I haven't been able to find an international index of air quality (I don't have my statistic search engines bookmarked at work, sorry), but AirNow has a list of individual international indices.
I'm not even sure there is an single international index, due to the different standards and technological possibilities. Okay, if we're just talking fine particulates, ozone, CO2, NOX, and SOX (no, not Sarbanes-Oxley) in major western cities, then you could find something. But I wouldn't place any money on the monitoring in Mumbai being as good as the monitoring in Munich.
No idea about Vitamin K, but Vitamins did start out as Vital Amines = Vitamaines. When the science folk realised not all vitamins were amines, they dropped the "e".
The Wik also has a bit on the difference between vitamins and essential minerals or acids (I figure you're more likely to read this than the papers I would generally reference).
Vitamin D is produced by the skin in response to certain wavelengths of ultraviolet light, and as such is not a true vitamin (since vitamins are substances we can't naturally produce -- it's a hormone). Vitamin D is also found in certain fats (e.g. cod-liver oil).
This basic form of Vitamin D gets processed by the liver into an second form (25-hydroxyvitamin D3), and then by the kidneys into the active form 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3, which tells your body how much calcium to draw out of your food. If you don't have enough calcium in your diet, but enough Vitamin D, the body can even draw the calcium out of your bones. Calcium is also required for the correct transmission of brain signals, so too little vitamin D can also lead to seizures.
To veer back to the OP's question: whether the synthetic vitamin D additive to milk products (as opposed to the vitamin D we used to create in foods in the 1920's and 1930's using mecury lamp ultraviolet radiation) is Vitamin D or Vitamin D3 is pretty much irrelevant for our body, but I believe it is the latter, yes.
Aside: Did you know we can cure cancer with Vitamin D? Sadly, the dosis required is lethal to humans... they're working on it.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between 5-digit and 3-digit UID Slashdotters: the latter considers "heterojunction ions" to be a perfectly self-explantory term.
That the OP has 6-digit UID is probably just a trick: I'm betting it's the secondary account of a 2-digit user used to catch out 4- and 5-digit newbies.
It's sort of like what Twitter does, but, you know.. with facts.
Paris Hilton Actress Chaotic Neutral Human Strength: 9 Intelligence: 9 Wisdom: 8 Constitution: 10 Dexterity: 14 Charisma: 18 Special Abilities: Wiggling out of jail time for DUI charges, washing cars in an entertaining manner.
George W. Bush 17th -level politician Chaotic Neutral Human Strength: 11 Intelligence: 10 Wisdom: 6 Constitution: 12 Dexterity: 10 Charisma: 16 Special Abilities: Always wins eligible elections, takes no damage for corporate connections, has the ability to prevaricate perfectly, and always goes first in initiative in attacks via other countries.
Ron Paul 23rd-Level Lawful Good Wizard Strength: 10 Intelligence: 17 Wisdom:17 Dexterity: 10 Charisma: 13 Special Abilities: Can see into the future, but must roll Charisma or less on d100 to convince anyone he's right. Can summon 1,000 devoted followers on command, and can pull 10,000 GP out of his hat as needed -- but no one knows how. His presence at delivery adds +1 to all child's attributes.
Steve Jobs 21st Level Paladin Strength: 12 Intelligence: 15 Wisdom: 17 Dexterity: 10 Charisma: 20 Special Abilities: Reality Distortion field allows him to temporarily influence any character, if he rolls less than his Charisma, minus the target's Intelligence. Special Equipment: +6 Magical Armor appears as a black turtleneck and blue jeans, but protects him from edged attacks.
Dean Kamen 43rd-Level Human* Strength: 10 Intelligence: 22 Wisdom: 23 Dexterity: 13 Charisma: 16 Special Abilities: Can instantaneously invent anything to solve any problem. Special Equipment: 6-wheeled, gyroscope-balanced battle chair. Dean's Dexterity is reduced by one and STR increased by two when riding the battle chair. Magical "water box." Powered by fire. Makes clean water and provides a bright light that can be used to reduce an opponent's dexterity by two points. *His exact origin/species is in dispute.
Stephen Hawking 25th-Level Cosmologist Neutral Good Human Strength: 3 Dexterity: 2 Constitution: 10 Intelligence: 28 Wisdom: 20 Charisma: 12 Special Abilities: Time dilation at will, and Hawking Radiation. Any nongenius within a 60-foot radius take 10d6 radiation damage. Base movement: 6 ft/round Special Equipment: Wheelchair of translation.
