And how many corporations do pure, theoretical, research? Pure mathematics, theoretical physics, etc.? Not too many I believe. And I don't think they can patent such results, even in the US. (But once they want to do such research, I'm sure they will be able. Then you can't move a finger without infringing on someone's patent.) Now, it is all about applications and short-term research (and profits) that most corporations are interested in.
Shouldn't it be more like 'Windows browser plugins for Linux/x86'? I'm sure I will not be able to use those plugins on a Sun or an Alpha.
And what about performance with all the wrapper-crap? "Geez this Linux is slow. This c00lplugin(tm) runs much faster on my slower windows box." (Heh, java and flash in IE in vmware on a ppro200 are faster than Sun's JDK and flash natively under Linux. That doesn't say they would be fast, which they are not, just faster.)
> Can you imagine how much a kid would get picked on in school once the other children learned they were genetically modified?
I think the opposite scene is much more alarming: being picked on (and worse at everything) because you are not genetically modified to be Perfect and the others are. That is exactly what is alarming about the whole genetic manipulation thing: an unmodified human is no good for anything anymore when we have "superhumans". I do not want such future.
> I've always found it hard to accurately copy a proof and think about it at the same time, and I doubt I'm alone in this.
This depends on the lecturer too. Some lecturers are hard to follow, get stuck on simple things and fastforward over the more complicated things. And never, ever use transparencies for anything, such as proofs, that should be followed with care. It is impossible to follow anything written on a transparency (as it is hard to concentrate reading anything on a flashy and shine computer screen) and trying to follow it takes all the time from thinking plus that the lecturer then just stands there and it is so booooooring. Use the chalkboard, it is much more expressive.
Could be. However, when people usually speak of just Rudin or "it's in Rudin", they mean that specific bible or "art of computer programming" of basic real analysis.
Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis is a great book, but only after you have studied the basics elsewhere:-). For that the university's lecture notes have proven sufficient to me. After that Rudin is really enjoyable reading, even if it requires some extra thought. I like rather dense textbooks. I dislike most american textbooks I've met (not math though) that contain so much of useless crap that they're boring to read and it is hard to find actual topics from all the examples and showing off hands. Especially teaching-by-examples often sucks. Examples may sometimes be good at introducing a topic and showing a practical examples after one, but there should not be too many of them and topics should not be disguised in the examples. For example Daniels' Digital Design from Zero to One was awful. (Coursebook here on a compulsory course to all "IT" students.)
There's this paper proposing structural proofs (http://www.research.compaq.com/SRC/personal/lampo rt/pubs/lamport-how-to-write.ps) that might be a good read.
In short what the paper proposes is to write proofs in a top-to-bottom tmaner so that you can easily see the outline of the proof without going into details unless you need them to understand it. He also says the method should better prevent errors. (And every self respecting mathematician and computer scientist should know who Leslie Lamport as well as Donald E. Knuth are.)
> Also, you mention IDE and SCSI but you should realise that these protocols do a lot more than give access to the I/O bus. They actually provide a standardised interface for block devices to communicate through your I/O bus
Maybe I should've been more specific. (Also remember closing the gap between software and hardware --- although following isn't everything about it.) What I'm thinking is that the bus or whatever interface would involve a protocol and the devices would implement calls such as read(), write(), ioctl() thus pretty much eliminating the need for device-specific drivers in each operating system. Of course the hardware would probably be more expensive. (And no bugs, dammit!) Now, applications could as well provide similar services to hardware and other programs. A program wouldn't have to need to know if it is communicating with a device or a program emulating the behaviour. Of course there must be lot of problems to solve with this approach and it may be practically impossible.
I've been thinking that why do we need all these dozens of different kind of buses in one PC: isa, pci, agp, ide (remove isa, replace agp with something else and ide with scsi on Real Computers) and also different kind of connectors. Why couldn't the computer be built so modularly that all devices use the same bus (or rather, a connection matrix kind of thing so the devices can discuss nicely) and same device bays -- any device can be attached anywhere and without freaking cables. Most cards and hard drives would nicely fit in the same buy; cd-rom and such would require a bigger bay but could still the same connectors. Of course, external devices still need a separate interface, but perhaps they could be seen as being on the same bus or whatever you call it. (Well, then I've also had some grandiose ideas of closing the gap between software and hardware. More about that some other time perhaps.)
