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Vadim Motorine's Ideas Blog Mon, 21 Sep 2009 To allow you posting the comments I continue this blog here. Sun, 23 Sep 2007 Well this notes rather for people who knows Microsoft Windows and would like to try Linux. When I decided to do this my first question was where is the help? Now I am sure that the help is the man command. Of course nowadays you may find the detailed help in the menu of the UNIX/LNUX desktop applications but even in this case the most up-to-date and reliable information is in man. Detailed helps are often obsolete. It is the philosophy. It is UNIX, so there is just one unique way to start getting help. So always start with the man. It will direct you to more detailed help if necessary. Other ways also exist but often don’t work properly. Man is the most reliable. As distinct from Windows, where any application has its separate help, in Linux man works for all cases. It is help for Linux, any application, shell command, the function from the computer library etc. One caveat, until you install the application, library etc you may have no page for it in the man. Just after you install something you sometimes need to issue command mandb to update man database. Man is usually short but often has the link to more comprehensive document or the site. On the other hands, even if the program had its own html/ doxygen/ info/ pdf/ … help, in man you find the reference for these more detailed documents. So the most often command I use now are
man –k
And of course you always may ask man about itself.
man man
Unix and Linux also sometimes have the detailed help in the form of the info pages. In this case you will find the link to these info pages in man. To my taste the native info browser is very inconvenient. It is certainly not “UNIX” way to use the info browser when everyone now uses the html browsers.
Fortunately you may see the info pages via the html like help browser embedded in the Gnome desktop. Start with the keyword search in the Gnome desktop help. You may also find man pages this way but the search not always reliable so it is better to use man –k command.
Who will do the persons from the personal computers?
I dream about the time when personal computers will be able to store information according to its content, make the associative links with the similar documents and then quickly find these documents by the hints (“hey, find yesterday to-do list, please”).
Sounds familiar?
Indeed, when we place a document in to the Web anyone including us can find it later with the search engine. In fact we can with the Google Desktop do it in our personal computers also but at the expense of our privacy.
So, more exactly, I dream about the time when the personal computer becomes rather persons than computers and rather my friend than the enterprise agents.
Actually the technology is already here.
The search engines have the necessary algorithms and enough artificial intelligence. Ajax technology helps to place together documents of the different kinds to compare it.
It resembles me the time when all calculations were performed on the mainframes and there were no personal computers at all.
So the goal now is to transfer the technology of the artificial intelligence from the enterprise level to the personal computer level and than the personal computers becomes the persons.
Who will do it?
How about me? Well I feel I could but I have to work for the living.
Google Has the Super Brain to Control the World.
Google search engine works pretty much like the human brain. The Google brain is however much more powerful than the human one because it may communicate with millions of people simultaneously and, in a way, knows them personally.
When we connect to Google it, exactly like a human, first tries to recall who we are. It cannot see us but nevertheless can identify our computer by its IP address and cookies. It may also recognize us personally if we use the Google Toolbar (especially its Web History) or one of the numerous tools from the Google Account. Google recognizes us when we login into the account.
Almost all Google tools are free only because they help Google to know us better studying what is most important to us (Google Alerts), what we are interesting in (Google Toolbar with the Web History and all searches after logging in to the Google account), what is our everyday life (Google Blogger and Google Calendar), what is our business (Google Docs, Calendar), who are our friends (Gmail, Groups, Orkut) and even the contents of our computer (Google Desktop).
So we pay for the Google services by the information about us and Google may know about us even more than our most intimate friends. It is because the “brain” of the Google search engine is much more powerful than ours and may analyze our habits knowing the site that we visit and search. Actually to be effective search engine Google simply have to study and really knows what kind of people visit a specific site, what sites are similar to this one whether this site has good or bad reputation (Google Page Rank) etc.
It helps Google provide us the most relevant search results and most target advertisements but at the same time gives Google the power to deceive and destroy life of any of the million people that use it.
It is again similar to the interpersonal communications. When we focus an attention on a person the associative memory of our brain begins to work and brings to our conscious or close to it all the most relevant information about the person. It helps us to answer the person specific questions and communicate in general. However, it may also help for the unscrupulous person to deceive other or simply tell rather what other person would like to hear rather than real truth.
Therefore clever people select the friends carefully and have few of them. However in the case of the search engine we actually have no choice. We have to trust them blindly.
Fortunately Google search engine lacks the own will and is just a super clever slave of the people who own it. Fortunately these people seem always use the Google power for good purposes.
However, if we believe that the knowledge is the power, Google now has more power than some governments. I feel that it is dangerous.
I believe that a kind of democratic social control is needed to be sure that the most popular search engines don’t abuse the power they have.
The Tested Open-source Software Is Never Free
It is actually the part of the open source development model that the end user should test the software and report the bugs.
It you would not like to test yourself, you have to pay to the companies that test the open-source software for you and provide the support.
Roughly speaking open-source software is always in beta stage of the development and in many cases it is even in alpha one. In plain English it means that unless you pay or test yourself the open-source software is either not ready to use or simply dangerous to use.
The only exclusion is the very popular Open Source software like Linux because many uses tested it just because they used it. "Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow". However even in this case you virtually always pay to get the stable build. You may of course make the researches and build Linux yourself, but the time is money and it is true for your time also.
