Rapidly navigating buffers using search
Jonathan Groll
(isearch-backward) for a phrase that catches my eye so that I can
quickly move to that part of the buffer. I *think* this is a technique
that a lot of us use for rapidly navigating buffers.
The thing is, what do you type when you want to exit the search? I
usually type C-SPC (set-mark) or if I'm feeling certain then I might
press something like C-d. Is there a better way to exit the search
without the unintended consequences (such as setting mark?) I also do
find it difficult to hold in my head that exiting a forward search
drops me at the end of the search result and vice-versa for a reverse
search.
Any body want to share their technique for rapidly navigating buffers?
Cheers,
Jonathan
Thierry Volpiatto
Have a look at ioccur.el:
hg clone http://mercurial.intuxication.org/hg/ioccur
hg update -C development
> Cheers,
> Jonathan
>
>
--
Thierry Volpiatto
Gpg key: http://pgp.mit.edu/
Qiang Guo
Try C-g which will cancel the action, that's what I do in
this situation.
Jonathan Groll
>
>Try C-g which will cancel the action, that's what I do in
>this situation.
The idea though is to move point to the text you are interested
in. C-g leaves you back where you started from.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Stefan Kamphausen
Jonathan Groll <li...@groll.co.za> writes:
> For quick navigation, I use C-s (isearch-forward) and C-r
> (isearch-backward) for a phrase that catches my eye so that I can
> quickly move to that part of the buffer. I *think* this is a technique
> that a lot of us use for rapidly navigating buffers.
>
> The thing is, what do you type when you want to exit the search? I
> usually type C-SPC (set-mark) or if I'm feeling certain then I might
> press something like C-d. Is there a better way to exit the search
> without the unintended consequences (such as setting mark?)
just type a movement command, e.g. a cursor key.
Cheers,
Stefan
--
a blessed +42 regexp of confusion (weapon in hand)
You hit. The format string crumbles and turns to dust.
user=> (clojure-buch (Locale/GERMANY))
#<URL http://www.clojure-buch.de>
Andrea Crotti
>
> The idea though is to move point to the text you are interested
> in. C-g leaves you back where you started from.
>
> Cheers,
> Jonathan
If you press RET doesn't it leave you where you want exiting the search?
Deniz Dogan
That's right, Emacs even echoes "Mark saved where search started" when
you use RET.
--
Deniz Dogan
Jonathan Groll
>2010/7/7 Andrea Crotti <andrea....@gmail.com>:
>>
>>>
>>> The idea though is to move point to the text you are interested
>>> in. C-g leaves you back where you started from.
>>>
>>
>>
>
>That's right, Emacs even echoes "Mark saved where search started" when
>you use RET.
>
been using emacs for a couple of years... and it is right there in the
manual under "basics of incremental search" too.
Regards,
Jonathan
Tim X
What about just hitting enter when you reach the match you want?
Tim
--
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
Xah Lee
> On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 11:33:51AM +0200, Deniz Dogan wrote:
>
> >>> The idea though is to move point to the text you are interested
> >>> in. C-g leaves you back where you started from.
>
> >> If you press RET doesn't it leave you where you want exiting the search?
>
> >That's right, Emacs even echoes "Mark saved where search started" when
> >you use RET.
>
> Thanks, this is something that I didn't realised until now, and have
> been using emacs for a couple of years... and it is right there in the
> manual under "basics of incremental search" too.
same here. I started to use emacs daily since 1998, and i didn't
realize that Enter will exit the search and leave the cursor at the
current location untill 2007 or so. I've always just used left/right
arrow. (and a year or two later, i also found out that it is right in
the manual. These happened only when i started to get more involved in
writing a emacs tutorial)
this situation of us using emacs for 5 or 10 years and often found
something basics we don't know about. I think that means there's
something wrong with the manual. People here often try to get other to
read the manual, but the fact is most of us, even dedicated emacs
fans, just don't read the manual and or don't have time to.
the manual is written mostly in the 1980s. The whole structure,
design, mindset. I think the manual can be cut 50% and become more
functional. Many 1980s terminologies could also use a update.
Xah
Aidan Gauland
> Any body want to share their technique for rapidly navigating buffers?
The defaults are fine for me, but I seem to remember that the defaults for GNU
Emacs 21 were not. Anyway, try M-x customize-group <RET> mouse and M-x
customize-apropos <RET> scroll and see if any of the options that turns up are
what you're after.
Regards,
Aidan Gauland
des...@verizon.net
> On Jul 7, 3:25 am, Jonathan Groll <li...@groll.co.za> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 11:33:51AM +0200, Deniz Dogan wrote:
>> >2010/7/7 Andrea Crotti <andrea.crott...@gmail.com>:
>>
>> >>> The idea though is to move point to the text you are interested
>> >>> in. C-g leaves you back where you started from.
>>
>> >> If you press RET doesn't it leave you where you want exiting the search?
>>
>> >That's right, Emacs even echoes "Mark saved where search started" when
>> >you use RET.
>>
>> Thanks, this is something that I didn't realised until now, and have
>> been using emacs for a couple of years... and it is right there in the
>> manual under "basics of incremental search" too.
>
> same here. I started to use emacs daily since 1998, and i didn't
> realize that Enter will exit the search and leave the cursor at the
> current location untill 2007 or so. I've always just used left/right
> arrow. (and a year or two later, i also found out that it is right in
> the manual. These happened only when i started to get more involved in
> writing a emacs tutorial)
>
> this situation of us using emacs for 5 or 10 years and often found
> something basics we don't know about. I think that means there's
> something wrong with the manual.
There's nothing wrong with the manual.
That makes no sense, you just said the information is in the manual.
Experienced Emacs users know that learning Emacs is an ongoing process.
Elena
> this situation of us using emacs for 5 or 10 years and often found
> something basics we don't know about. I think that means there's
> something wrong with the manual. People here often try to get other to
> read the manual, but the fact is most of us, even dedicated emacs
> fans, just don't read the manual and or don't have time to.
So, is the manual wrong or are we guilty of ignoring it? The latter, I
think, since even if we keep reading just one page at a time, we'll
have finished it way earlier than 5 or 10 years. Emacs is too powerful
an editor to be used after skimping the instructions. I'm mending this
situation right now.
Cheers.
David Kastrup
I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
In a way, it is a losing battle. People expect software to just work
without reading manuals. 95% of all Word users, for example, create
their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
and so on. The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
better. Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
order to get around that.
It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness. The more userfriendly a
piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for
_competent_ people willing to learn about their tool. At least Emacs is
at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to
the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up
on disk is that what they see on their screen.
I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the
documentation. Emacs has a help menu, and those also point to tutorials
explaining the basics in most local languages.
But people look at documentation mostly when they run into problems they
can't deal with on their own. And the more userfriendly Emacs becomes,
and the better its menus and interactive helps become, the less people
become inclined to bother looking for help.
--
David Kastrup
bolega
>
> In a way, it is a losing battle. People expect software to just work
> without reading manuals. 95% of all Word users, for example, create
> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> and so on. The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
> better. Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
> order to get around that.
>
> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness. The more userfriendly a
> piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for
> _competent_ people willing to learn about their tool. At least Emacs is
> at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to
> the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up
> on disk is that what they see on their screen.
>
Rare pearls of wisdom ... from DK.
The new interface of office 2007 with tabs instead of pull-down menu
is a lot better in terms of visual throughput.
A wysiwig editor with a good markup or definition language can go a
long way to educate the user about the underlying features while at
the same time providing user-friendly convenience.
Things are certainly progressing in this direction.
I have not used LyX but I have heard that it is wysiwig with the
option of viewing code in various representations.
des...@verizon.net
> des...@verizon.net writes:
>
>> Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> On Jul 7, 3:25 am, Jonathan Groll <li...@groll.co.za> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Thanks, this is something that I didn't realised until now, and have
>>>> been using emacs for a couple of years... and it is right there in the
>>>> manual under "basics of incremental search" too.
>>>
>>> same here. I started to use emacs daily since 1998, and i didn't
>>> realize that Enter will exit the search and leave the cursor at the
>>> current location untill 2007 or so. I've always just used left/right
>>> arrow. (and a year or two later, i also found out that it is right in
>>> the manual. These happened only when i started to get more involved
>>> in writing a emacs tutorial)
>>>
>>> this situation of us using emacs for 5 or 10 years and often found
>>> something basics we don't know about. I think that means there's
>>> something wrong with the manual.
>>
>> There's nothing wrong with the manual.
>> That makes no sense, you just said the information is in the manual.
