Linux, KDE, and Firefox, are innovative and "truly great".
IMO your comment is an example of how the word "innovative" has become so debased as to lose all meaning. Linux is my desktop and server OS of choice, but it's certainly not innovative. Linux is a monkey copy of Unix. Running on top of linux we have the Gnu userspace stack, which is a monkey copy of the Unix userspace. KDE is just another window manager. There's no significant innovation in it compared to its predecessors like the original Mac GUI, or the mouse-and-icons systems that predated the Mac. Firefox is not particularly innovative. NCSA Mosaic was innovative -- and had a proprietary license, although the source code was available.
Innovation is rare in the proprietary software world, and it's equally rare in the open-source world. If you want a good example of an innovative open-source project, probably one of the best is Apache. It wasn't the first web server, but it rapidly established itself as the dominant web server in the early days of the web.
Cool -- thanks for the link! The quick summary, for those who aren't going to read the whole speech, is that he wanted copyright to be a permanent property right, but since that was unconstitutional, he wanted it to last as long as possible. He makes the argument that putting a shorter term on copyright, such as the 42-year term they had at the time, is pointless, because so few books remain in print after 42 years. He claims that at that time less than 100 authors or descendants of authors in the US had ever benefited financially from a book that was more than 42 years old. Since there are so few of them, he claims that no harm is done by letting copyright last long enough to provide an income for their children. It's still true today that a copyrighted work's chance of remaining profitable for more than a few decades is virtually zero. But a lot of things have changed since the 19th century. The amount of copyrighted material is vastly greater. We have, say, Winnie the Pooh -- I don't know how much money Disney makes from Pooh merchandise every year, but I'm sure it's a lot of money. I don't know what the commercial situation was for sheet music copyrights in the 19th century, but America's only indigenous art form, jazz, relies heavily on a shared vocabulary of "standards." If a group of serious jazz musicians get together, one of them can call a tune like "Green Dolphin Street," or "A Train," and they're all supposed to know the changes and be able to start playing it. Because of our screwed up copyright system, these standards are never, ever going to come into the public domain. Even really square old tunes from 1923 are still under copyright, and I'm sure that Congress will keep extending their copyrights until after I'm dead.
Martin Gardner was one of a kind. I grew up with his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. His book Relativity Simply Explained is what I recommend whenever people ask me for a good intro to relativity. His intelligence and ability to explain were extraordinary compared to a lot of people with much more formal education. He had a long life and seems to have remained sharp and active for almost all of it.
This protects your privacy from everyone but google. Having someone sniff your packets is theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely in reality. On the other hand, you are absolutely guaranteed that google will harvest and store the information from your searches in order to show you ads that they think you'll be interested in. This is why I habitally use the search engine clusty.com for web searches. Clusty's search results usually seem to be about the same quality as google's, and clusty has a better privacy policy.
It's apparently pretty common for these machines to run an embedded copy of Windows these days. I know someone who was a sysadmin at UC Berkeley a few years back, and she had to clean up the mess when their photocopier picked up a Windows virus and became a spam zombie. This seems similar to the kind of situation we're seeing with people's home routers and cable modems getting owned. The basic problem seems to be that the end user buys something that is a general-purpose computer, but the manufacturer doesn't present it to them as a general-purpose computer that needs maintenance, security patches, etc., and the manufacturer may also choose an initial configuration that is designed for ease of use rather than security (e.g., having passwords that the user doesn't set).
If the only problem was getting your images read out by someone else when the machine is resold, that would seem pretty minor to me. Can't they just design the machine so that the memory used for temporary storage of images is volatile? Then as soon as you unplug the machine that you're going to resell, the memory is wiped.
But if your copier is getting owned by hackers while you're still using it, then the presence of the left-over images seems like it becomes a bigger issue, and harder to secure yourself against.
People get passed over for jobs they are qualified for just because hr departments throw out all the applicants who don't have a degree, even in an unrelated field. It makes it so that these people do essentially 'have to' go to college to get jobs, even though they'll get all the training they need on the job.
Employers use a college degrees as a proxy for other things, such as the ability to read at some kind of adult level, or the willingness to show up on time for work when your mommy isn't pushing you out the door every morning. I teach at a community college. We get students who have graduated from high school but who read at the sixth-grade level and can't do arithmetic. College requires a certain amount of independent thinking. Many people don't succeed in college because they can't handle any kind of work that requires thinking a thought that nobody else thought up for them. Employers want to avoid hiring these people.
Nobody has to go to college in order to get a job as a firefighter or a mail carrier or a truck driver. But if I was an employer looking to hire an administrative assistant, darn right I'd want to hire one who had a four-year degree, because I wouldn't want to hire someone who was functionally illiterate.
