Yes, I played around with JuraBib and it was pretty good. But when it became abandonware, it was suggested on the jurabib list to look to biblatex. That was the first time I had heard about biblatex. So I never made the investment to really learn JuraBib...biblatex is a far more flexible and general solution than JuraBib, IMO.
As far as I know, a TeX/LaTeX document has just one namespace, regardless of how the document is split into input files. The only way I know of (unless there's a package out there to do it) is to use some nomenclature convention, e.g., each input file has its own unique prefix, say, "ch1_", "ch2_", etc., for "local" macro and label names. Another solution is to localize the declarations all in one place, e.g., in a "preamble" file that is input at the very beginning so that it is easier to keep the names unique.
I work with multilingual documents all the time using LaTeX, and the only practical solution I have found is using UTF-8 encoded documents and XeLaTeX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX) and OpenType fonts. For non-English typesetting, I highly recommend this approach. I think it has the potential to replace the older TeX engines even for English typesetting...
The language for creating new BibTex styles is so retarded it's not even funny. Basically, you can't do it.
Check out the biblatex package (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/biblatex.html). It is far easier to create and modify bibliography styles. Although still rather new, it is rapidly gaining users and hence robustness. I work in the humanities and bibliography citation has never been handled adequately by any BibTeX style. I stumbled across biblatex a year ago and never looked back.
I'm not proposing legislated profit-sharing. I believe in capitalism, having lived in Europe for 15 years and seen how socialism works. Both systems have their excesses and I would not want to discourage investors. I was thinking more of the philosophy of why corporations exist.
If a company has so much loose cash that it cannot be productively plowed back into the company, then a greater percentage than now is practiced ought to go to the *productive* employees. And, yes, equity ownership (stock options, etc.) is an excellent way to go, from personal experience.
Of course, if you have top management just feathering their own nest, instead of looking at their jobs as stewards to the shareholders and employees (let's all spell together: E-N-R-O-N), then all this is moot.
I work with a former Microsoft employee who retired at 40 and uses that financial freedom to volunteer and generally contribute to society. He's the perfect example of what I'd like to see more of with profit-sharing. Unhappily, not everyone or even most are going to do with their lives what my co-worker does...
Zope is a web application server. It is written in python. It has a builtin web server or you can run it behind apache, squid, whatever. It maintains all data in a object-oriented database. What zope does is generate dynamic html pages on the fly. You write a page template and when the user GETS that page, the variable information is inserted and then returned to the user.
Another feature is that a Zope website -- and much of Zope itself -- is managed via the web. And it has a very sophisticated security and permissions facility. It uses the concept of "roles" to which permissions and access to objects can be attached.
CMF (Content Management Framework) is a zope application that creates a set of services for the website developer: navigation, calendar, new items, workflow, etc. It also provides the basis for css-based "look-and-feel".
Plone, as was noted in the interview, started out as a CMF "skin." It has evolved into kind of a "CMF best-practices". It's philosophy is -- in part -- to permit the creation of *sophisticated* web content in a collaborative environment by users who know little or nothing about html, etc.
There's lots more to be said, of course. But I've been using Zope for two years, and Plone for nearly a year. My preferred scripting language is Ruby, but Zope/CMF/Plone is so valuable, I went out and learned Python in order to read the source code. Today, most of my work involves writing a page template and maybe some snippets of python code to go along with it -- often less than ten lines. Simple.
If your need is collaborative web content creation/management, web portals, etc., and Joe Sixpack is your user, then Zope/CMF/Plone is the way to go.
I don't understand why LinuxandMain (or Slashdot) doesn't give a link to the actual exchange of messages. Summaries are fine for the casual reader, but if one cares about the debate or wants to judge for herself, it's best to read the original.
OPENOFFICE.ORG COMMUNITY ANNOUNCES OPENOFFICE.ORG 1.O: FREE OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE
Global Community Builds Full-Featured Office Suite With Revolutionary Momentum
May 1, 2002 - The OpenOffice.org community (www.openoffice.org) today announced the availability of OpenOffice.org 1.0, the open source, multi-platform, multi-lingual office productivity suite available as a free download at the OpenOffice.org community website. OpenOffice.org 1.0 is the culmination of more than 18 months of collaborative effort by members of the OpenOffice.org community, which is comprised of Sun employees, volunteer developers, marketers, and end users working to create an international office suite that will run on all major platforms.