>
> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
Well, he should say what he means.
:)
> In a way, it is a losing battle.
Many people will get to a level of proficiency and stop being curious.
I don't see a big problem, if they don't want to be power users,
so be it.
I think it's usually the same people that say they don't have
enough time to learn new things.
There are so many ways to access the "excellent manual" that it's
almost ridiculous.
One can type "^s ^h m" and get a whole lot of good info on isearch.
Some people will realize that they've got a whole screen full of
information and they should periodically go back and read it again
because the whole thing is not going to sink in at once.
Peter Flynn
> On Jul 8, 3:36�am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>> In a way, it is a losing battle. �People expect software to just work
>> without reading manuals. �95% of all Word users, for example, create
>> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
>> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
>> and so on. �The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
>> better. �Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
>> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
>> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
>> order to get around that.
>>
>> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness. �The more userfriendly a
>> piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for
>> _competent_ people willing to learn about their tool. �At least Emacs is
>> at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to
>> the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up
>> on disk is that what they see on their screen.
>>
>
> Rare pearls of wisdom ... from DK.
Actually, DK posts a lot of wisdom, but not all is as quotable as the
above :-)
> The new interface of office 2007 with tabs instead of pull-down menu
> is a lot better in terms of visual throughput.
I'm not familiar with that term. The ribbon is an experiment in
interface usability (for doing which, Microsoft is to be congratulated,
regardless of the outcome, and regardless of whether you think the
ribbon better or worse than the old-style menus). Unfortunately it is
based on the tyranny of the majority: it's fine for the unthinking user
that David describes above; it is almost certainly suboptimal for his
"competent user".
> A wysiwig editor with a good markup or definition language can go a
> long way to educate the user about the underlying features while at
> the same time providing user-friendly convenience.
The majority of users don't want to be educated about underlying
features, or indeed about anything outside their field. They just want
the system to produce what *they* *believe* to be right, whether it
actually is right or not. As far as they are concerned, if it looks
pretty, it's right. The fact that it may be unusable, obsolete within
days, unreadable, or whatever, remains forever beyond them (oddly, even
when they have to pay to have it put right afterwards). Fortunately,
most of the material concerned is transient, ephemeral, or simply
unimportant.
However, in the middle (between those users and the "competent user")
there will be users willing to learn how to do it right and avoid
mistakes and unnecessary expense. But my own research is showing that
these users do still insist on a synchronous typographical interface
(what they call WYSIWYG, even when it's not, quite). What I am
attempting to measure is how far you can go towards retaining the visual
manipulation of the text before the interaction descends below the bar
of mutual second-guessing that David describes.
> Things are certainly progressing in this direction.
Yes, slowly.
> I have not used LyX but I have heard that it is wysiwig with the
> option of viewing code in various representations.
It's near-WYSIWYG. They describe it as WYSIWYM (Mean; implying conscious
intent). For users in my middle group above, who require Instant Textual
Gratification [tm :-], it's a valuable tool in that it has made it
clearer where some of the boundaries lie.
///Peter
--
(Followups set to c.t.t)
Stefan Kamphausen
David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> writes:
> In a way, it is a losing battle. People expect software to just work
> without reading manuals. 95% of all Word users, for example, create
> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> and so on. The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
> better. Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
> order to get around that.
this is the most precise summary I've ever read for this. Actually that
squared second-guessing is what drives me absolutely mad whenever I have
to deal with 'office documents'.
> I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the
> documentation. Emacs has a help menu, and those also point to tutorials
> explaining the basics in most local languages.
FWIW. Emacs has more than a manual. It has a documentation environment
that made me happy for more than 15 years now. I could learn everything
I ever needed from looking at the manual with only minor additional
doses of other documents found on the Internet or of the source code
itself. I loath all the other programs that are not willing to tell me
what a certain keybinding does (C-h k), where a certain command is (C-h
w), what the current mode of operation is (C-h m), what a certain
function is supposed to do (C-h f) or a certain variable/setting is for
(C-h v), or which have no other way of pointing me in the general
direction of a needed functionality other than Google (C-h a). And that
is not even using the info-system which contains lots of background
information and describes underlying concepts. To me, there is no
friendlier program out there than Emacs.
So, a very big Thank You to all the contributors to the manual (and
other sources of documentation) from me. You're doing a hell of a job.
Kind regards,
Ilya Zakharevich
> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
> In a way, it is a losing battle.
Why consider it in military terms? The question at point is that
Emacs' UI is lacking. So just fix it: make it self-documenting, as
any good-UI program should be...
Looks like some vestiges of 80s' mentality still remains in Emacs
design: at the time, a common misconception was that problems with UI
may be "fixed" by updating the manuals. Well, even if one still
believes in this way, it is a dead end: Emacs' manual IS quite good
already, so the improvements achieved in this way would have a trace
value only.
Now, after the flood of "grandmother revolution" [*], we know OTHER
ways. "Self-documenting" means the program guides the user how to use
it. Emacs is now flexible enough so that with most tasks, this may be
easily achieved.
[*] this is how as one of the designers of Plan9 called the major
event of 90s: achievement of understanding of UI design so good
that UI accessible to "grandmothers" may be created. He
attributes this breakthrough to effort of M$; I tend to agree...
> People expect software to just work without reading manuals.
That's right. And when we can EASILY cater to their expectations, we should.
The question at point: ISearch. Lemme sketch one possiblity of adding
self-documentation to ISearch (people with better UI-design experience
must be able to find something yet better):
a) Change the prompt (configurable; verbose by default;
self-documentation should mention how to disable verbosity):
Isearch (F1 for help):
b) bind F1 F1 to "Open manual on basics of Isearch";
c) bind F1 to open a shrink-wrapped buffer with "Quick info" on
ISearch. This info should include the `current state' (case
sensitivity etc) - plus information where this state "comes
from": e.g., whether the particular setting is mode-specific. It
should also state how to toggle "I" in ISearch, toggle case-fold,
switch direction, regexpness, by-word, different ways to quit,
etc.
Should also state how to start Isearch in `a particular state'
(with some toggles pre-loaded).
Does not look difficult to do, does it?
Hope this helps,
Ilya
Ilya Zakharevich
> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> and so on. The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
> better. Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
> order to get around that.
I suspect that you wanted to say that you find this situation
disagreeable. Just think about that: would this opinion of yours
persist if Word had a clearly documented way to switch off guessing
(completely, and/or per particular heuristics)?
> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness.
Partially, this is true. But only at a small part (like M$'s
stupidity in not making the guessing optional). The major thing which
you are missing is that the escalation also happens in `having people
get what they wanted in the first place' (usually "getting the work
done"). (Although users-conditioning-via-designer's-cluelessness also
takes place - hmm, this is just another way to state the same as you did...)
> The more userfriendly a piece of software becomes, the more this
> becomes a problem for _competent_ people willing to learn about
> their tool.
BS. There is no direct connection.
> I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the
> documentation.
Just don't. (Addressed in another message in this thread.)
Yours,
Ilya
Pascal J. Bourguignon
> On 2010-07-08, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
>> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
>> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
>
>> In a way, it is a losing battle.
>
> Why consider it in military terms? The question at point is that
> Emacs' UI is lacking. So just fix it: make it self-documenting, as
> any good-UI program should be...
>
> Looks like some vestiges of 80s' mentality still remains in Emacs
> design: at the time, a common misconception was that problems with UI
> may be "fixed" by updating the manuals. Well, even if one still
> believes in this way, it is a dead end: Emacs' manual IS quite good
> already, so the improvements achieved in this way would have a trace
> value only.
>
> Now, after the flood of "grandmother revolution" [*], we know OTHER
> ways. "Self-documenting" means the program guides the user how to use
> it. Emacs is now flexible enough so that with most tasks, this may be
> easily achieved.
>
> [*] this is how as one of the designers of Plan9 called the major
> event of 90s: achievement of understanding of UI design so good
> that UI accessible to "grandmothers" may be created. He
> attributes this breakthrough to effort of M$; I tend to agree...
I'm not so sure grandmothers can use Microsoft programs so easily.
I sure cannot.
It seems to me that parangons of software explorability are more in
the camp of emacs, lisp and smalltalk. Granted, this is archived so
far mostly by giving access to the sources, so not for grandmothers.
But then, Smalltalk was designed for grandchildren...
>> People expect software to just work without reading manuals.
>
> That's right. And when we can EASILY cater to their expectations, we should.
