They are excellent Unix machines with a great, smooth UI, which is why they've found favour with programmers and Unix people.
More and more drivel. Apple people act as if they invented Unix and had it not been for them, the world would have denied the power of Unix / Linux etc. The fact of the matter is that Apple is a johnny come lately to the unix scene. And as to compatibility, the / folder in an apple machine (and I know because I have looked) does not resemble any Unix installation I have ever seen. The file locations are all different and completely unintuitive (if you are coming in from the unix world). I grew up on Unix (HP-UX mainframes, Sun blades and ultras and linux on personal machines, with occasional dalliances with FreeBSD, and to me, the directory structure is completely alien.
You referred to yourself as "technically proficient" I don't think this term means what you think it means. You clearly don't work with computers on any meaningful level, anyway.
Thanks for telling me that. Maybe you should also tell it to my colleagues who have for years depended on me for my help in complicated quantum mechanical simulations, data analysis and laboratory interfacing.
Hint : I have been doing scientific coding since your average Apple fanboy was in his diapers.
To add to their cult-like naivette and native stupidity, apple people often bring the most lovable human characteristic of all - ignorant arrogance (the best kind). One wonders if George W. Bush is an apple user.
Ok, so you for some unknown reason think OSX is "barren" -- if you feel like answering, what does that mean? The OS may be inseparable from the hardware, but the hardware is very separable from the OS.
That means that OSX carries outdated versions of GNU software (through fink) that people like me use daily in their work. Until a year ago, Matlab used to run like molasses on it. Certain technical unix software (available for years on Sun and Linux) is not available on OSX.
The hardware might be separable from the OS, but why would I pay 1.5 times the cost for the same components ? Until Apple used PowerPC processors, there might have been an argument for a cost differential, but there is not one today. I have done this myself - looked at Dell machines with precisely the same specs and they are barely 60-70% of the cost of an apple. I have 10 year old dells (and some old pre-lenovo IBMs) sitting at work and at home, and they are still going strong. When it comes to adding more RAM, even apple fanboys admit that their company basically rips people off.
Inferior software (and no, not everyone, or even a significant fraction of people in the world make movies / record albums for a living), unjustifiably more expensive hardware, for shiny covers and pretty graphics - what is not to like if you had an IQ below a certain level ?
Wow...did an apple user hit your dog or something?
You misunderstand. Apple people amuse me (in a pitying way). Not offend me.
In any case, your suspect pseudo-psychological analysis of apple users aside, there are a very good number of BSD, opensource, etc devs who use apple laptops. Are they hip wannabe fratboys?
Wannabe fratboys are found in every walk of life, since no one profession holds the copyright on stupidity. Opensource people tend to target certain platforms. For most of them, that is primarily Linux, then Sun and then Apple (that OSX is not a high priority shows up in the outdated versions of software in fink repos). As to BSD, the number of BSD users and developers has for long been a teeny tiny fraction of the size of the GNU universe. So, a good number of that "good number" that you refer to probably use apple to test their apps for the niche market that apple covers. Here is an example - if you want to develop for the iphone, you need a mac. This is why my gf bought her mac. She has since found that she can't really do her real work with it, so her trusty dell running ubuntu is still her primary machine.
But there is an upside to this. Given that apple fanboys are usually willing to part with good money for their toys, we can always sell that piece of beautiful junk for a good price when she finally decides that developing for iphone is no longer useful in terms of time commitment needed now that Google is in the market, without such requirements.
The features it is missing are niche features. How many of these "more feature complete" players you are using have features like Genius playlists?
An apple specific feature (I know since I have a free ipod touch that came with my gf's mac). I know of plenty of music players that have things like inbuilt support for last.fm and magnatune.
Video podcasts?
Amarok and gtkpod have no issues handling these.
How many also seemlessly manage the songs on your mp3(iPod) player? Smartphones(iPhone)? How many offer iTunes music sharing/streaming on the local network? How many seamlessly integrate with the most popular music store?
Amarok works perfectly with my mp3 player. Why would I want my music on my communication device (no matter what flashy ads tell me) ? I don't buy my music from iTunes. Rhapsody works seamlessly.