Richard Dawkins 22th-Level Evolutionary Biologist Lawful Neutral Human Strength: 12 Dexterity: 13 Constitution: 10 Intelligence: 18 Wisdom: 22 Charisma: 25 Special Abilities: Spell Resistance Infinite (because magic is not real). All Cleric-Priest within 60 feet gain 2 negate levels due to logical paradox. Special Equipment: Spectacles of Trueseeing (always sees things as they really are).
Rick Astley 20th-Level Bard Strength: 8 Intelligence: 9 Wisdom: 10 Constitution: 10 Dexterity: 18 Charisma: 18 Special Abilities: Uses Dex. bonus for all Dance-related checks due to years of training in the art of '80s pop dancing. Can rickroll targets for 5d6 of humiliation damage.
Mr. T lvl9 Fighter / lvl7 Barbarian Strength: 18 Intelligence: 8 Wisdom: 12 Constitution:16 Dexterity: 12 Charisma: 12 Special Abilities: At will: Pity (the fool). There is no save, and it is not subject to spell resistance. The effect is 4d6 subdual damage and permanent Pity. Languages Known: English, Jibba Jabba.
No, I haven't forgotten any stats: some people just didn't seem to deserve all 6, as far as Wired was concerned!
Hmmm... I was initially dismissive of your argument, but as you didn't write "IANAL" I reasoned you must know your way around copyright and contract law. What a stroke of luck!
Hey Blizzard! Forget about that highly-paid team of experienced lawyers you've got – there's free legal advice on Slashdot!
In all non-fairness, blizzard made it impossible for BNETD servers to discriminate over CD-KEYs, by utilizing encryption to prevent it. Impossible? I'm sure Blizzard would gladly have struck an arrangement with BNETD allowing them to decrypt the CD-Keys (or find some other solution), had BNETD offered enough money.
That they didn't doesn't mean it was "impossible", just "economically unfeasible". And simply because doing something right is economically unfeasible does not contenance doing it wrongly.
The article says that 100'000 copies of this tool have been sold, which implies ~100'000 users. While it is strictly speaking the fault of the user that Blizzard is suffering damage, the root cause is the creator and vendor of the tool.
As such it certainly makes sense for the Blizzard to go after Donnelly, since a) if they stop him, they stop further sales of the bot b) it's lot easier to litigate against one person than 100'000 c) you get much less bad press for litigating against one person than 100'000 d) the 100'000 are still bringing in income (as paying customers), just less of it. Blizzard probably doesn't want to scare them off with litigation. Donnelly, on the other hand, just costs them money.
Blizzard's in a lose-lose situation: litigation against Donnelly is legally unclear, but litigation against 100'000 users would cause an uproar.
The choice of target is in fact quite rational from a game-theoretic perspective. And from an emotive perspective, you could always compare it to going after the crack dealer rather than the addict:-)
Yes, Manjoo referred to a study that was conducted in the context of the Israel/Palestine conflict, but the link perfectly valid: both his article and study dealt with perceptions of media bias in cases where the issue evoked strong emotions in the audience.
On issues we're passionate about, we all tend to think our own views are essentially reasonable, Ross explains. Thus when a reporter, editor, news network, or pundit mentions the other side's arguments, it stings.
The subject of the media coverage itself is inconsequential: it could have been (from the article) "abortion, genetically modified food, [or] the wisdom of medical research on animals"; the focus is the perception of the media coverage, not issue being covered.
The height of optimism: posting proof in the form of a 70-odd page thesis on a Slashdot. I don't think we'll be Slashdotting your server any time soon, CBravo;-)
and you Aussies let such laws pass without torching the parliament building
The NSW Parliament hasn't passed anything. The laws haven't even been introduced into Parliament yet! They're thinking about suggesting this law, and even tabling it is still far away from passing it (or do you imagine the Parliament exists only to rubber-stamp legislation?)
I know it's unfashionable to read articles here, but you could at least read the whole summary (or even simply the text you quoted) instead of every second word.
Thanks god police possess the capability to yell police during a home invasion, and that people running on adrenalin from being booted out of bed in the middle of the night carefully evaluate what they hear before acting.
