I have some experience teaching a little python to adults (community college physics students). It was mostly pretty good. If the choice was pascal or python, I'd have a hard time imagining why anyone would pick pascal in this day and age. There are free books that use python as an introductory language, e.g., this one.
Another reasonable possibility other than python would be ruby. When I taught python to beginners, the significant whitespace really was a source of confusion. Ruby avoids that. There's this book for beginners (incomplete).
This is not such big news. Amazon.com will already sell you music in mp3 format, without any DRM. You can buy pretty much any commercial album or song you want.
There are differences between the McCartney deal and Amazon.com, but although they may be significant for some people, I don't think they warrant the breathless slashdot summary:
Amazon won't sell you MP3s if you're outside the US, presumably because of contractual problems.
Amazon doesn't sell anything in less lossy formats than MP3.
You can only listen to parts of tracks, not entire albums, before buying.
And by the way, amazon has gone out of their way to offer Linux support. (If you buy an entire album, you have to do it via an external application, and they've released versions of the external application for several linux distros. Personally, I prefer an OSS alternative called clamz.)
I run a web site that catalogs free books and accepts user-submitted reviews (see my sig). Reviews of this book would be welcome.
I read a couple of chapters online, and it seemed pretty cool. I'm interested in learning FP techniques, and it was really nice to be able to learn about techniques like memoization in the context of a language whose syntax I already know. I can glance through the code examples and say, "Aha, I get it!" instead of laboriously poring over code listings in lisp or haskell and saying, after 15 minutes of study, "Okay, I know what the first eleven characters on line 1 do."
I also liked the opportunity to see some of the nontrivial things that happen when you apply FP techniques to a language that isn't a pure FP language. E.g., I already knew that FP techniques focused on functions without side-effects, but I hadn't realized that the same applied to functions that return references. He also has some interesting examples of how OO and FP go together, common pitfalls of combining them, etc.
As an example of the learning curve, I wanted to learn a little OCaml. I played around with this insertion sort example. I used it to sort a list of 10,000 integers, and it took 10 seconds, versus <1 second in C with linked lists. Not too horrible. But changing it to 100,000 integers made it die with a stack overflow, so I'm guessing that its memory use goes like n^2. However, it's not at all obvious to me from looking at the code that this would be the case. I think if I wanted to do a lot of OCaml programming I'd have to develop "FP Eye for the Straight Guy." Probably if you wanted to make it perform better on big arrays you'd want to make it tail-recursive, but it's not totally obvious to me from the code that it's *not* tail-recursive; although the recursive call isn't the very last line of code in the function, it is the very last thing in its clause...?
I know of at least one well known OSS project in Haskell, written by a very smart guy, that is really struggling with performance issues. I wonder whether bad performance is to FP as null-pointer bugs are to C. Sure, a sufficiently skilled programmer should theoretically never write code that will dereference a null pointer, but nevertheless my Ubuntu system needs a dozen security patches every month, many of which are due to null pointers, buffer overflows, etc.
He's got a list of complaints which is completely the wrong list. Essentially he seems upset about (1) not getting a byline, (2) neutral point of view, (3) no original research, and (4) having what he writes modified by others. Well, sorry, but those are all basic features of WP. They're not gonna change, and IMO they shouldn't change. WP has problems, but the problems are not on this list.
In my opinion, the biggest problems with WP are (1) the poor quality of the writing, and (2) the tendency of the quality of an article to get worse over time, rather than better. Problem 1 is particularly pronounced in my field, which is physics; most of the physics articles read as if they were written by smart grad students who wanted to show off how smart they were. If there was going to be a #3 on my list, it would have to do with the factors that make me personally feel like working on WP has gotten about as pleasant as a proctological exam. But that's really not a problem with WP, it's just a problem that makes me personally not want to work on WP. Plenty of other people still seem to be happily maintaining it, which I think is great.
