Shell scripting (like all programming) is the practice of describing to the computer exactly what you want it to doâ"word for word, so to speak. Graphic UIs, for all their advantages, don't let the user give such specific instructions, forcing them to perform the individual steps themselves... Good GUIs are obviously indispensable in modern software, and with good reason. But they can never fully replace the expressive abilities of the command line.
Honestly, the reason for that is that nobody has bothered making a good graphical scripting language integral to operating systems, not that it's impossible.
Why is that? Well, most likely because the average user never needs automation at any large scale. The more advanced users who require automation because they actually do regularly and repeatedly perform tasks on large amounts of material are willing to take the time to learn to use existing tools which, as you say, work just fine.
I'd honestly like to see those claims you made taken as a challenge by some clever interface designers. I'd suggest that a good place to start would be evolving regular expressions to match only the files that the user selects and showing sample outcomes on the fly by highlighting affected files.
The user would describe the effects, the outcome, and the scope of the script by simply selecting files and folders and deselecting bad matches and a genetic algorithm would try to evolve a matching regex. Finally, all operations performed by the resulting script would be logged and put into a semipermanent undo queue, so users could find out what happened to their files if they didn't use the automation carefully enough.
If you want Youtube you should type a 'y', not 't'.
Don't even get me started on Flickr showing up when you type a 't'... The damned letter isn't even in the word.
Convenient or not, this is counterintuitive behavior which will just confuse new users of Firefox who you've been trying to convince to use it for security reasons.
Common sense is, unfortunately, far more subject to bias than just enforcing precedent. I'd rather be tried on the basis of countless cases before (fairly or otherwise) than be subject to the whims of a judge who doesn't understand what's going on or who just doesn't like my lawyer's argument.
The only problem I have with precedent is that ignorant and/or lazy judges seem to be the ones setting the majority of bad precedents. I recognize that it's not the judge's job to be well-informed on the facts of the case - it's the job of the attorneys involved to inform the judge on the factual matters at hand.
However, when judges are ill-informed on previous legal precedent and what precedent is actually applicable to the case at hand, and the act of determining the applicability requires being informed about the technology and "legal junk" involved, that's where the laziness comes in. Refusing to actually, er, "do the math" so to speak, is where these judges are failing our system.
In the immortal words of Dennis Miller, "Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."
$50 probably wouldn't be enough to serve as a deterrent, at least at RIAA prices. Unless of course that's $50 per song you're caught with.
The thing is, fines are designed to be punitive. I'd say the best settlement would be that if somebody was caught, they'd subpoena the contents of all of their storage media then charge them normal RIAA prices for every track they couldn't provide physical media or a download purchase proof for.
That would hurt too. Of course, then the RIAA would whine that they needed to recover attorney fees.
The sad thing is that these RIAA settlements are 90% greed and 10% pragmatism - after all, they need money to fund all of the unsuccessful lawsuits as well.
There's an arms race in place right now between people who have stupid amounts of money to throw at development of new gotta-have features, and the large numbers of volunteers making quality software.
And while the volunteers have been catching up quickly, they've been playing catch-up for nearly 20 years.
As long as companies like Microsoft and Apple continue to ingratiate themselves with corporate and educational customers (which they will) and wow consumers with shiny new features (which they will), the open source community will be struggling to keep up.
While we're seeing the rise of some very good *nix based desktop operating systems, they're still far behind Microsoft and Apple for "just install and it's ready for your media junky kid to use" goodness.
Ubuntu (being one of the easiest to configure and use Linux distros out there) can't play MP3s by default because of their (quite justified) fear of patent lawsuits. Installing a mediaplayer and making sound actually work is still extremely painful in Ubuntu (or any Linux OS for that matter). The last Linux version of Adobe Flash Player was a year behind the release of the Windows and OS X versions. If you've got an Nvidia display adapter, you're in for even more of a treat. If you've got a laptop, you may never get the wireless working. Finally there's the tired (but still as valid as ever) argument that there are no games for Linux which aren't years old by the time they get there, and only about 1% of the games released ever get there.
I'd love to use only Linux for my desktop needs, and indeed, Linux based operating systems do 80% of what I need. The only problem is that the other 20% is where I spend 80% of my computing time - gaming, NetFlix, Adultswim.com, Dreamweaver, Visual Studio.
Safe to stop reading here unless you feel like chewing me about about Visual Studio.
Before anybody raises objections, I've yet to see one programming IDE which works half as good as Visual Studio for C++ development
I'd be very happy if somebody showed me an open source equivalent which can build DirectX apps as well as Linux apps, debug inline, has code completion for all data structures in the project (including ones I just wrote) and not just library functions, reads comments and includes those as tooltips in the code completion, and doesn't rely on some byzantine dependency tree which makes it run like frozen molasses.