As far as WP implementing it... does the current software work and fill the needs that need to be filled? If so perhaps they simply did the intelligent thing and didn't try to fix what was working fine.
The current software renders equations as bitmaps. The bitmaps look lousy. They're less legible than mathml. They look awful when you print them. They're the wrong size compared to the text. People who are visually impaired can use the controls in their browser to enlarge the font in the web page, but that won't enlarge the equations. People who are blind can use text-to-speech on the web page, but it won't read the equations out loud.
I hope you're not saying that it's okay for Microsoft to make math on the web inaccessible to blind people. It's totally messed up that Microsoft can hold back progress in putting math on the web for a decade or more, just because they have the most popular browser and don't feel like implementing the standard in a standard way.
A great resource, easier to use than a heavy, giant book, and full of beautiful and useful graphs. However: web text with math mixed in as graphics can be done in a way that is pleasant enough to read, but NIST's pictorial mathematics is not optimal: the size of the symbols is not matched very well with the surrounding text and, because of extreme anti-aliasing, the contrast is very low. Since this is this way most users will see this material, it's a shame they didn't do a better job.
They did do a better job. You just aren't seeing it because you're using Internet Explorer, which doesn't support MathML. Try viewing the site with a recent version of Firefox, and you'll see all the math rendered correctly.
You don't need to change user-agent. Take a look at the customization page http://dlmf.nist.gov/help/customize. I wish all sites had something like that.
No, all sites should not have something like this. End users should not have to do something special like this to work around the fact that IE doesn't support MathML properly. (IE requires a plugin, and even with the plugin, it doesn't support standard mathml; web authors have to make special IE-only versions of their pages with nonstandard kludges written in.) The best solution is for IE to die. The second best solution is for Opera users to contact the webmaster at nist.gov and ask them to configure their server so it recognizes recent versions of Opera as having mathml, in the same way it recognizes recent versions of Firefox.
Opera has had MathML support since 9.5, but it looks like this page serves up PNGs for equations to Opera unless the user-agent is changed. When the user-agent is changed, MathML is served up, but the rendering is off, with little blank boxes dotted around (see this page for example: http://dlmf.nist.gov/2.7 ). Anyone else getting similar results?
This is just one of many examples of the pain and suffering caused by MS's failure to implement the MathML standard in IE. Webmasters shouldn't have to special-case browsers like this, but they're forced to, because they can't just afford to have the page not work for IE users. When you have to special-case different browsers and version numbers of browsers, it's inevitable that you'll get problems like this. Every new browser that is every written will not get served mathml by a site like this, until someone finally gets in touch with the webmaster of the site and gets him to add a special case for that browser. The only solution I can think of is to make it a federal crime to use IE.
There is very good, full-featured, open-source music notation software available. The program I've used is called lilypond. The people who wrote it put a huge amount of effort into studying high-quality music notation, so the scores really come out looking nice. It's cross-platform.
I get the impression that very few actual working musicians have switched to lilypond, or even heard of it. The main problem is probably that lilypond is basically a non-GUI program; you enter your music in a cryptic computer language, and the compile it. There is a GUI front-end called Denemo, which has been moving along, but very, very slowly. Most musicians seem to use Finale. Once they've paid the money for Finale, they don't have any motivation to try other software. I haven't played around with the latest version of Denemo very much, but superficially it doesn't appear to be anywhere near as full-featured as Finale's GUI, even though lilypond probably *is* right on par with Finale in terms of its feature set. There is a program to convert Finale to Lilypond (called etf2ly), but I don't know how good it is.
One thing that's frustrated me as a lilypond user is that the language is continually in flux. The developers keep introducing changes in the syntax, which I have to learn. When you upgrade lilypond, you're supposed to run all your source files through a converter to get them into the latest syntax.
It's conceivable that something web-based like this could really be a disruptive technology that would break people out of the proprietary Finale world and get a lot more people using OSS for music notation, but there would have to be some upgrade path from the web-based app to a full-featured OSS app. It would really be cool if that could happen. For instance, I play viola. Say I want to make a viola arrangement of a public-domain violin piece. It would be great if there was a large population of people standardized on an OSS format, so that I could just find someone's violin file that they'd released for free, and transpose it into viola clef. This exists right now in projects like Mutopia and Werner Icking Music Archive, but those projects are not as all-encompassing as what you might get if they were in file formats that were used by more than 0.1% of musicians.
MathML has been around since 1998, which is a heck of a long time by web standards, and yet IE still doesn't support it out of the box. That's why IE users can't view this book properly without a plugin to provide mathml support. Yet another reason to encourage everyone you know to drop IE and get a decent browser. Supporting mathml in IE is also a ridiculous pain in the neck for people creating web pages. Even if you are willing to tell your readers that they can't view your site without the plugin, you still can't write standard xhtml with mathml embedded in it; if you want it to work with the MathPlayer plugin for IE, you have to write all kinds of ugly, nonstandard hacks, and serve up a different version of the page to IE users than to everyone else. The end result of all this is that MathML doesn't get used nearly as much as it should.