> It's never the big boss that gets hurt. Not Julia Roberts or Leonardo Di Caprio. It's the man who's packing the videos for $8/hour. It's the guy making them. He's the one losing the money.
> These are the real victims of this crime, and I feel horrified that slashdot can condone it.
But it's the big bosses that are putting the money in _their_ _own_ _pockets_ and not the guy's who's packing the videos.
If CD:s cost half of what they do know, and I'd know that the artists and cd packing gues get properly compensated, I'd surely buy much more CD:s than I do now. (And I don't buy anything from the five big ones.) After all, the record companies do very little except for the most popular artists -- I haven't seen any of the artists I listen to advertised anywhere but by friends and on homepages, that are as well maintained by fans of the band. The record companies just package the music and take the money. And yet the CD:s cost exactly as much as those that are advertised.
And I wouldn't call file sharing or copying what you've bought to a few of your friends piracy. (The latter of which is still legal as it should be here in europe, but most likely not soon because the media companies want to stop all fair use and thus should be boycotted.) Piracy is what the Russian mafia et all exercise: making profit out of someone else's work. That is unacceptable and those people are the real criminals.
> But then again. I'm not in 'the land of the free' so I can 'freely' copy all the stuff I want =)
Does that mean Europe (more specifically, the EU)?
Then I hate disappoint you. If you have been following what's going on, we can't either do that soon.
> MS Word is often used as an example of bloatware. Yes, it is a fairly large program, but I don't hold its size against it, because it allows the non-computer savvy to create nice looking documents very quickly, with very little work.
Since when has word been able to create nice-looking documents? I thought you needed a typesetting or publishing program for that - latex, frame maker, etc. but certainly not word. Word (read: wysiwyg) output is so _ugly_.
And I don't agree that word is easy either. Wordpad is easy, word is not. Word is a constant fight.
What's this guy talking about? 350MHz and old? I'd say such a system is fresh out of the box. I wouldn't even consider my pentium pro (underclocked at 166MHz --- a few decibels less noise without the fan!) an old system and I know people with even older systems. The only things I have upgraded is added memory (helped a lot with the amount of small programs I run), bought a quieter hard disk and power supply. But then again, none of the new software, especially games, is usable on it --- no 3D card; I don't like plastic polygons. But I don't need those crappy, bloated pieces of software. Older, simpler software/games is/was better. (No, you do not want to try to run mozilla on this system: it sometimes renders faster than netscape 4.x (and 3.x on those few pages it is slow with), yes, but the interface is even sluggier than a 1200bps modem line. And it takes virtually years to start it.)
I've understood that people who use public transportation (and might not even own a car) are frowned upon in the US. In Finland (and rest of the Europe?) there's nothing special about that. People actually walk to places! (Instead of driving to a park to walk.) And both walking and public transportation is much, much more environmentally friendly than driving that half a kilometer to the local grocery store with that SUV. You shouldn't need a car if you live in a city. (Countryside is a different thing.)
> LOWER college tuition.
Instruction is free here (not only in our equivalents of colleges but in real universities as well). The only compulsory payment is student union membership and it isn't that much. Now, if educational grant just was even nearly as good as unemployment compensation... not that I have a real reason to complain, just that it is wrong in my opinion.
If you are willing to obey evil corporations' software patents and other stupid laws created to protect corporations, stay in the US. If you want to write software without worrying someone suing your ass off, move elsewhere.
US freedom is not about the freedom and wellfare of the individual, it is about the freedom and wellfare of corporations and the allmighty buck. Of the western/developed world, the US probably has the highest proportional amount of homeless and poor people and widest wealth cap between the poor and the rich.
If you're sick of hypocrisy, move elsewhere.
If you're sick of american popular culture, Hollywood, etc. Well, it is hard to escape.
Actually, "One second is 9192631770 periods of a certain vibration of the atom Cs^{133}".
But yes, our archaic sun and earth rotation based calendar should be replaced with something rational. At least dump daylight saving time, leap seconds, leap years and all those kludges designed to keep it with the rotations. I don't care if the sun isn't at the same position at the same time every day. I'm never awake when it is light anyway:-).
> Without any kind of stepping stone, people will never want to switch to Linux... this way they can get kind of used to the look/feel of it
Linux or *nix in general isn't only about gnome, which is just a windows ripoff. Windows users already have what gnome (or KDE; I dislike them both) is about. What's the benefit to users to move from windows to worse ripoffs? None! Stability blaa blaa, the only more stable things are what gnome et all are trying to hide from the user.
