Unfortunately, Word use is becoming far more common in academia. The last conference I submitted to were really sniffy about accepting PDFs, and the days of getting LaTeX article templates seem to be numbered.
I'm always astounded when I see people using Word for academic work. LaTeX is just so much less work and produces vastly superior output.
I was part of the last year at my Uni to learn Fortran-77 (studied 1997-2001, chemical engineering). They teach Maple now, I think.
Yes, FORTRAN is very common for engineering calculations: I've written things like distillation column models in it. It's fast, simple and there are lots of numerical libraries for it. I wouldn't want to use it on a project I had to maintain, but for getting the job done it's pretty good.
I've been a Linux user since 2001 and am also currently thinking about jumping on the Apple ship. I think I'm just getting fed up with all the fiddling, really.
Example: wireless card on my laptop kind of works, but causes a kernel panic in FC3, suspend-to-disk kinda-sorta works after a lot of fiddling, nautilus CD burning kind of works, but seems to burn a lot of coasters on my brand-new burner and there's no way to change the burn-speed, YAST2 is kinda nice, but slow and clunky.
I spend a lot of time reporting and dealing with annoying bugs in distros. I like all the polish I see in MacOSX, the nice configuration tools. I'd like to just be able to use my computer.
I use Linux because the x86 alternative (Windows) is *so* awful. I mean, I'm a free software developer and even I can see good reasons for switching.
I think most of the reason for the high prices is British Telecom, which still controls all the exchanges despite being privatised years back. Their wholesale prices are passed on to the customer.
AFAICS, the wholesale price to the ISP from BT of providing an ADSL connection is around £11-15 (depending on contention etc).
Things are getting better, but as provision of high speed internet isn't the kind of thing the tabloids would have a campaign about, it's a slow process.
Personally, I get an effectively unlimited 512/256 connection, static IP, no blocked ports for £20/month.
I just don't think that's true. The differences GNOME/KDE in technology and philosophy between the two groups would cause too many arguments and actually reduce productivity.
Volunteer coding time is a strange commodity - you can't just shift it around like man-hours in commercial software. If a volunteer is doing something they don't enjoy, their productivity will drop to zero rapidly.
They have to do that sort of thing: they're trying to run a daily national newspaper on a local newspaper budget. IIRC, they pay journalists something around half the rate other papers pay per article.
It was a decent paper back when it started as many people were prepared to work for cheap for them as it was seen as the home of good writing, but those days are long gone.
There's been a file-streaming interface to palm main memory databases since 3.0 days, complete with open, create, seek etc. From the docs: "The File Streaming API is derived from the C programming language's stdio.h interface".
No 64Kb limit, no worrying about records: it's essentially a layer that sits on top of the traditional palmos databases. I can't really see there being much difference in difficulty in writing it for Palmos 5.0 or 3.5.
Why? Load testing a game like this before release isn't that hard, is it? You don't even require any human players to do it - just build a test cluster that runs a few hundred thousand simulations of players (WoW has NPCs, right? just add random l33t-sp33k chat, looting etc to the AI) and send the commands to the servers. If the servers fall over, add more hardware or optimise the server code.
They could even have recorded actions of players during the beta and played them back, multiplied up a few times if writing a good enough AI is too hard.
It may be quite expensive to do, but at least that way you don't piss off your customers.
I was asked to write an algorithm to play a strange version of Blackjack against a human where:
- Red cards are positive, black cards negative - Aces are 1 or 11 - you only use half the deck each (play one-on-one) - your score at the end of the round is 20 if your cards total less than 15, 20 minus (cards total) if total is 15-20, and 50 if it is over 20 - Winner is player with lowest score after a few rounds
The trick is in the statistics: the black and red card values cancel out on average, leaving only the aces (1 or 11) as the average source of points.
This was after three hours of written exams, logic tests and IQ tests, so my brain was mush already and I failed majorly.
Two examples from my usage: to change the order of title bar buttons so close and maximize aren't right next to each other and to enable display of volume+computer icons on the desktop (Ubuntu had them off by default).
I think GNOME is great, and I use it every day, but I do think sometimes they have avoided the "control center clutter" of KDE by just shoving all the inconvenient settings into gconf-editor rather than dialogs.