For instance, Wikipedia renders bitmaps as equations, using software called texvc. A guy named D.M. Harvey at Harvard wrote software called blahtex that can be used as a drop-in replacement for texvc, rendering math as either MathML or bitmaps as required. There was a long discussion of this on WikiProject Mathematics, and there was a clear consensus that texvc was old, lame technology, and needed to be replaced with blahtex. However, the people who run the software setup for WP never implemented it -- never, apparently, even bothered to give an actual response, just blew it off. The attitude would presumably have been different if the situation with IE had been different. Since most people access WP with IE, those people would still have had to be served a version of the pages with bitmaps. That would have been a hassle in terms of software.
I believe that the current plan is for html 5 to include support for embedded mathml and svg tags (even though html 5 isn't xhtml). It will be interesting to see whether MS supports this aspect of html 5, or just does a partial implementation that omits these features.
I'm not rich (I'm a community college professor), but this is a price I could afford if I made it a priority in my life and planned my finances around it. Some people who make the same amount of money I do make it a priority to own a car that costs roughly this much.
Arguments against:
It's $100,000 for 5 minutes of entertainment.
Related to point #1, it's possible that in 10 more years, you'd be able to pay the same amount of money to spend a week in space. A week in space would be a lot more fun. This is one of those risks you have to worry about when you're an early adopter: maybe with hindsight you'll have bought at the wrong time.
It's probably impossible to quantify the risk of death. The risk would probably be considerably higher than the risk associated with a space shuttle launch and reentry... which is actually quite high.
When (not if!) Ubuntu starts to slack, someone else will step up and replace it with something even better.
It's happened already. The last few releases of ubuntu have been horrible. Please, oh please let someone else to step up and replace it with something better.
I believe the slashdot summary and TFA are misleading, because they make it sound like LISA will definitely be built. According to the WP article, LISA is competing against two other space-based science projects for funding, and the decision won't be made until 2013.
Personally, I would love to see LISA fly. Gravitational waves were first predicted in about 1914. Most aspects of general relativity have been tested pretty thoroughly at this point, but almost a century later we still have no direct confirmation that gravitational waves exist (although there is very strong indirect evidence). And if they can be detected, then it opens up an entirely new way of doing astronomy: not with electromagnetic waves, but with gravitational ones.
I don't get why the spammers even bother anymore though. People on Usenet tend to be experienced users - few people just accidentally wander there anymore. These type of users HATE spam. They can't possibly be getting much, if any, of a response from their efforts there. Why waste the effort in the first place?
What effort? It doesn't cost any effort to spam a usenet group. You download a script and start it running. It spams every group in the usenet hierarchy with ads for shoes or handbags. This is the same principle as with email spam. When the incremental cost of sending a spam is zero, there is no incentive to worry about targeting your spams, trying to make them effective, etc.
When you say students will switch courses, is that to similar courses from the same department?
That's one possibility. It's also very common in my area for students to mix and match students from multiple schools, e.g., Cal State Fullerton, Fullerton College, and Cypress College. They shop around for whichever teacher at whichever school has the lowest standards.
>>If they're wrong, they'll be punished at exam time.
>Or, they turn around and blame the professor (and the school) for failing to teach them. And ask for their money back. If the school can demonstrate, that they have not attended the classes, they can defend themselves.
IAACCP (I am a community college professor), teaching physics. Parent is sort of on the right track, although wrong about the specifics.
Students at my school hate -- hatehateHATE!!! -- any course in which the grade in the course is based 100% on exams. Why do they hate it? Because it's unfair. Why is it unfair? Because their grades on exams are always unfair. Always. They deserved more partial credit. The exam problems weren't the same as the ones in the book. The exam had a problem on that one chapter that they didn't understand, and that wasn't fair, because they understood the other chapters. Also, the student's friend got a bad grade too, and that proves that the exam was unfair, because that shows that nobody could do it.
As a professor, I do not have the option of doing something that is perceived as unfair, even if the perception is totally based on self-delusion and wishful thinking. It's not, as the parent suggests, that the students will sue. It's simply that they will choose not to enroll in my classes. Then all my sections will get canceled. Yeah, I have tenure, but my life is going to get pretty miserable if every class I teach is canceled every single semester.
