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I fondly remember regularly logging into simtel20.wsmr.army.mil back in the days (WSMR=White Sands Missile Range). No issue, just used “anonymous” as the username, and your email address as the password. And even the email address was just a convenience…

In nearly forty-ish years on the internet (yes, I was around before the web), I have not seen someone expressing an internet address in octal (before this discussion), although I remember that it is legal. Using hex, yes, but not octal.

But it does not work by definition, it is non-routable. That some systems use it as an alias is a different issue.

This is a special case. This resolves to 0.0.0.0, and technically cannot be routed. Some(!) systems use it as a kind of alias for all local network addresses, but it is not a given.

It’s all in the documentation. But people don’t read anymore.

Yes, but you can write it in different ways. If the numeric string contains a dot, left of it must be between 0 and 255, and is put in the highest byte of the address. If the rest also contains a dot, repeat, but put it into the second highest byte.

BUT: if the string does not contain a dot, the number is put into the remaining bytes.

So 123.256 is a valid address. The 123 goes into the top byte, the 256 goes into the remaining three bytes, so the address would be 123.0.1.0.

Most common example is 127.1, which is short for 127.0.0.1 - the localhost address.

Try pinging 127.1 - it is the same, but shorter.

Just another tipp from someone who learned TCP/IP from reading the sources over three decades ago…

This depends on what you are actually looking for, and how you are looking for it.

Do you really need pattern matching, or do you only look for fixed strings? Then other tools may be faster.

If you need case independent search on an upper- and lowercase data set, make a copy that is all upper or all lower, and search there.

If you only search in certain columns, make a copy that only includes these.

Or import the data into a database.

The killer collective.

I remember installing a fresh PC with win98. During installation, I disabled some windows bloatware (Imagine! You actually could do this!), and ended up with an unresponsive, non-windows app blocking the system. I killed that app and removed it from the system. Keep in mind that at this point, no network connection was set up, nor did I install any driver or program yet, this was straight from the windows install medium.

After reboot, the app was back, and again blocking the system.

Wiping the harddisk and starting installation over did not help either.

Turned out this was some bloatware installed by the BIOS whenever it detected at boot that there was a) a Windows installation that was b) “missing” their “register your PC with us” app. This needed some Windows bloatware to work, and thus failed on this machine.

This was the only time I angrily screamed at a hotline worker.

First of all, he should drop Python for anything resource intensive as such a simulation. And then think about how to optimize the algorithm.

“For our profits, it is reasonable not to waste money on AC.” – Your boss

Well, this would be more calling the cops on the DoorDash driver.

The compressing and renumbering seems to be more common with embedded Chinese fonts - Space-wise it makes a lot of sense. But yes, mark and copy text, paste it into word or writer, and you get gibberish. Can’t verify the search, though. And, of course, Google translate can’t do anything with it, either.

If you ever need to edit a PDF that way, just use Inkscape. It is way better than LO draw for that.

It is not a curse. It does exactly what it is intended to do: Create an archive of a document that is universally reproduceable.

It is a very well designed cul-de-sac for exactly this purpose. Using it for anything else is calling for trouble.

The problem lies in the PDFs themselves. In there are objects that represent lines of glyphs. If you are lucky. A conversion tool can guess which of those lines belong together and produce the text.

It cannot know any intentions behind it, though. Take a numbered list. The first line is two line objects: the number plus the . or the ), and the first line of text. The conversion tool can now guess. As the line blocks with the numbers are all left of the line blocks with text, this could be a numbered list. Or it could be a table with two columns. Nothing in the PDF is giving any hints.

And that is the easy part. This assumes that the document either uses default fonts, or keeps its embedded fonts untouched. If they use embedded fonts and a PDF optimizer that only embeds the used characters and renumbers them, any copy or conversion tool is bound to fail.

Same with protected PDFs where you simply cannot copy the text from the start.

And then there are PDFs that just consist of scanned pages. Here you would need an OCR software to get something readable out of them.

PDF is an archival, output format, the end of a process. Not something to work from.

Always preserve the original file. Keep it safe. If you change tools, make sure you have a conversion path into something editable. The PDF is for giving away, nothing else.

Funny though, I only had to install drivers manually on Windows for years now, but not on the various Linux systems I manage.

I used an Apple II at school, but that was already the fourth computer I worked with. The first was a one-board computer with an LCD and one kilobyte of RAM, the second was a TI99/4A with 16 KB, and the third was a C64. I never had a PC running Windows as a main OS, but one of my earlier PCs had win95 as an alternative boot for gaming only.