stop the rants and give us some facts
on
OSCON 2008 Roundup
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· Score: 1, Interesting
May I interrupt your rant and ask for some facts please? Where are the usability studies showing OS X or Windows to be superior?
The fact is that Apple has never shown their usability to be better than anybody else's.
And you have nothing to back up statements "There is a complete lack of even the most basic UI design concepts that have been developed over the past 20 years." Come on, try naming those "basic UI design concepts" that Gnome or KDE supposedly violate.
Backwards compatibility is nice, but there are really things horribly wrong with TeX: its macro language defies any kind of language design principles and its layout algorithms are aging, make numerous errors, and are hard to customize for new styles. LaTeX itself repudiates many of TeX's design decisions by changing the syntax and hiding as much of the ugliness and TeX design problems as possible. And Knuth's macro-riddled "literate programming" paradigm that was used for writing TeX itself was another abject failure; no sane programmer or computer scientist writes software like that.
At some point, we need to throw out the underlying TeX language and create a new LaTeX processor, one that actually has a real, modern programming language in it and one that fixes the many algorithmic deficiencies in TeX that have become clear over the years.
I used it successfully after I gave up on LaTex. Hey guys, having to google to piece together the different parts of the installation by clicking on multiple (sometimes broken) links is tiresome.
That's a problem with Windows, not LaTeX.
That kind of installation might be fascinating for Linux hackers,
On Linux, this isn't a problem; getting a complete LaTeX installation requires only clicking on "install LaTeX" in the package manager.
but it isn't up to the standards that people are used to on the desktop.
The standards that Windows users are used to are to poor: you're using OOo instead of LaTeX simply because Windows package management sucks and makes you twiddle the guts of your system for hours. Linux users don't put up with that kind poor usability.
In different words, the problem is that Windows is a lousy, user-unfriendly desktop OS.
Why do you think MS Word or OpenOffice do not use similar line breaking algorithms? Have you ever tried to test them specifically for that?
Because users would find it rather distressing if typing a character would cause large chunks of text to move around. Also because the optimization algorithms get rather expensive.
My observation is that with the SAME font and same margins, the outputs are extremely close.
Maybe if you type simple paragraphs into both. In the presence of floats and pagination, things can change completely.
\begin{tabular}{ll} col & col \\ col & col \end{tabular}
image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format
\includegraphics{foo.png}
Use \DeclareGraphicsRule to convert
and you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master to create a new document class
You can thank Don for that; the underlying language (TeX) is indeed about the most user-hostile language ever devised. Fortunately, LaTeX hides it pretty well.
However, designing new document classes is hard: there are dozens of parameters and rules that go into one. LaTeX actually makes it fairly simply by reducing it to a bunch of parameters.
but that is not stuck in the 1980s with the compiler metaphor and weird font technology.
Trust me, it's not the 80's. The 80's was the decade of graphical user interfaces and object oriented programming. TeX is more like the 1960's: machine language and macro processing. LaTeX is trying to bring it into the 1980's.
An application with visual interface and so on
Well, if you want a WYSIWYG version of LaTeX... you can't have it. People thought 20 years ago that TeX/LaTeX wouldn't last long because of GUIs. But nobody has figured out how to combine the power of something like LaTeX with a WYSIWYG interface. Microsoft Word tried, and you can see the result for yourself.
There are several LaTeX editing environments with live preview; those are quite neat and help a lot.
Does anybody know of a decent, scientific-structured document processor that is a modern application?
LaTeX is pretty good at what it does, that's why it's still the de-facto standard for scientific publishing. It's also an intermediate format that a lot of word processors can output. The other standard in this area is DocBook, but if you thought LaTeX was messy...
I'd recommend to invest the time to learn LaTeX reasonably well; if you write a lot of science, it's worth it. You'll write faster than you ever could with any WYSIWYG tool.