So what I have to do is cover my exams with a figleaf of other graded work. In my physics lecture/lab classes, 75% of their grade in lecture is based on exams. The other 25% doesn't really have any effect on their grades, but it's enough to convince them that their grade wasn't completely based on those horrible, unfair exams. I've always collected homework papers and written comments on them, but the psychological perception of fairness requires that these papers count for some tiny amount of credit (16% is what I'm doing these days). It's not satisfactory to the students just to get comments written on their paper so they have feedback; they feel that it must count for some pathetic number of points, or else the course is unfair.
I've explored some of the other psychological parameters of what they perceive as fair. For example, I've tried (a) giving four equally weighted exams, and (b) giving two "practice" exams that didn't count much, plus a midterm and final that counted a lot. Option b was considered extremely unfair, so I had to switch back to a.
So I have absolutely no option but to have something like 25% of their grade be based on something other than exams. As long as I'm doing that, what the heck does it matter whether or not I take attendance? My school requires me to take attendance, and drop students who don't attend. I don't have a problem with that. I just use homework to determine attendance, and anyone who's not turning in homework (or other written work) gets dropped. If they do the homework but get their friend to drop it off for them, I don't have a problem with that.
What TFA seems to be describing is the kind of thing that happens in a particular sort of class at big state universities. This is the kind of class where there are 300, 400, or 500 students in a gigantic auditorium. State universities teach a bunch of their freshman classes this way because it saves them a ton of money. Students' perceptions of fairness and unfairness are determined by different criteria in this type of class. Everyone knows that lectures in this type of class are a complete waste of time. Everyone knows that this type of class represents an extremely poor quality of education. Given that the whole thing is a sham, it makes sense to do silly stuff like using RFID for attendance, because the whole thing is just a cynical exercise, so why not do the thing that minimizes costs? And students, of course, do not have the option of voting with their feet, because these 500-person classes exist by virtue of the fact that they're required courses, and freshmen have no other options.
Man, I hate taking attendance. As far as I'm concerned, attendance should have nothing to do with assessments in college. Moreover, it's a huge waste of time having to do this paper-shuffling stuff at the beginning of each class session. [...]
However, it's just about the ONE thing that the administration of the college I teach at is totally anal about.
I teach physics at a community college, and we have a similar policy, although not as strictly enforced. The easy way to handle it is simply to keep track of the written work that the students have turned in, and use that to determine whether they've attended. If there's a quiz and homework due at a certain meeting, and the student didn't turn those in, then I have a record that the student didn't attend class. (If the student didn't do the homework, and was too late to class to take the quiz, then I consider that student to have been absent.)
That's where the LTS releases come in. If you don't want to upgrade, you don't have to. For years.
For me, the big problem with that is that I can't update my apps without updating the OS as well. This is just the way debian/ubuntu is designed. With jaunty and karmic, I had to upgrade in order to get bug fixes in my apps, but then I got new bugs in the OS.
If I'd still been running Hardy until last month, then I would have been running some ancient, buggy version of Inkscape, for instance. On the other hand, by upgrading I got sound completely broken by pulseaudio.
What OS guys don't seem to understand is that end users don't really care about the OS-level features that seem so exciting to an OS guy. We just want the OS to work so that we can run apps.
I nominate this for all-time...
on
Zen Coding
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· Score: 4, Informative
...crappiest article ever to get frontpaged on slashdot.
It's a couple hundred words worth of "OMG!" with a code example.
My family dropped cable TV service a couple of weeks ago. We're probably not typical, though. We never had cable TV until our kids got to be about 9 and 12, and then they said they really wanted it, so we got it. It was a novelty at first, but then they lost interest. Since we weren't watching more than an hour a month, we decided there was no need to keep paying the bill. I think flash games and internet chat take the place of TV for them. Rising prices were a contributing factor, but we probably would have stopped even if prices had stayed the same.
Soy is an excellent plant source of protein. However, protein is not a single nutrient, but a collection of nutrients known as amino acids. Some amino acids can be synthesized by humans (non-essential or dispensible amino acids), others can be interconverted between each other, and others still have to be consumed intact because humans have innadequate ability to synthesize them (essential or indispensible amino acids). Generally, animal sources of protein have ratios of amino acids more in line with the human requirement (Egg being the gold standard).
There used to be a widespread belief that vegetarians should eat complementary proteins in order to get enough protein in their diets. This turned out to be based on bad science. It is certainly easier to get enough protein in a vegetarian diet if you eat eggs and dairy products, but basically any vegetarian diet that includes a wide variety of plant foods will provide enough protein. The typical US diet contains much, much more protein than the body actually needs. More info here.
Any potential Martian colonists will have a diet that bares little resemplence to the average American's diet now, but Veganisms is dependent upon modern infrastructure that would be difficult to replicate on Mars.
