Aside from changing indentation, I've used it for things like turning single column tables into multiple column tables, removing common prefixes from a list, removing commas from aligned numbers, moving table columns in LaTeX source, and moving pieces of ascii diagrams around (for block comments designed to be renderable in ditaa.) Those are just some uses that I can think of off the top of my head.

I find it one of those things that doesn't seem very useful until you have an editor that can actually do it. Then you suddenly start finding uses for it.

Others, off the top of my head:

Sony Imageworks has started to open source a series of components recently. Admittedly, some of them like Pystring are fairly minor, but others like OSL are serious pieces of code.

Disney's Ptex library is also open source.

Then there's the old Cinepaint project from R&H.

You mean something like Fusion?

An even more appropriate old saying in this case: "One might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb."

It's not as though they're competing for a prize here. It's just a friendly competition. You're free to ignore their result and focus on the rest if you like.

Personally, I find this kind of thing interesting as far as seeing what's possible, even if it's not exactly practical.

Try "ps faux | grep [f]irefox" instead.

See <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws">Clarke's First Law</a>.

Honestly, Emacs does have a lot of stuff, but it's pretty much all load-on-demand these days. Jokes aside, a basic startup can be pretty darn quick:

% time emacs -nw -Q --kill

real 0m0.089s
user 0m0.067s
sys 0m0.012s

If I force it to load CC mode with a ~4kloc C++ file to edit, that rises to about 0.185s real. More importantly I only pay the extra delay the first time. Things are pretty much instant after that. If that's not enough, I can amortize the cost over a persistent session running for weeks at a time with multiple clients attached from different terminals.

<quote>I agree that it's a nuisance but I'm not certain it's spam. I am not receiving unsolicited e-mails or cold-calls to my phone about this. Unlike my personal inbox or my personal telephone, Amazon is a place of business.</quote>

Maybe you haven't seen it yet, but I've received a number of e-mails from Amazon announcing "new books" from these guys with titles referring to topics that I'm interested in. Yes, I can opt-out of such e-mails from Amazon but automatic notification of new books in my field is a useful service to me, and it's led directly to Amazon getting sales out of me because they provide it.

So yes, it does lead to spam of a form, and I think Amazon needs to handle this very carefully.

Ugh, yes. I don't even use either of those services.

I couldn't find a control specifically for them, but I did discover that turning on Help & Preferences > Layout > Use Classic Index seemed to kill them without too much impact.

less

I use grep a lot so I voted for that, but I use less far more.

Last I used Eclipse, it would show you giant tooltips with the Javadoc summaries too, assuming you had it correctly pointed at source jars and whatnot. So you do get more than just the prototype. I'm pretty sure VS does something similar with its XML documentation.

It's not really refraction. There actually is a refraction effect which is why we can see the sun at sunrise before it would be strictly visible over the horizon, and still see it at sunset after it's gone below the horizon. It's really more of a reflection -- think of light being scattered around by glitter except on a much smaller scale.

Rayleigh scattering preferentially scatters shorter (bluer) wavelengths more strongly. When the sun is directly overhead, as in midday, light nearer to the reddish end of the spectrum will reach you directly while only the bluer wavelengths will have been scattered. The blue that you see is light from the sun that has been scattered towards you by the air molecules in the atmosphere. The opposite happens at sunrise and sunset to make it appear red; the light reaching you has a much longer optical path to go through so nearly all of the the blue wavelengths have been scattered away leaving only the reddish light to reach you.

There's also a minor effect due to Mie's scattering off the dust and other particulates in the atmosphere. Mie's scattering deals with scattering by slightly larger particles than Rayleigh scattering.

I used to play a ton of instagib CTF on the Unreal Tournament series. No powerups, health boxes, armor, ammo, or weapons to collect. All you got was the super shockrifle: a beam weapon that killed instantly and had effectively infinite ammo but did no splash damage.

Skill in that game involved speed and accuracy with firing, learning the dodge combos to move evasively, and knowing the maps.

I always liked it because it felt more like a pure contest of skill to me than the FPS games that involved collecting weapons. Things like standing around guarding the rocket launcher from the guy with the pistol always seemed like a cheese tactic. The fully loaded player guarding the rockets might actually be the better player, or it could have been a lucky fluke that they capitalized on. The difference in power always seemed to me to obscure the connection between skill and performance.

By contrast, with instagib a player had to repeatedly prove that they really were the superior.