If it's free market you are worried about, did you notice that if you hire a foreign engineer even with just a bachelors, you just got approximately 16 years of training for absolutely free. The other country paid for the schooling, and you get the fruits.
The reason most countries have free education is that the investment into education is well worth it. Now you are saying no, when someone is giving it to you for free. The way to make sure that US engineers have jobs is to stimulate the job market, not by starving the job market of foreign talent. Investing in basic research is one way to do that, and the US has done that in the 50s and 60s, and we are still reaping the benefits. Now that huge government investment in basic research has gone the way of the dodo... so will the jobs. Insulating ourselves and pretending nothing's wrong ain't going to work.
Typical american paranoia. Government is not equal to any particular individual. People who say that "Govt != nation" always think that they themselves are equal "the nation."
It's not simply that PhDs from elsewhere are not going to work here (there is almost no private basic research nowdays and the universities are nowhere near the resources for research they had in the 60s). PhDs from the states are moving away or leaving research. I am saying this as a PhD (and my wife is also a PhD) and we are having a hard time finding the right job right here in the US, so jobs elsewhere are starting to seem more alluring.
That's the problem with democracy. People might vote for something you don't like. This is a lesson that many dictators learned the hard way (and solved in the same way as Chase). It's really better to start cheating from the very start and just pretend people are actually voting.
I don't do this. All my classroom talks are chalk talks. IMO it is easier to prepare and give chalk talks. In mathematics (my field) it is still the norm to give chalk talks. However, if class sizes continue to grow it will get harder and harder to give chalk talks. Unfortunately budgets for math and science departments are getting smaller and smaller. Especially when viewed as per student. Here at UIUC, 30 years ago there were over 90 math professors. Now there are a little more than 60, yet the number of students grew significantly. You get what you pay for. There's a lot less state funds going to universities. We (taxpayers) pay more for wars and banker bonuses than we ever did before. But we (taxpayers) pay a lot less today for education and science than we did 30 years ago.
Chalk talks themselves don't solve the "the professor read from the book" problem. But don't blame it all on professors, due to teaching evaluations being taken overly seriously, professors will simply do whatever the students want in order to get good evaluations so that they can get promoted. Don't expect such professors to be overly excited about teaching the class. Finally, spoiled students are also a problem. Lot of students expect to come to class and get knowledge poured into their brain without any effort on their part. They want powerpoint presentation they can print at home and hope that the easy test (due to grade inflation) will include some verbatim questions from the powerpoint slides.
Your credentials as anonymous coward are incredibly impressive.
PS: Owning a laser printer does not make you into a professional typesetter. Creating TPS reports in your office does not make you a typesetter either.
So what is the problem with using tex underneath to do the typesetting. Your frontend just needs to spit out tex (or latex) that the user never sees. In fact this is what most converters named something like foo2pdf do.
You will never do proper typesetting in a wysiwyg interface. The problem is that if the paragraphs were shifting around as you type and floats did the same thing, and table of contents grew a page while you added a subsection, etc... This would make the interface very annoying.
So current wysiwyg processors will never do proper layout for this exact reason. It's not a priority for pointy haired bosses who write memos about TPS reports. That's the main application for word processors.
elaborate? sure: For example, the tex paragraph layout engine. The thing is, Don Knuth went and read up about how text layout was done in professional layout. What are the proper spacings etc... Tex does layout per paragraph, not per line. So for example interword spacing is as uniform as can be for the whole paragraph, not for a single line.
There are many other aspects of layout that tex does properly, that no word processor does. That's not to say no other software does it. Professional typesetters do also use other software that does layout right (or perhaps somewhere it is still done by hand).
Tex/Latex is as close as you get to something done by a careful professional typesetter, without the cost or effort.
The problem is that all the things with decent interface have crappy quality of output. Truth is, latex (tex really) have far FAR better output than anything else. Nothing comes close in terms of typesetting text and math correctly. I can spot a word document once it's printed. Not by the font, but by text layout. Reading something written in a gui word processor like word (or openoffice) hurts your eyes and your brain.
