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Stop the Math Press's Presses — Knuth Announces iTex
After Donald Knuth's anticipated "earthshaking announcement," it's safe to say that the world is still here. yowlanku writes "Christoper Adams tweeted live from TUG 2010 Conference that 'Donald Knuth's TeX successor will be named iTeX.' " Knuth "also stated that this successor of TeX will have features like 3-D printing, animation, stereographic sound."
...yes?
Google is the new Apple
Apple is the new Microsoft
Microsoft is the new IBM
IBM is just old
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
What do you expect? Apple took the wind out of Slashdotters' fantasy of Linux on the desktop supplanting Windows, so there's some bitterness there.
I'm pretty sure this is a joke. All the twitter posts have a parody flag, and Knuth is renowned for his odd sense of humor.
Except that 80% of laptops sold over $1000 are Apple and most high end computers tend to be Macs. It's more entrenched than Linux on the desktop that's for sure.
Very True.
I am a big Linux fan and personally use it everywhere, even on my macbook - however, to be honest, I am still appalled at non-resolution of issues that were glaring in the nineties and are still a gaping hole.
A Linux user is painted as not giving a rat's ass to anything as fancy as X with beautiful ornately decorated windows -- which is true to a large extent, but I guess a large set of core developers forgot that X is what a casual computer user sees.
I am not denying that there are some really extensive Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Mint etc.) geared towards user experience - the fact is that all these distributions are trying to provide an environment similar to Windows. Graphical Linux has always tried to emulate either Windows/Mac OS, as if they are the standard in user friendliness.
Any other graphical environment in Linux does not make it friendly for the user.
My gripe is that Linux has not invented a standard of user friendliness for itself, that is unique to it. A casual user sees an emulation of Windows/Mac OS and feels as if he/she is settling for second best -- I mean why not go for Windows or OS X itself!
The advanced user doesn't even care about that!
The result? X is still a very unwieldy system when things don't go right. If things are perfect, the autodetection system works well, but do something delta out of ordinary and X literally regurgitates all its mess, and you can spend days trying to fix something as simple as monitors of different sizes, or different makes, or on different graphic cards.
And let us not even talk about enabling 3D acceleration for your graphics card if it is not Nvidia.
Oh, then there's Java configuration (Want Sun Java, some distros make it extremely difficult to switch!), Flash idiocy (another reason to hate flash), and finally..
don't even forget actually customizing KDE/Gnome so that everything at the very least looks properly, scales properly. Mac OS X does a fantastic job of all of that. Linux can actually use quite a few tips from OS X.
Now I use LaTeX whenever I can since the output is so beautiful and I can type lists and tables a lot faster than I can mouse them in in Word.
And, as a bonus, it's actually amenable to version control. Nothing like being able to throw a document into cvs/svn/git/what-have-you, and have real, sensible diffs to tell you how the document changed over time, without resorting to storing all that version info in the damn document format itself where it can't be accessed by anything but specialized software designed to work with that format.
It's good to know that people in academics are concentrating on the essential.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.