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Professor is an English word, albeit one with a Latin origin, and it has been an English word for about 700 years. Most English words do not get inflected by gender. It must be admitted that many occupation-words that can be used as pronouns are inflected (actor/actress, waiter/waitress, etc.), but professor is not among those words. Professora does not appear in any English dictionary I tried, such as dictionary.reference.com. Professor, emeritus, and emerita all appear in every dictionary I tried.

Furthermore, "Professors Emeriti/ae" is often used as the plural. The 's' plural demonstrates that "professor" is being used in its English-language form.

Surely if a student were to talk about their "professors", you would not lecture them on their ignorant use of plurals. Why, then, do you insist that the professor is "professor emeritus" is actually a different word in a different language and therefore subject to different inflections?

And if that isn't convincing, there's the fact that "Professor Emerita" is an officially-conferred title, and therefore it is correct by definition:

http://www.sfu.ca/policies/gaz... -- an example from Canada
http://www.ucc.ie/en/academics... -- an example from Ireland
http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/artic... -- an example from the United States

What I find particulary fascinating though is the insecurity apparent in perhaps a large number of readers who prefer to defend and repeat a corrupt usage from someone who may not have known better, lest their own competency in English be considered.

The pot calling the kettle black.

Fourier considered convection, which is notably absent from significant mention in the majority of current climate models.

Citation?

I could choose from many, but HERE is mention of Fourier's consideration of convection.

HERE is a discussion of cooling via convection vs. radiation at differing pressures.

HERE is a discussion of how the climate models do not properly account for convection. (Paywalled but you can read the abstract if you don't want to pay for the paper.)

And also HERE. (NOTE: I do not claim the site that offers the paper for download is unbiased, but that is irrelevant to the content of Dr. van Andel's paper. It is also available elsewhere.)

Redaction should have been accomplished with more competence. I disagree with the idea the accused and/or accuser in any case (of adults) be allowed anonymity. The accused is, of course, Dylan Evans, and the accuser, Rossana Kennedy.

Redaction should have been accomplished with more competence. I disagree with the idea the accused and/or accuser in any case (of adults) be allowed anonymity. The accused is, of course, Dylan Evans, and the accuser, Rossana Kennedy.

Right. You are totally nuts. I suspect you've been raised with a whole heap of false information, told it's secret and privileged, etc.

But really, ancient irish writings are remarkable mostly in that they were somewhat preserved. Suffice to say, they don't support your nuttiness. http://www.ucc.ie/celt/publishd.html

It also depends on the balance between the textual content of what you write (the words) and the form they take. In past ages, writers simply wrote -- the formatting was the job of the publisher, and the author had no control over it (unless they were a Big Name). Now that it is possible for every writer to be their own typesetter, many of them feel that it is therefore their job to spend as much if not more time formatting what they write, than actually writing it.

The first thing your publisher does when they receive your final draft is probably to rip out every scrap of your formatting and put in their own, to conform to their house style. They would actually much rather have your book in plain text, with virtually zero formatting, than have to go through the expensive and time-consuming task of removing all the unnecessary hard spaces, hard linebreaks, hard pagebreaks, etc that authors insert in the fond belief that they are "helping". Smart publishers and skilled authors in technical fields use LaTeX or XML because the writer or editor can indicate what is what without prejudicing the formatting; but there are no interfaces to either system yet that are usable by the average non-specialist writer (see my paper on this topic to the Extreme Markup conference in 2006) although a couple are beginning to get close.

Unless you are writing for self-publication (just about viable now; in which case get professional typographic advice), your best bet is a wordprocessor with a stylesheet that uses some kind of Named Styles and that saves in XML so that the publisher can pick out your text with minimal formatting, and trash all the rest of the junk that wordprocessors typically insert. For a novel, however, which typically has only minimal formatting requirements anyway, it's probably not important what you use.

In fact there are a dozen or so simple interface changes that editor makers could implement that would radically ease the burden on the writer of formal or complex documents, but this would involve a paradigm shift in the interface away from concentrating on the appearance to concentrating on actually writing. Editor makers are reluctant to do this because it would reveal just how much of their interface is actually eye-candy and how little of it is really there to help the writer; and authors are naturally reluctant to forsake the comfort of their favourite wordprocessor, especially if they perceive a new interface as restricting their ability to decorate their text (not actually the case, but a perception nevertheless).