OpenOffice.org 1.0, which shares the same code base as Sun's StarOffice [tm] 6.0 software is - like StarOffice 6.0 software - a full-featured office suite that provides a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org 1.0 offers software freedom, enabling a free market for service and support, while the Sun-branded product, StarOffice 6.0 software, offers 24x7 fee-based support and training for consumers and businesses, along with deployment and migration services. StarOffice software also offers additional features, such as a database, special fonts and Sun quality and assurance testing. The two office suites complement each other, meeting the varying needs of consumers, open source advocates and enterprise customers.
"OpenOffice.org 1.0 may be the single best hope for consumers fed-up with Microsoft's desktop monopoly," said Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). "With Sun moving to a full service and support business model for StarOffice software, users around the globe will continue to have a free office productivity software tool through the OpenOffice.org open source community."
The OpenOffice.org 1.0 office suite features key desktop applications - including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing programs - in more than 25 languages. In addition, OpenOffice.org 1.0 works transparently with a variety of file formats, enabling users familiar with other office suites, such as Microsoft Office and StarOffice software, to work seamlessly in the application. The OpenOffice.org 1.0 software runs stably and natively on multiple platforms, including Linux, PPC Linux, Solaris [tm], Windows and many other flavors of Unix.
OpenOffice.org is the largest open source project with more than 7.5 million lines of code. To date, more than 4.5 million downloads of earlier versions of OpenOffice.org 1.0 have taken place. With the release of the 1.0 version, the OpenOffice.org community expects that number to grow significantly as businesses and individuals around the world explore the free alternative to proprietary office suites. The OpenOffice.org Community In less than two years, the OpenOffice.org community has grown to more than 10,000 volunteers, working together to build the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format. Sun initiated this effort by donating the StarOffice software source code and engineering to the OpenOffice.org community. One of the major benefits of community-based development is peer review, which has resulted in a stable, secure and flexible software package.
Participants in the Community work on projects ranging from code development to porting and localization, to bug reporting, documentation, product marketing, local language sites and mirror sites for software download. "There are many important roles that volunteer developers can play to shape the future functionality of OpenOffice.org (OOo) so if you are looking for someplace to contribute, OOo can use you," said Kevin Hendricks, a key contributor to the OpenOffice.org community since its inception nearly two years ago. Hendricks has lead volunteer development teams for both the OpenOffice.org 1.0 spellchecker and PPC Linux port projects.
"When OpenOffice.org was released, it was a tremendous amount of code with a very deep history, and thus we knew it would take a lot of time and effort to reach a critical mass of community participation," said Brian Behlendorf, CTO and co-founder, CollabNet. "The project has now attracted a significant amount of outside involvement, some of it in pretty interesting areas like marketing and quality assurance. With the release of 1.0, it's clear those efforts are bearing real fruit. Congratulations to the community -- and to Sun -- for making this happen."
CollabNet's SourceCast application enables both centralized and geographically distributed software development teams to collaborate on OpenOffice.org projects and to track them accurately. SourceCast is the premier Web-based collaboration environment, which includes an integrated set of software development applications. CollabNet also provides strategic advice on open source issues and the growth of OpenOffice.org, and offers analysis on current trends within the community.
"OpenOffice.org may be the most important open source project right now," said Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project. "Because people will try it and see they can get everyday work done without giving more money to Microsoft, they'll see -- in a low-risk way -- that open source software can work for them and be an even better solution."
About OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org is the home of the open source project and its community of developers, users and marketers responsible for the on-going development of the OpenOffice.org 1.0 product. The mission of OpenOffice.org is to create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format. Additional ports, such as FreeBSD, IRIX and Mac OS X are in various stages of completion by developers and end-users in the OpenOffice.org community. OpenOffice.org 1.0 is written in C++ and has documented API's licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) open source licenses.
About CollabNet CollabNet provides companies with solutions for collaborative software development by combining a Web-based software application with a suite of consulting services. Using these solutions, customers can collaborate on development projects within an enterprise, with customers, business partners, or with third party developer organizations, such as industry specific or open source communities. CollabNet enables corporations to reduce costs and increase revenues by bringing different project team members together, regardless of their location. CollabNet is currently working with customers ranging from hardware and software providers to companies from industries such as financial services, wireless, and pharmaceuticals. Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, established CollabNet in July 1999. For more information, see http://www.collab.net
About Sun Microsystems, Inc. Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer[tm]" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com.