From a purely economic point of view it is probably better to let the mentally ill and unemployable just die on the street instead of subsidizing them for the rest of their life, but that's not what most people consider acceptable for the first world.
You're making the common mistake of confusing the "economic point of view" with "valuing everything in terms of money". Yes, economists do use money to measure most things, but only because it's the best proxy we can find for what we actually want to measure: utility (think of it as happiness).
So, yes, the money spent on the mentally ill and unemployable (MI&U)might outweigh the money they generate, but – as you said yourself – "that's not what most people consider acceptable for the first world". That is, if we stopped funding the MI&U, people (the nation) would be unhappier. If this decrease in happiness is greater than the greatest amount of happiness we could generate with the money we stopped spending on the MI&U (the first-best alternative - tax cuts, schools, lollipops for all), then it would make economic sense to keep funding the MI&U
So you're saying the guy owning the property should be allowed to keep the property, and then build his part of the railroad. After that he'll charge what ever the market can bear in toll?
Precisely. What you have just described is (at heart) a Public-Private Partnership: State wants roads, can't afford them / doesn't want to pay for them, awards a contract for their construction with part of the revenues being recouped in the form of tolls. The analogy falls apart when you consider that the market price for road tolls is usually seen as being more "fair" than the market price of pharmaceuticals.
Woah there, sailor, with your solid ideas and easy-to-understand balloon and train analogies. What we Slashdotters really want is analogy using cars – wait, damn!
It's not Microsoft's lawn, it's Joe User's lawn; Microsoft is selling the fortress, and paying for anyone who reports a (literal) back door so they can nail it shut.
Joe User's lawn is better protected, and Microsoft sells more fortresses.
(1 week later still) Hey, I found another exploit! Should I report it? You know what.. let's exploit that sucker.
You're supposing that large companies are naive enough to value the short-term gain of saving on one payout over the long-term gain of having freelance bug-finders out there. Is that realistic?
(remember, this article is about ALL large software companies, even if only one of them has been used as a stand-in)
Having the minimum bid price raised to $10'000 isn't an issue if Microsoft, as discussed in the write-up, continues to offer the $10,000 even after the bug has been sold on the black market. In this scenario, it's no longer a single market, and the economically rational thing for the exploit -finder to do is to sell the exploit to both parties.
I've seen posts arguing that if you do this (sell to both), the black market will stop trusting you and won't pay for your exploits. In that case, those sellers may choose not to sell their exploits to Microsoft. However, people usually value legal earnings more than illegal earnings; raising the costs for the black market exploit purchasers can't be a bad thing, and; people who wouldn't sell to the black market would probably sell to Microsoft, making the price difference irrelevant.
Given I don't want to replace my shiny & new copy of Office 2003 so soon after I got it, I won't be purchasing 2007 for some time.
Fair enough. I use OneNote on a Tablet PC on a daily basis, and the improvement in OneNote 2007 over 2003 was easily worth the AUD$75 I got it for (hooray for Australia)
Questions: is the output of "Print to PDF, then print the PDF" the same as just printing?
As long as you choose the correct page size (the PDF plugin defaults to "Letter", whereas I print to A4), yes.
Also, how "good" is the PDF output. That is, are the files sizes quite small, is it embedding proper scaleable fonts, and does it print fast?
Excellent. I've tried various free PDF Printers (for non-office applications), and this wipes the floor with them. The files sizes are small (unless I've got a whole lot of handwritten stuff, but that's only in OneNote), the fonts are properly embedded, and it's quick: no opening up a second or third dialog box to confirm again -- 'Save as PDF', choose filename, done. A 12 page assignment with charts, graphs, diagrams was converted in under a second, with 118 KB (76 KB as a.doc). The converter is, after all, from Adobe.
I have used EndNote, and it is not nearly as good as BibTeX. Other people (read the comments) seem to feel that EndNote works better than Word 2007's support; I simply don't believe that a mouse-driven interface for adding citations can ever beat a text-based one.
I'll take your word for it, since I haven't used BibTeX. So far I've been happy with the Office offering, but then, I don't write that many articles.
I think you're missing the point. LaTeX easily allows you (and encourages you) to split your documents up into multiple files.
You're right, I missed that. However, while I can see where splitting large files up might be of use during simultaneous editing, how often is this an issue? Not simply the simultaneous editing, but having files so large they cause problems? I can't believe this would be much a of deal-breaker in an Office/LaTeX comparison.