Yes, I am fully aware that there are open-source tools which probably do every single one of these things individually. The point is that Visual Studio does them all together, and it makes it worth every penny for me (even if I hadn't gotten it for free from the university), however it does still tie me to the Windows platform and sort of remove the possibility of cross-platform compilation.
Indeed. Portal had some of the most devious puzzles I've encountered in video games in addition to demanding high performance reactions if you wanted to solve all of the challenge modes.
The "Fastest Time" challenges required quick memory and fast reaction times as well as a high level of ingenuity to clear the levels in some of the absurdly low target times they set.
The "Least Portals" modes required you to think in extremely devious ways and might take you an hour to solve a single puzzle just to shave off that one extra portal.
The "Least Steps" mode was a godawfully difficult hybrid of the two, requiring conservation of momentum between portals in ways that no other play style would, in addition to making crazy trickshots with the portal gun and thinking in extremely convoluted ways.
This is of course all without mentioning the story mode, which, while comprised of slightly easier puzzles, was still beautifully told and simultaneously chilling and hilarious.
I'd say the game was every bit as twisted in its logic as the great old Lucasarts games like Monkey Island, and was close to as funny as well.
The sun is still always the most intense IR source in the sky until after sunset. Unless you've got something highly reflective on the ground right next to the sensor, you're probably OK with IR, which is extremely cheap.
Anyone who has used a Nintendo Wii knows that infrared source tracking is cheap technology, and anyone who has used a Nintendo ROB knows that (it's not fun and...) a single servo and controller isn't that expensive either.
Honestly, I think that it'd be depressing, should we find clear and obvious evidence of alien life and communication through SETI, only to learn that the place is a million light years away and this fellow "illuminated society" is most likely either dead, decadent, or so far beyond us that we'd be unable to relate.
Even if they were not dead, nobody would ever know what they were saying before their own lives were over. It's the feeling of isolation from other "like minds" which drives people mad, not the absence of them.
...And why should it? Even a biblical literalist would have no good reason for believing we're alone in the universe.
Even believing that humans are Capital G God's chosen people, you'd have to extend the definition of "people" to mean flartghs from the planet ftang. Maybe Capital G God has some chosen flartghs as well.
The only people who will be threatened by the sudden discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life are the ones who use their religion as a justification for their own bigotry and mistreatment of others.
I'd have to say there are several factors involved there.
Largely because GPA has little to do with your actual programming ability and more with your ability to solve problems in the same way the instructor expects, creative problem solving and a high GPA don't always go together. Sometimes a creative and elegant solution that would work great or more efficiently than the expected solution will take too much time, so the (irrepressibly) creative student finds themselves working toward a solution which they ultimately have to abandon to meet deadline and instead finish up a hackwork version of the expected solution. Creative students who are good at quelling their impulses to do it "right" are usually graded better.
Another point is that EE students aren't usually primarily programmers, but if they are, they learn assembly first, VHDL, etc., then higher order languages. This is particularly useful when it comes to writing extremely tight code. Add that to the heavier emphasis on boolean logic and logic reduction and you get tight minimal solutions to complicated input/output problems. I've noticed that EE majors tend to make better drivers and low level I/O and message processing stuff whereas CS students tend to be better at making very abstract reusable code. Both are survival tactics to survive their education.
For a CS student, the quality of the solution doesn't matter, just whether it solves the problem and displays whatever "design pattern du jour" their instructor favors most.
For an EE student, if you make a circuit which has 10 more gates than the optimal solution, you'd better have a damned good reason why, like reusability of the package or better heat dispersal. In electronics, everything is time critical, and silicon is time. The more you put between vdd and gnd, the less performance you usually get, the higher the power consumption, and the worse your grade.
Looking at the 2008 ACM-ICPC challenges (just a quick glance), I see that almost all of these challenges depend on some vaguely subtle maths and are stated in the form of input/output problems. These are problems that both EE and CS students should be well-trained to approach.
However, the judging criteria are somewhat weighted toward what EE students tend to be better at than CS students. Time-critical applications with precise output. It's not just requiring your output be correct, but always correctly formatted.
They'll just be brought up again by James Cameron.
Re:What happened to interchangable parts?
on
Inside the Lego Factory
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
They still have the mixed bag packs, technics sets, etc. - it's just that most toy stores don't carry them. There's more money to be made in selling the smaller (less shelf real estate) movie-licensed themed sets (presumably better selling for younger children, the target market).
