Feeding the trolls... On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 10:33:01PM +0800, Zak B. Elep wrote: > Shouldn't the guys at FSF make a guide to Emacs, or something like that?
They have one. In fact they have many. There's a highly readable tutorial that should teach you everything you know in order to get started using Emacs by simply typing Ctrl-h-T (with a capital T). If you ever bothered to start Emacs that keystroke should have been one of the first things you see, as it's on the opening splash screen. Ctrl-h-i should get you to the official Emacs manual, and a load of other TeXinfo documentation (a hypertext documentation system that predates the World Wide Web) for most of the major GNU tools and programs. > I'm attracted to it, but I still use vim for most things, including > writing mail and src... I know there's a lot of howtos/guides for emacs > in the net, (and hell, even short college courses ;-) but I believe the > FSF should go a little lower down so even the average FOSS user (if > there's such a thing ;) can even comprehend. Spoken like someone who has never tried to read any of the fine documentation the FSF produces for their tools and programs. > Yes, I'm aware of a certain elitism among FSF/rms groupies (here be > trolls) as well as those who advocate FOSS to be as easy (and > insecure) as Win*; but if there's any freedom to be attained, to be > cherished, there should be sharing of knowledge that's even > comprehendable (is there such a word?) The word you're looking for is 'comprehensible'. > for the large masses of me-who-use-my-pc-as-a-glorified-typewriters... > Why do you think the FSF developed the GNU Free Documentation License? Read the FSF's own position on this very topic you're harping about: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html They are not as unaware or insensitive to this need for documentation as you make them out to be. They even go so far as to advocate that software documentation should have the same kinds of freedoms as the > Now, we have Linux, we have GNOME and KDE, we have Windows and Mac OS X, > we have a whole bunch of OSes and their accompanying tools/apps/warez, > all implementing things that have been done before in the sixties at the > MIT AI labs, with little or no innovation at all. However, nearly all of the technologies you mention would have been to a person from the MIT AI Lab in the 1960's as a Boeing 747 would be to the Wright Brothers. The very idea of the graphical user interface, which is what many of the things you mention incorporate, didn't exist until nearly twenty years later, and it wasn't until thirty or so years later that these things began to become practical for mass market computers. The very idea of networked computing didn't exist in the time you mention. There have been a thousand other major innovations in computing science that we today take for granted that were developed and changed the face of computing and the world as we know it within the past forty years. > We have many technologies, competing technologies that subtly drain > away our most precious natural resource (and we thought that was > Iraqi oil ;-)... > And what might that "precious natural resource" be? -- dido "The only thing of value passing through a politician's brain is a bullet." -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