>
> The question at point: ISearch. Lemme sketch one possiblity of adding
> self-documentation to ISearch (people with better UI-design experience
> must be able to find something yet better):
>
> a) Change the prompt (configurable; verbose by default;
> self-documentation should mention how to disable verbosity):
>
> Isearch (F1 for help):
>
> b) bind F1 F1 to "Open manual on basics of Isearch";
>
> c) bind F1 to open a shrink-wrapped buffer with "Quick info" on
> ISearch. This info should include the `current state' (case
> sensitivity etc) - plus information where this state "comes
> from": e.g., whether the particular setting is mode-specific. It
> should also state how to toggle "I" in ISearch, toggle case-fold,
> switch direction, regexpness, by-word, different ways to quit,
> etc.
>
> Should also state how to start Isearch in `a particular state'
> (with some toggles pre-loaded).
>
> Does not look difficult to do, does it?
It's a lot of work if you have to do it manually for all the commands.
You must find a way to do it automatically. We may require adding
declarations to commands, perhaps an improved interactive declaration?
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
Xah Lee
On Jul 8, 3:36 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
>
> In a way, it is a losing battle. People expect software to just work
> without reading manuals. 95% of all Word users, for example, create
> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> and so on.
that's called progress.
vast majority of people who makes a living by coding, don't know any
assembly language. They use scripting langs such as php, python, perl,
and probably a significant of them don't even know a language proper,
e.g. they are html, css, dreamweaver etc “coders”.
often there's complaint heard in the form of a sigh that sneer upon
the earlier generation, thinking they are uneducated and idiotic, but
quite the contrary. (slide rule vs electronic calculator, check vs
credit card use, hand writing vs type writer, type writer vs word
processor, ...)
> The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
> better. Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
> order to get around that.
yes, there's something to be said about how much time people spend in
learning the tools well for their profession.
however, this must be differentiated from requiring users to
understand the implementation or the science behind things. Many tech
geekers unconsciously confuse this.
Also, if you take a look from the other side of the coin, although
say, the prototypical “Microsoft using idiots” create incredibly
crappy documents, but overall, the technology make it possible for a
thousand fold more people contribute to this world in diverse fields.
In fact, many of these “idiots”, are professors and scientists and
engineers, who have not studied about computing. (in a similar way, a
typical hardcore tech geeker, who can drilldown on tech detail of C, C+
+, Java, python, perl, lisp, tail recursion, monads, macros, pointers,
arrays, garbage collection, RFCs, etc and etc, but are a complete
idiot to fields of psychology, legal system, history, basics
economics... etc.)
personally, i'm a friend with many older generation mathematician
professors, who are run conferences or are chairman or presidents of
universities or large well known academic organizations. These
people's IQ, are above than i'd say 99% of hardcore emacs developers
in entire emacs history. These people, won't even be able to grok what
emacs is actually used for. It'd be hard pressed for them to
understand what a embeded scripting language in a application really
means. In fact, most won't even try. Here we can actually see a
phenomenon that might be interesting to tech geekers. In many
professional mathematicians's minds, programers are considered
inferior brainers, that programing field is something considered
trivial, a mere matter of some typing and dicing and fidgeting with
their theories.
> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness. The more userfriendly a
> piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for
> _competent_ people willing to learn about their tool.
This train of thought, is prototypical of tech geek thinking. It comes
in a chantable form too that we often see these idiots put in their
sigs.
It bears nothing to reality. It amounts to something equivalent to,
say, something as factual and meaningless as “the world has become
more dumb.”.
It's incredible how this mentality tickles the tech geekers, as we can
see already a bunch following heartily praising this summery. The
thought that easy-to-use or GUI based software creates a viscous cycle
of more idiots, is a pleasing thought to tech geekers.
Psychologists have studied this. In one example, different people
perceive different aspects of identical things. (e.g. flashing a
photo, and guys remember it as a photo of a beautiful chick, while
others don't remember there's a woman in it.) And or people will have
opposing conclusions given a identical article. (e.g. the leftist will
perceive a concrete evidence for leftist thoughts, while rightists see
concrete evidence of rightist thoughts (while the open source and or
“‘Free’ Software” camp see confirmation of the need for software
“freedom!”.)) People will defend to death their (irrational) beliefs.
The severe case is a form of self-deception, from beliefs in God to
politics to love relationships.
It has to do with protecting one's own mental image and with that
generating the juices for to go on. This may seem all illogical... but
you know how there's many personality disorders and psychological
illness and the phenomenon of mental breakdown? A gist of it is that
human animals are just not logical machines, the working of the mind,
the constituents to go on living, is filled with seemingly illogical
complications.
(personally, i have struggled with a quest to become a machine-like
being, e.g. like those of mister Data or Spock in the StarTrek scifi.
Been fret with this for some 20 years. Part of it is inborn
personality, a inclination towards what's called a schizoid
personality, and part of it is a quest to have the most powerful,
logical, mind without emotion. It'd be a booklet to write about my
experiences in this. (most tech geekers will probably think if it can
done then wow that'd be great... (it's not what you think!)) (and
besides a personal tale, there's also many scientific aspect of this.
On the computer science side: can machines think? why yes or no? when
circuits becomes sufficiently complex, will it develop emotion?
Emergent phenomenon, complexity theories, cellular automata... and on
the psychology/neuro-science side: is it possible for a human animal
be totally emotionless? (note that many Hollywood movies depict such
(fascinating!) character to various degrees.)) )
> At least Emacs is
> at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to
> the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up
> on disk is that what they see on their screen.
>
> I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the
> documentation. Emacs has a help menu, and those also point to tutorials
> explaining the basics in most local languages.
>
> But people look at documentation mostly when they run into problems they
> can't deal with on their own. And the more userfriendly Emacs becomes,
> and the better its menus and interactive helps become, the less people
> become inclined to bother looking for help.
been writing already long... so i'll cut short here. All of the above
is actually not exactly revalent here. We can go on philosophizing
about whether people are getting more dumb or whatnot...
but the issue here is the quality of emacs's documentation. A
documentation, has a quality. This quality can be measured. It can be
measure in many ways, depending on your purpose. e.g. how good is the
use of the english language in coveying information? how easy is it
for readers to understand? how impeccable is the style with respect to
logicians? How well is the grammar? How well are the over-all
structure organized? will people LIKE the manual? ... so many and so
many.
but in short, here's one thing to consider: i think emacs manual is
well written (generally speaking), but it is largely written in the
1980s. The bulk of it, the organization, the style of what things are
presented, the verbosity of the words to convey a idea, ... are all
geared in the computer of a era 2 decades old.
i wrote something about this aspect, it can be seen here:
• Problems of Emacs's Manual
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_manual_problem.html
i'll need to clean it up...
for a glimpse of the era of computing that emacs's manual was in, see:
• GNU Emacs and Xemacs Schism, by Ben Wing
http://xahlee.org/emacs/gnu_emacs_xemacs_schism_Ben_Wing.html
• Keyboard Hardware's Influence on Keyboard Shortcut Design
http://xahlee.org/emacs/keyboard_hardware_and_key_choices.html
Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/
☄
Uday S Reddy
> same here. I started to use emacs daily since 1998, and i didn't
> realize that Enter will exit the search and leave the cursor at the
> current location untill 2007 or so. I've always just used left/right
> arrow. (and a year or two later, i also found out that it is right in
> the manual. These happened only when i started to get more involved in
> writing a emacs tutorial)
You are unnecessarily demoting yourself, Xah Lee.
The original Emacs didn't use RET to end an incremental search. My neurons
tell me that it was ESC. Typing a RET in the middle of an isearch meant that
you wanted to search for a newline character. But the manual said that you
could basically type any Emacs command to end the search. Since the ESC keys
moved further and further away from the reachable keyboard real estate, people
used various alternatives. C-g was the most common.
The use of RET to end an incremental search is a relatively new feature,
introduced in Emacs 19. The NEWS.19 file says:
"**** The character to terminate an incremental search is now RET.
This is for compatibility with the way most other arguments are read.
To search for a newline in an incremental search, type LFD (also known
as C-j)."
You are not expected to re-read the manual after every new release, but you are
expected to read the NEWS file. Since we recently had a
several-hundred-messages-long debate on the virtues of reading the NEWS file, I
will just refer you to it.
Sorry for foiling this opportunity for you to attack the Emacs manual one more
time.
Cheers,
Uday
Xah Lee
> Xah Lee wrote:
> > 2010-07-10
>
> > On Jul 8, 3:36 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
> >> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
> >> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
>
> >> In a way, it is a losing battle. People expect software to just work
> >> without reading manuals. 95% of all Word users, for example, create
> >> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> >> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> >> and so on.
