[Info-vax] Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[AEF]

On Feb 2, 10:35 am, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
> In article <00ACE4B7.44B65... at sendspamhere.org>,
>         VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG writes:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

Well, one annoying thing I find posting with Google Groups is all
those >'s you see above. WTF?

> > In article <an4o97Fbfm... at mid.individual.net>, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) writes:
> >>In article <nospam-942E9C.15475402022... at news.chingola.ch>,
> >>        Paul Sture <nos... at sture.ch> writes:
> >>> In article <an0qmpFduj... at mid.individual.net>,
> >>>  billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
>
> >>>> Just out of curiosity, I just looked at a couple of manpages on a
> >>>> FreeBSD system and none of them exhibited this straight-right-margin
> >>>> of which you speak.
>
> >>> uname -sr
> >>> FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p1
> >>> man bash
>
> >>> DESCRIPTION
> >>>   Bash  is  an  sh-compatible  command language interpreter that executes
> >>>   commands read from the standard input or from a file.  Bash also incor-
> >>>   porates useful features from the Korn and C shells (ksh and csh).
>
> >>>   Bash  is  intended  to  be a conformant implementation of the Shell and
> >>>   Utilities portion  of  the  IEEE  POSIX  specification  (IEEE  Standard
> >>>   1003.1).  Bash can be configured to be POSIX-conformant by default.
>
> >>> (edited to strip first 5 spaces of each line to avoid wrapping in this
> >>> post)
>
> >>> Note how multiple spaces are distributed along the lines to get right
> >>> justification.
>
> >>MAN(1)                  FreeBSD General Commands Manual                 MAN(1)
>
> >>NAME
> >>     man -- format and display the on-line manual pages
>
> >>SYNOPSIS
> >>     man [-adfhkotw] [-m arch[:machine]] [-p string] [-M path] [-P pager]
> >>         [-S list] [section] name ...
>
> >>DESCRIPTION
> >>     The man utility formats and displays the on-line manual pages.  This ver-
> >>     sion knows about the MANPATH and PAGER environment variables, so you can
> >>     have your own set(s) of personal man pages and choose whatever program
> >>     you like to display the formatted pages.  If section is specified, man
> >>     only looks in that section of the manual.  You may also specify the order
> >>     to search the sections for entries and which preprocessors to run on the
> >>     source files via command line options or environment variables.  If
> >>     enabled by the system administrator, formatted man pages will also be
> >>     compressed with the ``/usr/bin/gzip -c'' command to save space.
>
> >>Notice that this one doesn't.  :-)  Looks like it depends on who wrote the
> >>man page and being as we all know where bash originated, is it any wonder
> >>they did a bad job on the man page?
>
> > I just 'alias' man to 'man --nj'  (--no-justification)
>
> And I just ignore the spaces (actually, my brain does that without any
> additional effort on my part) and just extract the meainingful information
> from what I read.

You spelled "meaningful" wrong.

That's you. Obviously, quite a few disagree.

> Considering the complaints about text formating in man pages and
> the repeated grammar and spelling corrections seen here and in
> other technical groups, just when did computer science become the
> domain of frustrated english teachers?

The formatting issue (you spelled formatting wrong) is a question of
typography and ease of reading.

Prose with a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes gives the impression
of a, well -- let's just say it doesn't give a good impression. If a
diploma were written by a child in crayon, what would you think? If
such diplomas were plastered on the wall in a doctor's office, what
would _you_ think?

Execute, not liberate.

Execute not, liberate.

The comma makes all the difference in the world.

>
> bill
>
> --
> Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
> billg... at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
> University of Scranton   |
> Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>

AEF

I vote for chocolate chip cookies and skim milk.