Trying to be all things to all people is not a good way to put it. It's like saying that Java tries to be all things to all people because it let's you create many different kinds of programs. But that's the purpose of a programming language in the first place. Or that a web browser tries to be all things to all people, because you can go to Facebook, or GMail, or Wikipedia, or whatever, but the point of the browser is to let you do many many different things. Once you have a programming language in a system then you automatically can do many different things with few constraints.
So Emacs is the same. It is not an editor. It is a system that you can use to do many many different things, and editing files is just one of the things it can do by default.
When the only UI was an ascii terminal, that was very handy. You've got a VT100 with 24 lines only (and maybe a 25th status line). If your typical work cycle is "edit with vi then exist", "compile with cc", "remember line number of error", "edit with vi to fix error", and so on, then being able to do it all from one program is handy. Why run the shell inside of Emacs? Because you can scroll up and down and see previous shell output which you can't do with just a raw shell (though windowing systems removed a lot of that). "Screen" can do some of that but screen wasn't always available, and why learn and use screen when you've already got a tool that can do what screen does but lots more besides?
Part of the problem with Emacs detractors I think is that they view Emacs as an editor. But it's not an editor. It's a system that has a built in editor.
The need is because so many things require editing of some form. So you do a mail reader in emacs because you can compose your emails using the same editor that you use to edit everything else, and without spawning it as a subprocess of the mail reader. Same for news reader, etc. Same keystrokes, same commands, same environment. When the alternative was the standard command line "mail" then using Emacs was a vast improvement.
The other reason is that you can write your own and customize the hell out of it. Remember that Emacs is not a text editor, rather Emacs is a programmable system that includes an editor. So you use that programming system to program your own tools. You could not even start to do anything like this the original vi, it had no programming language. It allows for some simple integration of development tools: compile the current code you're looking at and pop up the error messages and scroll through them. This integrated the edit/compile/debug cycle back when when most people hadn't even heard of IDEs (except perhaps on Lisp Machines and the like).
The endless hours comes from the ability to customize. When you're stuck with an uncustomizable tool then you don't spend that time customizing but you do spend a lot of time wasted on the frustration of inadequate tools.
Everyone? Emacs is on Macs (though it's text only). Most people I know go out of their way to stick their favorite editors on their systems, SlickEdit, JavaBeans, even full blown IDEs. I use vi and Emacs both. Why not?
I do remember days when vi was not present on all unix systems. Had to use ed on occasion.
If you look at Emacs today, it's relatively small overall. The old joke gets stale because it's gone from being an example of a giant software package into something that is dwarfed by other packages. What makes it big is that it has a programming language which means there are thousands of optional user created programs for it. Meanwhile there are editors much bigger than Emacs which are not nearly as extensible.
Emacs is a textual display system with a programming language to use it, with several primitives related to editing. The editor part itself is added with the programming language.
I am highly annoyed with code reviews, because people really aren't doing them. I find all sorts of bugs that should be caught by any cursory code review but they sneak past. I think most people just say "yup, looks ok, does the job, pass" without spending any meaningful time scrutinizing the code. Then I end up seeing the code and feel like an ass if I ask people to change it after it's already been done. Especiallly with things that work, aren't bugs, but just violate a lot of other common sense things (wasteful of memory on a small system, using the polar opposite of the group's coding standards, etc).
Only if they want to investigate though. It's still a relatively small crime if it's just one blackmailer for $2000 against one person. It only becomes a big enough deal to pay attention if it's something big like the Ashley Madison case.
Actually even if they pay it's not so simple. They want payment in bitcoin. Most people can't easily do that. It's not like you can go to the bank and get some. Those ransom malwares that want bitcoin paid often result in baffled users trying to figure out how to pay up in time. Story on a podcast that started relating how someone needed to pay the ransomware and ended up with several roadblocks, including having to drive several hours to a bitcoin "ATM" to meet a deadline and then still ended up having the wrong amount paid because the conversion rate had fallen. The "ATM" was unmanned but had a phone number to call for service; the person on the other end knew what was up quickly because most people who used that machine did so for ransomware.
