Okay, I think I'll have a go at disagreeing with this.
Nobody writes while adhering to grammatical rules well enough for their sentences to compile. The best natural language parsers have a precision and recall of around 90%, meaning that the most sophisticated grammatical rules that we're able to write down after about eighty years of study still get one in ten phrases wrong. Furthermore their exact match rate is closer to 50%, meaning that most sentences are misinterpreted. The standard corpus for evaluating parser performance is the WSJ - hardly a publication in which I would describe the writes as ignorant (and yes, I know I twisted what you said there).
Returning to the subject at hand, you appear to be claiming that when KJV was written, writers were still refining the grammatical rules of English and shortly after this they settled on some rules which are now set in stone. This is, frankly, nonsense. If you look at the writing of perhaps two hundred years ago - well after KJV - and use that to build a formal grammar of English then there is no way this grammar would be able to accurately parse well written modern text.
To take one specific example, consider the split infinitive which two hundred years ago was considered a breach of grammatical rules due to the strong Latin grounding in education at the time. Nowadays it is widely accepted that English is a different language to Latin and splitting the infinitive is perfectly acceptable.
English, including written English, is a _natural_ language, meaning it evolves. The syntax that defined English last year will not precisely define it this year and with the advent of faster and cheaper means of publishing (e.g. SMS, Twitter) it is to be expected that the rate of change will increase. That's not to say that I'm happy about it - I think live would be much easier if computers could reliably interpret everything that we write - but I accept that it is the case and the grammar rules written a hundred years ago (or even last year) are little more than approximations of how people write. When a sentence is written in violation of those rules (such as "My bad."), you can argue that the sentence has incorrect syntax, but when many sentences sharing the same grammatical structure are written then the only reasonable conclusion is that the rules are incorrect representations of English.
My goal when writing is to make it as easy as possible for readers to understand what is written. This means that while it may be syntactically acceptable for me to continue a sentence as long as I want, adding prepositions and inviting the reader to attach them as they see fit, and continuing on tangents freely, I do not do so because I am more interested in being understood than in adhering to rules that I doubt most readers have studied. Occasionally I am lazy, and my posts to Slashdot are a good example of this, with ellipses used instead of coherently structuring my thoughts. Again this is not invalid grammar, any non trivial grammar will permit a rule such as S -> NP (S) VP, but it is poor form since it leads to a less comprehensible essay. And my apologies for such a long-winded post, something which I also believe is another sign of lazy writing.
Finally an argument you did not make but I will refute directly just case you were thinking it: writing a grammar in which every valid sentence is marked valid is a trivial task. The problem is writing a grammar that will reject every grammatically invalid sentence. Syntacticians have an irritating habit of saying that anything remotely challenging must be resolved using semantics, leading to such absurd interpretations as "The I are of a" as a valid sentence (roughly: the I'th acre of plot A).
I'd have guessed not, though perhaps I'm being naive.
Judges are people too. Even if their job is not on the line, their friends are likely lawyers and local businessmen - all of whom owe their livelihood to the continued patent cases.
I doubt the judges are being biased deliberately (there goes my naivety again) but when all of your friends and colleagues are telling you about how good it is for the community that you're addressing these issues, it's pretty hard to retain objectivity.
Honestly, I think if you ask these judges I believe you'd find they'd be proud of the work they're doing on behalf of both their community and America. Actually, I bet that'd be a great Ask Slashdot...
The iphone and macbook freely allow tinkering, so I expect the iPod will be much the same.
If you recall all the peek charts did was give you access to system calls and variables, well... things are a little tighter now thanks to multitasking and you're expected to use an API to access them. Apart from that though, Apple is quite happy with you tinkering with your own computers to your heart's content.
What apple tries hard to control is you sharing those hacks with non tinkerers. Say I wrote an awesome iPad game and distributed the source code over the net for anyone with the SDK (a free download). Well, Apple would not exactly approve but they wouldn't stop me. However, say I distributed the same game in binary form, telling anybody interested to email me their IEMI number... well, I suspect Apple would take action at that point.
