Ok, so we've established something.;) At least we've established some background, so here goes:
There are obvious things that can be said about what should not have been done. Unlike abuse or neglect, I think GPS tracking is benign.
Generally speaking, as a technological measure, I tend to agree. However, in a non-exceptional case, I would tend to think that GPS tracking a kid would cause more problems than it would solve. The basic issue is a trust issue. Now, as I already conceded (which I'd have to really know you to be able to disagree), you had a trust issue with your daughter. Sounds like you were able to use GPS tracking to her benefit in dealing with the trust issue. Also doens't sound fully resolved, but these things take time, in general. She'll probably look back at it at some point and agree with you.
So my contention is that in the absence of a trust issue, GPS tracking your kid will create a trust issue. And that trust issue is more damaging than what would happen had it not been created. Mind you, I'm still talking about the general case.
Besides the generally accepted wisdom of trusting your kids (at least, it's one of several polar viewpoints supported by "experts", whoever these "experts" are), I've only got subjective stuff to offer in support of this viewpoint.;) Once upon a time, as a kid I was honest with my parents. At some point (I think I was 15), my mom decided I didn't do things other kids did and so something must be wrong. (Typical geek story, right?) My parents were all about trusting their kids, and then someone she knew (who coincidentally had drug-using kids and one of them had had an abortion) suggested she go through my stuff looking for something, because I must have been hiding something. Well, I wasn't, I was just a typical geek kid that liked to read, listen to music, and play computer games. But from that point on, my mother stopped getting the straight dope from me about what I was up to. Luckily, I never got into any trouble, but an unstoppable feedback loop started where she didn't trust me and I didn't trust her. It could have gotten worse than it did, but I didn't actually want to get into trouble. I wanted to finish high school and get the hell out of that house, and that's what I did. She still only gets the minimal story from me about what's going on in my life, and she still doesn't completely trust me, and at this point I don't really care.
Now, there's room for argument that it didn't hurt me, her going through my things, since I turned out fine, just fine, nothing wrong. (heh) But our relationship did suffer, and that's my contention. That the relationship suffers. In some cases, the suffering is more or less benign (as in mine), but in others it can get serious quick.
In my wife's case, her mother started going through her things on a whim, and at her age (around 11, iirc, but you'd have to ask her for specifics) it was enough to make her think she was a "bad kid", and start hanging out with other "bad kids". Which led to 3-4 years that the rest of us have a hard time believing could have really happened. It all stopped when she married me, at age 15, and trust was a big issue for a long time because both of her parents (who were divorced) had done many of the things that hurt the trust relationship. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. One day you decide something must be wrong with your kid, you do something that hurts the trust relationship. The kid starts to question their own trust for you and starts leaving out a few details, possibly lying altogether. So you lose some real trust for the kid, and the kid sees that and steps up the pace. How far it goes is dependent on many other factors. Starting the process of ruining the trust relationship isn't going to drive every kid to gang warfare, drugs, worshipping Satan, or whatever. There are, no doubt, millions of kids who grow up not trusting their parents, and vice versa, w
Heh, I was trying to stay focused on GUI tools, since everytime we point out the wonderful set of commandline tools that predate all the GUI tools we've got now, people whine about having to type.
Of course, they did have to type their posts, so typing obviously isn't that hard.
And urpmi kicks emerge's ass, since it doesn't have to compile anything.;)
Alright, you're talking about a specific instance where you already had suspicions and your kid was lying to you. I won't second-guess you because the evidence and the way you have written the story show you made the right decision.;)
Neither will I agree that this is a method that should be generally recommended. What if your daughter had been telling the truth? Also, what would the potential consequences have been?
Now, it is, in fact, normal for people without kids to make the same arguments I've put forth. I am not one of those people, however. I've got 3 of my own, but my oldest is 5, so it's not like I've had to face the serious decisions that a parent of a teenager faces. It's also normal for people who have been the most sheltered to put forth the same arguments that I have.
I was pretty sheltered, I'll admit.;) As an adult, though, I was pretty exposed. My wife, on the other hand, was about as exposed as you could be. She was even present in cars that were engaged in drive-by shootings, and she got to actually see people getting shot at by her "friends". (She didn't hang out with them for very long, though) Repeated instances of rape, drug abuse, all sorts of things, in her past.
