``I can define my own style and use it in all my documents''
Most people don't take the time to figure out how to alter the default style(s) that ship with the standard LaTeX distributions. It ain't easy but I found it to be worth the effort. (Even though there are some things that continue to stymie me.)
``It's plain text so I can use version control''
Bingo. I find this to be invaluable as I document systems' ``as is'' configurations. Keeping the changes outside the actual document keeps the files smaller. And, as one other poster noted, you can more easily do a search for text when the files aren't filled with binary formatting dreck.
``I don't have to worry to have the same version of Office then my co-worker.''
Sigh... if you're able to pull this off then more power to ya. I find that I still need to be able to read a variety of Word formats (even though I've been using a Linux desktop for a fair number of years now). Luckily OO/LO has been able to read/write formats that others have been sending me. So far.
LibreOffice has its uses, but you can't grep.odt files.
Depends on what you're doing. You can't use grep, specifically, but you can search by regular expression in LibreOffice.
I think the grandparent post was talking about doing a search of files within a directory (or tree) outside the editing utility. What lunatic is going to manually load each file in a directory and repeat a search? (``Well, that string's not in this document... let's close this file and try the next one....'')
Really? The last time I used cards was due to a class requirement. I was taking a class that had a programming assignment and the professor actually wanted us to turn in card decks. So I sent a copy of the program to my virtual punch and sent a message to the operator asking him to send the file in my punch to a physical card punch. His response: SERIOUSLY? And this was back in my FORT-G and FORT-H days. I've never heard of anyone coming anywhere near an 029 keypunch in the F77 era. In fact, I think it was the quarter after I took that class when they finally ripped out the keypunches and the vending machines where students got blank cards.
... don't seem to be the ones elected to Congress in the last round of elections. I heard a report on the radio just the other day that stated that every single Tea Party-affiliated member of Congress that was elected in 2010 believed in a Young Earth (along with being knee-jerk climate change deniers and pretty much incapable of doing simple math when they get to talking about budgets). Where'd the researchers dig up the Tea Party folks that were exhibiting all the scientific knowledge? Surely not from the hallowed halls of Congress.
``as many as 80,000 employees, and possibly more, were working from home in part because the company didn't have desks for them all within its own buildings''
Oh that's an easy problem to solve: ``HP Announces 80,000 Jobs To Be Eliminated''.
... and how high a mucky-muck will you have to be to warrant one of these scans? Is the the intent to find some kind of hidden damage that an insurance adjuster missed? And who pays for the CT scan? Just how valuable would the car need to be to deserve this kind of post-accident analysis?
The shipping container scan sounds like a good idea but the cost of these things would have to come way, way down before they got widespread use. If they aren't used at every port (because of the cost) the terrorists will just change their shipping destinations to ports that aren't equipped with these scanners.
My post was in response, in part, to the passage in the intro that read:
``What if you could build a computer that works just like the human brain? You could invent new forms of industrial machinery, create fully autonomous thinking cars, devise new kinds of home appliances. And a new project in Europe hopes to create a computer brain just that powerful in the next ten years''
It seems to me that, if those are the project's goals, then I suspect it will ultimately fail because I have my doubts about it being possible to build something that is capable of doing those things. For example: inventing. If it were merely a situation where all that's been missing in the past was raw compute power I think we'd have seen progress in the past. Sure... it might have taken longer for the computer to come up with the results (though hopefully not seven and half million years) but we haven't even seen that. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy if they were to pull off the construction of such a computer though I would (and, I suspect, we all would) be concerned about what they'd do with it. So, perhaps, my primary beef is with the leap taken by the person submitting the story. So go nuts European project and let's see what nifty stuff falls out of your work. We're all waiting for the next Tang.
... we can turn our attention to how we make our water sources potable and how to decontaminate the soil around fracking sites. (Without lobbying the government to increase the maximum allowable levels of [insert name of nasty carcinogenic chemical here] so as to make the need for cleaning up fracking sites neatly go away.)