I think any LaTeX replacement will basically have a LaTeX syntax, but replace the underlying language (TeX) with something more modern. Also, TeX's layout algorithms, groundbreaking as they were 20 years ago, are pretty obsolete.
Higher education is much more of an efficient, free market than other businesses: there is a lot of information about educational outcomes, and students and universities have a lot of information about each other, and there are a lot of different approaches being tried. If something improves education, it's already being tried, and if it works, other universities will adopt it.
Besides, there is no single way of "fixing" higher education: people, institutions, and fields are much too diverse.
also - if you look at the revenue per employee HP doesn't hold a candle to Apple (10 times the employees, 4 times the revenue)
Yes, and that's a bad thing. Apple outsources a lot more than other companies and they have cut out a lot of the things that responsible computer companies should do, like promote computer science research and publish. If all big computer companies were like Apple, we'd be in big trouble.
Because if every company operated as "efficiently" as Apple, the US economy would collapse.
Of course, Apple doesn't operate efficiently at all: they simply outsource all the dirty work overseas and take most of their basic research from competitors and academics without paying for it.
Which lets Apple make $1.411.764 per employee, while HP made only $336.569.
Quit right. Now, is that a good thing? Think about where that money is coming from. And think about what the economy would be like if all companies were like Apple. It would be a disaster.
Apple is taking more than its fair share out of the economy.
There have always been few companies where the best and brightest wanted to work and could do research: Bell Labs, AT&T, MITRE, SRI, IBM, Xerox, Microsoft, Google, and a few others.
It's good that Google exists, because without them, the only corporate research lab worth talking about would be Microsoft, and that is a truly depressing state of affairs.
Except the Cuil founders used to work at Google, and Google is constrained in what they can do because they have a big user base.
Cuil could have innovated greatly and pushed search to the next level. Cuil looks pretty incremental to me, and a bit unpredictable at that.
The fact that some common phrases result in no hits also suggests to me that they optimized at an unacceptable expense in search quality. In the end, users don't care how few machines they are using if they simply don't deliver the results.
Apple's products have nothing to do with civil rights.
Indeed. Instead, Apple's products have something to do with destroying libraries and academic freedoms.
This is not the way to go about things.... If the FSF continues these kinds of wastes of energy, that is their choice, but they will become irrelevant themselves.
FSF has a far better track record than you.
to such negative activist group-think.
An accusation of "group-think" from an Apple fanboy, that's precious.
It was a nefarious excuse to put nuclear weapons in space.
Unfortunately, it looks like a hidden agenda is behind quite a bit of space policy.
Space solar power (now abandoned) was another attempt at getting weapons into space: collecting solar energy in space makes no economic sense, but it does make sense as an excuse to get a giant, city busting energy weapon into space.
Nuclear propulsion is another such attempt: it makes no sense for solar system exploration, but it does make sense as an excuse to get atom bombs into space.
He has the legal right to keep his medical information private.
However, as head of an organization that is built upon marketing and image, in particular his own image, it may still be prudent for him to disclose his medical conditions.
And it is certainly proper for people who give their money to this company to ask about it.
What quantum computers are better at is taking advantage of quantum effects to exponentially outperform conventional computers at things such as factoring immense integers.
That's a little misleading; it's unknown how fast classical factoring is, so it's impossible to say that quantum factoring "exponentially outperforms" it.
but that is when they develop more uses for it, such as emulating the human mind to make ultra-realistic (if not realistic) AI.
It's unlikely that quantum computers are needed for AI; the problem with AI is not that we don't have enough computer power, but that we don't know what to do.
Someone in some field will most likely make a huge discovery similar to the silicon transistors of the past
Or it will turn out that quantum computing just isn't feasible for some physical reason.
I don't think anybody claims Apple's aims are aligned with those of the FSF.
No, but you imply that yours are. I don't think they do.
The most constructive thing you can do for the FSF is help them to make software that people want to use.
The two shittiest and most overpriced computer software companies from the 1980's are the only big ones that survived, killing one competitor after another that actually made the "software that people want to use". The software that people want to use is the software that is marketed to them and that they know about.