I think most of the stability issues are sorted now - they certainly are on my FC3 box. I'd buy a pizza for whoever fixes Palm syncing, though. It's currently horribly broken syncing to my Tungsten E and has been for years.
A whole bunch of file dialogs from different OS are here. Panther's looks kind of similar to the current GNOME one - the old GTK dialog looks like the older MacOS style.
You can get better guarantees, it just depends on the store. I don't know about in the US, but in the UK John Lewis, for example, will give you a one year guarantee on Creative players.
Many companies, Creative included, seem to treat the music-syncing software as a necessary evil, rather than an important part of their product.
Look at Sony's awful NetMD software or Creative's poorly thought out, slow and unstable music organizer for their Muvo line. It's not all that difficult a problem to solve, but Apple seems to be the only one that puts any engineering effort into it.
Access is widely used in small businesses and non-profits, IME. It's just about simple enough that an intelligent non-technical user can set up some sort of customer/contact database with mail-merge and label printing.
Access is a horrible program, but it's good enough for many uses. One campaign group I worked for had every UK Member of Parliaments' voting records and details in Access, which they used for mail-shots and was indispensable for their work.
True enough. I think that there would be a huge benefit to the Free Software community if somebody wrote a simple text book descibing issues like that (big-O, unit testing, asserts, basic software design). The knowledge is out there, it's just spread between a lot of sources and harder to find than it could be.
I get the feeling that a lot of Free software developers are like me: people who can program well enough, but have little formal education in development techniques.
It's been a difficult learning curve for me (current version of my software is 10 times faster than the first version and vastly improved testing), certainly.
You probably just need to train your filters better. Looking at my procmail logs, Spamassassin catches around 100 spam a day to my account, and lets through about 2-5 a day.
Slashdot Mirror
Current results (using grep, not find next !)
Debian
41
Redhat (Redhat + "red hat")
69
SuSe
47
Gentoo
33
Slackware
9
Unfortunately, Word use is becoming far more common in academia. The last conference I submitted to were really sniffy about accepting PDFs, and the days of getting LaTeX article templates seem to be numbered.
I'm always astounded when I see people using Word for academic work. LaTeX is just so much less work and produces vastly superior output.
I was part of the last year at my Uni to learn Fortran-77 (studied 1997-2001, chemical engineering). They teach Maple now, I think.
Yes, FORTRAN is very common for engineering calculations: I've written things like distillation column models in it. It's fast, simple and there are lots of numerical libraries for it. I wouldn't want to use it on a project I had to maintain, but for getting the job done it's pretty good.
I've been a Linux user since 2001 and am also currently thinking about jumping on the Apple ship. I think I'm just getting fed up with all the fiddling, really.
Example: wireless card on my laptop kind of works, but causes a kernel panic in FC3, suspend-to-disk kinda-sorta works after a lot of fiddling, nautilus CD burning kind of works, but seems to burn a lot of coasters on my brand-new burner and there's no way to change the burn-speed, YAST2 is kinda nice, but slow and clunky.
I spend a lot of time reporting and dealing with annoying bugs in distros. I like all the polish I see in MacOSX, the nice configuration tools. I'd like to just be able to use my computer.
I use Linux because the x86 alternative (Windows) is *so* awful. I mean, I'm a free software developer and even I can see good reasons for switching.
I think most of the reason for the high prices is British Telecom, which still controls all the exchanges despite being privatised years back. Their wholesale prices are passed on to the customer.
AFAICS, the wholesale price to the ISP from BT of providing an ADSL connection is around £11-15 (depending on contention etc).
Things are getting better, but as provision of high speed internet isn't the kind of thing the tabloids would have a campaign about, it's a slow process.
Personally, I get an effectively unlimited 512/256 connection, static IP, no blocked ports for £20/month.
I just don't think that's true. The differences GNOME/KDE in technology and philosophy between the two groups would cause too many arguments and actually reduce productivity.
Volunteer coding time is a strange commodity - you can't just shift it around like man-hours in commercial software. If a volunteer is doing something they don't enjoy, their productivity will drop to zero rapidly.
XEmacs seems to redraw the entire window content (toolbars, frames, text and all) on every keypress in the SuSE 9.2 version. Very annoying.