I'm skeptical of this claim. We've seen claims upthread that, for example, lack of vitamin B12 would be a big issue. The recommended daily value of vitamin B12 is five micrograms. Let's say we have a colony with 1000 people, and they need to survive for 100 years. The total amount of vitamin B12 they'll need is about 4 kg. That's for the entire group, for 100 years. This is a negligible amount of mass compared to the total amount that would have to be brought from earth to set up such a colony.
Non-vegetarians tend to have exaggerated fears of the things that would happen to them if they didn't eat meat. Most people who have lived since the invention of agriculture have eaten a negligible amount of meat. Yes, many of them had dietary-deficiency diseases, but those diseases had nothing to do with lack of meat. They had to do with lack of things like fruit and vegetables.
After upgrading to lucid, my system failed to boot properly a significant fraction of the time. Turns out this was a problem with kernel 2.6.32-19. The thing that I really wished I'd understood a couple of weeks ago was that in order to keep up to date with the latest version of the lucid beta, I needed to keep on doing apt-get dist-upgrades. It is not enough to do a single apt-get dist-upgrade, and then just do apt-get upgrades after that. Only after I did another dist-upgrade did I get kernel 2.6.32-21, which fixed the problem with booting.
There is a regression in printing. My Brother laser printer had been working fine in karmic. Now with lucid, on about 50% of boots, the printer is not recognized, and I have to reboot in order to print. (I haven't gotten around to filing a proper bug report on this one yet, or seeing if it's a known bug -- any other slashdotters having similar problems?)
For anyone who is having serious problems with jaunty or karmic that have been fixed in lucid, it might actually be smart to go ahead and upgrade sooner rather than later. My impression is that the beta is at least as high in quality as the release versions of jaunty and karmic. Jaunty and karmic were simply horrible releases.
In the future, I'm thinking of being much more conservative, just staying with LTS releases. What I'd been doing in the past was upgrading the OS for the sake of getting new versions of certain apps (mainly inkscape). But the quality of the non-LTS releases seems to be so ridiculously bad that I don't think I'm going to do that anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO your comment is an example of how the word "innovative" has become so debased as to lose all meaning. Linux is my desktop and server OS of choice, but it's certainly not innovative. Linux is a monkey copy of Unix. Running on top of linux we have the Gnu userspace stack, which is a monkey copy of the Unix userspace. KDE is just another window manager. There's no significant innovation in it compared to its predecessors like the original Mac GUI, or the mouse-and-icons systems that predated the Mac. Firefox is not particularly innovative. NCSA Mosaic was innovative -- and had a proprietary license, although the source code was available.
Innovation is rare in the proprietary software world, and it's equally rare in the open-source world. If you want a good example of an innovative open-source project, probably one of the best is Apache. It wasn't the first web server, but it rapidly established itself as the dominant web server in the early days of the web.
Cool -- thanks for the link! The quick summary, for those who aren't going to read the whole speech, is that he wanted copyright to be a permanent property right, but since that was unconstitutional, he wanted it to last as long as possible. He makes the argument that putting a shorter term on copyright, such as the 42-year term they had at the time, is pointless, because so few books remain in print after 42 years. He claims that at that time less than 100 authors or descendants of authors in the US had ever benefited financially from a book that was more than 42 years old. Since there are so few of them, he claims that no harm is done by letting copyright last long enough to provide an income for their children. It's still true today that a copyrighted work's chance of remaining profitable for more than a few decades is virtually zero. But a lot of things have changed since the 19th century. The amount of copyrighted material is vastly greater. We have, say, Winnie the Pooh -- I don't know how much money Disney makes from Pooh merchandise every year, but I'm sure it's a lot of money. I don't know what the commercial situation was for sheet music copyrights in the 19th century, but America's only indigenous art form, jazz, relies heavily on a shared vocabulary of "standards." If a group of serious jazz musicians get together, one of them can call a tune like "Green Dolphin Street," or "A Train," and they're all supposed to know the changes and be able to start playing it. Because of our screwed up copyright system, these standards are never, ever going to come into the public domain. Even really square old tunes from 1923 are still under copyright, and I'm sure that Congress will keep extending their copyrights until after I'm dead.
Martin Gardner was one of a kind. I grew up with his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. His book Relativity Simply Explained is what I recommend whenever people ask me for a good intro to relativity. His intelligence and ability to explain were extraordinary compared to a lot of people with much more formal education. He had a long life and seems to have remained sharp and active for almost all of it.
This protects your privacy from everyone but google. Having someone sniff your packets is theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely in reality. On the other hand, you are absolutely guaranteed that google will harvest and store the information from your searches in order to show you ads that they think you'll be interested in. This is why I habitally use the search engine clusty.com for web searches. Clusty's search results usually seem to be about the same quality as google's, and clusty has a better privacy policy.