I had an Apple II. I didn't write any C code for it because I didn't have a C compiler, so instead I wrote assembly - in hindsight, how dumb is that! I mean, great, I can say I wrote 6502 assembly and sound geeky - but I'm sure I would've been more productive using C. Similarly, I had a Mac Plus and I had to copy someone else's compiler to be able to write software. Piracy because I wanted to write software... Then I got a 6100, and I shelled out I believe $150 of my hard earned student money to buy a compiler (Metrowerks). I couldn't afford the apple suite at the time. As I got a bit older and richer, I signed up for an apple developer account which gave me access to tech support (they were amazingly helpful in the days before you could get similar information off the internet or usenet).
Lets compare that to now, where I can download the SDK for not only my mac but my iPhone completely for free (a colleague of mine would disagree on this point, noting that he wanted to develop for the iPhone but had to buy a mac to do so). Not only do I get an excellent SDK, but I get video tutorials, lots of example code and even a simulator! Sadly, I'm too busy to tinker any more but I do feel that Apple is bending over backwards to make it easy for me, completely unlike how they were twenty years ago.
They could be better - If they embraced open standards a bit more so that say MobileMe could be connected to using LDAP - it would make it easier to do cool stuff in a similar way to how easy it is to do cool stuff in Linux. But to say they're less tinker friendly because they try and prevent jail-breaking is just... wrong.
Think what having a framed check of $1337 from Google to you would do for your career, or on your CV "Awarded a prize by Google for finding security flaws", or perhaps "One of only 7 people worldwide awarded a prize by Google for finding bugs in their software". You get the drift...
The money only needs to be enough that people will not dismiss it as a joke prize - I doubt any recipient will actually cash the check.
I think ditching PPC for 10.6 was a good call by Apple.
10.6 does not add many new features that are valuable to you as a PPC user. 10.6 is about consolodating their code-base, getting rid of 32 bit, getting rid of PPC, etc.
We still get 10.4 updates now and I believe security still happens on 10.3 though I don't follow that. So no, you won't lose our security patches, upgrades to iLife for quite some time. I'd guess at least 2 years.
At the end of the day, there are not that many people who want to run older hardware with the latest software and it's too expensive to base your business around them. As you've noted, you can continue running on Mac OS 8 (why not 9?), and I expect you can continue to run on 10.5 for a long time to come. But just as those people running on classic miss out on loads of features, you'll miss out on iLife 10 or 11 and other new software.
Re:Why only one database language?
on
SQL in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Nah, it's easier than that.
Firstly, writing a DB engine is pretty easy. B-Tree implementation is a standard 2nd year assignment, hash is first year, and trying them into a database with persistent storage would probably still be 2nd year or 3rd year at worst. Transations (undo segments and the like) are harder, but you could leave them out.
Query optimisation firstly isn't in SQL, though I'd be lying if I said it was in relational algebra. Certainly it is in an intermediate language that is convertible too. Secondly as you say, compiler building is not rocket science and optimisation is part of that. It's a bit different to programming optimisation because you're much more concerned with fetches than instructions but fundamentally the concept is the same.
Of course, that's writing your own language, not writing a decent RDBMS.
I recently bought a motorbike and stopped using the train so can present a single data point on how much costs increase.
I paid $110/month for a train ticket. However I'd often have to work late and then use a combination of busses and taxis (or very long walks) to get home. As a result I ended up spending around an extra $20/month even though I had a monthly train pass. Total cost then was around $1500/year.
I now pay approx $10/week for petrol and approx $120/quarter for servicing (yes, that means servicing is costing the same as petrol). That's roughly $1000/year. There's about $200 extra in insurance too, and interest on the purchase price is also around $200/year. So in total I'm now spending about $1400/year, a saving of $1500.
Curiously, the bike has saved me a lot less time than I anticipated. The trip takes around 50 minutes by train (including walking) and around 40 mintues by motorbike (including putting gear on/away).
