I know a lot of linux-only people that use a microsoft mouse for this reason.
Sit down and take a deep breath: the reason so many Linux geeks use MS mice is because Linux users in general like budget hardware, and you can scoop up boxes full of discarded MS keyboards and mice in the closet of the FE's office at your job. We use them because they're what's always there until we can find better.
What we *prefer* are Logitech trackballs.
On a related note, just because you pipe Dukes of Hazzard on your TV station 24 hours a day with no other choice does not mean people prefer it.
Come to that, there's a Linux screensaver by the name of "WebCollage" which flips random words out of/usr/share/dict at Google image search, then arranges the results on the screen. The results are a bit of a random mish-mosh, with the entertainment factor coming from the way a porn picture *always* pops in there, no matter what it searched for.
Anyway, I could think of a shell script calling curl or lynx that could do this, but watch them lord it out as the Next Great Thing to those who don't know better.
Heh, waddaya know, I like it. Not bad for a Visual Basic user.
My recollection of the Window's programming world was one of confinement. Your program's always in this dark little box, and it has to pass data back and forth through this narrow little slit, "Pardon me, Windows, when you get the chance, if you're not too busy, could you check if the user clicked the mouse?" In the *nix world, you practically own the whole machine.
Of course, the *nix model feels more like a rowdy kindergarten, with you chasing hundreds of scampering processes around, none of which speak the same language: "Where's my awk hiding on this machine?/usr/bin?/usr/share/bin? What name is it called today? Oh, it's mawk! OK, mawk, take this and go find sed, have him pipe my file to the user's directory. Now, which library do I have available? Oh, GTK, so I have to find a translator in/lib... What, the user's locale is en, but his keyboard driver says it's es? Oh, God. Wait a minute, what resolution am I at? Where's XF86config? Oooohh, we have xorg.conf here. You say I'm at nice 15 now? OK, I'll stand in line and wait..."
Ja, check, over many years is goot 'ting. No, I wasn't saying they had to do it all in one month - although I accomplished most of my itinerary (as far as different systems and some of the less important languages) inside of three years. I didn't say they had to master every nuance of every language - just be able to bang out some code in a language, plow through at least one book on it, and keep the book around as a refresher and reference. Yes, there are three or four languages (C, Python, $SHELL, HTML/CSS/Javascript, Tcl/Tk) which I think I will always have with me, which I've burrowed to the depths of. But I now know of no language that exists that I could not begin reading up on in the morning and at least get a handle on it by the afternoon.
To point out to others the knowledge I'm sure you and I share: after your fifth language, the learning comes incredibly easy. You start seeing the things all languages have in common, the data types, operators, iterators, conditionals, and comments, and can equate everything with what you already know. You start calling one language using the system-command syntax of another, so that you can call Bash to call sed from inside your C program... You get a real instinct for which language to use to solve what problem. You even get to where you can find a completely new language, breeze through the book or tutorial web page, notice that it's actually a derivative of another language you already know, and begin coding in it immediately, with only occasional reference to the docs after that. It's a lot of trouble for some people, but it's worth it a hundred-fold.
*Afterthought...It's amusing how those stupid "Teach Yourself $LANGUAGE in 24 Hours" books fly off the shelves at B. Dalton, but I come in here and say, "You learn to program by rolling up your sleeves and working your motherf***ing ass off!", and everybody has to go, "Oh NO, Hosiah! It simply cannot BE!!!"
And while you're doing all this you are making a living precisely how?
Pulling six-twelves a week at whatever sweatshop currently rents your body like always. I did it that way, continue to do it that way now, there is nothing wrong with doing it that way. Too hard? Then get out of programming and go do something easier to learn, like web design or management.
My, it certainly is a tough little world we live in, isn't it? Gotta wonder why some people go on living, being that life is such a difficult undertaking.
