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Comment MSX Basic (Score 2) 623

I started when I was around 12 years old, on a Philips VG8010. I believe my friends had 386 PCs at that time. I did not have a lot of games on tape so I started reading the computer user's manual (which teaches programming). The book was a really good introductory material because I managed to learn pretty much everything by myself ... well except sprites, which was only a few years later that I actually managed to understood how they worked :P

Nobody else here starting with a MSX ??

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 466

Nobody gives a damn about 10 MB of their disk space because the program takes it's libraries with it.
(...)
Disk space is cheap.

What about the huge latency caused by the load of those libraries from teh HDD? What about RAM?
Unless everyone has SSDs and plenty of RAM, the performance impact will be quite noticeable. Otherwise, projects like prelink wouldn't ever exited.

and yes.. I run Gentoo :D

Comment Re:Europe has been adapting Linux.... (Score 4, Informative) 182

This is old news - in these pages itself, the first time they started on it was 2006 [slashdot.org], and last year, too, there was another story [slashdot.org] on their experiment here. Extremadura, Munich and Portugal happen to be pretty unique/ahead in this regard - do a search on their stories over this experiment.

Except the current Portuguese government decided to start replacing some of the machines running GNU/Linux with Windows. There were even some problems in the transition of the government website infrastructure, because the new Microsoft solution could not serve as much client requests as the previous Linux-based one, leading to a massive downtime which lasted weeks [1].

I don't want to speculate but most probably the new team assigned to manage the government website did only have knowledge on Microsoft technologies, so the old previous system had to go.... This is a shame because they did it during an Economical crisis, wasting money on Windows server license keys and all other associated costs which they did not have before (since it was already running Linux).

[1] http://exameinformatica.sapo.pt/web/exameinformatica/noticias/internet/2012-04-04-sistema-de-redundancia-do-portal-do-governo-nao-funcionou;jsessionid=7AE120CAF45F6309EC0DB51D0D8E70D5

Comment Re:Zotero is good (Score 3, Interesting) 87

I've been using Mendeley and I'm quite happy with it. However, I don't use any of the collaborative/social functionalities of Mendeley. What I use and find it very useful is:
1) the autocomplete of bibliographic metadata of papers newly added to the database.
2) generating a single bibtex file for all the papers you have in the Mendeley database.
3) automatic assigning of citation keys for your papers in the database.

So basically when I'm writing a paper I just need to go to Mendeley, search for some keywords (the search engine is good), select the relevant paper and copy-paste the citation key into my latex document. That's it!

Does Zotero provide similar functionality?

Comment Re:Hollywood Computers (Score 1) 305

I like CLIs, but if you want to have multiple windows that is a GUI, and being able to have multiple windows is incredibly useful. (I know you can "fake" multiple windows in CLI, i've done it before with emacs and such, but it's a pretty limited both in the number of "windows" you can create and in functionality of those windows.) GUIs are much better for multi-tasking, you can have one task going in one window and keep an eye on it while working in another window.

Well if we want to be pedantic, I can also argue that several windows with each containing just a CLI; is the same as having three or four tiled computer screens, with each having its own CLI in fullscreen. No? :P
But I get what you mean, CLI alone is less functional than CLI+GUI (for example being able to copy paste data between CLIs using contextual menus), I totally agree.

I realize you're mainly railing against the practice of entering commands and information via pressing GUI buttons as opposed to typing in commands on the keyboard, but you're painting the entire CLI vs GUI thing in very absolute black and white terms, and reality is much more grey. Either you don't like multitasking in windowed environments, even if the windows are all CLIs, which i don't think most people would agree with, or you're defining the features of a GUI as "the parts i don't think are necessary."

I totally agree with you that CLI+GUI promotes the best productivity. My "b/w" comparison was made on purpose to try making the parent poster realize that CLI is very powerful and cannot simply be disregarded as an old fashioned interface for bearded necks.
I do love multitasking in windowed environments! In fact I'm currently typing in my left screen (chromium window fullscreen), while the front screen has gvim opened with the source code and the right screen is displaying several terms with python code running :)

Comment Re:Hollywood Computers (Score 2) 305

GUI's have increased productivity. How simply because instead of paying one UNIX guru to do it in 20 years, you can have 20 people do it in one.

That's a very bold claim! GUIs are only very good at one thing, suggesting context to the user. This is the case when the user does not have a very good idea what he wants to accomplish or how to accomplish it. For example, think on browsing the internet.
CLIs are very powerful and orders of magnitude faster than GUIs when you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish and a slight idea on how to accomplish it. This is the case when you are programming, it is the case when you are administrating systems, etc..
Most importantly, CLI allows you to batch repetitive tasks, which doing over a GUI would be time consuming.

I remember seeing some colleagues from my first years of University that used to leave a scientific program running, copy the results into excel once finished, change some parameters in the program, run it again, copy the results into excel.... they did this over 20 times!!!!
People that know better just write a couple of lines in bash and go waste their time with something else, while the bash script re-run the program with different parameters and dump the results somewhere for a final pass. Clearly you are not very comfortable with CLIs, otherwise you would acknowledge how powerful they are!

The GUI interface and touchscreen interface is quick and easy. Mcdonalds, Dunkin Donuts, fast food, Heck that chain restaurant down the street are all having massive increases in possibly productivity because Touchscreens and GUI's make the employees have to push less buttons to get more consistent orders.

Agreed. But would a touchscreen+ GUI fit a programmer? What about someone doing CAD? My point is that different jobs need different tools. A programmer needs a keyboard +CLI while someone doing CAD needs a GUI+CLI + a very precise input like a mouse and/or stylus.

That's why I think the idea behind Metro and Gnome 2 is simply retarded. You cannot have a single user interface accepting for multiple input devices and working to perform different kinds of jobs. Each job requires a different tool!

I would love to see you take my order at a restaurant with a command-line interface.

LOL What do you think cash registers and calculators are exactly? Just because the commands are only composed of numerical digits it does not mean they are not a command line interface.
Also, try using your shiny touchscreen + GUI in a warehouse with thousands of products and let me know how good it is.

Comment Re:That and... (Score 2) 305

well lets start with the 16 bit color color palette, hard to read, fonts massive over sized non scaling buttons.

Well.. Is that a bad thing? I'm not a user interface expert but in my opinion It provides better contrast between interface elements/controls.
http://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/static/Documentation/rostock_paper/gui_main.gif
Can't you tell immediately what are the controls and what they do? Now compare that with the interfaces that some software companies started pushing into our throats, where you can't even tell the difference between clickable and non-clickable elements! That and the abusive integration of media and/or distracting UI elements.
Everything seems to be geared for content consumption but what about production? Are we supposed to be productive using interfaces designed for content consumption?

Actually the only thing I really miss is focus follows mouse.

Well, pretty much all window managers in Linux allow you to configure them to work that way.

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