The level of technical accuracy in most of these reviews is really really lacking:
* They really didnt measure the CPU's power draw. They measured what the power supply draws from the wall. A whole different ball of wax altogether.
I don't know if they had the same PSU, hard drive, etc. but if they did, then measuring the power at the wall is the most realistic and reliable number. The Opterons and Xeon's have different relationships with the components on the mobo, and the mobos and memory are different. So to reflect the difference that will be experienced between choosing an Opteron system versus a Xeon system the *actual* power consumed to do the tasks is required - otherwise you are measuring the power required to perform two or three tasks on the Opteron and the power required to perform one task on the Xeon.
* A dual-core CPU is going to draw twice the power. Duh.
The Opteron was a dual-core too, so the Xeon shouldn't draw twice the power (and it didn't, it drew about 1.5 times the power, which is almost as bad).
> Shouldn't it be "What do you get if you multiply six by seven" since you're responding to a post about Hitchhiker?
No, the primitive humanoids on Earth ware taking part in the process of finding the Question, they got as far as that when the calculations of the great computer called Earth were disturbed by the telephone sanitisers and it would never be able to find the Question.
> without knowing more information on the origination of the predestination paradox, we can't be certain if this is the cause of or a result of the "Bad Wolf."
It may be neither the cause nor the result. A predestination paradox like this may be a loop where it is a single self consistent artifact spread over time and space, both its earliest effect and its latest effect are visible consequences of one singular structure.
> James Bond, as Ian Fleming originally conceived him was based on reality. But any author needs to inject a level of glamour and excitement beyond reality in order to sell. By the time the filmmakers focused on Bond the gap between truth and fiction had already widened. Nevertheless, staff who join SIS can look forward to a career that will have moments when the gap narrows just a little and the certainty of a stimulating and rewarding career which, like Bond's, will be in the service of their country.
Translation: You'll be behind a desk, pouring over microfiche, but just occasionally you'll get to go and listen in on somebody's conversation in a cafe.
> No, the easiest way to get non-leaky behaviour is to use a purely functional programming language.
Perhaps in "clean", certainly not in Haskell, unlambda is very leaky as you have to use shitloads of stack for a long time. It's pretty difficult to avoid leaky behaviour in Haskell, but I don't know what sort of annotations you can do in clean to get it to statically analyse.
If I was asked to write a native number representation to hex string algorithm using a given set of primitives then yes, fine. If the primitives are not specified, then, as far as I can see, simplest, most straightforward wins every time. At some point, you are using somebody else's work since the language defines operators on numbers and dereferencing of arrays - if the langauge also defines a "convert-to-hexstring" construct, that is a primitive operation too. Some computers have even been designed with a primitive number representation that *is* a hex string and implementing a number to hex string algorithm in assembler for that platform is rather easy.
If they asked for it in freestanding C, I would have used a for loop, bit shifts, array dereference and assignment as my primitives (coincidentally, I wrote such a function a few days earlier to work on a freestanding implementation), if they asked for it in hosted C, I would have used sprintf.
If you want a particular result, and you want them to follow instructions, you have to give the instructions properly because one man's up is another man's down.
> Though I've been very interested in getting my wife to do some simple programming.. And believe me, I have no interest in scaring her off by making her go through the entire drill routine..
Yeah, I suppose you should get em hooked with scripting first. Something fairly nice, like python.
Or bash so they can see automation at work, and love programming for its obvious benefits.
I won't quote any of your post because this sort of replies to the general idea... That's why I said refcounting is hard.
The easiest way to get non-leaky behaviour is malloc and free (or your preferred language's equivalent). C++ makes it really quite easy.
I should rephrase: GC is a memory leak. refcounting is the only non-leaky way to automatically determine object lifetime, and refcounting is really, really *hard* to do right without using GC to avoid cycles preventing lifetime determination thus causing leaks.
The advice I would give to new programmers is learn C++ and learn how to use proxies allocated in the stack frame, and learn how to determine object lifetime correctly. *Then* move on to Java and.NET and things like that. The greatest chefs all learned how to season their dishes, but once perfected, they just bung in a dollop of brown sauce.