A piece of hardware that processes information like the human brain? Or hardware plus software that can win a game show? (Well, that's been done so I guess it'd have to be able to win all game shows.) People have been trying to get the software right that can ``think'' like a human since the early '80s (Lenat, et al). Where are the thinking machines? Is throwing a ton of money at the problem all that was lacking?
Unless this people building this system have come up with a way to program a creative spirit into the system, I'm skeptical that it's going to amount to much and that humans are still going to have to interpret the results to decide what's something worth doing and what's crap.
It might make a much better Racter than anyone's ever seen before, though.
``the 'permanent record' we used to joke about as kids might become real. By the time a kid is out of highschool, companies are going to know every detail about them and have that information to use for their own purposes.''
At least when the old `permanent record' we were told our misdeeds would be recorded in was being kept, it was generally something that was only used while you were still a student and became a closed book once you graduated from high school. This system will almost certainly be stored on an external `cloud' and the student's information will be, effectively, available to any government entity and corporation that pays for a relationship with the cloud provider. (``You saw the mention of that in the 17-pages of fine print when you registered little Johnnie for school, didn't you?'')
What's going to be needed is a law like HIPAA but for your school-related information. That'll keep the corporations away from your educational records (at least in theory) but I'm worried that there'll be another secret court formed for the purpose of issuing secret legal interpretations of the law to allow secret access to your high school math grades and, since everything's secret, you won't be allowed to do anything about the government rummaging around in your educational records because you won't know they're doing any snooping. (``You may have suspicions but unless you can provide actual proof you have no standing in this court. Case dismissed. Next!'')
Oh yeah. Turn the entire work force into the equivalent of migrant farm workers. That's the American Dream. Non wait.. that's the American Corporations' Dream.
The other something that will likely happen is that IBM will now ask their contractors to take an extra week of furlough. (Furloughing contractors is one of the ways IBM weathers bad news from Wall Street or, in this case, the Feds. In recent years you could expect to be furloughed for a time pretty much every quarter.) I know other places that let whole rooms full of contractors go when the government slapped them with a fine; they're there in the morning but gone when you return from lunch. Unfortunately, it's the contractors/permatemps -- and not the people in management who rolled the dice and made the decision to violate regulations hoping to not get caught -- who end up bearing the brunt of any punishment that the government metes out.
The executive branch nominates the Fed president but that person doesn't report to the POTUS.
My guess is that someone with an inside connection to the Fed leaked the information (over cocktails or a golf outing the day before) to one of their hedge fund buddies who made the billion dollar bets. They jumped the gun because they figured that John Q. Public isn't going to believe that trades made a few thousandths of a second too early can really be that big of a deal. Even if they get caught and wind up paying a fine, they will still make out like bandits. Tax these millisecond trades and they'd go away or, at least, the volume would drop significantly. Instead of the paltry fines that the SEC levies on the cheaters, they ought to take the entire transaction away from the guilty party. That'd stop the practice. In a heartbeat. Third strike and you go directly to jail.
I had a good friend and his brother wind up on a runway -- not in active use that day but still... -- at O'Hare back in the '70s. It didn't take very long before a cluster of airport vehicles with flashing lights stopped them before they got into real trouble. It turns out that there was an entrance to the airfield that was easily accessible via one of the roads that circled the airport. They were going to apply for a Summer job and didn't know where the heck they were supposed to be going. I used to drive by that entrance to/from work and the gate was almost always open; anyone could have driven onto an active runway. Pretty stupid but then those were different times. Back then a lot of dads would take their kids and park right outside the fence to watch the airliners take off and land. (I did that with my dad; we did it outside Glenview NAS to watch the military jets as well.) Nowadays that'll get you a visit from airport security (or worse) who'll tell you to shove off or else.
Looks like they're going to be violating either a State law or a Federal law (or two) whatever they do.
The real ``fun'' begins when the pharmacies find themselves being sued left/right/every-which-way for violating HIPAA regulations when they choose incorrectly. (IMHO, the ``correctly'' choice is protecting patient privacy and not cowtowing to the snooping by the DEA.)
The so-called ``War On Drugs'' is the real problem here.
``I have never fully switched to KDE4 because of many of its limitations, the most annoying being the network, memory and CPU load panel displays.''