In particular it means that popular open-source tools like Boost, ACE, Loki, and Blitz++ are not suited for commercial usage unless there are companies that sells the support for your particular operation system even if these libraries are ported to them. The point is that these tools are so large that usually it faster to write the program yourself than use these tools and then fix the bugs in their not supported porting.
Why Smart Software Developer Don't Need to Know the Technology to Use It.
I mean don't need to know in advance, of course.
It is because the most of the software technologies are very simple and all that the smart developer should do to start using them is to read a few paragraphs in a very good book. Sometimes it is just one sentence, see for example XML in Seven Words and COM in Twenty One Words.
Most of the thick books about the technologies are just the handbooks of the functions in the technology. No reasonable person will try to learn them. They will use the index instead.
Most so called experts in the technologies just learnt the most often used functions from the handbooks because they used them often. It is nothing especially to be proud of because it may happen that the new technology exits that is more suits the particular task.
Really smart developer searches for the most suitable technology for the particular task independently of whether this technology is new to her / him.
It means that the numerous lists of the technologies in the job offers and job resumes are rather senseless as well as the certificates in the technologies.
I believe that there are two reasons for their existing. Developers pretend that technology is complex and they are the experts because it makes them indispensable in the eyes of their bosses. Large companies pretend that their technologies are complex and need certificates to tie up their customers to their technologies.
However in their hearts they know the truth. For example Microsoft in the job interview rather asks to solve general puzzles than checks the technologies. I know it exactly because tried to get the job in Microsoft in year 2002. My friend once got the job to develop for Linux though the startup company knew exactly that he never did it. This person worked for this company several years and both were happy.
So why do I write about it? Just because I feel that in many cases the really smart developers that are able select the suitable technology for the task and work quickly and reliably cannot get the job they deserve. It is a kind of loose-loose. The company doesn't get the really smart developer and the developer doesn't get the job.
How can the company check that the developer is really smart? One way is to check whether the developer is generally clever as Microsoft does. However it is mainly for the students. For mature developers the more reliable way is to look at their projects. If he / she made one large project, he /she is able to make another independently of any technology.
And at the conclusion I would like to quote the words of Peter Drucker's ("The Man Who Invented Management"). As he said to Harriet Rubin "A knowledge worker needs one thing only: to learn how to learn"
If you are not software engineer or never heard a word about COM just skip this entry.
COM is the set of the C++ structures with pure virtual functions and the unique name for each of the structure.
That's basically all that you need to know to start using COM.
Most thick books about COM just describe the content of theses structures. In other words they are just handbooks. I wouldn't even try to learn them. The best of theses "handbooks" have the good indexes. Just use them.
XML is the three types of tags.
That's all. There is nothing more in XML.
Example: <a>, </a> or <b/> .
Most thick books about XML just describe which tag names the particular company suggests for the standard that this company hopes make money on. So, the most of XML books are the kind of the advertisement combined with specification for the tag names that the company suggests as the standard, say, for the documents exchange or other purposes.
It turned out however that , probably, the most popular standard that XML is used for is the news RSS Feed and as far as I know that standard was born without heavy advertisement and printing thick books.
There are naturally books that describe the programs that work with XML. But this is another story. Most of these programs in essence just check that for every tag we have the matched tag and can give us what is between.
I believe that is enough information for anybody to start using XML.
People Prefer Educated Computers
Recent top best rating shows that now Apple Computers is at the top even for the laptops.
Since laptops allow very limited hardware customization and the performance is never was the top priority for the laptops we may safely assume that Apple got their popularity because of its software.
It seems that most people like Apple approach to supply computers with ready to use solutions for all regular tasks that the computers most often are used for.
In other words, the majority of people prefer to buy the "educated" computer rather than to teach it themselves. They prefer to have computer that right from the shop can write, communicate, play music, develop the photo and movies. They don't like to teach the computer to do this. In other words they don't like to install the software themselves.
If I am right the producers of "MS Windows PC" should preinstall high quality office, communication and entertainment programs to compete with Apple if it is not too late.
The best top rating shows that by the popularity Apple Computers is at the top both for the laptops and the desktops. Apple was the first company that initially implemented the windows in the personal computers. Later Microsoft became the leader.
However it seems that soon talking about the computers we again will use the term Windows in the sense of Apple Windows instead MS Windows.
When we buy a computer we virtually never can rely on the opinions of our friends, experts, magazine reviews, consumer societies and Internet portals and our own.
Why? Let us assume that we are trying to find an expert that can help us to buy a good and reliable computer. I doubt that they exist.
Indeed, to be the expert the person should have experience of the modern computers from several manufacturers. Moreover he/she should work sufficiently long with each of the computer to estimate the usability. To check the reliability the expert should test several computers from each manufacture and again sufficiently long. Do such people exist in nature? Well, probably, there are few in large companies whose job is to study the competitors but they are difficult (i.e. long) to find and they are probably not allowed to share their experience of the competitors.
So it seems that there are no experts in the computer buying except for the user opinion and we should search not for the experts in the computers but rather for the experts in studying the user opinion. In other words we need the results of the professionally performed poll. The poll should include the thousands of the participants, because to have reliable opinion about just one brand you should ask about one hundred people and better one thousand. More over the questions should be carefully worded to get the real opinion and avoid the response bias. It is clear that such a poll is very expensive. All the "polls" that I am able to find in the well known computer magazines and free Internet sources used opinion of few, often just one expert and I believe that such polls cannot give the reliable result.
How then to buy a good reliable computer without spending large money for the results of the poll? Well, I have an idea.
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