> Go fix those memory leaks that have been with us in Mozilla for years if you think it is so damn easy. No really, I mean it. I would be grateful.
But mozilla doesn't leak any memory, when it exits it will garbage collect everything in one go. This is the same philosophy that java takes: let unused memory pile up and be wasted (ie leak) then reclaim it sometime later.
GC is a memory leak. refcounting is the only non-leaky way to automatically free unused memory, and refcounting is really, really *hard* to do right without GC.
> One of the other more "nasty" questions I ask is for people to do a number to hex-string conversion algorithm. I've only have ONE person do it right.
> C# has a LOT of syntactic niceties that Java doesn't
The "override", and "new" keywords for methods are really nice. plus the "in" and "out" modifiers for method arguments too. Then there's the "using" compound statements.
C# the language really *is* better than Java. And I hate Microsoft as much as anybody else but then Nemerle is better than C# so I don't feel too bad about it;)
Yeah, although, looking at the flash intro, it says "Unlimited Lifetime". Which would suggest that it is pretty reliable, or at least that the life is not related to the number of times it switches as it is with flash.
It may gain density, but gain little in reliability. I have a Ph.D. in solid state physics, so I should respond. The carbon nanotubes bend to make connect with an electrode, so something moves. This is usually a bad sign for long-term reliability. Ask telecom technicians if they would like to replace their solid state transistor-based switches with moving switches. Their answer will be that these moving parts wore out.
A mechanical moving switch (which is the type of switch I imagined you were talking about) has problems of shear forces on the contacts wearing them down rapidly until they no longer contact. Or other forces deforming whatever is used to form the fulcrum. Nanotubes are held together by covalent bonds and (importantly) free electrons spread over the bonds like a benzene ring. Even long straight chain hydrocarbons don't spontaneously crack - and they bend and flex many more times a second than a carbon nanotube will in an electric field. The only problem then is the contact that it meets where it is probably held in place by Van-der-Waals forces. The nanotube will pull on the contact until the Van-der-Waals force is broken (it will break *way* before the covalent bonds in the nanotube) - but the forces binding some of the surface atoms of the contact could break first or at about the same time. There are very hard conducting surfaces that can be made and these will probably not fail for many years. I would not be suprised if they have or can make a device that is reliable enough for nearly any purpose, and certainly reliable enough for consumer and office electronics and short term (few years) space missions.
Re:The choice was probably about cost...
on
Nessus Closes Source
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> 3) Market your produce better than the competition.
Somebody didn't learn to read. He *can't* make his produce better than the competition, because the competition *is* his product!!! Because nobody was chipping in to help, he was spending his time writing the core of somebody else's application for them.
You flaming well cut out my opinion of the cost and a proposal to pay for it due to its value to society!! And proceeded to completely ignore my assertion that most of the money that people pay for CDs pays for hype and marketing - which has no value to the person buying *or* to society!
What is so valuable to you about marketing departments that they should be sustained by a law making them effective where they would otherwise not be. What is the value to society of marketing departments? Copyright law harms the artistic development of our society by making people pay for legal protection to get hold of and develop on new and interesting music.
The music can be made cheaply enough to pay for it through taxation (as art is valuable to society, public funding is appropriate) of related purchases. Talent doesn't cost anything, inspiration doesn't cost anything, they come whether you like it or not. It is time and materials that cost, and it doesn't take much time and materials to make good music - so the money you spend on CDs goes nearly completely on things that are not valuable (the CD substrate, the posters, the TV airtime to persuade you to choose this music instead of the other music - when you should really be able to choose *all* music instead of just the music with the best marketing department).
People don't pay Apple for the *music* they pay apple for the easy distribution and search and for the protection from prosecution under an unjust law. They'd happily take the music for free because most people know that music hardly costs a thing, and that if they don't pay for music to be made, the government will set up a public fund because music is important to society. Apple's music business is unsustainable, their directory, digital distribution and legal protection business is thriving (until a cheaper competitor of similar quality comes along - but that's what happens in a free market).