They have to do that sort of thing: they're trying to run a daily national newspaper on a local newspaper budget. IIRC, they pay journalists something around half the rate other papers pay per article.
It was a decent paper back when it started as many people were prepared to work for cheap for them as it was seen as the home of good writing, but those days are long gone.
There's been a file-streaming interface to palm main memory databases since 3.0 days, complete with open, create, seek etc. From the docs: "The File Streaming API is derived from the C programming language's stdio.h interface".
No 64Kb limit, no worrying about records: it's essentially a layer that sits on top of the traditional palmos databases. I can't really see there being much difference in difficulty in writing it for Palmos 5.0 or 3.5.
Why? Load testing a game like this before release isn't that hard, is it? You don't even require any human players to do it - just build a test cluster that runs a few hundred thousand simulations of players (WoW has NPCs, right? just add random l33t-sp33k chat, looting etc to the AI) and send the commands to the servers. If the servers fall over, add more hardware or optimise the server code.
They could even have recorded actions of players during the beta and played them back, multiplied up a few times if writing a good enough AI is too hard.
It may be quite expensive to do, but at least that way you don't piss off your customers.
In the UK, excluding all sales taxes, it's still at least 10% more expensive.
I don't get it: I see so many people posting "WoW is so much fun". Are those times accurate - can you really spend 30 minutes running to a quest?
In what weird world does anyone consider that fun?
If you type in the address in full (with the dots) it tabs for you. Quite a nice idea, really.
I was asked to write an algorithm to play a strange version of Blackjack against a human where:
- Red cards are positive, black cards negative
- Aces are 1 or 11
- you only use half the deck each (play one-on-one)
- your score at the end of the round is 20 if your cards total less than 15, 20 minus (cards total) if total is 15-20, and 50 if it is over 20
- Winner is player with lowest score after a few rounds
The trick is in the statistics: the black and red card values cancel out on average, leaving only the aces (1 or 11) as the average source of points.
This was after three hours of written exams, logic tests and IQ tests, so my brain was mush already and I failed majorly.
>Why the hell are you using gconf-editor???
Two examples from my usage: to change the order of title bar buttons so close and maximize aren't right next to each other and to enable display of volume+computer icons on the desktop (Ubuntu had them off by default).
I think GNOME is great, and I use it every day, but I do think sometimes they have avoided the "control center clutter" of KDE by just shoving all the inconvenient settings into gconf-editor rather than dialogs.
I think most of the stability issues are sorted now - they certainly are on my FC3 box. I'd buy a pizza for whoever fixes Palm syncing, though. It's currently horribly broken syncing to my Tungsten E and has been for years.
A whole bunch of file dialogs from different OS are here. Panther's looks kind of similar to the current GNOME one - the old GTK dialog looks like the older MacOS style.
You can get better guarantees, it just depends on the store. I don't know about in the US, but in the UK John Lewis, for example, will give you a one year guarantee on Creative players.
Many companies, Creative included, seem to treat the music-syncing software as a necessary evil, rather than an important part of their product.
Look at Sony's awful NetMD software or Creative's poorly thought out, slow and unstable music organizer for their Muvo line. It's not all that difficult a problem to solve, but Apple seems to be the only one that puts any engineering effort into it.
Sims have more interesting conversations, too.
Access is widely used in small businesses and non-profits, IME. It's just about simple enough that an intelligent non-technical user can set up some sort of customer/contact database with mail-merge and label printing.
Access is a horrible program, but it's good enough for many uses. One campaign group I worked for had every UK Member of Parliaments' voting records and details in Access, which they used for mail-shots and was indispensable for their work.
True enough. I think that there would be a huge benefit to the Free Software community if somebody wrote a simple text book descibing issues like that (big-O, unit testing, asserts, basic software design). The knowledge is out there, it's just spread between a lot of sources and harder to find than it could be.
I get the feeling that a lot of Free software developers are like me: people who can program well enough, but have little formal education in development techniques.
It's been a difficult learning curve for me (current version of my software is 10 times faster than the first version and vastly improved testing), certainly.
"Premature optimisation is the root of all evil" as somebody once said.
Both the desktops are putting more effort into optimisation now they have most of the functionality required.
You probably just need to train your filters better. Looking at my procmail logs, Spamassassin catches around 100 spam a day to my account, and lets through about 2-5 a day.