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, StarOffice, Solaris and "The Network Is The Computer" are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
There is a fact that everyone seems to be overlooking: most systems are shipped with the OS pre-installed. Any OS install is technical--by definition! Ya gotta know your hardware!
No matter how "easy" installers become (and I'm a Debian enthusaist), the first step of installation is researching the motherboard, video and network cards, and an idea of how the box is going to be used (workstation, server, laptop, etc.).
I'm getting ready to install a dual-boot Win2k/Debian on my new Dell Latitude C400 laptop (yumm: 1GB RAM, 40GB disk, all in a 1.5in thick, 3.5lb package). It's taken me about two weeks to do the research and I'm glad I did: there are issues with the Intel video chipset and X-Windows. It saved me some frustration.
But no way can the newbie or Joe Sixpack be expected to do this. Linux installation is always going to require some technical savvy, like any OS.
Using Roget's Thesaurus is one way to select a group of words around a theme.
If you speak another language (or even if you don't), especially if that language is a bit "exotic" or one of the "dead" languages, you have a rich source of host names.
In the early days, GNU software was distributed by computer tape. When network access became widespread, and then nearly universal, the ability of developers to work together allowed Linus Torvalds to share his brand new kernel with others. It was no accident that Linux began (c. 1990) about the same time as cheap, unbiquitous network access.
Free/Open Source software grows in proportion to network connectivity.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I played around with JuraBib and it was pretty good. But when it became abandonware, it was suggested on the jurabib list to look to biblatex. That was the first time I had heard about biblatex. So I never made the investment to really learn JuraBib...biblatex is a far more flexible and general solution than JuraBib, IMO.
As far as I know, a TeX/LaTeX document has just one namespace, regardless of how the document is split into input files. The only way I know of (unless there's a package out there to do it) is to use some nomenclature convention, e.g., each input file has its own unique prefix, say, "ch1_", "ch2_", etc., for "local" macro and label names. Another solution is to localize the declarations all in one place, e.g., in a "preamble" file that is input at the very beginning so that it is easier to keep the names unique.
I work with multilingual documents all the time using LaTeX, and the only practical solution I have found is using UTF-8 encoded documents and XeLaTeX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX) and OpenType fonts. For non-English typesetting, I highly recommend this approach. I think it has the potential to replace the older TeX engines even for English typesetting...
The language for creating new BibTex styles is so retarded it's not even funny. Basically, you can't do it.
Check out the biblatex package (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/biblatex.html). It is far easier to create and modify bibliography styles. Although still rather new, it is rapidly gaining users and hence robustness. I work in the humanities and bibliography citation has never been handled adequately by any BibTeX style. I stumbled across biblatex a year ago and never looked back.
I'm not proposing legislated profit-sharing. I believe in capitalism, having lived in Europe for 15 years and seen how socialism works. Both systems have their excesses and I would not want to discourage investors. I was thinking more of the philosophy of why corporations exist.
If a company has so much loose cash that it cannot be productively plowed back into the company, then a greater percentage than now is practiced ought to go to the *productive* employees. And, yes, equity ownership (stock options, etc.) is an excellent way to go, from personal experience.
Of course, if you have top management just feathering their own nest, instead of looking at their jobs as stewards to the shareholders and employees (let's all spell together: E-N-R-O-N), then all this is moot.
I work with a former Microsoft employee who retired at 40 and uses that financial freedom to volunteer and generally contribute to society. He's the perfect example of what I'd like to see more of with profit-sharing. Unhappily, not everyone or even most are going to do with their lives what my co-worker does...
...why not reward the employees with serious profit-sharing?
I'm an investor in stocks, but I've always thought the employees deserved a bigger piece of the pie than the shareholder.
It might even reign in on some of the insanity of the markets...nah. "Fear and greed" will always rule.
Ok. Here's the long description:
Zope is a web application server. It is written in python. It has a builtin web server or you can run it behind apache, squid, whatever. It maintains all data in a object-oriented database. What zope does is generate dynamic html pages on the fly. You write a page template and when the user GETS that page, the variable information is inserted and then returned to the user.