That's why the RIAA is in the business of scaring the living daylights out of people (thousands of pounds for one CD copy when the most pessimistic cost of copying a CD is the few quid that you would pay in HMV)? That's to cause fear so people buy the legal protection - it is through sales of legal protection that record labels make their money, not through sales of music. They know that, and that's why they lobbied for laws like the DMCA and that's why they spend so much money on legal departments and marketing departments.
> So if a child steals from a store that they go to without a parent, it should be OK because the minor can't afford to purchase the item?
If a child steals from a store, the store no longer has the item available to sell to recoup the cost of purchase, shipping, handling, storage and promotion. If a child makes a copy at his/her own cost, the shop still has the item to sell. That is why copyright infringement isn't theft.
Does this mean that nobody would want to buy music? Yes, but nobody wants to buy my semen either, so I just don't base my income on selling my cum. If there's no market, don't try to sell the stuff. Damn socialists constructing artificial markets all the bloody time - its like passing a law requiring you to buy three patches of lawn each week, nobody wants to pay for grass when they could just buy one then grow their own from the seeds it produces. But a grass grower gets the government to make it illegal to grow your own grass from the seeds of your first purchase so that you have to buy it from them. It's rediculous.
The worlds first copyright law was passed in Britain by a lord who's friend was a silversmith who made elegant designs on the silver. He didn't want to spend his time working on the boring work of smithing silver - he wanted to have fun making his art, so the lord tabled a bill to allow people that wanted to doss about doing what humans have done in their spare time since before the first civilisations to be able to do it and get paid for it. The rest of us have to work on dull shit to get paid. How the hell do you justify this?
If music can be reproduced so cheaply, don't try to sell music - all the other business leaders have the smarts to do sustainable business that consumers can't "Just Do". The musicians are too dumb to realise that consumers don't want to pay that sort of money for music so they are effectively subsidised. Music is cheap to make and cheap to reproduce. It can be reproduced by the consumer at the consumers cost. So the only cost remaining is that of the time to write and record the song. That is a matter of a maybe two or three days - that is each good song takes up two-three days. We end up paying for the artists to produce crap since the time to produce the rubbish songs is paid for in the price of the decent songs. If you produce crap, don't expect to get paid for it. A single good song can be expected to cost about GBP2000 (couple of hundred quid each for 10 people) to produce, 1million people should expect to pay 0.05 pence per track. Fitting 1000 tracks on a CD, that's 50pence per blank media *for the first million blank CDs - and there's a lot more blank media sold than that. then there's all the storage space. Tax permanent storage sales at 1 pence per gigabyte and you've pretty much paid for all the music that will ever be produced. That means that there is no income for the surrounding hype and promotion of bands, but hype is not valuable to society and its not valuable to consumers - so why would you expect people to pay to cover that?
> OK, yes that was unfair -- (La)TeX is widely used in at least three disciplines, to my knowledge (natural sciences, computer science, and mathematics).
And those ones are worth their research grant:) - They also happen to be the three fields that I studied at university (if you would count linguistics in natural sciences).
> Try submitting an essay on 18th-century German nationalism in LaTeX and see what mark you get.
And would the professor give you a bad mark if you used a typewriter? If so, then that professor is marking you on "like-me-ness" and should face disciplinary proceedings. He should be marking your skill in the study of history.
My professors marked the work on paper *in computation related subjects no less*. The only times work was expected (or even accepted) in electronic form we were given access to computers with the appropriate software installed and configured - and training provided. For some of that work, we could not even *use* our own computers and *had* to use the lab, so the choice of the professor was irrelevant to the the choices available to the student for his own computer. Only two peices of coursework in the whole course were expected to work with Microsoft technology, many more than that were expected to work on Linux (and we had to use emacs for some of that too) - they provided configured computers and ample lab time.
A friend of mine doing a bio-informatics course had a module on perl programming for genetics stuff:) - They supplied all the software. For my courses using prolog we were supplied with licensed copies of sicstus prolog, etc...