A new programmer should start with small command-line programs,
What sad world we inhabit when common sense is in such short supply that things like this have to be *told* to people - and be disbelieved anyway. I wouldn't expect to learn to drive by hiring somebody else to chaffer me around while I sit in the back seat with opaque glass blocking my view of the driver's seat - yet gullible unfortunates out there insist that they will learn to program by paying for somebody else's program to write programs for them.
Believe it, folks: programming is a PHYSICAL activity. Do it in the console. Unplug the damn mouse and throw it in the closet. SWEAT! Type til your fingers bleed! You shouldn't touch a GUI IDE until you've generated at least your first thousand-line original code block.
In the first place, on my last gasp of Windows usage, I *used* the Basic dialects of QBasic, QB, and VB, and found them all to be toys! Non-VB programmer my foot. Ditto *any* language hosted on a Microsoft machine C++, C# - can you use it to recompile the kernel? rewrite the DLLs? Fix IE? Then it's a toy. You might as well play football with a blindfold on - even when you win, it was pure luck.
Second, many in this thread have asked "Why not both?" I'll back that up, and further submit, in this day and age, that anybody who knows fewer than five languages can scarcely call themselves a programmer at all. To hyperfocus on learning only one language on one platform, which leads to agonizing for days on end over *which* *language* to learn, is exactly like living your whole life in the one small town you happened to be born in, never venturing outside the city limits. It's a big world! See the damn thing, already! Learn the Basics and C-variants on Windows, and pick up Python while you're at it. Jump over to OS/2 and pick at their C++ for awhile. Then prepare for an extended stay in Linux, to learn Bash, CLisp, Python, Perl, pure-ANSI-C, Ruby, Tcl/Tk, Scheme, sed, and awk. Be sure to familiarize yourself with libraries like ncurses, GTK, and Qt, because they'll pop up again and again. Visit MacIntosh and try out Java and Lisp on that platform. Pick up a Free BSD or Open Solaris and explore the languages on that platform (same languages as other platforms, just different environment). Write a web page or two using CGI, Javascript, or PHP. Drop in on Plan 9 from Bell Labs and tinker with rc and plan9's own C variant. And oops, I almost forgot, at least plow through ten tutorials on assembler so you know you can handle it if you absolutely gotta.
Then come back and tell me you know something about programming! Hell, I might even listen, kiddies!
Visual Basic is great to write viruses in. I know because every Windows platform virus I ever caught and examined in a hex editor had "Microsoft Visual Basic" stamped in the binary somewhere. I've only occasionally heard of the virus that *wasn't* written in Visual Basic.
Finally, the number one thing to know: There IS NO PERFECT language. So it doesn't matter a thin damn what language you learn as a beginner. Learn five to be a beginner. Learn a hundred to be a competent expert. And prepare to do it all again a decade or so from now when all you know becomes outdated again.
You've got the Solaris install mechanism all wrong.
Let me introduce you to our friend Mr. Batman. This guy glanced at a computer screen once back in 1994, learned everything in the world about computers in that minute, and ever since then time has frozen, and you can't tell him a damn thing. I've tried.
Oh, come on. Not every Linux fan disparages Solaris. It's just that we had our free Unix-clone years before we had our open-Solaris clone, so Solaris is farther behind. However, I notice it's catching up big-time.
You know what the difference is? The kernel and about five programs each - the rest is the same GNU software you find all over the place. When I tried Belenix 0.3, it was very much like an early Ubuntu. - only slower (and I never would have thought that *anything* could have gone slower than Ubuntu!). As I hear it, the next release of Belenix is the one where it's starting to shine, and then there's Nexenta...
Well, most of us in the US "route around" the US government already. Can't wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
Come on, when's the last time you were at a party and smacked a joint out of somebody's hand because the government doesn't like it? Or had a hot date on which, before consumating your passion of the evening, you looked up every local law pertaining to which sex acts are legal or illegal? Strove to report every nickel of income to the IRS, even jackpot winnings and yard sale income? I could go on indefinitely. The twisted spaghetti code of the US legal system has dwelled in such a state of chaos for so long, no living human being could possibly put it right again. I bet by now, for every law you can name, there exists somewhere an equal and contradicting law, such that it is impossible to obey both at the same time. This pretty much empowers law enforcement to arrest anybody they want at whim, because if you look hard enough, everybody is breaking some law of some kind...usually without even knowing it.