>
> > that's called progress.
>
> base that contains all possible compositions. Then if you want to write
> a piece of expository prose arguing for the healthfulness of Twinkies,
> you can just pick the document from a menu. Voila! Magnum opus
> determined, dared, and done.
you mean like this?
• World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics???
http://xahlee.org/comp/WMSCI.html
and Larry Wall's post-modern stuff? like the following chantable
quote?
“The difference between theory and practice in theory is much less
than the difference between theory and practice in practice.”
• Perl: Theory vs Practice
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/theory_practice.html
and “The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness,
Impatience, and Hubris.”, right?
• Larry Wall and Cults
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/larry_wall_n_cults.html
and the unix philosophy KISS right?
• The Nature of the Unix Philosophy
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/unix_phil.html
> Some are, some aren't. From what I can informally grok, RMS for example,
> displays a significantly higher level of general culture than the
> average sociology or psychology Ph. D.
so, you are saying, that some non-professionals actually have opinions
or insights that turn out to be more correct than the common theories
of the experts in particular field? I agree, and also agree that
sometimes cherry can be mistaken for banana, and female for male.
Though, what's the point?
My point that you were replying to, was about how tech geekers
ignorantly attribute laziness or stupidity to non-tech-geekers. And my
method used to convey this, is by a analogy, that indicates that
computing tech geekers are in general too idiotic about everything
other than computers. That, when you snear non-techies for their
cluelessness about using emacs or applications, you should look at the
mirror and think about how at this very moment those business people,
lawers, politicians, are laughing at you about how eternally-clueless
you are of basic social matters.
the reason i wrote in such a style and comparison, is due to, a
reaction from the idiotic style widely purveyed by the tech geekers,
as, if you will, a retaliatory refutation, which, mirrors and puts a
dagger right in the heart of matter. Did you enjoy reading it?
> If Gauss or Goedel dared to sneer at someone like Donald Knuth they
> would be shown up as fools.
What about Einstein or Newton or Archimedes? How they fit in?
did you know that your dropping of names is not scholarly smooth? For
example, if you meant to mention what's considered the greatest, then
Godel and Knuth would not be up there. If you want to go by tech
geekers's fashion, then Gauss shouldn't be there.
y'know? we can turn this section to be more fruitful. Alas, whenever i
give it a start in that direction, tech geekers quickly drop out of
discussion, for lack of knowledge when dicussion gets a bit valuable.
For example, let's ask the question, of which we can have mutual
education: Who would be considered the top 20 computer scientist and
or programer? I don't really know the answer at all... but let's take
up the computer scientists case. At best i could maybe come up with 5
names off hand... and if pressed can come up with 10 names, but would
have no idea if the names would be say top 20 or so off that some of
them might be within top 100 instead.
however, this is certainly a valid question albeit non-scientific one.
And for a computer scientist (thousands of people quality), they
easily know the answer. So, let's grok... who among us can give us a
ball park list of people that might be roughly agreed among majority
of computer scientists that are the top 20 in the world in the past
100 years?
ok, let me try to pull off the top of my head as fast as i can type
without thinking or thumbing the web.... ok there's Knuth, and Guy
Steel of Scheme fame might be on it (after-thought: probably not (and
with Guy, there's probably the other 2 Sussman & co who co-write of
the Structure & Interp of Comptuer Programs books)), then Edsger
Dijkstra i think, then i think Haskell Curry (though not sure to what
degree logicians should be counted as computer scientists here), hum
ok probably a number of folks from the functional programing community
would get on the list, Dana Scott or something, and there's the
logician Quin something, and of course there's Turing who is gay and
got forced to eat a poisoned apple; here Alan Turing to tech geekers
is like Britney Spears to teens, every sophomoron knows and loves to
cite (same with Knuth), and with him there's Church... thinking of
this, then my fav author of all times B Russell. With Russell
mentioned, then Whitehead might deserve consideration. Humm, so the
train of thought quickly runs to the idea that the list of possible
names can easily be gotton by thinking with the math subjects of
functional lang's foundations, then grab the associated names of that
field, e.g. lambda calculus, symbolic logic, combinator theory,
recursion theory (recursion theory reminds me of Wolfram and Gospel
and Smullian and a gaggle from Martin Gardner circle
(• Martin Gardner (1914-2010) http://xahlee.org/math/Martin_Gardner.html
)
), ... and broaden
it we can start to think of names associated with any finite/discrete
math, e.g. game theory, computational geometry, ... with game theory
there's the famous Conway... (and again the Martin circle Penrose,
Hofstadter... Rudy Rucker)
humm, of course there's a bunch of lang inventors, e.g. inventors of
java (gosgling and co), perl (Larry charlatan), python (Guido dummy),
tcl (the John something), c (3 or so major idiots with their “unix
philosophy” fuck ((Dennis co.) one particular i vaguely think is a
fuckface idiot from the unix gang is Rob Pike, with is unix KISS my
ass!)), c++ (bjormine moron), but these dumb asses prob won't even
make it to top 100. With that, i am thinking of all unix protocols and
tech and or before that, e.g. inventors of many networking protocols
e.g. the tcp/ip suite... but again prob i don't think any would make
it to top 20. (oh and there's the Ruby japanese guy M something, and
of course the lisp guy McCarthy i think he might make it to top 20,
then going on we can think about the Fortran, Pascal, Logo lisp,
Cobol, Ada, Basic... guys)
wheew.... my spade of typing is quite impressive! i think given a day
of web checking, i can probably come up with at at least 40 of people
who should be in the top 100.
do we have a working computer scientist here familiar with most field
of comp sci and can quickly give as a list? am sure such topic might
be brought up in computing journals or hist of comp sci books.
> The poster's point is that there is no hardwired repertoire of
> thinkables and that any design template that posits such state of
> affairs is doomed to become a strait-jacket. M$ is trying to please the
> lowest common denominator, same as the pornographers.
my point is that this train of thought is bullshit, in particular
always just to mention something about Microsoft Word, and like the
way you did in a disrespectful way of writing Microsoft as M$.
let me repeat, the “point” is meaningless chant. For example, what you
mean common denominator?? So, Pine, Pico, isn't common denominator?
How about BBEdit? and Linux's GUI Knight and Kate? hum? are they
supposed to be this common denominator?
also, why tech geekers always pull up a word processor to compare
with? What about Apple's X-code, tms's Visual Studio, and Java's
NetBeans and Eclipse? Mathematica's Notebook system? and there also
was Thick C, Code Warrior, etc on the Mac in the 1990s, and speaking
of that, on Windows there's Delphi IDE and quite a few others. Are
these, also idiotic, dumb, a vicious cycle of idiot begetting idiot?
What's a example of a editor that's not a idiotic viscous cycle? is it
vi and emacs?
if any tech geeker has pain in his ass and must mention that proper
IDEs shouldn't be compared to emacs, then there's BBEdit, Notepad++,
Notepad2, Textmate, NEdit, JEdit... quite a few. Are these, then,
belongs to the common denominator reposible for idiocy in society?
does non-idiotic practically mean something crass and
incomprehensible? So, unix, C++, and speghetti mudball are good,
right? Visual Basic, Python, JavaScript, are kid's fuck that damage
society and idiot generating crap, right?
are the world's top 100 programers, am sure 95% of them don't use
emacs and will adamantly refuse to, are they, considered as idiots?
that they are too dumb to sit down and consume a beautiful manual as
emacs?
> > (personally, i have struggled with a quest to become a machine-like
> > being, e.g. like those of mister Data or Spock in the StarTrek scifi.
> > Been fret with this for some 20 years. Part of it is inborn
> > personality, a inclination towards what's called a schizoid
> > personality, and part of it is a quest to have the most powerful,
> > logical, mind without emotion. It'd be a booklet to write about my
> > experiences in this. (most tech geekers will probably think if it can
> > done then wow that'd be great... (it's not what you think!)) (and
> > besides a personal tale, there's also many scientific aspect of this.
> > On the computer science side: can machines think? why yes or no? when
> > circuits becomes sufficiently complex, will it develop emotion?