Amazon.com has a fabulous selection, and I'm sure with a little searching you could find an online retailer which had an even better selection with the same quality (or better) customer reviews.
I bought a Technics front-loader from them last Christmas when I needed some cheering up and was pleased that the quality was as high as ever, the instructions were just as graphic and cleanly presented, and the process was just as mystifying until it all came together.
It filled me with that same glee of discovery and revelation that I'm sure anybody who remembers Lego from their childhood knows.
To be fair, I can use a Wiimote while flopped like a vegetable on my couch moving only my wrist like any lazy slob would use a TV remote or a mouse.
A more accurate criticism is that the Wiimote is only accurate given that you're the right distance and angle from the sensor bar and you don't have shaky hands like, say, diabetics, hypoglycemics, people with several kinds of palsies, and just people over the age of 30 (like me).
Not to be crass, but not one technology which has been predicted in the last 30 years to be "gone in 20 years" has been gone in 20 years.
AM Radio's still here, the transistor is stronger than ever, dial-up internet is still the only option for many Americans (north, south, and central), and a majority of the people in the US still own CRTs, mercury thermometers, and gas-burning cars.
Technology doesn't die, it just gets smoother plastic and shinier stickers.
They can also be your subconscious' way of communicating to you that your brain has analyzed their natural body smell and find it displeasing, and therefore sexually incompatible with you.
Intuition is useful as a starting point for analysis, not an endpoint.
Nonsense, I can only think of dozens of malevolent uses for this and no positive uses!
Heh. Let's see:
Causing accidents on the freeway by sending huge bursts of high amplitude noise at drivers
Physically jamming communications to a person during a vital period (think robberies or assassinations) by filling their head with a loud buzz.
Stalkers using this to victimize the objects of their obsessions from a safe distance
Interrupting important business meetings your competitors are having with foreign investors.
Harassing police officers nearly undetectably.
Cheating on tests. (ha)
Disrupting peaceful protests and political rallies with plausible deniability. (not necessarily the government, a conflicting interest group properly funded could do the same)
Harassing public figures. (does the Popemobile need a Faraday cage?)
In fact, I'm hard-pressed to come up with a single positive use for the technology that can't be done easier and better with a less invasive technology like a sound cannon.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd bet that 640 carefully chosen words could make a hell of a good point.
Shell scripting (like all programming) is the practice of describing to the computer exactly what you want it to doâ"word for word, so to speak. Graphic UIs, for all their advantages, don't let the user give such specific instructions, forcing them to perform the individual steps themselves... Good GUIs are obviously indispensable in modern software, and with good reason. But they can never fully replace the expressive abilities of the command line.
Honestly, the reason for that is that nobody has bothered making a good graphical scripting language integral to operating systems, not that it's impossible.
Why is that? Well, most likely because the average user never needs automation at any large scale. The more advanced users who require automation because they actually do regularly and repeatedly perform tasks on large amounts of material are willing to take the time to learn to use existing tools which, as you say, work just fine.
I'd honestly like to see those claims you made taken as a challenge by some clever interface designers. I'd suggest that a good place to start would be evolving regular expressions to match only the files that the user selects and showing sample outcomes on the fly by highlighting affected files.
The user would describe the effects, the outcome, and the scope of the script by simply selecting files and folders and deselecting bad matches and a genetic algorithm would try to evolve a matching regex. Finally, all operations performed by the resulting script would be logged and put into a semipermanent undo queue, so users could find out what happened to their files if they didn't use the automation carefully enough.
"In law, a default is the failure to do something required by law or to appear at a required time in legal proceedings." -wikipedia
IANAL, but failure to uphold your end of a contract (violating terms of service which results in a breach of contract) is a form of default.
Why exactly is that convenient or logical?
If you want Youtube you should type a 'y', not 't'.
Don't even get me started on Flickr showing up when you type a 't'... The damned letter isn't even in the word.
Convenient or not, this is counterintuitive behavior which will just confuse new users of Firefox who you've been trying to convince to use it for security reasons.
Common sense is, unfortunately, far more subject to bias than just enforcing precedent. I'd rather be tried on the basis of countless cases before (fairly or otherwise) than be subject to the whims of a judge who doesn't understand what's going on or who just doesn't like my lawyer's argument.
The only problem I have with precedent is that ignorant and/or lazy judges seem to be the ones setting the majority of bad precedents. I recognize that it's not the judge's job to be well-informed on the facts of the case - it's the job of the attorneys involved to inform the judge on the factual matters at hand.
