Re:Only going to work if it became standard
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Heck, I think programming actually requires you to "un-learn" touch typing to a certain extent. If you code a lot, you won't find much reason to keep your fingers on the "home keys" (except that vi uses simple letter keys in command mode). Programming languages use punctuation extensively, unless you're using something like Python, where you use tab and return a lot more. And when developing larger applications, you'll find half your keystrokes involve the special edit keys, particularly copy 'n' paste (you gtk+ coders with me on this one?).
How is this re-arrange-the-keys feature unique to Gentoo? Every computer I've had allowed some customizable key definition, and KDE on any Linux allows you to virtually shuffle every bit however you like.
Anybody who's programmed can tell you there's no special trick to re-defining keys. All your program has to do is catch the keyboard input. What you do with that input is entirely up to your application.
You don't get anything like this buzz about your craft when you throw up an ISP-hosted homepage!
My take: Blogs are here to stay, but they're going to fade a lot from the public mind. "Blog" is one of those words like "hacker", accidentally discovered by some brain-dead mediadroid and then accidentally falling into the cultural echo chamber, until all the media sources began parroting the word back and forth to each other, with no real understanding of what it means, as is usual for the public's treatment of esoteric technical terms. "Blog" just happens to be one of those words you can't utter without sounding terribly hip and with-it.
At the bottom of it all, though, blogs are just another form of personal web-page, with more flexibility. They serve as a convenient place to dump your writings, showcase your open-source code when it's not major enough for Sourceforge, hone your HTML skills, and run a mini-discussion forum all in the same place.
You can quickly tell what idea the owner has of blogging by looking at their blog. The genuine make an effort to make the blog as solid as a commercial website. Those who have something to offer the world post their own original content.
Those who copy a template from another blog, and then do nothing but post links and pictures with little comment, are the ones who are just there because they were told over and over how K001 blogs were, and they didn't want to be left out.
Never have I seen a medium with less to say about it and more said than the blog. If you view the source for a few blogs, you'll see that they're just regular old web pages with some scripting services provided by the host.
And to be sure, I'm no where near conceiving how to program a winning bot. But the bluffing thing's nailed. Consider that I have my bot figure as perfect strategy as it can, including figuring when the other players bluff. Calling is an entirly different matter. In those situations where it is strategic to bluff, if you never bluff, you get figured out. If you always bluff, you get figured out. If you bluff only every fifth time, you get figured out...etc. Making a random decision whether or not to play the "bluff function" when it makes sense to do so, however, has the effect of blowing your opponent's strategy. The opponent wastes time looking for patterns that aren't there.
By the time you hit this post, you will have spent four mod points trying to shut me out of the debate. I have karma to spare, as if my whole life revolved around it. And a blog where I can post about the topic even more. I would think you were doing this to express an honest opinion, were you to have not picked such random reasons to waste your points.
I don't insist I'm right. I don't even think I'm smart. But my points are well-considered, and I voice them because of the possibility that it will stimulate the common good.
Microsoft is as dangerous as a cornered lion, right now. Later, they'll be IBM: great in their day, but de-fanged so that the rest of us can breathe around them again. But now, they do not realize it. All they know is how to panic.
The symptoms of that panic are evident every day. The effects of that panic will be viscious attacks on our software freedom. Microsoft trying to Borg the whole Open-Source world one at a time will do no one any good; it just prolongs the battle. No matter *who* they recruit, you have two nearly identical products (*cough* that's a hand-wave!), one free, one costs $179.00.
And Robbins knows in his heart everything I've said here. But the money mattered more.
Any Linux user should be thinking right now, "What if Microsoft eats it *ALL* ?" We should at least express our outrage, to send a message. To fortify those who cannot be so easily persuaded.
(1) Working for Microsoft=the only way to keep your family fed. Red Hat makes money. Suse makes money. The original Mosaic team made money. Halliburton makes money off of killing other countries, but at least they didn't stoop to working at Microsoft. Enron made money...
