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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Siri and the future of scripters, and people like us... Post 302580975 by Corona688 on Sunday 11th of December 2011 12:57:11 PM
Old 12-11-2011
Watching someone hammer away -- for months -- at a monstrous java program that could be accomplished with a 1-line shell script, having used 9 terminals so far this morning in solving a work issue after being soundly told GUIs makes terminals wholly useless, I'm pretty convinced 'new' isn't always 'better'.

The bottom line is, the computer's not psychic. It can only respond in a human manner in a small preprogrammed domain. We'll still end up learning how to talk to the computer instead of vice-versa.

---------- Post updated at 11:57 AM ---------- Previous update was at 11:50 AM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by ifthanwhile
I have just noticed a trend of an unfortunate number of people who are "good with computers" but not familiar with anything going on behind the mouse and desktop. (To be certain that kind of person fills a niche in the technology field, but when the computer crashes and you have to boot to a command line they get lost.
All too true. It gets embarrassing to be hailed as a technical genius for exercising one's ability to read, and follow instructions Smilie

I had a customer bring in their computer after it 'crashed and went black and refused to do anything'. Boot it up and what's happened?

'CMOS time and date not set. Press F1 to continue' White text on a black screen instead of vice versa was so intimidating to them that they never read it.


Another one acted so astonished when their hard drive failed out of the blue. It'd been warning them every boot for weeks, a 'hard drive 0 fail' on the POST screen requiring them to hit F1 to boot. White text on a black screen instead of vice versa was so intimidating that they just mashed keys until they figured out F1 makes it boot.

Last edited by Corona688; 12-11-2011 at 02:11 PM..
 

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MANCALA(6)							   Games Manual 							MANCALA(6)

NAME
mancala - simple board game for human player and computer SYNOPSIS
mancala level-top level-bottom number-of-stones xmancala [-stones N] mancala-text DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the mancala and xmancala commands. This manual page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a manual page. mancala runs the game in the console, while xmancala is a fancy X-interface. mancala-text is a shell script to run mancala in a console from the Debian menu system. When run as xmancala the program has no options, and should be self-explanatory. Built in buttons and sliders control the difficulty level (default 4), and bring up the rules of the game. The console version, mancala, has no access to the rules, and the difficulty level can only be set on the command line (see below). When it is your turn to play, you enter the letter of the cell that you want to move the stones from, A to F (case insensitive). The rules are contained in the file /usr/share/doc/mancala/RULES. OPTIONS
When run as mancala, the program normally takes two arguments, level-top and level-bottom, one of which should be 0 to represent the human player (you), and the other should be in the range 1 to 9, to represent the skill level of the computer player. The first argument repre- sents the top player, who starts. Alternatively, you can give a single argument or two non-zero arguments, to watch the computer playing itself, or two zero arguments, to play against another human player on the same console. For the console version, you can add a third argument to specify the number of stones per hole. For xmancala you can specify the number of stones per hole using the -stones N argument. On Debian systems, the shell script mancala-text is provided to facilitate running mancala in a console, from the Debian menu system. This script will run mancala with a difficulty level of 4, and will pause when the game is finished, to enable the player to view the final screen. SEE ALSO
<http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala> AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Andrew Gray <ajpg@debian.org> for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others). 13 March 2001 MANCALA(6)
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