> > Emergent phenomenon, complexity theories, cellular automata... and on
> > the psychology/neuro-science side: is it possible for a human animal
> > be totally emotionless? (note that many Hollywood movies depict such
> > (fascinating!) character to various degrees.)) )
>
> This sounds like a bad attack of ADD. What's fascinating about Keanu
> Reeves? Lieutenant Ripley is fascinating; Bishop is not.
well the characters i had in mind are... the top 2 that portrait the
gist is of course Mr Spock and Mr Data. Then, there's Dr Lectur in
Silence of the Lamb, e.g. who can do things that threatens his life
without raising a heartbeat,... there are many many such chars in
films, i think i can easily list 20 off hand in 10 min but requires
too much typing and description... from psycho freaks to actors who
pull great heists to womanizers, liers... etc. The key is that these
mostly fictional characters has the ability to perform a action
without any emotional baggage that normal human beings have (fear,
anxiety, nervousness, cold heartedness... so on), and to various
degrees. (007 for example, usually have chars that fits such
description too ...)... serial killers, serial marriage money
grabbers, ...
> How good (adjective) is the grammar? The nub of the matter here is the
> question of who will evaluate the measurer.
when you measure, say, a dick, once the rules and methods are agree
upon, the question of the measurer isn't a question. Because, that can
be easily resolved in many ways.
> Or maybe even entirely rethink your position. "Cleaning" it up, as you
> say, might just further implicate you in the "viscous" ...
hum? what is your point? that i am wrong? that i might be wrong? or,
are you indicating in anyway which side of argument you are on?? Or,
is the whole point being that i should reconsider?? If so, what are
the reasons?
Thanks.
Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/
☄
David Kastrup
> The point is that David is right about criticizing M$' word processor
> design philosophy
I was not really criticizing it, merely pointing out the consequences of
an interface focused on shallow contact. If you don't manage to keep
the corresponding problem space as shallow as the interface (and I don't
think that this is, in every case, impossible), then you get a conflict
of interest that get increasingly harder to solve.
I think that at one time at least Apple was renowned for restructuring
the problem space complexity to match their user interfaces, by no means
a trivial feat.
--
David Kastrup
Xah Lee
>
> > my point is that this train of thought is bullshit, in particular
> > always just to mention something about Microsoft Word, and like the
> > way you did in a disrespectful way of writing Microsoft as M$.
>
> not the people. Unlike the Supreme Court, I don't think corporations are
> people, just legal fictions that have to be mercilessly regulated.
you are a victum of the Microsoft hatred. A hatred spread by, Richard
M Stallman, and much of the unix people (although we should remember
that Richard Stallman hated unix, if not more than Microsoft, and the
hatred of unix was a major reason he started GNU's Not Unix, by
writing a complete OS that's not unix but with the behavior of unix
due to its popularity. But as a political tactics, he has not
emphasized it since about 1990s.). When there's a hatred, lots of mis-
information spread. See:
• On Microsoft Hatred
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/mshatred155.html
plain text version follows.
------------------------
On Microsoft Hatred
Xah Lee, 2002-02-23
Dear Naggum,
It is well known that you are a avid hater of Microsoft, from their
technologies to their leader to their business practices. I have now
and then seen your impassioned expression of this hatred, scattered
among your newsgroup posts.
Personally, i have a inherent distrust toward big organizations. This
applies to Microsoft. Since perhaps 1995, MS has become more and more
large, and as well becoming a hate target especially among unix
communities. Of MS hatred there are two aspects: those who think MS
products are utterly incompetent, and those who think MS business
practices are the most evil.
I have always been a Apple Macintosh user. I have used a few MS
products such as MS Word word processor on the Mac since about 1990,
and Mac version of MS Internet Explorer web browser and Outlook
Express email program when they became available around 1997 or so
free of charge. My experiences have been that MS software on the Mac
are pretty good, if not usually better than competitors. In fact,
before the MS-hatred era of late 1990s, i recall that i was found of
MS Word and would say it was the software that never crashed, with the
richest (useful) features. I have not used MS Windows much until 1999,
so i cannot judge from my own experience whether people's complains
about MS's product's poor quality. By the time i used MS Windows daily
in 1999, it was MS Windows NT, and i have moved into industrial
programing field now called IT. At the time Apple's OS is around
version 8. Although Windows is not as esthetic or intuitive as my
beloved Mac OS, but on the whole i think Windows NT beats the shit out
of Mac OS by far. Mac OS crashed daily if a info-collecting tech-head
like myself are careful, hourly if not, and among quite a few of other
reasons.
As the MS hatred is rolling like a snowball, i started to pay
attention. On one hand, i never cared for Microsoft. Their sole
impression on me before 1998 was that MS Word is good software, and i
hate Windows just because i'm a dedicated Apple fan just because Apple
had made many revolutionary innovations in both software and hardware,
and MS was Apple's market enemy. Although i think the unix crowd are
tech morons of the world, but when it comes to political issues, i'm
inclined to side with their freedom loving and paranoia propensities.
I'm ashamed to admit, that i started to visit unix moron's mecca the
slashdot.org around 1999, and have read quite a lot of their MS hatred
verbiage, from drivel of sopho-morons to Eric Raymond's Open Source
Jihad to Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation. Perhaps due to
their propaganda, at times i shudder at the mind-numbing MS
juggernaut, and have felt ready to join their cause and kill
Microsoft.
Since 1999, my behavior have in fact been mildly anti-Microsoft. I
would, for example, mention Free Software or Open Source in meetings,
avoid using MS products myself and convert all my MS Word files i have
on my Mac to some standard format such as plain text, and also use the
Free Software Foundation's GNU Public License for my own software
dabblings. Still, i was never a MS hater. Many colleagues i know are
MS haters, but i'm just a mild Free Software proponent and was never
sure i should be a MS hater. I could have investigated the issue, by
studying the various lawsuits, check out MS history, exam and verify
MS hater's essays, but life is short and i have other interests so i
did not undertook such activities and never decided whether MS should
be hated. I just disliked big organizations, and thus Microsoft.
Since 1999 i entered the field of industrial programing known as Info
Technology. In particular, i'm a web application programer on the unix
platform. My daily office machines are PCs running Microsoft Windows
(NT and followings) and remote unix servers. I find NT quite usable
and almost never crashed at least as a desktop machine. I don't know
much about any MS-bred technologies, but i knew quite a lot about
unix. My attitude towards unixes is that it is the MOST incompetent
thing in the computing world. I am a outright unix HATER. I have
becoming increasingly nosy about unix MS-hater's claims technology-
wise as most readily found from slashdot.org, from User Interface
design to protocol “embrace & extend” to innovation to power &
flexibility to security considerations. In the past few years, i
started to pay mild attention to the question of whether from a
technical or technological point of view MS should be hated.
Even i don't know much Microsoft technologies except as a daily
Windows user, but in my personal judgment system among all things
considered, i think that if MS has done damage to society then unix
has done hundred times more. I believe that Microsoft Windows
technologies is on the whole FAR superior to unixes both as a PC and
server, all things considered. (this includes the fact that unix is
more stable than Windows NT, today. (as opposed to examing unix's
early years)) Comparing to the other major desktop Operating System
the Mac OS (where unixes are so incompetent it is out of the
question), with intact conscience i think that MS's OS since about
1997 has left my beloved Mac OS in dust. If Windows 98 is poor quality
(i know it is), then Mac OS of that year is neighborhood crap.
(i plan to have book-length material on the reasons, but here for now
i can only briefly state my beliefs in a conclusive manner.)
The above is my beliefs on product or technological quality aspect of
Microsoft-hatred. I have much interest in technology than politics or
business, thus my know-how of social oriented issues pales in
comparison. I have never examined the accusations of MS's evil
business practices, other than news hearsay. To this day, i know
little of what is true or false regarding MS's business practices.
Although i have never undertook a interest of a topic, but as a
philosopher i have gathered opinions regarding a topic from great
variety of sources and experiences, and can form a personal judgment.
And from my observations of computing industry, and my little
knowledge of economics, all things and experiences lead me to believe
that there is little to no reason to hate MS for their business
practice either. Sometimes last year i read Thomas Sowell's Basic
Economics. Although he never talked about software in the book, but
that book made a major impression on my views of MS-hating issues.
Around 1994 i read the book _Steve Jobs and the NeXT big thing_ by
historian Randall E Stross, and i was highly positively impressed by
him. I have then learned that he also wrote a book in 1997 on MS: _The
Microsoft Way : The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its
Competition_. Although i have not read the book, but from amazon.com
reviews it indicated that he simply think that the success of MS is
due to being smart.
