[CM] If your car were Emacs

[RS Wood]

From the «surprisingly reverent list» department:
Title: If Your Car Were Emacs
Author:
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2016 18:31:21 -0500
Link: http://wiki.c2.com/?IfYourCarWereEmacs

Comments[1]

Links:
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13018612 (link)

[RS Wood]

Post by RS Wood
Title: If Your Car Were Emacs
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2016 18:31:21 -0500
Link: http://wiki.c2.com/?IfYourCarWereEmacs
Comments[1]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13018612 (link)

I thought it was going to be a snarky article making fun of emacs'
complexity. Instead, it's a somewhat reverent piece born of the
author's frustration his car doesn't have the same power emacs does.
Well done.

//--clip
This page was born of my frustration at once again having to monitor
my power windows to make sure they were open just enough and no more
(guess how far that is). Feel free to add your own.

They seem to fall into three categories: actual useful things cars
could do, ridiculous flexibility that parodies emacs, and things which
it's impossible for cars to do with existing technology. I find it
interesting that the first two are closely related. Any are on-topic.
//--clip

I particularly like the "macros for known routes (like going to work)"
and the preset for car window ventilation choices.

Automobiles should have power users too!

[Bob Eager]

Post by RS Wood
I particularly like the "macros for known routes (like going to work)"
and the preset for car window ventilation choices.
Automobiles should have power users too!

Easy to add, really. We already have presets for seat position, mirror
position...etc. - invoked by inserting a personalised key.

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Post by RS Wood
I particularly like the "macros for known routes (like going to work)"
and the preset for car window ventilation choices.
Automobiles should have power users too!

I wish DVRs had extension interfaces (like elisp/guile in emacs). As a
rule, they have great hardware coupled with appalling software.

One frustrating example among *many*:

My Samsung HD DVR has a pause button for live TV. Great. So we have
paused the Premier League game for an hour. I then want to know which
game comes next on the same channel and press the EPG button on the
remote.

I'm served with the program guide, all right, but the time shift mode
is canceled and the game instantly jumps to the 89th minute.

Just let me program the software. No need for the Samsung product
managers and coders to worry their little heads.


Marko

[James K. Lowden]

On Wed, 23 Nov 2016 21:15:57 +0200

Post by Marko Rauhamaa
Just let me program the software. No need for the Samsung product
managers and coders to worry their little heads.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?

"[W]hen Stallman spotted the print-jam defect in the Xerox
laser printer, he didn't panic. He simply looked for a way to update
the old fix or " hack" for the new system. In the course of looking up
the Xerox laser-printer software, however, Stallman made a troubling
discovery. The printer didn't have any software, at least nothing
Stallman or a fellow programmer could read. Until then, most companies
had made it a form of courtesy to publish source-code files-readable
text files that documented the individual software commands that told a
machine what to do. Xerox, in this instance, had provided software
files in precompiled, or binary, form."

-- For Want of a Printer
http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html



--jkl