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As the old joke goes:

"For your birthday, I wanted to get you a pocket calculator ... but then I thought you'd already know how many pockets you have."

> was Metafont the only outline-based font technology

Surely Karow's Ikarus was earlier than that.

One of the main innovations of Metafont was the use of "pen"s, so that one would describe a single path and the software would trace it and imitate the use of one or more pens, to end with an outline of something with thickness, and essentially more curves. It mimics how drawing and writing actually happens.

AFAIK, Zapf did not like this approach at all, as he was used to design typefaces the traditional way, by specifying all the curves. Richard Southall embraced the new paradigm and used Metafont as it was supposed to be used, but produced only a couple of demo typefaces (mainly the nmt family) and a handful of commercial ones (I can now only remember Colorado, with Ladislas Mandel, used in the phone directories of US West). I think he also implemented Melior, but of course this was never distributed as it was a proprietary Zapf design.

Note: all the above are based on recollections of my discussions with Zapf, Southall, and Knuth, in the distant past. All my relevant printed materials are in a different country right now, and I don't have easy access to them.

RIP. I've actually found the Handbook of Programming Languages (4 volumes) that he edited much more useful than his Unix history.

I met him in a few conferences, back in the day. We ended up talking more about linguistics than Unix history, somehow.

They definitely also had NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access): on multi-CPU systems, you had a variety of ways to specify where you wanted your data to live (stay close to one CPU, for example).

People who look for solutions in this space (Time Series DB for measurements, for example) can also look at the good ol' RRDtool https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/ first released more than 25 years ago...

And thank you for this. In my professional setting, this is a very valuable addition -- provided it works correctly, of course ;-).

Now if we could also have comments inside the code ("BEGIN/END snippet by Copilot"), that would also be great!

I concur completely. Back in those days, the very basic stuff you mention (awk, sed, make) were being built by a handful of people, all sitting together, and the few outsiders who were submitting enhancements (even before these were called "patches") knew the email addresses to send these to. For Sendmail, you should contact the people at Berkeley, for most of the others you sent to Bell Labs.

Then software started appearing from other points. We were getting new versions of software after email announcements -- and later on, on comp.sources.unix -- and we were reading the comments to see that other people were contributing, too.

The way you publish your software (especially today) essentially boils down to how much you are looking for contributors vs. users (vs. no one at all).

Most of this is based on Copyright legal framework, which is surprisingly homogeneous around the world. The discussions about ownership of AI-generated material are exactly the same in EU.

Yes, and if the same come ends up in someone else's hands, they can state "we didn't steal it, a GenAI generated it for us, the same as it did for you". Given the non-deterministic operation of current GenAI systems (a major difference from compilers), it would probably be hard to prove either position.

One of the minor but very welcome latest updates of Microsoft Windows was the addition of the capability to type Win+- to get an en-dash (–) and Shift+Win+- to get an em dash (—).

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Grik-spiking werld.

You can still start such a company now. The tricky part is to gain the trust of customers.

Well, if it's AI-generated, it's not really copyrighted by you and you cannot license it under GPL, since you did not write it.

Nice work, nevertheless, and useful!

I believe the major hurdle would be from the "renter" part.

Usually such installations are only allowed to be done by the owners, not tenants.

Interesting, but some of the information is conflicting: the design was about "No assumed orientation. Something that works in a mirror" but then the 24-hour arc talks about "(top, 12 o'clock position) clockwise".

Placing midnight on top forces an orientation, while specifying clockwise makes mirroring impossible.

But this is only on the text description, the actual clock would work anyway.

People are still be born in Sparta, Greece; no time travel needed.

It's pretty straightforward to sync the contacts on the phone with the contacts on Fastmail via CardDAV, using DAVx5 for example.

Right! ed was the first one, and its ideas and commands influenced sed (a "streams" ed), and ex (an "extended" editor, which also had a "vi"sual mode).

It's even easier to exec a hash of argv[0] and print it.

Of all the C-named fonts introduced by Microsoft at that moment in time, I think Consolas was the one which made the greatest difference from what was available already.

Let's see whether it will also be the one with the most lasting impact.

IIRC, it will never stop because now it has been "standardized". The OOXML specification explicitly mentions that the conversions of dates and their attributes (like whether a year is a leap one) has to follow the Excel implementation.

Most (all?) of the solutions offered are not providing a "code review service" but rather a "curated registry" one: download from us and we guarantee some things.

It's definitely more widely known/used for container images than individual software packages.

The complexity (and therefore the effort) of implementing such a setup varies greatly, depending on the ecosystem you're working on: Java, Python, Rust, Go, Node, ...

For anyone interested, the corresponding software has been released under an Open Source license: https://github.com/IntelLabs/encrypted-computing-sdk

I also regularly visit the 3-4 that are within 10 minutes walking distance from my place. It's fun to see that they have slowly become more "specialized"; for example, English books typically appear in only one of them.

Even better would be an advanced user setting, allowing to set the difference percentage. I find it illuminating to answer questions with 100% (or more), when one answer is at least double the other -- and still make mistakes.

The main advantage for using "or later" is not really to be OK when a new version of the license is published, as this happens rarely.

What you gain is the possibility of combining this code with any other code that is under a later version of the license. If there is code X under GPL-2.0-only and code Y under GPL-3.0-only, these cannot be combined, since each license declares that any derivative work has to be under the same license. If code X were under GPL-2.0-or-later, the combination would be compliant.

Yes, it was essentially a "zoom" wheel.

Writing in a plan "no GPL/LGPL code" does not actually mean "forget all the GPL/LGPL code that you have ever seen, so that you start from a clean slate".

Remember that we're talking many years ago, in the previous century.

The only way to "automatically" deposit cash was to put it into an envelope and then drop it in the machine. IIRC, you used to write the total amount on the outside of the envelope, together with your bank account information.

The machine was emptied at regular intervals, the envelopes were transferred to the bank, and an employee was manually opening them, verifying the amount, and credit your account.