There are various lawsuits against the MS giant in the last few years,
from Sun Microsystem's Java lawsuit, to United States vs Microsoft
anti-trust lawsuit, to last month's AOL suit for Netscape browser. As
you know, Sun is a unix vendor, with its own greedy grip on Java. I
frankly don't buy any bullshit from the Sun Micro commercial turd. MS
may be devious with their own “standard”-breaking java, but no more
hanky-panky than Sun's “Universal” Java sham in the first fucking
place. Any commercial organizations do devious things for their own
interest. As to United State's claim that MS screwed innovation by
bundling browser, that itself is a fantastic fucking idea. Integrating
browser into OS is a innovation, and amid so great many claims that MS
does not innovate, i can think of quite a few cases where MS has in
fact been innovative or responsible for technological lead from my
personal computing experiences. (Microsoft Word accounts for great
many innovations in word processing alone.) And, who needs the
government to meddle with industry? (as i have learned in Thomas's
Sowell's book, anti-trust cases are invariably all the same. Anti-
trust laws in the outset purport to protect the consumer, but always
ends up as a weapon against the successful in a free-market system.)
Lastly is the AOL's bandwagon-hopping lawsuit in the name of
fantastically incompetent Netscape browser. Fuck America On-Line.
I'm often ignorant when it comes to economics practicality, such as
stock market or personal finance. Since about 1999, i started to
become a stock holder, thus started to learn a bit of its nature. On
this process, one thing came to my attention is that Microsoft is a
public owned company. Public owned companies are directed by the
people who own its stock, and any joe can purchase it. That means, if
Microsoft is a evil empire, then the public shares a great blame. From
this aspect, i don't see any sense of Microsoft-hatred either. Blame
the public, such as your boss and neighbors and wife and friends and
community, or, blame the fantastic greed-oriented system called
capitalism that made USA so prosperous far beyond the moral-oriented
communist/socialist nations or sovereignly ruled kingdoms and
queendoms.
--------------------------------------------------
PS the above was written in 2002 addressed to Erik Naggum, who, died
in 2009. See:
• Death Of A Troll
http://xahlee.org/Netiquette_dir/death_of_a_troll.html
--------------------------------------------------
you wrote:
> just legal fictions that have to be mercilessly regulated.
You are ignorant of basic economics. I suggest reading Thomas Sowell's
Basic Economics. I have some (lousy) notes here
http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/jdini/basic_economics.html (if
you are one of the free software proponent, who like to pirate things
at night, i noticed that the audio version of Thomas's book is
available free on the net thru bittorrent. Go grab it quickly before
it got mercilessly regulated.)
Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/
☄
nanothermite911fbibustards
>
> you are a victum of the Microsoft hatred. A hatred spread by, Richard
> M Stallman, and much of the unix people (although we should remember
> that Richard Stallman hated unix, if not more thanMicrosoft, and
ORACLE by Larry Ellison is a more dangerous monopoly with boundless
GREED
Bill Gates is a decent family man and a genuine PHILANTHROPIST
On Jul 11, 10:27 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> you are a victum of the Microsoft hatred. A hatred spread by, Richard
> M Stallman, and much of the unix people (although we should remember
> that Richard Stallman hated unix, if not more thanMicrosoft, and
> thehatredof unix was a major reason he started GNU's Not Unix, by
ORACLE by Larry Ellison is a more dangerous monopoly with boundless
GREED
Bill Gates is a decent family man and a genuine PHILANTHROPIST
On Jul 11, 10:27 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> you are a victum of the Microsoft hatred. A hatred spread by, Richard
> M Stallman, and much of the unix people (although we should remember
> that Richard Stallman hated unix, if not more thanMicrosoft, and
> thehatredof unix was a major reason he started GNU's Not Unix, by
ORACLE by Larry Ellison is a more dangerous monopoly with boundless
GREED
Bill Gates is a decent family man and a genuine PHILANTHROPIST
On Jul 11, 10:27 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> you are a victum of the Microsoft hatred. A hatred spread by, Richard
> M Stallman, and much of the unix people (although we should remember
> that Richard Stallman hated unix, if not more thanMicrosoft, and
> thehatredof unix was a major reason he started GNU's Not Unix, by
ORACLE by Larry Ellison is a more dangerous monopoly with boundless
GREED
Bill Gates is a decent family man and a genuine PHILANTHROPIST
On Jul 11, 10:27 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> you are a victum of the Microsoft hatred. A hatred spread by, Richard
> M Stallman, and much of the unix people (although we should remember
> that Richard Stallman hated unix, if not more thanMicrosoft, and
> thehatredof unix was a major reason he started GNU's Not Unix, by
ORACLE by Larry Ellison is a more dangerous monopoly with boundless
GREED
Bill Gates is a decent family man and a genuine PHILANTHROPIST
On Jul 11, 10:27 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> you are a victum of the Microsoft hatred. A hatred spread by, Richard
> M Stallman, and much of the unix people (although we should remember
> that Richard Stallman hated unix, if not more thanMicrosoft, and
> thehatredof unix was a major reason he started GNU's Not Unix, by
ORACLE by Larry Ellison is a more dangerous monopoly with boundless
GREED
Bill Gates is a decent family man and a genuine PHILANTHROPIST
On Jul 11, 10:27 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> you are a victum of the Microsoft hatred. A hatred spread by, Richard
> M Stallman, and much of the unix people (although we should remember
> that Richard Stallman hated unix, if not more thanMicrosoft, and
> thehatredof unix was a major reason he started GNU's Not Unix, by
ORACLE by Larry Ellison is a more dangerous monopoly with boundless
GREED
Bill Gates is a decent family man and a genuine PHILANTHROPIST
On Jul 11, 10:27 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> you are a victum of the Microsoft hatred. A hatred spread by, Richard
> M Stallman, and much of the unix people (although we should remember
> that Richard Stallman hated unix, if not more thanMicrosoft, and
> thehatredof unix was a major reason he started GNU's Not Unix, by
ORACLE by Larry Ellison is a more dangerous monopoly with boundless
GREED
Bill Gates is a decent family man and a genuine PHILANTHROPIST
On Jul 11, 10:27 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> you are a victum of the Microsoft hatred. A hatred spread by, Richard
> M Stallman, and much of the unix people (although we should remember
> that Richard Stallman hated unix, if not more thanMicrosoft, and
> thehatredof unix was a major reason he started GNU's Not Unix, by
ORACLE by Larry Ellison is a more dangerous monopoly with boundless
GREED
Bill Gates is a decent family man and a genuine PHILANTHROPIST
nanothermite911fbibustards
<nanothermite911fbibusta...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jul 11, 10:27 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > you are a victum of the Microsoft hatred. A hatred spread by, Richard
> > M Stallman, and much of the unix people (although we should remember
> > that Richard Stallman hated unix, if not more thanMicrosoft, and
> > thehatredof unix was a major reason he started GNU's Not Unix, by
>
> ORACLE by Larry Ellison is a more dangerous monopoly with boundless
> GREED
>
> Bill Gates is a decent family man and a genuine PHILANTHROPIST
>
They are all from Bronx
http://www.nndb.com/people/439/000022373/
Larry Ellison
Larry EllisonAKA Lawrence Joseph Ellison
Born: 17-Aug-1944
Birthplace: Bronx, NY
Gender: Male
Religion: Jewish
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Business
Nationality: United States
Executive summary: CEO of Oracle
Larry Ellison was born out of wedlock to a 19-year-old mother, and
raised by her aunt. As a boy he showed an aptitude for math and
science, and as a young man he was a computer programmer for Ampex
Corporation. His primary project for Ampex was crafting a large-scale
database for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The database was
code-named "Oracle".
Ellison put up $2,000 of his own money to start Software Development
Laboratories in 1977, in partnership with Robert Miner, his boss from
Ampex. The new company was renamed Relational Software Inc. in 1979,
as it prepared to release Oracle Version 2, a commercial database
system -- but the company had never released a "Version 1" of Oracle.
Calling it "Version 2" was a marketing tactic, intended to convey the
notion that any initial bugs had been worked out. Oracle sold briskly,
and in 1983 the company renamed itself after its principal product.
Oracle Corporation went public in 1986, and was on the verge of
bankruptcy by 1990, when it was revealed that its revenues had been
overstated for several years. The company has since rebounded, and
been extremely profitable.
In 1996, Ellison took a month-long sabbatical, and spent most of his
waking time on-line. When he returned he'd decided that the 'net was
the next big thing, bigger than personal computers. Oracle started
reconfiguring its software for on-line data sharing, and for
adaptability to not-quite-computer products like TVs with internet
access and pocket internet devices. This strategy has made Oracle
still more profitable.