Most people -- including, I suspect, doctors -- have trouble with critical thinking, and one area that tends to be a particular problem is critical thinking about probabilities and cause-and-effect relationships. I'm a community college professor in California, and recently there was a big state-wide earthquake drill, which they made into sort of a media event. The day before, I heard my students before class talking about it. "There's gonna be an earthquake tomorrow at 10 o'clock." "Huh? They can't predict earthquakes, can they?" "I heard it on the news." "Really?" Most people just accept information without thinking about it critically. Obama won't say the pledge of allegiance? Oh, okay.
I don't think medicine is different from any other field where people gather their own information, and I don't think health-care professionals are always much better than anyone else at this kind of thing. For example, I had a certain foot problem, and my G.P. prescribed physical therapy. One of the things the physical therapist did was to use ultrasound on my feet (therapeutic ultrasound, not ultrasound for imaging). I checked on the web later, and it turned out that the only controlled scientific studies on the topic had shown that ultrasound had no effect on my condition.
I think it's telling that "evidence-based medicine" is a term that even needs to be used. If it's not evidence-based, what's it based on? Wishful thinking? Voodoo? The placebo effect?
wouldn't you love to hear truly CD-quality digital music you can download legally that sounds great even on a high-end stereo system?
No, mp3 sounds just fine to me, and I have a reasonably good stereo. I'm a complete nonbeliever in the kinds of things that audiophiles claim to be able to hear. I can believe that people can hear the difference between digital (no background hiss) and analog (background hiss). I can believe people can hear the difference between one set of speakers and another, or a difference in the acoustics of the room. I don't believe in anything other than that. There's a reason that audio magazines never do double-blind tests -- if they did, they'd have to admit that they're making it all up.
You poor bastard. You should have used something lossless like FLAC. Disk space is cheap, and a compressed size of 70->80% of WAV is nothing to sneeze at. Plus, you can reencode to *ANY* future format w/out worrying about a horrific loss in quality. (OGG MP3, anyone?:( )
Disk space is cheap, but backup space isn't. I don't want to have to have a stack of a hundred disks to back up my music collection, because the whole point was to get rid of the physical media.
Sure, theoretically the need for transcoding in the future might be a problem. But realistically, why would I want to do that? The mp3 patents are in the process of expiring. Ogg failed; it didn't get any significant traction before mp3 patents started expiring, at which point it became irrelevant.
It's strange that nobody ever talks about Amazon. You can buy MP3's on Amazon for 89-99 cents per track, complete albums typically for about $8. I ripped all my CDs to mp3 this year, tossed the CDs in a dumpster, and am now buying music only on Amazon. I love not having piles of CDs lying around and making my house messy. Amazon sells music with no DRM. It works on any OS that can run a web browser.
iTunes, on the other hand... yeesh. It's a completely proprietary system, and it doesn't run on my OS. It's also got DRM (although the DRM is fairly easy to circumvent).
I know the impetus is to produce big and fast SS drives, but I'm more interested in cheap and fast ones. My desktop machine has 11 Gb of system and apps and <1 Gb of user files. I would be perfectly happy with a 16 Gb SSD that had great performance, was cheap, and was reliable. Reliability is a big issue. Although theoretically a device with no moving parts should always be more reliable than one with moving parts, in reality SSD technology isn't as mature as HD technology, so the failure rate may actually be higher, and there may be no way to recover from a failure.
We need to prevent another monoculture in the information sector, even in open source. If everyone uses the same kernel, they will all have the same vulnerabilities.
Good point, but we already have the whole BSD family. Having a third family of kernels available is probably a lot less important than having a second one. I would think that avoiding monoculture would be a much less important argument in Nexenta's favor than the availability of ZFS, for people who need specific features of ZFS. Hmm...but then, the licensing issue that makes ZFS incompatible with the Linux kernel doesn't apply to BSD, and ZFS is already available on BSD. I suppose if you want specific features of ZFS, and you're used to the GNU toolchain, then Nexenta might be more congenial than BSD. But an awful lot of the user-visible differences between BSD userland and Linux userland have been going away lately. E.g., GNU m4 is now the default on BSD.