In ancient times you advertised your own stuff. That is, you FIRST did something productive, and only after that did you add a tiny bit of advertising. Today it's the opposite, advertise the hell out of it first, then try to make it work buying second. Advertising is a major industrial sector today which is totally bizarre in my view.
Fascism is the wrong word, it gets overused too much just like socialism. However "homeland" does have a very strong sense of intense patriotism behind it rather than being neutral. Department of Domestic Security would have been better perhaps.
And the reasons for creating the department were dubious. We had separate offices that didn't seem to cooperate, we were told that we could have prevented the attacks if only they were more chatty with with each other, so we create an umbrella department to put them under. It was not necessary, they were already under the same umbrella called the Executive Branch. But now the separate missions of each office are blurred.
To be honest, when the Department of Homeland Security was created it already sounded ominously fascist just by itself. Peggy Noonan, a Republican speechwriter, said at the time that she hoped Bush would change the name.
There are sects that say that the Bible must be interpreted literally. Even the parts that are allegories! Yes, some of those people have issues. Christianity has been used to justify killing witches, killing gays, killing jews, keeping slaves, etc.
As for Islam, Jews and Christians were allowed to live in the early Caliphates (yes they had to pay taxes). Where those caliphs apostates for not killing them, or perhaps there is plenty of room for interpretations within Islam? As for Jihad, it means struggle. Struggling to stop smoking with help from God is a Jihad also.
That's a part of creating the illusion of safety. We intervene militarily and thus we have "done something". That's what the public wants. If the governments sit back and debate to invade or not to invade the public complains that they do nothing and that they want those terrorists squashed like bugs. Never mind that the number dead from terrorist attacks is miniscule. So we go in and stomp around and create even more terrorists, then the public says good job but too bad this is a bigger problem than we first thought, maybe we should keep stomping around and see what happens?
Illusions are easy to create. Sure, we had one terrorist attack slip through but think of the thousands we prevented but weren't allowed to tell you about!
Did we learn the right lessons though? Learn the lesson to immediately jump on the suspected case and call in law enforcement as step one, or learn the lesson to clamp down on bullying early rather than let it fester over time?
Teachers there do not "feel" that they are required to report, the law states that they must report this sort of thing. We're no longer living in an age where anyone is allowed to say "this is a mistake, let's skip it" when it comes to schools. Flexibility is being removed from educators.
Except that the BBC story today say that the police and town council claim that it is "untrue to suggest that this situation was brought about by a simple spelling mistake". In other words, they don't think it was a mistake and that the police acted "responsibly and proportionately".
Except that it seems Chrome is much much bigger than Firefox with adblocking. I hadn't realized how big it got given that is has many of the same bad design decisions that Firefox copied, but it is getting automatically installed quite a bit (at least one anti-malware product automatically installs it unless the user is savvy enough to uncheck the box during upgrades). I don't know if it uses APB or not though, but if just Firefox went away it would only make a relatively small dent in ad blocking.
They will eventually I think. Right now it's a lot of work for them. They already get tons and tons of free money by sucking at other people's bandwidth, it would just hurt the bottom line if they reinvested in R&D. So yes, the advertising industry is just as short sighted and incompetent as everyone else in the "tech" industry.
More practically, it's a big change in their model. They exist as a third-party, loosely integrated with another site. They sell the idea to the content creator that they only need to add a few scripts then just sit back and wait for revenue to roll in. If instead they required the content creator to give the third party advertiser more direct control over the web server it becomes so much more complicated. The web site owner would start paying more attention to what's happening, and notice what's really going on ("hey, that's malware in that last ad you had!", "why do we need to promote hygiene products again?", "what do you mean I don't have permission to change my files?").
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to be all things to all people is not a good way to put it. It's like saying that Java tries to be all things to all people because it let's you create many different kinds of programs. But that's the purpose of a programming language in the first place. Or that a web browser tries to be all things to all people, because you can go to Facebook, or GMail, or Wikipedia, or whatever, but the point of the browser is to let you do many many different things. Once you have a programming language in a system then you automatically can do many different things with few constraints.
