Re: emacs stackexchange beta site

[Emanuel Berg]

Udyant Wig <udyantw@gmail.com> writes:

> I should have mentioned this beforehand and included
> other entities along with Google. Would the fact that
> many intelligence agencies were monitoring fora
> affect your perspective?

I expect them to do that. This is all public material
and that is in part the purpose. We communicate within
this guild of sorcerers, but if anyone Google our
discussion to help them with a particular problem (they
might find our material just as well as a SX site
question) that is just as well. Or if they just get
curious what we are doing and start thinking/acting in
new ways in part because of it. This sounds a bit
pompous but I know such things happen every day.

In general, I take a principled approach: if I possess
some sensitive material, I don't put it anywhere where
anyone can see it, ever.

If the material isn't sensitive, I put it somewhere
public. Then, if every single human being on the planet
read it, I wouldn't have a problem with that.

And as Pascal said (sort of), it is a difference
between the material (text) in a newsgroup, and the
number-crunching machines that do work on the posters,
searchers, i.e. the humans and their habits.

But I admit I don't have a huge problem with that,
actually. It is just a positive side effect from using
great software that you yourself control instead of
Hotmail, Gmail, etc. - it is more efficient, more
creative (fun), more pleasant, but also, correct, you
don't play their game. At least not (by far) as much as
they like you to.

>> The GUI or UI shouldn't matter. A CLI, or otherwise
>> text-only, is superior to just about any GUI, I
>> believe. But that shouldn't matter. The material
>> should just be there, free - if you want to access
>> it through a GUI I don't have any problem with that,
>> as long as I can access the same material not using
>> a GUI. Why fight about it?
>
> As I said, the future is the GUI, or so it seems.
> This is to say that very often the primary and only
> interface available would be the GUI without
> alternatives.

The future is not exactly the GUIs. The future is a
separation between the data and the GUIs. This is
already the case in a lot of places. We already
mentioned mails (Gnus = not GUI, Thunderbird = GUI -
still compatible), and Usenet (Gnus vs. web interfaces
à la Google Groups), but also bash, zsh, etc. that can
fully replace work in the Linux and Unix desktops
(GNOME, KDE, etc. - GNOME and KDE can absolutely not
replace bash and zsh, though they are hosted, of
course), in programming (mouse-free Emacs vs. the MS
and Apple IDE with tons of buttons and menus
everywhere), and so on. The GUIs came big with the
Xerox and Apple and Microsoft and IBM PC revolution,
but many, many programmers and advanced computer users
solely use the shell. The SX sites are a good example:
how many questions are of the nature "how do I do X
from bash?", "do that and that from the command line",
etc. There are also many books with that approach, on
that I can recommend is:

@Book{sobell,
author = {Mark Sobell},
title = {A Practical Guide to Linux},
publisher = {Prentice Hall},
edition = {3rd edition},
year = 2013,
ISBN = {0-13-308504-X}}

So I think GUI vs. CLI  will look much the same in the
future. The bigger challenge is the touchscreen interfaces
that are meant for just consuming information (not
being creative) that appear on pads and phones. Those
are much worse than GUIs and really make zombies out
of people.

-- 
underground experts united