However it's greatly simplified things, I can work late or get delayed on my way out the door without incident. The train's occasional break-downs/delays don't affect me now either - my bike is much more reliable.
Winter on the bike hasn't been the most pleasant, especially heading home in the dark when it's raining and cold and it started making me wish I was in a nice air-conditioned car. So I worked out the approximate cost of 'upgrading'.
It was a lot - I would have to pay roughly five times as much in repayments, roughly three times as much in fuel, and I'd have to start paying for parking. I estimated the total cost at roughly $6k extra (though a far cry from the article's $20k).
There's non financial issues to take into account too... Trains are safter than cars, which are safer than bikes. Trains allow you to read during your commute. Trains and cars keep you dry and warm. That's one data point, YMMV
I used postgres a while ago before switching to MySQL (4) for performance reasons. Since then I've kept a close eye on Postgres and come to the conclusion that they now exceed MySQL in almost every area that matters.
There's a few areas that MySQL still wins: Ease of configuring and maintaining for small projects. Ease of setting up clustering/replication. Analytic functions and general SQL friendliness.
But the feeling I had was that unless MySQL started to improve substantially, it was now on the long spiral downwards. This acquisition is not likely to be good news at all for MySQL. Oracle already own two other databases (Times 10 and Berekeley), look at how Oracle treats them. Some work on compatibility with Oracle and that's about it.
I just cannot see Oracle being inclined to make MySQL more suitable for enterprise use.
But the kind of organisations that insist on an MSI also insist that it's the one that came from the vendor.
If you prefer a Linux analogy then if I install RHEL then improve the kernel I lose any support from the vendor.
Organizations distinguish code as either officially sanctioned or not, and support only the former. Until Mozilla releases a sanctioned MSI there is no officially supported Mozilla installers.
It's like Linus and his holy penguin piss. If he called a kernel 2.6.29RC9 then people have different expectations to if he called it 2.6.29.
What's wrong with an iMac with external storage? As long as its graphics is good enough, and it should be now... this seems to give everything you're looking for.
The only real downside is that storage is over USB2 or Ethernet (I went with ethernet), neither of which is as fast as internal or external SATA. But if 20MB/s is good enough then it isn't a problem.
Oh, and if the video card isn't good enough then you're screwed too.
I don't think the parent should be called a troll; It's a valid opinion. Up until now, nvidia is what you picked if you wanted:
better compatibility with recent kernels
easier installation
better performance
I used to have an ATI card (hehe, nearly wrote AMD - the merger really has started to change how I think). It was built because I needed 3D in a 100% open source system and NVidia's closed-source drivers were so good that not enough developers could be bothered developing open-source equivilants (whatever happened to noveau anyway?). At the same time, ATI's closed-source driver sucked so the open-source support was pretty good.
But apart from that one foray where open-source was a requirement, I've always wanted things to 'just work' and nvidia has been so much better in that regard.
Now, AMD (and independently, intel) have thrown down the gauntlet and next time I will actually have to think instead of buying nvidia automatically. Having said that, and I think this is the parent's point, if I were buying a system next week then there is no way I'd go ATI - this donation will take months before it finds its way into released distributions and I've long past being willing to patch my kernel constantly to support my hardware.
If you're a consumer, rejoice in this annoucnement but wait a few months before changing your buying significantly. If you're nvidia - now is the time to start sweating and seriously think about just exactly why you can't open-source your drivers.
Right. I used LaTeX because... well, because I knew it mainly, and because I wanted to get words on paper rather than distract myself with layout early on.
At the end of the process I had to interact with a lot of people and Word would have made the process a hellova lot easier. At 500 odd pages, LaTeX was still taking a while (it builds the PAF by merging all of the DVIs and that takes a while) - I'm not at all convinced Word is any slower. Besides, you're going to write the book on your desktop and you're probably used to using your desktop for all sorts of fancy technical work. The kind of desktops that computer geeks use regularly are more than capable of
Also the spelling and grammar tools for Word are better than comporable tools for LaTeX. And the figure placement in LaTeX - argh! Index management wasn't bad in LaTeX either, but no better than Word. LaTeX might have nice linebreak rules, but it's perfectly happy to do a page break at a stupid place instead of trying harder to squeeze the document - I think LaTeX has stagnated while the GUI world caught up.
