'Emacs style' delete line shortcut (CTRL/U) doesn't work correctly in Firefox

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 15 Oct 2018 at 18:45, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
>
> On 15/10/18 15:10, Liam Proven wrote:> It held on in the legal field in
> the UK for _decades_ and that made me
> > a little bit of money fixing balky systems.
>
> Excellent. Always good to take lawyers' excess money :-)

Heh. It was a fun peek into another world.

> > It also sometimes leaves bits of deleted or edited-out text in the
> > saved files, which can be extremely legally embarrassing.
>
> No longer, fortunately.

I guess. Not sure the price was worth it. Zipped XML with embedded BLOBs? Yuck.

I have rescued many word processor documents from disk corruption.
With all these compressed formats, data is indistinguishable from
noise.
> That on its own is the one reason that Linux (including Mac OS X) will
> not (indeed cannot) supersede Windows (barring some world-shattering
> catastrophy).

I think Google is semi-accidentally doing a home-run around the whole
thing, and I'm amazed that nobody is copying them.

First came Gmail. Webmail that was good enough it was _better_ than a
local client.

Then came Google Contacts and Google Calendar.  Nowhere near as good,
but the device sync was good enough and then some. Now my PIM was in
the cloud and synched onto all my devices.

Just now I got a call from an unknown number. I spoke with them and
needed to SMS some info.

So on my work PC, I signed into my Gmail, Googled the company name,
copied-and-pasted the company info into a new entry in my Google
Contacts... and by the time I picked up the phone to text, it was
there in the phone's address book.

And it's not even a Google OS, it's iOS.

OK, the copy-pasting bit needs work -- I would very much like a magic
"add this company's contact info to my address book" button, please.
In fact gContacts is appallingly clunky, but it works, and it works
better than anything I've seen in the FOSS arena.

It does the important stuff Exchange Server plus Windows Server plus a
client with Windows in the same domain plus Outlook does, and it does
it quicker, simpler, for free for personal use, across devices, and
all without actually trying to emulate or copy what Exchange does.

*THAT* is what the FOSS people didn't even fail to do -- they didn't even try.

But it's here now, and it works on Linux. It runs on Linux at the server end.

ChromeOS delivers that. It gives you a world-leading browser, an OS to
run it, and some cloud apps that are Just Barely Good Enough. This is
a core Agile principle:

http://agilemodeling.com/essays/barelyGoodEnough.html

For their first few years, ChromeBooks looked too limited to be of
interest to me. (So did tablets.)

But now, I could probably work on one.

A few months ago, I took the plunge and bought my first tablet. A
cheap Chinese one. It's great, I use it almost every day, sometimes
for hours. I've made a dent in my movies-to-see directory. It's ideal
for surfing. My girlfriend loves it too.

But Android on a tablet is limiting. Especially the browser. It can't
do stuff I *need* from my desktop browser.

Neither can Safari on my phone, come to that.

Chrome OS, though, can.

Now ChromeOS can run on little "net top" thin client like things, it
can run Android apps, it can run local Linux apps, it can run virtual
desktop sessions to Windows servers, and it can run on tablets and
convertibles...

Suddenly a lot of the stuff in Windows (and macOS and iOS) seems a bit
irrelevant.

Google Apps are not actually very good, but we've passed the Pareto
Principle now. Most people don't use the famous 20% of Office's
functionality. They use 2% or less.

Google Apps can deliver that 2%, and ChromeOS delivers it in a small-f
free Linux-based OS, on cheap hardware, with a good rich app selection
now.

And suddenly it looks like the writing might be on the wall for
Microsoft and for Apple, because this really is all most people need.

It may be that the PC (and desktop Mac) will become a high-end tools
for power users. Workstations.

Most people will be fine with a convertible ChromeOS device that can
become a just-barely-good-enough laptop, and most business staff will
be fine with a thin-client type thing that doesn't actually need a
company server at all -- it just talks to Google-hosted servers.
Google don't sell you the hardware, or the software. Some 3rd party
sells you cheap client devices and you pay a subscription fee for the
services and all those maintenance and support issues just go away.

It's what Oracle tried to do 20 years ago.

It's here now and nobody's noticed.

And neither Ubuntu nor Red Hat has anything like it, and I'm not sure
that they've realised that they _need_ anything like it yet.

> Since I retired from my last 9–5 job to concentrate on consultancy I
> have stopped being so tactful :-) If a program is a dog — or worse — I
> will probably say so, unless a client thinks it's wunnerful...

Heh. :-D I applaud and salute that, while being a bit more careful
still myself...

> No, it's not a technology that you should ever need or want to know.
> Unfortunately [see my rant about editors the other day] it's still
> missing some software, so users are still exposed to the pointy
> brackets, which is silly. When it was being written, the assumption was
> that the software would grow up with it, and that's only partially true.

I regard it as a bit like HTML. In 1996 I said this was something that
humans shouldn't need to fiddle with, like Postscript.

I stand by it. Where I was wrong  is that I didn't realise it would
all be generated on demand...

And by something as ugly as PHP. :-(

> > I am still learning to produce clear, readable DocBook, thanks in part
> > to some occasionally-crunchy feedback from my more expert colleagues.
>
> I use it for pretty much everything except actual Humanities texts, for
> which TEI is designed.  And I'm still learning DocBook's oddities :-)

:-D Thank you! I am relieved...

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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