Oracle's main competitors are Microsoft and IBM, and one of Ellison's
passions is needling Microsoft. He's been a prominent proponent of
efforts to break Microsoft up for antitrust violations. "I think when
somebody breaks the law, they should be punished", says Ellison. He's
admitted hiring private detectives to gather information on
Microsoft's tactics, and charged that Microsoft funded pro-Microsoft
"grassroots" political action groups that were pressuring the Justice
Department to drop its antitrust prosecution. Microsoft responded that
Oracle might be funding anti-Microsoft political groups. Neener-
neener. David Theroux, president of the Independent Institute --
alleged by Ellison to be a Microsoft front -- said of Ellison,
"anybody who stoops to whatever was done here, cannot be trusted.
Oracle has apparently felt the need to employ back-alley tactics,
subterfuge, and disinformation in order to achieve its aims".
Ellison's net worth dropped about $3.5 billion after September 11, as
stocks plummeted and Oracle stock lost almost 50% of its value. It was
at this time that Ellison became a loud supporter of a U.S. identity
card, which -- he insisted -- would help prevent terrorism. Ellison
has offered to provide data-tracking software for the national ID card
free of charge (but with fees for maintenance and upgrades, of
course). As envisioned by Ellison, the national ID card would be
"optional" for native-born Americans, but mandatory for immigrants.
Ellison had a dispute with the city of San Jose, CA, and its airport,
when his personal jet violated the city's jet curfew law at least six
times. Noise control legislation makes it illegal for planes weighing
75,000 pounds or more to take off or land at San Jose International
Airport during overnight hours, but after Ellison sued, the city
granted him a special exemption to the law in 2001.
In 2000, Forbes listed Ellison as the world's second richest man,
worth $47 billion to Bill Gates's $60 billion. By 2007, Forbes had
Ellison slipping to fourth place, worth only $26 billion.
Close friend of Steve Jobs.
Mother: Florence Spellman (unwed mother, at age 19)
Father: Louis Ellison (adoptive father)
Mother: Lillian Ellison (adoptive mother)
Wife: Adda Quinn (m. 1967, div. 1974)
Wife: Nancy Wheeler (m. 1977, div. 1978)
Wife: Barbara Boothe (m. 1983, div. 1986)
Daughter: Megan Ellison
Son: David Ellison
Girlfriend: Adelyn Lee (later fired by an Oracle VP, she sued Ellison,
settled for $100k)
Wife: Melanie Craft (romance novelist, m. 18-Dec-2003)
High School: South Shore High School, Chicago, IL
University: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (two years,
dropped out)
University: University of Chicago (one quarter, dropped out)
Oracle CEO (1977-)
Oracle President (1978-96)
nCUBE CEO (1996-2002)
nCUBE Majority Shareholder (1988-)
Ampex
Amdahl (1973-)
Member of the Board of Apple (-2002)
Member of the Board of Oracle (1977-, as Chairman, 1990-92 and
1995-2004)
Academy of Achievement (1997)
Dreier for Congress Committee
John McCain 2008
Monday Morning PAC
Obama for Illinois
US Big Brother Award Greatest Corporate Invader
Rhinoplasty
FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Iron Man 2 (26-Apr-2010) Himself
The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (12-
Jun-1996) Himself
Appears in articles:
Time, 23-Jun-2003, DETAILS: Eat... or Be Eaten -- Software mogul Larry
Ellison makes a hostile bid for a rival firm -- and predicts that
other tech giants will follow his lead (p.47, three pages), BYLINE:
Chris Taylor
New!
NNDB MAPPER Create a map starting with Larry Ellison
Requires Flash 7+ and Javascript.
Do you know something we don't?
Submit a correction or make a comment about this profile
Copyright ©2010 Soylent Communications
nanothermite911fbibustards
Switzerland
We all know that Germans are paying a big tribute to the polanskys and
the swiss paid for the gold in the teeth.
Israeli Professor:
'We Could Destroy All European Capitals'
By Nadim Ladki
2-6-3
(IAP News) -- An Israeli professor and military historian hinted
that Israel could avenge the holocaust by annihilating millions of
Germans and other Europeans.
Speaking during an interview which was published in Jerusalem
Friday, Professor Martin Van Crevel said Israel had the capability of
hitting most European capitals with nuclear weapons.
"We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and
can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome.
Most European capitals are targets of our air force."
Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, pointed out that "collective deportation" was
Israel's only meaningful strategy towards the Palestinian people.
"The Palestinians should all be deported. The people who
strive for this (the Israeli government) are waiting only for the
right man and the right time. Two years ago, only 7 or 8 per cent of
Israelis were of the opinion that this would be the best solution, two
months ago it was 33 per cent, and now, according to a Gallup poll,
the figure is 44 percent."
Creveld said he was sure that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon wanted to deport the Palestinians.
"I think it's quite possible that he wants to do that. He
wants to escalate the conflict. He knows that nothing else we do will
succeed."
Asked if he was worried about Israel becoming a rogue state if
it carried out a genocidal deportation against Palestinians, Creveld
quoted former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan who said "Israel
must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Creveld argued that Israel wouldn't care much about becoming a
rogue state.
"Our armed forces are not the thirtieth strongest in the
world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take
the world down with us. And I can assure you that this will happen
before Israel goes under."
Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP)
http://www.iap.org
A CHRISTIAN VIEW OF THE HOLOCAUST
Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to hear a very frightening
speech. This speech is an explanation of the plans now being laid to
throw the United States into a third world war. It was made a short
time ago before a large group in the Congressional `Room of the
Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. Both the speech and the question
and answer period later so electrified the audience that a group of
patriots has transferred it to two long-playing records which you may
buy to play for friends, clubs, and your church group in your
community. The speaker is Mr. Benjamin Freedman, noted authority on
Zionism and all of its schemes. Mr. Freedman is a former Jew, and I
mean a FORMER Jew. He has fought the Communist world conspiracy tooth
and nail, and stands today as a leading American patriot. We now take
you to the speaker's platform to present Benjamin Freedman.
(applause)
[Freedman's speech]
What I intend to tell you tonight is something that you have
never been able to learn from any other source, and what I tell you
now concerns not only you, but your children and the survival of this
country and Christianity. I'm not here just to dish up a few facts to
send up your blood pressure, but I'm here to tell you things that will
help you preserve what you consider the most sacred things in the
world: the liberty, and the freedom, and the right to live as
Christians, where you have a little dignity, and a little right to
pursue the things that your conscience tells you are the right things,
as Christians.
I'm not so poor that I can't live without working and that's what
worries the Anti-Defamation League. I can just get by without going
and asking for a job or getting on the bread line. But Mr. McGinley
is working. He's sick and he's going at this stronger than ever. And
all I want to say is that they want to close up "Common Sense" more
than any other single thing in the whole world, as a death-blow to the
fight Christians are making to survive.
So I just want to tell you this. All they do is circulate rumors:
"Mr. Benjamin H. Freedman is the wealthy backer of 'Common Sense'."
The reason they do that is to discourage the people in the United
States: don't send any money to Common Sense. They don't need it.
The've got the wealthy Mr. Freedman as a backer. That all has
strategy. They don't want to advertise me so that people that have
real estate or securities to sell will come and call on me. They just
want people to lay off "Common Sense". And all I'm telling you is, I
do try to help him, but I haven't been able to. And I will be very
honest. One thing I won't do is lie. In the last year I've had so
much sickness in my family that I could not give him one dollar.
How he's managed to survive, I don't know. God alone knows. And
he must be in God's care because how he's pulled through his sickness
and with his financial troubles, I don't know. But that press is
working. . . and every two weeks about a hundred or a hundred-fifty-
thousand of "Common Sense" go out with a new message. And if that
information could be multiplied. . . if people that now get it could
buy ten or twenty five, or fifty, give them around. Plow that field.
Sow those seeds, you don't know which will take root, but for God's
sake, this is our last chance.
Jeongtae Roh
I want to search a function what I need, just like google it.
ex) C-h "how can i find a word" -> answer: type C-s
It will satisfy almost every newbie. But it looks so hard to make.
-Jeongtae.
On Jul 11, 8:25 am, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
> Xah Lee wrote:
> > 2010-07-10
>
> > On Jul 8, 3:36 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
> >> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
> >> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
>
> >> In a way, it is a losing battle. People expect software to just work
> >> without reading manuals. 95% of all Word users, for example, create
> >> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> >> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> >> and so on.
>
> > that's called progress.
>
> Maybe at the end of that "Road Ahead" there is the final Borgesian data
> base that contains all possible compositions. Then if you want to write
> a piece of expository prose arguing for the healthfulness of Twinkies,
> you can just pick the document from a menu. Voila! Magnum opus
> determined, dared, and done.
