> To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special?

I started out with OS/2 v1.1. It had threads, DLLs, multi-tasking, much larger memory space, and from v1.2 a somewhat decent filesystem. Coming from DOS 3.2/Win 2.0 this was an incredible leap, in particular the SDK was amazing compared to the ragtag assembly of info I was used to. The _delta_ between two systems haven't been this large ever since, and I think that is what contributes to the "magic" feeling.

Draw.io is quite good, and it is made without using any frameworks. Alas, the source code is not open to learn from.

<https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-tools-and-languages-used-i...>

> source code is not open

What about this: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio

> What about this: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio

That repository only contains the minified code, not the original source.

Holy shit dude, all those years I was dead sure it was open source and all.

Like a "proof that open source is working", a show case of a good quality, open source project.

Oh well, time to strike that one off the list.

The original Dvorak layout had 0 positioned on the right index finger (where 7 is on Qwerty keyboards). The layout of the numeric keys on what passes as a "Dvorak" layout today was apparently determined by the ANSI committee for... reasons.

In Norway, the companies are required by law to pay the pensions into a special type of investment account where withdrawal are not allowed until you are retired, but you can choose your own investment profile: A mandatory 401k.

The arrangement where the _company_ controls the account seems to me to be more of a allowed delay in salary payout, to the benefit of the company, than a retirement account for the employee.

The traditional way pensions were handled in the US was directly by the company and paid from company coffers. In those days, the goal of any company was to stay in business long term. One of the ways that was accomplished was by making a lifetime career with the company as attractive as possible through generous pensions.

In modern times, retirement is pretty much exclusively through private investment accounts (401k and similar) into which your company may directly deposit funds. Nowadays it'd be a crazy risk to pin your retirement 100% on a single company. The company could fail, raid the pension fund, or just decide to not pay anymore. All those things happened and that's why we use private investment accounts now.

There are still some traditional pension plans, notably the US postal service. But they're very rare now.

most companies converted from pensions to self-directed plans because the cost of any benefit is essentially free compared to a defined benefit pension plan.

The savings are managed by bank or insurance companies' subsidiaries who are entirely unrelated to the employer. In other words it has nothing to do with mid century corporate pensions.

Australia has a similar system called Super. On top of base pay, every Australian employer has to contribute another 11.5% of a person's salary into an employee-controlled Super investment fund that the employee can only touch upon retirement or severe illness.

It's a great system.

New Zealand copied it, except employee has to pay 3% (now just increased to 4%) and employer matches.

What happens with contractors in Oz? I know a nurse over there on high hourly rate, and I'm guessing part of the reason is to avoid employer contributions.

Is there a strong push for contractors throughout the Oz economy (not just government)?

Most contractors “work” for a payroll firm that manages this for them, which is usually the recruiting firm that put them into the role.

For tax and superannuation purposes, they are PAYG employees in non-ongoing positions.

The real fun situation is when the 401k requires mandatory investment in the company stock.

None of the responsibility, all the moral hazard.

This was made illegal in the US after Enron.

For now

Except this time around it'll be mandatory Trump coin

I second this, and just want to add that strsafe.h contains replacements for the runtime string routines.

> The real problem is acceptance of non-word/latex papers

Some scientific journals, which only provides a Word template, require you to print to PDF to submit, then ships this PDF to India, where a team recreates the look of the submission in LaTeX, which is then used to compose the actual journal. I wish this was hyperbole. For these journals, you can safely create a LaTeX-template looking _almost_ the same, and get away with it.

I have a Brother DCP-9020CDW which I've owned for over a decade and which still keeps humming. A bit expensive with four toners and a drum, but that's color laser for you. I'm very happy with it, and I guess I'd be equally happy with any Brother MFC-LxxxxCDW that's one market now.

If one wants an inkjet, I'd go for an Epson EcoTank.

This makes the Fermi paradox even weirder: If there is a bunch of these asteroids floating around in space, ready to seed life on numerous Earth-like planets, there should be an even bigger chance of seeing someone else, than if life have to originate on the planets themselves.

It could be life is evolved elsewhere but it's hard to communicate / travel many light years?

Firefox can be configured to use Kerberos for authentication (search for "Configuring Firefox to use Kerberos for SSO"); on Windows, Chrome is supposed to do so too by adding the domain as an intranet zone.

Could you not use --first-parent option to test only at the merge-points?