops in what is called "punctuated equilibrium" in evolutionary circles-- long periods of stasis in which things evolve slowly, interrupted by short, frantic periods in which things change drastically and quickly. During those periods of rapid change, little things can make a big difference in the final outcome (chaos theory). Those who control the change control the outcome.
We are building our future society right now, in more ways than you can imagine. Corporations are struggling to control the genie-out-of-the-bottle that is the Internet; the only way to control the Internet is to control the software with which people access the Internet. Note the recent DeCSS and Napster rulings. We'll see more and more patent wars between corporations, with our rights being collateral damage; eventually, it will become almost impossible to even write programs because every little thing will be a patent infringement.
Personally, I would like to see a patent system that allows anyone to use any patent under a GPL-compatible license. That way, corporations can keep other corporations from making a buck off their patent, but it allows fair use of the patent for citizens who will not profit from use of the patent.
In any case, corporations will not be satisfied until they can force us to hand over our money. They will use any means necessary, including infringing on our rights. Ten years from now, this will have settled down into equilibrium-- the time for them to act is now. The time for us to stop them is now.
Our future depends on it.
It's just particular about its friends.
- Tony "Yes, it's paraphrased" Taylor
Damn it. I meant "*not* disprovable." Freudian slip?
Did I say MB was based on Freud's ideas? No. I compared the two only in that *neither one is disprovable.* I was simply drawing a parallel.
Yes, analytical psychology is based on science. However, not all research done in the name of analytical psychology is science.
I'm sorry if I led you to believe I think MB is disprovable because Freud is disprovable. MB is disprovable because *there's always an exception* to cover anything or anyone who doesn't fit they MB pattern. That's the same way Freud made psychoanalysis fit everyone-- he always had an obscure explaination for why that person really *did* fit his model.
MB is not science-- it is pop psychology. It is useful in reducing the complexity of human variability to a few simple variables (that is, it makes it easy to categorize people).
For MB to be science, it must be disprovable. Please, explain how MB can be disproved, and then explain why that cannot happen.
While it is axiomatic, it bears repeating here that emotions and political fashion can change, but reality and scientific fact remain unchanging.
Myers-Briggs is not based in science in any way, shape, or form. Science is merely a method of developing models (called "theories") based on evidence; one of the key attributes of all scientific theories is that they must be disprovable. If you have a model that cannot be disproven, you cannot apply the scientific method.
Freud's theories are not disprovable, and so Freudian analysis is not scientific. Myers-Briggs is not disprovable, and so is not scientific. Please do not mis-use an already misunderstood word ("science") in support of Myers-Briggs.
Now. With that said, psychoanalysis is useful. So is the MBTI. There are many models that are not scientifically provable that are still useful.
Windows Good.
This premise is based on the fact that the Microsoft coders are paid good money to play by the rules and code efficiently and securely, whatever the cost in time and headaches. Hence, the higher overall quality of Windows programs coded in C/C++.
Uhm....
Which alternate reality are you from?
Umm...
I agree with what you say, but what you say also applies to Solaris, and many other good proprietary (read: closed-source) Unixes. And Metcalfe was specifically talking about Free software-- and not just Linux.
I happen to disagree with him. Free software has typically had better staying power than closed source alternatives. That's why Sendmail is still around and going strong, as is tcl/Tk, Perl, Bind, Linux, and even Unix in general, while NT has gone through 2 major re-writes since its introduction-- the last amounting to over 75% of the codebase.
In any case, I believe Metcalfe is wrong. Very, very wrong.
What I can't seem to explain to Linux users is that in Windows, you don't NEED any of those, so it makes not one bit of difference if they are not implemented in the same way as in linux.
../ego/src
In MS-Windows, you don't have them, you mean. I don't know how many times I've tried to do simple things in MS-Windows, and been stymied, and had to do it the tedious CTRL-click selection route.
I could very well come back and say: "But Linux sux because it doesn't have a visual file explorer tool!"
Really, I've not found any tool that comes with MS-Windows that doesn't have an equivelent graphical tool for Linux over this last year. KFM is a damned fine browser every bit as capable as MS-Explorer.
Of course, the answer is that it doesn't need it, the command line tools are sufficient. However, I still prefer to shift-select 100 files and drag them with the mouse to writing a ten mile long command to select those (and only those!) files I want copied.
What's so hard about
cp *ego*.c
In a directory of mixed names in which you only want to move certain types of files, the command line is 100000 times faster than a graphical tool.
Now, suppose you wish to move all your mp3s, which are scattered all through your various subdirectories, into a common directory. You could go hunting for them with a graphical find tool, and moving them one at a time, or you can just type:
find . -name \*.mp3 -exec mv {} ~/music \;
Granted, that requires a bit of knowledge of your tools. But I will pit myself at a command line (which MS-Windows does not even have to any great extent) to someone running a graphical browser, for any but the most trivial file manipulation tasks.
MS-Windows makes the job prettier. It doesn't make it easier. I know. I've used both extensively.