It's apparently pretty common for these machines to run an embedded copy of Windows these days. I know someone who was a sysadmin at UC Berkeley a few years back, and she had to clean up the mess when their photocopier picked up a Windows virus and became a spam zombie. This seems similar to the kind of situation we're seeing with people's home routers and cable modems getting owned. The basic problem seems to be that the end user buys something that is a general-purpose computer, but the manufacturer doesn't present it to them as a general-purpose computer that needs maintenance, security patches, etc., and the manufacturer may also choose an initial configuration that is designed for ease of use rather than security (e.g., having passwords that the user doesn't set).
If the only problem was getting your images read out by someone else when the machine is resold, that would seem pretty minor to me. Can't they just design the machine so that the memory used for temporary storage of images is volatile? Then as soon as you unplug the machine that you're going to resell, the memory is wiped.
But if your copier is getting owned by hackers while you're still using it, then the presence of the left-over images seems like it becomes a bigger issue, and harder to secure yourself against.
Employers use a college degrees as a proxy for other things, such as the ability to read at some kind of adult level, or the willingness to show up on time for work when your mommy isn't pushing you out the door every morning. I teach at a community college. We get students who have graduated from high school but who read at the sixth-grade level and can't do arithmetic. College requires a certain amount of independent thinking. Many people don't succeed in college because they can't handle any kind of work that requires thinking a thought that nobody else thought up for them. Employers want to avoid hiring these people.
Nobody has to go to college in order to get a job as a firefighter or a mail carrier or a truck driver. But if I was an employer looking to hire an administrative assistant, darn right I'd want to hire one who had a four-year degree, because I wouldn't want to hire someone who was functionally illiterate.
The current software renders equations as bitmaps. The bitmaps look lousy. They're less legible than mathml. They look awful when you print them. They're the wrong size compared to the text. People who are visually impaired can use the controls in their browser to enlarge the font in the web page, but that won't enlarge the equations. People who are blind can use text-to-speech on the web page, but it won't read the equations out loud.
I hope you're not saying that it's okay for Microsoft to make math on the web inaccessible to blind people. It's totally messed up that Microsoft can hold back progress in putting math on the web for a decade or more, just because they have the most popular browser and don't feel like implementing the standard in a standard way.
They did do a better job. You just aren't seeing it because you're using Internet Explorer, which doesn't support MathML. Try viewing the site with a recent version of Firefox, and you'll see all the math rendered correctly.
No, all sites should not have something like this. End users should not have to do something special like this to work around the fact that IE doesn't support MathML properly. (IE requires a plugin, and even with the plugin, it doesn't support standard mathml; web authors have to make special IE-only versions of their pages with nonstandard kludges written in.) The best solution is for IE to die. The second best solution is for Opera users to contact the webmaster at nist.gov and ask them to configure their server so it recognizes recent versions of Opera as having mathml, in the same way it recognizes recent versions of Firefox.
This is just one of many examples of the pain and suffering caused by MS's failure to implement the MathML standard in IE. Webmasters shouldn't have to special-case browsers like this, but they're forced to, because they can't just afford to have the page not work for IE users. When you have to special-case different browsers and version numbers of browsers, it's inevitable that you'll get problems like this. Every new browser that is every written will not get served mathml by a site like this, until someone finally gets in touch with the webmaster of the site and gets him to add a special case for that browser. The only solution I can think of is to make it a federal crime to use IE.
There is very good, full-featured, open-source music notation software available. The program I've used is called lilypond. The people who wrote it put a huge amount of effort into studying high-quality music notation, so the scores really come out looking nice. It's cross-platform.
I get the impression that very few actual working musicians have switched to lilypond, or even heard of it. The main problem is probably that lilypond is basically a non-GUI program; you enter your music in a cryptic computer language, and the compile it. There is a GUI front-end called Denemo, which has been moving along, but very, very slowly. Most musicians seem to use Finale. Once they've paid the money for Finale, they don't have any motivation to try other software. I haven't played around with the latest version of Denemo very much, but superficially it doesn't appear to be anywhere near as full-featured as Finale's GUI, even though lilypond probably *is* right on par with Finale in terms of its feature set. There is a program to convert Finale to Lilypond (called etf2ly), but I don't know how good it is. One thing that's frustrated me as a lilypond user is that the language is continually in flux. The developers keep introducing changes in the syntax, which I have to learn. When you upgrade lilypond, you're supposed to run all your source files through a converter to get them into the latest syntax.