> It's a necessary step in taking over the world.
If a bloated and slow (than windows) windows ripoff is what is wanted to take over the world, I'd rather let windows dominate the world.
Infact, I could very well use windows if I had a good user interface for it, which modern GUI is not. Unix (I don't care which *nix it is, free or not), on the other hand, offers me the best, although not perfect, UI (CLI, xterm and a good window manager) I've met.
That screenshot is apparently using a _scaled bitmap font_. Such surely is ugly and is the problem of X fonts. I only use unscaled fonts and they're much prettier than any AA crap. The only reason I see for AA is to increase the readability of really small fonts on big displays (less than 8 pixels or so on my 17" at 1280x1024) --- but who wants to read text that small?. Bigger resolution is, of course, a better solution to this. There's been arguments that AA is good for big fonts as well. Truly in big fonts there is some apparent jagginess without but I still consider jagginess less ugly of the two evils --- kludges just don't cut it. I'll welcome dead-tree resolution screens any day (paper is still much more readable than screens: no flicker, no reflections, no ugly aa-blur, no jagginess and can take it anywhere).
Otherwise blurriness just makes text unreadable. (Bi/trilinear filtering is equally ugly.)
> You can define a stream that equals System.out, so that you only have to type something like o.println()
But is is still longer than printf. This is the result of one of the main reasons I don't like java: almost purely object oriented. There's no way to have simple non-object functions like printf (I hate c++ cout operator abuse too). Short and easy functions for essentials are essential for coding to be fun; having to do everything the long way makes code "heavy" (not in the memory usage sense necessarily, although that applies to java). Oh, gtk is equally awfull with java with horrondeously long function and macro names.
Praise the good old days with direct frame buffer access instead of bloated and difficult APIs and no hype standards.
> I do think that LaTeX doesn't remove the need for products like Word though, can you imagine
teaching LaTeX to your mother?
No I don't imagine. But I wouldn't teach her Word either but something, much, much simpler; perhaps Wordpad or LyX (in lack of knowledge of better alternatives), depending on what she'd want to do with it. At least I find modern office packages very difficult to use. They have too much features visible to the user and everything important hidden. And Word at least is damn buggy, I get frustrated always when I have to use it because it doesn't do what I want and can even corrupt my files.
But anyone who seriously wants to create high print-quality documents, especially ones containing mathematical formulas, should take the time to learn something better, like LaTeX. Or perhaps docbook if there's not going to be maths (MathML is not to be written directly). At least I prefer TeX syntax over SGML/XML, though (too much writing with all the end tags and all).
> The users wants a WYSIWYG application ala Frame or Word. Latex is not an option.
Do they? Wysiwyg may seem easier but I believe that in the long run, LaTeX is far more productive when one can truly describe the structure and not play with positioning stuff on the paper (even framemaker has problems for what I've tried it -- and I don't like guis). LaTeX also has its problems, yes. I'm sure everyone who uses and even advocates LaTeX has run into them. The problem is that there just isn't anything better for what I want! Hopefully LaTeX3 will help. There's also lout, which seems to have fixed some of the problems, but the math mode is (IMO) inferior to TeX (e.g. x sup 2 vs. x^2). This is also a problem with most wysiwyg programs: the equation editors are crap. Writing latex math is very natural. Using the mouse midst writing text just doesn't cut it. And there aren't enough keys for shortcuts to everything. Writing commands within the text is much better. An editor with some automation can help users to learn them. Plus with a language like TeX, one can use his/her favourite editor and not an inferior one.
But I certainly wouldn't mind a system, that in one frame showed the source code in ones favourite editor and in one the rendered output, not necessarily exactly as on paper.
Reading:
http://www.ideography.co.uk/library/seybold/WYS- an te.html
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
> On a command line, even after a DIR or LS, you still have to type the name of the viewer app.
Not entirely true. Debian, for example has the commands 'view' and 'edit' that are supposed to open the file with correct program based on its MIME type (the same that the GUIs do).
>it's RIGHT THERE, in front of you, you want to point to it and grab it.
I don't want to "grab" it. When I'm using the keyboard (most of the time I write something), I hate to move my hand to the rodent. With an archaic command line, it'd be annoying to write a long file name, but fortunately we have tab completion. If the system could just read my thoughts or sight...