However, when judges are ill-informed on previous legal precedent and what precedent is actually applicable to the case at hand, and the act of determining the applicability requires being informed about the technology and "legal junk" involved, that's where the laziness comes in. Refusing to actually, er, "do the math" so to speak, is where these judges are failing our system.
In the immortal words of Dennis Miller, "Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."
$50 probably wouldn't be enough to serve as a deterrent, at least at RIAA prices. Unless of course that's $50 per song you're caught with.
The thing is, fines are designed to be punitive. I'd say the best settlement would be that if somebody was caught, they'd subpoena the contents of all of their storage media then charge them normal RIAA prices for every track they couldn't provide physical media or a download purchase proof for.
That would hurt too. Of course, then the RIAA would whine that they needed to recover attorney fees.
The sad thing is that these RIAA settlements are 90% greed and 10% pragmatism - after all, they need money to fund all of the unsuccessful lawsuits as well.
There's an arms race in place right now between people who have stupid amounts of money to throw at development of new gotta-have features, and the large numbers of volunteers making quality software.
And while the volunteers have been catching up quickly, they've been playing catch-up for nearly 20 years.
As long as companies like Microsoft and Apple continue to ingratiate themselves with corporate and educational customers (which they will) and wow consumers with shiny new features (which they will), the open source community will be struggling to keep up.
While we're seeing the rise of some very good *nix based desktop operating systems, they're still far behind Microsoft and Apple for "just install and it's ready for your media junky kid to use" goodness.
Ubuntu (being one of the easiest to configure and use Linux distros out there) can't play MP3s by default because of their (quite justified) fear of patent lawsuits. Installing a mediaplayer and making sound actually work is still extremely painful in Ubuntu (or any Linux OS for that matter). The last Linux version of Adobe Flash Player was a year behind the release of the Windows and OS X versions. If you've got an Nvidia display adapter, you're in for even more of a treat. If you've got a laptop, you may never get the wireless working. Finally there's the tired (but still as valid as ever) argument that there are no games for Linux which aren't years old by the time they get there, and only about 1% of the games released ever get there.
I'd love to use only Linux for my desktop needs, and indeed, Linux based operating systems do 80% of what I need. The only problem is that the other 20% is where I spend 80% of my computing time - gaming, NetFlix, Adultswim.com, Dreamweaver, Visual Studio.
Safe to stop reading here unless you feel like chewing me about about Visual Studio.
Before anybody raises objections, I've yet to see one programming IDE which works half as good as Visual Studio for C++ development
I'd be very happy if somebody showed me an open source equivalent which can build DirectX apps as well as Linux apps, debug inline, has code completion for all data structures in the project (including ones I just wrote) and not just library functions, reads comments and includes those as tooltips in the code completion, and doesn't rely on some byzantine dependency tree which makes it run like frozen molasses.
Yes, I am fully aware that there are open-source tools which probably do every single one of these things individually. The point is that Visual Studio does them all together, and it makes it worth every penny for me (even if I hadn't gotten it for free from the university), however it does still tie me to the Windows platform and sort of remove the possibility of cross-platform compilation.
The implication was that the US has a weak and fragile economy, hence the comparable pricing.
You should have tried the challenge modes, AC.
The story mode's puzzles may not have been too complicated, but it gets more complicated while working under constraints.
Or you could have tried for speed runs. I think the fastest time is around 13 minutes right now.
Makes your hour look a bit like weak sauce.
Indeed. Portal had some of the most devious puzzles I've encountered in video games in addition to demanding high performance reactions if you wanted to solve all of the challenge modes.
The "Fastest Time" challenges required quick memory and fast reaction times as well as a high level of ingenuity to clear the levels in some of the absurdly low target times they set.
The "Least Portals" modes required you to think in extremely devious ways and might take you an hour to solve a single puzzle just to shave off that one extra portal.
The "Least Steps" mode was a godawfully difficult hybrid of the two, requiring conservation of momentum between portals in ways that no other play style would, in addition to making crazy trickshots with the portal gun and thinking in extremely convoluted ways.
This is of course all without mentioning the story mode, which, while comprised of slightly easier puzzles, was still beautifully told and simultaneously chilling and hilarious.
I'd say the game was every bit as twisted in its logic as the great old Lucasarts games like Monkey Island, and was close to as funny as well.
The sun is still always the most intense IR source in the sky until after sunset. Unless you've got something highly reflective on the ground right next to the sensor, you're probably OK with IR, which is extremely cheap.
Actually, the word "wet" implies the presence of a meaningful amount of liquid (or gel) SOMETHING.
Wait, he's a fish?
Anyone who has used a Nintendo Wii knows that infrared source tracking is cheap technology, and anyone who has used a Nintendo ROB knows that (it's not fun and...) a single servo and controller isn't that expensive either.
