I can't speak for all emacs users, but I wouldn't be caught dead using an "IDE"
IDE ostensibly stands for "integrated development environment." AFAIK, not a single IDE is as integrated, programmable, hackable, flexible, or stable as emacs (or vim).
In Emacs, I can effortlessly open and navigate through an indefinitely large number of files. I can take advantage of myriads of language-specific modes for syntax highlighting, auto-completion, snippets, verification, prettification, truly integrated compiler/interpreter environments, you name it.
If I find I need to do some repetitious gruntwork, I can C-x ( gruntwork C-x ) it away. If this gruntwork seems excessive, I can program it into my editor and forget about it. If I find I really need some feature or functionality, I can pop open a scratch buffer, hack it, and use it instantly. No boilerplate, no compiling, no restarting.
These are just the tip of the iceberg, though. The overwhelming sense an emacs or vim user experiences, is one of power. We have complete control over our programming environment. We dictate it, hack it, and tweak it until it is effortless. This sense of power and hackability so permeates our programming environment, that it becomes physically painful to have to navigate a swarm of inconsistent modal dialogues, accept some kludges and pray they get fixed, and accept that The Developers know how best to configure our environment.
I think it would be a worthwhile project to get some of the top emacs/vim users doing a set task (e.g. spit out a rails app, or build a small java app) and compare them to the gold standard ide in a guided screencast setting.
It would be enlightening for the wider programming community to see some stats about how fast each truly is. Obviously approaches could be streamlined, and best practice could be learned by beginners from the get-go.
You still can't name a file or folder "con" (even in Win7) because it's a reserved word used for keyboard input on the command line. When Windows 9x was popular, you could bluescreen any machine on a local network by trying to access the share \\machinename\con\con, which was great if you lived in a dorm :)
You can do it with Cygwin though, and Explorer will still have trouble dealing with it after it's been created. You can also create files with a trailing period or leading/trailing space, which usually isn't allowed.
I just verified that the =rand(200,99) one does still exist (in Word 2008 on Mac anyway). As brunov said, this looks more like an easter egg than a bug though.
"NOTE: Depending on your query, it may take several minutes to return the results of your query to the worksheet."
First thought: this has got to be a parody.
Second thought: Oh Cthulhu, it is for real.
Third thought: Just by mentioning this link almost anywhere, it'll be excoriated as "just another baseless attack on Microsoft (which I, being a technologically fair and balanced soul, will admit to having less than stellar practices)"
"If you can't make the effort to make your post understandable to someone not in your domain, why should I assume you're saying something worth reading?"
He assumed the domain of people familiar with ginsu knives is roughly identical to the domain of people who have ever watched an infomercial in the past two decades.
Obviously, there are people all over the world for which this assumption is false. However, globalization is arguably incomplete until every single human on earth has at some time thought: "Gee. Cuts through a boot. How tired would I have to be for this advertisement to work?"
Well, I'd never read it before, so it was new to me. And it was an interesting story, and I expect there to be conversation about the value of metrics when any metric can be faked. The first thought I had after reading this was "What matters at all statistically speaking if none of the facts can be trusted?" How do we know that pagerank or daily hits means anything when they can be as effectively bullshitted?
The liberal arts are just as good at stopping bullshit from coming through. That they rarely choose to do so demonstrates how cowed many people in the liberal arts are, and that's an entirely separate discussion. But there's a simple test in the liberal arts wherein when somebody doesn't make sense, you ask them to clarify, and repeat the process until they make sense or admit they were faking.
> The liberal arts are just as good at stopping bullshit from coming through. That they rarely choose to do so demonstrates how cowed many people in the liberal arts are, and that's an entirely separate discussion.
Actually, the "physical arts" have another test - it either works or it doesn't.
> But there's a simple test in the liberal arts wherein when somebody doesn't make sense, you ask them to clarify, and repeat the process until they make sense or admit they were faking.
Nope - they call you racist, Republican, fascist, etc., and you lose.
I'm of the mindset that you never lose when the other person resorts to calling you names. If somebody's called out for their bullshit, then they've lost.
But it is how they work. Each person is able to choose their own idols. Disagreement is expected. You have aesthetic extremists who will tell you T. S. Eliot is a terrible poet, or that E. E. Cummings is modernist garbage. I personally think that Dickinson is overrated; I know a literary enthusiast who doesn't really think Shakespeare is particularly brilliant. That's all acceptable.
The idea of the liberal arts is that they're not rankable collectively. While there's an objective bad to be found, good is to some degree subjective, and each person can decide what they value. So you're allowed to value deconstructionism if you'd like, or state that meaninglessness is the point of art, and I'm allowed to disagree with you and call your work bullshit.
Where did politics come in? Are you legitimately trying to make a point, or are you just trying to blindly spew your dislike of the liberal arts? If so, tell me so I can directly address that instead of making tangential arguments.
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This is not quite what you want, but there are quite a few 4D puzzles.
iirc, Scott Kim, who did many of the illustrations for Douglas Hofstadter, wrote a paper presenting an optical illusion only perceivable in 4 spatial dimensions ("The Impossible Skew Quadrilateral: A Four-Dimensional Optical Illusion").
"The wikifiddler drew his wikivorpal sword and slayed the terrible wikibeast"