--

If you're serious about doing documentation, use an XML editor with something like the DocBook DTD/Schema, not Word. Word is for shopping lists and letters, not "real" documentation. And yes, Word does actually have a real XML editor, but it's pretty crummy; and no, Save As XML (WordML or OOXML) doesn't count.

The problem is that most XML document editors suck for non-XML-gurus. They can display either plaintext with syntax colorisation (Emacs/psgml/xxml) or pseudo-WYSIWYG, but lack the interface smarts that would make them usable (see my paper to Markup last year on this topic, or wait for the full report next year :-). Both have their advantages and disadvantages but they all require a fairly deep prior knowledge of XML. In your own case this may be fine, but not if you want to hand the editing suite to your non-XML colleagues.

A good documentation system takes some effort to build, but the results in terms of usability, persistence, quality, etc are usually well worth it. In the specific case of quoting code, XML's CDATA section feature lets you embed code verbatim, and one of the possible outputs is to transform the XML to LaTeX using XSLT, and thus enable the use of things like the listings package, which makes pretty-printed code in your PDFs.

Exactly. Håkon is almost completely correct, but for the wrong reasons. If we exclude the few people who really understand pointy-bracket markup, the traditional author just wants to be able to type stuff and edit it. They don't give a tinker's spit about file structure or formats and never will, so if Microsoft or OpenOffice want to push their undistinguished XML formats as "the" save-formats, so be it. There are currently no XML editors suitable for use by people who do not grok pointy bracket markup. Only when we have an editor capable of detecting the author's intentions and silently adding the appropriate markup will any use of meaningful XML become possible at that level (claimer: yes, this is my PhD topic :-)

You're mistaken - this is the link to the 15 year old web server. (Sorry, Irish admins!)

This type of fraud (a rogue purchases property from an innocent vendor, flips it to an innocent buyer, then absconds with the money, leaving the property with unclear title) has been around at least as long as there has been the law of contract. The legal doctrine is one of "Mistake". Here is a more recent case from the U.K. about Mistake in contract, invovling a similarly fraudulent transaction, but with a car instead of a house: Hudson v. Shogun [2001] EWCA Civ 1001.

A choice quote from that British case: "It may seem remarkable that the law governing the consequences of a fraud as common as this is still in doubt, but it is." This would apply to all of the jurisdictions deriving their law from British common law, including Australia, Canada and the U.S.

Here is an American viewpoint (the Law Site on MSN) on the issue of Mistake

No kidding. I always hate it when the tempertures outside get below -200 C. Having to swim through the atmosphere makes me terribly cold by the time I get to work.

If you are doing a lot of writing, I recommend looking at moving to XML. That way you can keep using LaTeX as your preferred formatter (via an XLST transformation XML-->LaTeX) but also have other transformations to HTML, RTF, or whatever*. Editors for XML are a pain for authors (part of my PhD work involves finding out why), but no more so than learning to write LaTeX code. Using an intermediate transformation is an extra step, but I find it gives me more flexibility.

*In theory, publishers should be able to give you their DTD or Schema for writing in XML, but in practice, they don't believe authors would be able to use it properly yet -- largely because of the poor facilities provided by XML editors.

The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree [Spike Milligan]

One of the later possibilities was implementing it in Javascript rather than embedding it in the stored SGML, which would exactly fit the "not embedded into the document stream" criterion you mention. It came up again recently when we started converting the docbase to XML.

We had rough consensus and running code, but we would never have considered patenting something that obvious, and anyway we decided we would embed it in the document markup after all.

Specifically, ethanol boils at 78.3C

What you might be refering to is the industrial production of ethanol rather than fermentation. As from the above website, industrial production uses Ethene and steam, which requires higher temperatures than simple distillation. Also note that distillation of ethanol only gets 95% pure, as that mixture of water+ethanol has a lower boiling point than either component seperately.

It is somewhat controversial.

According to many references, acronyms must be pronounceable (eg NATO, LASER), so WWF is only an abbreviation.

For example: http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxacrony .html

"Strictly, an acronym is a string of initial letters pronounceable as a word, such as "NATO". Abbreviations like "NBC" have been variously designated "alphabetisms" and "initialisms", although some people do call them acronyms. WDEU says, "Dictionaries, however, do not make this distinction [between acronyms and initialisms] because writers in general do not"; but two of the best known books on acronyms are titled Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary (19th ed., Gale, 1993) and Concise Dictionary of Acronyms and Initialisms (Facts on File, 1988).

