Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2020 July 17

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July 17

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Keyboard ¬

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Indirectly from reading Australian English#Computer keyboards, I learn that British versions of the IBM Enhanced PC keyboard have featured the ¬ ("not" or negation) character explicitly. This is fascinating to me: I had tended to assume that ¬ was one of those obscure fossils in ISO 8859 that had largely been forgotten. So to those of you who have this on your keyboards: What (if anything) do you use it for in practice? —Steve Summit (talk) 12:40, 17 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It is there, but I've never used it. Programming languages still use ! or ~ from ASCII for not, regardless of ¬ being available. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 13:22, 17 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I have a *very* vague memory that Phil Wadler's Orwell language may have used it for something (not necessarily for any kind of not), which is credible because Orwell was a creature of Oxford and Glasgow Universities. Unfortunately someone stole my Orwell book 20 years ago. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 14:38, 17 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Plusungood. :-( —Steve Summit (talk) 15:02, 17 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It's used in PL/1: ¬ not, ¬= not equal, ¬> not greater than ¬< not less than.[1] I've no idea why anyone would use ¬> instead of <=. It used to be on US keyboards as well, particularly the card punches (actually at that date IIRC the only keyboards were "US"). (Sorry forgot signature) Martin of Sheffield (talk) 20:24, 17 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It is one of the standard operators of ALGOL 60, and as such predates PL/I. In fact, ALGOL 60 inherited this from its precursor ALGOL 58, aka IAL.[1]  --Lambiam 13:35, 23 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Roper, J S (1973), PL1 in easy stages, Paul Elek (Scientific Books), ISBN 0 236 17634 X

¬ was a standard EBCDIC character present on IBM keyboards in the mainframe era, and languages like PL/I used it for boolean negation. Its presence on that British keyboard probably derives from this, rather than some ASCII extension. 2601:648:8202:96B0:0:0:0:5B74 (talk) 20:23, 23 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

display/cursor switches between pages/lines

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Windows 10, Microsoft Surface laptop a couple years old.

Very strange. As I type along, the cursor jumps to another line or elsewhere on the current line This has been happening for quite some time.

Today, for the first time, something really amazing. I logged in, and immediately a blank Word document page pops up.

????

Any advice appreciated. --173.21.154.185 (talk) 13:08, 17 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like sticky keys. Have you tried vacuuming the keyboard?--Shantavira|feed me 17:41, 17 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Internet website

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Tips on how to launch internet website — Preceding unsigned comment added by AWOTIDE Emmanuel (talkcontribs) 21:45, 17 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Can you be more specific please? Do you want to build a website, or to publicize a new already functional website? What type of website is this (news; discussion forum; e-commerce; ...)? What is the intended audience or user group?  --Lambiam 08:25, 18 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
And since you posted this on the computing refdesk, some platform information would be germane to our answers. Do you see this as a LAMP stack sort of Linux machine server, is it virtualized, perhaps on AWS or Digital Ocean? Or do you intend to delegate all the server platform management to a web hosting service, such as Wordpress? What technical expertise is held by your team and organization? How much money have you budgeted for the hosting service, the bandwidth, the storage, the compute cycles, the manpower, the design and programming? Are you planning to use apps or Javascript or just a static website? What security considerations will you need to address?
Inquiring minds want to know! Elizium23 (talk) 08:43, 18 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]