So really it doesn't matter what your professor likes, you can have whatever software you like and the professor should supply that which he requires.
> We'd like that to be true, but in reality there probably isn't a single version of Linux that is not vulnerable to a root exploit from an unprivileged process.
There's a big difference between a system that's vulnerable due to a bug, and one that's vulnerable by design. Primarily, the one that's vulnerable by design has to stay vulnerable (since everyday stuff breaks if you fix it), the one with bugs can be fixed and then attackers have to find a new vector.
> RPM and Debian packages both run their pre- and post-installation scripts as root.
Yeah and the lsb shouldn't standardise on them either (except if they specify that pre and post installation scripts do not have to be supported).
> If you don't trust the software provider, you are in hot water no matter where you stand.
Not true at all. You are only in hot water if you run the software as root. Most application software *never* gets run as root, so why should the vender be trusted with RootPower for the pre/post installation scripts.
How well will an mp3 player sell when the refills are marked with an 18 age rating. Methylated spirit isn't, because kids don't want to use it for anything anyway, but give them ready and ordinary access to it for utility and they *will* drink it.
> My brother is a lawyer and would love to move his entire staff over to an open source suite (just for financial reasons) but he has to be 100% compatible.
Then he shouldn't be using Microsoft Office. Different versions of Microsoft Office often render the same file differently. For compatibility, use PDF or OpenDocument. *Everyone* can view and edit his OpenDocument files since *everyone* has a license to install and use the same version of OpenOffice.org while there are far fewer people with a license to install and use the same version of Microsoft Office.
And besides, I, my parents, and my aunt and uncle use OpenOffice.org 2.0 betas. They would probably *never* switch to Microsoft Office, even if you gave them the chance.
Adoption of OpenOffice will be sped by two things - adoption of Linux/*BSD on the server and workstation, and awareness and availability of the cheaper but mostly equivalent option for home users. The reason people at home don't use OpenOffice is because they already have Microsoft Office. The old argument that people expect to have Microsoft Office when they buy the computer is not true, since most computers are sold with Works (completely incompatible with any recent version of Office). All people need is a half decent office suite - the first highstreet retailer to realise that people would prefer OpenOffice to Works will make some money then everyone else will follow suit.
Slashdot Mirror
> Shouldn't it be "What do you get if you multiply six by seven" since you're responding to a post about Hitchhiker?
No, the primitive humanoids on Earth ware taking part in the process of finding the Question, they got as far as that when the calculations of the great computer called Earth were disturbed by the telephone sanitisers and it would never be able to find the Question.
> without knowing more information on the origination of the predestination paradox, we can't be certain if this is the cause of or a result of the "Bad Wolf."
It may be neither the cause nor the result. A predestination paradox like this may be a loop where it is a single self consistent artifact spread over time and space, both its earliest effect and its latest effect are visible consequences of one singular structure.
> James Bond, as Ian Fleming originally conceived him was based on reality. But any author needs to inject a level of glamour and excitement beyond reality in order to sell. By the time the filmmakers focused on Bond the gap between truth and fiction had already widened. Nevertheless, staff who join SIS can look forward to a career that will have moments when the gap narrows just a little and the certainty of a stimulating and rewarding career which, like Bond's, will be in the service of their country.
Translation: You'll be behind a desk, pouring over microfiche, but just occasionally you'll get to go and listen in on somebody's conversation in a cafe.
> "John Madden All-Pro Glibc Updater 2006"
Don't you mean "John 'Maddog' Hall, Pro Glibc Updater 2006"?
> No, the easiest way to get non-leaky behaviour is to use a purely functional programming language.
Perhaps in "clean", certainly not in Haskell, unlambda is very leaky as you have to use shitloads of stack for a long time. It's pretty difficult to avoid leaky behaviour in Haskell, but I don't know what sort of annotations you can do in clean to get it to statically analyse.
