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I am not getting it at all...
A generation ago, you could buy spray cans with "air freshener" to make your living room smell like, say, a pine forest. (Maybe these products still exist in other parts of the world; here I haven't seen them for many years.)
Discussing the quality of coffee served in paper cups (or plastic cups) is like discussing which of these "air fresheners" would give the most satisfying feeling of being out in a pine forest. With the only difference that in a huge metropol, the nearest pine forest may be a hundred miles away. Most likely you wouln't have to walk (in the USA: drive) more than a handful miles to the nearest shop selling you whole coffee beans, that you can pour into your grinder with a grain of cardamom (not too much - it should never give a taste of cardamom, just a slight aroma). You put the ground coffee into the filter, pour boiling water over it, and you get real coffee, the way it is meant to taste!
Sure, when you're on the run, with no time for anything but what's available, then you grab whatever is available and don't give a sh*t. But what is the purpose of discussing / evaluating the various qualities of sh*t??
I guess I know. It has to do with lots of people never caring to make themselves a decent cup of coffee. They never cared to buy whole coffee beans (or cardamom fruits); in their kitchen they haven't got coffee filters for a Moccamaster or even a simple filter holder and a water kettle. Briefly said: They have never experienced the taste of real coffee.
It isn't limited to coffee. You can see people discussing various diaper teas (tea bags), without ever having tasted "real" tea. Or canned soups, never having been served a soup made from fresh vegables and meat/fish and freshly boiled broth. Discussing alternative plastic packed bread, never having tasted bread still warm from the oven.
There is a strange belief that cooking takes a lot of effort and time, so you "have to" use pre-factored products. When we got these "Ready-for-use" pre-packaged bags of oats porrige, "Just add water and bring to a boil", one of my friends commented, "Isn't that exactly what you do with plain oats at one third the price?" - well, you may have to add a pinch of salt, but that is the main difference!
A friend of mine distinguishes between the bottles of home made strawberry juice from berries picked on sunny days or on cloudy days; they have distinctly different character. You won't ever see that kind of distinction in something sold by CCC! At one occasion when I was served waffels with strawberry jam, I commented that I sure enjoy homemade strawberry jam, but nowadays you rarely are offered jam from wild strawberries! and the housewife gave me a broad smile for recognizing that quality.
I am certianly not suggesting that we all should learn to distinguish between two and three Michelin star restaurants. I am talking about mass produced food and super mass produced food. I am just saying that by making your own, from a cup of coffee and upwards, from ingredients of reasonable decent quality, you can get a lot more quality, and not the least: a lot more variation, than from those super-mega-factory pre-made products that make a virtue never to taste any better than the two thousand times you have tasted the same thing from the same manufacturer.
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Markdown: To force a line return, place two empty spaces at the end of a line.
It's enough to deal with * and ** and # and ## and ### and 1. and 1. and 1. and all the other stupid things about markdown, including the inconsistencies from site to site.
Seriously BitBucket and the rest that think markdown is the cat's meow rather than... You can't just use one of the dozens of free, open source WYSIWYG editors out there?
I know, I've ranted about this before. But it's our fault. We love this symbol soup. It's the geek version of the manager's buzzword bingo, and no better.
And I don't love it. When I use an editor, I don't want to be in "ooh, look, shiny symbols that mean things" geek mode. I want to be in "user mode" -- Give me a decent editor!!!
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Marc Clifton wrote: We love this symbol soup
Speak for yourself. I hate it. Edlin, vi, emacs. Stuff the lot of 'em, and give me Brief, or even notepad ...
As you say, there are good free open source WYSiPMWYGUYGCIWCACH* editors out there.
* What You See Is Pretty Much What You Get Unless You Get Cute In Which Case Anything Could Happen.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Notepad++ 
Monday starts Diarrhea awareness week, runs until Friday!
JaxCoder.com
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Been there . . . use that !