Another feature is that a Zope website -- and much of Zope itself -- is managed via the web. And it has a very sophisticated security and permissions facility. It uses the concept of "roles" to which permissions and access to objects can be attached.
CMF (Content Management Framework) is a zope application that creates a set of services for the website developer: navigation, calendar, new items, workflow, etc. It also provides the basis for css-based "look-and-feel".
Plone, as was noted in the interview, started out as a CMF "skin." It has evolved into kind of a "CMF best-practices". It's philosophy is -- in part -- to permit the creation of *sophisticated* web content in a collaborative environment by users who know little or nothing about html, etc.
There's lots more to be said, of course. But I've been using Zope for two years, and Plone for nearly a year. My preferred scripting language is Ruby, but Zope/CMF/Plone is so valuable, I went out and learned Python in order to read the source code. Today, most of my work involves writing a page template and maybe some snippets of python code to go along with it -- often less than ten lines. Simple.
If your need is collaborative web content creation/management, web portals, etc., and Joe Sixpack is your user, then Zope/CMF/Plone is the way to go.
A very satisfied user,
Kirk
It's an online book, best I've ever read on the GIMP. The instructions for how to retouch photos is fantastic. You can also buy a hardcopy.
I don't understand why LinuxandMain (or Slashdot) doesn't give a link to the actual exchange of messages. Summaries are fine for the casual reader, but if one cares about the debate or wants to judge for herself, it's best to read the original.
Anyway, here's one URL for the thread, starting with RMS' comments on ethics.
I think the website was having troubles. Try again. I just did and it worked fine.
But even better, here is the kernel archives URL for RMS' comments and the response.
Kirk
OPENOFFICE.ORG COMMUNITY ANNOUNCES OPENOFFICE.ORG 1.O: FREE OFFICE
PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE
Global Community Builds Full-Featured Office Suite With Revolutionary
Momentum
May 1, 2002 - The OpenOffice.org community (www.openoffice.org) today
announced the availability of OpenOffice.org 1.0, the open source,
multi-platform, multi-lingual office productivity suite available as a
free download at the OpenOffice.org community website. OpenOffice.org
1.0 is the culmination of more than 18 months of collaborative effort by
members of the OpenOffice.org community, which is comprised of Sun
employees, volunteer developers, marketers, and end users working to
create an international office suite that will run on all major
platforms.
OpenOffice.org 1.0, which shares the same code base as Sun's StarOffice
[tm] 6.0 software is - like StarOffice 6.0 software - a full-featured
office suite that provides a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft
Office. OpenOffice.org 1.0 offers software freedom, enabling a free
market for service and support, while the Sun-branded product,
StarOffice 6.0 software, offers 24x7 fee-based support and training for
consumers and businesses, along with deployment and migration services.
StarOffice software also offers additional features, such as a database,
special fonts and Sun quality and assurance testing. The two office
suites complement each other, meeting the varying needs of consumers,
open source advocates and enterprise customers.
"OpenOffice.org 1.0 may be the single best hope for consumers fed-up
with Microsoft's desktop monopoly," said Eric Raymond, co-founder of the
Open Source Initiative (OSI). "With Sun moving to a full service and
support business model for StarOffice software, users around the globe
will continue to have a free office productivity software tool through
the OpenOffice.org open source community."
The OpenOffice.org 1.0 office suite features key desktop applications -
including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing
programs - in more than 25 languages. In addition, OpenOffice.org 1.0
works transparently with a variety of file formats, enabling users
familiar with other office suites, such as Microsoft Office and
StarOffice software, to work seamlessly in the application. The
OpenOffice.org 1.0 software runs stably and natively on multiple
platforms, including Linux, PPC Linux, Solaris [tm], Windows and many
other flavors of Unix.
OpenOffice.org is the largest open source project with more than 7.5
million lines of code. To date, more than 4.5 million downloads of
earlier versions of OpenOffice.org 1.0 have taken place. With the
release of the 1.0 version, the OpenOffice.org community expects that
number to grow significantly as businesses and individuals around the
world explore the free alternative to proprietary office suites.