If I was asked to write a native number representation to hex string algorithm using a given set of primitives then yes, fine. If the primitives are not specified, then, as far as I can see, simplest, most straightforward wins every time. At some point, you are using somebody else's work since the language defines operators on numbers and dereferencing of arrays - if the langauge also defines a "convert-to-hexstring" construct, that is a primitive operation too. Some computers have even been designed with a primitive number representation that *is* a hex string and implementing a number to hex string algorithm in assembler for that platform is rather easy.
If they asked for it in freestanding C, I would have used a for loop, bit shifts, array dereference and assignment as my primitives (coincidentally, I wrote such a function a few days earlier to work on a freestanding implementation), if they asked for it in hosted C, I would have used sprintf.
If you want a particular result, and you want them to follow instructions, you have to give the instructions properly because one man's up is another man's down.
> Though I've been very interested in getting my wife to do some simple programming.. And believe me, I have no interest in scaring her off by making her go through the entire drill routine..
Yeah, I suppose you should get em hooked with scripting first. Something fairly nice, like python.
Or bash so they can see automation at work, and love programming for its obvious benefits.
I won't quote any of your post because this sort of replies to the general idea... That's why I said refcounting is hard.
.NET and things like that. The greatest chefs all learned how to season their dishes, but once perfected, they just bung in a dollop of brown sauce.
The easiest way to get non-leaky behaviour is malloc and free (or your preferred language's equivalent). C++ makes it really quite easy.
I should rephrase: GC is a memory leak. refcounting is the only non-leaky way to automatically determine object lifetime, and refcounting is really, really *hard* to do right without using GC to avoid cycles preventing lifetime determination thus causing leaks.
The advice I would give to new programmers is learn C++ and learn how to use proxies allocated in the stack frame, and learn how to determine object lifetime correctly. *Then* move on to Java and
> Go fix those memory leaks that have been with us in Mozilla for years if you think it is so damn easy. No really, I mean it. I would be grateful.
But mozilla doesn't leak any memory, when it exits it will garbage collect everything in one go. This is the same philosophy that java takes: let unused memory pile up and be wasted (ie leak) then reclaim it sometime later.
GC is a memory leak. refcounting is the only non-leaky way to automatically free unused memory, and refcounting is really, really *hard* to do right without GC.
C++ is the future.
> One of the other more "nasty" questions I ask is for people to do a number to hex-string conversion algorithm. I've only have ONE person do it right.
#include <string>
#include <sstream>
#include <iomanip>
using namespace std;
template<class T>
string tohex (T n)
{
ostringstream stream;
stream << hex << n;
return stream.str();
}
In an interview as I was asked how I would parse XML. I said I would use an XML parsing library... They gave me the job.
> C# has a LOT of syntactic niceties that Java doesn't
;)
The "override", and "new" keywords for methods are really nice. plus the "in" and "out" modifiers for method arguments too. Then there's the "using" compound statements.
C# the language really *is* better than Java. And I hate Microsoft as much as anybody else but then Nemerle is better than C# so I don't feel too bad about it
Yeah, although, looking at the flash intro, it says "Unlimited Lifetime". Which would suggest that it is pretty reliable, or at least that the life is not related to the number of times it switches as it is with flash.
A mechanical moving switch (which is the type of switch I imagined you were talking about) has problems of shear forces on the contacts wearing them down rapidly until they no longer contact. Or other forces deforming whatever is used to form the fulcrum. Nanotubes are held together by covalent bonds and (importantly) free electrons spread over the bonds like a benzene ring. Even long straight chain hydrocarbons don't spontaneously crack - and they bend and flex many more times a second than a carbon nanotube will in an electric field. The only problem then is the contact that it meets where it is probably held in place by Van-der-Waals forces. The nanotube will pull on the contact until the Van-der-Waals force is broken (it will break *way* before the covalent bonds in the nanotube) - but the forces binding some of the surface atoms of the contact could break first or at about the same time. There are very hard conducting surfaces that can be made and these will probably not fail for many years. I would not be suprised if they have or can make a device that is reliable enough for nearly any purpose, and certainly reliable enough for consumer and office electronics and short term (few years) space missions.
