Dr. Dobb's is certainly closer to being dead than 8-bit microcontrollers are. It ceased publication as a standalone magazine in February 2009; it's now online and a monthly section in InformationWeek called Dr. Dobb's Report.
Jack Crenshaw's book Let's Build a Compilerhttp://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/ is probably too far to the pragmatic end; it essentially walks you through the process of writing a recursive-descent compiler in Pascal for a Pascal-like language that generates code for the m68k. No separate parser and lexer as such, but he does teach you how to turn those kinds of ideas (regexes and EBNF equations) into code more-or-less directly in your head. In short, it was just about perfect for someone who wanted to whip up a nice little compiler for a foogol on a late-1980s DOS box without paying for or finding any tools beyond Turbo Pascal.
It's entirely possible to use the techniques in the book to, say, whip up a compiler in Ruby that turns an inconvenient data format into JSON. The real utility of doing this by hand in 2010 is, however, debatable.
> Of course, Scott Adams has been at this for years and having to come up with a new joke each day for that length of time would be rather challenging.
Definitely the case. This comedy degradation happened to Garfield and Peanuts as well, and it hit Peanuts especially hard because, well, it's Schultz. He was doing genius work in the 1950s-1960s, refining a lot of the medium traits we now take for granted.
Both Garfield and Dilbert were a lot weirder in their early years, had larger casts, and more diverse settings. In one of the early Dilbert plotlines, he discovers dinosaurs hiding in his home after a computer model tells him they can't all be gone. Not exactly genius, but better than anything Adams is making now.
The decline of Peanuts was especially sad. Schultz was a trouper and did the work until he physically and mentally couldn't anymore, and the decline showed painfully. Buying the huge Fantagraphics collection might be beyond your budget, but if you get a chance to flip through it by all means do so.
The foregoing illustrates why The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were ended early. It also illustrates just how resistant to change newspaper readers are: The reason strips are allowed to sit and fester for decades when TV shows are off the air in a few seasons is due entirely to the fact papers will lose circulation if they cut the wrong strip.
> Killing someone while drunk should be considered premeditated.
I agree.
> Some of the current drugs out there need to stay illegal. Not because they get you high, but because they are toxic.
OK, I'll replace 'toxic' with 'potentially more addictive and dangerous than weed, alcohol, and nicotine' (Tobacco is damned addictive but it doesn't seem to cause antisocial behaviors.), because otherwise what you said makes no damned sense.
Go back to the late 1800s: People could buy cocaine and opium over-the-counter at drugstores. Laudanum (also called tincture of opium), a common patent medicine, was made from 10% opium and 1% morphine dissolved in alcohol. This, too, was available over-the-counter. America was prosperous, growing, and certainly not universally addicted to drugs.
So, why do you think going back to that regime would be dangerous? What evidence do you have that contradicts my historical analysis?
I was actually talking about the chemical mixes that are actually toxic / poison that are being brewed in trailers in the rural areas or kitchens in apartment complexes. I wasn't writing about addictiveness.
> I was actually talking about the chemical mixes that are actually toxic / poison that are being brewed in trailers in the rural areas or kitchens in apartment complexes. I wasn't writing about addictiveness.
Right. Well, legalization will help that as it is, in fact, illegal for a legitimate company to sell some unknown poison when it is claiming to sell drugs of a given composition and purity. Also, meth labs as we now know them will become economically impossible if it's possible to get meth legally: They are the perfect, absolutely perfect example of the kind of high-risk/high-reward behavior that is only worthwhile if you have gigantic margins subsidized by the DEA and local police.
> Drug violence is rarely about cartels vs cops -- more often it's cartels vs cartels and dealers vs dealers.
Precisely the point: If the cartels come to intimidate grandma, she calls the police, because her operation is legal and the intimidation is not. The police, because her operation is legal, then go after the cartel and shut them down.
Additionally, contract laws and theft/burglary laws and so on work in grandma's favor, because the legal system is at least potentially on the side of her legal operation. This alone greatly reduces the need for violence.
No, the critical difference is that as things currently stand none of the people involved in the drug trade have any reason to cooperate with the authorities. And really, once alcohol was legalized look at how quickly the mob violence around it disappeared.
Right. Prohibition created the Mafia - before Prohibition they were a bunch of petty Italian thugs, but America's real desire for alcohol made them rich and powerful. Prohibition never works. You'd think a bunch of free marketeers like American conservatives would get that.
Textbooks do seem to exist as if the Internet weren't usable, don't they? At most they seem to have a few URLs to the publisher's and author's websites. It's actually kind of sad, as if textbook authors didn't trust themselves to outdo what people can find online. Zed does not seem to have that problem.
Make this one option. The other option should be one HTML file per chapter (or subchapter, or thereabouts) for the people who want to use the browser's bookmark functionality to pick up where they left off.
> no headers and footers on every page
Footnotes, OTOH, are fine if you make them links in both directions (to the note and back to the body text). Both HTML and PDF can do this, and it makes it so much less of a pain in the ass to actually read the things when you know you won't get lost.
Nedit http://www.nedit.org/ might be too much like ass for you, but it's pretty simple in the default state and isn't just a GUI wrapper around a character-terminal editor.