Throughout my history of Internet usage, I have told either lies or the truth as the fancy suits me when filling out online forms. My policy for doing so is to judge how risky the collecting agency will be with my data, i.e. can somebody steal it? In most cases, I will only tell as much truth as necessary for the situation. To my recollection, I have never filled out an online registration for participating in a forum with entirely truthful information. Just to join a BSD forum and ask how to run foo with bar options and leave, never to be heard from again, I need to fill out my life history to do that?
Now, how is every 1GB-hosted forum on the net going to have the resources to verify every single identity of every participant? In this day of identity theft, half the time the damn *bank* can't get it straight who's who (and I've had the checks stolen from me and falsely signed and cashed to prove it!), show me the Internet ID mechanism that could not possibly be faked or fooled.
The example of "King Kong" was an incredibly absurd one. Jackson got to make "King Kong" because of the tremendous success of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which demonstrated nicely that long, epic, big budget movies still draw a substantial audience.
God, yes. Especially when there are great fantasy and science fistion epics just screaming to be made. *Climbing on one of his favorite soapboxes* Larry Niven's Ringworld, for instance! I want to see Nessus and Speaker live! Louis Wu and Teela Brown doing it in zero-gee! The stunning visuals of the ringworld artifact! Niven's novels would be very easy to translate into script - he was at the height of his dialog skills when he was into Known Space. It's a blockbuster waiting to happen...I think audiences would react very positively to this "playground for the mind".
No, I think you're silly. Your dismissal of my needs as trivial just because *you* don't happen to dirty your hands with any of the grubby tools the little, insignificant people like me happen to use strikes me as grandiose. In other news, the fact that *you* find plenty of groceries on your shelf doesn't make global hunger less real, the fact that you still have to put on a coat does not mean anybody talking about global warming is wrong, and, in fact, contrary to your perception, the center of rotation of the Universe isn't anywhere near you.
Linux is still getting dumbed down. It's still a problem. Some of us don't dumb ourselves down, and hence notice it sooner. Dismissed.
If Linux is going to make headway into the desktop market
See, we're begging a question, here. Who says Linux *wanted* to conquer the world? I use Linux and love it; many others do, too. I never demanded that everybody else love it, too. Our only objection is when we're actively undermined by Big Business.
Five years ago when the 9-to-5ers never heard of Linux was a good time. We had less spotlight on us, less distractions. Now everybody talks about Linux like it, itself, was a "Big Business". Expect, whoa, time out here, who is Linux's CEO? Where is Linux's board of shareholders? Who does it belong to? See, it "belongs" to you and I as much as anybody else. It's not only a different kind of business model; it's not a business model at all. We came to destroy the throne, not push the reigning dictator out of it and replace him.
Linux is Go, and as long as John Q. Public keeps thinking about it in terms of Chess, it's gonna keep getting it wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
The Microsoft "get the facts" ad that accompanies it...
Sit down and take a deep breath: the reason so many Linux geeks use MS mice is because Linux users in general like budget hardware, and you can scoop up boxes full of discarded MS keyboards and mice in the closet of the FE's office at your job. We use them because they're what's always there until we can find better.
What we *prefer* are Logitech trackballs.
On a related note, just because you pipe Dukes of Hazzard on your TV station 24 hours a day with no other choice does not mean people prefer it.
Anyway, I could think of a shell script calling curl or lynx that could do this, but watch them lord it out as the Next Great Thing to those who don't know better.
My recollection of the Window's programming world was one of confinement. Your program's always in this dark little box, and it has to pass data back and forth through this narrow little slit, "Pardon me, Windows, when you get the chance, if you're not too busy, could you check if the user clicked the mouse?" In the *nix world, you practically own the whole machine.