PS: My father swears by InDesign for this sort of stuff having migrated to it from Word. Dunno myself and I don't really care, I'm not planning on going through that again.
You could be right about why. To be honest, I've never missed this functionality - the way I use the phone doesn't ever require copy paste. However while we're guessing, I'm guessing the reason it is missing is they couldn't develop a UI to copy/paste that was intuitive enough. How _do_ you copy/paste without a menu, some sort of special 'snip' gesture?
Personally the biggest missing functionality for me is the inability to remember passwords/secure notes and requiring me to type them in on every visit. This is despite the phone already connecting to the mobileme server where my passwords and secure notes are stored!
I disagree; places in the top ten are too tempting to buy for bragging rights. After all if I was in the market for a small supercomputer I would be swayed by the argument - we built the world's #1! Having more of the top 500 tells me that independent people are more likely to choose HP than they are to choose IBM.
Yeah, it's supposed to be read - the firmware will detect failing sectors during read and remap them.
Plug it in every so often and check the integrity of all files. Not only will you get a convenient notice if anything has gone wrong, you'll also keep data on valid secotrs.
Slashdot Mirror
Then... why did you go with this particular vendor instead of one that meets your needs?
Okay, I think I'll have a go at disagreeing with this.
Nobody writes while adhering to grammatical rules well enough for their sentences to compile. The best natural language parsers have a precision and recall of around 90%, meaning that the most sophisticated grammatical rules that we're able to write down after about eighty years of study still get one in ten phrases wrong. Furthermore their exact match rate is closer to 50%, meaning that most sentences are misinterpreted. The standard corpus for evaluating parser performance is the WSJ - hardly a publication in which I would describe the writes as ignorant (and yes, I know I twisted what you said there).
Returning to the subject at hand, you appear to be claiming that when KJV was written, writers were still refining the grammatical rules of English and shortly after this they settled on some rules which are now set in stone. This is, frankly, nonsense. If you look at the writing of perhaps two hundred years ago - well after KJV - and use that to build a formal grammar of English then there is no way this grammar would be able to accurately parse well written modern text.
To take one specific example, consider the split infinitive which two hundred years ago was considered a breach of grammatical rules due to the strong Latin grounding in education at the time. Nowadays it is widely accepted that English is a different language to Latin and splitting the infinitive is perfectly acceptable.
English, including written English, is a _natural_ language, meaning it evolves. The syntax that defined English last year will not precisely define it this year and with the advent of faster and cheaper means of publishing (e.g. SMS, Twitter) it is to be expected that the rate of change will increase. That's not to say that I'm happy about it - I think live would be much easier if computers could reliably interpret everything that we write - but I accept that it is the case and the grammar rules written a hundred years ago (or even last year) are little more than approximations of how people write. When a sentence is written in violation of those rules (such as "My bad."), you can argue that the sentence has incorrect syntax, but when many sentences sharing the same grammatical structure are written then the only reasonable conclusion is that the rules are incorrect representations of English.
My goal when writing is to make it as easy as possible for readers to understand what is written. This means that while it may be syntactically acceptable for me to continue a sentence as long as I want, adding prepositions and inviting the reader to attach them as they see fit, and continuing on tangents freely, I do not do so because I am more interested in being understood than in adhering to rules that I doubt most readers have studied. Occasionally I am lazy, and my posts to Slashdot are a good example of this, with ellipses used instead of coherently structuring my thoughts. Again this is not invalid grammar, any non trivial grammar will permit a rule such as S -> NP (S) VP, but it is poor form since it leads to a less comprehensible essay. And my apologies for such a long-winded post, something which I also believe is another sign of lazy writing.
