Slashdot Mirror

The 1. missing idea from my previous post is the output format. There is no reason to have documents be a stack of pages when they are displayed on a screen. It is absolutely boneheaded. There are solutions for producing HTML from TeX source, this was the first search result: http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/ . I don't know why academics keep ignoring this and keep making PDFs which are only good for printing and for displaying on large monitors. There are many small devices which are better suited for reading (e.g. on the train), and PDF papers look like crap on them ( http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/12/01/214255/ask-slashdot-tablets-for-papers-are-we-there-yet ). The problem with HTML is that it can't be saved locally and passed around easily. Maybe EPUB can help. The page I linked has a section on how to make EPUBs. So my suggestion is to have a prominent option to output to EPUB. Strike the collaboration features, we can handle using git or SVN for a few more years.

This is the reputation that Gcc has, but it's not quite true anymore.

Gcc improves all the time. They have been using the SPEC benchmarks to monitor performance at every build for quite some time now, and it shows. There are commercial players behing Gcc (and Apple is one of them), for whom performance is really an issue.

The numbers for recent versions of GCC aren't that bad, really. In an objective comparison you will find that Gcc sometime yields faster code than the native compiler of choice. This has been true for me on Alphas, PPCs, Sparcs and x86. Sometimes this is not true and the native compiler produces significantly better code, but this only points out where things can be improved in Gcc. There is nothing set in concrete there.

I don't think that there are too many cooks. Each of them can focus on a particular back end.

Also I've consistently found native compiler buggier. As recently as yesterday the Intel Compiler (latest version: 7.1) could not compile tth, on Linux RedHat 7.3. It does after allocating all the available memory in the system (tth is a very long single-file program). Try it yourself if you don't believe me.

Finally Gcc is the cornerstone of the Free Software movement. Without it no Linux, no *BSD, nothing. It's probably the most tested and solid compiler on the face of the Earth.

[All links pulled from google's first page for each letter - sick, ain't it?]

instead of latex2html, use tth -- much cleaner output (although it does still choke on a few things).

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LaTeX is an excellent tool, but it's a tool to organize information into platform-independent documents. These documents are set up using pre-defined types (this is an article, a book, etc.), and then organized following the established structure for that document type. LaTeX then provides a variety of tools to simplify cross-referencing, indexing, and otherwise making logincal use of that information.

Using LaTeX to provide greater control over the layout of information on the Web seems like it would be falling into the same trap that ate HTML -- if you remember, HTML was originally intended to organize information in a logical hierarchy, not make pretty pictures.

The paragraph of links:
At least one other person has already pointed to TeX 2 HTML and LaTeX 2 HTML, so I'll just add that if you're interested in well structured documents on the Web, it is actually true that XML has a lot to offer. And as long as I'm listing sites off like a madman, let's not forget the good old W3C.

Oh, yeah...http://www.latex-project.org...


Coke Is It (1982)

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .