You're right -- LaTeX does typography much better than Word. Honestly, I've never quite understood why Word still sucks so badly at so many basic typographic functions.
In any regard, however, LaTeX's shortcomings (like you mentioned) make it absolutely unbearable in many situations. Donald Knuth might be the god of CS, but his program absolutely sucks at catching and handling errors. Make a typo, or try to do something that LaTeX doesn't like (there are many things that fall in this category) and try to decipher the error message -- 9 times out of 10, it's several pages long and offers absolutely no hint as to what the actual error was.
I don't know about you, but it doesn't give me any confidence when the treasury secretary can't even do his taxes right.
I hate to sound like a shill for Obama, but the focus of this whole ordeal did bother me somewhat for the simple reason that it actually did sound somewhat plausible that he was confused by the tax code.
Have you ever tried to do your own taxes....unassisted? The American tax code is an absolute nightmare at the present.
I'm not sure that a flat tax or the FairTax proposal are good options. However, this is a debate we need to be having at the forefront. Our financial system is being dramatically reshaped, and it's about time that we addressed our massively bloated tax code. Make it simple, and it'll be far easier to audit and enforce.
Also consider that Richard Hammond weighs about as much as a hamster.
However, that all said, these very-efficient (yet tiny) cars do exist, and were deemed to be unsuitable for American audiences. (You wonder why these companies are on the verge of bankruptcy?)
If you stuffed a small TDI engine into a subcompact, I wouldn't doubt that you could get 60+mpg in it.
Is it too much for a lowly American like myself to ask for something bigger than a Smart car, but smaller than a Jetta? The Honda Fit's nice, and one of the most efficient cars available on the US markets, but still doesn't even come close to matching the efficiency of a european diesel subcompact.
The EPA mileage rating methodology is not accurate for diesel vehicles, and the EPA have openly acknowledged that:
1) Hybrid vehicles tend to have inflated mileage ratings 2) Diesel vehicles tend to have much lower-than-actual mileage ratings. (It has also been noted that diesels with less than 5k miles tend to perform less efficiently) 3) Ratings for gas (petrol) powered cars tend to be fairly representative of real-world performance since the last revision of the rating system.
This could be part of the grand GM conspiracy, or the EPA could simply be incompetent, or the mileage test could have last been revised before diesel and hybrid vehicles were commonplace on the US market. Either way, it does need to be fixed.
2009 Jetta TDI owners have colloquially reported 40-50MPG.
In what universe? W&M's endowment is fairly small, especially compared to similarly-ranked schools (even publics).
It's not hard to see why. We tend to graduate a lot of teachers and peace corps volunteers.
Also, it was that "extensive" alumni base that banded together with the help of Fox News (no joke), withdrew their money, demanded the removal of the president, and..... never returned the money when he was fired.
It was particularly irritating, given that it was literally a manufactured controversy. Most actual students and faculty either liked the guy, or didn't care either way.
Actually, the dual-clutch transmission in the Jetta TDI should result in the automatic model actually being *more* efficient than its manual counterpart.
The dual-clutch gearbox is essentially a computer-controlled manual transmission (although it's a bit more complicated than that). There's no torque-converter to kill the efficiency.
The system also allows you to switch gears in the semi-manual mode faster than you could ever possibly do with a "real" manual transmission (around 8ms).
They're also available on a number of petrol-powered vehicles from a variety of manufacturers.
(Re: -40F: I know of quite a few gas powered cars that won't start at those temperatures! Electrics/hybrids also won't hold a charge without heating the batteries.)
We had something vaguely similar happen over in Virginia last year. The college president refused to censor a controversial event, and also refused to allow religious icons to be displayed in public rooms that weren't being used for religious services.
The budget didn't get cut*, though a few administrators lost their jobs shortly afterward for "undisclosed reasons."
(*Actually, the budget did get cut, and by a substantial amount. However, this was because the state's currently broke)
Hasn't sopped them from floating ass-backward legislation again. There's a bill currently before the senate to cap out-of-state enrollment at 20%, which would either drive most of the state's universities into insolvency, or raise tuition to absurd ($60k+) levels.
Fun times all around! I can't wait to graduate, and move the hell away from here.
I agree in principle, but need to play devil's advocate here:
#1 cannot be proven easily. We were saying that about hydrogen for ages, and despite a massive R&D effort, nobody was able to develop an efficient process. It also doesn't apply to plug-in hybrids.
#2 and 3 would be solved by market forces and responsible foreign policy. Neither has anything to do with GM, and everything to do with an irresponsible government.
#4 could be solved with a (gasp) gas tax. Causes people to drive less, take more public transport, and drive more efficient cars (most of which are paradoxically not sold in the US -- Fiat could make a killing if they re-entered the US market).
Before you get all proud about the 40MPG rating, please note that a US Gallon differs from an Imperial Gallon.
A US Gallon is smaller, which makes British mileage ratings appear inflated compared to US ratings.
Also, US residents can buy a Diesel VW Jetta, which seats 5 comfortably, and (legitimately) gets 40+MPG. They sell like hotcakes, although the total number imported is still somewhat small. I've driven one -- it's quite nice. Almost impossible to distinguish from its petrol-powered cousin.
Of course, your main point still applies: By global standards, cars sold in the US are hideously inefficient, and we have an inherent fear of diesel, thanks to the loud, smoky GM diesels of the 1980s.
How many desktop machines actually need the/usr/ vs./usr/local/ distinction?
Also, with regard to distributed drive loads, ZFS provides some very swanky tools/features that allow you to do these things very easily, even for "home" users. (Seriously, ZFS is easily the most impressive piece of software I've seen in ages. There are exciting things in store as the platform matures even further, and the licensing issues are hopefully cleared up)
Why not? The approach works fine on Mac OS X (even though I do lament the lack of a proper package manager).
It's not even that the traditional Unix filesystem is cryptic.... it's that it no longer makes sense for the manner in which it's used.
What is/opt used for these days?
Is the distinction between/usr/ and/usr/local/ particularly important any more?/lib,/usr/lib,/usr/local/lib,/usr/X11R6/lib,/var/lib etc... all tend to point to the same libraries.
Does it make sense for/var and/proc to be separated?
Why do X11 apps need their own folder within/usr/?
Why is mail stored in/var instead of user folders?
What's the difference between/bin and/sbin?/etc isn't used for "Et-cetera." It's used for configuration files.
I've seen the EMACS documentation, and would simply like to respectfully disagree.
Like EMACS itself, it's unnecessarily thorough. The text, IMO is dense, unnecessarily lengthy, and poorly formatted.
The EMACS docs read like a novel, which is great if you want to sit down for a week, and learn the guts of the program inside-and-out. Unfortunately, this is not how most software documentation is used.
Most (good) software documentation is briefly glanced at as a quick reference. To make the most of this scenario, it should be terse, adequately indexed, formatted with a decent stylesheet, and hyperlinked where appropriate. I personally feel that the PHP documentation stands out among F/OSS projects as being a particularly good reference source.
How can you possibly answer "no" to that question? Do you want your stuff actually being, you know, used by people? There's a reason it's called "usability" and not bumblebee.
Go read up on the arguments against the GoboLinux filesystem structure. (These Ubuntu folks have a bunch). There are some fairly passioned "screw the n00bs" rants out there. Does anybody honestly think that the traditional Unix filesystem heirarchy makes an ounce of sense in 2009?
Both vi and EMACS seem to have taken the "fuck the users" approach to heart. I suppose I might be of the wrong mindset to operate either application, though the developers could have at the very least taken the time to provide a decent set of documentation for their astonishingly-complex applications.
The old Netflix Instant Viewer required you to download a bunch of crap as well.
The new one is the exact same way, and provides better video quality to every user I've talked to. What exactly is the issue here? It honestly sounds like a paranoid anti-MS rant. I suppose there might be some bugs, though anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that the Silverlight-based system is more stable.
The angry comments on the blog come primarily from users who have PPC macs -- users who weren't supported under the old system either. Although this comes down to being Microsoft's fault, the VC-1 codec is currently the only DRM'd solution that the movie studios see as being viable. Like it or not, DRM is going to be the reality for streaming video for some time to come.
Unfortunately, Microsoft have chosen not to support PPC machines with the codec, primarily because there are very few PPC machines powerful enough to decode VC-1 video in real-time. It sucks for PPC Mac users, but you should be able to see their logic.
you'll find this isn't much of an option when you get to industry-specific stuff (with some exceptions).
Hopefully this will be less true in the future. At $1m-2m/license, there's no reason why buyers couldn't set up a consortium and have to have their boutique software written for them and release as free software. The problem of free riders this would create would probably be outweighed by the benefit of knowing the software will stick around.
When software costs $1m-2m/license, it's usually because it cost nearly that much to develop. Although I imagine that the specialized software business is indeed profitable, I don't think that companies would see dramatic cost savings. Somebody would still have to pay.
The laws of economics suggest that as long as there are a sufficient number of software firms, and there is a competitive bidding process, the customer shouldn't be paying terribly much above what it would have cost them to produce on their own.
I could also train my own in-house plumber, or form a consortium of businesses who occasionally require a plumber. It might sound OK on paper, but it's doubtful that you'd actually save any money this way.
On the other hand, if you're paying 1mil for a piece of custom, mission-critical code, I'd want a copy of the source code along with the binaries.
Microsoft speeds too much money on research that they fail to turn into products.
Well, they're one of the only companies left on the planet with a substantial "academic" research operation.
Bell Labs and PARC might not have been profitable for their corporate overlords in the short-term, but produced research that had a profound impact on society at large.
Microsoft may have some rather unsavory business practices (as did AT&T and Xerox), though I'd encourage them to continue to pump money into research as long as they're willing to.
At the worst, it keeps geeks like us employed. At best, they discover something that propels us forward into the next epoch.
Considering just how ass-backward most of Microsoft is, their research division has always impressed me.
News print is a renewable resource. Is the Plastic in Kindle?
Yes. Bioplastics have existed for a few years, and are virtually indistinguishable from petroleum-based plastics. I'm not sure that the plastics in the kindle use these materials, although they certainly could be swapped out.
They do cost a bit more to manufacture, but terribly much, considering that plastic is already cheap as dirt.
The Motorola F3 has a (fairly rudimentary) E-Ink display, and only costs about $25 for an unlocked handset.
If they can get these things in a lot of devices, the $150mil R&D should be easily recoverable. Remember that the Kindle also includes a wireless modem, storage, and a decent amount of processing power.
Reverend Phelps, on the other hand, goes around to funerals of gays all over the US with his inbred clan and they hold up signs and chant things like, "God hates fags!" without being stopped. At FUNERALS.
Actually, Fred Phelps mainly concentrates on funerals of deceased soldiers. You know...because the military harbors so many homosexuals....
Honestly, I'm willing to say that the guy is nuts, and leave it at that. It's the ugly side of our protections of freedom of speech -- he's entitled to his opinion, no matter how unpopular it is.
As it turns out, it's extremely unpopular. There are several large groups of individuals who follow Fred Phelps around, and peacefully surround his protests with a silent protest of their own.
Although it's not a good idea to begin hiring foreign workers during a recession
That line always has the implied hint that other countries on this planet don't ever hire foreign workforce, which they do, and a lot. Should the US eliminate H1B completely, that wouldn't even be felt, their number is so low (relatively speaking), although in certan fields their number is probably higher than others.
I think you misunderstood my point: If you have too much of something (workers in this case), it's simply not prudent to import more of it. Foreign workers will be increasingly uncompetitive, as unemployed domestic workers become more desperate, and more willing to work for low wages.
Of course, you're also correct -- the number of foreign workers in the US is tiny compared to most other nations. Sadly, the US is no longer a place that one typically immigrates to, or emigrates from.
I grew up in the North Atlantic, and knew exactly one Canadian. That's just sad.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right -- LaTeX does typography much better than Word. Honestly, I've never quite understood why Word still sucks so badly at so many basic typographic functions.
In any regard, however, LaTeX's shortcomings (like you mentioned) make it absolutely unbearable in many situations. Donald Knuth might be the god of CS, but his program absolutely sucks at catching and handling errors. Make a typo, or try to do something that LaTeX doesn't like (there are many things that fall in this category) and try to decipher the error message -- 9 times out of 10, it's several pages long and offers absolutely no hint as to what the actual error was.
It sure does make pretty formulas though...
I don't know about you, but it doesn't give me any confidence when the treasury secretary can't even do his taxes right.
I hate to sound like a shill for Obama, but the focus of this whole ordeal did bother me somewhat for the simple reason that it actually did sound somewhat plausible that he was confused by the tax code.
Have you ever tried to do your own taxes....unassisted? The American tax code is an absolute nightmare at the present.
I'm not sure that a flat tax or the FairTax proposal are good options. However, this is a debate we need to be having at the forefront. Our financial system is being dramatically reshaped, and it's about time that we addressed our massively bloated tax code. Make it simple, and it'll be far easier to audit and enforce.
That'd be 62.3 US MPG.
Also consider that Richard Hammond weighs about as much as a hamster.
However, that all said, these very-efficient (yet tiny) cars do exist, and were deemed to be unsuitable for American audiences. (You wonder why these companies are on the verge of bankruptcy?)
If you stuffed a small TDI engine into a subcompact, I wouldn't doubt that you could get 60+mpg in it.
Is it too much for a lowly American like myself to ask for something bigger than a Smart car, but smaller than a Jetta? The Honda Fit's nice, and one of the most efficient cars available on the US markets, but still doesn't even come close to matching the efficiency of a european diesel subcompact.
The EPA mileage rating methodology is not accurate for diesel vehicles, and the EPA have openly acknowledged that:
1) Hybrid vehicles tend to have inflated mileage ratings
2) Diesel vehicles tend to have much lower-than-actual mileage ratings. (It has also been noted that diesels with less than 5k miles tend to perform less efficiently)
3) Ratings for gas (petrol) powered cars tend to be fairly representative of real-world performance since the last revision of the rating system.
This could be part of the grand GM conspiracy, or the EPA could simply be incompetent, or the mileage test could have last been revised before diesel and hybrid vehicles were commonplace on the US market. Either way, it does need to be fixed.
2009 Jetta TDI owners have colloquially reported 40-50MPG.
In what universe? W&M's endowment is fairly small, especially compared to similarly-ranked schools (even publics).
It's not hard to see why. We tend to graduate a lot of teachers and peace corps volunteers.
Also, it was that "extensive" alumni base that banded together with the help of Fox News (no joke), withdrew their money, demanded the removal of the president, and..... never returned the money when he was fired.
It was particularly irritating, given that it was literally a manufactured controversy. Most actual students and faculty either liked the guy, or didn't care either way.
Actually, the dual-clutch transmission in the Jetta TDI should result in the automatic model actually being *more* efficient than its manual counterpart.
The dual-clutch gearbox is essentially a computer-controlled manual transmission (although it's a bit more complicated than that). There's no torque-converter to kill the efficiency.
The system also allows you to switch gears in the semi-manual mode faster than you could ever possibly do with a "real" manual transmission (around 8ms).
They're also available on a number of petrol-powered vehicles from a variety of manufacturers.
(Re: -40F: I know of quite a few gas powered cars that won't start at those temperatures! Electrics/hybrids also won't hold a charge without heating the batteries.)
We had something vaguely similar happen over in Virginia last year. The college president refused to censor a controversial event, and also refused to allow religious icons to be displayed in public rooms that weren't being used for religious services.
The budget didn't get cut*, though a few administrators lost their jobs shortly afterward for "undisclosed reasons."
(*Actually, the budget did get cut, and by a substantial amount. However, this was because the state's currently broke)
Hasn't sopped them from floating ass-backward legislation again. There's a bill currently before the senate to cap out-of-state enrollment at 20%, which would either drive most of the state's universities into insolvency, or raise tuition to absurd ($60k+) levels.
Fun times all around! I can't wait to graduate, and move the hell away from here.
I agree in principle, but need to play devil's advocate here:
#1 cannot be proven easily. We were saying that about hydrogen for ages, and despite a massive R&D effort, nobody was able to develop an efficient process. It also doesn't apply to plug-in hybrids.
#2 and 3 would be solved by market forces and responsible foreign policy. Neither has anything to do with GM, and everything to do with an irresponsible government.
#4 could be solved with a (gasp) gas tax. Causes people to drive less, take more public transport, and drive more efficient cars (most of which are paradoxically not sold in the US -- Fiat could make a killing if they re-entered the US market).
Before you get all proud about the 40MPG rating, please note that a US Gallon differs from an Imperial Gallon.
A US Gallon is smaller, which makes British mileage ratings appear inflated compared to US ratings.
Also, US residents can buy a Diesel VW Jetta, which seats 5 comfortably, and (legitimately) gets 40+MPG. They sell like hotcakes, although the total number imported is still somewhat small. I've driven one -- it's quite nice. Almost impossible to distinguish from its petrol-powered cousin.
Of course, your main point still applies: By global standards, cars sold in the US are hideously inefficient, and we have an inherent fear of diesel, thanks to the loud, smoky GM diesels of the 1980s.
x64 probably started as a verbal colloquialism. x64 rolls off the tongue much easier than x86-64.
I don't think this guy seems corrupt --- just stupid.
How many desktop machines actually need the /usr/ vs. /usr/local/ distinction?
Also, with regard to distributed drive loads, ZFS provides some very swanky tools/features that allow you to do these things very easily, even for "home" users. (Seriously, ZFS is easily the most impressive piece of software I've seen in ages. There are exciting things in store as the platform matures even further, and the licensing issues are hopefully cleared up)
Why not? The approach works fine on Mac OS X (even though I do lament the lack of a proper package manager).
It's not even that the traditional Unix filesystem is cryptic.... it's that it no longer makes sense for the manner in which it's used.
What is /opt used for these days?
Is the distinction between /usr/ and /usr/local/ particularly important any more? /lib, /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, /usr/X11R6/lib, /var/lib etc... all tend to point to the same libraries.
Does it make sense for /var and /proc to be separated?
Why do X11 apps need their own folder within /usr/?
Why is mail stored in /var instead of user folders?
What's the difference between /bin and /sbin? /etc isn't used for "Et-cetera." It's used for configuration files.
I've seen the EMACS documentation, and would simply like to respectfully disagree.
Like EMACS itself, it's unnecessarily thorough. The text, IMO is dense, unnecessarily lengthy, and poorly formatted.
The EMACS docs read like a novel, which is great if you want to sit down for a week, and learn the guts of the program inside-and-out. Unfortunately, this is not how most software documentation is used.
Most (good) software documentation is briefly glanced at as a quick reference. To make the most of this scenario, it should be terse, adequately indexed, formatted with a decent stylesheet, and hyperlinked where appropriate. I personally feel that the PHP documentation stands out among F/OSS projects as being a particularly good reference source.
Errr... yes?
How can you possibly answer "no" to that question? Do you want your stuff actually being, you know, used by people? There's a reason it's called "usability" and not bumblebee.
Go read up on the arguments against the GoboLinux filesystem structure. (These Ubuntu folks have a bunch). There are some fairly passioned "screw the n00bs" rants out there. Does anybody honestly think that the traditional Unix filesystem heirarchy makes an ounce of sense in 2009?
Both vi and EMACS seem to have taken the "fuck the users" approach to heart. I suppose I might be of the wrong mindset to operate either application, though the developers could have at the very least taken the time to provide a decent set of documentation for their astonishingly-complex applications.
Really?
The old Netflix Instant Viewer required you to download a bunch of crap as well.
The new one is the exact same way, and provides better video quality to every user I've talked to. What exactly is the issue here? It honestly sounds like a paranoid anti-MS rant. I suppose there might be some bugs, though anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that the Silverlight-based system is more stable.
The angry comments on the blog come primarily from users who have PPC macs -- users who weren't supported under the old system either. Although this comes down to being Microsoft's fault, the VC-1 codec is currently the only DRM'd solution that the movie studios see as being viable. Like it or not, DRM is going to be the reality for streaming video for some time to come.
Unfortunately, Microsoft have chosen not to support PPC machines with the codec, primarily because there are very few PPC machines powerful enough to decode VC-1 video in real-time. It sucks for PPC Mac users, but you should be able to see their logic.
