TeX can be a pain in the neck, but if you chose to
use MSWord instead then you're the one who's crazy. WYSIWYG word processors are basically just perfected typewriters. They've taken out the problems of a typewriter, but haven't advanced a
bit. And Beyond just the problem of huge file sizes
(my 70-page thesis is only 90K as TeX files),
there's the problem of intentionally-obfuscated file formats.
When I did my thesis, several dissertations available seemed relevant to my topic, but I wasn't
going to spend $30 per copy to get them. Most of
the authors, found via the web and contacted by
e-mail, were happy to send me digital copies. One
guy told me that he couldn't read the electronic
copies he'd saved, since his computer had been
upgraded and the new stuff wasn't sufficiently
backward-compatible. If he wanted an electronic
copy of his own paper, he'd have to scan it in
and then fix up the misreads.
My wife has used troff for years (she started
before TeX existed), and can still read and print
and trivially grep through documents well over
20 years old. They've moved across a dozen kinds
of hardware and as many flavors of Unix, and all
are still 100% usable.
Using LaTeX is like writing programs instead of
doing everything with pencil and paper. It'll take longer now, but over the long run you'll
save a ton of time and trouble.
And, of course, nothing looks as good as
what you get from TeX.
Apart from the fact that he moved to America from England AFTER he'd finished University, so he must have been at least 20 years old at the time. He's English by anybody's standards - if you're going to be patriotic, at least use subjects from your own country.
By this argument, many of the USA's early
Presidents and other statesmen can't rightly be
called Americans: they were born British subjects.
George Washington was well past 20 when he led
the American armies.
In any case, I believe Osborne's company was
incorporated in the USA, and his machines were
designed and built here. So it's not an
unreasonable association.
You may be missing an important point about US
culture, which is that anyone who comes here and
becomes a citizen gets to be American. Suppose
you moved to China -- would you ever be regarded
as Chinese by the Chinese? Probably not. I
don't know if Osborne became a citizen or not,
but the point is not just "Americans taking
credit for everything". It's that just about
anyone can join our little club, and so we think
in terms of "anyone who's here must be in".
Or at least that's how we think at our best. At
our worst, we fall far short of that ideal (and
many others).
You might like them better if you read them in the chronological story order, instead of in the order they were written. That would be:
The Magician's Nephew, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Last Battle
The first shows an impressive vista of worlds, and I'd have been interested to see what Lewis made of those -- OTOH, maybe it's best for that to go to your own imagination.
The third book is interesting in that while it's set entirely in the Narnia world (there are brief cameos of the Pevensie children, but they don't really have much to do), the book is set outside the land of Narnia itself, in the neighboring countries. (There may be a bit of action in Narnia, but none that I remember.)
Several people have listed Douglas Adams, even
though he's not actually alive anymore, so it seems
okay for me to mention CS Lewis.
Lewis has been dead for nearly 38 years, and at my last information, every single one of his books is
still in print. Among relatively prolific writers
(say, 20 books or more), I can't think of anybody else whose entire corpus was still in print four decades after his death. Another fifty years will probably make little difference.
On the first question, I would say that well-written software which implements an algorithm can be far superior to a written explanation in terms of sharing the idea. A program which actually computes something can make the result computed more understandable to another programmer than a written description.
But my response for the second question: suppose I wanted to do a review of the special effects in a movie such as `The Matrix', and illustrate how effects have improved since the ones in some earlier movie. Such a comparison may well require a highly-detailed still image from both films, which wouldn't be possible without being able to produce such a still from the high-quality digital copy.
...in my world (green, third from sun), the dominant species has TWO genders, and is called "humankind"
If you are referring to Earth, the dominant lifeform is bacteria. Always has been, always will be. The history of life on Earth is the history of bacteria, with a small percentage of largely irrelevant multicellular organisms thrown in as a sidebar.