Honestly, I think that it'd be depressing, should we find clear and obvious evidence of alien life and communication through SETI, only to learn that the place is a million light years away and this fellow "illuminated society" is most likely either dead, decadent, or so far beyond us that we'd be unable to relate.
Even if they were not dead, nobody would ever know what they were saying before their own lives were over. It's the feeling of isolation from other "like minds" which drives people mad, not the absence of them.
Even believing that humans are Capital G God's chosen people, you'd have to extend the definition of "people" to mean flartghs from the planet ftang. Maybe Capital G God has some chosen flartghs as well.
The only people who will be threatened by the sudden discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life are the ones who use their religion as a justification for their own bigotry and mistreatment of others.
I'd have to say there are several factors involved there.
Largely because GPA has little to do with your actual programming ability and more with your ability to solve problems in the same way the instructor expects, creative problem solving and a high GPA don't always go together. Sometimes a creative and elegant solution that would work great or more efficiently than the expected solution will take too much time, so the (irrepressibly) creative student finds themselves working toward a solution which they ultimately have to abandon to meet deadline and instead finish up a hackwork version of the expected solution. Creative students who are good at quelling their impulses to do it "right" are usually graded better.
Another point is that EE students aren't usually primarily programmers, but if they are, they learn assembly first, VHDL, etc., then higher order languages. This is particularly useful when it comes to writing extremely tight code. Add that to the heavier emphasis on boolean logic and logic reduction and you get tight minimal solutions to complicated input/output problems. I've noticed that EE majors tend to make better drivers and low level I/O and message processing stuff whereas CS students tend to be better at making very abstract reusable code. Both are survival tactics to survive their education.
For a CS student, the quality of the solution doesn't matter, just whether it solves the problem and displays whatever "design pattern du jour" their instructor favors most.
For an EE student, if you make a circuit which has 10 more gates than the optimal solution, you'd better have a damned good reason why, like reusability of the package or better heat dispersal. In electronics, everything is time critical, and silicon is time. The more you put between vdd and gnd, the less performance you usually get, the higher the power consumption, and the worse your grade.
Looking at the 2008 ACM-ICPC challenges (just a quick glance), I see that almost all of these challenges depend on some vaguely subtle maths and are stated in the form of input/output problems. These are problems that both EE and CS students should be well-trained to approach.
However, the judging criteria are somewhat weighted toward what EE students tend to be better at than CS students. Time-critical applications with precise output. It's not just requiring your output be correct, but always correctly formatted.
They'll just be brought up again by James Cameron.
They still have the mixed bag packs, technics sets, etc. - it's just that most toy stores don't carry them. There's more money to be made in selling the smaller (less shelf real estate) movie-licensed themed sets (presumably better selling for younger children, the target market).
Amazon.com has a fabulous selection, and I'm sure with a little searching you could find an online retailer which had an even better selection with the same quality (or better) customer reviews.
I bought a Technics front-loader from them last Christmas when I needed some cheering up and was pleased that the quality was as high as ever, the instructions were just as graphic and cleanly presented, and the process was just as mystifying until it all came together.
It filled me with that same glee of discovery and revelation that I'm sure anybody who remembers Lego from their childhood knows.
To be fair, I can use a Wiimote while flopped like a vegetable on my couch moving only my wrist like any lazy slob would use a TV remote or a mouse.
A more accurate criticism is that the Wiimote is only accurate given that you're the right distance and angle from the sensor bar and you don't have shaky hands like, say, diabetics, hypoglycemics, people with several kinds of palsies, and just people over the age of 30 (like me).
Not to be crass, but not one technology which has been predicted in the last 30 years to be "gone in 20 years" has been gone in 20 years.
AM Radio's still here, the transistor is stronger than ever, dial-up internet is still the only option for many Americans (north, south, and central), and a majority of the people in the US still own CRTs, mercury thermometers, and gas-burning cars.
Technology doesn't die, it just gets smoother plastic and shinier stickers.
This wouldn't have been a problem using OSX Leopard Server. His employers could have stopped this using Time Machine.
They can also be your subconscious' way of communicating to you that your brain has analyzed their natural body smell and find it displeasing, and therefore sexually incompatible with you.
Intuition is useful as a starting point for analysis, not an endpoint.
You said it man, nobody fucks with the Jesus.
Nonsense, I can only think of dozens of malevolent uses for this and no positive uses!
Heh. Let's see:
In fact, I'm hard-pressed to come up with a single positive use for the technology that can't be done easier and better with a less invasive technology like a sound cannon.