If it was found that mass and energy didn't convert, we could just set c to zero and E=mc^2 would still hold. Or redefine n^2 to always equal zero. That wouldn't require upsetting c, which might be useful.
If it was found that mass and energy didn't convert, we'd have to explain why there was a world-wide conspiracy to fabricate the experimental evidence that it did. The conspiracy would have had to last over five generations of physicists, numbering in the tens of thousands. (I'm one of them.) It would be awfully odd that not a single one of us had ever refused the secret initiation into this cabal. I've helped out with a museum exhibit in which a cloud chamber demonstrated electron-positron production by cosmic rays. If it was found that mass and energy didn't convert, then you'd have to assume that every schoolkid who ever saw that demonstration was also part of this vast conspiracy.
You might as well worry about how to adapt all our old maps and globes if the world turned out to be flat.
Some argue, that only savvy internet users activate it. however, if you use Ubuntu, the add on is installed by default.
I don't see this as a "however." You typically don't use ubuntu unless you're part of the unusually computer-savvy end of the bell curve. Linux is something like 1% of the desktop market, so why would Google care?
Chrome is also open-source, so even if Google refuses to release it with an ad blocker, there's nothing stopping third parties from making their own versions that do. We're already seeing third-party-branded versions of OOo such as go-oo.org that omit Sun's annoying click-through licenses. (Or if Chrome has a plug-in architecture as flexible as Firefox's, Google probably can't stop people from making the equivalent of AdBLock Plus.)
I'm also very skeptical that Chrome can change the web as much as you're talking about:
a new standard in high quality browsers
I'd say that's extremely premature, since Chrome is a very raw beta.
could usher in Javascript games
I think JS games are cool, because JS is an open standard. But the average person playing Neopets couldn't care less that it's implemented on a semi-proprietary technology.
AJAX apps
We already have AJAX apps. The biggest problems with AJAX apps are (a) lack of cross-browser compatibility and (b) the fact that web browsers and HTTP were never designed as an application platform. Chrome won't make (b) better, and adding a new browser to the mix can at best keep from making (a) worse.
I thought it was extremely gratifying to look at the graph of the stock price and see that Yahoo had thoughtfully provided some space on the y axis for negative values.
The article at theage.com gives a completely bogus interpretation, which is repeated in the slashdot article. The New Scientist article is much better.
It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated,
This is just total scientific illiteracy. E=mc2 has been verified over and over again. We see it, for example, in processes like alpha decay, where the sum of the masses of the product nuclei doesn't equal the mass of the original nucleus. Mass is converted into energy in that process, and that's been experimentally established since probably the 1920's. Likewise energy can be converted into mass, as when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere and create electron-antielectron pairs. The theoretical foundations of E=mc2 are also extremely firm; it's deeply linked to the basic logical structure of relativity, and relativity has been abundantly experimentally verified.
Saying that this calculation verified E=mc2 is just stupid. The calculation assumes (1) special relativity, (2) quantum mechanics, (3) some technical stuff about how to make special relativity and quantum mechanics work together (generic ideas about quantum field theory), and (4) a bunch of very specific technical approximations needed in order to get an answer out of this particular flavor of quantum field theory (lattice QCD). The calculation has a bunch of adjustable parameters (quark masses, coupling constants). You play with the adjustable parameters and get a bunch of numbers out (neutron and proton masses, etc). If the number of adjustable parameters that goes in is m, and the number of experimentally testable numbers that pop out is n, then n-m is the number of degrees of freedom that verify whether the calculation is right. (For n=m, it would just be a complicated exercise in fitting the data, like putting two points on a graph and saying "look, it's a line!") I assume they calculated more than just the mass of the proton and neutron, because otherwise n=2 would be less than m. I assume the n-m degrees of freedom checked out fairly well, because they're calling it a success.