(2) We can't blame the guy. Sorry, I can. How small am I, to hold something like this against him? This small->
(3) Microsoft and FOSS will merge into a fuzzy, wuvvy snuggle-fest and good times will be had by all. Let me give ya' all a book of clue coupons and directions to the Clue Store: Microsoft is dying. Think it through: A company founded on providing programs for people, and charging them Gigabucks for this service, and the service that they perform can be done by *anybody* just by
* clicking a download link!
* gunzipping a file !
* typing "make" !
and furthermore, that a massive culture of hobbyist programmers (not necessarily living in a cave and living on dandelions, OK? You CAN work an unrelated 9-5 and code the weekends!) are keeping it going, forever. If you *SHOT* every open-source developer tonight, by tomorrow a new one would take interest, and that would be the next Stallman or Torvalds to get the ball rolling again.
Consider history. Every new technology has had it's Ford, it's Carnegie, it's Hearst, it's tycoon who rode the wave until people figured out that they could just start doing the same thing themselves...
So Microsoft is dying, and as Neal Stephenson observed, the Mammoth of Redmond is spending it's dying days thrashing around, taking as many others down with it as it can. Which will mean more tricks, more suits, more booby-trapped hardware, more nuisances to work around, until at last the Beast's head sinks into the tar, and the rest of us can get back to making some progress building the information age again, before we had this 800-pound millstone tied around our necks.
SO THANKS A LOT, DANIEL ROBBINS, FOR PROLONGING OUR AGONY FOR ANOTHER *FUN* YEAR!!! AND DON'T EXPECT ANY OF THAT MONEY TO BUY *US* TO BE YOUR FRIENDS!
PS go ahead, mod it down again. Sometimes truth tastes bitter.
(1) Working for Microsoft=the only way to keep your family fed. Red Hat makes money. Suse makes money. The original Mosaic team made money. Halliburton makes money off of killing other countries, but at least they didn't stoop to working at Microsoft. Enron made money...
(2) We can't blame the guy. Sorry, I can. How small am I, to hold something like this against him? This small->
(3) Microsoft and FOSS will merge into a fuzzy, wuvvy snuggle-fest and good times will be had by all. Let me give ya' all a book of clue coupons and directions to the Clue Store: Microsoft is dying. Think it through: A company founded on providing programs for people, and charging them Gigabucks for this service, and the service that they perform can be done by *anybody* just by
* clicking a download link!
* gunzipping a file !
* typing "make" !
and furthermore, that a massive culture of hobbyist programmers (not necessarily living in a cave and living on dandelions, OK? You CAN work an unrelated 9-5 and code the weekends!) are keeping it going, forever. If you *SHOT* every open-source developer tonight, by tomorrow a new one would take interest, and that would be the next Stallman or Torvalds to get the ball rolling again.
Consider history. Every new technology has had it's Ford, it's Carnegie, it's Hearst, it's tycoon who rode the wave until people figured out that they could just start doing the same thing themselves...
So Microsoft is dying, and as Neal Stephenson observed, the Mammoth of Redmond is spending it's dying days thrashing around, taking as many others down with it as it can. Which will mean more tricks, more suits, more booby-trapped hardware, more nuisances to work around, until at last the Beast's head sinks into the tar, and the rest of us can get back to making some progress building the information age again, before we had this 800-pound millstone tied around our necks.
SO THANKS A LOT, DANIEL ROBBINS, FOR PROLONGING OUR AGONY FOR ANOTHER *FUN* YEAR!!! AND DON'T EXPECT ANY OF THAT MONEY TO BUY *US* TO BE YOUR FRIENDS!
Our first sell-out! Count me as one who will never load Gentoo. Or develop for it.
Uh, yeah, sure, M$ hired him just to learn more about a platform THAT YOU CAN DOWNLOAD FOR FREE AND SEE EVERY BYTE OF SOURCE CODE YOURSELF. Absolutely, I'll believe that for a dollar.
I'm a Linux user who's never tried BSD, so I have no opinion of them. I have tried some BSD programs which work on Linux, and liked them about as well as I like Linux and GNU programs.
I've tried Mac, and while it has it's merits, it's not for me. Mac is commendable for being sleek and slick, it really is duh-simple to use, but it just doesn't have the functionality I like that I get in Linux. And I like to upgrade my own hardware, thank you!