As best I can tell (I've never found it, and I've tried...) you can't apply a template to a document after the fact (and get the expected results). If my paper is rejected from one place, I can reformat the entire document by changing which style file I include.
I haven't (yet) changed templates mid-stream -- or post-stream, even -- so I can't counter that argument. Ah, the joys of arguing about a new product../sardonic
I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively,
Except for those on the Office 2007 team, *nobody* has used Office 2007 extensively:)
The latter = LaTeX
From talking with people who have used 2007, there is quite a learning jump to go from 2003 to 2007
Rubbish. I don't want to insult any friends of yours, but those people are either power-users whose favourite routines have just been broken, or nitwits. If you know of a feature, it's not hard to find -- and what's more, stuff you didn't know about is there right next to it. Like the Bibliography thing: 1 click on the "Reference" tab gives me options for citations, bibliographies, table of contents, indexes, footnotes, endnotes, cross-referencing, blah blah blah... as soon as Joe Schmoe wants to put in a Footnote, he suddenly learns he can do an Endnote instead. Or a Crossreference. Or a Citation. Etc. I do a lot of different things with my Office Suite, and needed no more than a day or two to be just as comfortable with it as 2003. After a week, I couldn't imagine going back.
Especially since 2007 breaks math support for journals, it makes sense to consider moving to LaTeX just as much as an alternative to moving to Office 2007.
1. PDF publishing is supported (free) with a download from the Microsoft website (the only reason it wasn't bundled is because Adobe didn't want it to be).
2. Citations and Bibliographies are both supported under Word: there's that whole "Reference" tab. Not having used BibTeX I can't compare - but then, neither can you, apparently.
3. Office 2007 documents can be saved to document managment servers for sharing. I don't know what that entails, but it's there, and easy to find.
4. LaTeX has style files; Word has templates. What's the difference? Templates seem rather fragile to you, and some journals don't offer them. I'm not sure this even needs rebutting -- failure to offer templates isn't Word's fault, and, well they seem solid to me, so we're at 1:1
I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively, but I do know it's not as bad as you make it out to be. That 80/20 rule is precisely what Microsoft tried to address with their new layout, since -- probably due to their ubiquity -- the Office products are routinely underrated as far as their functionality goes (probably less so by the/. crowd); Excel, for instance, has some powerful statistical tool. Sure, it's no STATA, but before I shell out $900 on STATA I'd rather install some modules and read some documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't been able to find an international index of air quality (I don't have my statistic search engines bookmarked at work, sorry), but AirNow has a list of individual international indices.
I'm not even sure there is an single international index, due to the different standards and technological possibilities. Okay, if we're just talking fine particulates, ozone, CO2, NOX, and SOX (no, not Sarbanes-Oxley) in major western cities, then you could find something. But I wouldn't place any money on the monitoring in Mumbai being as good as the monitoring in Munich.
No idea about Vitamin K, but Vitamins did start out as Vital Amines = Vitamaines. When the science folk realised not all vitamins were amines, they dropped the "e".
The Wik also has a bit on the difference between vitamins and essential minerals or acids (I figure you're more likely to read this than the papers I would generally reference).
I was blindsided at about 11pm on a Wednesday evening by a shocking and awful discovery.
She was a Collingwood fan?
Vitamin D is produced by the skin in response to certain wavelengths of ultraviolet light, and as such is not a true vitamin (since vitamins are substances we can't naturally produce -- it's a hormone). Vitamin D is also found in certain fats (e.g. cod-liver oil).
This basic form of Vitamin D gets processed by the liver into an second form (25-hydroxyvitamin D3), and then by the kidneys into the active form 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3, which tells your body how much calcium to draw out of your food. If you don't have enough calcium in your diet, but enough Vitamin D, the body can even draw the calcium out of your bones. Calcium is also required for the correct transmission of brain signals, so too little vitamin D can also lead to seizures.
To veer back to the OP's question: whether the synthetic vitamin D additive to milk products (as opposed to the vitamin D we used to create in foods in the 1920's and 1930's using mecury lamp ultraviolet radiation) is Vitamin D or Vitamin D3 is pretty much irrelevant for our body, but I believe it is the latter, yes.
Aside: Did you know we can cure cancer with Vitamin D? Sadly, the dosis required is lethal to humans... they're working on it.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between 5-digit and 3-digit UID Slashdotters: the latter considers "heterojunction ions" to be a perfectly self-explantory term.