So, as a matter of fact, my wife and I are both well aware what the consequences can be for a teenager, and we're also both capable of analyzing how a parent-child relationship can push a kid to pursue activities that have those consequences.
There are exceptions, and for the sake of argument we'll assume you and your daughter are one of those exceptions. An exception is nothing but a bad reason to proscribe spying to the general population of parents that don't face those exceptions.
Why is it so important? OS X and Windows have two completely different methods of managing software. Hell, until recently Windows didn't even have a way to manage software, they dumped that onto the developers.
We have a "standard", if you insist. GNU gave us one already, and most/all packages implement it to a degree that makes it reliable. But if I mention that, then you'll start whining about having to use the commandline, because it's really too fucking hard to type "./configure && make && make install"
Offtopic, did you see on my website that I've got a way to dump hydrogen files for people to download?;) I was wanting someone to actually test it...
Sometimes they will do things that are wrong, or that you as a parent do not approve of. And what's worse, you catching them doing it the first time or them doing it and thinking they can get away with it?
That's an easy one. It's worse if I catch my kids doing it, because if they do it and, as you say, "think they can get away with it", they will learn why it's wrong better than any lecture I could ever give. My daughter's five, and she just learned why it's sometimes necessary to suck in your pride and let someone have something, no matter how right you think you are.
If your not planning on keeping your child lock in the room until they are 18 you'll have to let them go out on there own sooner or later, if nothing less than to see if they can handle flying on their own, and as a parent your going to still have to make sure they are acting in the manor that you want them to act in.
Besides the obvious spelling errors (heh), how is spying on your kid seeing if "they can handle flying on their own"? If you're there to second-guess their decisions, they are not "flying on their own", they are flying under supervision.
I knew parents that went through their child's stuff, as a child I thought it was wrong. I don't know if my parents did because I didn't have things that my parents thought were wrong (drugs etc) to get busted on. I kind of hope they did in retrospect, and I will probably do it to mine.
And you will send your kids the message "I don't trust you". One of the things that has become a staple in modern childcare is the idea that the parent-child relationship has a very deep impact on how a kid grows up, develops a conscience, and so forth. In every case where you see a kid turn to crime or other so-called wrongdoings you find bad parent-child relationships. But in every case where you see a kid grow up "successful" (whatever that means), you find good, solid parent-child relationships. Searching your kids' stuff for contraband isn't a periodic inspection, it's a blatant accusation. Parents that mistrust their children have children that mistrust their parents. Do you want your kid to lie to you? Don't trust them.
You have to keep tabs on your child while letting them go off on there own it's part of letting them grow up.
The biggest part of letting them grow up is letting them become independent, and keeping tabs on them is not letting them become independent. Now, I don't have a problem with rules like "Call me before it gets too late, and if it's a schoolnight you have to come home". But putting a GPS sensor on their car just so you can call them and ask them why they're there instead of coming home? Trust is the most crucial element to manage in a parent-child relationship, and any attempt at surveillance will undermine the trust that you need if you intend for your kids to actually grow up.
Ok, I was going to write some witty thing in agreement with you, but realized half way through it that I couldn't have said it better than you did. Good call, dude.
Um, didn't that happen right about a year ago or so? And then didn't X.org fork right after that? "nobody did" assumes that these sorts of things can just happen overnight. Many people have been working on it since then, it just takes time. Just like the whole WinAPI wasn't built overnight, neither will a new and better X implementation be.
Thank you. I'm actually working on an article about Metisse, and 3d desktops in general, with some commentary about 3d accelerated 2d desktops vs 3d desktops.;) So any information on the subject right now can only be good for me.
As far as your comment about Linux being behind the times, I'd agree that Linux is playing 'catch up,' but I don't think that's a bad thing, just a necessary step.
Actually, we're not ten years behind. Microsoft just got a ten year head start, and UNIX even longer.
Let's not forget how young today's open source operating system is compared to these others. Sure, the BSDs can claim direct lineage to the original UNIX, but all the fragmenting of UNIX that happened in the 80s and the lawsuits of the 90s made sure BSD would fall behind. And Linux came to the table pretty late in the game, and before Linux there was no open source X implementation. XFree86 was given to us (iirc) when Linux finally had enough POSIX implemented to run it.
