World's richest man claims the cost of software is not an important issue in the

WarpKat

Because often they are utterly useless? Inadequate. Lacking important commands?

Did you know that you can set printer margins from lpd? Forget finding how in the man page. They left that out all together.

I have found dozens of man pages pulling stunts like that.

And examples, syntax. Man pages don't do syntax. Ofetn you can't read teh uinstructions and do it. You have to f*** with it and experiment. That sucks hugely.

Man pages were concived years ago when memory and hard disk space were expensive. And when one needed real halp, one wandered back to teh back office where teh Wall of Manuals were kept. With modern Linux you do not get the Wall of Manuals for when man page doesn't hack it. Manpage is a memnomic,

Linux is stuck in an 25 year old Unix mindset and it is so wrong on so many levels only morons would argue its adequate.

Even if you struggle through, the time issue alone makes it a broken system. What should take you 5 minutes to achieve can take days looking for the missing information nobody bothered to write up.

The lack of decent documentation is what is holding Linux back.

I now totally hate and resent any software that wastes so much as a second of my time by refusing to adequately document itself. I now often do not even bother with man pages, I haven't seen a useful one in over two years that did not waste time. Straight to google; program name, tutorial, configure. Even then, all too often that is a bust too from the stand point of complete, correct, quick.

-- "There is a word in Newspeak," said Syme.ÊÊ"IÊdon't know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck.ÊÊIt isÊoneÊofÊthoseÊinterestingÊwordsÊthat have two contradictory meanings.ÊÊAppliedÊtoÊan opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise." ÊÊÊÊ-GeorgeÊOrwellÊ"NineteenÊEighty-Four"

Cheerful Charlie