To see why this calculation can't really be interpreted as a test of E=mc2, you have to imagine what would have happened if it had turned out wrong. If it had disagreed with experiment, then we would conclude that some of the assumptions built into it were wrong. Let's look back at the assumptions 1-4 above. Well, 1 (special relativity) has been verified a zillion different ways since 1905 (or even as far back as the 19th century, the Michelson-Morley experiment, with hindsight). 2 (quantum mechanics) has likewise been verified a zillion different ways since the 1920's. 3, the general framework of quantum field theory, has some ugly spots, but it's been used to verify things like the magnetic moment of the electron to a dozen decimal places, so it's still on fairly firm ground. 4 is extremely shaky; it's only very recently that anyone has claimed to be able to calculate anything at all useful and realistic with QCD. So if it had failed, no physicist in the world would have interpreted it as evidence that assumption 1 (relativity) was wrong. They would have interpreted it as evidence that assumption 4 was wrong: the lattice QCD approximations weren't good enough, probably for very boring, technical reasons that would only be of interest to a specialist in lattice QCD.
Honestly, tell me you could generate this with gnuplot. (Disclaimer: I've never used mathematica).
I didn't sit through the whole slide show, but yes, I think gnuplot can do the kinds of things it showed. Gnuplot's 3-d surface plots don't look quite as nice as Mathematica's (different shading algorithm).
What don't you like about gnuplot? Basically it does what I need. My main complaints are that some of the options are a little arcane or seem like historical design mistakes, and also the SVG output isn't as good as EPS.
The Wikipedia list is very long. For anyone who's specifically interested in OSS that runs on Linux, here are some of my impressions:
Maxima - In my experience, it's very mature and bug-free. It's only suitable for interactice use; e.g., if you do certain integrals, it will ask you whether a particular constant occurring in the integrand is positive.
Yacas - Unlike Maxima, is designed to be suitable for both interactive and noninteractive use. Somewhat buggy, and fails more often than Maxima does.
Axiom - Has a complete implementation of the Risch algorithm, so it can do some integrals that other programs can't. E.g., it can integrate 1/(x^4-8*x^3+8*x^2-8*x+7), and so can Maxima, but Yacas can't.
Sage - Pros: Sage lets you program in python, so if you want to mix in some general-purpose programming, python libraries, etc., you can. Sage implements arbitrary-precision arithmetic much more efficiently than programs that use the GMP library. (E.g., sage computes (2^123456789-1)%(2^12345678-1) in about 10 s, whereas ordinary python takes longer to evaluate (2**123456789-1)%(2**12345678-1) than I was willing to wait.) Cons: It's basically a hairball of other math packages, and the interface to other packages often doesn't seem to be very good.
It's not packaged properly for debian/ubuntu.
The tutorial shows you how to do lots of fancy things using examples from abstract algebra, but doesn't tell you ordinary, useful things, like how to integrate x^a.
I've actually had very good experiences with Maxima. I've never seen a crash. BTW, I notice that your version says "This is a development version of Maxima. The function bug_report() provides bug reporting information." Did you try reproducing the problem with the stable version? Did you report the bug?
The thing that made me vow never to touch Mathematica again was that I owned a MacOS version, and it stopped working when I upgraded to a newer version of MacOS. (This was all back in the 90's, so we're talking about maybe MacOS 6 and 7 or something.) When I called to ask about how to get it working again, Wolfram told me that my only option was to buy a new copy of Mathematica.
More generally, Mathematica is a computer language, and the lesson of history is never to hitch your wagon to a proprietary computer language. Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science, for example, attracted a lot of criticism for a variety of reasons, but one of the criticisms was that the entire book was built around examples written in Mathematica notation, and scientists and mathematicians didn't want to have to learn a proprietary computer language in order to be able to evaluate his (somewhat overblown) claims.
The decision was based on both US and UK copyright law.
Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. was a U.S. court decision.
It's not a precedent affecting the U.K. I have a web site with my free physics textbooks, and I've received nastygrams from a U.K. museum about a contemporary portrait of Isaac Newton that's reproduced on my site. I didn't worry much about it, because I'm in the U.S., but they and their lawyers did seem to believe that the law was on their side in the U.K. (or maybe they were just bluffing). The WP article has some specific discussion of this at the end.
