So there is this obscure book that was printed in 1971 in a run of 10K copies and never has been reprinted, the publisher has been obtained by the Elsevier in 1992, the author has died in 2003. Whom do I pay to read this, except the local library to maybe get it via ILL after half a year of waiting?
It would be very nice if those huge copyright-holding publishing megahouses provided print-on-demand service but they generally don't, they are more focused on trying to make reselling of used books a punishable crime.
I doubt they even could for a book from 1971; word processors and computerized layout that could really handle a book were still in the future. Even in 1981, TeX was only 3 years old. I imagine any masters for it were destroyed, lost, or melted down in the intervening 50+ years.
So the best anyone, even the publisher, could do would be to ask the Library of Congress for a photocopy.
However, I firmly agree that not providing it for sale at a reasonable rate (no higher than the original sale price of a generally-available hardback edition, adjusted for inflation) should end copyright. You made it, you released it, you wanted to profit from it: fine. You own those rights for a long time: don't like it, but not really what I want to argue. You're embarassed by it and don't want anyone to know you published it: hey, man, if you sold it to the public, ever, you put it out there, and if you later decide you don't want to any more, well, you should not have published and taken advantage of copyright protection.
Um, "snarky"? How do I ask "is this last element optional, and does it have to be an emoji?" without snark? And it's the most egregious (in the "glaring" sense, not "outlandishly awful") things about the example, you don't often see emojis being a part config/programming languages outside of embedded strings, everything else is pretty self-explanatory dialect of YAML.
The use of emojis looks quite similar to the way parameter/argument labels are introduced in Swift: in the function signature, you use two names (separated by a space) before the colon, instead of one. So, is this second part a shorthand alternative name, or just a visual comment, or?..
Don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to emojis on principle, they are just 1) a tad too outstanding in the text for my taste, 2) a tad too difficult to enter unless you're on a mobile keyboard, 3) I personally would rather not edit program source code/configs on mobile.
> 2) a tad too difficult to enter unless you're on a mobile keyboard
Windows and macOS both have great on-screen keyboards (OSK)/input method editor (IME) for emoji. Many (most?) Linux desktop environments also provide one. On Windows it is Win+. or Win+; and on macOS it is Ctrl+Cmd+Space and on Gnome it is Ctrl+Shift+E,Space or Super+E.
NixOS, GNOME 47, Firefox, Ctrl+Shift+E opens devtools, Super+E does nothing. I have a flatpak app called "Smile" for entering emojis which always starts up very slowly - faster to open some webchat client and copy from its emoji picker...
Bwahahaha. Sorry, I’ve just imagined the poor sod who has to implement this grammar and has to decide whether presentation selectors or (potentially unknown) ZWJ sequences or (potentially unknown) letter-pairs denoting flags count parts of as single emoji (in theory they do[1], but good luck figuring out what tables you need).
> the way parameter/argument labels are introduced in Swift: in the function signature, you use two names (separated by a space) before the colon, instead of one
Side note: Swift’s style likely comes from Objective-C, which in turn comes from Smalltalk.
Yeah, I also have stopped for a second to consider what "SINGLE" should mean here but then realized I was thinking about Unicode grapheme clusters, and emoji sequences, and I should probably not do that before the dinner (or ever, really).
Ah, yet another archive format. Well, at least it's not .ar (I still find it amusing that .tar has never managed to supplant it for the static library storage).
No? Both "rule" and "ruler" can denote this thing also called straightedge; but the word "ruler" is more commonly used in this sense, while "rule" generally means an instruction.
But here the meaning of "rule" is not "straightedge", but rather the derived meaning "a thin printed line or dash". So "ruler" would be improper because that word doesn't have the typographical meaning.
Wait, so the "ruler guides" are misnamed, they are just "rules"?
In any case, the things they added could very well have been called "column-divider" and "row-divider" with much less ambiguity because not everyone who has to wrangle with CSS is a designer by profession or by choice.
In page layout software, the thin UI elements bordering the left side and top side of the page, with the little tick marks, is called a ruler. The tick marks on the ruler are called rules (just like the rules on a physical ruler used for measuring things). When you click/drag on the ruler elements, you create guides (or guidelines).
I’ve never seen “ruler guides” verbatim, but I would take that to be shorthand for “guides one could create using the ruler” (which would be a mouthful) to disambiguate the word “guide” when there isn’t sufficient context for the reader to likely understand what was meant.
"ruler guide" - One of those English noun chains that my translators hate so much. Because in most other languages you actually do have to say "the guide of the ruler" or some comparably awkward mouthful.
> A ruler, sometimes called a rule, scale or a line gauge or metre/meter stick, is an instrument used to make length measurements, whereby a length is read from a series of markings called "rules" along an edge of the device.
What about execution speed? I find it somewhat hard to believe that adding 2/3 additional arithmetic instructions plus a branch to every addition/subtraction would perform better than having the (I believe quite small) circuitry after the ALU (probably still on the critical path) that detects carry-out/overflow and triggers a trap.
> it is explicit, which makes it even better. No hidden behaviour.
Which is why we do virtual address translation and populate (and evict!) L1/L2 caches in software, and the reason why CHERI project is misguided.
Personally, the two most alluring things about RTX for me is a) better global illumination, none of that silly "you can see sunrise shining through the mountain/cave's ceiling" stuff; b) better local illumination: a glowing object should be an actual light source and make its surroundings brighter, dammit.
Everything else, including insanely accurate shadows and reflections, weird lenses/out-of-focus effects, etc. is much lower on my list.
No, but I would expect to do binary long multiplication and division, which have been used since before the intel 4004, and which it has surely seen in many Z80 and 6502 code bases fed into it.
Wow, an actual, purposeful, and quite general return-pointer-smashing gadget, built right into the program itself. Just what any program written in C needs.
It would be very nice if those huge copyright-holding publishing megahouses provided print-on-demand service but they generally don't, they are more focused on trying to make reselling of used books a punishable crime.
reply