It's conceivable that something web-based like this could really be a disruptive technology that would break people out of the proprietary Finale world and get a lot more people using OSS for music notation, but there would have to be some upgrade path from the web-based app to a full-featured OSS app. It would really be cool if that could happen. For instance, I play viola. Say I want to make a viola arrangement of a public-domain violin piece. It would be great if there was a large population of people standardized on an OSS format, so that I could just find someone's violin file that they'd released for free, and transpose it into viola clef. This exists right now in projects like Mutopia and Werner Icking Music Archive, but those projects are not as all-encompassing as what you might get if they were in file formats that were used by more than 0.1% of musicians.
MathML has been around since 1998, which is a heck of a long time by web standards, and yet IE still doesn't support it out of the box. That's why IE users can't view this book properly without a plugin to provide mathml support. Yet another reason to encourage everyone you know to drop IE and get a decent browser. Supporting mathml in IE is also a ridiculous pain in the neck for people creating web pages. Even if you are willing to tell your readers that they can't view your site without the plugin, you still can't write standard xhtml with mathml embedded in it; if you want it to work with the MathPlayer plugin for IE, you have to write all kinds of ugly, nonstandard hacks, and serve up a different version of the page to IE users than to everyone else. The end result of all this is that MathML doesn't get used nearly as much as it should.
For instance, Wikipedia renders bitmaps as equations, using software called texvc. A guy named D.M. Harvey at Harvard wrote software called blahtex that can be used as a drop-in replacement for texvc, rendering math as either MathML or bitmaps as required. There was a long discussion of this on WikiProject Mathematics, and there was a clear consensus that texvc was old, lame technology, and needed to be replaced with blahtex. However, the people who run the software setup for WP never implemented it -- never, apparently, even bothered to give an actual response, just blew it off. The attitude would presumably have been different if the situation with IE had been different. Since most people access WP with IE, those people would still have had to be served a version of the pages with bitmaps. That would have been a hassle in terms of software.
I believe that the current plan is for html 5 to include support for embedded mathml and svg tags (even though html 5 isn't xhtml). It will be interesting to see whether MS supports this aspect of html 5, or just does a partial implementation that omits these features.
I'm not rich (I'm a community college professor), but this is a price I could afford if I made it a priority in my life and planned my finances around it. Some people who make the same amount of money I do make it a priority to own a car that costs roughly this much.
Arguments against:
It's happened already. The last few releases of ubuntu have been horrible. Please, oh please let someone else to step up and replace it with something better.
I believe the slashdot summary and TFA are misleading, because they make it sound like LISA will definitely be built. According to the WP article, LISA is competing against two other space-based science projects for funding, and the decision won't be made until 2013.
Personally, I would love to see LISA fly. Gravitational waves were first predicted in about 1914. Most aspects of general relativity have been tested pretty thoroughly at this point, but almost a century later we still have no direct confirmation that gravitational waves exist (although there is very strong indirect evidence). And if they can be detected, then it opens up an entirely new way of doing astronomy: not with electromagnetic waves, but with gravitational ones.
What effort? It doesn't cost any effort to spam a usenet group. You download a script and start it running. It spams every group in the usenet hierarchy with ads for shoes or handbags. This is the same principle as with email spam. When the incremental cost of sending a spam is zero, there is no incentive to worry about targeting your spams, trying to make them effective, etc.
That's one possibility. It's also very common in my area for students to mix and match students from multiple schools, e.g., Cal State Fullerton, Fullerton College, and Cypress College. They shop around for whichever teacher at whichever school has the lowest standards.
IAACCP (I am a community college professor), teaching physics. Parent is sort of on the right track, although wrong about the specifics.
Students at my school hate -- hate hate HATE!!! -- any course in which the grade in the course is based 100% on exams. Why do they hate it? Because it's unfair. Why is it unfair? Because their grades on exams are always unfair. Always. They deserved more partial credit. The exam problems weren't the same as the ones in the book. The exam had a problem on that one chapter that they didn't understand, and that wasn't fair, because they understood the other chapters. Also, the student's friend got a bad grade too, and that proves that the exam was unfair, because that shows that nobody could do it.
As a professor, I do not have the option of doing something that is perceived as unfair, even if the perception is totally based on self-delusion and wishful thinking. It's not, as the parent suggests, that the students will sue. It's simply that they will choose not to enroll in my classes. Then all my sections will get canceled. Yeah, I have tenure, but my life is going to get pretty miserable if every class I teach is canceled every single semester.
So what I have to do is cover my exams with a figleaf of other graded work. In my physics lecture/lab classes, 75% of their grade in lecture is based on exams. The other 25% doesn't really have any effect on their grades, but it's enough to convince them that their grade wasn't completely based on those horrible, unfair exams. I've always collected homework papers and written comments on them, but the psychological perception of fairness requires that these papers count for some tiny amount of credit (16% is what I'm doing these days). It's not satisfactory to the students just to get comments written on their paper so they have feedback; they feel that it must count for some pathetic number of points, or else the course is unfair. I've explored some of the other psychological parameters of what they perceive as fair. For example, I've tried (a) giving four equally weighted exams, and (b) giving two "practice" exams that didn't count much, plus a midterm and final that counted a lot. Option b was considered extremely unfair, so I had to switch back to a.