You personally might not encourage traditional gender roles, but the culture around you, including friends, relatives and the media, probably does.
I have two daughters. According to standardized tests, daughter #1 is about equally good at math and language. According to the same standardized tests, daughter #2 is also about equally good at math and language. What's totally different is that #1 hates math and loves English, which #2 hates English and loves math. Same environment, but #1 writes fantasy stories, #2 builds elaborate devices out of popsicle sticks and scotch tape. Seeing them both grow up, I think it's just clearly genetic. You shuffle the chromosomes randomly, and one kid ends up genetically predisposed to enjoy one thing, the other likes the other thing. Anyone who's a parent of more than one kid will tell you similar stories. Kids are just different from birth.
Go-oo looks interesting. Can you explain more about how it relates to Novell -- or doesn't? How is it different from this Novell version?
The thing that kills me about Sun's version of Ooo is that on Windows, it demands that every user click through a EULA. I teach physics in a computer lab at a school where every Windows box gets its hard disk restored from a standard image every night, so if a student wants to use Ooo, he has to click through all the multiple steps of agreeing to the Eula every single day that he uses the software. Needless to say, I'm having a hard time motivating any of them to use it instead of MS Office.
Slashdot Mirror
I have some experience teaching a little python to adults (community college physics students). It was mostly pretty good. If the choice was pascal or python, I'd have a hard time imagining why anyone would pick pascal in this day and age. There are free books that use python as an introductory language, e.g., this one.
Another reasonable possibility other than python would be ruby. When I taught python to beginners, the significant whitespace really was a source of confusion. Ruby avoids that. There's this book for beginners (incomplete).
This is not such big news. Amazon.com will already sell you music in mp3 format, without any DRM. You can buy pretty much any commercial album or song you want.
There are differences between the McCartney deal and Amazon.com, but although they may be significant for some people, I don't think they warrant the breathless slashdot summary:
And by the way, amazon has gone out of their way to offer Linux support. (If you buy an entire album, you have to do it via an external application, and they've released versions of the external application for several linux distros. Personally, I prefer an OSS alternative called clamz.)
If you speak Greek, English is the ultimate syntax hurdle. And vice versa if you speak English.
I run a web site that catalogs free books and accepts user-submitted reviews (see my sig). Reviews of this book would be welcome.
I read a couple of chapters online, and it seemed pretty cool. I'm interested in learning FP techniques, and it was really nice to be able to learn about techniques like memoization in the context of a language whose syntax I already know. I can glance through the code examples and say, "Aha, I get it!" instead of laboriously poring over code listings in lisp or haskell and saying, after 15 minutes of study, "Okay, I know what the first eleven characters on line 1 do."
I also liked the opportunity to see some of the nontrivial things that happen when you apply FP techniques to a language that isn't a pure FP language. E.g., I already knew that FP techniques focused on functions without side-effects, but I hadn't realized that the same applied to functions that return references. He also has some interesting examples of how OO and FP go together, common pitfalls of combining them, etc.
What's a good book to learn this kind of thing from?
As an example of the learning curve, I wanted to learn a little OCaml. I played around with this insertion sort example. I used it to sort a list of 10,000 integers, and it took 10 seconds, versus <1 second in C with linked lists. Not too horrible. But changing it to 100,000 integers made it die with a stack overflow, so I'm guessing that its memory use goes like n^2. However, it's not at all obvious to me from looking at the code that this would be the case. I think if I wanted to do a lot of OCaml programming I'd have to develop "FP Eye for the Straight Guy." Probably if you wanted to make it perform better on big arrays you'd want to make it tail-recursive, but it's not totally obvious to me from the code that it's *not* tail-recursive; although the recursive call isn't the very last line of code in the function, it is the very last thing in its clause...?
I know of at least one well known OSS project in Haskell, written by a very smart guy, that is really struggling with performance issues. I wonder whether bad performance is to FP as null-pointer bugs are to C. Sure, a sufficiently skilled programmer should theoretically never write code that will dereference a null pointer, but nevertheless my Ubuntu system needs a dozen security patches every month, many of which are due to null pointers, buffer overflows, etc.
