This is only true in certain areas. As an academic, I read many documents from the most diverse sources, and I can tell you for a fact that in my field (Economics) Word is rapidly fading away and everyone is using LaTeX (at least, people under 50;-)).
It used to be 50/50 just 2-3 years ago, but if you go check working paper repositories like IDEAS, which is LARGE, you ll'notice that most recent working papers are written using some version of LaTeX.
Apart from the inherent qualities of LaTeX, it's just an example of "network effect": the more people adopt a technology, the more costly it becomes not to follow suit. For instance, all publishers but some minor ones nowadays recommend submissions in LaTeX. It has worked just like this for microsoft products in many cases, here it's working the other way around.
Exactly. Scientific research is my job, so believe me, I know what I am talking about. Sometimes you mis-cite papers you know extremely well just because you copy/paste an incorrect citation. That doesn't imply at all that you have not read the article.
Proof: in one occasion, I misquoted a paper that I had written myself, just because I copied its title from the preliminary version, forgetting that eventually the title had (slightly) changed in the published version.
IMHO, this is cheap sensationalism. On the other hand, it is true that the academic profession is too loaded with the "publish or perish" thing, which leads researchers (and eventually publishing) sloppy research.
you can actually gain a lot from OOP in scientific applications. Beware: IANASC (I am not a serious coder). However, I am an econometrician (for the majority: roughly speaking, halfway between an economist and a statistician) who often does his estimations in high-level languages such as Gauss or Ox rather than using prepackaged solutions.
In the last two years I have been using Ox quite a bit, whose syntax resembles C++, and encourages the use of objects. My eperience is that performance and ease of code writing are comparable, but what really makes the difference is code maintainability: once you've got something that works, WHAM!, you wrap it into a class and forget about it. With other packages, the population of global variables and such made it a nightmare to go through code you had written months earlier and re-use it for a related task.
Both Hewlett-Packard and Compaq have been hurt by price wars in
personal computers, where it has been difficult for makers to
differentiate themselves when all except Apple Computer are offering
operating systems from Microsoft.
One of the most interesting aspects of Judge Jackson's Finding of Facts was the fact that no HW company could allow independence from M$ and they were essentially forced to pre-install Windows on every machine at MS's conditions.
I guess, if HW vendors become fewer and fewer, I expect to see more penguins out of the box;-)
Whatever distro you choose, a very helpful thing is to have people around familiar enough with it (and friendly enough) to give you advice when you need it. Of course, the Net gives you all the answers, but having someone around is faster and more reassuring.
I have been using Debian from the start, mainly because I could ask things to a friend who had been using it for years. Despite the fact that Debian is usually considered to be one of the esoteric distros, I've never looked back.
So, I wouldn't blame anyone who chose her initial distro on the basis of the people she hangs out with. Later, when you're comfortable with Linux, you can make your own choice.
I guess the real reason why M$ wants to port Office to *NIX is to stop Wine. For most people, what makes Wine interesting is the ability to run Office on Linux/BSD (roughly now, possibly spotlessly in the future).
Once a native port is out, why bother with Wine anymore? Keep in mind that Wine is the single biggest threat to M$'s domination. It's the only existing piece of software that undermines the ``Applications Barrier to Entry'', to say it in Judge Jackson's words. Once M$ loses that, they're just another SW company.
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It used to be 50/50 just 2-3 years ago, but if you go check working paper repositories like IDEAS, which is LARGE, you ll'notice that most recent working papers are written using some version of LaTeX.
Apart from the inherent qualities of LaTeX, it's just an example of "network effect": the more people adopt a technology, the more costly it becomes not to follow suit. For instance, all publishers but some minor ones nowadays recommend submissions in LaTeX. It has worked just like this for microsoft products in many cases, here it's working the other way around.
Proof: in one occasion, I misquoted a paper that I had written myself, just because I copied its title from the preliminary version, forgetting that eventually the title had (slightly) changed in the published version.
IMHO, this is cheap sensationalism. On the other hand, it is true that the academic profession is too loaded with the "publish or perish" thing, which leads researchers (and eventually publishing) sloppy research.
you can actually gain a lot from OOP in scientific applications. Beware: IANASC (I am not a serious coder). However, I am an econometrician (for the majority: roughly speaking, halfway between an economist and a statistician) who often does his estimations in high-level languages such as Gauss or Ox rather than using prepackaged solutions.
In the last two years I have been using Ox quite a bit, whose syntax resembles C++, and encourages the use of objects. My eperience is that performance and ease of code writing are comparable, but what really makes the difference is code maintainability: once you've got something that works, WHAM!, you wrap it into a class and forget about it. With other packages, the population of global variables and such made it a nightmare to go through code you had written months earlier and re-use it for a related task.
Verbatim from the NYT article:
;-)
Both Hewlett-Packard and Compaq have been hurt by price wars in personal computers, where it has been difficult for makers to differentiate themselves when all except Apple Computer are offering operating systems from Microsoft.
One of the most interesting aspects of Judge Jackson's Finding of Facts was the fact that no HW company could allow independence from M$ and they were essentially forced to pre-install Windows on every machine at MS's conditions.
I guess, if HW vendors become fewer and fewer, I expect to see more penguins out of the box
Whatever distro you choose, a very helpful thing is to have people around familiar enough with it (and friendly enough) to give you advice when you need it. Of course, the Net gives you all the answers, but having someone around is faster and more reassuring. I have been using Debian from the start, mainly because I could ask things to a friend who had been using it for years. Despite the fact that Debian is usually considered to be one of the esoteric distros, I've never looked back. So, I wouldn't blame anyone who chose her initial distro on the basis of the people she hangs out with. Later, when you're comfortable with Linux, you can make your own choice.
I guess the real reason why M$ wants to port Office to *NIX is to stop Wine. For most people, what makes Wine interesting is the ability to run Office on Linux/BSD (roughly now, possibly spotlessly in the future). Once a native port is out, why bother with Wine anymore? Keep in mind that Wine is the single biggest threat to M$'s domination. It's the only existing piece of software that undermines the ``Applications Barrier to Entry'', to say it in Judge Jackson's words. Once M$ loses that, they're just another SW company.