So, yeah, you could say we're ten years behind if you really wanted to. That means we've closed the gap considerably, when you get right down to it.;)
(Side note: I don't think we're ten years behind anymore, I think we've closed the gap completely. In some areas we have some truly innovative stuff, while in others we lag behind, so the aggregate of all the OSS stuff you get with an average distribution puts us on par with Windows XP and Mac OS X. The thing is, nobody will notice until we actually surpass them, and then it'll be too late for them to catch up. Also, people focus on individual features as being behind, rather than looking at the whole forest to see how thick it has grown and how much true innovation is in it, and that's a great disservice to the OSS world as a whole)
Ok, accuser. List every innovative thing you've done and released under an open source license.
It's either put up or shut up, and real quick. Your criticism is hardly constructive, and while I'm willing to grant any random user the right to constructive criticism, I'm not willing to grant it to flaming criticism. So now you have to prove your credentials or shut the fuck up.
You've been waiting in vain, my friend. Simply because XFree86 has been able to do this for years. Sorry to hear you've been so far out of the loops, but a simple google search will tell you what you need to know.
I had just assumed "release early and often" was the explanation. Your page is pretty, and informative, but doesn't really say anything besides "release early and often".;)
OS X uses an openGL rendering engine, but you can reproduce 99% of the GUI functionality using XFree86 as it stands now and still be 3 years ahead of Windows.
Yeah, you could do that, if you wanted. The only problem is that then the desktop would be a third as responsive as it is now. There's a reason OS X uses an openGL rendering engine rather than dumping all that load on the CPU. "Arrogant" OSS developers are well familiar with that reason, are you?
No, the other guy is also dealing with Fedora, a distribution which has been gaining notoriety for running like a hog.;)
Wait 'till Mandrake comes out with this version of X.org. Then we'll really start pissing. (I'm actually thinking of downloading it and putting it in here, does KDE 3.2 need anything extra to use this stuff, or will it do so automagically?)
X has been around longer than Windows. And it JUST NOW has a feature that has been around for years on Windows. Why is it that OSS weenies jump up and down when a tiny feature like this finally arrives for X, when non-OSS has had this for years, and act like OSS just pulled a rabbit out of its hat?
Idiot. XFree86 has been a weak link in the chain of wonderful OSS for years, and for years we (as in the community) have been trying to get XFree86 to pick up the pace, clean up their act, and get to work. But no, XFree86 decided to linger in political pissing wars instead of actually building. It has been stagnant for a long time, and as we've celebrated all the wonderful things OSS brings us, we've all been accepting and acknowledging what XFree86 represented: a complete and utter failure that was independent of the development model. A project both unmanaged and micromanaged to the point where nothing could be done with it but barely keep pace with video cards (and even then not always managing that).
The win here is that XFree86 finally made a decision that made it necessary for the very people distributing it to stop doing so, and for a rival project to fork and fix all the mistakes.
So, yeah, you could focus only on the fact that X.org has new features that supposedly have been had for years in other parts of the industry and talk about how OSS sucks because of that. In the process you will be ignoring all the other wonderful things OSS has that proprietary software doesn't, and never will.
And you'll be ignoring the fact that the very development at which you scoff represents one of the biggest strong points of the OSS movement, and one of the strongest arguments RMS ever makes about Free Software.
So you can be ignorant, and there's still plenty of room for you.
Microsoft makes money off of Internet Explorer precisely because people aren't using a big series of cross-platform applications on the OS of their choice.
Never forget that Microsoft decided to do this nasty anti-competitive thing to kill Nutscrape precisely because they saw Nutscrape ultimately growing into something that threatened their operating system monopoly. No other reason, just basic survival.
Fuck yeah. I use KWrite for everything, personally. I use it to write articles, I use it to write python, I use it for xml, xhtml, you fuckin' name it. Everything! A good syntax highlighting text editor that supports searching with regular expressions is all that I need to do anything I want.
Hell, I'd use it to hand code Microsoft Word documents if they'd release some decent documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you misspelled sourted.
About the time that the electric company starts taking bullshit instead of cash.
You mean the?{'}[];'{
NO CARRIER
Ok, so we've established something. ;) At least we've established some background, so here goes:
There are obvious things that can be said about what should not have been done. Unlike abuse or neglect, I think GPS tracking is benign.