He's got a list of complaints which is completely the wrong list. Essentially he seems upset about (1) not getting a byline, (2) neutral point of view, (3) no original research, and (4) having what he writes modified by others. Well, sorry, but those are all basic features of WP. They're not gonna change, and IMO they shouldn't change. WP has problems, but the problems are not on this list.
In my opinion, the biggest problems with WP are (1) the poor quality of the writing, and (2) the tendency of the quality of an article to get worse over time, rather than better. Problem 1 is particularly pronounced in my field, which is physics; most of the physics articles read as if they were written by smart grad students who wanted to show off how smart they were. If there was going to be a #3 on my list, it would have to do with the factors that make me personally feel like working on WP has gotten about as pleasant as a proctological exam. But that's really not a problem with WP, it's just a problem that makes me personally not want to work on WP. Plenty of other people still seem to be happily maintaining it, which I think is great.
Most people -- including, I suspect, doctors -- have trouble with critical thinking, and one area that tends to be a particular problem is critical thinking about probabilities and cause-and-effect relationships. I'm a community college professor in California, and recently there was a big state-wide earthquake drill, which they made into sort of a media event. The day before, I heard my students before class talking about it. "There's gonna be an earthquake tomorrow at 10 o'clock." "Huh? They can't predict earthquakes, can they?" "I heard it on the news." "Really?" Most people just accept information without thinking about it critically. Obama won't say the pledge of allegiance? Oh, okay.
I don't think medicine is different from any other field where people gather their own information, and I don't think health-care professionals are always much better than anyone else at this kind of thing. For example, I had a certain foot problem, and my G.P. prescribed physical therapy. One of the things the physical therapist did was to use ultrasound on my feet (therapeutic ultrasound, not ultrasound for imaging). I checked on the web later, and it turned out that the only controlled scientific studies on the topic had shown that ultrasound had no effect on my condition.
I think it's telling that "evidence-based medicine" is a term that even needs to be used. If it's not evidence-based, what's it based on? Wishful thinking? Voodoo? The placebo effect?
No, mp3 sounds just fine to me, and I have a reasonably good stereo. I'm a complete nonbeliever in the kinds of things that audiophiles claim to be able to hear. I can believe that people can hear the difference between digital (no background hiss) and analog (background hiss). I can believe people can hear the difference between one set of speakers and another, or a difference in the acoustics of the room. I don't believe in anything other than that. There's a reason that audio magazines never do double-blind tests -- if they did, they'd have to admit that they're making it all up.
Disk space is cheap, but backup space isn't. I don't want to have to have a stack of a hundred disks to back up my music collection, because the whole point was to get rid of the physical media.
Sure, theoretically the need for transcoding in the future might be a problem. But realistically, why would I want to do that? The mp3 patents are in the process of expiring. Ogg failed; it didn't get any significant traction before mp3 patents started expiring, at which point it became irrelevant.
It's strange that nobody ever talks about Amazon. You can buy MP3's on Amazon for 89-99 cents per track, complete albums typically for about $8. I ripped all my CDs to mp3 this year, tossed the CDs in a dumpster, and am now buying music only on Amazon. I love not having piles of CDs lying around and making my house messy. Amazon sells music with no DRM. It works on any OS that can run a web browser.
iTunes, on the other hand ... yeesh. It's a completely proprietary system, and it doesn't run on my OS. It's also got DRM (although the DRM is fairly easy to circumvent).
I know the impetus is to produce big and fast SS drives, but I'm more interested in cheap and fast ones. My desktop machine has 11 Gb of system and apps and <1 Gb of user files. I would be perfectly happy with a 16 Gb SSD that had great performance, was cheap, and was reliable. Reliability is a big issue. Although theoretically a device with no moving parts should always be more reliable than one with moving parts, in reality SSD technology isn't as mature as HD technology, so the failure rate may actually be higher, and there may be no way to recover from a failure.
I was just talking about FOSS.