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AcronymVsAbbreviation

Others disagree. For example: http://www.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym

"There is no requirement that an acronym be pronounceable as a normal word (this is a curious myth perpetuated by American dictionaries): IBM is just as much an acronym as LASER."

The interesting thing is that there is (kind of) an alternative to nuclear for generating hydrogen from water.

Aluminum + Water + mercury = Aluminum Oxide + Hydrogen + mercury (take a look at the other reactions on there as well. There are some that don't use dangerous stuff like mercury as a catalyst, though you can do it slower without the mercury.)

The best part? Aluminum Oxide can be recycled straight into the middle of the smelting process (aluminum is extracted from bauxite ore as aluminum hydroxide, which is then converted to aluminum oxide, which is then converted to aluminum.

Of course, it might play havoc with the market for used aluminum cans, but I can just drop the soda cans into my engine ;) (ok, not quite ;) And you still need power to convert aluminum oxide to aluminum, however that means you can set up nuclear power plants in a few key distribution centers, and ship aluminum out to everyone else for local energy generation, vehicle propulsion, etc.

Not sure what the energy density and efficiency for this process is though. Could be that you'd need 1 ton of aluminum to generate enough hydrogen to generate enough energy to propel a 1 ton car ;)

Transport solutions like this solve another problem as well: Hydrogen seepage. Hydrogen can't easily be stored for long periods of time as it seeps through cracks just larger than its own atom, and sealing these cracks is very difficult.

CPA?

The acronym server brings up Coffee Pot Attendant.

Well whoop-de-doo. Their problem. They were warned, and if they chose to ignore the warnings, they'll have to dig themselves out of it, or pay someone with a clue to do it for them. There are enough clueless designers around to keep consultants in business until Stardate 4096.

> Now imagine a world where you can only use XAML

Oh good grief. Get a life. It's just XML. It's not rocket science (or if it is, I know several unemployed rocket scientists who can help). Yes it's big. So is DocBook. Yes it's badly designed: the inclusion of executable code in a different syntax is a silly mistake, and only someone who has never used ISO 8879 before would allow Mixed Content in top-level element types. Unfortunately there are people like this at Microsoft, as well as plenty of people who do have a serious clue...but with a marketing-driven organisation, the marketing droids will always win, and if they want it that way, that's the way they'll get it.

It'll be a pig to write, a pig to maintain, a pig to understand, a pig to document, and a hog on resources, but that isn't really anything new. If it's XML, I can always open it and reprocess it using standard tools. Bill Gates (or his successors) will come to rue the day he bet the farm on XML.

The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree. --Spike Milligan

Claimer: yes, I do run the XML FAQ. No, my opinions are not those of the University I work for.

The big problem with OCLC is lack of responsiveness. I wanted to use DDC in the Acronym Server but despite me mailing them three times, they never responded, which is either ignorance, stupidity, or just plain rudeness.

currency converter - findsounds.com

how stuff works - infoplease

about.com - librarian's index

rebecca's reference - tom mayo's links
-words:

acronym/abbr -lookup -finder -bm

trans -babelfish -worldlingo -google bm

bartleby

phrontistery

pseudodictionary

jargon file
--music

epitonic - pitchfork

sonomu - electraum

gnod - audioquarium --books:

amazon - abebooks - bookfinder

gutenberg & onlinebooks

loc.gov - lambiek comiclopedia - rebecca's books

gnu scientific library

and

gnu plot

Absolutely killer apps !!!

So I'll step forward, Bob. I implemented the layout for the individual document format for the CELT project (formerly CURIA) web site in 1995. We generated (and still do) some 500 documents from SGML masters in Old Irish, Latin, and Old French using TEI into HTML via an Omnimark script. Click on the link labeled "HTML" next to any document listed in http://celt.ucc.ie/publishd.html to see it.

(It's simplistic to the point of being crude, but we specifically wanted to keep the Table of Contents on view all the time, but let the user change the document panel display when needed, which is pretty much the point of the patent, if I've understood you. Despite my dislike of the navigational problems of frames, that was how we did it.)

Any of the hundreds of scholars who have visited the site since then will be able to attest this, and I presented papers about what we were planning to do as long before as 1992 and 1993. The site has been extensively publicized in the academic field (it was originally the 9th Web server in the world) although we never specifically shouted about the technique of what we did, as it seemed too simple and obvious :-)

But it's easy to go back further. I think this method was used in one of the original SGML offline browsers, perhaps the first: the IETM (ebook) system called DynaBook, at that time (late 1980s) from EBT (Providence, RI), later Inso Corp; it was still until recently being marketed by Enigma.