> 3) Market your produce better than the competition.
Somebody didn't learn to read. He *can't* make his produce better than the competition, because the competition *is* his product!!! Because nobody was chipping in to help, he was spending his time writing the core of somebody else's application for them.
You flaming well cut out my opinion of the cost and a proposal to pay for it due to its value to society!! And proceeded to completely ignore my assertion that most of the money that people pay for CDs pays for hype and marketing - which has no value to the person buying *or* to society!
What is so valuable to you about marketing departments that they should be sustained by a law making them effective where they would otherwise not be. What is the value to society of marketing departments? Copyright law harms the artistic development of our society by making people pay for legal protection to get hold of and develop on new and interesting music.
The music can be made cheaply enough to pay for it through taxation (as art is valuable to society, public funding is appropriate) of related purchases. Talent doesn't cost anything, inspiration doesn't cost anything, they come whether you like it or not. It is time and materials that cost, and it doesn't take much time and materials to make good music - so the money you spend on CDs goes nearly completely on things that are not valuable (the CD substrate, the posters, the TV airtime to persuade you to choose this music instead of the other music - when you should really be able to choose *all* music instead of just the music with the best marketing department).
People don't pay Apple for the *music* they pay apple for the easy distribution and search and for the protection from prosecution under an unjust law. They'd happily take the music for free because most people know that music hardly costs a thing, and that if they don't pay for music to be made, the government will set up a public fund because music is important to society. Apple's music business is unsustainable, their directory, digital distribution and legal protection business is thriving (until a cheaper competitor of similar quality comes along - but that's what happens in a free market).
That's why the RIAA is in the business of scaring the living daylights out of people (thousands of pounds for one CD copy when the most pessimistic cost of copying a CD is the few quid that you would pay in HMV)? That's to cause fear so people buy the legal protection - it is through sales of legal protection that record labels make their money, not through sales of music. They know that, and that's why they lobbied for laws like the DMCA and that's why they spend so much money on legal departments and marketing departments.
> So if a child steals from a store that they go to without a parent, it should be OK because the minor can't afford to purchase the item?
If a child steals from a store, the store no longer has the item available to sell to recoup the cost of purchase, shipping, handling, storage and promotion. If a child makes a copy at his/her own cost, the shop still has the item to sell. That is why copyright infringement isn't theft.
Does this mean that nobody would want to buy music? Yes, but nobody wants to buy my semen either, so I just don't base my income on selling my cum. If there's no market, don't try to sell the stuff. Damn socialists constructing artificial markets all the bloody time - its like passing a law requiring you to buy three patches of lawn each week, nobody wants to pay for grass when they could just buy one then grow their own from the seeds it produces. But a grass grower gets the government to make it illegal to grow your own grass from the seeds of your first purchase so that you have to buy it from them. It's rediculous.
The worlds first copyright law was passed in Britain by a lord who's friend was a silversmith who made elegant designs on the silver. He didn't want to spend his time working on the boring work of smithing silver - he wanted to have fun making his art, so the lord tabled a bill to allow people that wanted to doss about doing what humans have done in their spare time since before the first civilisations to be able to do it and get paid for it. The rest of us have to work on dull shit to get paid. How the hell do you justify this?
If music can be reproduced so cheaply, don't try to sell music - all the other business leaders have the smarts to do sustainable business that consumers can't "Just Do". The musicians are too dumb to realise that consumers don't want to pay that sort of money for music so they are effectively subsidised. Music is cheap to make and cheap to reproduce. It can be reproduced by the consumer at the consumers cost. So the only cost remaining is that of the time to write and record the song. That is a matter of a maybe two or three days - that is each good song takes up two-three days. We end up paying for the artists to produce crap since the time to produce the rubbish songs is paid for in the price of the decent songs. If you produce crap, don't expect to get paid for it. A single good song can be expected to cost about GBP2000 (couple of hundred quid each for 10 people) to produce, 1million people should expect to pay 0.05 pence per track. Fitting 1000 tracks on a CD, that's 50pence per blank media *for the first million blank CDs - and there's a lot more blank media sold than that. then there's all the storage space. Tax permanent storage sales at 1 pence per gigabyte and you've pretty much paid for all the music that will ever be produced. That means that there is no income for the surrounding hype and promotion of bands, but hype is not valuable to society and its not valuable to consumers - so why would you expect people to pay to cover that?