Plus, your problem was the interface. So why not consider something that outputs latex? It needs to be a front end that handles all the dirty work and uses latex for what it does best. Just like you don't care that most of your operating is written in C which is just as old technology.
Plus, most places that want mathematics documents, really want you to submit latex. You're better off with something that can output it natively.
Writing something that does the same thing is stupid if what is wrong is an interface. If a good interface is written, you might never know you are using latex (or tex) in the background.
Although it took along time a university such as Harvard figured out that open access means far higher citation rates which translates to more prestige for their researchers, and ultimately more money for the university. Many journals already figured out this formula works for them too. Harvard is the kind of high caliber university that can force the big journals that are still holdouts to see the light.
Also closed access journals just make doing research painful in a time when it could (and should) be much easier. It sucks trying to access journals from off campus (especially older articles). Currently I have access to two university libraries and can use their proxies to fetch online articles. I still get stuck going to the library once in a while and thumbing through an old journal just to find the paper is totally irrelevant to what I'm doing. Yay for arxiv!!!
I know many examples where a paper happened to be published in a journal that the university of the researcher no longer has access to. That's just ridiculous.
Funny: the reason I just want it to work is exactly why I use linux and not windows.
The problem is not that linux doesn't work for majority of users, or is too hard for majority of users. Problem is that it is slightly different and that morons keep recommending some stupid distribution that IS broken, and other morons keep telling new users to use the shell and type in things like "man find." There is plenty of bad advice one can give to windows users as well to make their experience frustrating.
My mom and my wife are both computer illiterate and use ubuntu because it works just fine for them and doesn't break as often making me come and fix it as often as I had to with windows. In other words. It just works. Installing might have been harder, but I've had as much trouble trying to get windows to work after changing some hardware (probably more).
the most people don't care comment I agree with. That's why they stay with windows. You have to care to get and install linux, same with mac or any other OS. Hence if 95% of PCs sold will have windows, then 95% of people will use windows. You would have a hard time making me switch to windows too. 95% of my software wouldn't work, I'd have to actually buy replacements, and I'd have to learn a new interface for no real gain. That's not exactly any fault of windows, so what. I hate it when people make it the fault of the software that it's slightly different. That's like saying the english units are better than metric because "we are already used to them and changing would lead to all sorts of short term problems".
The correct way to read mathematical theorems is to read the proofs. The only way to understand any (even the simplest one) theorem is to understand the proof. There is a reason that when mathematics is taught, you aren't just supposed to memorize a bunch of statements of theorems. Mathematics IS proofs. Wikipedia would be doing itself (and the mathematics community) a disservice by not allowing proofs. Knowing a good proof of a theorem is worth much more than knowing a statement.
The statements of the theorems are important for a reference, but for it to be complete, you need proofs, at least of the fundamental results. It is just as important when reading mathematics to look up proofs of theorems as it is to look up theorem statements. So a complete reference MUST include proofs.
BTW, anyone noticed that Planetmath does include (and does encourage including) proofs with theorems? While most theorems remain unproved there, it is more a lack of time on the part of the authors and everyone is encouraged to contribute proofs of anything on Planetmath!
Have you noticed that you're posting this on a site that's advertising based? And you can pay to not have advertising? You should stop reading slashot! And stop posting here. Oh well, maybe my expectation that slashdot comments should be guided by logic is too much to ask.
Now you could say that you can use some software to avoid the slashdot ads. Well, you can also install a different screensaver and change the default page and bookmarks to avoid mandrake's ads. So if you do nothing you get ads on slashdot, and if you do nothing you get ads on mandrake. Now why exactly is it ok for slashdot and not for mandrake? Logic, logic, logic... that damn logic again.
I didn't follow either desktop that much in recent months due to having lots of schoolwork to do, but I do remember KDE people saying that do not have enough resources to tackle accessibility (some months ago). GNOME would not have the resources had Sun not taken up the project. It would be great if that has changed. I didn't really mean that accessibility isn't a goal of KDE, though it does seem that KDE has a different set of users in mind.
My original point was that accessibility was completely overlooked in the discussion, yet it seems (to me) a key point for a usable desktop that would bring free software to the masses.