> Selecting a bunch of files. Here the GUI can get quite awkward or useless.
Actually, GUI can be good for selecting multiple files that have no connection between their names, but the advantage to command line is marginal if there is such.
> A lot of people would disagree with this statement, myself included. I can remember how to get to someone's house, but I rarely remember the street name.
See, you have given a name: "someone's house". This is an abstract "high-level" name. Street names - which I don't remember by the way - are detailed, precise names and more like file system paths.
I tend to remember the commands I use (abstract name) more than randomly but I don't remember every single option to them (detailed name). I do know a way (path) to get to what I want (man). One can see this as three layers: abstract name > path > detailed name. GUIs are mostly missing the highest level. (But that's just one man's interpretation.)
And no, the CLI isn't optimal and implementations not very consistent but the GUI, as it is, is much, much worse. It may be more intuitive at first but it is restrictive and certainly not efficient. Why spend time moving hand to the moused browsing through menus (or try to remember key bindings that are often too many to be intuitive) when I can just intuitively write \section{Foobar}. If I don't remember it, then only search through the help.
Actually, navigating around Windows is difficult for the advanced user as well. It is the inherent feature of such a user interface (that includes kde, gnome and all) that *one has to search for everything*. It is much harder to remember where something is than remember the name. The compulsory analogy: You have lost your car keys. You know that you want your keys, but you don't know where they are. Also, people tend to give names to places, cities and all and don't remember the roads to take to reach all of them. Just like command line user interfaces have named commands, not clumsy and difficult to remember paths like: go to menu A, click entry B, select tab C, enable check D, press the button that says Ok on it. That's difficult and, most of all, _slow_! When I think of it, the file system is something between these two approaches: naming and paths. But there's always locate.
Slashdot Mirror
And how many corporations do pure, theoretical, research? Pure mathematics, theoretical physics, etc.? Not too many I believe. And I don't think they can patent such results, even in the US. (But once they want to do such research, I'm sure they will be able. Then you can't move a finger without infringing on someone's patent.) Now, it is all about applications and short-term research (and profits) that most corporations are interested in.
>Of course it'll be x86-only because that's what they were compiled for.
And that's why this doesn't solve anything. We still need native *nix plugins. I don't want to stick to x86 crap forever.
> Where does the wrapper come into play?
Windows: app -> windows api -> whatever draws things in windows.
Linux: app -> wine emulation -> Xlib -> Xserver
See, wine's an extra layer of sluggishness. And wine is not to be considered light.
Shouldn't it be more like 'Windows browser plugins for Linux/x86'? I'm sure I will not be able to use those plugins on a Sun or an Alpha.
And what about performance with all the wrapper-crap? "Geez this Linux is slow. This c00lplugin(tm) runs much faster on my slower windows box." (Heh, java and flash in IE in vmware on a ppro200 are faster than Sun's JDK and flash natively under Linux. That doesn't say they would be fast, which they are not, just faster.)
> Can you imagine how much a kid would get picked on in school once the other children learned they were genetically modified?
I think the opposite scene is much more alarming: being picked on (and worse at everything) because you are not genetically modified to be Perfect and the others are. That is exactly what is alarming about the whole genetic manipulation thing: an unmodified human is no good for anything anymore when we have "superhumans". I do not want such future.
> I've always found it hard to accurately copy a proof and think about it at the same time, and I doubt I'm alone in this.
This depends on the lecturer too. Some lecturers are hard to follow, get stuck on simple things and fastforward over the more complicated things. And never, ever use transparencies for anything, such as proofs, that should be followed with care. It is impossible to follow anything written on a transparency (as it is hard to concentrate reading anything on a flashy and shine computer screen) and trying to follow it takes all the time from thinking plus that the lecturer then just stands there and it is so booooooring. Use the chalkboard, it is much more expressive.
Could be. However, when people usually speak of just Rudin or "it's in Rudin", they mean that specific bible or "art of computer programming" of basic real analysis.
Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis is a great book, but only after you have studied the basics elsewhere :-). For that the university's lecture notes have proven sufficient to me. After that Rudin is really enjoyable reading, even if it requires some extra thought. I like rather dense textbooks. I dislike most american textbooks I've met (not math though) that contain so much of useless crap that they're boring to read and it is hard to find actual topics from all the examples and showing off hands. Especially teaching-by-examples often sucks. Examples may sometimes be good at introducing a topic and showing a practical examples after one, but there should not be too many of them and topics should not be disguised in the examples. For example Daniels' Digital Design from Zero to One was awful. (Coursebook here on a compulsory course to all "IT" students.)