And the FSF's strengths isn't end-user applications but platforms on which others (including Apple) build software. They continue to make big contributions. At the same time, they also do the kind of marketing and PR that an activist organization needs to do.
Let me re-iterate that for you: Why RMS and FSF may have theological/political differences with Apple, Apple is is full compliance with the FSF/GNU license terms of the software that they contribute to and distribute.
Let me re-iterate that for you: that is irrelevant. The GPL is a means to an end, not an end in itself. That's why we have three major revisions to the GPL. You can produce all the GPL software you want, and that still doesn't mean that your goals are in any way aligned with those of free software.
The people at FSF who are involved in this petty irrelevant protest
As opposed to the non-petty and quite relevant harm that Apple has caused and is continuing to cause open source?
That did bother me, RMS boycotted apple and then Apple eventually complied. Richard Stallman announced the End of the Apple Boycott in 1995.
And yet you claim that you're still "involved" with the FSF. And they ended the boycott not because they suddenly agreed with Apple, but because they felt that it wasn't useful anymore.
are only making the FSF look bad
Every form of publicity and visibility make some organization look bad to someone else. I think Apple's marketing is deceitful and offensive and makes them look bad. Do you worry about that? Apple's continued insults and depictions of PC users are silly and offensive. Do you complain to Apple about that?
Sorry to break your bubble, but the FSF is doing what an activist organization on a small budget needs to do to get the job done. Activist organizations are, by definition, not popular, and getting their message across is going to bother a lot of people. Or do you think the activists that fought for civil rights didn't upset a lot of people?
bullshit attitude? I have been involved in GPL projects for over 18 years now!
Putting out a bunch of GPL projects (not a lot it seems) isn't being "involved" with free software. Many companies use the GPL to further their own commercial ends and couldn't care less about free software.
Anyway, when you buy from Apple or Microsoft, you are contributing to limiting other people's choices; they have a right to complain. You can still buy your shiny gadgets, but you have to realize that many people are not going to consider it cool.
And why didn't any of the previous FSF actions against Apple bother you?
Apple are the ones who convinced RIAA members to allow non-drm music on their store. Some RIAA members were not happy about this and protested.
Those distortions are typical. In fact, Apple got into the non-DRM act late, after many other companies had pioneered it.
The FSF people protesting apple ARE NOT CONTRIBUTING to positive alternatives!
Writing software and protesting Apple are not mutually exclusive. The FSF has always done both.
Yes they are. Apple has a huge chunk of the market, and they are the primary company responsible for establishing DRM in the market.
It's bullshit attitude like yours that have given us 20 years of Microsoft, and I don't want to see that followed by 20 years of Apple.
For instance, a POSITIVE effort would be to embrace OpenMoko or Google Android and help fund and promote quality open software for these products so that customers would have more choices in the market for open systems.
They are doing that. But at the same time, why shouldn't they protest Apple? I mean, Apple puts billions into marketing and getting their message out (much of it lies). Why shouldn't the FSF go for visibility?
You haven't made a point. There isn't a shred of evidence that Apple has been beneficial for UNIX or Linux. You're simply repeating Apple's marketing fiction.
Apple is a Linux competitor with billions of dollars in marketing resources aimed at grabbing market share.
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May I interrupt your rant and ask for some facts please? Where are the usability studies showing OS X or Windows to be superior?
The fact is that Apple has never shown their usability to be better than anybody else's.
And you have nothing to back up statements "There is a complete lack of even the most basic UI design concepts that have been developed over the past 20 years." Come on, try naming those "basic UI design concepts" that Gnome or KDE supposedly violate.
Backwards compatibility is nice, but there are really things horribly wrong with TeX: its macro language defies any kind of language design principles and its layout algorithms are aging, make numerous errors, and are hard to customize for new styles. LaTeX itself repudiates many of TeX's design decisions by changing the syntax and hiding as much of the ugliness and TeX design problems as possible. And Knuth's macro-riddled "literate programming" paradigm that was used for writing TeX itself was another abject failure; no sane programmer or computer scientist writes software like that.