So I'll step forward, Bob. I implemented the layout for the individual document format for the CELT project (formerly CURIA) web site in 1995. We generated (and still do) some 500 documents from SGML masters in Old Irish, Latin, and Old French using TEI into HTML via an Omnimark script. Click on the link labeled "HTML" next to any document listed in http://celt.ucc.ie/publishd.html to see it.

(It's simplistic to the point of being crude, but we specifically wanted to keep the Table of Contents on view all the time, but let the user change the document panel display when needed, which is pretty much the point of the patent, if I've understood you. Despite my dislike of the navigational problems of frames, that was how we did it.)

Any of the hundreds of scholars who have visited the site since then will be able to attest this, and I presented papers about what we were planning to do as long before as 1992 and 1993. The site has been extensively publicized in the academic field (it was originally the 9th Web server in the world) although we never specifically shouted about the technique of what we did, as it seemed too simple and obvious :-)

But it's easy to go back further. I think this method was used in one of the original SGML offline browsers, perhaps the first: the IETM (ebook) system called DynaBook, at that time (late 1980s) from EBT (Providence, RI), later Inso Corp; it was still until recently being marketed by Enigma.

So I'll step forward, Bob. I implemented the layout for the individual document format for the CELT project (formerly CURIA) web site in 1995. We generated (and still do) some 500 documents from SGML masters in Old Irish, Latin, and Old French using TEI into HTML via an Omnimark script. Click on the link labeled "HTML" next to any document listed in http://celt.ucc.ie/publishd.html to see it.

(It's simplistic to the point of being crude, but we specifically wanted to keep the Table of Contents on view all the time, but let the user change the document panel display when needed, which is pretty much the point of the patent, if I've understood you. Despite my dislike of the navigational problems of frames, that was how we did it.)

Any of the hundreds of scholars who have visited the site since then will be able to attest this, and I presented papers about what we were planning to do as long before as 1992 and 1993. The site has been extensively publicized in the academic field (it was originally the 9th Web server in the world) although we never specifically shouted about the technique of what we did, as it seemed too simple and obvious :-)

But it's easy to go back further. I think this method was used in one of the original SGML offline browsers, perhaps the first: the IETM (ebook) system called DynaBook, at that time (late 1980s) from EBT (Providence, RI), later Inso Corp; it was still until recently being marketed by Enigma.

So I'll step forward, Bob. I implemented the layout for the individual document format for the CELT project (formerly CURIA) web site in 1995. We generated (and still do) some 500 documents from SGML masters in Old Irish, Latin, and Old French using TEI into HTML via an Omnimark script. Click on the link labeled "HTML" next to any document listed in http://celt.ucc.ie/publishd.html to see it.

(It's simplistic to the point of being crude, but we specifically wanted to keep the Table of Contents on view all the time, but let the user change the document panel display when needed, which is pretty much the point of the patent, if I've understood you. Despite my dislike of the navigational problems of frames, that was how we did it.)

Any of the hundreds of scholars who have visited the site since then will be able to attest this, and I presented papers about what we were planning to do as long before as 1992 and 1993. The site has been extensively publicized in the academic field (it was originally the 9th Web server in the world) although we never specifically shouted about the technique of what we did, as it seemed too simple and obvious :-)

But it's easy to go back further. I think this method was used in one of the original SGML offline browsers, perhaps the first: the IETM (ebook) system called DynaBook, at that time (late 1980s) from EBT (Providence, RI), later Inso Corp; it was still until recently being marketed by Enigma.

Strictly, an acronym is a string of initial letters pronounceable as a word, such as "NATO". Abbreviations like "NBC" have been variously designated "alphabetisms" and "initialisms", although some people do call them acronyms. WDEU says, "Dictionaries, however, do not make this distinction [between acronyms and initialisms] because writers in general do not"; but two or the best known books on acronyms are titled _Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary_ (19th ed., Gale 1993) and _Concise Dictionary of Acronyms and Initialisms_ (Facts on File, 1988).

No, there is nothing about acronyms which means that, it's a mistaken idea perpetuated by some American dictionaries who should know better. FBI is indisputably an acronym but it's pronounced Eff-Bee-Eye.

