Re: [tlug] Speaking of computer usage ....

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

Attila Kinali writes:

 > Well.. how about "let me tell what the computer does instead of the
 > computer telling me what i should do"?

"Empowerment."  The free software movement is about maintaining hacker
privileges.  The open source movement is about empowering users.

 > I'm not surprised. A damn lot of professionals who do comptuer

Ouch.  A professional is not "one who gets paid for what they do".

A professional is a person who (a) keeps her own tools sharp (and
perhaps even builds them herself), and (b) has a set of ethical
principles about how to treat clients that sometimes get in the way of
clocking out at 5pm.

 > I think record i ever counted was 70 windows open, of which 50 were Eterms
 > on my desktop at home.

I've had over 300 windows open: for i in *.jpeg; do display $i & done.
That turned out to be a mistake, but the system didn't crash.  And
once down to about 100 windows, it was reasonably responsive. :-)

(What for?  Picking the best of multiple shots each of about 50 scenes
to send to my mother.  After shutting down about 250 or so instances
of display, I did

mkdir for-mom
for i in `ps x | grep display | sed -e 's/^.*display //'`; do
  mv $i for-mom/
done

I won't go so far as to say I want to marry Steve Bourne, but I
certainly am fond of that AT&T crowd who gave us the ideas of pipes
and powerful shells.)

 > > I logged in 45 days ago, the system has an uptime of 83 days (I
 > > don't have a UPS in my cube), I have only 1GB of memory and I'm
 > > slightly over 1GB into swap.
 > 
 > I beat that: 512MB RAM 1.8GB swap (300MB used). Uptime is just
 > 13 days because i had to reboot for some hardware tests.
 > (this also explains the low number of open windows)

Do either of you remember the last time you rebooted because of an OS
fault?  (I mostly run on Mac OS X, so I reboot about once a month
because of non-kernel software upgrades.  I consider that an OS fault
given that on platforms with loadable kernel modules you can often do
partial kernel upgrades without rebooting.)

 > was too slow (on my newly bought PC). And for a few years now,
 > i keep my computer even gnome-clean (ie not even libraries installed).

I wish that were possible with any of the Mac's free software distros.

 > I had to work on windows 4 years back, when i was in Japan.
 > Heck! I was astonished how the "mother of all GUIs" sucked so
 > much at handling multiple windows. While one window worked ok,
 > having a second one open that didn't overlap was kind of iffy.
 > Having more than 3 windows, all higly overlapping was a total
 > pain. I'm astonished that people can work like this. 

That's one major reason why webapps are so popular.  A tabbing browser
is like having multiple desktops, while frames basically amount to a
tiled window manager.  All controllable with a small standard API
(HTML), skinnable with a slightly larger standard API (CSS), and
highly extensible with a crap language that is nonetheless fairly
powerful and having familiar control structures (ecmascript).