Finally an argument you did not make but I will refute directly just case you were thinking it: writing a grammar in which every valid sentence is marked valid is a trivial task. The problem is writing a grammar that will reject every grammatically invalid sentence. Syntacticians have an irritating habit of saying that anything remotely challenging must be resolved using semantics, leading to such absurd interpretations as "The I are of a" as a valid sentence (roughly: the I'th acre of plot A).
I'd have guessed not, though perhaps I'm being naive.
Judges are people too. Even if their job is not on the line, their friends are likely lawyers and local businessmen - all of whom owe their livelihood to the continued patent cases.
I doubt the judges are being biased deliberately (there goes my naivety again) but when all of your friends and colleagues are telling you about how good it is for the community that you're addressing these issues, it's pretty hard to retain objectivity.
Honestly, I think if you ask these judges I believe you'd find they'd be proud of the work they're doing on behalf of both their community and America. Actually, I bet that'd be a great Ask Slashdot...
The iphone and macbook freely allow tinkering, so I expect the iPod will be much the same.
If you recall all the peek charts did was give you access to system calls and variables, well... things are a little tighter now thanks to multitasking and you're expected to use an API to access them. Apart from that though, Apple is quite happy with you tinkering with your own computers to your heart's content.
What apple tries hard to control is you sharing those hacks with non tinkerers. Say I wrote an awesome iPad game and distributed the source code over the net for anyone with the SDK (a free download). Well, Apple would not exactly approve but they wouldn't stop me. However, say I distributed the same game in binary form, telling anybody interested to email me their IEMI number... well, I suspect Apple would take action at that point.
I had an Apple II. I didn't write any C code for it because I didn't have a C compiler, so instead I wrote assembly - in hindsight, how dumb is that! I mean, great, I can say I wrote 6502 assembly and sound geeky - but I'm sure I would've been more productive using C. Similarly, I had a Mac Plus and I had to copy someone else's compiler to be able to write software. Piracy because I wanted to write software... Then I got a 6100, and I shelled out I believe $150 of my hard earned student money to buy a compiler (Metrowerks). I couldn't afford the apple suite at the time. As I got a bit older and richer, I signed up for an apple developer account which gave me access to tech support (they were amazingly helpful in the days before you could get similar information off the internet or usenet).
Lets compare that to now, where I can download the SDK for not only my mac but my iPhone completely for free (a colleague of mine would disagree on this point, noting that he wanted to develop for the iPhone but had to buy a mac to do so). Not only do I get an excellent SDK, but I get video tutorials, lots of example code and even a simulator! Sadly, I'm too busy to tinker any more but I do feel that Apple is bending over backwards to make it easy for me, completely unlike how they were twenty years ago.
They could be better - If they embraced open standards a bit more so that say MobileMe could be connected to using LDAP - it would make it easier to do cool stuff in a similar way to how easy it is to do cool stuff in Linux. But to say they're less tinker friendly because they try and prevent jail-breaking is just... wrong.
Perhaps...
Think what having a framed check of $1337 from Google to you would do for your career, or on your CV "Awarded a prize by Google for finding security flaws", or perhaps "One of only 7 people worldwide awarded a prize by Google for finding bugs in their software". You get the drift...
The money only needs to be enough that people will not dismiss it as a joke prize - I doubt any recipient will actually cash the check.
cf Knuth's prizes for bugs in TeX.
None; it's a donation that's put through as a support contract for legal reasons
I think ditching PPC for 10.6 was a good call by Apple.
10.6 does not add many new features that are valuable to you as a PPC user. 10.6 is about consolodating their code-base, getting rid of 32 bit, getting rid of PPC, etc.
We still get 10.4 updates now and I believe security still happens on 10.3 though I don't follow that. So no, you won't lose our security patches, upgrades to iLife for quite some time. I'd guess at least 2 years.