I agree that the KDE monitoring tools are lousy but I've been using `gkrellm' for years and didn't mind that KDE built-in widgets were awful. I just don't use them when there's something I feel is better.
``But it is confusing for new users, so the ability to middle-click paste was briefly removed...''
doesn't make any sense. Most long time Windows users that I know welcomed a means of pasting text without extra keystrokes. And were more than a little jealous of what I could do on Linux without reaching for Ctrl-V all the time. It was/is downright painful to watch a Windows user cut/select-n-paste in a DOS window. Just who was the Gnome team surveying anyway? Idiots?
It appears that the Gnome team won't be happy until Linux is just as much of a pain in the ass to use as Windows is.
You mean `fixing' like getting your dog or cat `fixed'? Because that's what it looks like from this long-time Linux user's perspective.
I gave up on Gnome -- after probably ten years as a happy user -- once that tablet-like interface was introduced. I tried it and found it completely unusable as a desktop interface. At least KDE still allows me to work the way I am comfortable with. Once they go off the rails like the Gnome team, I'll be looking for a new desktop (back to Enlightenment, perhaps). What worries me is the collateral damage that the Gnome team will do to the rest of Linux that will make it too difficult -- or worse, impossible -- to configure the way I like.
Good effin' luck trying to gain insight into me based on the posts I make on your site. Especially now that I know that you're trying to figure me out as a person, what I like, what I'll buy, etc. based on those posts. (How long before FB's new algorithm decides "They're all schizoid!"?
Right. The WSJ author has an agenda. He's having a bit of difficulty finding facts to back up said agenda so he's forced to twist whatever he can find to satisfy his readers.
Unfortunately, readers rarely even see the retractions, apologies, etc. that are published after an article is found to be incorrect. Let me guess: the apology was not on the editorial page where the original article was published. Instead it was likely found on the lower left corner of the page where the WSJ telephone numbers are listed; a real popular place to bury something that the editors would rather people didn't spend much time reading.
``So why can't you just print the pages out to PDF?''
I'm guessing that the results wouldn't be very good.
One could cut-n-paste the text from the web page into a LaTeX skeleton document and process the file as you would any other LaTeX document. (After editing to put in proper LaTeX chapter/section/subsection/figure/includegraphics/etc. markup tags, that is.) It would be a fair amount of work but doable for the motivated but cash-strapped (and ethically challenged) student.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people don't take the time to figure out how to alter the default style(s) that ship with the standard LaTeX distributions. It ain't easy but I found it to be worth the effort. (Even though there are some things that continue to stymie me.)
Bingo. I find this to be invaluable as I document systems' ``as is'' configurations. Keeping the changes outside the actual document keeps the files smaller. And, as one other poster noted, you can more easily do a search for text when the files aren't filled with binary formatting dreck.
Sigh... if you're able to pull this off then more power to ya. I find that I still need to be able to read a variety of Word formats (even though I've been using a Linux desktop for a fair number of years now). Luckily OO/LO has been able to read/write formats that others have been sending me. So far.
I think the grandparent post was talking about doing a search of files within a directory (or tree) outside the editing utility. What lunatic is going to manually load each file in a directory and repeat a search? (``Well, that string's not in this document... let's close this file and try the next one....'')
Really? The last time I used cards was due to a class requirement. I was taking a class that had a programming assignment and the professor actually wanted us to turn in card decks. So I sent a copy of the program to my virtual punch and sent a message to the operator asking him to send the file in my punch to a physical card punch. His response: SERIOUSLY? And this was back in my FORT-G and FORT-H days. I've never heard of anyone coming anywhere near an 029 keypunch in the F77 era. In fact, I think it was the quarter after I took that class when they finally ripped out the keypunches and the vending machines where students got blank cards.
... don't seem to be the ones elected to Congress in the last round of elections. I heard a report on the radio just the other day that stated that every single Tea Party-affiliated member of Congress that was elected in 2010 believed in a Young Earth (along with being knee-jerk climate change deniers and pretty much incapable of doing simple math when they get to talking about budgets). Where'd the researchers dig up the Tea Party folks that were exhibiting all the scientific knowledge? Surely not from the hallowed halls of Congress.