That's not even including the non-music features of itunes, such as syncing calendars, contacts, photos, applications, and songs with iPods and iPhones. It offers video podcasts, downloadable tv shows, and streaming internet radio.
Typical apple user drivel. My phone syncs my google calendar, contacts, photos etc. Why would I give a rat's ass about whether it syncs with an ipod or not ? As to streaming internet radio, my ipod touch does not even support shoutcast, instead supporting crippled apps like Pandora etc. which do not give me any freedom in adding new streams. No wonder its collecting dust at home. Along with my gf's two month old mac.
... pay a crap load of money for this barren an OS (which is inseparable from the hardware) while superior choices exist for free OS'es (that run on more hardware) and even Windows. Always thought apple users were status wh***s with a pathological desire to look hip to the frat boy/meaning of life empty-talk crowd with a complimentary membership of the Steve Jobs cult (while looking monumentally stupid to the technically proficient or even people with any common sense). This is just more evidence.
You mean independents like me (who will be voting for Obama tomorrow) ?
Its an open secret that Democrats might be agnostic in this Microsoft vs open standards debate, but Democratic lawmakers tend to be pro-Microsoft (as are many Republicans). The reason is pretty simple - much of their money in campaigns comes from the silicon valley and other tech firms on the West Coast. Most of them like Microsoft. With the emergence of Google, that picture might change, but it hasn't yet.
Take a look at RIAA, which is another enemy of many slashdot contributors (some would say, hated even more than Microsoft). Yet, one of its former chairpersons is a woman by the name of Hillary Rosen, who was a big Hillary Clinton supporter, and now supports Obama.
On issues related to privacy, Democrats have been complicit (Obama included) with big government Republicans in killing the Bill of Rights. Your lawmakers, regardless of party, do not work for you when it comes to these commercial and tech issues. The reason for that is obvious - try selling "save my right to choose an office standard" as a political argument. The creature hunted in our political campaigns is a fecund, much worshipped and fawned, human creature called Joe Sixpack. And we all know how much Joe Sixpack hates Linux. Or anything requiring more than a handful of gray cells.
Winning my vote that is. A few months ago, Obama voted for the FISA bill and at the time, I thought he had irrevocably lost my vote. I care about my privacy and in judicial redressal when the government steps over the line. I tuned myself off this election and decided to just vote downticket if there was someone interesting there that I agreed with.
However, I watched the last debate along with a couple of friends. I realized that it would be criminal to let this old angry coot into the White House along with his ditzy sidekick who is more suited to a late night comedy show than the serious business of governing, especially when we are in such a mess. There was a time when I used to find McCain's gestures and way of acting appealing. Even supported him then. However, its clear he has gone senile since. Joe the Plumber does not even have a license to be, ahem, a plumber. He makes nowhere close to the amount of money he would need to buy the business of his employer. And his employer does not want to sell it. The fellow even thinks Social Security and the progressive income tax are socialist ideas. They might well be, but its about the only certainty that people retiring these days can count on.
Plus, I am completely ticked off by McCain's antics - he attacks Obama personally almost all the time, and never gets specific how his tax plan is simply = Obama for middle class / 3 + tax cuts for the ultra wealthy. I can understand how it is impolitic to defend tax cuts for the wealthy in this environment, and why McCain won't come out and say that is what is fighting for. However, that kind of a weasel is not the McCain I knew back when I voted for him.
I am still not happy about Obama's FISA betrayal, but the fellow puts specifics on the board in explaining why he thinks he is better. I do not agree with all of his positions, but at least he is not hiding his plan behind the smoke screen of character attacks on his opponent.
I will be voting early for him to avoid any creative ideas the local Republicans might come out with on suppressing the vote on the 4th.
By technical stuff, I mean precisely technical stuff. Not IT stuff.
I use Ubuntu. Haven't edited a configuration file for about a year. Don't know Yggdrasil (?).
Isn't that Apple in a nutshell ?