So Emacs is the same. It is not an editor. It is a system that you can use to do many many different things, and editing files is just one of the things it can do by default.
Compare that to a fresh instance of any modern browser. Or any modern IDE. Emacs is no longer the hog.
I use both vi and emacs also. So I surprise some people who see me use vi and then say "wait, if you know vi then why do you use emacs?"
When the only UI was an ascii terminal, that was very handy. You've got a VT100 with 24 lines only (and maybe a 25th status line). If your typical work cycle is "edit with vi then exist", "compile with cc", "remember line number of error", "edit with vi to fix error", and so on, then being able to do it all from one program is handy. Why run the shell inside of Emacs? Because you can scroll up and down and see previous shell output which you can't do with just a raw shell (though windowing systems removed a lot of that). "Screen" can do some of that but screen wasn't always available, and why learn and use screen when you've already got a tool that can do what screen does but lots more besides?
Part of the problem with Emacs detractors I think is that they view Emacs as an editor. But it's not an editor. It's a system that has a built in editor.
The need is because so many things require editing of some form. So you do a mail reader in emacs because you can compose your emails using the same editor that you use to edit everything else, and without spawning it as a subprocess of the mail reader. Same for news reader, etc. Same keystrokes, same commands, same environment. When the alternative was the standard command line "mail" then using Emacs was a vast improvement.
The other reason is that you can write your own and customize the hell out of it. Remember that Emacs is not a text editor, rather Emacs is a programmable system that includes an editor. So you use that programming system to program your own tools. You could not even start to do anything like this the original vi, it had no programming language. It allows for some simple integration of development tools: compile the current code you're looking at and pop up the error messages and scroll through them. This integrated the edit/compile/debug cycle back when when most people hadn't even heard of IDEs (except perhaps on Lisp Machines and the like).
The endless hours comes from the ability to customize. When you're stuck with an uncustomizable tool then you don't spend that time customizing but you do spend a lot of time wasted on the frustration of inadequate tools.
Everyone? Emacs is on Macs (though it's text only). Most people I know go out of their way to stick their favorite editors on their systems, SlickEdit, JavaBeans, even full blown IDEs. I use vi and Emacs both. Why not?
I do remember days when vi was not present on all unix systems. Had to use ed on occasion.
If you look at Emacs today, it's relatively small overall. The old joke gets stale because it's gone from being an example of a giant software package into something that is dwarfed by other packages. What makes it big is that it has a programming language which means there are thousands of optional user created programs for it. Meanwhile there are editors much bigger than Emacs which are not nearly as extensible.
Emacs is a textual display system with a programming language to use it, with several primitives related to editing. The editor part itself is added with the programming language.
Was this determined statistically, or is it confirmation bias?
I am highly annoyed with code reviews, because people really aren't doing them. I find all sorts of bugs that should be caught by any cursory code review but they sneak past. I think most people just say "yup, looks ok, does the job, pass" without spending any meaningful time scrutinizing the code. Then I end up seeing the code and feel like an ass if I ask people to change it after it's already been done. Especiallly with things that work, aren't bugs, but just violate a lot of other common sense things (wasteful of memory on a small system, using the polar opposite of the group's coding standards, etc).
Only if they want to investigate though. It's still a relatively small crime if it's just one blackmailer for $2000 against one person. It only becomes a big enough deal to pay attention if it's something big like the Ashley Madison case.
Actually even if they pay it's not so simple. They want payment in bitcoin. Most people can't easily do that. It's not like you can go to the bank and get some. Those ransom malwares that want bitcoin paid often result in baffled users trying to figure out how to pay up in time. Story on a podcast that started relating how someone needed to pay the ransomware and ended up with several roadblocks, including having to drive several hours to a bitcoin "ATM" to meet a deadline and then still ended up having the wrong amount paid because the conversion rate had fallen. The "ATM" was unmanned but had a phone number to call for service; the person on the other end knew what was up quickly because most people who used that machine did so for ransomware.