Oh that's an easy problem to solve: ``HP Announces 80,000 Jobs To Be Eliminated''.
... and how high a mucky-muck will you have to be to warrant one of these scans? Is the the intent to find some kind of hidden damage that an insurance adjuster missed? And who pays for the CT scan? Just how valuable would the car need to be to deserve this kind of post-accident analysis?
The shipping container scan sounds like a good idea but the cost of these things would have to come way, way down before they got widespread use. If they aren't used at every port (because of the cost) the terrorists will just change their shipping destinations to ports that aren't equipped with these scanners.
... is a Bob Costas-free Olympics.
My post was in response, in part, to the passage in the intro that read:
It seems to me that, if those are the project's goals, then I suspect it will ultimately fail because I have my doubts about it being possible to build something that is capable of doing those things. For example: inventing. If it were merely a situation where all that's been missing in the past was raw compute power I think we'd have seen progress in the past. Sure... it might have taken longer for the computer to come up with the results (though hopefully not seven and half million years) but we haven't even seen that. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy if they were to pull off the construction of such a computer though I would (and, I suspect, we all would) be concerned about what they'd do with it. So, perhaps, my primary beef is with the leap taken by the person submitting the story. So go nuts European project and let's see what nifty stuff falls out of your work. We're all waiting for the next Tang.
... we can turn our attention to how we make our water sources potable and how to decontaminate the soil around fracking sites. (Without lobbying the government to increase the maximum allowable levels of [insert name of nasty carcinogenic chemical here] so as to make the need for cleaning up fracking sites neatly go away.)
A piece of hardware that processes information like the human brain? Or hardware plus software that can win a game show? (Well, that's been done so I guess it'd have to be able to win all game shows.) People have been trying to get the software right that can ``think'' like a human since the early '80s (Lenat, et al). Where are the thinking machines? Is throwing a ton of money at the problem all that was lacking?
Unless this people building this system have come up with a way to program a creative spirit into the system, I'm skeptical that it's going to amount to much and that humans are still going to have to interpret the results to decide what's something worth doing and what's crap.
It might make a much better Racter than anyone's ever seen before, though.
At least when the old `permanent record' we were told our misdeeds would be recorded in was being kept, it was generally something that was only used while you were still a student and became a closed book once you graduated from high school. This system will almost certainly be stored on an external `cloud' and the student's information will be, effectively, available to any government entity and corporation that pays for a relationship with the cloud provider. (``You saw the mention of that in the 17-pages of fine print when you registered little Johnnie for school, didn't you?'')
What's going to be needed is a law like HIPAA but for your school-related information. That'll keep the corporations away from your educational records (at least in theory) but I'm worried that there'll be another secret court formed for the purpose of issuing secret legal interpretations of the law to allow secret access to your high school math grades and, since everything's secret, you won't be allowed to do anything about the government rummaging around in your educational records because you won't know they're doing any snooping. (``You may have suspicions but unless you can provide actual proof you have no standing in this court. Case dismissed. Next!'')
Oh yeah. Turn the entire work force into the equivalent of migrant farm workers. That's the American Dream. Non wait.. that's the American Corporations' Dream.
The other something that will likely happen is that IBM will now ask their contractors to take an extra week of furlough. (Furloughing contractors is one of the ways IBM weathers bad news from Wall Street or, in this case, the Feds. In recent years you could expect to be furloughed for a time pretty much every quarter.) I know other places that let whole rooms full of contractors go when the government slapped them with a fine; they're there in the morning but gone when you return from lunch. Unfortunately, it's the contractors/permatemps -- and not the people in management who rolled the dice and made the decision to violate regulations hoping to not get caught -- who end up bearing the brunt of any punishment that the government metes out.
Actually, it's the other way around.
Huh?
The executive branch nominates the Fed president but that person doesn't report to the POTUS.