Is in P, yet not solvable within our lifetimes. P just tells you the GROWTH rate, not the absolute time. NP complete problems (with current non-P algs) for small numbers are doable within seconds too. P problems are quite often too slow just as well. Any alg that does n^2 will kill your puter on even fairly small n just as well.
Without such information think of the people that need it. Such as enviromental organizations. We live in a democracy so that we can monitor what happens in the state. This includes say nuclear/chemical plants. Without this information being public, there will be 0 public preassure about enviromental concerns (or any other such concerns). Note that in this case only people that own the plants and government will have this information, that is big bussiness and polititians. Are you willing to trust them your future? If so, why don't we just set up a dictatorship, it's much simpler. It avoids the hassle of voting. And without available information, your vote is arbitrary anyway.
Theft is taking something against your will. If you use a GPL project and contribute to it, it's your decision.
Furthermore, what is the freedom that you are so proudly defending? Freedom to make code proprietary? So you want to be able to take other people's code and hide it from the community?
You are requiring a freedom to take freedom away from others. That's akin to saying I want to have the freedom to beat others with a baseball bat, because else I don't have freedom.
You are always free to do with your code as you wish. What GPL prevents you from doing is takeing code from OTHER people that was meant to be shared, and making it not shared. That is the difference.
It's not a radical left policy. Neither is it a right wing policy. It's a policy of any republic that values freedom. Or then again you might want to live in a state where I CAN go beat down your door with a baseball bat just because I want to.
Slashdot Mirror
genius> log(500!)
= 2611.33045846
genius> log(5000!)
= 37591.1435089
genius> log(50000!)
= 490995.24305
genius> log(500000!)
= 6061189.16882
genius>
you probably have not looked at any of them then. Just because something has a clicky interface doesn't mean it doesn't also have a cli interface.
If it's free market you are worried about, did you notice that if you hire a foreign engineer even with just a bachelors, you just got approximately 16 years of training for absolutely free. The other country paid for the schooling, and you get the fruits.
The reason most countries have free education is that the investment into education is well worth it. Now you are saying no, when someone is giving it to you for free. The way to make sure that US engineers have jobs is to stimulate the job market, not by starving the job market of foreign talent. Investing in basic research is one way to do that, and the US has done that in the 50s and 60s, and we are still reaping the benefits. Now that huge government investment in basic research has gone the way of the dodo ... so will the jobs. Insulating ourselves and pretending nothing's wrong ain't going to work.
Typical american paranoia. Government is not equal to any particular individual. People who say that "Govt != nation" always think that they themselves are equal "the nation."
It's not simply that PhDs from elsewhere are not going to work here (there is almost no private basic research nowdays and the universities are nowhere near the resources for research they had in the 60s). PhDs from the states are moving away or leaving research. I am saying this as a PhD (and my wife is also a PhD) and we are having a hard time finding the right job right here in the US, so jobs elsewhere are starting to seem more alluring.
That's the problem with democracy. People might vote for something you don't like. This is a lesson that many dictators learned the hard way (and solved in the same way as Chase). It's really better to start cheating from the very start and just pretend people are actually voting.
I don't do this. All my classroom talks are chalk talks. IMO it is easier to prepare and give chalk talks. In mathematics (my field) it is still the norm to give chalk talks. However, if class sizes continue to grow it will get harder and harder to give chalk talks. Unfortunately budgets for math and science departments are getting smaller and smaller. Especially when viewed as per student. Here at UIUC, 30 years ago there were over 90 math professors. Now there are a little more than 60, yet the number of students grew significantly. You get what you pay for. There's a lot less state funds going to universities. We (taxpayers) pay more for wars and banker bonuses than we ever did before. But we (taxpayers) pay a lot less today for education and science than we did 30 years ago.