A mac is a better fit for anything technical than a windows PC any day, but why would someone intelligent enough to do technical stuff bother with paying so much for what can be had for free ? BSD / Linux do everything technical that Mac can do (and more - since fink etc. usually supply outdated GNU packages), and do it for a much lower price point.
There are things that you can run like a business, and there are things that you cannot. Without meaning to be political about it, look at what 8 years of running the country like a business with an MBA at the top has got us.
I have not read the article. If the summary is accurate reflection of the authors' point about this, then it is at once misguided, and foolhardy. The purpose of business in a modern capitalist economy is to produce goods at low prices that the consumers can afford, generate enough profit to please the shareholders and to set aside enough money to do research to develop the goods and services to increase these profits and consumer good down the road. Sure, businesses cannot be left alone to do what they wish and government regulations limit unchecked profit-mongering, but the primary purpose of businesses is to establish a market share and earn profit for the shareholders.
Contrast this with the purpose of scientific research. The purpose varies from gaining a more accurate understanding of physical, chemical and biological phenomena to leveraging these phenomena into processes and contraptions that improve the quality of human life (where you lie on this spectrum depends on how pure/fundamental or applied your area of research is). The only shareholders in this process are the authors of scientific work, and their reward varies from just scientific renown to funding for future research or even commercialization of the fruits of their research. However, to achieve the most progress, scientific research tends to be 'open source', in the sense that anyone capable of understanding, and with financial resources to buy access to the journals (if the work is not presented in the growing number of free journals online) can read not only what was done, but also how it was done (something commercial concerns never reveal).
Of course, scientific journals are often run like a business (at least successful and well-renowned ones), but to extend these ideas to the actual business of carrying out research is utterly misguided. The goals of business (from a businessman's pov) and science (from a scientist's pov) are very different. The authors might as well apply these ideas to conduct of a military for all the relevance it has.
There are a host of other objections to such treatment as well, but I will pause here as people know what they are.
Good. Why would you then use a binary format to save what is perfectly doable in plain text (take out the math, and the effort level required in writing a latex and a word document is identical) ? Having personally suffered from corrupted binary files, it just appears dumb to trust text to a binary format.
Quite so. However, you need to detect the supernova event first (spectral measurements come only after you first see it). That depends on the supernova's apparent magnitude, not absolute magnitude. If it is too far for us to even see it, then it cannot really be used for anything.
Yeah. Try writing a paper full of equations with Word. You will feel like bashing the monitor in before you are a fifth of your way into the task. (Assuming you know LaTeX).
It may be close now in output quality, but any search, point and click system will always be inferior to LaTeX when it comes to equations.
I know it is popular and many science and engineering faculty lazily encourage their graduate students to use it. However, something like matlab beats the crap out of excel any day. Spreadsheets tend to obfuscate relationships between data, require a lot more clicking (read human intervention) and waste time that could be spent thinking about the data, and are singularly unsuited for analysis of similar sets of data (a situation any scientist faces when he has to do a series of experiments).
Matlab might take sometime to initially write the scripts, but it is so powerful and extensible that no one in their right mind would want to use excel. If you are a slave to spreadsheets, get yourself a copy of Microcal Origin or Labplot.
Excel is especially unsuited to the task of preparing figures for scientific publications. The default formatting is at once wrong for the task and hard to change. Once you set your preferences in matlab (easy to do), you are set for life.
In my experience, excel is also rarely used for anything serious outside of US. Maybe its an indictment of how lazy, slow witted and easily misled our pool of talent is becoming.
I have not read the PRL paper that the article refers to, but if the entire test depends on detecting a large number of supernovae in a certain region of space, its a non-starters. Supernova events tend to be rare, and the further away you are looking, the brighter the event has to be, to be detectable.
These people may well be right, but they need to come up with a better test. What they are asking is akin to us asking a kid who has grown up in a submarine world, and has never been out of water or has any chance of being out of water, to somehow prove that the refractive index of the atmosphere is lower than the sea he lives in, and that somehow explains how he is unable to see anything above the water beyond a certain critical angle.