Of course, the *nix model feels more like a rowdy kindergarten, with you chasing hundreds of scampering processes around, none of which speak the same language: "Where's my awk hiding on this machine? /usr/bin? /usr/share/bin? What name is it called today? Oh, it's mawk! OK, mawk, take this and go find sed, have him pipe my file to the user's directory. Now, which library do I have available? Oh, GTK, so I have to find a translator in /lib... What, the user's locale is en, but his keyboard driver says it's es? Oh, God. Wait a minute, what resolution am I at? Where's XF86config? Oooohh, we have xorg.conf here. You say I'm at nice 15 now? OK, I'll stand in line and wait..."
To point out to others the knowledge I'm sure you and I share: after your fifth language, the learning comes incredibly easy. You start seeing the things all languages have in common, the data types, operators, iterators, conditionals, and comments, and can equate everything with what you already know. You start calling one language using the system-command syntax of another, so that you can call Bash to call sed from inside your C program... You get a real instinct for which language to use to solve what problem. You even get to where you can find a completely new language, breeze through the book or tutorial web page, notice that it's actually a derivative of another language you already know, and begin coding in it immediately, with only occasional reference to the docs after that. It's a lot of trouble for some people, but it's worth it a hundred-fold.
*Afterthought...It's amusing how those stupid "Teach Yourself $LANGUAGE in 24 Hours" books fly off the shelves at B. Dalton, but I come in here and say, "You learn to program by rolling up your sleeves and working your motherf***ing ass off!", and everybody has to go, "Oh NO, Hosiah! It simply cannot BE!!!"
Pulling six-twelves a week at whatever sweatshop currently rents your body like always. I did it that way, continue to do it that way now, there is nothing wrong with doing it that way. Too hard? Then get out of programming and go do something easier to learn, like web design or management.
My, it certainly is a tough little world we live in, isn't it? Gotta wonder why some people go on living, being that life is such a difficult undertaking.
I take it back, folks: VB is super-leet!
What sad world we inhabit when common sense is in such short supply that things like this have to be *told* to people - and be disbelieved anyway. I wouldn't expect to learn to drive by hiring somebody else to chaffer me around while I sit in the back seat with opaque glass blocking my view of the driver's seat - yet gullible unfortunates out there insist that they will learn to program by paying for somebody else's program to write programs for them.
Believe it, folks: programming is a PHYSICAL activity. Do it in the console. Unplug the damn mouse and throw it in the closet. SWEAT! Type til your fingers bleed! You shouldn't touch a GUI IDE until you've generated at least your first thousand-line original code block.
I've cooked my own goose similarly with likewise comments. Wonder which one of us will be flamed worse?
Second, many in this thread have asked "Why not both?" I'll back that up, and further submit, in this day and age, that anybody who knows fewer than five languages can scarcely call themselves a programmer at all. To hyperfocus on learning only one language on one platform, which leads to agonizing for days on end over *which* *language* to learn, is exactly like living your whole life in the one small town you happened to be born in, never venturing outside the city limits. It's a big world! See the damn thing, already! Learn the Basics and C-variants on Windows, and pick up Python while you're at it. Jump over to OS/2 and pick at their C++ for awhile. Then prepare for an extended stay in Linux, to learn Bash, CLisp, Python, Perl, pure-ANSI-C, Ruby, Tcl/Tk, Scheme, sed, and awk. Be sure to familiarize yourself with libraries like ncurses, GTK, and Qt, because they'll pop up again and again. Visit MacIntosh and try out Java and Lisp on that platform. Pick up a Free BSD or Open Solaris and explore the languages on that platform (same languages as other platforms, just different environment). Write a web page or two using CGI, Javascript, or PHP. Drop in on Plan 9 from Bell Labs and tinker with rc and plan9's own C variant. And oops, I almost forgot, at least plow through ten tutorials on assembler so you know you can handle it if you absolutely gotta.
Then come back and tell me you know something about programming! Hell, I might even listen, kiddies!