Now, unless somebody wants to argue about what the politically-correct gender references for bacteria are, can we let this entire stupid thing drop? "Grammar Attacks" never convince anybody of anything, or solve anything. I commend to your attention Sun Tzu's work, The Art of War, which includes the advice "Take no action unless there is advantage to it."
Slashdot Mirror
When I did my thesis, several dissertations available seemed relevant to my topic, but I wasn't going to spend $30 per copy to get them. Most of the authors, found via the web and contacted by e-mail, were happy to send me digital copies. One guy told me that he couldn't read the electronic copies he'd saved, since his computer had been upgraded and the new stuff wasn't sufficiently backward-compatible. If he wanted an electronic copy of his own paper, he'd have to scan it in and then fix up the misreads.
My wife has used troff for years (she started before TeX existed), and can still read and print and trivially grep through documents well over 20 years old. They've moved across a dozen kinds of hardware and as many flavors of Unix, and all are still 100% usable.
Using LaTeX is like writing programs instead of doing everything with pencil and paper. It'll take longer now, but over the long run you'll save a ton of time and trouble.
And, of course, nothing looks as good as what you get from TeX.
By this argument, many of the USA's early Presidents and other statesmen can't rightly be called Americans: they were born British subjects. George Washington was well past 20 when he led the American armies.
In any case, I believe Osborne's company was incorporated in the USA, and his machines were designed and built here. So it's not an unreasonable association.
You may be missing an important point about US culture, which is that anyone who comes here and becomes a citizen gets to be American. Suppose you moved to China -- would you ever be regarded as Chinese by the Chinese? Probably not. I don't know if Osborne became a citizen or not, but the point is not just "Americans taking credit for everything". It's that just about anyone can join our little club, and so we think in terms of "anyone who's here must be in".
Or at least that's how we think at our best. At our worst, we fall far short of that ideal (and many others).
You might want to look up the particulars of something known as the "K-T Boundary", loaded with iridium, and nowhere near 200 million years ago.
Drat! I was looking forward to blowing my own joystick!
You might like them better if you read them in the chronological story order, instead of in the order they were written. That would be:
The Magician's Nephew,
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe,
The Horse and His Boy,
Prince Caspian,
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
The Silver Chair,
The Last Battle
The first shows an impressive vista of worlds, and I'd have been interested to see what Lewis made of those -- OTOH, maybe it's best for that to go to your own imagination.
The third book is interesting in that while it's set entirely in the Narnia world (there are brief cameos of the Pevensie children, but they don't
really have much to do), the book is set outside the land of Narnia itself, in the neighboring countries. (There may be a bit of action in
Narnia, but none that I remember.)
What this really needs is a Sigourney Weaver doll,
like from the start of "Aliens", with a little spider-crawley alien climbing in through the glass.
Lewis has been dead for nearly 38 years, and at my last information, every single one of his books is still in print. Among relatively prolific writers (say, 20 books or more), I can't think of anybody else whose entire corpus was still in print four decades after his death. Another fifty years will probably make little difference.
On the first question, I would say that well-written software which implements an algorithm can be far superior to a written explanation in terms of sharing the idea. A program which actually computes something can make the result computed more understandable to another programmer than a written description.
But my response for the second question: suppose I wanted to do a review of the special effects in a movie such as `The Matrix', and illustrate how effects have improved since the ones in some earlier movie. Such a comparison may well require a highly-detailed still image from both films, which wouldn't be possible without being able to produce such a still from the high-quality digital copy.
If you are referring to Earth, the dominant lifeform is bacteria. Always has been, always will be. The history of life on Earth is the history of bacteria, with a small percentage of largely irrelevant multicellular organisms thrown in as a sidebar.
Now, unless somebody wants to argue about what the politically-correct gender references for bacteria are, can we let this entire stupid thing drop? "Grammar Attacks" never convince anybody of anything, or solve anything. I commend to your attention Sun Tzu's work, The Art of War, which includes the advice "Take no action unless there is advantage to it."