> OK, yes that was unfair -- (La)TeX is widely used in at least three disciplines, to my knowledge (natural sciences, computer science, and mathematics).
:) - They also happen to be the three fields that I studied at university (if you would count linguistics in natural sciences).
:) - They supplied all the software. For my courses using prolog we were supplied with licensed copies of sicstus prolog, etc...
And those ones are worth their research grant
> Try submitting an essay on 18th-century German nationalism in LaTeX and see what mark you get.
And would the professor give you a bad mark if you used a typewriter? If so, then that professor is marking you on "like-me-ness" and should face disciplinary proceedings. He should be marking your skill in the study of history.
My professors marked the work on paper *in computation related subjects no less*. The only times work was expected (or even accepted) in electronic form we were given access to computers with the appropriate software installed and configured - and training provided. For some of that work, we could not even *use* our own computers and *had* to use the lab, so the choice of the professor was irrelevant to the the choices available to the student for his own computer. Only two peices of coursework in the whole course were expected to work with Microsoft technology, many more than that were expected to work on Linux (and we had to use emacs for some of that too) - they provided configured computers and ample lab time.
A friend of mine doing a bio-informatics course had a module on perl programming for genetics stuff
So really it doesn't matter what your professor likes, you can have whatever software you like and the professor should supply that which he requires.
My professors all used LaTeX. Although they also did their work using perl and prolog. Not a word document in sight.
What prof. worth his research grant uses word?
> We'd like that to be true, but in reality there probably isn't a single version of Linux that is not vulnerable to a root exploit from an unprivileged process.
There's a big difference between a system that's vulnerable due to a bug, and one that's vulnerable by design. Primarily, the one that's vulnerable by design has to stay vulnerable (since everyday stuff breaks if you fix it), the one with bugs can be fixed and then attackers have to find a new vector.
> RPM and Debian packages both run their pre- and post-installation scripts as root.
Yeah and the lsb shouldn't standardise on them either (except if they specify that pre and post installation scripts do not have to be supported).
> If you don't trust the software provider, you are in hot water no matter where you stand.
Not true at all. You are only in hot water if you run the software as root. Most application software *never* gets run as root, so why should the vender be trusted with RootPower for the pre/post installation scripts.
Autopackage requires running vendor supplied binaries as root. It is a *very* *very* *bad* idea.
How well will an mp3 player sell when the refills are marked with an 18 age rating. Methylated spirit isn't, because kids don't want to use it for anything anyway, but give them ready and ordinary access to it for utility and they *will* drink it.
> My brother is a lawyer and would love to move his entire staff over to an open source suite (just for financial reasons) but he has to be 100% compatible.
Then he shouldn't be using Microsoft Office. Different versions of Microsoft Office often render the same file differently. For compatibility, use PDF or OpenDocument. *Everyone* can view and edit his OpenDocument files since *everyone* has a license to install and use the same version of OpenOffice.org while there are far fewer people with a license to install and use the same version of Microsoft Office.
And besides, I, my parents, and my aunt and uncle use OpenOffice.org 2.0 betas. They would probably *never* switch to Microsoft Office, even if you gave them the chance.
Adoption of OpenOffice will be sped by two things - adoption of Linux/*BSD on the server and workstation, and awareness and availability of the cheaper but mostly equivalent option for home users. The reason people at home don't use OpenOffice is because they already have Microsoft Office. The old argument that people expect to have Microsoft Office when they buy the computer is not true, since most computers are sold with Works (completely incompatible with any recent version of Office). All people need is a half decent office suite - the first highstreet retailer to realise that people would prefer OpenOffice to Works will make some money then everyone else will follow suit.