To clear up some points people have commented on (based on a very preliminary inspection plus a lot of discussion at the conference):

1. The default save format is still .doc (ie you have to go the extra click to save in XML format)
2. If you pick to click it, the default XML format is MS's own office-document vocabulary, which retains all the formatting, held in attributes. Hairy but processable, and they will be shipping their schema for it so people can reprocess it externally. But this format will (of course) only represent the appearance, not any structure.
3. It will also let you specify your own schema (or an industry standard one) and let you supply a binding of named styles to your element types, so you can edit using what look like styles but actually get represented in the saved file as XML markup. There is some debate as to whether this constitutes "being an XML editor" or just "being a wordprocessor that saves data in XML" (my money is on the latter).
4. It will not support DTDs, so you're stuck with W3C Schemas whether you like them or not*
5. The discussion over a [more?] suitable schema/DTD for handling office documents (wordprocessing, spreadsheet, presentation) continues at the OASIS TC on Open Office XML Formats **

* [Bias note] I think W3C schemas were a big mistake; provision for data content typing and validation, namespaces, and extended grouping could have been achieved by extending DTD syntax; and wimpy programmers who moan about having two syntaxes to handle should get a life - it's not a big deal, the code is free and has been in use for 15 years :-)

** Sun has donated the OpenOffice (aka StarOffice) XML file formats to the public domain. It's worth remembering that {Star|Open}Office has been saving in XML as its native format for some time now, and has a lot more experience at this than MS.

To clear up some points people have commented on (based on a very preliminary inspection plus a lot of discussion at the conference):

1. The default save format is still .doc (ie you have to go the extra click to save in XML format)
2. If you pick to click it, the default XML format is MS's own office-document vocabulary, which retains all the formatting, held in attributes. Hairy but processable, and they will be shipping their schema for it so people can reprocess it externally. But this format will (of course) only represent the appearance, not any structure.
3. It will also let you specify your own schema (or an industry standard one) and let you supply a binding of named styles to your element types, so you can edit using what look like styles but actually get represented in the saved file as XML markup. There is some debate as to whether this constitutes "being an XML editor" or just "being a wordprocessor that saves data in XML" (my money is on the latter).
4. It will not support DTDs, so you're stuck with W3C Schemas whether you like them or not*
5. The discussion over a [more?] suitable schema/DTD for handling office documents (wordprocessing, spreadsheet, presentation) continues at the OASIS TC on Open Office XML Formats **

* [Bias note] I think W3C schemas were a big mistake; provision for data content typing and validation, namespaces, and extended grouping could have been achieved by extending DTD syntax; and wimpy programmers who moan about having two syntaxes to handle should get a life - it's not a big deal, the code is free and has been in use for 15 years :-)

** Sun has donated the OpenOffice (aka StarOffice) XML file formats to the public domain. It's worth remembering that {Star|Open}Office has been saving in XML as its native format for some time now, and has a lot more experience at this than MS.

There have been some electronic editions of medieval texts, notably the sole remaining manuscript of the poem Beowulf, which was written down in the early 1100s. Alas, it is proprietary, and you have to pay a rather large sum to the British Library if you want a copy.

Can you use apostrophes in acronyms when pluralizing them? Some people say yes, some people say no. I say yes! Here's why:

Purdue University has a nice blurb on how to properly use apostrophes. One of the uses is "Forming plurals of letters, numbers, and symbols" to avoid confusion.

This page says you can us an apostrophe when the acronym ends in S to avoid confusion. Their example was if you said "The DHSSs of Europe are getting together next week" it would look strange so you can use "The DHSS's of Europe are getting together next week"

This says use an Apostrophe whenever there is punctuation in the acronym. Many other publications say you can't.

Since acronyms and codes are getting more popular they have to get more complex to be unique. You wouldn't want someone getting confused between multiple Non-Maskable Interrupts and a Navy Manpower Information System. Why not make it NMI's instead of NMIs so it doesn't get confused with a NMIS.

Many people seem to agree that you shouldn't use apostrophes to pluralize acronyms but I don't. I think the "ends in S" rule is good but what about the "could be confused with another acronym which is this one with an s on the end" rule. How do you know there isn't an acronym out there that is that one with an S on the end? How do you know there won't be one tomorrow?

You cant!

The bottom line is that the purpose of language is to communicate effectively. If I can do that using 31337 sp33ch then that's ok. It's like the whole stupid he/she vs they thing. (They has always been acceptable as a singular gender neutral pronoun despite many people's assertions otherwise).