My Hello Kitty Online Adventures account uses "1" as the password.
In ancient times you advertised your own stuff. That is, you FIRST did something productive, and only after that did you add a tiny bit of advertising. Today it's the opposite, advertise the hell out of it first, then try to make it work buying second. Advertising is a major industrial sector today which is totally bizarre in my view.
Fascism is the wrong word, it gets overused too much just like socialism. However "homeland" does have a very strong sense of intense patriotism behind it rather than being neutral. Department of Domestic Security would have been better perhaps.
And the reasons for creating the department were dubious. We had separate offices that didn't seem to cooperate, we were told that we could have prevented the attacks if only they were more chatty with with each other, so we create an umbrella department to put them under. It was not necessary, they were already under the same umbrella called the Executive Branch. But now the separate missions of each office are blurred.
To be honest, when the Department of Homeland Security was created it already sounded ominously fascist just by itself. Peggy Noonan, a Republican speechwriter, said at the time that she hoped Bush would change the name.
There are sects that say that the Bible must be interpreted literally. Even the parts that are allegories! Yes, some of those people have issues. Christianity has been used to justify killing witches, killing gays, killing jews, keeping slaves, etc.
As for Islam, Jews and Christians were allowed to live in the early Caliphates (yes they had to pay taxes). Where those caliphs apostates for not killing them, or perhaps there is plenty of room for interpretations within Islam? As for Jihad, it means struggle. Struggling to stop smoking with help from God is a Jihad also.
That's a part of creating the illusion of safety. We intervene militarily and thus we have "done something". That's what the public wants. If the governments sit back and debate to invade or not to invade the public complains that they do nothing and that they want those terrorists squashed like bugs. Never mind that the number dead from terrorist attacks is miniscule. So we go in and stomp around and create even more terrorists, then the public says good job but too bad this is a bigger problem than we first thought, maybe we should keep stomping around and see what happens?
Illusions are easy to create. Sure, we had one terrorist attack slip through but think of the thousands we prevented but weren't allowed to tell you about!
Did we learn the right lessons though? Learn the lesson to immediately jump on the suspected case and call in law enforcement as step one, or learn the lesson to clamp down on bullying early rather than let it fester over time?
Spell checkers do what they can to screw up anything you write.
Teachers there do not "feel" that they are required to report, the law states that they must report this sort of thing. We're no longer living in an age where anyone is allowed to say "this is a mistake, let's skip it" when it comes to schools. Flexibility is being removed from educators.
Except that the BBC story today say that the police and town council claim that it is "untrue to suggest that this situation was brought about by a simple spelling mistake". In other words, they don't think it was a mistake and that the police acted "responsibly and proportionately".
I recommend watching Black Mirror, episode 2, Fifteen Million Merits. Where one loses merits by choosing not to watch the adverts.
Except that it seems Chrome is much much bigger than Firefox with adblocking. I hadn't realized how big it got given that is has many of the same bad design decisions that Firefox copied, but it is getting automatically installed quite a bit (at least one anti-malware product automatically installs it unless the user is savvy enough to uncheck the box during upgrades). I don't know if it uses APB or not though, but if just Firefox went away it would only make a relatively small dent in ad blocking.
They will eventually I think. Right now it's a lot of work for them. They already get tons and tons of free money by sucking at other people's bandwidth, it would just hurt the bottom line if they reinvested in R&D. So yes, the advertising industry is just as short sighted and incompetent as everyone else in the "tech" industry.
More practically, it's a big change in their model. They exist as a third-party, loosely integrated with another site. They sell the idea to the content creator that they only need to add a few scripts then just sit back and wait for revenue to roll in. If instead they required the content creator to give the third party advertiser more direct control over the web server it becomes so much more complicated. The web site owner would start paying more attention to what's happening, and notice what's really going on ("hey, that's malware in that last ad you had!", "why do we need to promote hygiene products again?", "what do you mean I don't have permission to change my files?").