Generally speaking, as a technological measure, I tend to agree. However, in a non-exceptional case, I would tend to think that GPS tracking a kid would cause more problems than it would solve. The basic issue is a trust issue. Now, as I already conceded (which I'd have to really know you to be able to disagree), you had a trust issue with your daughter. Sounds like you were able to use GPS tracking to her benefit in dealing with the trust issue. Also doens't sound fully resolved, but these things take time, in general. She'll probably look back at it at some point and agree with you.
So my contention is that in the absence of a trust issue, GPS tracking your kid will create a trust issue. And that trust issue is more damaging than what would happen had it not been created. Mind you, I'm still talking about the general case.
Besides the generally accepted wisdom of trusting your kids (at least, it's one of several polar viewpoints supported by "experts", whoever these "experts" are), I've only got subjective stuff to offer in support of this viewpoint. ;) Once upon a time, as a kid I was honest with my parents. At some point (I think I was 15), my mom decided I didn't do things other kids did and so something must be wrong. (Typical geek story, right?) My parents were all about trusting their kids, and then someone she knew (who coincidentally had drug-using kids and one of them had had an abortion) suggested she go through my stuff looking for something, because I must have been hiding something. Well, I wasn't, I was just a typical geek kid that liked to read, listen to music, and play computer games. But from that point on, my mother stopped getting the straight dope from me about what I was up to. Luckily, I never got into any trouble, but an unstoppable feedback loop started where she didn't trust me and I didn't trust her. It could have gotten worse than it did, but I didn't actually want to get into trouble. I wanted to finish high school and get the hell out of that house, and that's what I did. She still only gets the minimal story from me about what's going on in my life, and she still doesn't completely trust me, and at this point I don't really care.
Now, there's room for argument that it didn't hurt me, her going through my things, since I turned out fine, just fine, nothing wrong. (heh) But our relationship did suffer, and that's my contention. That the relationship suffers. In some cases, the suffering is more or less benign (as in mine), but in others it can get serious quick.
In my wife's case, her mother started going through her things on a whim, and at her age (around 11, iirc, but you'd have to ask her for specifics) it was enough to make her think she was a "bad kid", and start hanging out with other "bad kids". Which led to 3-4 years that the rest of us have a hard time believing could have really happened. It all stopped when she married me, at age 15, and trust was a big issue for a long time because both of her parents (who were divorced) had done many of the things that hurt the trust relationship. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. One day you decide something must be wrong with your kid, you do something that hurts the trust relationship. The kid starts to question their own trust for you and starts leaving out a few details, possibly lying altogether. So you lose some real trust for the kid, and the kid sees that and steps up the pace. How far it goes is dependent on many other factors. Starting the process of ruining the trust relationship isn't going to drive every kid to gang warfare, drugs, worshipping Satan, or whatever. There are, no doubt, millions of kids who grow up not trusting their parents, and vice versa, w
Read my post again, and then fuck off.
Heh, I've thought the same thing myself. ;)
Heh, I was trying to stay focused on GUI tools, since everytime we point out the wonderful set of commandline tools that predate all the GUI tools we've got now, people whine about having to type.
Of course, they did have to type their posts, so typing obviously isn't that hard.
And urpmi kicks emerge's ass, since it doesn't have to compile anything. ;)
"Ghandi took my IT job." -- Me
Cheers,
Fucksl4shd0t
That's because I^Hgeeks won't make the last six inches. Four, generally, five on a good day, but not the last six.
Alright, you're talking about a specific instance where you already had suspicions and your kid was lying to you. I won't second-guess you because the evidence and the way you have written the story show you made the right decision. ;)
Neither will I agree that this is a method that should be generally recommended. What if your daughter had been telling the truth? Also, what would the potential consequences have been?
Now, it is, in fact, normal for people without kids to make the same arguments I've put forth. I am not one of those people, however. I've got 3 of my own, but my oldest is 5, so it's not like I've had to face the serious decisions that a parent of a teenager faces. It's also normal for people who have been the most sheltered to put forth the same arguments that I have.
I was pretty sheltered, I'll admit. ;) As an adult, though, I was pretty exposed. My wife, on the other hand, was about as exposed as you could be. She was even present in cars that were engaged in drive-by shootings, and she got to actually see people getting shot at by her "friends". (She didn't hang out with them for very long, though) Repeated instances of rape, drug abuse, all sorts of things, in her past.