At the end of the day, there are not that many people who want to run older hardware with the latest software and it's too expensive to base your business around them. As you've noted, you can continue running on Mac OS 8 (why not 9?), and I expect you can continue to run on 10.5 for a long time to come. But just as those people running on classic miss out on loads of features, you'll miss out on iLife 10 or 11 and other new software.
Nah, it's easier than that.
Firstly, writing a DB engine is pretty easy. B-Tree implementation is a standard 2nd year assignment, hash is first year, and trying them into a database with persistent storage would probably still be 2nd year or 3rd year at worst. Transations (undo segments and the like) are harder, but you could leave them out.
Query optimisation firstly isn't in SQL, though I'd be lying if I said it was in relational algebra. Certainly it is in an intermediate language that is convertible too. Secondly as you say, compiler building is not rocket science and optimisation is part of that. It's a bit different to programming optimisation because you're much more concerned with fetches than instructions but fundamentally the concept is the same.
Of course, that's writing your own language, not writing a decent RDBMS.
I recently bought a motorbike and stopped using the train so can present a single data point on how much costs increase.
I paid $110/month for a train ticket. However I'd often have to work late and then use a combination of busses and taxis (or very long walks) to get home. As a result I ended up spending around an extra $20/month even though I had a monthly train pass. Total cost then was around $1500/year.
I now pay approx $10/week for petrol and approx $120/quarter for servicing (yes, that means servicing is costing the same as petrol). That's roughly $1000/year. There's about $200 extra in insurance too, and interest on the purchase price is also around $200/year. So in total I'm now spending about $1400/year, a saving of $1500.
Curiously, the bike has saved me a lot less time than I anticipated. The trip takes around 50 minutes by train (including walking) and around 40 mintues by motorbike (including putting gear on/away).
However it's greatly simplified things, I can work late or get delayed on my way out the door without incident. The train's occasional break-downs/delays don't affect me now either - my bike is much more reliable.
Winter on the bike hasn't been the most pleasant, especially heading home in the dark when it's raining and cold and it started making me wish I was in a nice air-conditioned car. So I worked out the approximate cost of 'upgrading'.
It was a lot - I would have to pay roughly five times as much in repayments, roughly three times as much in fuel, and I'd have to start paying for parking. I estimated the total cost at roughly $6k extra (though a far cry from the article's $20k).
There's non financial issues to take into account too... Trains are safter than cars, which are safer than bikes. Trains allow you to read during your commute. Trains and cars keep you dry and warm. That's one data point, YMMV
That's my feeling too.
I used postgres a while ago before switching to MySQL (4) for performance reasons. Since then I've kept a close eye on Postgres and come to the conclusion that they now exceed MySQL in almost every area that matters.
There's a few areas that MySQL still wins:
Ease of configuring and maintaining for small projects.
Ease of setting up clustering/replication.
Analytic functions and general SQL friendliness.
But the feeling I had was that unless MySQL started to improve substantially, it was now on the long spiral downwards. This acquisition is not likely to be good news at all for MySQL. Oracle already own two other databases (Times 10 and Berekeley), look at how Oracle treats them. Some work on compatibility with Oracle and that's about it.
I just cannot see Oracle being inclined to make MySQL more suitable for enterprise use.
All IMHO, of course.
It was a joke in reference to a company recently pushing ISO to ratify a non standard.
But you're right, I should probably have used a tag.
Surely not!
I'd heard it was recently ratified as an ISO standard...
Sure anybody can build their own.
But the kind of organisations that insist on an MSI also insist that it's the one that came from the vendor.
If you prefer a Linux analogy then if I install RHEL then improve the kernel I lose any support from the vendor.
Organizations distinguish code as either officially sanctioned or not, and support only the former. Until Mozilla releases a sanctioned MSI there is no officially supported Mozilla installers.
It's like Linus and his holy penguin piss. If he called a kernel 2.6.29RC9 then people have different expectations to if he called it 2.6.29.
What's wrong with an iMac with external storage? As long as its graphics is good enough, and it should be now... this seems to give everything you're looking for.