So I have absolutely no option but to have something like 25% of their grade be based on something other than exams. As long as I'm doing that, what the heck does it matter whether or not I take attendance? My school requires me to take attendance, and drop students who don't attend. I don't have a problem with that. I just use homework to determine attendance, and anyone who's not turning in homework (or other written work) gets dropped. If they do the homework but get their friend to drop it off for them, I don't have a problem with that.
What TFA seems to be describing is the kind of thing that happens in a particular sort of class at big state universities. This is the kind of class where there are 300, 400, or 500 students in a gigantic auditorium. State universities teach a bunch of their freshman classes this way because it saves them a ton of money. Students' perceptions of fairness and unfairness are determined by different criteria in this type of class. Everyone knows that lectures in this type of class are a complete waste of time. Everyone knows that this type of class represents an extremely poor quality of education. Given that the whole thing is a sham, it makes sense to do silly stuff like using RFID for attendance, because the whole thing is just a cynical exercise, so why not do the thing that minimizes costs? And students, of course, do not have the option of voting with their feet, because these 500-person classes exist by virtue of the fact that they're required courses, and freshmen have no other options.
I teach physics at a community college, and we have a similar policy, although not as strictly enforced. The easy way to handle it is simply to keep track of the written work that the students have turned in, and use that to determine whether they've attended. If there's a quiz and homework due at a certain meeting, and the student didn't turn those in, then I have a record that the student didn't attend class. (If the student didn't do the homework, and was too late to class to take the quiz, then I consider that student to have been absent.)
For me, the big problem with that is that I can't update my apps without updating the OS as well. This is just the way debian/ubuntu is designed. With jaunty and karmic, I had to upgrade in order to get bug fixes in my apps, but then I got new bugs in the OS.
If I'd still been running Hardy until last month, then I would have been running some ancient, buggy version of Inkscape, for instance. On the other hand, by upgrading I got sound completely broken by pulseaudio.
What OS guys don't seem to understand is that end users don't really care about the OS-level features that seem so exciting to an OS guy. We just want the OS to work so that we can run apps.
...crappiest article ever to get frontpaged on slashdot.
It's a couple hundred words worth of "OMG!" with a code example.
My family dropped cable TV service a couple of weeks ago. We're probably not typical, though. We never had cable TV until our kids got to be about 9 and 12, and then they said they really wanted it, so we got it. It was a novelty at first, but then they lost interest. Since we weren't watching more than an hour a month, we decided there was no need to keep paying the bill. I think flash games and internet chat take the place of TV for them. Rising prices were a contributing factor, but we probably would have stopped even if prices had stayed the same.
There used to be a widespread belief that vegetarians should eat complementary proteins in order to get enough protein in their diets. This turned out to be based on bad science. It is certainly easier to get enough protein in a vegetarian diet if you eat eggs and dairy products, but basically any vegetarian diet that includes a wide variety of plant foods will provide enough protein. The typical US diet contains much, much more protein than the body actually needs. More info here.
I'm skeptical of this claim. We've seen claims upthread that, for example, lack of vitamin B12 would be a big issue. The recommended daily value of vitamin B12 is five micrograms. Let's say we have a colony with 1000 people, and they need to survive for 100 years. The total amount of vitamin B12 they'll need is about 4 kg. That's for the entire group, for 100 years. This is a negligible amount of mass compared to the total amount that would have to be brought from earth to set up such a colony.
Non-vegetarians tend to have exaggerated fears of the things that would happen to them if they didn't eat meat. Most people who have lived since the invention of agriculture have eaten a negligible amount of meat. Yes, many of them had dietary-deficiency diseases, but those diseases had nothing to do with lack of meat. They had to do with lack of things like fruit and vegetables.
After upgrading to lucid, my sound started working again for the first time since intrepid ibex.
FWIW, here's my experience with upgrading from karmic to lucid. I've been running lucid since April 10.
For anyone who is having serious problems with jaunty or karmic that have been fixed in lucid, it might actually be smart to go ahead and upgrade sooner rather than later. My impression is that the beta is at least as high in quality as the release versions of jaunty and karmic. Jaunty and karmic were simply horrible releases.
In the future, I'm thinking of being much more conservative, just staying with LTS releases. What I'd been doing in the past was upgrading the OS for the sake of getting new versions of certain apps (mainly inkscape). But the quality of the non-LTS releases seems to be so ridiculously bad that I don't think I'm going to do that anymore.