Emacs in the future: after the ice-caps melt

Emacs 24.1 is out. I haven't really tried it properly yet. All of the pre-release Emacs 24 snapshots I tried had severe memory-leak problems (at least with my set-up) and the quick try-out of 24.1 I did do revealed that it seems to be incompatible with twittering-mode. Since Emacs 23.3 is still working nicely for me, perhaps I'll wait a bit before trying 24.1 seriously.

Speaking of the future of Emacs, a great quote from sociologist Kieran Healy on The Setup ("usesthis.com") site:

Emacs ... will be there when the icecaps melt and the cities drown, when humanity destroys itself in fire and zombies, when the roaches finally achieve sentience, take over, and begin using computers themselves - at which point its various Ctrl-Meta key-chords will seem not merely satisfyingly ergonomic for the typical arthropod, but also direct evidence for the universe's Intelligent Design by some six-legged, multi-jointed God.

History as revealed by Google Ngrams, I: UNIX

UNIX was apparently really first discovered in the 18th century, about fifty years before the American War of Independence. However, it wasn't until the 20th century that it gained wide-spread use, when it was repopularised by AT&T.

Source: Google Ngram Viewer.

Vote for Emacs and Conkeror in the 2011 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards

Vote for Emacs in the Text Editor of the Year category and in the IDE/Web Development Editor of the Year category.

Vote for Conkeror in the Browser of the Year category.

Emacs user at work

Despite being designed by a Vim user, and despite its implied criticism of Emacs, I still enjoyed this image:

ashawley in the comments below points out the similarity with the 1981 cover of the EMACS Manual:

rms on apple and brain scans

On his RSS stream, Richard Stallman posted the following item:

Some Apple addicts truly worship that company, suggest brain scans.
That must be why they allow it to abuse them so much and don't care.

I know a number of Apple fans, and they do tend to have strongly favourable attitudes towards Apple products. (Apple things generally seem to be superior to Microsoft things, but the Apple company doesn't seem any less evil than Microsoft, and Linux is generally superior to both anyway.)

But I question whether this is a reaction which is actually specific to Apple fans. I imagine my brain scans might show similar reactions to GNU/Linux and Emacs.... (Most Windows/Microsoft users probably wouldn't show similar results, given that it's really just the "default" nowadays.)

Emacs in Tron

JT Nimoy discusses the creation of software art for creating visual effects in the film Tron: Legacy. Additionally, he mentions that:

In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.

Links:
(1) The original article/post by JT Nimoy
(2) On jwz's blog
(3) On boingboing
(4) On reddit

Tip: Showing blocked syntactic movement in LaTeX with tikz(-qtree)

Minimal example showing how to indicate blocked/illegal syntactic movement in LaTeX using the tikz and tikz-qtree packages.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{tikz-qtree}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[baseline,description/.style={fill=white,inner sep=2pt}]
  \Tree [.A [.B \node(b){b}; ] [.C c [.D d [.E e [.F f [.G g [.H \node(h){h}; ]]]]]]]
  \draw [dashed, ->, bend left] (h) to node [description] {\LARGE $\times$} (b);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Thanks to Andy Lücking and Alexis Dimitriadis from the Ling-TeX mailing list.