The only real downside is that storage is over USB2 or Ethernet (I went with ethernet), neither of which is as fast as internal or external SATA. But if 20MB/s is good enough then it isn't a problem.
Oh, and if the video card isn't good enough then you're screwed too.
I dunno.
How do you type in the name of the contact you want to ring without a keyboard? Dial charles by pressing:
1 1 1 3 3 1 7 7 7 5 5 5 3 3 7 7 7 7
No thanks, I'll stick to a keyboard for basic phone use.
Which reporting tool did you switch to?
Er, we do. (Just not for humans)
Simple yet brilliant huh?
So, would you say it is patent worthy? Or was it obvious to somebody 'skilled in the art'?
I don't think the parent should be called a troll; It's a valid opinion. Up until now, nvidia is what you picked if you wanted:
better compatibility with recent kernels
easier installation
better performance
I used to have an ATI card (hehe, nearly wrote AMD - the merger really has started to change how I think). It was built because I needed 3D in a 100% open source system and NVidia's closed-source drivers were so good that not enough developers could be bothered developing open-source equivilants (whatever happened to noveau anyway?). At the same time, ATI's closed-source driver sucked so the open-source support was pretty good.
But apart from that one foray where open-source was a requirement, I've always wanted things to 'just work' and nvidia has been so much better in that regard.
Now, AMD (and independently, intel) have thrown down the gauntlet and next time I will actually have to think instead of buying nvidia automatically. Having said that, and I think this is the parent's point, if I were buying a system next week then there is no way I'd go ATI - this donation will take months before it finds its way into released distributions and I've long past being willing to patch my kernel constantly to support my hardware.
If you're a consumer, rejoice in this annoucnement but wait a few months before changing your buying significantly. If you're nvidia - now is the time to start sweating and seriously think about just exactly why you can't open-source your drivers.
That's my opinion, anyhow.
Right. I used LaTeX because ... well, because I knew it mainly, and because I wanted to get words on paper rather than distract myself with layout early on.
At the end of the process I had to interact with a lot of people and Word would have made the process a hellova lot easier. At 500 odd pages, LaTeX was still taking a while (it builds the PAF by merging all of the DVIs and that takes a while) - I'm not at all convinced Word is any slower. Besides, you're going to write the book on your desktop and you're probably used to using your desktop for all sorts of fancy technical work. The kind of desktops that computer geeks use regularly are more than capable of
Also the spelling and grammar tools for Word are better than comporable tools for LaTeX. And the figure placement in LaTeX - argh! Index management wasn't bad in LaTeX either, but no better than Word. LaTeX might have nice linebreak rules, but it's perfectly happy to do a page break at a stupid place instead of trying harder to squeeze the document - I think LaTeX has stagnated while the GUI world caught up.
PS: My father swears by InDesign for this sort of stuff having migrated to it from Word. Dunno myself and I don't really care, I'm not planning on going through that again.
You could be right about why. To be honest, I've never missed this functionality - the way I use the phone doesn't ever require copy paste. However while we're guessing, I'm guessing the reason it is missing is they couldn't develop a UI to copy/paste that was intuitive enough. How _do_ you copy/paste without a menu, some sort of special 'snip' gesture?
Personally the biggest missing functionality for me is the inability to remember passwords/secure notes and requiring me to type them in on every visit. This is despite the phone already connecting to the mobileme server where my passwords and secure notes are stored!
No, OSX doesn't use X, although X is easily installable.
Nope, he had his cold.
I disagree; places in the top ten are too tempting to buy for bragging rights. After all if I was in the market for a small supercomputer I would be swayed by the argument - we built the world's #1! Having more of the top 500 tells me that independent people are more likely to choose HP than they are to choose IBM.
Yeah, it's supposed to be read - the firmware will detect failing sectors during read and remap them.
Plug it in every so often and check the integrity of all files. Not only will you get a convenient notice if anything has gone wrong, you'll also keep data on valid secotrs.