An explanation of why emacs exists, notable for the optimism it contains:
The programmable editor is an outstanding opportunity to learn to program! A beginner can see the effect of his simple program on the text he is editing; this feedback is fast and in an easily understood form. Educators have found display programming to be very suited for children experimenting with programming, for just this reason (see LOGO).
Programming editor commands has the additional advantage that a program need not be very large to be tangibly useful in editing.
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As netcraft point out so well.
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Apparently Chaucer wrote what is the oldest technical manual in English. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
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The Reg reveals all.
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Corewars is a game of competing computer programs, each trying to force the other to crash. There are various classes of program: the imp, which just keeps on running and hopes that the other guy crashes himself; the dwarf, which drops little bombs throughout memory, hoping to land one on a running opponent; scanners, which look for the opponent, trying to find & kill him; vampires, which try to run another program’s code.
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Happy Penguin is proof that not only are there Linux games, there are plenty of ’em. Some are a bit on the old-fashioned side, but they’re still great fun (which is what I have always been led to believe is the whole point of a game). Among my favourites are NetHack and LinCity; freeciv and xconq are great (I remember playing xconq as a boy at ODU). What’s sad are the great old games no longer supported: games like spellcast and xtank (both more games o’ ODU).
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Anyone who’s dealt much with computer graphics has come across a few standard images, the teapot and an image of a young woman gazing alluringly over her shoulder. Well, here are the true stories behind both the teapot and the gal.
04 February 2018: update URL
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From the classic tale:
when you came back to it that a (supposed) friend had typed rm -rf ~/* and was hovering over the keyboard with threats along the lines of ‘lend me a fiver ’til Thursday, or I hit return’? Undoubtedly the person in question would not have had the nerve to inflict such a trauma upon you, and was doing it in jest. So you’ve probably never experienced the worst of such disasters …
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Some ancient anti-visual-editor humour:
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, ‘C-h for help’ and ‘“foo” File is read only.’ So I use the editor that doesn’t waste my valuable time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1) NAME ed - text editor SYNOPSIS ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ] DESCRIPTION Ed is the standard text editor.
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A handy guide to identifying Unix sysadmins exists. I am a Technical Thug, but I wish I were a Maniac. So true, even after more than a decade.
04 February 2018: updated URL
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Los Angeles County has requested hardware vendors to stop referring to the components of an IDE chain as master & slave. This is the same kind of lunacy which demands that male and female plugs be referred to by some other, less descriptive, moniker. It goes without saying that we cannot be free until these people are stopped.
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I saw on Sci-Fi Hi-Fi that Dan Sugalski has written a wonderful series of introductory articles on somewhat advanced subjects. I don’t agree with all he writes, but it’s well worth reading.
07 February 2018: updated URL
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