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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yeah, theres a lot of old old laptops which make no sense to run. But there’s a growing crop of more recent used devices that are only being sold off because they don’t support Windows 11, and the power efficiency story changes there. The OOP mentions “8.1 lappies”; my main laptop has a 15W 8th gen which is only in the last year starting to feel less appropriate for desktop use. (And honestly, a RAM and storage bump will probably get me another couple years.)

    For environmental concerns, youve got to tax new devices with manufacturing costs as well.

    100% agree about VMs though.




  • Relevant except below, bolded is the key point.

    -v prints non-printing characters in a visible representation. Making strange characters visible is a genuinely new function, for which no existing program is suitable. (sed -n l, the closest standard possibility, aborts when given very long input lines, which are more likely to occur in files containing non-printing characters.) So isn’t it appropriate to add the -v option to cat to make strange characters visible when a file is printed?

    The answer is “No.” Such a modification confuses what cat’s job is  concatenating files  with what it happens to do in a common special case  showing a file on the terminal. A UNIX program should do one thing well, and leave unrelated tasks to other programs. cat’s job is to collect the data in files. Programs that collect data shouldn’t change the data; cat therefore shouldn’t transform its input.