So, as a matter of fact, my wife and I are both well aware what the consequences can be for a teenager, and we're also both capable of analyzing how a parent-child relationship can push a kid to pursue activities that have those consequences.
There are exceptions, and for the sake of argument we'll assume you and your daughter are one of those exceptions. An exception is nothing but a bad reason to proscribe spying to the general population of parents that don't face those exceptions.
Why is it so important? OS X and Windows have two completely different methods of managing software. Hell, until recently Windows didn't even have a way to manage software, they dumped that onto the developers.
We have a "standard", if you insist. GNU gave us one already, and most/all packages implement it to a degree that makes it reliable. But if I mention that, then you'll start whining about having to use the commandline, because it's really too fucking hard to type "./configure && make && make install"
Offtopic, did you see on my website that I've got a way to dump hydrogen files for people to download? ;) I was wanting someone to actually test it...
Sometimes they will do things that are wrong, or that you as a parent do not approve of. And what's worse, you catching them doing it the first time or them doing it and thinking they can get away with it?
That's an easy one. It's worse if I catch my kids doing it, because if they do it and, as you say, "think they can get away with it", they will learn why it's wrong better than any lecture I could ever give. My daughter's five, and she just learned why it's sometimes necessary to suck in your pride and let someone have something, no matter how right you think you are.
If your not planning on keeping your child lock in the room until they are 18 you'll have to let them go out on there own sooner or later, if nothing less than to see if they can handle flying on their own, and as a parent your going to still have to make sure they are acting in the manor that you want them to act in.
Besides the obvious spelling errors (heh), how is spying on your kid seeing if "they can handle flying on their own"? If you're there to second-guess their decisions, they are not "flying on their own", they are flying under supervision.
I knew parents that went through their child's stuff, as a child I thought it was wrong. I don't know if my parents did because I didn't have things that my parents thought were wrong (drugs etc) to get busted on. I kind of hope they did in retrospect, and I will probably do it to mine.
And you will send your kids the message "I don't trust you". One of the things that has become a staple in modern childcare is the idea that the parent-child relationship has a very deep impact on how a kid grows up, develops a conscience, and so forth. In every case where you see a kid turn to crime or other so-called wrongdoings you find bad parent-child relationships. But in every case where you see a kid grow up "successful" (whatever that means), you find good, solid parent-child relationships. Searching your kids' stuff for contraband isn't a periodic inspection, it's a blatant accusation. Parents that mistrust their children have children that mistrust their parents. Do you want your kid to lie to you? Don't trust them.
You have to keep tabs on your child while letting them go off on there own it's part of letting them grow up.
The biggest part of letting them grow up is letting them become independent, and keeping tabs on them is not letting them become independent. Now, I don't have a problem with rules like "Call me before it gets too late, and if it's a schoolnight you have to come home". But putting a GPS sensor on their car just so you can call them and ask them why they're there instead of coming home? Trust is the most crucial element to manage in a parent-child relationship, and any attempt at surveillance will undermine the trust that you need if you intend for your kids to actually grow up.
Ok, I was going to write some witty thing in agreement with you, but realized half way through it that I couldn't have said it better than you did. Good call, dude.
Um, didn't that happen right about a year ago or so? And then didn't X.org fork right after that? "nobody did" assumes that these sorts of things can just happen overnight. Many people have been working on it since then, it just takes time. Just like the whole WinAPI wasn't built overnight, neither will a new and better X implementation be.
Patience is a virtue.
Ok, let's do this, then.
I'll give you the biggest one right now: A way to install software that doesn't require a computer science degree.
Mandrake has the Mandrake Control Center. Fedora/RedHat have Synaptic, and Debian's got it too.
What's next?
Thank you. I'm actually working on an article about Metisse, and 3d desktops in general, with some commentary about 3d accelerated 2d desktops vs 3d desktops. ;) So any information on the subject right now can only be good for me.
As far as your comment about Linux being behind the times, I'd agree that Linux is playing 'catch up,' but I don't think that's a bad thing, just a necessary step.
Actually, we're not ten years behind. Microsoft just got a ten year head start, and UNIX even longer.
Let's not forget how young today's open source operating system is compared to these others. Sure, the BSDs can claim direct lineage to the original UNIX, but all the fragmenting of UNIX that happened in the 80s and the lawsuits of the 90s made sure BSD would fall behind. And Linux came to the table pretty late in the game, and before Linux there was no open source X implementation. XFree86 was given to us (iirc) when Linux finally had enough POSIX implemented to run it.