I've used OS/2 Warp a long time ago at a job, and found it merited the term of derision: "Half an operating system", though some things were done quite well.
And then there's Windows. Which is just terrible in every regard. It rips off ideas from every other system and re-presents them in sloppy, half-realized, buggy style. It is even more bondage-and-discipline than Mac, having a single-minded drive to force you to do it the Windows-way ONLY, and punishes you harshly for deviating from the path.
The frustrating thing is that people cannot see the logical loop in their thinking when they say, "I have to use Windows because that's what everything's compatible with." Windows does nothing to bring this about. Instead, peripheral device makers say, "We have to write our drivers to be Windows-compatible, because that's what everybody uses." Change the public mindset all at once, and the percieved superiority vanishes like a soap bubble.
I notice that whenever somebody calls me 'bigot', it's a Windows user talking 100% of the time. Hmmmm...
For all you people sharing the pains of getting your non-geek friends and family to break their Windows dependency...
DUAL-BOOT Linux and Windows. Make it something fool-proof, like hanging a second IDE drive off the original setup, and configure the boot to floppy-only, so they can see that their original computer is still there, but if they put in the floppy and reboot, it's Linux. Or give them a Linux live CD, same effect.
This way, you can tutor them gradually. They'll have Linux to play with whenever they feel up to it; Windows is still there for their fall-back option. They can get acquainted with Linux one application at a time, at their own pace.
I did this with my family on the "general purpose" PC. My daughter is now, at age eight, getting to be quite a little shell script hacker, my son so far just likes the games, and my spouse...the least of the technically savvy, is gradually getting Linux concepts one at a time. In the meantime, everybody can see Windows getting eaten alive by malware while Linux just keeps chugging, and has time to appreciate the difference.
In a few more years, my kids can probably take over teaching mom...remember, kids pick this stuff up like little sponges, it's their nature.
I never buy a computer. Ever. The most I pay for is the one part that caused the original owner to throw it out. Power boxes run from $70 to $130, motherboards go from $100 to $200, 17"-19" monitors used can go from $20 to $50. The rest can be scooped out of card bins for less than $5 apiece, even graphics cards. Been doing it for years.
But the Wall Street Journal won't tell you that, would they? Would they really?
Um, I run Mozilla from Linux and just checked Weather.com, it worked for me... In any case, just remember that lynx is absolutely the browser that cannot be messed with!
It would get itself an R2-D2 case mod, hire an engineer from dice.com to rebuild itself, and, once mobile and armed with a laser, it would come after you seeking revenge for ever making it run Windows just so you could play Freecell for six hours straight...
As with *all* things technical when they get too popular for their own good, I actually find Google's hit-quality to be going down-hill. Now, I use multiple engines, but they're all unifying to one standard, which will make them all mediocre in the future.
If you run Linux, you have a decent tool-kit on hand to enhance search engine performance. Use lynx from the command line, with either the -source or -dump option, and pipe it through sed and such to filter it however you like. A recursive check of each link from the main page should get you most of the results, but you'd have to alter the formulae depending on which engine you use.
You could even put a Python script somewhere in the pipeline, which could sort the resulting links and keywords into a dictionary data structure, useful to save as a pickled object which can be recalled at leisure. Heck, once you have a source file in text form on your desktop, you have all those text tools to fiddle with. I'm sure others can come up with 100 more ideas.
In point of fact, the only thing requiring me to use search engines at all is the question, given that it would be simple enough to have a bot crawl the web for me while I sleep, of where would I *put* the data? But for small, specific applications, this manner could even work, and it could generate a list of links as bookmarks for you to try in the morning.
On the whole, I prefer that search engines *not* try to read my mind, because too often in the tech age, reading my mind changes to "making my mind up for me". I favor broad results which I can narrow in batch scripts, vs pre-narrowed results that reflect some corporate IDIOT's idea of what I'm supposed to find, but which will inevitably make what I want unobtainable.
why oh why do I never get cool free stuff when I'm out and about.