Temporarily cutting space exploration funding during a rough patch will set things back a few years, but shouldn't have any massive long-term effects.
It certainly isn't great, but you honestly can't say that about many areas of the government.
you'll find this isn't much of an option when you get to industry-specific stuff (with some exceptions).
Hopefully this will be less true in the future. At $1m-2m/license, there's no reason why buyers couldn't set up a consortium and have to have their boutique software written for them and release as free software. The problem of free riders this would create would probably be outweighed by the benefit of knowing the software will stick around.
When software costs $1m-2m/license, it's usually because it cost nearly that much to develop. Although I imagine that the specialized software business is indeed profitable, I don't think that companies would see dramatic cost savings. Somebody would still have to pay.
The laws of economics suggest that as long as there are a sufficient number of software firms, and there is a competitive bidding process, the customer shouldn't be paying terribly much above what it would have cost them to produce on their own.
I could also train my own in-house plumber, or form a consortium of businesses who occasionally require a plumber. It might sound OK on paper, but it's doubtful that you'd actually save any money this way.
On the other hand, if you're paying 1mil for a piece of custom, mission-critical code, I'd want a copy of the source code along with the binaries.
Microsoft speeds too much money on research that they fail to turn into products.
Well, they're one of the only companies left on the planet with a substantial "academic" research operation.
Bell Labs and PARC might not have been profitable for their corporate overlords in the short-term, but produced research that had a profound impact on society at large.
Microsoft may have some rather unsavory business practices (as did AT&T and Xerox), though I'd encourage them to continue to pump money into research as long as they're willing to.
At the worst, it keeps geeks like us employed. At best, they discover something that propels us forward into the next epoch.
Considering just how ass-backward most of Microsoft is, their research division has always impressed me.
News print is a renewable resource. Is the Plastic in Kindle?
Yes. Bioplastics have existed for a few years, and are virtually indistinguishable from petroleum-based plastics. I'm not sure that the plastics in the kindle use these materials, although they certainly could be swapped out.
They do cost a bit more to manufacture, but terribly much, considering that plastic is already cheap as dirt.
The Motorola F3 has a (fairly rudimentary) E-Ink display, and only costs about $25 for an unlocked handset.
If they can get these things in a lot of devices, the $150mil R&D should be easily recoverable. Remember that the Kindle also includes a wireless modem, storage, and a decent amount of processing power.
The HRC maintains a list of gay-friendly employers in the US.
The results are surprisingly heartening, and have been getting better every year. Microsoft have had a 100% rating for 4 years.
(If you care about these things, you might want to avoid Wal-Mart and Exxon. Their scores are fairly embarrassing)
Reverend Phelps, on the other hand, goes around to funerals of gays all over the US with his inbred clan and they hold up signs and chant things like, "God hates fags!" without being stopped. At FUNERALS.
Actually, Fred Phelps mainly concentrates on funerals of deceased soldiers. You know...because the military harbors so many homosexuals....
Honestly, I'm willing to say that the guy is nuts, and leave it at that. It's the ugly side of our protections of freedom of speech -- he's entitled to his opinion, no matter how unpopular it is.
As it turns out, it's extremely unpopular. There are several large groups of individuals who follow Fred Phelps around, and peacefully surround his protests with a silent protest of their own.
The Cylons were created by man.....
Although it's not a good idea to begin hiring foreign workers during a recession
That line always has the implied hint that other countries on this planet don't ever hire foreign workforce, which they do, and a lot. Should the US eliminate H1B completely, that wouldn't even be felt, their number is so low (relatively speaking), although in certan fields their number is probably higher than others.
I think you misunderstood my point:
If you have too much of something (workers in this case), it's simply not prudent to import more of it. Foreign workers will be increasingly uncompetitive, as unemployed domestic workers become more desperate, and more willing to work for low wages.
Of course, you're also correct -- the number of foreign workers in the US is tiny compared to most other nations. Sadly, the US is no longer a place that one typically immigrates to, or emigrates from.
I grew up in the North Atlantic, and knew exactly one Canadian. That's just sad.