To sum it up:

Language rules are here to help us communicate and any rule that restricts our ability to do so effectively is invalid by definition no matter how much some know-it-all wants to convince you otherwise. It's the way it always has been and the way it always will be.

Mockus and Herbsleb (PDF, from the 2nd Workshop on OSS Engineering) look at the way Apache is developed (and try to glean lessons that can be applied to distributed development in general). They point out that a small team of core developers produce most of the new features, a much larger group contributes patches to fix bugs, and a much larger group than that uses and tests the code. In my experience, that is how the most successful OSS projects work.

The study in this article only counts the number of registered developers--the small core team. The people contributing patches are where the "More Eyeballs" argument comes in. I don't think that was reflected in this study.

`It's like Noah and the Ark,' he explained, `he could have gone to a professional ark-builder, or he could have done the job himself.'

Silence.

Finally it's broken by a rookie engineer at the back taking the bait.

`But Noah did build the ark himself!'

`Damn right!' roared the salesman, `and if you've got 40 years experience and God on your side, you can build your own computer.'

The company decided to buy...from the competition.

(anonymous, probably apochryphal, but reputed to have been Ferranti selling to Glacier Metal). <plug class="shameless">Quoted in my book on SGML and XML Tools.</plug>

///Peter

It's Gnutella, not GNUtella.

Gnutella, much like gnuplot, has gnu in it's name for reasons independant of the GNU project. The original versions of Gnutella didn't even have source released at all, let alone under the GPL.

... who doesn't know what EAA stands for? It's not mentioned anywhere on their website what their acronym means. The closest I could find by searching http://www.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym is "Experimental Aircraft Association". Is that right?

This is utter nonsense: a parochial N. American view, not shared by the rest of the world.

UML is of course an acronym: there is nothing inherent in an acronym which says it has to be pronounceable, it's just what it means: the heads of the names (ie the initial or significant letters).

Restricting acronyms to those which read as pronounceable words is a mere pettish foolishness dear to those who should know better, who treat it as a shibboleth by which they dare to judge others. It is a misplaced belief perpetuated by several generations of ignorant educators who know no better than to parrot the mistakes of their own tutors.

Lexicographers are right to record this aberrant and anomalous view of an acronym but this must not be taken as evidence of its truth. Ignore them.

Web Acronym Database

</Rant>

Sulphur seems to have very rich and subtle chemical properties, as can be guessed from the variety of colors in Tupan Pateraon and elsewhere on Io. Any chemistry write-up on sulphur will tell you that sulphur atoms can make 2,4,6 or 8 bonds and that sulphur has many solid and liquid forms.

So if you're open minded, it's conceivable to imagine life based on sulphur instead of carbon/water. Could Io harbor sulphur-based life? It looks like a promising place, with all these volcanos stirring the soup. "But Io is cold" scientists exclaim. So what? Life does not depend on temperature, but on the richness of the available chemical reactions. "But Io is in a bath of radiation". So what? Life would be safe deeper underground. And Io has a far side always pointing away from Jupiter, which probably has more gentle radiation levels.

So interesting stuff could be going on right now on Io. Let's hope that in 2 centuries the Galileo probe doesn't enter history as the probe that "could have detected life, but didn't because no one in charge of the mission even thought about it".

Well, there is at least one well-known project doing exactly this: Gnuplot.

Gnuplot has been existing for ages, but it is not part of the GNU project, it is not distributed under the GPL, and as of now it does not qualify as Free Software. See section 1.3 of the Gnuplot FAQ.

• GCC for C/C++/FORTRAN coding. It's free, it's not the fastest in the world but it's competent.
• Octave is a great, free replacement for Matlab. For general data manipulation it seems fine, where it really lacks relative to Matlab is in the GUI.
• Gnuplot is a great all-round, all-purpose, scriptable plotting tool that can also do fitting. For general everyday tasks gnuplot gets used a lot in our lab.
• SciGraphica is a great 2d/3d/vector/polar/ plotting and analysis package. It is a little like an Origin clone so is pretty easy to pick up, and can be extended with Python plugins. I am one of the developers ;0) (although far too busy atm to contribute, anyone want to help?). More suitable for publication-quality plots and still heavily in development. A new release is imminent. Plug ;0).
• teTeX is the main (La)TeX distribution for Linux and you'll most probably have it in Debian anyway but for writing reports, articles, books, theses, even letters you shouldn't need to use anything else. Really.
• OpenOffice if you have to deal with mad, crazy, annoying .doc using people.