My guess is that someone with an inside connection to the Fed leaked the information (over cocktails or a golf outing the day before) to one of their hedge fund buddies who made the billion dollar bets. They jumped the gun because they figured that John Q. Public isn't going to believe that trades made a few thousandths of a second too early can really be that big of a deal. Even if they get caught and wind up paying a fine, they will still make out like bandits. Tax these millisecond trades and they'd go away or, at least, the volume would drop significantly. Instead of the paltry fines that the SEC levies on the cheaters, they ought to take the entire transaction away from the guilty party. That'd stop the practice. In a heartbeat. Third strike and you go directly to jail.
Oh, yeah, they'll notice but how soon?
I had a good friend and his brother wind up on a runway -- not in active use that day but still... -- at O'Hare back in the '70s. It didn't take very long before a cluster of airport vehicles with flashing lights stopped them before they got into real trouble. It turns out that there was an entrance to the airfield that was easily accessible via one of the roads that circled the airport. They were going to apply for a Summer job and didn't know where the heck they were supposed to be going. I used to drive by that entrance to/from work and the gate was almost always open; anyone could have driven onto an active runway. Pretty stupid but then those were different times. Back then a lot of dads would take their kids and park right outside the fence to watch the airliners take off and land. (I did that with my dad; we did it outside Glenview NAS to watch the military jets as well.) Nowadays that'll get you a visit from airport security (or worse) who'll tell you to shove off or else.
... and damned if they don't.
Looks like they're going to be violating either a State law or a Federal law (or two) whatever they do.
The real ``fun'' begins when the pharmacies find themselves being sued left/right/every-which-way for violating HIPAA regulations when they choose incorrectly. (IMHO, the ``correctly'' choice is protecting patient privacy and not cowtowing to the snooping by the DEA.)
The so-called ``War On Drugs'' is the real problem here.
I agree that the KDE monitoring tools are lousy but I've been using `gkrellm' for years and didn't mind that KDE built-in widgets were awful. I just don't use them when there's something I feel is better.
I noticed that, too. $DIETY only knows what abomination they have planned for the right mouse button.
... a statement like
doesn't make any sense. Most long time Windows users that I know welcomed a means of pasting text without extra keystrokes. And were more than a little jealous of what I could do on Linux without reaching for Ctrl-V all the time. It was/is downright painful to watch a Windows user cut/select-n-paste in a DOS window. Just who was the Gnome team surveying anyway? Idiots?
It appears that the Gnome team won't be happy until Linux is just as much of a pain in the ass to use as Windows is.
You mean `fixing' like getting your dog or cat `fixed'? Because that's what it looks like from this long-time Linux user's perspective.
I gave up on Gnome -- after probably ten years as a happy user -- once that tablet-like interface was introduced. I tried it and found it completely unusable as a desktop interface. At least KDE still allows me to work the way I am comfortable with. Once they go off the rails like the Gnome team, I'll be looking for a new desktop (back to Enlightenment, perhaps). What worries me is the collateral damage that the Gnome team will do to the rest of Linux that will make it too difficult -- or worse, impossible -- to configure the way I like.
Good effin' luck trying to gain insight into me based on the posts I make on your site. Especially now that I know that you're trying to figure me out as a person, what I like, what I'll buy, etc. based on those posts. (How long before FB's new algorithm decides "They're all schizoid!"?
Right. The WSJ author has an agenda. He's having a bit of difficulty finding facts to back up said agenda so he's forced to twist whatever he can find to satisfy his readers.
Unfortunately, readers rarely even see the retractions, apologies, etc. that are published after an article is found to be incorrect. Let me guess: the apology was not on the editorial page where the original article was published. Instead it was likely found on the lower left corner of the page where the WSJ telephone numbers are listed; a real popular place to bury something that the editors would rather people didn't spend much time reading.
I'm guessing that the results wouldn't be very good.
One could cut-n-paste the text from the web page into a LaTeX skeleton document and process the file as you would any other LaTeX document. (After editing to put in proper LaTeX chapter/section/subsection/figure/includegraphics/etc. markup tags, that is.) It would be a fair amount of work but doable for the motivated but cash-strapped (and ethically challenged) student.
No "JohnnyCab" tag?