Chalk talks themselves don't solve the "the professor read from the book" problem. But don't blame it all on professors, due to teaching evaluations being taken overly seriously, professors will simply do whatever the students want in order to get good evaluations so that they can get promoted. Don't expect such professors to be overly excited about teaching the class. Finally, spoiled students are also a problem. Lot of students expect to come to class and get knowledge poured into their brain without any effort on their part. They want powerpoint presentation they can print at home and hope that the easy test (due to grade inflation) will include some verbatim questions from the powerpoint slides.
that's true, after getting the linux version of eeepc I wiped it and installed linux on it.
Your credentials as anonymous coward are incredibly impressive.
PS: Owning a laser printer does not make you into a professional typesetter. Creating TPS reports in your office does not make you a typesetter either.
So what is the problem with using tex underneath to do the typesetting. Your frontend just needs to spit out tex (or latex) that the user never sees. In fact this is what most converters named something like foo2pdf do.
You will never do proper typesetting in a wysiwyg interface. The problem is that if the paragraphs were shifting around as you type and floats did the same thing, and table of contents grew a page while you added a subsection, etc... This would make the interface very annoying.
So current wysiwyg processors will never do proper layout for this exact reason. It's not a priority for pointy haired bosses who write memos about TPS reports. That's the main application for word processors.
elaborate? sure: For example, the tex paragraph layout engine. The thing is, Don Knuth went and read up about how text layout was done in professional layout. What are the proper spacings etc... Tex does layout per paragraph, not per line. So for example interword spacing is as uniform as can be for the whole paragraph, not for a single line.
There are many other aspects of layout that tex does properly, that no word processor does. That's not to say no other software does it. Professional typesetters do also use other software that does layout right (or perhaps somewhere it is still done by hand).
Tex/Latex is as close as you get to something done by a careful professional typesetter, without the cost or effort.
The problem is that all the things with decent interface have crappy quality of output. Truth is, latex (tex really) have far FAR better output than anything else. Nothing comes close in terms of typesetting text and math correctly. I can spot a word document once it's printed. Not by the font, but by text layout. Reading something written in a gui word processor like word (or openoffice) hurts your eyes and your brain.
Plus, your problem was the interface. So why not consider something that outputs latex? It needs to be a front end that handles all the dirty work and uses latex for what it does best. Just like you don't care that most of your operating is written in C which is just as old technology.
Plus, most places that want mathematics documents, really want you to submit latex. You're better off with something that can output it natively.
Writing something that does the same thing is stupid if what is wrong is an interface. If a good interface is written, you might never know you are using latex (or tex) in the background.
Although it took along time a university such as Harvard figured out that open access means far higher citation rates which translates to more prestige for their researchers, and ultimately more money for the university. Many journals already figured out this formula works for them too. Harvard is the kind of high caliber university that can force the big journals that are still holdouts to see the light.
Also closed access journals just make doing research painful in a time when it could (and should) be much easier. It sucks trying to access journals from off campus (especially older articles). Currently I have access to two university libraries and can use their proxies to fetch online articles. I still get stuck going to the library once in a while and thumbing through an old journal just to find the paper is totally irrelevant to what I'm doing. Yay for arxiv!!!
I know many examples where a paper happened to be published in a journal that the university of the researcher no longer has access to. That's just ridiculous.
I would be more impressed if he did not have any slashdot login. Having even read this discussion decreases his credibility.
The problem is not that linux doesn't work for majority of users, or is too hard for majority of users. Problem is that it is slightly different and that morons keep recommending some stupid distribution that IS broken, and other morons keep telling new users to use the shell and type in things like "man find." There is plenty of bad advice one can give to windows users as well to make their experience frustrating.
My mom and my wife are both computer illiterate and use ubuntu because it works just fine for them and doesn't break as often making me come and fix it as often as I had to with windows. In other words. It just works. Installing might have been harder, but I've had as much trouble trying to get windows to work after changing some hardware (probably more).
the most people don't care comment I agree with. That's why they stay with windows. You have to care to get and install linux, same with mac or any other OS. Hence if 95% of PCs sold will have windows, then 95% of people will use windows.
You would have a hard time making me switch to windows too. 95% of my software wouldn't work, I'd have to actually buy replacements, and I'd have to learn a new interface for no real gain. That's not exactly any fault of windows, so what. I hate it when people make it the fault of the software that it's slightly different. That's like saying the english units are better than metric because "we are already used to them and changing would lead to all sorts of short term problems".
