On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 03:11:55PM +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Feeding the trolls... > > 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. >
C-h-T and C-h-i are indeed truly invaluable as online docs could get... and yes, I'm aware of TeXinfo (that's TeCHinfo, the 'X' pronounced as 'K' from which the corruption 'Xmas' for 'christmas' was derived) and it really is cool (in fact, I'm writing my documentation for a few tools I'm using with it ;) Not that I'm letting down the online docs, but coming from a 'paranoid' mindset (and that kind of mindset is prevalent nowadays ;) those docs ought to be a 'lil more friendlier (but too friendly to be Big Brother ;) > > 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. > False. Like you've never had Weekdays with no Internet: I spend a *lot* of time with online docs, courtesy of /usr/share/doc and http://localhost/doc/HTML (that's dhelp), especially in the HOWTO and <packagename-i'm-interested-in> directories (right now, I'm into /usr/share/doc/qemu, in the middle of installing legit WinXP home into /var/local/tmp/myimage, while chatting to buddies in #debian, writing program docs, writing this email and surfing the Web); but when my prepaid ISP's load is nada, what do you think I would do? RTFM is what separates the experts from the wanabees (and I don't mean you ;-) > > 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'. > Ah, thanks. After sending the last mail, doing `dict comprehendable` showed that. Updating my wetware wordlist: done. > > 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 > Read it, and I agree with it: the only thing I don't get is this: why don't they implement that in FDL 1.2? From what I've read, there is a lot of controversy regarding this and other whatnots: "Why You Shouldn't Use The GNU FDL" by Nathanael Nerode http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html "Draft Debian Position Statement About The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)" by Manoj Srivastava http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml > 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 > I hope they do. Perhaps i may be biased as a Debian user who believes in the DFSG, and perhaps I may be out of line in saying that even the GFDL may ! be free, but one simple question remains in mind: if software is free, with the fucking licenses still exist? If software were to be free, then ideally these things capped software patents and license *should* not be even here in the first place. But, of course, commercialization and the introduction of programs as cash cows were to have it their way, and now, of course, we have the current thread ;-) > > 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. > Nope. The X window system may have been made only in the 1980s, but before that, there was the W window system, pre-1983, which was originally designed for the V operating system which as many know had the key concepts of multithreading and SMP. True, there may have been many innovations, but their underlying cruft (read: incompatibilities among systems due to trade secrets and NDAs) only made the computing landscape a lot more harder to mature. > > 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? > Take your pick: wetware, hardware, or software. i'm not even counting spyware among this... Well, thanks anyway for the trolls, here be dragons. It's nice to have a 'lil row over the wires... ;-P Cheers, Zakame -- 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
