This link puts a little meat on the bones, though the story is still sketchy. Seems the law was aimed at 5 or 6 specific bloggers, though probably upwards of 500 could wind up being covered. ISPs not happy with it. Law purports to regulate Russian-language blogging, not limited by geography or physical placement. So a foreigner could theoretically run afoul of it if they publish in Russian (and become popular doing so) while a Russian could write anything they want without worry as long as they do it in another language?

"Emacs is a great operating system, if only it had a decent text editor!"

Nice dig but quite out of date. Check out EVIL.

Absolutely. For simple text file editing, it really cant be beat. No wasted time, you type what you want and it does it, end of story. You can even use it in scripts! The ideal tool for many, many jobs.

Notepad++ is windows-only. And if you are ok with that huge flaw, you should really try TSE. By far the best windows editor.

"That's one of the reason I stopped using Google anything. Until they do the right thing and give us back our YouTube accounts, they can go fuck themselves."

Hear hear!

That was really an act of astonishing rudeness and arrogance. A formal apology and the firing of the person responsible would not be uncalled for.

So they did a text-editor roundup that excluded every serious contender in favor of 5 third-string also-rans.

I actually tried to read the text but it was too brain-numbingly stupid to get through. He's trumpeting all these wonderful features that... vi and emacs had in the 80s.

It's so true - 'those who do not remember Unix are condemned to re-invent it, poorly.'

Indeed, ages ago, I used to have so much fun with assembly.

High level languages sucked all the fun out of programming for me though.

I don't really understand what you're trying to say here. I don't know COBOL. Are you saying that if you gave me an assignment to parse a data stream in COBOL, and I couldn't do it in COBOL because I don't know COBOL, but I could both demonstrate a solution in another language and learn COBOL at a later date, I would still FAIL?

Not the same guy but I think we are on the right wavelength.

Here. Now go parse that stream using Cobol.

I dont care if you have ever heard of Cobol or not. I have never used it myself, and I havent been a working programmer in decades. But if I needed a parser written in Cobol I expect I could search for the docs first thing in the morning, find a syntax reference, and have a working if rough parser done before lunch. If this sort of work was needed by me on a regular basis I expect I would become very familiar with Cobol and a week later I would re-implement that parser in less than an hour and do a much better job.

All a computer can do is math, or if you prefer to think of it as symbolic logic, fine. But it's still all the same stuff. Any high level language you use, no matter how strange the syntax, no matter how unfamiliar the vocabulary, is still the exact same thing at core. Logic. Arithmetic. Algorithms.

A particular language may be a pleasure to work with, or it may be a pain but end of the day if you understand logic you should be able to translate your logic into any language for which you can find useful reference documentation.

I didn't.

And no, that shit is far from dead. You'll find lots of assembly in specialized proprietary hardware where it's easier to just implement your own code instead of using an entire suite of libraries and ready made IDE packages.

What I like about coding assembly, is that it's relatively straight forward, ok...the math really isn't as we don't have the luxury of floating points in every variable, various math function - and we need to keep track of our code jumps as the MCUs have certain limitations when it comes to branching here and there.

I usually use older MCUs too as I don't have to deal with numerous layers of special codes to access special features of the chip. I keep things on a simple I/O level - and add "shit" as I please. No need to have an AD/DA converter with every thing I come up with, so I just add the hardware layers I need and what whenever I need them. I've been thinking of moving to FPGAs...now THERE's something that would eat my time. Assembly is the simple shit. (But very gratifying and fun to do, even for beginners).

...and btw, those systems are OFFLINE ALWAYS! ;)

Yep, I live in the stone ages, but at least I know every corner of my systems.

I suspect he's ok with that (if not with the way you phrased it).

I've heard of lazy, but this takes the cake. Or maybe, in your case, has the cake delivered, not to your front door, but to your sofa.

This is HP through and through. They acquire a business then ruin it. We used to use a (very expensive) piece of software from a company that HP bought, immediately when HP bought the company (for a hugely overinflated amount too) the customer service turned so awful that we dropped them along with many other customers.

An 'unboxing' is only half of the modern way of reporting on new hardware. The more interesting question in this case is "will it blend?"