I am not saying that this is impossible. I am just saying that the test for this will likely be extremely subtle, and extremely unlikely to be definitive.
If IBM joins up with major countries that are on record against this infamy (like Brazil and India) and convinces other big players like Sun to join to form a rival to ISO, this could be a good move. I daresay, smaller players like Linux vendors (except Novell) will gladly join the new organization. They should then set up rules that an improperly documented and vendor-tied standard cannot even be brought up for a vote in that new organization, let alone bribed through like this OOXML bullshit.
Often, the background material for a publication is a quite large set of partially overlaping works, and it is only practical to cite a subset of them.
That is kind of obvious. However, when you are using some specialized software, that does not really apply. You have chosen *one* work, and not any overlapping set of works. So, you are supposed to cite it properly, assuming you are not mostly just repeating what they are doing (in which case, you have no business publishing it unless it is one of the initial confirmations or a proof that the original work is wrong. In that latter set of cases, the original work would form a rather central point in your paper, and it is hard to see how you would justify leaving it out).
I agree that the culture varies from one academic field to the next, but when it comes to common sense rules about citations, I would tend to think that they are rather constant (just as rules about plagiarism are rather constant). The theme of your anecdote is, however, distressingly common. One of the winners of recent Nobel Prizes (for work on polyacetylene conductivity similarly "forgot" to cite an earlier work by an Australian group for their breakthrough paper). Practically everyone in the field knows about it, but since the recipients are rather influential (and one suspects, fast friends with the people who matter), no one likes to mention it too often.
However, especially when stakes are not quite so high (or perhaps when they are so high), its much more seemly to properly attribute each work you use or refer to in any central fashion to your manuscript.
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They are excellent Unix machines with a great, smooth UI, which is why they've found favour with programmers and Unix people.
More and more drivel. Apple people act as if they invented Unix and had it not been for them, the world would have denied the power of Unix / Linux etc. The fact of the matter is that Apple is a johnny come lately to the unix scene. And as to compatibility, the / folder in an apple machine (and I know because I have looked) does not resemble any Unix installation I have ever seen. The file locations are all different and completely unintuitive (if you are coming in from the unix world). I grew up on Unix (HP-UX mainframes, Sun blades and ultras and linux on personal machines, with occasional dalliances with FreeBSD, and to me, the directory structure is completely alien.
You referred to yourself as "technically proficient" I don't think this term means what you think it means. You clearly don't work with computers on any meaningful level, anyway.
Thanks for telling me that. Maybe you should also tell it to my colleagues who have for years depended on me for my help in complicated quantum mechanical simulations, data analysis and laboratory interfacing. Hint : I have been doing scientific coding since your average Apple fanboy was in his diapers.
To add to their cult-like naivette and native stupidity, apple people often bring the most lovable human characteristic of all - ignorant arrogance (the best kind). One wonders if George W. Bush is an apple user.
Quite. Though in addition to being fed up, I am quite amused at the surprising naivette of Apple users as well.
Ok, so you for some unknown reason think OSX is "barren" -- if you feel like answering, what does that mean? The OS may be inseparable from the hardware, but the hardware is very separable from the OS.
That means that OSX carries outdated versions of GNU software (through fink) that people like me use daily in their work. Until a year ago, Matlab used to run like molasses on it. Certain technical unix software (available for years on Sun and Linux) is not available on OSX.
The hardware might be separable from the OS, but why would I pay 1.5 times the cost for the same components ? Until Apple used PowerPC processors, there might have been an argument for a cost differential, but there is not one today. I have done this myself - looked at Dell machines with precisely the same specs and they are barely 60-70% of the cost of an apple. I have 10 year old dells (and some old pre-lenovo IBMs) sitting at work and at home, and they are still going strong. When it comes to adding more RAM, even apple fanboys admit that their company basically rips people off.
Inferior software (and no, not everyone, or even a significant fraction of people in the world make movies / record albums for a living), unjustifiably more expensive hardware, for shiny covers and pretty graphics - what is not to like if you had an IQ below a certain level ?
Wow...did an apple user hit your dog or something?