The OpenOffice.org Community
In less than two years, the OpenOffice.org community has grown to more
than 10,000 volunteers, working together to build the leading
international office suite that will run on all major platforms and
provide access to all functionality and data through open-component
based APIs and an XML-based file format. Sun initiated this effort by
donating the StarOffice software source code and engineering to the
OpenOffice.org community. One of the major benefits of community-based
development is peer review, which has resulted in a stable, secure and
flexible software package.
Participants in the Community work on projects ranging from code
development to porting and localization, to bug reporting,
documentation, product marketing, local language sites and mirror
sites for software download.
"There are many important roles that volunteer developers can play to
shape the future functionality of OpenOffice.org (OOo) so if you are
looking for someplace to contribute, OOo can use you," said Kevin
Hendricks, a key contributor to the OpenOffice.org community since its
inception nearly two years ago. Hendricks has lead volunteer development
teams for both the OpenOffice.org 1.0 spellchecker and PPC Linux port
projects.
"When OpenOffice.org was released, it was a tremendous amount of code
with a very deep history, and thus we knew it would take a lot of time
and effort to reach a critical mass of community participation," said
Brian Behlendorf, CTO and co-founder, CollabNet. "The project has now
attracted a significant amount of outside involvement, some of it in
pretty interesting areas like marketing and quality assurance. With the
release of 1.0, it's clear those efforts are bearing real fruit.
Congratulations to the community -- and to Sun -- for making this
happen."
CollabNet's SourceCast application enables both centralized and
geographically distributed software development teams to collaborate on
OpenOffice.org projects and to track them accurately. SourceCast is the
premier Web-based collaboration environment, which includes an
integrated set of software development applications. CollabNet also
provides strategic advice on open source issues and the growth of
OpenOffice.org, and offers analysis on current trends within the
community.
"OpenOffice.org may be the most important open source project right
now," said Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project. "Because
people will try it and see they can get everyday work done without
giving more money to Microsoft, they'll see -- in a low-risk way -- that
open source software can work for them and be an even better solution."
About OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org is the home of the open source project and its community
of developers, users and marketers responsible for the on-going
development of the OpenOffice.org 1.0 product. The mission of
OpenOffice.org is to create, as a community, the leading international
office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to
all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an
XML-based file format. Additional ports, such as FreeBSD, IRIX and Mac
OS X are in various stages of completion by developers and end-users in
the OpenOffice.org community. OpenOffice.org 1.0 is written in C++ and
has documented API's licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public
License (LGPL) and Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) open
source licenses.
About CollabNet
CollabNet provides companies with solutions for collaborative software
development by combining a Web-based software application with a suite
of consulting services. Using these solutions, customers can collaborate
on development projects within an enterprise, with customers, business
partners, or with third party developer organizations, such as industry
specific or open source communities. CollabNet enables corporations to
reduce costs and increase revenues by bringing different project team
members together, regardless of their location. CollabNet is currently
working with customers ranging from hardware and software providers to
companies from industries such as financial services, wireless, and
pharmaceuticals. Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Software
Foundation, established CollabNet in July 1999. For more information,
see http://www.collab.net
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The
Computer[tm]" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to
its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware,
software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more
than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com.
© 2002 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, StarOffice, Solaris and "The
Network Is The Computer" are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun
Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
There is a fact that everyone seems to be overlooking: most systems are shipped with the OS pre-installed. Any OS install is technical--by definition! Ya gotta know your hardware!
No matter how "easy" installers become (and I'm a Debian enthusaist), the first step of installation is researching the motherboard, video and network cards, and an idea of how the box is going to be used (workstation, server, laptop, etc.).
I'm getting ready to install a dual-boot Win2k/Debian on my new Dell Latitude C400 laptop (yumm: 1GB RAM, 40GB disk, all in a 1.5in thick, 3.5lb package). It's taken me about two weeks to do the research and I'm glad I did: there are issues with the Intel video chipset and X-Windows. It saved me some frustration.
But no way can the newbie or Joe Sixpack be expected to do this. Linux installation is always going to require some technical savvy, like any OS.
Using Roget's Thesaurus is one way to select a group of words around a theme.
If you speak another language (or even if you don't), especially if that language is a bit "exotic" or one of the "dead" languages, you have a rich source of host names.
Free/Open Source software grows in proportion to network connectivity.