Re: what is the important uses of emacs lisp?

[stan]

Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
> Evans Winner <thorne@timbral.net> writes:
>
>> Michael Ekstrand <michael@elehack.net> writes:

< well done rant snipped> 

>> I'm on a bit of a rampage of late because I just took a new
>> sysadmin job and found that the IT department policies are
>> so absurdly strict that I can't even install my choice of
>> text editors on the PC there.  There is a short (very short)
>> list of allowed software (almost all of it proprietary, of
>> course) and I'm just stuck with it.  There I am running a
>> million-dollar system running (nee) OS/400 and on the front
>> end I'm stuck with Windows and notepad.exe.  Point...
>> grunt...  point...  grunt.
>
> If you can have a program such as putty.exe authorized, that'd be an
> escape route.  Even without putty.exe, IIRC, telnet.exe comes standard
> with MS-Windows.  Otherwise, there are ssh-enabled java terminal
> emulators running in web browsers... http://www.javassh.org/

Unfortunately in many cases IT departments are unwilling or incapable of
distinguishing between people who search for the "any" key and kernel
hackers. Consequently the level of nonesense can and does achieve scary
levels.

>> I'm so extremely sorry to have wasted everyone's time with
>> all this ranting... though evidently not sorry enough to
>> rethink sending it.
>
> That's ok, to share the feeling. ;-)

I'll second the OK, and point out this rant has more meat than many
posts on usenet.  I don't know if it will help but there are entire
newgroups that never rise to the level of your article. A mouse does
have uses. Mine has a light on it that's just about perfect when stuff
falls behind the monitor.

John Dvorak once repeated a story about a service call from a woman
having problems with her computer. She couldn't get it to start. As the
story goes, after awhile the tech discovered the woman stepping on the
mouse just like she did with the pedal on her sewing machine but the
computer just wouldn't start. 

>> Anyway, long live Emacs lisp.
>>
>> Footnotes: 
>> [1]  Not that I have anything against the mouse or GUIs; on
>> the contrary I think they can be very useful.  I just don't
>> think they are a good substitute for those things... for
>> which they are not a good substitute... like, er, most user
>> input, for instance.