>
>
>
>
>
> Some are, some aren't. From what I can informally grok, RMS for example,
> displays a significantly higher level of general culture than the
> average sociology or psychology Ph. D.
>
>
>
> > personally, i'm a friend with many older generation mathematician
> > professors, who are run conferences or are chairman or presidents of
> > universities or large well known academic organizations. These
> > people's IQ, are above than i'd say 99% of hardcore emacs developers
> > in entire emacs history. These people, won't even be able to grok what
> > emacs is actually used for. It'd be hard pressed for them to
> > understand what a embeded scripting language in a application really
> > means. In fact, most won't even try. Here we can actually see a
> > phenomenon that might be interesting to tech geekers. In many
> > professional mathematicians's minds, programers are considered
> > inferior brainers, that programing field is something considered
> > trivial, a mere matter of some typing and dicing and fidgeting with
> > their theories.
>
> If Gauss or Goedel dared to sneer at someone like Donald Knuth they
> would be shown up as fools.
>
>
>
> >> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness. The more userfriendly a
> >> piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for
> >> _competent_ people willing to learn about their tool.
>
> > This train of thought, is prototypical of tech geek thinking. It comes
> > in a chantable form too that we often see these idiots put in their
> > sigs.
>
> The poster's point is that there is no hardwired repertoire of
> thinkables and that any design template that posits such state of
> affairs is doomed to become a strait-jacket. M$ is trying to please the
> lowest common denominator, same as the pornographers.
>
>
>
>
>
> This sounds like a bad attack of ADD. What's fascinating about Keanu
> Reeves? Lieutenant Ripley is fascinating; Bishop is not.
>
>
>
>
>
> >> At least Emacs is
> >> at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to
> >> the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up
> >> on disk is that what they see on their screen.
>
> >> I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the
> >> documentation. Emacs has a help menu, and those also point to tutorials
> >> explaining the basics in most local languages.
>
> >> But people look at documentation mostly when they run into problems they
> >> can't deal with on their own. And the more userfriendly Emacs becomes,
> >> and the better its menus and interactive helps become, the less people
> >> become inclined to bother looking for help.
>
> > been writing already long... so i'll cut short here. All of the above
> > is actually not exactly revalent here. We can go on philosophizing
> > about whether people are getting more dumb or whatnot...
>
> Boris Sidis, (Bill's father), a shrewd psychologist, thought, with good
> reason, that IQ testing was dumb. I do, however, have solid evidence
> that the X generation is more ahistorical than the Boomers, who, in
> turn, tend to live in the moment.
>
>
>
> > but the issue here is the quality of emacs's documentation. A
> > documentation, has a quality. This quality can be measured. It can be
> > measure in many ways, depending on your purpose. e.g. how good is the
> > use of the english language in coveying information? how easy is it
> > for readers to understand? how impeccable is the style with respect to
> > logicians? How well is the grammar? How well are the over-all
> > structure organized? will people LIKE the manual? ... so many and so
> > many.
>
> How good (adjective) is the grammar? The nub of the matter here is the
> question of who will evaluate the measurer.
>
>
>
> > but in short, here's one thing to consider: i think emacs manual is
> > well written (generally speaking), but it is largely written in the
> > 1980s. The bulk of it, the organization, the style of what things are
> > presented, the verbosity of the words to convey a idea, ... are all
> > geared in the computer of a era 2 decades old.
>
> There are things more than two millennia old whose value just keeps
> growing year by year. Since the philosophy and structure of the Emacs
> documentation was so well thought out way back then, the texts just have
> to be tweaked here and there to keep up with the evolution of the program.
>
>
>
> > i wrote something about this aspect, it can be seen here:
>
> > • Problems of Emacs's Manual
> > http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_manual_problem.html
>
> > i'll need to clean it up...
>
> Or maybe even entirely rethink your position. "Cleaning" it up, as you
> say, might just further implicate you in the "viscous" ...
>
> read more »
Jeongtae Roh
I want to search a function what I need, just like google it.
ex) C-h "how can i find a word" -> answer: type C-s
It will satisfy almost every newbie. But it looks so hard to make.
-Jeongtae.
On Jul 11, 8:25 am, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
> Xah Lee wrote:
> > 2010-07-10
>
> > On Jul 8, 3:36 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
> >> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
> >> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
>
> >> In a way, it is a losing battle. People expect software to just work
> >> without reading manuals. 95% of all Word users, for example, create
> >> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> >> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> >> and so on.
>
> > that's called progress.
>
> Maybe at the end of that "Road Ahead" there is the final Borgesian data
> base that contains all possible compositions. Then if you want to write
> a piece of expository prose arguing for the healthfulness of Twinkies,
> you can just pick the document from a menu. Voila! Magnum opus
> determined, dared, and done.
>
>
>
>
>
> Some are, some aren't. From what I can informally grok, RMS for example,
> displays a significantly higher level of general culture than the
> average sociology or psychology Ph. D.
>
>
>
> > personally, i'm a friend with many older generation mathematician
> > professors, who are run conferences or are chairman or presidents of
> > universities or large well known academic organizations. These
> > people's IQ, are above than i'd say 99% of hardcore emacs developers
> > in entire emacs history. These people, won't even be able to grok what
> > emacs is actually used for. It'd be hard pressed for them to
> > understand what a embeded scripting language in a application really
> > means. In fact, most won't even try. Here we can actually see a
> > phenomenon that might be interesting to tech geekers. In many
> > professional mathematicians's minds, programers are considered
> > inferior brainers, that programing field is something considered
> > trivial, a mere matter of some typing and dicing and fidgeting with
> > their theories.
>
> If Gauss or Goedel dared to sneer at someone like Donald Knuth they
> would be shown up as fools.
>
>
>
> >> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness. The more userfriendly a
> >> piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for
> >> _competent_ people willing to learn about their tool.
>
> > This train of thought, is prototypical of tech geek thinking. It comes
> > in a chantable form too that we often see these idiots put in their
> > sigs.
>
> The poster's point is that there is no hardwired repertoire of
> thinkables and that any design template that posits such state of
> affairs is doomed to become a strait-jacket. M$ is trying to please the
> lowest common denominator, same as the pornographers.
>
>
>
>
>
> This sounds like a bad attack of ADD. What's fascinating about Keanu
> Reeves? Lieutenant Ripley is fascinating; Bishop is not.
>
>
>
>
>
> >> At least Emacs is
> >> at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to
> >> the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up
> >> on disk is that what they see on their screen.
>
> >> I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the
> >> documentation. Emacs has a help menu, and those also point to tutorials
> >> explaining the basics in most local languages.
>
> >> But people look at documentation mostly when they run into problems they
> >> can't deal with on their own. And the more userfriendly Emacs becomes,
> >> and the better its menus and interactive helps become, the less people
> >> become inclined to bother looking for help.
>
> > been writing already long... so i'll cut short here. All of the above
> > is actually not exactly revalent here. We can go on philosophizing
> > about whether people are getting more dumb or whatnot...
>
> Boris Sidis, (Bill's father), a shrewd psychologist, thought, with good
> reason, that IQ testing was dumb. I do, however, have solid evidence
> that the X generation is more ahistorical than the Boomers, who, in
> turn, tend to live in the moment.
>
>
>
> > but the issue here is the quality of emacs's documentation. A
> > documentation, has a quality. This quality can be measured. It can be
> > measure in many ways, depending on your purpose. e.g. how good is the
> > use of the english language in coveying information? how easy is it
> > for readers to understand? how impeccable is the style with respect to
> > logicians? How well is the grammar? How well are the over-all
> > structure organized? will people LIKE the manual? ... so many and so
> > many.
>
> How good (adjective) is the grammar? The nub of the matter here is the
> question of who will evaluate the measurer.
>
>
>
> > but in short, here's one thing to consider: i think emacs manual is
> > well written (generally speaking), but it is largely written in the
> > 1980s. The bulk of it, the organization, the style of what things are
> > presented, the verbosity of the words to convey a idea, ... are all
> > geared in the computer of a era 2 decades old.
>
> There are things more than two millennia old whose value just keeps
> growing year by year. Since the philosophy and structure of the Emacs
> documentation was so well thought out way back then, the texts just have
> to be tweaked here and there to keep up with the evolution of the program.
>
>
>
> > i wrote something about this aspect, it can be seen here:
>
> > • Problems of Emacs's Manual
> > http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_manual_problem.html
>
> > i'll need to clean it up...
>