At some point, we need to throw out the underlying TeX language and create a new LaTeX processor, one that actually has a real, modern programming language in it and one that fixes the many algorithmic deficiencies in TeX that have become clear over the years.
I used it successfully after I gave up on LaTex. Hey guys, having to google to piece together the different parts of the installation by clicking on multiple (sometimes broken) links is tiresome.
That's a problem with Windows, not LaTeX.
That kind of installation might be fascinating for Linux hackers,
On Linux, this isn't a problem; getting a complete LaTeX installation requires only clicking on "install LaTeX" in the package manager.
but it isn't up to the standards that people are used to on the desktop.
The standards that Windows users are used to are to poor: you're using OOo instead of LaTeX simply because Windows package management sucks and makes you twiddle the guts of your system for hours. Linux users don't put up with that kind poor usability.
In different words, the problem is that Windows is a lousy, user-unfriendly desktop OS.
Why do you think MS Word or OpenOffice do not use similar line breaking algorithms? Have you ever tried to test them specifically for that?
Because users would find it rather distressing if typing a character would cause large chunks of text to move around. Also because the optimization algorithms get rather expensive.
My observation is that with the SAME font and same margins, the outputs are extremely close.
Maybe if you type simple paragraphs into both. In the presence of floats and pagination, things can change completely.
You have to install new packages for new features
apt-get install
compatibility issues are everywhere
Compatibility between what and what?
you need to know commands for everything
Not if you use a GUI like Kile.
table composition is torture
\begin{tabular}{ll} col & col \\ col & col \end{tabular}
image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format
\includegraphics{foo.png}
Use \DeclareGraphicsRule to convert
and you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master to create a new document class
You can thank Don for that; the underlying language (TeX) is indeed about the most user-hostile language ever devised. Fortunately, LaTeX hides it pretty well.
However, designing new document classes is hard: there are dozens of parameters and rules that go into one. LaTeX actually makes it fairly simply by reducing it to a bunch of parameters.
but that is not stuck in the 1980s with the compiler metaphor and weird font technology.
Trust me, it's not the 80's. The 80's was the decade of graphical user interfaces and object oriented programming. TeX is more like the 1960's: machine language and macro processing. LaTeX is trying to bring it into the 1980's.
An application with visual interface and so on
Well, if you want a WYSIWYG version of LaTeX... you can't have it. People thought 20 years ago that TeX/LaTeX wouldn't last long because of GUIs. But nobody has figured out how to combine the power of something like LaTeX with a WYSIWYG interface. Microsoft Word tried, and you can see the result for yourself.
There are several LaTeX editing environments with live preview; those are quite neat and help a lot.
Does anybody know of a decent, scientific-structured document processor that is a modern application?
LaTeX is pretty good at what it does, that's why it's still the de-facto standard for scientific publishing. It's also an intermediate format that a lot of word processors can output. The other standard in this area is DocBook, but if you thought LaTeX was messy...
I'd recommend to invest the time to learn LaTeX reasonably well; if you write a lot of science, it's worth it. You'll write faster than you ever could with any WYSIWYG tool.
I think any LaTeX replacement will basically have a LaTeX syntax, but replace the underlying language (TeX) with something more modern. Also, TeX's layout algorithms, groundbreaking as they were 20 years ago, are pretty obsolete.
Higher education is much more of an efficient, free market than other businesses: there is a lot of information about educational outcomes, and students and universities have a lot of information about each other, and there are a lot of different approaches being tried. If something improves education, it's already being tried, and if it works, other universities will adopt it.
Besides, there is no single way of "fixing" higher education: people, institutions, and fields are much too diverse.
I don't know enough about Walmart to be able to say; providing jobs is necessary but not sufficient.