It's not enough to have the mind of a hacker. You need the soul of a leech, as well. The free-stuff radar, once you're trained your brain to constantly scan with it, can be dimmed into the background, so it's not a conscious process until it pings.
Definition: Dodgy disclaimer at the beginning of a paragraph of opinion about either product, more to turn down the temperature of flaming responses than to be any kind of heartfelt admission. Easily seen through.
Usage: "ILL, but Open Source software lags behind Windows, is more costly, less secure, comes from the devil, sponsors terrorism and communism..."
or: "IDLMS, but Bill Gates is the second coming of Christ, he's actually the hero of the information age, and I heard Linux gives you herpes..."
Can be shortened to "ILL, but FUD!" or "IDLMS, but FUD, YMMV!"
Oh, count me as one Linux user who not only agrees, but is somewhat more extreme! I go weeks at a time with the desktop switched off, using just the console. It does everything I need to do.
People need to understand that an ASCII dump of a buffer full of text into a hard-drive sector is exactly the same operation as selecting the flower-shaped Save entry from the Garden popup menu with your Busy-Bee-cursored mouse pointer and the assistance of a winking, mugging, hammy, animated, chatty paper clip. The first method just takes less time.
WHEN in hell did my happy text-mode console have to become everybody's own private Disneyland ? And when will the lusers go away and leave us as we were before?
Sorry, we hard-core programming geeks associate appointment calendar books with Evilly Boring Meetings Featuring Excel Powerpoint Cartoons Of Death, and other suit-related horrors we left behind in our previous corporate lives.
An efficient person can keep their whole lives notated in the two-inch squares on the wall calendar. Those seeking greater precision can make a simple Bash script-plus-text file suffice. A whole GUI *just* to serve as an upgraded post-it note tends to strike us as silly, as would a whole spread-sheet program just to figure your budget.
I for one, could care less if I never saw another office application again. They get in the way of doing REAL WORK.
Re:What's the problem with dual boot on same disk?
on
Test Driving Linux
·
· Score: 1
Yep, and Joe Sixpack can go run Windoze! (-:
Perhaps that's where we geeks went wrong. It was a mistake to ever "dumb down" machines to the point where Joe Sixpack would come to expect the point-n-drool interface as a God-given-right. I notice before mice and icons existed, you were actually expected to have almost a whole thought in your head when you sat down at the computer, and nobody thought this was in any way unusal! Even Joe Sixpack could key his way through Xtree-Pro and write simple BASIC programs back then!
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, I think programming actually requires you to "un-learn" touch typing to a certain extent. If you code a lot, you won't find much reason to keep your fingers on the "home keys" (except that vi uses simple letter keys in command mode). Programming languages use punctuation extensively, unless you're using something like Python, where you use tab and return a lot more. And when developing larger applications, you'll find half your keystrokes involve the special edit keys, particularly copy 'n' paste (you gtk+ coders with me on this one?).
Anybody who's programmed can tell you there's no special trick to re-defining keys. All your program has to do is catch the keyboard input. What you do with that input is entirely up to your application.
My take: Blogs are here to stay, but they're going to fade a lot from the public mind. "Blog" is one of those words like "hacker", accidentally discovered by some brain-dead mediadroid and then accidentally falling into the cultural echo chamber, until all the media sources began parroting the word back and forth to each other, with no real understanding of what it means, as is usual for the public's treatment of esoteric technical terms. "Blog" just happens to be one of those words you can't utter without sounding terribly hip and with-it.
At the bottom of it all, though, blogs are just another form of personal web-page, with more flexibility. They serve as a convenient place to dump your writings, showcase your open-source code when it's not major enough for Sourceforge, hone your HTML skills, and run a mini-discussion forum all in the same place.
You can quickly tell what idea the owner has of blogging by looking at their blog. The genuine make an effort to make the blog as solid as a commercial website. Those who have something to offer the world post their own original content.
Those who copy a template from another blog, and then do nothing but post links and pictures with little comment, are the ones who are just there because they were told over and over how K001 blogs were, and they didn't want to be left out.