You misunderstand. Apple people amuse me (in a pitying way). Not offend me.
In any case, your suspect pseudo-psychological analysis of apple users aside, there are a very good number of BSD, opensource, etc devs who use apple laptops. Are they hip wannabe fratboys?
Wannabe fratboys are found in every walk of life, since no one profession holds the copyright on stupidity. Opensource people tend to target certain platforms. For most of them, that is primarily Linux, then Sun and then Apple (that OSX is not a high priority shows up in the outdated versions of software in fink repos). As to BSD, the number of BSD users and developers has for long been a teeny tiny fraction of the size of the GNU universe. So, a good number of that "good number" that you refer to probably use apple to test their apps for the niche market that apple covers. Here is an example - if you want to develop for the iphone, you need a mac. This is why my gf bought her mac. She has since found that she can't really do her real work with it, so her trusty dell running ubuntu is still her primary machine.
But there is an upside to this. Given that apple fanboys are usually willing to part with good money for their toys, we can always sell that piece of beautiful junk for a good price when she finally decides that developing for iphone is no longer useful in terms of time commitment needed now that Google is in the market, without such requirements.
Whether this is a troll or not, is your opinion. It is however, an opinion I hold sincerely.
The features it is missing are niche features. How many of these "more feature complete" players you are using have features like Genius playlists?
An apple specific feature (I know since I have a free ipod touch that came with my gf's mac). I know of plenty of music players that have things like inbuilt support for last.fm and magnatune.
Video podcasts?
Amarok and gtkpod have no issues handling these.
How many also seemlessly manage the songs on your mp3(iPod) player? Smartphones(iPhone)? How many offer iTunes music sharing/streaming on the local network? How many seamlessly integrate with the most popular music store?
Amarok works perfectly with my mp3 player. Why would I want my music on my communication device (no matter what flashy ads tell me) ? I don't buy my music from iTunes. Rhapsody works seamlessly.
That's not even including the non-music features of itunes, such as syncing calendars, contacts, photos, applications, and songs with iPods and iPhones. It offers video podcasts, downloadable tv shows, and streaming internet radio.
Typical apple user drivel. My phone syncs my google calendar, contacts, photos etc. Why would I give a rat's ass about whether it syncs with an ipod or not ? As to streaming internet radio, my ipod touch does not even support shoutcast, instead supporting crippled apps like Pandora etc. which do not give me any freedom in adding new streams. No wonder its collecting dust at home. Along with my gf's two month old mac.
... pay a crap load of money for this barren an OS (which is inseparable from the hardware) while superior choices exist for free OS'es (that run on more hardware) and even Windows. Always thought apple users were status wh***s with a pathological desire to look hip to the frat boy/meaning of life empty-talk crowd with a complimentary membership of the Steve Jobs cult (while looking monumentally stupid to the technically proficient or even people with any common sense). This is just more evidence.
You mean independents like me (who will be voting for Obama tomorrow) ?
Its an open secret that Democrats might be agnostic in this Microsoft vs open standards debate, but Democratic lawmakers tend to be pro-Microsoft (as are many Republicans). The reason is pretty simple - much of their money in campaigns comes from the silicon valley and other tech firms on the West Coast. Most of them like Microsoft. With the emergence of Google, that picture might change, but it hasn't yet.
Take a look at RIAA, which is another enemy of many slashdot contributors (some would say, hated even more than Microsoft). Yet, one of its former chairpersons is a woman by the name of Hillary Rosen, who was a big Hillary Clinton supporter, and now supports Obama.
On issues related to privacy, Democrats have been complicit (Obama included) with big government Republicans in killing the Bill of Rights. Your lawmakers, regardless of party, do not work for you when it comes to these commercial and tech issues. The reason for that is obvious - try selling "save my right to choose an office standard" as a political argument. The creature hunted in our political campaigns is a fecund, much worshipped and fawned, human creature called Joe Sixpack. And we all know how much Joe Sixpack hates Linux. Or anything requiring more than a handful of gray cells.
It could get overturned on appeal (and Microsoft friendly Dems are going to be in charge in all likelihood soon), but one wonders.