Good point, but we already have the whole BSD family. Having a third family of kernels available is probably a lot less important than having a second one. I would think that avoiding monoculture would be a much less important argument in Nexenta's favor than the availability of ZFS, for people who need specific features of ZFS. Hmm...but then, the licensing issue that makes ZFS incompatible with the Linux kernel doesn't apply to BSD, and ZFS is already available on BSD. I suppose if you want specific features of ZFS, and you're used to the GNU toolchain, then Nexenta might be more congenial than BSD. But an awful lot of the user-visible differences between BSD userland and Linux userland have been going away lately. E.g., GNU m4 is now the default on BSD.
If it was found that mass and energy didn't convert, we'd have to explain why there was a world-wide conspiracy to fabricate the experimental evidence that it did. The conspiracy would have had to last over five generations of physicists, numbering in the tens of thousands. (I'm one of them.) It would be awfully odd that not a single one of us had ever refused the secret initiation into this cabal. I've helped out with a museum exhibit in which a cloud chamber demonstrated electron-positron production by cosmic rays. If it was found that mass and energy didn't convert, then you'd have to assume that every schoolkid who ever saw that demonstration was also part of this vast conspiracy.
You might as well worry about how to adapt all our old maps and globes if the world turned out to be flat.
I don't see this as a "however." You typically don't use ubuntu unless you're part of the unusually computer-savvy end of the bell curve. Linux is something like 1% of the desktop market, so why would Google care?
Chrome is also open-source, so even if Google refuses to release it with an ad blocker, there's nothing stopping third parties from making their own versions that do. We're already seeing third-party-branded versions of OOo such as go-oo.org that omit Sun's annoying click-through licenses. (Or if Chrome has a plug-in architecture as flexible as Firefox's, Google probably can't stop people from making the equivalent of AdBLock Plus.)
I'm also very skeptical that Chrome can change the web as much as you're talking about:
I'd say that's extremely premature, since Chrome is a very raw beta.
I think JS games are cool, because JS is an open standard. But the average person playing Neopets couldn't care less that it's implemented on a semi-proprietary technology.
We already have AJAX apps. The biggest problems with AJAX apps are (a) lack of cross-browser compatibility and (b) the fact that web browsers and HTTP were never designed as an application platform. Chrome won't make (b) better, and adding a new browser to the mix can at best keep from making (a) worse.
I thought it was extremely gratifying to look at the graph of the stock price and see that Yahoo had thoughtfully provided some space on the y axis for negative values.
The article at theage.com gives a completely bogus interpretation, which is repeated in the slashdot article. The New Scientist article is much better.
This is just total scientific illiteracy. E=mc2 has been verified over and over again. We see it, for example, in processes like alpha decay, where the sum of the masses of the product nuclei doesn't equal the mass of the original nucleus. Mass is converted into energy in that process, and that's been experimentally established since probably the 1920's. Likewise energy can be converted into mass, as when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere and create electron-antielectron pairs. The theoretical foundations of E=mc2 are also extremely firm; it's deeply linked to the basic logical structure of relativity, and relativity has been abundantly experimentally verified.
Saying that this calculation verified E=mc2 is just stupid. The calculation assumes (1) special relativity, (2) quantum mechanics, (3) some technical stuff about how to make special relativity and quantum mechanics work together (generic ideas about quantum field theory), and (4) a bunch of very specific technical approximations needed in order to get an answer out of this particular flavor of quantum field theory (lattice QCD). The calculation has a bunch of adjustable parameters (quark masses, coupling constants). You play with the adjustable parameters and get a bunch of numbers out (neutron and proton masses, etc). If the number of adjustable parameters that goes in is m, and the number of experimentally testable numbers that pop out is n, then n-m is the number of degrees of freedom that verify whether the calculation is right. (For n=m, it would just be a complicated exercise in fitting the data, like putting two points on a graph and saying "look, it's a line!") I assume they calculated more than just the mass of the proton and neutron, because otherwise n=2 would be less than m. I assume the n-m degrees of freedom checked out fairly well, because they're calling it a success.