Never have I seen a medium with less to say about it and more said than the blog. If you view the source for a few blogs, you'll see that they're just regular old web pages with some scripting services provided by the host.
And to be sure, I'm no where near conceiving how to program a winning bot. But the bluffing thing's nailed. Consider that I have my bot figure as perfect strategy as it can, including figuring when the other players bluff. Calling is an entirly different matter. In those situations where it is strategic to bluff, if you never bluff, you get figured out. If you always bluff, you get figured out. If you bluff only every fifth time, you get figured out...etc. Making a random decision whether or not to play the "bluff function" when it makes sense to do so, however, has the effect of blowing your opponent's strategy. The opponent wastes time looking for patterns that aren't there.
By the time you hit this post, you will have spent four mod points trying to shut me out of the debate. I have karma to spare, as if my whole life revolved around it. And a blog where I can post about the topic even more. I would think you were doing this to express an honest opinion, were you to have not picked such random reasons to waste your points.
I don't insist I'm right. I don't even think I'm smart. But my points are well-considered, and I voice them because of the possibility that it will stimulate the common good.
Microsoft is as dangerous as a cornered lion, right now. Later, they'll be IBM: great in their day, but de-fanged so that the rest of us can breathe around them again. But now, they do not realize it. All they know is how to panic.
The symptoms of that panic are evident every day. The effects of that panic will be viscious attacks on our software freedom. Microsoft trying to Borg the whole Open-Source world one at a time will do no one any good; it just prolongs the battle. No matter *who* they recruit, you have two nearly identical products (*cough* that's a hand-wave!), one free, one costs $179.00.
And Robbins knows in his heart everything I've said here. But the money mattered more.
Any Linux user should be thinking right now, "What if Microsoft eats it *ALL* ?" We should at least express our outrage, to send a message. To fortify those who cannot be so easily persuaded.
(1) Working for Microsoft=the only way to keep your family fed. Red Hat makes money. Suse makes money. The original Mosaic team made money. Halliburton makes money off of killing other countries, but at least they didn't stoop to working at Microsoft. Enron made money...
(2) We can't blame the guy. Sorry, I can. How small am I, to hold something like this against him? This small->
(3) Microsoft and FOSS will merge into a fuzzy, wuvvy snuggle-fest and good times will be had by all. Let me give ya' all a book of clue coupons and directions to the Clue Store: Microsoft is dying. Think it through: A company founded on providing programs for people, and charging them Gigabucks for this service, and the service that they perform can be done by *anybody* just by
* clicking a download link!
* gunzipping a file !
* typing "make" !
and furthermore, that a massive culture of hobbyist programmers (not necessarily living in a cave and living on dandelions, OK? You CAN work an unrelated 9-5 and code the weekends!) are keeping it going, forever. If you *SHOT* every open-source developer tonight, by tomorrow a new one would take interest, and that would be the next Stallman or Torvalds to get the ball rolling again.
Consider history. Every new technology has had it's Ford, it's Carnegie, it's Hearst, it's tycoon who rode the wave until people figured out that they could just start doing the same thing themselves...
So Microsoft is dying, and as Neal Stephenson observed, the Mammoth of Redmond is spending it's dying days thrashing around, taking as many others down with it as it can. Which will mean more tricks, more suits, more booby-trapped hardware, more nuisances to work around, until at last the Beast's head sinks into the tar, and the rest of us can get back to making some progress building the information age again, before we had this 800-pound millstone tied around our necks.
SO THANKS A LOT, DANIEL ROBBINS, FOR PROLONGING OUR AGONY FOR ANOTHER *FUN* YEAR!!! AND DON'T EXPECT ANY OF THAT MONEY TO BUY *US* TO BE YOUR FRIENDS!
PS go ahead, mod it down again. Sometimes truth tastes bitter.
(1) Working for Microsoft=the only way to keep your family fed. Red Hat makes money. Suse makes money. The original Mosaic team made money. Halliburton makes money off of killing other countries, but at least they didn't stoop to working at Microsoft. Enron made money...