There's this paper proposing structural proofs (http://www.research.compaq.com/SRC/personal/lampo rt/pubs/lamport-how-to-write.ps) that might be a good read.
In short what the paper proposes is to write proofs in a top-to-bottom tmaner so that you can easily see the outline of the proof without going into details unless you need them to understand it. He also says the method should better prevent errors. (And every self respecting mathematician and computer scientist should know who Leslie Lamport as well as Donald E. Knuth are.)
> Also, you mention IDE and SCSI but you should realise that these protocols do a lot more than give access to the I/O bus. They actually provide a standardised interface for block devices to communicate through your I/O bus
Maybe I should've been more specific. (Also remember closing the gap between software and hardware --- although following isn't everything about it.) What I'm thinking is that the bus or whatever interface would involve a protocol and the devices would implement calls such as read(), write(), ioctl() thus pretty much eliminating the need for device-specific drivers in each operating system. Of course the hardware would probably be more expensive. (And no bugs, dammit!) Now, applications could as well provide similar services to hardware and other programs. A program wouldn't have to need to know if it is communicating with a device or a program emulating the behaviour. Of course there must be lot of problems to solve with this approach and it may be practically impossible.
I've been thinking that why do we need all these dozens of different kind of buses in one PC: isa, pci, agp, ide (remove isa, replace agp with something else and ide with scsi on Real Computers) and also different kind of connectors. Why couldn't the computer be built so modularly that all devices use the same bus (or rather, a connection matrix kind of thing so the devices can discuss nicely) and same device bays -- any device can be attached anywhere and without freaking cables. Most cards and hard drives would nicely fit in the same buy; cd-rom and such would require a bigger bay but could still the same connectors. Of course, external devices still need a separate interface, but perhaps they could be seen as being on the same bus or whatever you call it. (Well, then I've also had some grandiose ideas of closing the gap between software and hardware. More about that some other time perhaps.)
> It's never the big boss that gets hurt. Not Julia Roberts or Leonardo Di Caprio. It's the man who's packing the videos for $8/hour. It's the guy making them. He's the one losing the money.
> These are the real victims of this crime, and I feel horrified that slashdot can condone it.
But it's the big bosses that are putting the money in _their_ _own_ _pockets_ and not the guy's who's packing the videos.
If CD:s cost half of what they do know, and I'd know that the artists and cd packing gues get properly compensated, I'd surely buy much more CD:s than I do now. (And I don't buy anything from the five big ones.) After all, the record companies do very little except for the most popular artists -- I haven't seen any of the artists I listen to advertised anywhere but by friends and on homepages, that are as well maintained by fans of the band. The record companies just package the music and take the money. And yet the CD:s cost exactly as much as those that are advertised.
And I wouldn't call file sharing or copying what you've bought to a few of your friends piracy. (The latter of which is still legal as it should be here in europe, but most likely not soon because the media companies want to stop all fair use and thus should be boycotted.) Piracy is what the Russian mafia et all exercise: making profit out of someone else's work. That is unacceptable and those people are the real criminals.
> But then again. I'm not in 'the land of the free' so I can 'freely' copy all the stuff I want =)
Does that mean Europe (more specifically, the EU)?
Then I hate disappoint you. If you have been following what's going on, we can't either do that soon.
> MS Word is often used as an example of bloatware. Yes, it is a fairly large program, but I don't hold its size against it, because it allows the non-computer savvy to create nice looking documents very quickly, with very little work.
Since when has word been able to create nice-looking documents? I thought you needed a typesetting or publishing program for that - latex, frame maker, etc. but certainly not word. Word (read: wysiwyg) output is so _ugly_.
And I don't agree that word is easy either. Wordpad is easy, word is not. Word is a constant fight.