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Holy Moses, batman I haven't thought of Brief editor in decades. It was one of the best ones I can remember (at the time - early 80s). Now I want to find a current implementation.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, navigate a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects! - Lazarus Long
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Yay! BRIEF! I miss it.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I too did miss it for several years - but Notepad++ isn't too bad as a Windows replacement.
(I never tried any Windows version of Brief)
If I'm not mistaken, the Brief installation floppy is still down in my basement. But is it readable? If it is, will Brief run in a command.exe window? And wasn't that installation floppy a 5.25" one? Then I would have to fire up that old Win98 machine as well (for 3,5" floppies I have a USB drive ... but modern Windows refuse to read floppies without a proper format code in the boot sector, so sometimes I have to fire up Win98 for those).
Maybe I will spend this weekend to see if I can get Brief on the air again!
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I miss BRIEF, too. There's nothing like hammering out code in a hurry in a MsDOS application once you get the quirky keyboard mapping embedded into your brain. I'm probably the last guy on the planet that misses WordStar, too. 
There are some BRIEF re-creations out there, but Notepad++ works well for me with lots more support than BRIEF ever had.
BTW, remember when MS Excel and Word used to be fairly snappy? Now the latest iterations of these products seem so "leisurely" when typing, not enough to slow my work but text appears on the screen slower than on old machines with slower CPUs.
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No, your not! I use the WordStar control sequences daily. I have an AutoHotKey script that makes all my editors/IDEs/word processors use the Wordstar control sequences. I also use an old ZDNET utility called TradeKeys to remap the CAP LOCK key as the control key. Heh, nobody at work likes trying to use the editors on my machine.
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If I remember right, Brief was (or maybe still is) the only editor with a separate command for shifting the two last written characters (Ctrl-B?)
The creator must have had big problems with that. 
Leslie Nielsen:
We're sorry to bother you at such a time like this, Mrs. Twice. We would have come earlier, but your husband wasn't dead then.
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It is actually a very common typing error. I haven't yet seen a spelling checker that does not consider flipping character pairs in attempts to get a match in the dictionary.
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Very common. In my college days, I created a shortcut for the VAX VMS editors to swap two characters.
This predates all of the code completion intellisense stuff that makes coding so much easier now.*
Eclipse has great templates and "quick fixes" for just about every common Java structure.
- You still have to know what you want. We had one programmer straight out of school that would randomly accept ANY offered code completion.
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I believe that the Vax had a CPU instruction for swapping bytes (and for swapping halfwords as well). I wonder if that instruction was ever used for correcting this kind of typing error. (The instructions, in particular the halfword swap, was made for handling certain legacy PDP-11 formats, where 32 bit fields were stored with the two 16 bit PDP words in the opposite order of a Vax 32 bit word.
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Emacs used to have something similar, Ctrl-T and stood for 'twiddle' 
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I used to use Ctrl-T in the EVE* editor on VMS to do the same thing. I can't remember if it was a default command or an extension I added.
* EVE stood for Extensible Vax Editor and was written in language named VaxTPU (or just TPU - Text Processing Utility) and I added lots of 'useful' features!
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sounds like a code project 
Real programmers use butterflies
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What you are asking for, cannot easily be provided in a 7-bit-ASCII command shell. So in a Linux environment, it is DOA.
WYSIWYG is for sissies. If you can't handle ed, you don't belong.
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Member 7989122 wrote: If you can't handle ed, you don't belong
still way too interactive, a chain of sed commands with well crafted (and carefully double escaped) regex is all you need for most tasks, for anything longer there's cat.
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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The only symbol soup i can tolerate is regex and that had to grow on me.
Real programmers use butterflies
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It only grew on me when I found Expresso[^] - it's free, and it examines and generates Regular expressions. It helps a lot, especially when you're doing some complex grouping.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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honey the codewitch wrote: regex and that had to grow on me.
I can't imagine a worse fate.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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haha but they're so bloody useful. A compact way of representing little state machines.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: I can't imagine a worse fate
An infestation of VB6 ?
(Hope that didn't make you wet yourself in horror).
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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