So, yeah, you could say we're ten years behind if you really wanted to. That means we've closed the gap considerably, when you get right down to it. ;)
(Side note: I don't think we're ten years behind anymore, I think we've closed the gap completely. In some areas we have some truly innovative stuff, while in others we lag behind, so the aggregate of all the OSS stuff you get with an average distribution puts us on par with Windows XP and Mac OS X. The thing is, nobody will notice until we actually surpass them, and then it'll be too late for them to catch up. Also, people focus on individual features as being behind, rather than looking at the whole forest to see how thick it has grown and how much true innovation is in it, and that's a great disservice to the OSS world as a whole)
Ok, accuser. List every innovative thing you've done and released under an open source license.
It's either put up or shut up, and real quick. Your criticism is hardly constructive, and while I'm willing to grant any random user the right to constructive criticism, I'm not willing to grant it to flaming criticism. So now you have to prove your credentials or shut the fuck up.
So let's have it. What have you done?
The eventual goal is to implement the X server on top of OpenGL, so transparency and 2D operations can be hardware accelerated.
This is good news. ;) Trust me, it is. Do you have any links showing this, and possibly a timetable or something?
You've been waiting in vain, my friend. Simply because XFree86 has been able to do this for years. Sorry to hear you've been so far out of the loops, but a simple google search will tell you what you need to know.
I had just assumed "release early and often" was the explanation. Your page is pretty, and informative, but doesn't really say anything besides "release early and often". ;)
OS X uses an openGL rendering engine, but you can reproduce 99% of the GUI functionality using XFree86 as it stands now and still be 3 years ahead of Windows.
Yeah, you could do that, if you wanted. The only problem is that then the desktop would be a third as responsive as it is now. There's a reason OS X uses an openGL rendering engine rather than dumping all that load on the CPU. "Arrogant" OSS developers are well familiar with that reason, are you?
No, the other guy is also dealing with Fedora, a distribution which has been gaining notoriety for running like a hog. ;)
Wait 'till Mandrake comes out with this version of X.org. Then we'll really start pissing. (I'm actually thinking of downloading it and putting it in here, does KDE 3.2 need anything extra to use this stuff, or will it do so automagically?)
X has been around longer than Windows. And it JUST NOW has a feature that has been around for years on Windows. Why is it that OSS weenies jump up and down when a tiny feature like this finally arrives for X, when non-OSS has had this for years, and act like OSS just pulled a rabbit out of its hat?
Idiot. XFree86 has been a weak link in the chain of wonderful OSS for years, and for years we (as in the community) have been trying to get XFree86 to pick up the pace, clean up their act, and get to work. But no, XFree86 decided to linger in political pissing wars instead of actually building. It has been stagnant for a long time, and as we've celebrated all the wonderful things OSS brings us, we've all been accepting and acknowledging what XFree86 represented: a complete and utter failure that was independent of the development model. A project both unmanaged and micromanaged to the point where nothing could be done with it but barely keep pace with video cards (and even then not always managing that).
The win here is that XFree86 finally made a decision that made it necessary for the very people distributing it to stop doing so, and for a rival project to fork and fix all the mistakes.
So, yeah, you could focus only on the fact that X.org has new features that supposedly have been had for years in other parts of the industry and talk about how OSS sucks because of that. In the process you will be ignoring all the other wonderful things OSS has that proprietary software doesn't, and never will.
And you'll be ignoring the fact that the very development at which you scoff represents one of the biggest strong points of the OSS movement, and one of the strongest arguments RMS ever makes about Free Software.
So you can be ignorant, and there's still plenty of room for you.
Microsoft makes money off of Internet Explorer precisely because people aren't using a big series of cross-platform applications on the OS of their choice.
Never forget that Microsoft decided to do this nasty anti-competitive thing to kill Nutscrape precisely because they saw Nutscrape ultimately growing into something that threatened their operating system monopoly. No other reason, just basic survival.
Fuck yeah. I use KWrite for everything, personally. I use it to write articles, I use it to write python, I use it for xml, xhtml, you fuckin' name it. Everything! A good syntax highlighting text editor that supports searching with regular expressions is all that I need to do anything I want.
Hell, I'd use it to hand code Microsoft Word documents if they'd release some decent documentation.