What's this guy talking about? 350MHz and old? I'd say such a system is fresh out of the box. I wouldn't even consider my pentium pro (underclocked at 166MHz --- a few decibels less noise without the fan!) an old system and I know people with even older systems. The only things I have upgraded is added memory (helped a lot with the amount of small programs I run), bought a quieter hard disk and power supply. But then again, none of the new software, especially games, is usable on it --- no 3D card; I don't like plastic polygons. But I don't need those crappy, bloated pieces of software. Older, simpler software/games is/was better. (No, you do not want to try to run mozilla on this system: it sometimes renders faster than netscape 4.x (and 3.x on those few pages it is slow with), yes, but the interface is even sluggier than a 1200bps modem line. And it takes virtually years to start it.)
> They have a REAL bus system. REAL rail system.
I've understood that people who use public transportation (and might not even own a car) are frowned upon in the US. In Finland (and rest of the Europe?) there's nothing special about that. People actually walk to places! (Instead of driving to a park to walk.) And both walking and public transportation is much, much more environmentally friendly than driving that half a kilometer to the local grocery store with that SUV. You shouldn't need a car if you live in a city. (Countryside is a different thing.)
> LOWER college tuition.
Instruction is free here (not only in our equivalents of colleges but in real universities as well). The only compulsory payment is student union membership and it isn't that much. Now, if educational grant just was even nearly as good as unemployment compensation... not that I have a real reason to complain, just that it is wrong in my opinion.
If you are willing to obey evil corporations' software patents and other stupid laws created to protect corporations, stay in the US. If you want to write software without worrying someone suing your ass off, move elsewhere.
US freedom is not about the freedom and wellfare of the individual, it is about the freedom and wellfare of corporations and the allmighty buck. Of the western/developed world, the US probably has the highest proportional amount of homeless and poor people and widest wealth cap between the poor and the rich.
If you're sick of hypocrisy, move elsewhere.
If you're sick of american popular culture, Hollywood, etc. Well, it is hard to escape.
(Score: -1, Flamebait)
> Users find themselves lost in space.
Hell, I find myself lost in a pile of windows in a WIMP GUI as well.
I could write lots of why 3D GUIs are a vain and why WIMP sucks as well and we should think of something better, but I have better things to do...
Actually, "One second is 9192631770 periods of a certain vibration of the atom Cs^{133}".
:-).
But yes, our archaic sun and earth rotation based calendar should be replaced with something rational. At least dump daylight saving time, leap seconds, leap years and all those kludges designed to keep it with the rotations. I don't care if the sun isn't at the same position at the same time every day. I'm never awake when it is light anyway
> Without any kind of stepping stone, people will never want to switch to Linux ... this way they can get kind of used to the look/feel of it
Linux or *nix in general isn't only about gnome, which is just a windows ripoff. Windows users already have what gnome (or KDE; I dislike them both) is about. What's the benefit to users to move from windows to worse ripoffs? None! Stability blaa blaa, the only more stable things are what gnome et all are trying to hide from the user.
> It's a necessary step in taking over the world.
If a bloated and slow (than windows) windows ripoff is what is wanted to take over the world, I'd rather let windows dominate the world.
Infact, I could very well use windows if I had a good user interface for it, which modern GUI is not. Unix (I don't care which *nix it is, free or not), on the other hand, offers me the best, although not perfect, UI (CLI, xterm and a good window manager) I've met.
Score: -1 (Troll)
That screenshot is apparently using a _scaled bitmap font_. Such surely is ugly and is the problem of X fonts. I only use unscaled fonts and they're much prettier than any AA crap. The only reason I see for AA is to increase the readability of really small fonts on big displays (less than 8 pixels or so on my 17" at 1280x1024) --- but who wants to read text that small?. Bigger resolution is, of course, a better solution to this. There's been arguments that AA is good for big fonts as well. Truly in big fonts there is some apparent jagginess without but I still consider jagginess less ugly of the two evils --- kludges just don't cut it. I'll welcome dead-tree resolution screens any day (paper is still much more readable than screens: no flicker, no reflections, no ugly aa-blur, no jagginess and can take it anywhere).
Otherwise blurriness just makes text unreadable. (Bi/trilinear filtering is equally ugly.)
> You can define a stream that equals System.out, so that you only have to type something like o.println()
But is is still longer than printf. This is the result of one of the main reasons I don't like java: almost purely object oriented. There's no way to have simple non-object functions like printf (I hate c++ cout operator abuse too). Short and easy functions for essentials are essential for coding to be fun; having to do everything the long way makes code "heavy" (not in the memory usage sense necessarily, although that applies to java). Oh, gtk is equally awfull with java with horrondeously long function and macro names.
