recoil

I've wondered this too. I can only assume it's because they send infected patients home, and they spread it to their families. That and hospitals & nursing homes, where infected staff may be spreading it between the patients/residents?

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_flu_pandemic perhaps?

One less launcher I have to have installed on my PC at least.

Pitman covers this in his article: communication back then between Europe and the US was much more difficult. Sending UUCP emails meant at least a 48hr round trip and so the US committee basically couldn't be bothered cooperating with their European counterparts. The Europeans - at least as Pitman imagines it - got upset and did their own thing

> Java is essentially never used for serious embedded work.

I don't know whether it counts as "serious" to you, but literally billions of SIM cards and credit cards are running JavaCard:

https://software.ac.uk/blog/2018-07-13-javacard-execution-en...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31D94QOo2gY

> the control chars still appeared in the file (at least on some Unix version)

That's a good point. My whole reply is a bit GNU-centric: the "col -bx" solution should work with everything except groff in ANSI mode (looks like the flag to go back to the standard troff behaviour is GROFF_NO_SGR [1][2], in case anybody is interested).

[1] See: https://linux.die.net/man/1/grotty [2] SGR is "Select Graphics Rendition", apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#SGR_(Select_G...

> you shouldn't really need a dedicate script to do that

It isn't because the terminal is mis-configured and/or mis-interpreting those characters, it's because these characters have historically been used in a special way by troff's ascii output driver, as used by the man command.

Bold characters are "emulated" by outputting the character itself, followed by ^H, then by repeating the character, and underline is emulated by outputting _ (the underscore character) followed by ^H, followed by the character to be underlined. This is the same way that bold/underline was achieved on a manual typewriter or by old teletype terminals with paper output.

Pagers like "more" & "less" have in-built behaviour that knows how to interpret these sequences and render bold or underline appropriately, and if you "cat" the file your terminal would probably ignore them, but if you open a file with those sequences in a text editor, you're going to see a bunch of unnecessary ^H characters. The OP's script uses the "col" command to remove the unnecessary ^Bs (and the preceding character) that troff has output.

By default, GNU groff doesn't actually output those sequences anymore and uses ANSI escape codes instead. AFAIK many (most?) distributions actually compile out the ANSI behaviour in favour of the old way though (because "more" and "less" don't actually behave correctly with the ANSI characters by default), but some don't, which breaks the script (it's broken in Cygwin, for instance).

FWIW, if you need a fool-proof way to convert a man page to plain old ASCII with no escapes at all, it's easiest just to redirect the output of "man" to a file:

    man ls > ls.txt

The long-winded way (with groff) is something like:

    zcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz | groff -man -Tascii -P -cbdu > ls.txt

Assuming you're talking about the incident in 2005... My wife and I to got stuck at Waterloo station for hours waiting for a train to Paris while the authorities sorted things out... :-)

We were interviewed by a reporter from one of the red tops and they had to re-take our photo several times because we didn't look miserable enough.

> none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas

I don't know where you got this bizarre notion. The populations of Russia (~144m), Germany (~83m), Turkey (~80m), France (~67m), The United Kingdom (~65m), Italy (~61m), Spain (~46m), Ukraine (~43m), and Poland (~38m) are all quite a lot larger than Texas (~27m).

The other useful term I've heard for these people is BANANAs - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.

> First we had console editors, [...] Then we had full IDEs [...] Now the trend is toward "enhanced text editors" (VSC/Atom/ST): editors that can have modular plugin functionality and interact with the console so you don't lose any of its versatility. They're usually faster and more lightweight than IDEs but keep most of what you need

Emacs has functioned as an "advanced text editor" for at least 20 years and probably longer. There's a very common misconception that Emacs is a "console editor", but the reality is that when you first launch it in a windowed environment you get something that looks an awful lot like Sublime, VSCode & Atom: a text editor window with a menubar and toolbar similar (yes, it's not perfect!) to what you'd expect from any other editor native to your chosen platform.

The time investment involved in learning how to use it is also considerably less than implied elsewhere in this thread. In fact I really doubt that it's significantly more than you'd have to spend educating yourself about any other "advanced editor"'s configuration, keybindings for non-obvious actions, extension mechanism, etc. It's easy enough to learn the (admittedly unconventional) keybindings for a handful of common things like opening and saving files when you have the menus to refer to, and by default it'll even open a buffer containing clickable hyperlinks to helpful things like tutorials. I still haven't seen an editor or IDE with better built-in help.

Even configuring Emacs isn't all that hard: there's a built-in interface for installing packages, most of which will pretty-much auto-activate once installed (i.e. less need to mess around with elisp), and for changing configuration there's "customize", which is a nicer way to change configuration variables than just editing a JSON file. When you do have to start writing some elisp code (you'll almost certainly have to write a little) the documentation is superb and there are more than enough resources on the web to help you. A programmer who is already familiar with a dynamic language like JS will probably have less trouble learning elisp than a C programmer did 20 years ago.

None of which is to say that there aren't areas where Emacs isn't behind. I'd like to see better support for projects, snippets and auto-completion out of the box, as well as being more nicely pre-configured for popular languages like JavaScript and Python. Emacs 24 is four years old at this point, and that's a very long time for any developer tool to stay still.

These days I'd say the most confusing thing about Emacs is working out which of the many competing packages you should choose for whatever it is you're trying to do. Age is working against it here, because what was the almost-universally-recommended package five years ago - for which you'll get plenty of helpful google search results - has often been superceded by something better.

But with a handful of plugins installed (yasnippet, helm, projectile, auto-complete) it's (IMO of course) still the best editor out there.