Visual Basic is great to write viruses in. I know because every Windows platform virus I ever caught and examined in a hex editor had "Microsoft Visual Basic" stamped in the binary somewhere. I've only occasionally heard of the virus that *wasn't* written in Visual Basic.
Finally, the number one thing to know: There IS NO PERFECT language. So it doesn't matter a thin damn what language you learn as a beginner. Learn five to be a beginner. Learn a hundred to be a competent expert. And prepare to do it all again a decade or so from now when all you know becomes outdated again.
Let me introduce you to our friend Mr. Batman. This guy glanced at a computer screen once back in 1994, learned everything in the world about computers in that minute, and ever since then time has frozen, and you can't tell him a damn thing. I've tried.
Wrong? OK, then it was Colonel Mustard in the Closet with the Slinky.
No, and you also wouldn't be kidding to say "Next week's headline: Microsoft-funded study shows Windows Vista is more secure than Mac OS X."
You know what the difference is? The kernel and about five programs each - the rest is the same GNU software you find all over the place. When I tried Belenix 0.3, it was very much like an early Ubuntu. - only slower (and I never would have thought that *anything* could have gone slower than Ubuntu!). As I hear it, the next release of Belenix is the one where it's starting to shine, and then there's Nexenta...
Relax. Some of us are so cynical, we regard your statement as a ray of Pollyanna sunshine.
Well, most of us in the US "route around" the US government already. Can't wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
Come on, when's the last time you were at a party and smacked a joint out of somebody's hand because the government doesn't like it? Or had a hot date on which, before consumating your passion of the evening, you looked up every local law pertaining to which sex acts are legal or illegal? Strove to report every nickel of income to the IRS, even jackpot winnings and yard sale income? I could go on indefinitely. The twisted spaghetti code of the US legal system has dwelled in such a state of chaos for so long, no living human being could possibly put it right again. I bet by now, for every law you can name, there exists somewhere an equal and contradicting law, such that it is impossible to obey both at the same time. This pretty much empowers law enforcement to arrest anybody they want at whim, because if you look hard enough, everybody is breaking some law of some kind...usually without even knowing it.
Now, how is every 1GB-hosted forum on the net going to have the resources to verify every single identity of every participant? In this day of identity theft, half the time the damn *bank* can't get it straight who's who (and I've had the checks stolen from me and falsely signed and cashed to prove it!), show me the Internet ID mechanism that could not possibly be faked or fooled.
God, yes. Especially when there are great fantasy and science fistion epics just screaming to be made. *Climbing on one of his favorite soapboxes* Larry Niven's Ringworld, for instance! I want to see Nessus and Speaker live! Louis Wu and Teela Brown doing it in zero-gee! The stunning visuals of the ringworld artifact! Niven's novels would be very easy to translate into script - he was at the height of his dialog skills when he was into Known Space. It's a blockbuster waiting to happen...I think audiences would react very positively to this "playground for the mind".
"I'm out of Star Wars ideas."
Liberty, my friends; always, always liberty!
It coughed up a story from 1995.
Linux is still getting dumbed down. It's still a problem. Some of us don't dumb ourselves down, and hence notice it sooner. Dismissed.
You, uh, DO realize that cyber-sex parody was born, played, and panned out within the space of 16 minutes in 1994, right?
See, we're begging a question, here. Who says Linux *wanted* to conquer the world? I use Linux and love it; many others do, too. I never demanded that everybody else love it, too. Our only objection is when we're actively undermined by Big Business.
Five years ago when the 9-to-5ers never heard of Linux was a good time. We had less spotlight on us, less distractions. Now everybody talks about Linux like it, itself, was a "Big Business". Expect, whoa, time out here, who is Linux's CEO? Where is Linux's board of shareholders? Who does it belong to? See, it "belongs" to you and I as much as anybody else. It's not only a different kind of business model; it's not a business model at all. We came to destroy the throne, not push the reigning dictator out of it and replace him.
Linux is Go, and as long as John Q. Public keeps thinking about it in terms of Chess, it's gonna keep getting it wrong.