Praise the good old days with direct frame buffer access instead of bloated and difficult APIs and no hype standards.
> I do think that LaTeX doesn't remove the need for products like Word though, can you imagine
teaching LaTeX to your mother?
No I don't imagine. But I wouldn't teach her Word either but something, much, much simpler; perhaps Wordpad or LyX (in lack of knowledge of better alternatives), depending on what she'd want to do with it. At least I find modern office packages very difficult to use. They have too much features visible to the user and everything important hidden. And Word at least is damn buggy, I get frustrated always when I have to use it because it doesn't do what I want and can even corrupt my files.
But anyone who seriously wants to create high print-quality documents, especially ones containing mathematical formulas, should take the time to learn something better, like LaTeX. Or perhaps docbook if there's not going to be maths (MathML is not to be written directly). At least I prefer TeX syntax over SGML/XML, though (too much writing with all the end tags and all).
> The users wants a WYSIWYG application ala Frame or Word. Latex is not an option.
- an te.html
Do they? Wysiwyg may seem easier but I believe that in the long run, LaTeX is far more productive when one can truly describe the structure and not play with positioning stuff on the paper (even framemaker has problems for what I've tried it -- and I don't like guis). LaTeX also has its problems, yes. I'm sure everyone who uses and even advocates LaTeX has run into them. The problem is that there just isn't anything better for what I want! Hopefully LaTeX3 will help. There's also lout, which seems to have fixed some of the problems, but the math mode is (IMO) inferior to TeX (e.g. x sup 2 vs. x^2). This is also a problem with most wysiwyg programs: the equation editors are crap. Writing latex math is very natural. Using the mouse midst writing text just doesn't cut it. And there aren't enough keys for shortcuts to everything. Writing commands within the text is much better. An editor with some automation can help users to learn them. Plus with a language like TeX, one can use his/her favourite editor and not an inferior one.
But I certainly wouldn't mind a system, that in one frame showed the source code in ones favourite editor and in one the rendered output, not necessarily exactly as on paper.
Reading:
http://www.ideography.co.uk/library/seybold/WYS
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
> On a command line, even after a DIR or LS, you still have to type the name of the viewer app.
Not entirely true. Debian, for example has the commands 'view' and 'edit' that are supposed to open the file with correct program based on its MIME type (the same that the GUIs do).
>it's RIGHT THERE, in front of you, you want to point to it and grab it.
I don't want to "grab" it. When I'm using the keyboard (most of the time I write something), I hate to move my hand to the rodent. With an archaic command line, it'd be annoying to write a long file name, but fortunately we have tab completion. If the system could just read my thoughts or sight...
> Selecting a bunch of files. Here the GUI can get quite awkward or useless.
Actually, GUI can be good for selecting multiple files that have no connection between their names, but the advantage to command line is marginal if there is such.
> A lot of people would disagree with this statement, myself included. I can remember how to get to someone's house, but I rarely remember the street name.
See, you have given a name: "someone's house". This is an abstract "high-level" name. Street names - which I don't remember by the way - are detailed, precise names and more like file system paths.
I tend to remember the commands I use (abstract name) more than randomly but I don't remember every single option to them (detailed name). I do know a way (path) to get to what I want (man). One can see this as three layers: abstract name > path > detailed name. GUIs are mostly missing the highest level. (But that's just one man's interpretation.)
And no, the CLI isn't optimal and implementations not very consistent but the GUI, as it is, is much, much worse. It may be more intuitive at first but it is restrictive and certainly not efficient. Why spend time moving hand to the moused browsing through menus (or try to remember key bindings that are often too many to be intuitive) when I can just intuitively write \section{Foobar}. If I don't remember it, then only search through the help.
Actually, navigating around Windows is difficult for the advanced user as well. It is the inherent feature of such a user interface (that includes kde, gnome and all) that *one has to search for everything*. It is much harder to remember where something is than remember the name. The compulsory analogy: You have lost your car keys. You know that you want your keys, but you don't know where they are. Also, people tend to give names to places, cities and all and don't remember the roads to take to reach all of them. Just like command line user interfaces have named commands, not clumsy and difficult to remember paths like: go to menu A, click entry B, select tab C, enable check D, press the button that says Ok on it. That's difficult and, most of all, _slow_! When I think of it, the file system is something between these two approaches: naming and paths. But there's always locate.