Still, the average WalMart employee probably leads a much better life than the average Chinese assembly line worker manufacturing Apple products.
also - if you look at the revenue per employee HP doesn't hold a candle to Apple (10 times the employees, 4 times the revenue)
Yes, and that's a bad thing. Apple outsources a lot more than other companies and they have cut out a lot of the things that responsible computer companies should do, like promote computer science research and publish. If all big computer companies were like Apple, we'd be in big trouble.
Apple obviously has larger margins, and from your own post appears to have employees with an order of magnitude more productivity!
Well, why do you think Apple needs only 1/15 the number of employees to have about the same market share as HP?
Simple: Apple outsources more and has almost no research lab to speak of. That's the magic behind Apple's "productivity".
I didn't realize the purpose of companies was to provide jobs. Here I am thinking the purpose of companies was to make profit.
In fact, the purpose of corporations is the public interest, including jobs, nothing else.
Providing the opportunity for profit is merely a means to that end.
how is it more than "its fair share"?
Because if every company operated as "efficiently" as Apple, the US economy would collapse.
Of course, Apple doesn't operate efficiently at all: they simply outsource all the dirty work overseas and take most of their basic research from competitors and academics without paying for it.
Which lets Apple make $1.411.764 per employee, while HP made only $336.569.
Quit right. Now, is that a good thing? Think about where that money is coming from. And think about what the economy would be like if all companies were like Apple. It would be a disaster.
Apple is taking more than its fair share out of the economy.
Without Jobs' return, Apple would be what HP/Compaq are today - shitty printer ink companies.
Comments like those just demonstrate the typical ignorance of a Mac fanatic.
HP had $104 billion in revenues in 2007, Apple had $24 billion.
HP had 309000 employees in 2007, Apple had 17000.
There have always been few companies where the best and brightest wanted to work and could do research: Bell Labs, AT&T, MITRE, SRI, IBM, Xerox, Microsoft, Google, and a few others.
It's good that Google exists, because without them, the only corporate research lab worth talking about would be Microsoft, and that is a truly depressing state of affairs.
Except the Cuil founders used to work at Google, and Google is constrained in what they can do because they have a big user base.
Cuil could have innovated greatly and pushed search to the next level. Cuil looks pretty incremental to me, and a bit unpredictable at that.
The fact that some common phrases result in no hits also suggests to me that they optimized at an unacceptable expense in search quality. In the end, users don't care how few machines they are using if they simply don't deliver the results.
Apple's products have nothing to do with civil rights.
Indeed. Instead, Apple's products have something to do with destroying libraries and academic freedoms.
This is not the way to go about things. ... If the FSF continues these kinds of wastes of energy, that is their choice, but they will become irrelevant themselves.
FSF has a far better track record than you.
to such negative activist group-think.
An accusation of "group-think" from an Apple fanboy, that's precious.
It was a nefarious excuse to put nuclear weapons in space.
Unfortunately, it looks like a hidden agenda is behind quite a bit of space policy.
Space solar power (now abandoned) was another attempt at getting weapons into space: collecting solar energy in space makes no economic sense, but it does make sense as an excuse to get a giant, city busting energy weapon into space.
Nuclear propulsion is another such attempt: it makes no sense for solar system exploration, but it does make sense as an excuse to get atom bombs into space.
He has the legal right to keep his medical information private.
However, as head of an organization that is built upon marketing and image, in particular his own image, it may still be prudent for him to disclose his medical conditions.
And it is certainly proper for people who give their money to this company to ask about it.
Sorry, but that's not how it works; quantum computers don't give exponential speedups on arbitrary computations.
What quantum computers are better at is taking advantage of quantum effects to exponentially outperform conventional computers at things such as factoring immense integers.
That's a little misleading; it's unknown how fast classical factoring is, so it's impossible to say that quantum factoring "exponentially outperforms" it.
but that is when they develop more uses for it, such as emulating the human mind to make ultra-realistic (if not realistic) AI.
