🚀 go-pugleaf

>       Talking about how-to-turn-off-machine I forgot to say
>       that BESM has a software feature to block power turnoff
>       (I think it's a quite valuable idea, especially for Unix
>       machines; what's about self-turning-on machines? ;-).

i have seen such a unix machine---the off switch just started a software
routine that does synch and then turns off the power via software.

we have a very old sun at gc (a unix), and once we accidentally turned it
off while it was working, and it was a real pain to restart it. :( luckily,
it wasn't my machine. :)

>       Another piece of BESM's hardware is a drum printers ACPU-128
>       (stands for Alphabetic-Numeric Printing Device, oh days of yore!)

(totally unrelated.) I've been playing with Russian hyphenation (indeed, my
MA thesis was about a very good Liang-based algorithm for doing just that),
and I've seen an algorithm (not mine:) that hyphenates, in particular,
AC-PU. :) There's a Russian language newspaper in NYC, and whatever they use
for hyphenation wasn't apparently meant for Russian: it breaks
'zdr-awstwujte' and 'prof-essor', nor for English ('tha-nks'); (I've seen
all of those in the paper). On the other hand, your Pravda breaks
'perest-rojka' a lot, totally non-Russian. :)

Of course, English (mis)hyphenations give rise to even funnier breaks. The
NYTimes uses some really dumb hyphenation algorithm that breaks "gran-daunt"
et al. This I've seen, but one can come up with cute examples, like
"the-rapists pre-ached on wee-knights" (from the TeXbook) or "rear-range
off-ending par-king", but this is made up. Who's seen really bad hyphenation
breaks in real life publications? Post 'em up. :)

D.V.