To see why this calculation can't really be interpreted as a test of E=mc2, you have to imagine what would have happened if it had turned out wrong. If it had disagreed with experiment, then we would conclude that some of the assumptions built into it were wrong. Let's look back at the assumptions 1-4 above. Well, 1 (special relativity) has been verified a zillion different ways since 1905 (or even as far back as the 19th century, the Michelson-Morley experiment, with hindsight). 2 (quantum mechanics) has likewise been verified a zillion different ways since the 1920's. 3, the general framework of quantum field theory, has some ugly spots, but it's been used to verify things like the magnetic moment of the electron to a dozen decimal places, so it's still on fairly firm ground. 4 is extremely shaky; it's only very recently that anyone has claimed to be able to calculate anything at all useful and realistic with QCD. So if it had failed, no physicist in the world would have interpreted it as evidence that assumption 1 (relativity) was wrong. They would have interpreted it as evidence that assumption 4 was wrong: the lattice QCD approximations weren't good enough, probably for very boring, technical reasons that would only be of interest to a specialist in lattice QCD.
I didn't sit through the whole slide show, but yes, I think gnuplot can do the kinds of things it showed. Gnuplot's 3-d surface plots don't look quite as nice as Mathematica's (different shading algorithm).
What don't you like about gnuplot? Basically it does what I need. My main complaints are that some of the options are a little arcane or seem like historical design mistakes, and also the SVG output isn't as good as EPS.
The Wikipedia list is very long. For anyone who's specifically interested in OSS that runs on Linux, here are some of my impressions:
I've actually had very good experiences with Maxima. I've never seen a crash. BTW, I notice that your version says "This is a development version of Maxima. The function bug_report() provides bug reporting information." Did you try reproducing the problem with the stable version? Did you report the bug?
The thing that made me vow never to touch Mathematica again was that I owned a MacOS version, and it stopped working when I upgraded to a newer version of MacOS. (This was all back in the 90's, so we're talking about maybe MacOS 6 and 7 or something.) When I called to ask about how to get it working again, Wolfram told me that my only option was to buy a new copy of Mathematica.
More generally, Mathematica is a computer language, and the lesson of history is never to hitch your wagon to a proprietary computer language. Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science, for example, attracted a lot of criticism for a variety of reasons, but one of the criticisms was that the entire book was built around examples written in Mathematica notation, and scientists and mathematicians didn't want to have to learn a proprietary computer language in order to be able to evaluate his (somewhat overblown) claims.
Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. was a U.S. court decision. It's not a precedent affecting the U.K. I have a web site with my free physics textbooks, and I've received nastygrams from a U.K. museum about a contemporary portrait of Isaac Newton that's reproduced on my site. I didn't worry much about it, because I'm in the U.S., but they and their lawyers did seem to believe that the law was on their side in the U.K. (or maybe they were just bluffing). The WP article has some specific discussion of this at the end.
I have two daughters. According to standardized tests, daughter #1 is about equally good at math and language. According to the same standardized tests, daughter #2 is also about equally good at math and language. What's totally different is that #1 hates math and loves English, which #2 hates English and loves math. Same environment, but #1 writes fantasy stories, #2 builds elaborate devices out of popsicle sticks and scotch tape. Seeing them both grow up, I think it's just clearly genetic. You shuffle the chromosomes randomly, and one kid ends up genetically predisposed to enjoy one thing, the other likes the other thing. Anyone who's a parent of more than one kid will tell you similar stories. Kids are just different from birth.
Go-oo looks interesting. Can you explain more about how it relates to Novell -- or doesn't? How is it different from this Novell version?
The thing that kills me about Sun's version of Ooo is that on Windows, it demands that every user click through a EULA. I teach physics in a computer lab at a school where every Windows box gets its hard disk restored from a standard image every night, so if a student wants to use Ooo, he has to click through all the multiple steps of agreeing to the Eula every single day that he uses the software. Needless to say, I'm having a hard time motivating any of them to use it instead of MS Office.