It's unlikely that quantum computers are needed for AI; the problem with AI is not that we don't have enough computer power, but that we don't know what to do.
Someone in some field will most likely make a huge discovery similar to the silicon transistors of the past
Or it will turn out that quantum computing just isn't feasible for some physical reason.
I don't think anybody claims Apple's aims are aligned with those of the FSF.
No, but you imply that yours are. I don't think they do.
The most constructive thing you can do for the FSF is help them to make software that people want to use.
The two shittiest and most overpriced computer software companies from the 1980's are the only big ones that survived, killing one competitor after another that actually made the "software that people want to use". The software that people want to use is the software that is marketed to them and that they know about.
And the FSF's strengths isn't end-user applications but platforms on which others (including Apple) build software. They continue to make big contributions. At the same time, they also do the kind of marketing and PR that an activist organization needs to do.
Let me re-iterate that for you: Why RMS and FSF may have theological/political differences with Apple, Apple is is full compliance with the FSF/GNU license terms of the software that they contribute to and distribute.
Let me re-iterate that for you: that is irrelevant. The GPL is a means to an end, not an end in itself. That's why we have three major revisions to the GPL. You can produce all the GPL software you want, and that still doesn't mean that your goals are in any way aligned with those of free software.
The people at FSF who are involved in this petty irrelevant protest
As opposed to the non-petty and quite relevant harm that Apple has caused and is continuing to cause open source?
That did bother me, RMS boycotted apple and then Apple eventually complied. Richard Stallman announced the End of the Apple Boycott in 1995.
And yet you claim that you're still "involved" with the FSF. And they ended the boycott not because they suddenly agreed with Apple, but because they felt that it wasn't useful anymore.
are only making the FSF look bad
Every form of publicity and visibility make some organization look bad to someone else. I think Apple's marketing is deceitful and offensive and makes them look bad. Do you worry about that? Apple's continued insults and depictions of PC users are silly and offensive. Do you complain to Apple about that?
Sorry to break your bubble, but the FSF is doing what an activist organization on a small budget needs to do to get the job done. Activist organizations are, by definition, not popular, and getting their message across is going to bother a lot of people. Or do you think the activists that fought for civil rights didn't upset a lot of people?
bullshit attitude? I have been involved in GPL projects for over 18 years now!
Putting out a bunch of GPL projects (not a lot it seems) isn't being "involved" with free software. Many companies use the GPL to further their own commercial ends and couldn't care less about free software.
Anyway, when you buy from Apple or Microsoft, you are contributing to limiting other people's choices; they have a right to complain. You can still buy your shiny gadgets, but you have to realize that many people are not going to consider it cool.
And why didn't any of the previous FSF actions against Apple bother you?
Apple are the ones who convinced RIAA members to allow non-drm music on their store. Some RIAA members were not happy about this and protested.
Those distortions are typical. In fact, Apple got into the non-DRM act late, after many other companies had pioneered it.
The FSF people protesting apple ARE NOT CONTRIBUTING to positive alternatives!
Writing software and protesting Apple are not mutually exclusive. The FSF has always done both.
Apple isn't screwing anyone with DRM!
Yes they are. Apple has a huge chunk of the market, and they are the primary company responsible for establishing DRM in the market.
It's bullshit attitude like yours that have given us 20 years of Microsoft, and I don't want to see that followed by 20 years of Apple.
For instance, a POSITIVE effort would be to embrace OpenMoko or Google Android and help fund and promote quality open software for these products so that customers would have more choices in the market for open systems.
They are doing that. But at the same time, why shouldn't they protest Apple? I mean, Apple puts billions into marketing and getting their message out (much of it lies). Why shouldn't the FSF go for visibility?
You haven't made a point. There isn't a shred of evidence that Apple has been beneficial for UNIX or Linux. You're simply repeating Apple's marketing fiction.
Apple is a Linux competitor with billions of dollars in marketing resources aimed at grabbing market share.