That the OP has 6-digit UID is probably just a trick: I'm betting it's the secondary account of a 2-digit user used to catch out 4- and 5-digit newbies.
It's sort of like what Twitter does, but, you know.. with facts.
Paris Hilton
Actress
Chaotic Neutral Human
Strength: 9 Intelligence: 9 Wisdom: 8 Constitution: 10 Dexterity: 14 Charisma: 18
Special Abilities: Wiggling out of jail time for DUI charges, washing cars in an entertaining manner.
George W. Bush
17th -level politician
Chaotic Neutral Human
Strength: 11 Intelligence: 10 Wisdom: 6 Constitution: 12 Dexterity: 10 Charisma: 16
Special Abilities: Always wins eligible elections, takes no damage for corporate connections, has the ability to prevaricate perfectly, and always goes first in initiative in attacks via other countries.
Ron Paul
23rd-Level Lawful Good Wizard
Strength: 10 Intelligence: 17 Wisdom:17 Dexterity: 10 Charisma: 13
Special Abilities: Can see into the future, but must roll Charisma or less on d100 to convince anyone he's right. Can summon 1,000 devoted followers on command, and can pull 10,000 GP out of his hat as needed -- but no one knows how. His presence at delivery adds +1 to all child's attributes.
Steve Jobs
21st Level Paladin
Strength: 12 Intelligence: 15 Wisdom: 17 Dexterity: 10 Charisma: 20
Special Abilities: Reality Distortion field allows him to temporarily influence any character, if he rolls less than his Charisma, minus the target's Intelligence.
Special Equipment: +6 Magical Armor appears as a black turtleneck and blue jeans, but protects him from edged attacks.
Dean Kamen
43rd-Level Human*
Strength: 10 Intelligence: 22 Wisdom: 23 Dexterity: 13 Charisma: 16
Special Abilities: Can instantaneously invent anything to solve any problem.
Special Equipment: 6-wheeled, gyroscope-balanced battle chair. Dean's Dexterity is reduced by one and STR increased by two when riding the battle chair.
Magical "water box." Powered by fire. Makes clean water and provides a bright light that can be used to reduce an opponent's dexterity by two points.
*His exact origin/species is in dispute.
Stephen Hawking
25th-Level Cosmologist
Neutral Good Human
Strength: 3 Dexterity: 2 Constitution: 10 Intelligence: 28 Wisdom: 20 Charisma: 12
Special Abilities: Time dilation at will, and Hawking Radiation. Any nongenius within a 60-foot radius take 10d6 radiation damage. Base movement: 6 ft/round
Special Equipment: Wheelchair of translation.
Richard Dawkins
22th-Level Evolutionary Biologist
Lawful Neutral Human
Strength: 12 Dexterity: 13 Constitution: 10 Intelligence: 18 Wisdom: 22 Charisma: 25
Special Abilities: Spell Resistance Infinite (because magic is not real).
All Cleric-Priest within 60 feet gain 2 negate levels due to logical paradox.
Special Equipment: Spectacles of Trueseeing (always sees things as they really are).
Rick Astley
20th-Level Bard
Strength: 8 Intelligence: 9 Wisdom: 10 Constitution: 10 Dexterity: 18 Charisma: 18
Special Abilities: Uses Dex. bonus for all Dance-related checks due to years of training in the art of '80s pop dancing. Can rickroll targets for 5d6 of humiliation damage.
Mr. T
lvl9 Fighter / lvl7 Barbarian
Strength: 18 Intelligence: 8 Wisdom: 12 Constitution:16 Dexterity: 12 Charisma: 12
Special Abilities: At will: Pity (the fool). There is no save, and it is not subject to spell resistance. The effect is 4d6 subdual damage and permanent Pity.
Languages Known: English, Jibba Jabba.
No, I haven't forgotten any stats: some people just didn't seem to deserve all 6, as far as Wired was concerned!
Hmmm... I was initially dismissive of your argument, but as you didn't write "IANAL" I reasoned you must know your way around copyright and contract law. What a stroke of luck!
Hey Blizzard! Forget about that highly-paid team of experienced lawyers you've got – there's free legal advice on Slashdot!
