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Comment Eshell has done this for years (Score 1) 286

Eshell, part of Emacs for years (decades, really) has done all this and more. Because it integrates with tramp, you can pretty seamlessly do things like redirect to files on other boxes via ssh, etc. If you use it with an Emacs distribution like Doom, all sorts of things are integrated nicely.

Once in eshell:

To get a clickable listing of files, use "dired" instead of "ls". Dired supports all the file operations you're after.

Press Tab for completion and you're presented with a popup with possible completions, which narrow as you type, per your configured fuzzy search options.

Type "emacs image.jpg" while in eshell and it opens it right within your window.

Type something like "cp foo.txt /ssh:hostname:/path" and you copy it there. cd to remote paths, redirect to/from them, etc. It all works. IMHO this is the killer feature, more than the things you mentioned.

Comment Re:Whatever you're used to seems simple (Score 3, Interesting) 716

Actually, I DO remember the first time I saw a Unix filesystem. It was on FreeBSD. And it DID make sense. When I switched to Debian not long later, there was this document that eventually became the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). It clearly spelled out where things lived, and in Debian non-compliance with the FHS was a bug (and once the notion of a release-critical bug was invented in Debian, it was a release-critical bug.)

Part of the problem here is that we are in a twisty little maze and every passage looks alike, and our flashlight ran out of batteries in 2013. The manpages, to the extent they exist for things like cgmanager and polkit, describe the texture of the walls in our little cavern, but don't give us a map to the cave. Therefore we are each left to piece it together little bits at a time, but there are traps that keep moving around and it is slow going.

Add to the the fact that it's a damn big cave.

I could understand the FHS in about 10 minutes. This stuff? Would probably take weeks.

The order of magnitude of complexity is entirely different. It came out in the comments on my post that Fedora finally threw up their hands, and the reason that Wifi works out of the box there is because they just expose all wifi passwords to all users of the box. Whoops. Could you have known that by looking at the permissions with ls? Nope. You'd have to read some XML file in a location that network-manager never mentions.

Comment Re:Why does John shut down all systemd talk? (Score 4, Informative) 716

I didn't shut down all systemd talk. Just the stuff that was flamebait. What you didn't see is the comments that I deleted, which degenerated exceptionally quickly into namecalling and four-letter words. I am happy to tolerate many viewpoints on my personal blog as long as they are expressed with respect. I have seen sooooo many threads, whether here or elsewhere, start with statements like the one there. That post was on a technical matter, and things that are verifiably false and rehash the way a systemd decision was made were both off-topic and non-respectful.

There are a lot more systemd comments on the post, by the way. Some pro, some against.

"Systemd is a problem because..." was fine. "forced upon us" is a completely different discussion that is still highly-charged, produces nearly instant flamewars, and I didn't want to go there (yesterday).

My blog is my own little corner of the Internet where I try to raise the level of discourse just a bit. It's fighting a tidal wave, but I do try.

Comment Re:Computers aren't interesting anymore -- finally (Score 1) 358

I remember the days as a child playing with my electronics project kit from RadioShack. It seemed that it could do everything - burglar alarms, sirens, even simple radios. Even let you accidentally wire things up in a short and cause some batteries to burst...

It's been interesting to watch RadioShack. They morphed from the good place to get connectors, resistors, and fun things into a run of the mill phone and TV shop. Or did they?

Wired ran an interesting article called The Lost Tribes of RadioShack talking about a potential revival of the maker hobbies. I blogged about it too (Once, We Were Makers). There is one local franchise RadioShack that has a huge amateur section in the back, complete with cable by the foot, antennas, hams on staff, amazing service, etc.

What I'm trying to say is: You're exactly right. I used to love to tinker. I thought I didn't anymore, outside of programming. I learned last year, when I got my ham radio license, that I was wrong. Amateur radio is just Open Source in hardware.

There is no accomplishment in being in Kansas and talking to someone in Japan via the Internet or telephone. I'm sure I do this without even realizing it frequently. How about doing the same using only a $7 antenna and no third-party infrastructure at all? No satellites, no buried cables, no telephone or cable companies -- just my rig and the one in Japan?

I realize it's not at all unique to be able to do this among the amateur radio crowd, but it still gives me a thrill. I love it.

Comment Re:Book for a newbie? (Score 1) 358

Yes. Well, in a sense, yes. The handbook is more a reference book. Giant, and frankly, overwhelming to a newbie. You need to know where to start. Even if the License Manual is a subset of the handbook, it will help focus on where to start (with an emphasis on the things needed to get the first license), help explain WHY people care about them (which a reference work won't), and also has some sidebars on what people do with their new licenses.

Having passed the tests and been active with the hobby, I have the handbook close by and never refer to the license manual anymore. BUT - when I first got started - it was with the license manual, and the handbook wouldn't have helped me much there.

Comment Here's why to get involved with ham radio, and how (Score 2) 358

I've seen a lot of comments here ask "why bother, given the Internet?" That attitude kept me away from ham radio for years, too. I wrote up a bit about what changed my mind:

http://wiki.complete.org/WhyAmateurRadio

And here's a page with some information on how to get started:

http://wiki.complete.org/GettingStartedWithAmateurRadio

I also recommend some books and exam practice sites on that page.

Incidentally, another aspect of amateur radio is packet radio - AX.25, which is a networking protocol similar to, but distinct from, the TCP/IP stack. Guess which OS has the best support built into the kernel? I've had a lot of fun with packet, both in its traditional and APRS (positioning beacons) forms.

http://wiki.complete.org/PacketRadio

Comment Re:Not totally accurate (Score 2) 358

I got my tech and my general in July 2010, and my extra a few months later. I have seen NONE of this.

I've experienced the community as tremendously positive, supportive, and encouraging. Sure, I've had encouragement to learn CW -- which I'm working on -- but only as a "here are some other great things you can do if you take this step." Not a grousing, grumpy sort of thing.

I know there are that sort of people out there. Maybe the locals in Kansas are friendly. Maybe the thousands of QSOs (conversations) I've had on HF have somehow been randomly lucky. One person mentioned the grumps on 80m phone - that band has a reputation for attracting that type of people, so I simply avoid it most of the time. Problem solved.

Announcements

Submission + - All of Gopherspace Available for Download

An anonymous reader writes: Cory Doctorow tells us that in 2007, John Goerzen scraped every gopher site he could find (gopher was a menu-driven text-only precursor to the Web; I got my first online gig programming gopher sites). He saved 780,000 documents, totalling 40GB. Today, most of this is offline, so he's making the entire archive available as a .torrent file; the compressed data is only 15GB. Wanna host the entire history of a medium? Here's your chance!

Go get yourself a piece of pre-Internet history here!

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 3, Informative) 435

Where is this cell phone with less downtime?

I can think of ONCE in the last ten years where a landline hasn't been working. And that because the entire town was knocked out due to a severed cable (and cellphones were knocked out too.)

Cell phone outages are a daily occurrence.

And what problems for the maintenance guy? It's two pieces of copper. What is mysteriously failing for you all the time?

Landlines, for me, Just Work.

Comment Not Just for embedded devices (Score 3, Insightful) 565

I think there is some shallow reading going on here.

eglibc has a number of features that are useful in general. It happens that embedded systems have a strong need for these features, but they are generally useful as well. I've discussed it with one of the Debian glibc maintainers, and he said that eglibc is basically a patchset atop glibc implementing new features and fixing bugs. I think of it similar to the relationship between go-oo.org and OpenOffice. Distributions have to fix these bugs anyway, because upstream won't. So why not adopt a standard patchset to do so collectively?

This has no implications for a change of focus away from the desktop or anything like that.

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