Winning my vote that is. A few months ago, Obama voted for the FISA bill and at the time, I thought he had irrevocably lost my vote. I care about my privacy and in judicial redressal when the government steps over the line. I tuned myself off this election and decided to just vote downticket if there was someone interesting there that I agreed with.
However, I watched the last debate along with a couple of friends. I realized that it would be criminal to let this old angry coot into the White House along with his ditzy sidekick who is more suited to a late night comedy show than the serious business of governing, especially when we are in such a mess. There was a time when I used to find McCain's gestures and way of acting appealing. Even supported him then. However, its clear he has gone senile since. Joe the Plumber does not even have a license to be, ahem, a plumber. He makes nowhere close to the amount of money he would need to buy the business of his employer. And his employer does not want to sell it. The fellow even thinks Social Security and the progressive income tax are socialist ideas. They might well be, but its about the only certainty that people retiring these days can count on.
Plus, I am completely ticked off by McCain's antics - he attacks Obama personally almost all the time, and never gets specific how his tax plan is simply = Obama for middle class / 3 + tax cuts for the ultra wealthy. I can understand how it is impolitic to defend tax cuts for the wealthy in this environment, and why McCain won't come out and say that is what is fighting for. However, that kind of a weasel is not the McCain I knew back when I voted for him.
I am still not happy about Obama's FISA betrayal, but the fellow puts specifics on the board in explaining why he thinks he is better. I do not agree with all of his positions, but at least he is not hiding his plan behind the smoke screen of character attacks on his opponent.
I will be voting early for him to avoid any creative ideas the local Republicans might come out with on suppressing the vote on the 4th.
By technical stuff, I mean precisely technical stuff. Not IT stuff.
I use Ubuntu. Haven't edited a configuration file for about a year. Don't know Yggdrasil (?).
Isn't that Apple in a nutshell ?
A mac is a better fit for anything technical than a windows PC any day, but why would someone intelligent enough to do technical stuff bother with paying so much for what can be had for free ? BSD / Linux do everything technical that Mac can do (and more - since fink etc. usually supply outdated GNU packages), and do it for a much lower price point.
There are things that you can run like a business, and there are things that you cannot. Without meaning to be political about it, look at what 8 years of running the country like a business with an MBA at the top has got us.
I have not read the article. If the summary is accurate reflection of the authors' point about this, then it is at once misguided, and foolhardy. The purpose of business in a modern capitalist economy is to produce goods at low prices that the consumers can afford, generate enough profit to please the shareholders and to set aside enough money to do research to develop the goods and services to increase these profits and consumer good down the road. Sure, businesses cannot be left alone to do what they wish and government regulations limit unchecked profit-mongering, but the primary purpose of businesses is to establish a market share and earn profit for the shareholders.
Contrast this with the purpose of scientific research. The purpose varies from gaining a more accurate understanding of physical, chemical and biological phenomena to leveraging these phenomena into processes and contraptions that improve the quality of human life (where you lie on this spectrum depends on how pure/fundamental or applied your area of research is). The only shareholders in this process are the authors of scientific work, and their reward varies from just scientific renown to funding for future research or even commercialization of the fruits of their research. However, to achieve the most progress, scientific research tends to be 'open source', in the sense that anyone capable of understanding, and with financial resources to buy access to the journals (if the work is not presented in the growing number of free journals online) can read not only what was done, but also how it was done (something commercial concerns never reveal).
Of course, scientific journals are often run like a business (at least successful and well-renowned ones), but to extend these ideas to the actual business of carrying out research is utterly misguided. The goals of business (from a businessman's pov) and science (from a scientist's pov) are very different. The authors might as well apply these ideas to conduct of a military for all the relevance it has.
There are a host of other objections to such treatment as well, but I will pause here as people know what they are.
... an upswing in the use of in-house customized solutions based on FOSS for new ventures that want to cut costs ?
While .tex is still plain text.
Good. Why would you then use a binary format to save what is perfectly doable in plain text (take out the math, and the effort level required in writing a latex and a word document is identical) ? Having personally suffered from corrupted binary files, it just appears dumb to trust text to a binary format.
