True, except for the part where the fine print is designed to obfuscate and mislead, and the company's agents recruit under false pretenses, and the negotiations involve all kinds of sleazy practices and misdirection, and the playing field is basically a monopoly.

If we held to a pure 'caveat emptor' line of reasoning then we might as well do away with all fraud laws and similar industry regulation.

The stereotype of the naiive artist is based on the common fact that they (we) have no taste for the implicit corruption and nastiness of business and legalese, instead preferring innuendo, sniping, and petty ego thumping. Money is really just an extension, or symptom, of fame. This means that most artists are the business equivalent of a minor.

Look, there's no need to be condescending. All I'm saying is that man pages could be more than just a reference for those who no longer need to learn, if they consistently have

1. good, useful examples
2. more context, such as 'used when' and 'similar to' etc. in addition to the often terse descriptions
3. redirection for more info, such as 'to learn more about...' instead of just 'see also'

Why is this relevant to more than the experts? Because in the absence of decent (or any other) documentation, we're left with man pages.

Gone are the days when the only people who use unix-y shells are tied to a university CS or physics dept. or lost in the basement. So you now have all these other folks, like me, who are wiling to learn enough to get by but not to become experts... I went for 20 years between working on a mainframe with TeX to booting up Linux and trying to get a sound card working.

So, the "angle" I'm coming at is that I don't want to become a command line expert to get stuff done, but still have to use it, and don't want to wade through a manual or take a course. I'm used to things being somewhat discoverable, or well-explained, because I can usually figure them out that way, and in fact am border-line familiar enough with the bash shell that man pages actually can help. And I'm not alone.

oh, don't get me started.... ALL OS's suck, they just incite different kinds of violent feelings!

MS has always had a central figurehead to vent spleen upon. Linux just gives one a feeling of antipathy towards nerd-dom... unless it's the urge to revenge that comes from a particularly bad man page.

Linux documentation... the ultimate vapourware.

Now now, no need to be a douche to those of us who do want to learn, but want to learn as we go.

The 'user' you're talking about is common, but there are a significant minority of people who have a life and other interests, yet wish to improve their understanding of things like using a shell... without taking a course, or giving up a significant portion of our life.

All we want is tiered documentation that includes a few pointers for those new to the command to be included in man pages etc.; things like examples, and related concepts, and scenarios. A simple paragraph would suffice, usually.

The fascinating thing about man pages, for me, was how utterly obscure some of them are to beginners. Most of them assume an intermediate understanding of unixy concepts, and don't bother to explain the context of the command -- i.e. when and why you would want to use it in the first place!

The whole experience of learning to use the command line reeked of disdain for those who hadn't been to school (or endless sexless nights in the basement) to study the stuff, and myopia about the fact that someone may be coming at all this from a different angle.

Which I guess is just nerdly, right? what did I expect.

This is why I wanted to KILL linux developers when I first started teaching myself this stuff. Thanks for the laugh...

The "premium" this particular consumer will have to pay will be a refinement of the Purgatory section of my hosts file.

whippersnapper! When I was a kid all our computing was done with yarrow sticks.

Respectfully (because maybe you weren't there to see it), desktop computing before the Woz really sucked.

I'm almost a fanboy (transcoding video on one mac and moving 900GB on another, while updating linux mint on an old xp box and posting on a win7 netbook ATM) but have to point out that Apple bought FCP, then made it theirs.

But Hypercard still rocks.

While true, this doesn't acknowledge the reality that, like a toyota,* old macs hold their value because the ones that survive generally turn out to be very reliable, and the older operating systems (10.3 and up) remain pretty functional.

*couldn't resist a car metaphor

A 5-year old Mac that's still running is a pretty good bet for a used computer; expect to replace the hard drive, but no worries about the power supply, for instance. I recently sold a 9-year-old iBook that was still quite functional despite chips knocked out of the plastic shell due to tumbles.

For small projects: FrogCMS.

For blogs: wordpress.

For other, more complex sites, try ExpressionEngine.

For galleries, zenphoto.