That they didn't doesn't mean it was "impossible", just "economically unfeasible". And simply because doing something right is economically unfeasible does not contenance doing it wrongly.
The article says that 100'000 copies of this tool have been sold, which implies ~100'000 users. While it is strictly speaking the fault of the user that Blizzard is suffering damage, the root cause is the creator and vendor of the tool.
:-)
As such it certainly makes sense for the Blizzard to go after Donnelly, since
a) if they stop him, they stop further sales of the bot
b) it's lot easier to litigate against one person than 100'000
c) you get much less bad press for litigating against one person than 100'000
d) the 100'000 are still bringing in income (as paying customers), just less of it. Blizzard probably doesn't want to scare them off with litigation. Donnelly, on the other hand, just costs them money.
Blizzard's in a lose-lose situation: litigation against Donnelly is legally unclear, but litigation against 100'000 users would cause an uproar.
The choice of target is in fact quite rational from a game-theoretic perspective. And from an emotive perspective, you could always compare it to going after the crack dealer rather than the addict
The subject of the media coverage itself is inconsequential: it could have been (from the article) "abortion, genetically modified food, [or] the wisdom of medical research on animals"; the focus is the perception of the media coverage, not issue being covered.
The height of optimism: posting proof in the form of a 70-odd page thesis on a Slashdot. ;-)
I don't think we'll be Slashdotting your server any time soon, CBravo
The NSW Parliament hasn't passed anything. The laws haven't even been introduced into Parliament yet! They're thinking about suggesting this law, and even tabling it is still far away from passing it (or do you imagine the Parliament exists only to rubber-stamp legislation?)
I know it's unfashionable to read articles here, but you could at least read the whole summary (or even simply the text you quoted) instead of every second word.
Thanks god police possess the capability to yell police during a home invasion, and that people running on adrenalin from being booted out of bed in the middle of the night carefully evaluate what they hear before acting.
You're making the common mistake of confusing the "economic point of view" with "valuing everything in terms of money". Yes, economists do use money to measure most things, but only because it's the best proxy we can find for what we actually want to measure: utility (think of it as happiness).
So, yes, the money spent on the mentally ill and unemployable (MI&U)might outweigh the money they generate, but – as you said yourself – "that's not what most people consider acceptable for the first world". That is, if we stopped funding the MI&U, people (the nation) would be unhappier. If this decrease in happiness is greater than the greatest amount of happiness we could generate with the money we stopped spending on the MI&U (the first-best alternative - tax cuts, schools, lollipops for all), then it would make economic sense to keep funding the MI&U
Economists – we're here to make you happy
Precisely. What you have just described is (at heart) a Public-Private Partnership: State wants roads, can't afford them / doesn't want to pay for them, awards a contract for their construction with part of the revenues being recouped in the form of tolls.
The analogy falls apart when you consider that the market price for road tolls is usually seen as being more "fair" than the market price of pharmaceuticals.
My New Year's resolution: learn how to sit on a chair properly.
Woah there, sailor, with your solid ideas and easy-to-understand balloon and train analogies. What we Slashdotters really want is analogy using cars – wait, damn!
So, you're saying, Fascism != Cubism? ^_^
It's not Microsoft's lawn, it's Joe User's lawn; Microsoft is selling the fortress, and paying for anyone who reports a (literal) back door so they can nail it shut.
Joe User's lawn is better protected, and Microsoft sells more fortresses.
(1 week later still) Hey, I found another exploit! Should I report it? You know what.. let's exploit that sucker.
You're supposing that large companies are naive enough to value the short-term gain of saving on one payout over the long-term gain of having freelance bug-finders out there. Is that realistic?
(remember, this article is about ALL large software companies, even if only one of them has been used as a stand-in)
Having the minimum bid price raised to $10'000 isn't an issue if Microsoft, as discussed in the write-up, continues to offer the $10,000 even after the bug has been sold on the black market. In this scenario, it's no longer a single market, and the economically rational thing for the exploit -finder to do is to sell the exploit to both parties.
I've seen posts arguing that if you do this (sell to both), the black market will stop trusting you and won't pay for your exploits. In that case, those sellers may choose not to sell their exploits to Microsoft. However, people usually value legal earnings more than illegal earnings; raising the costs for the black market exploit purchasers can't be a bad thing, and; people who wouldn't sell to the black market would probably sell to Microsoft, making the price difference irrelevant.