Ergo, we cannot have a large enough dataset for supernovae in any given direction.
Quite so. However, you need to detect the supernova event first (spectral measurements come only after you first see it). That depends on the supernova's apparent magnitude, not absolute magnitude. If it is too far for us to even see it, then it cannot really be used for anything.
Yeah. Try writing a paper full of equations with Word. You will feel like bashing the monitor in before you are a fifth of your way into the task. (Assuming you know LaTeX).
It may be close now in output quality, but any search, point and click system will always be inferior to LaTeX when it comes to equations.
for scientific data analysis.
I know it is popular and many science and engineering faculty lazily encourage their graduate students to use it. However, something like matlab beats the crap out of excel any day. Spreadsheets tend to obfuscate relationships between data, require a lot more clicking (read human intervention) and waste time that could be spent thinking about the data, and are singularly unsuited for analysis of similar sets of data (a situation any scientist faces when he has to do a series of experiments).
Matlab might take sometime to initially write the scripts, but it is so powerful and extensible that no one in their right mind would want to use excel. If you are a slave to spreadsheets, get yourself a copy of Microcal Origin or Labplot.
Excel is especially unsuited to the task of preparing figures for scientific publications. The default formatting is at once wrong for the task and hard to change. Once you set your preferences in matlab (easy to do), you are set for life.
In my experience, excel is also rarely used for anything serious outside of US. Maybe its an indictment of how lazy, slow witted and easily misled our pool of talent is becoming.
I have not read the PRL paper that the article refers to, but if the entire test depends on detecting a large number of supernovae in a certain region of space, its a non-starters. Supernova events tend to be rare, and the further away you are looking, the brighter the event has to be, to be detectable.
These people may well be right, but they need to come up with a better test. What they are asking is akin to us asking a kid who has grown up in a submarine world, and has never been out of water or has any chance of being out of water, to somehow prove that the refractive index of the atmosphere is lower than the sea he lives in, and that somehow explains how he is unable to see anything above the water beyond a certain critical angle.
I am not saying that this is impossible. I am just saying that the test for this will likely be extremely subtle, and extremely unlikely to be definitive.
If IBM joins up with major countries that are on record against this infamy (like Brazil and India) and convinces other big players like Sun to join to form a rival to ISO, this could be a good move. I daresay, smaller players like Linux vendors (except Novell) will gladly join the new organization. They should then set up rules that an improperly documented and vendor-tied standard cannot even be brought up for a vote in that new organization, let alone bribed through like this OOXML bullshit.
Often, the background material for a publication is a quite large set of partially overlaping works, and it is only practical to cite a subset of them.
That is kind of obvious. However, when you are using some specialized software, that does not really apply. You have chosen *one* work, and not any overlapping set of works. So, you are supposed to cite it properly, assuming you are not mostly just repeating what they are doing (in which case, you have no business publishing it unless it is one of the initial confirmations or a proof that the original work is wrong. In that latter set of cases, the original work would form a rather central point in your paper, and it is hard to see how you would justify leaving it out).
I agree that the culture varies from one academic field to the next, but when it comes to common sense rules about citations, I would tend to think that they are rather constant (just as rules about plagiarism are rather constant). The theme of your anecdote is, however, distressingly common. One of the winners of recent Nobel Prizes (for work on polyacetylene conductivity similarly "forgot" to cite an earlier work by an Australian group for their breakthrough paper). Practically everyone in the field knows about it, but since the recipients are rather influential (and one suspects, fast friends with the people who matter), no one likes to mention it too often.
However, especially when stakes are not quite so high (or perhaps when they are so high), its much more seemly to properly attribute each work you use or refer to in any central fashion to your manuscript.
Yes, they are. They need to support certain hardware beneath their own hardware abstraction layer (KAL/VISA).
Easy to talk big unless you need it. Its not as if there are other vendors that make anything comparable. No, the linux-gpib project does not cut it.
The kernel API also needs to be stable (or so do vendors like National Instruments think).