recoil · HackerTrans

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?

recoil

6 anni fadiscuss

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

recoil

7 anni fadiscuss

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

recoil

7 anni fadiscuss

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

recoil

7 anni fadiscuss

> 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

recoil

8 anni fadiscuss

> 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...

recoil

8 anni fadiscuss

> 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

recoil

8 anni fadiscuss

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.

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