The correct way to read mathematical theorems is to read the proofs. The only way to understand any (even the simplest one) theorem is to understand the proof. There is a reason that when mathematics is taught, you aren't just supposed to memorize a bunch of statements of theorems. Mathematics IS proofs. Wikipedia would be doing itself (and the mathematics community) a disservice by not allowing proofs. Knowing a good proof of a theorem is worth much more than knowing a statement.
The statements of the theorems are important for a reference, but for it to be complete, you need proofs, at least of the fundamental results. It is just as important when reading mathematics to look up proofs of theorems as it is to look up theorem statements. So a complete reference MUST include proofs.
BTW, anyone noticed that Planetmath does include (and does encourage including) proofs with theorems? While most theorems remain unproved there, it is more a lack of time on the part of the authors and everyone is encouraged to contribute proofs of anything on Planetmath!
Have you noticed that you're posting this on a site that's advertising based? And you can pay to not have advertising? You should stop reading slashot! And stop posting here. Oh well, maybe my expectation that slashdot comments should be guided by logic is too much to ask.
... that damn logic again.
Now you could say that you can use some software to avoid the slashdot ads. Well, you can also install a different screensaver and change the default page and bookmarks to avoid mandrake's ads. So if you do nothing you get ads on slashdot, and if you do nothing you get ads on mandrake. Now why exactly is it ok for slashdot and not for mandrake? Logic, logic, logic
Does this mean anyone was actually buying it before? Or did they finally realize they have no chance of actually selling a product?
what I really want to know is when they are planning to do all this so that I can short their stock
What are you smoking? And where can I get some?
I didn't follow either desktop that much in recent months due to having lots of schoolwork to do, but I do remember KDE people saying that do not have enough resources to tackle accessibility (some months ago). GNOME would not have the resources had Sun not taken up the project. It would be great if that has changed. I didn't really mean that accessibility isn't a goal of KDE, though it does seem that KDE has a different set of users in mind.
My original point was that accessibility was completely overlooked in the discussion, yet it seems (to me) a key point for a usable desktop that would bring free software to the masses.
Since this seems to be another GNOME vs KDE flamewar and I feel like commenting ...
GNOME vs. KDE: How about accessiblity? Which can a blind person use? Which can be used in US government contracts?
Just a note, I think people are forgetting about, to me at least, the most exciting "feature" of GNOME.
Having said that, I think that KDE is a fine desktop, with different goals and different audience.
Something with a time of (in seconds)
99999999999999999999999 * n^555555555555
Is in P, yet not solvable within our lifetimes. P just tells you the GROWTH rate, not the absolute time. NP complete problems (with current non-P algs) for small numbers are doable within seconds too. P problems are quite often too slow just as well. Any alg that does n^2 will kill your puter on even fairly small n just as well.
Without such information think of the people that need it. Such as enviromental organizations. We live in a democracy so that we can monitor what happens in the state. This includes say nuclear/chemical plants. Without this information being public, there will be 0 public preassure about enviromental concerns (or any other such concerns). Note that in this case only people that own the plants and government will have this information, that is big bussiness and polititians. Are you willing to trust them your future? If so, why don't we just set up a dictatorship, it's much simpler. It avoids the hassle of voting. And without available information, your vote is arbitrary anyway.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Theft is taking something against your will. If you use a GPL project and contribute to it, it's your decision.
Furthermore, what is the freedom that you are so proudly defending? Freedom to make code proprietary? So you want to be able to take other people's code and hide it from the community?
You are requiring a freedom to take freedom away from others. That's akin to saying I want to have the freedom to beat others with a baseball bat, because else I don't have freedom.
You are always free to do with your code as you wish. What GPL prevents you from doing is takeing code from OTHER people that was meant to be shared, and making it not shared. That is the difference.
It's not a radical left policy. Neither is it a right wing policy. It's a policy of any republic that values freedom. Or then again you might want to live in a state where I CAN go beat down your door with a baseball bat just because I want to.