(2) We can't blame the guy. Sorry, I can. How small am I, to hold something like this against him? This small->
(3) Microsoft and FOSS will merge into a fuzzy, wuvvy snuggle-fest and good times will be had by all. Let me give ya' all a book of clue coupons and directions to the Clue Store: Microsoft is dying. Think it through: A company founded on providing programs for people, and charging them Gigabucks for this service, and the service that they perform can be done by *anybody* just by
* clicking a download link!
* gunzipping a file !
* typing "make" !
and furthermore, that a massive culture of hobbyist programmers (not necessarily living in a cave and living on dandelions, OK? You CAN work an unrelated 9-5 and code the weekends!) are keeping it going, forever. If you *SHOT* every open-source developer tonight, by tomorrow a new one would take interest, and that would be the next Stallman or Torvalds to get the ball rolling again.
Consider history. Every new technology has had it's Ford, it's Carnegie, it's Hearst, it's tycoon who rode the wave until people figured out that they could just start doing the same thing themselves...
So Microsoft is dying, and as Neal Stephenson observed, the Mammoth of Redmond is spending it's dying days thrashing around, taking as many others down with it as it can. Which will mean more tricks, more suits, more booby-trapped hardware, more nuisances to work around, until at last the Beast's head sinks into the tar, and the rest of us can get back to making some progress building the information age again, before we had this 800-pound millstone tied around our necks.
SO THANKS A LOT, DANIEL ROBBINS, FOR PROLONGING OUR AGONY FOR ANOTHER *FUN* YEAR!!! AND DON'T EXPECT ANY OF THAT MONEY TO BUY *US* TO BE YOUR FRIENDS!
Uh, yeah, sure, M$ hired him just to learn more about a platform THAT YOU CAN DOWNLOAD FOR FREE AND SEE EVERY BYTE OF SOURCE CODE YOURSELF. Absolutely, I'll believe that for a dollar.
I've tried Mac, and while it has it's merits, it's not for me. Mac is commendable for being sleek and slick, it really is duh-simple to use, but it just doesn't have the functionality I like that I get in Linux. And I like to upgrade my own hardware, thank you!
I've used OS/2 Warp a long time ago at a job, and found it merited the term of derision: "Half an operating system", though some things were done quite well.
And then there's Windows. Which is just terrible in every regard. It rips off ideas from every other system and re-presents them in sloppy, half-realized, buggy style. It is even more bondage-and-discipline than Mac, having a single-minded drive to force you to do it the Windows-way ONLY, and punishes you harshly for deviating from the path.
The frustrating thing is that people cannot see the logical loop in their thinking when they say, "I have to use Windows because that's what everything's compatible with." Windows does nothing to bring this about. Instead, peripheral device makers say, "We have to write our drivers to be Windows-compatible, because that's what everybody uses." Change the public mindset all at once, and the percieved superiority vanishes like a soap bubble.
I notice that whenever somebody calls me 'bigot', it's a Windows user talking 100% of the time. Hmmmm...
For all you people sharing the pains of getting your non-geek friends and family to break their Windows dependency...
DUAL-BOOT Linux and Windows. Make it something fool-proof, like hanging a second IDE drive off the original setup, and configure the boot to floppy-only, so they can see that their original computer is still there, but if they put in the floppy and reboot, it's Linux. Or give them a Linux live CD, same effect.
This way, you can tutor them gradually. They'll have Linux to play with whenever they feel up to it; Windows is still there for their fall-back option. They can get acquainted with Linux one application at a time, at their own pace.
I did this with my family on the "general purpose" PC. My daughter is now, at age eight, getting to be quite a little shell script hacker, my son so far just likes the games, and my spouse...the least of the technically savvy, is gradually getting Linux concepts one at a time. In the meantime, everybody can see Windows getting eaten alive by malware while Linux just keeps chugging, and has time to appreciate the difference.
In a few more years, my kids can probably take over teaching mom...remember, kids pick this stuff up like little sponges, it's their nature.
But the Wall Street Journal won't tell you that, would they? Would they really?
Um, I run Mozilla from Linux and just checked Weather.com, it worked for me... In any case, just remember that lynx is absolutely the browser that cannot be messed with!