Given I don't want to replace my shiny & new copy of Office 2003 so soon after I got it, I won't be purchasing 2007 for some time.
Fair enough. I use OneNote on a Tablet PC on a daily basis, and the improvement in OneNote 2007 over 2003 was easily worth the AUD$75 I got it for (hooray for Australia)
Questions: is the output of "Print to PDF, then print the PDF" the same as just printing?
As long as you choose the correct page size (the PDF plugin defaults to "Letter", whereas I print to A4), yes.
Also, how "good" is the PDF output. That is, are the files sizes quite small, is it embedding proper scaleable fonts, and does it print fast?
Excellent. I've tried various free PDF Printers (for non-office applications), and this wipes the floor with them. The files sizes are small (unless I've got a whole lot of handwritten stuff, but that's only in OneNote), the fonts are properly embedded, and it's quick: no opening up a second or third dialog box to confirm again -- 'Save as PDF', choose filename, done. A 12 page assignment with charts, graphs, diagrams was converted in under a second, with 118 KB (76 KB as a .doc). The converter is, after all, from Adobe.
I have used EndNote, and it is not nearly as good as BibTeX. Other people (read the comments) seem to feel that EndNote works better than Word 2007's support; I simply don't believe that a mouse-driven interface for adding citations can ever beat a text-based one.
I'll take your word for it, since I haven't used BibTeX. So far I've been happy with the Office offering, but then, I don't write that many articles.
I think you're missing the point. LaTeX easily allows you (and encourages you) to split your documents up into multiple files.
You're right, I missed that. However, while I can see where splitting large files up might be of use during simultaneous editing, how often is this an issue? Not simply the simultaneous editing, but having files so large they cause problems? I can't believe this would be much a of deal-breaker in an Office/LaTeX comparison.
As best I can tell (I've never found it, and I've tried...) you can't apply a template to a document after the fact (and get the expected results). If my paper is rejected from one place, I can reformat the entire document by changing which style file I include.
I haven't (yet) changed templates mid-stream -- or post-stream, even -- so I can't counter that argument. Ah, the joys of arguing about a new product.. /sardonic
I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively,
Except for those on the Office 2007 team, *nobody* has used Office 2007 extensively :)
The latter = LaTeX
From talking with people who have used 2007, there is quite a learning jump to go from 2003 to 2007
Rubbish. I don't want to insult any friends of yours, but those people are either power-users whose favourite routines have just been broken, or nitwits. If you know of a feature, it's not hard to find -- and what's more, stuff you didn't know about is there right next to it. Like the Bibliography thing: 1 click on the "Reference" tab gives me options for citations, bibliographies, table of contents, indexes, footnotes, endnotes, cross-referencing, blah blah blah... as soon as Joe Schmoe wants to put in a Footnote, he suddenly learns he can do an Endnote instead. Or a Crossreference. Or a Citation. Etc.
I do a lot of different things with my Office Suite, and needed no more than a day or two to be just as comfortable with it as 2003. After a week, I couldn't imagine going back.
Especially since 2007 breaks math support for journals, it makes sense to consider moving to LaTeX just as much as an alternative to moving to Office 2007.
If you
Hello - have you used Office 2007?
/. crowd); Excel, for instance, has some powerful statistical tool. Sure, it's no STATA, but before I shell out $900 on STATA I'd rather install some modules and read some documentation.
1. PDF publishing is supported (free) with a download from the Microsoft website (the only reason it wasn't bundled is because Adobe didn't want it to be).
2. Citations and Bibliographies are both supported under Word: there's that whole "Reference" tab. Not having used BibTeX I can't compare - but then, neither can you, apparently.
3. Office 2007 documents can be saved to document managment servers for sharing. I don't know what that entails, but it's there, and easy to find.
4. LaTeX has style files; Word has templates. What's the difference? Templates seem rather fragile to you, and some journals don't offer them. I'm not sure this even needs rebutting -- failure to offer templates isn't Word's fault, and, well they seem solid to me, so we're at 1:1
I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively, but I do know it's not as bad as you make it out to be. That 80/20 rule is precisely what Microsoft tried to address with their new layout, since -- probably due to their ubiquity -- the Office products are routinely underrated as far as their functionality goes (probably less so by the
aye, I be usin' my SpoofStick aaall the time when I'm online. Never whipped it out for no fishin' website, though. Weirdos.