There's plenty more where they came from. Most distrbutions come with a lot of these things anyway. These are mainly analysis or document tools, there's plenty of other things for both these areas and any other which plenty of other posters have shown. I've written a little guide for my local group. Some of it's out of date (and some of it's wrong but I have better things to fix) but it does have a list of common tools we use. And, of course, SAL is a pretty comprehensive database of unix tools. HTH.

• VTKis a very good package for scientific visualization.
• Maxima is a Free computer algebra system, a bit like Mathematica. It can solve equations, do calculus, plot things, produce TeX output of what you've done, and lots more. Incredibly useful for long tedious bits of algebra.
• gnuplot is a versatile graphing package (2D and 3D, but maxima or VTK are IMO better for 3d stuff). As well as graphing, it can try to fit arbitrary functions to your experimental data.
• LaTeX -- it's very hard indeed to typeset equations better than LaTeX can.

God I hate PowerPoint. What awful, awful software.

There was a great article about it in the May 28 issue of The New Yorker, but their website is impossible to use (tiny fonts, no search feature, and spotty access to the archives) and Google can only get me as far as this snippet. Still, it gets the idea across:

"PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people," Ian Parker writes in "Absolute PowerPoint." Its use has become so pervasive, Parker suggests, that it is changing the way we think, not just about work but about life. One defense-industry consultant, Parker reports, put together a presentation entitled "Family Matters," when her daughters weren't cleaning up their bedrooms or doing their chores. It ran to eighteen pages. "The briefing was given only once, last fall," Parker writes. "The experience was so upsetting to her children that the threat of a second showing was enough to make one of the...girls burst into tears." This may be extreme, but it is not unusual. "PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence," Parker contends. "It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion -- an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion -- about the way we should think." This was not the intention of the programmers, who originally designed PowerPoint to "get rid of the intermediaries ---graphic designers --- and never mind the consequences," Parker writes. As the use of PowerPoint spread, though, its programmers began to tinker with the content as well as the form of presentations. "We said, 'What we need is some automatic content!'" one former Microsoft developer tells Parker. "'Punch the button and you'll have a presentation.'" And the name that was chosen for this feature --- AutoContent --- "was meant as a joke," Parker reports. "But Microsoft took the idea and kept the name --- a rare example of a product named in outright mockery of its target customers."

Why people use PowerPoint over sadly unknown but clearly superior alternatives -- from simple HTML pages to WimpyPoint to full blown Flash movies -- is completely beyond me. None of the three alternatives above suffers PowerPoints drawbacks: hugely bloated (ever try to put a presentation on a floppy? Hah!), fiercely constraining, and most importantly in this context (again, this rant was launched because of the presentations at an Open Source conference), spawn of the Beast From Redmond.

So, why use it? I see no benefit.

Gah....

Anyway, I'd love to see these slides, but there's no way in hell I'm installing that damned software for it. Too bad that the Open Source speakers didn't think of the Open Source users....

PEBCAK

Bear in mind also that you live in one of the most publicly anal-retentive countries in the world, where politicians and their sponsor corporations pay only lip-service to serious issues like this because the real votes lie in pandering to the large numbers of under-informed adults.

Have you tried the school-l and schoolweb-l mailing lists? These are specifically for discussing general education matters and internet matters respectively in relation to K-12/Highschool education. Mail me for details: for security the list details are not on the regular Web interface for LISTSERV lists.

///Peter

Ar mo ghabháil dom siar chun Droichead Uí Mhórdha, and
Ag gabháil dom sior chun Droichead Uí Mhóradha.
are the first lines of the song according to Here and here.

It seems odd that the song name would be put in there as the rest of the text of the message seems to be words chosen randomly (Probably for their letters, not their meaning).

Currently I'm guessing that the image is something you have to cut out and then after aligning the text properly and running the cut-out over the page and putting the yellow square over a certain letter then the arrows will point to 4 letters of the message. Something just needs to determine the alignment of the text.

Or something to that effect....

this site has a list of lots of acronyms.

Well that's unfortunate. A very quick trip straight to the Web Consortium shows their pages on XML straight up, complete with links to the XML FAQ and of course, just what you always wanted, the XML 1.0 Spec. If that's not an adequate definition, read the source for your favourite parser!

The XML FAQ is here.