Um, actually, bluffing wouldn't be that hard - the whole idea of bluffing is to be unpredictable. Meet mister random number generator!
It would get itself an R2-D2 case mod, hire an engineer from dice.com to rebuild itself, and, once mobile and armed with a laser, it would come after you seeking revenge for ever making it run Windows just so you could play Freecell for six hours straight...
If you run Linux, you have a decent tool-kit on hand to enhance search engine performance. Use lynx from the command line, with either the -source or -dump option, and pipe it through sed and such to filter it however you like. A recursive check of each link from the main page should get you most of the results, but you'd have to alter the formulae depending on which engine you use.
You could even put a Python script somewhere in the pipeline, which could sort the resulting links and keywords into a dictionary data structure, useful to save as a pickled object which can be recalled at leisure. Heck, once you have a source file in text form on your desktop, you have all those text tools to fiddle with. I'm sure others can come up with 100 more ideas.
In point of fact, the only thing requiring me to use search engines at all is the question, given that it would be simple enough to have a bot crawl the web for me while I sleep, of where would I *put* the data? But for small, specific applications, this manner could even work, and it could generate a list of links as bookmarks for you to try in the morning.
On the whole, I prefer that search engines *not* try to read my mind, because too often in the tech age, reading my mind changes to "making my mind up for me". I favor broad results which I can narrow in batch scripts, vs pre-narrowed results that reflect some corporate IDIOT's idea of what I'm supposed to find, but which will inevitably make what I want unobtainable.
It's not enough to have the mind of a hacker. You need the soul of a leech, as well. The free-stuff radar, once you're trained your brain to constantly scan with it, can be dimmed into the background, so it's not a conscious process until it pings.
IDLMS: "I don't like Microsoft..."
ILL: "I love Linux..."
Definition: Dodgy disclaimer at the beginning of a paragraph of opinion about either product, more to turn down the temperature of flaming responses than to be any kind of heartfelt admission. Easily seen through.
Usage: "ILL, but Open Source software lags behind Windows, is more costly, less secure, comes from the devil, sponsors terrorism and communism..."
or: "IDLMS, but Bill Gates is the second coming of Christ, he's actually the hero of the information age, and I heard Linux gives you herpes..."
Can be shortened to "ILL, but FUD!" or "IDLMS, but FUD, YMMV!"
XEmacs has 'em both beat!
People need to understand that an ASCII dump of a buffer full of text into a hard-drive sector is exactly the same operation as selecting the flower-shaped Save entry from the Garden popup menu with your Busy-Bee-cursored mouse pointer and the assistance of a winking, mugging, hammy, animated, chatty paper clip. The first method just takes less time.
WHEN in hell did my happy text-mode console have to become everybody's own private Disneyland ? And when will the lusers go away and leave us as we were before?
An efficient person can keep their whole lives notated in the two-inch squares on the wall calendar. Those seeking greater precision can make a simple Bash script-plus-text file suffice. A whole GUI *just* to serve as an upgraded post-it note tends to strike us as silly, as would a whole spread-sheet program just to figure your budget.
I for one, could care less if I never saw another office application again. They get in the way of doing REAL WORK.
Het, at least they're giving the Christian Science Monitor a pass this week!
I have blogs, I work hard on them, and If I saw my entrys posted as news on /., I'd be horrified. That's simply not what they're for!
and pull down your hat, my spidey-senses suggest the MShills are gonna jump all over this thread like flies on...stuff that draws flies!
Fix your bot. It's thrashing.
Perhaps that's where we geeks went wrong. It was a mistake to ever "dumb down" machines to the point where Joe Sixpack would come to expect the point-n-drool interface as a God-given-right. I notice before mice and icons existed, you were actually expected to have almost a whole thought in your head when you sat down at the computer, and nobody thought this was in any way unusal! Even Joe Sixpack could key his way through Xtree-Pro and write simple BASIC programs back then!
You...found Linux at Walmart? Walmart will actually sell Linux? Hope for civilization, yet!
Last time I checked a Walmart, they didn't even carry computer software, but I guess it's a matter of which one you hit.