By some trick of fate, I juust caught the launch here in Aus at 6pm (4am EDT)... Even though it was due to have happened hours ago I clicked the link to see how it had gone... At exactly 17:59:40!

Thanks for sharing the link :-)

Indeed. Ctrl-w in Emacs is actually "kill-region".

Apple don't trust the AUD not to drop further than it already has in the last 3 months.

> What is the longevity of Minecraft?

There's an unofficial modding API and thousands of mods [1], some of which are extremely sophisticated. For instance, "Red Power" [2] includes an in-game 6502-based computer for which the author wrote a Forth interpreter that can be used to control in-game objects, and somebody else has embedded a Lua interpreter that can do similar things, IIRC.

There are also dozens of user-created game modes (some of which only have informally-enforced rules) and special maps like "Feed the Beast" [3].

The only games I can think of with comparable amounts of content are MMOs and possibly the Elder Scrolls series, though in both of those cases the content is nothing like as varied, nor does it rely on its user's creativity to anything like the same extent.

Minecraft is very much like Lego, only you can also program your own bricks.

[1] http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Mods

[2] http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/365357-125-eloraams-mods...

[3] http://feed-the-beast.com/

My solution to this is just to go into the Task Manager and kill the Flash plugin about 30 seconds after every restart (This saves a load of memory too). When I actually want to watch one of the videos, just reloading the page is enough to kick Flash back into gear.

Going back as long as I can remember (slashdot in the late 90s), all the completely unscientific web polls I've seen [1][2][3] favour vi(m) by at least 2 to 1.

(FWIW, I am an emacs user).

[1] From HN about a year ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3717754

[2] Another random poll I found searching HN - http://gopollgo.com/which-editor-do-you-prefer-emacs-or-vi

[3] Slashdot poll from 2009, the earliest/only one I can actually find right now - http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1717&aid=-1

Another trick nobody else has mentioned is to remember that the 2nd argument is actually optional, so you can do things like:

    ln -s /path/to/some/file

And it'll create a symlink called "file" in the current directory. That wouldn't be possible if the arguments were the other way around.

There's a startup option (-w for word processor mode [1]) that changes this behaviour (as well as enabling word wrap). It's a big improvement, but not quite perfect IIRC.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/doc/#Invoking

As I understand it, the kernel is pretty much a hybrid of Mach and FreeBSD, and I don't think you can really say that it's more of one than the other: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

There's definitely more BSD in there than just the userland.

Longer ago than that... More than 30 years ago there were themed sets with somewhat custom pieces:

http://letsbuilditagain.com/instructions/6630/ http://letsbuilditagain.com/instructions/6880/

(To pick 2 completely random examples)

Back in '82 there weren't as many different themes (afaik there were maybe 4: space, town, castle and trains), but the concept definitely existed.

Some might even argue about the gender-neutrality of those themes too: the majority of Lego I owned around that time was the space-themed stuff, and my sister had some of the town sets. In fact, as long ago as 1979 Lego brought out a range called Scala [1] that was targeted almost exclusively at girls (my wife has really fond memories of those sets!)

[1] http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/Scala

I also grew up in Scotland. At one point I worked with a Swede and was interested to find that many Scots words are closer to their equivalents in Scandinavian languages than they are to those in English.

For example, "greet" for "cry" is clearly related to the Norwegian gråte or Swedish gråta. Likewise "kirk" for "church" is a lot closer to the Norwegian "kirke". These are the only ones I remember off the top of my head, but I remember there being surprisingly many.

edit: bairn (Scots) vs barn (Norwegian) for child just came to mind.

So OS X is really just a skinned FreeBSD?

In my case I assumed until I started primary school that all boys had blue eyes and all girls had brown eyes, because this observation just happened to hold for everyone in my immediate family as well as all of the neighbours' children that I played with.

It's actually worse than that: US government spending on healthcare per-capita actually exceeds per-capita government spending on healthcare in countries like Canada or the United Kingdom that have universal healthcare [1], let alone total spending per-capita across both the private & government sectors.

Far from universal healthcare bringing an economy "to its knees", it seems to me that the US system has a far greater chance of doing so.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jun/30/healthca...

It's interesting that "set autoindent" is so common. I replaced this with "filetype indent on" some years ago, since I'd rather have language-sensitive indentation.

This works really well with the suggested --color=always, because it highlights the line number, the filename and the separators in different colours.

Only three years ago we were hearing how twitter was doomed because teens don't tweet! [1][2]

On the other hand, while I'm not a teen (by a long shot), I do find facebook more restrictive in terms of the things I feel I can say. Somehow twitter is more anonymous, despite being more public. On facebook I get the impression that people are more likely to pay attention to my ramblings.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/30/why-dont-teens-tweet-we-ask... [2] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/teens-dont...

> The major problem facing the world economy is excessive sovereign debt, and you cant blame the banks for that.

In a country like Greece this may be true, but in Spain - for instance - the country's sovereign debt before the financial crisis was low: it's the possibility of Spain having to bail out its over-indebted banks that is driving government bond yields higher there.

In the UK, the government was forced to nationalise the imprudent RBS and as such increase its own debt burden.

And in the US, the government has been motivated to issue more and more debt partly to help re-capitalise insolvent banks...

The banks are definitely to blame.

If I search for something where I might expect a regionally-customised result, like "newspaper", I get "The Sun", "The New York Times" and "The Guardian" from encrypted.google.com, but I get the SMH, "The Australian", etc. etc. from a regular google.com.au search.