I used to be a zealot as well. A few years of working every day has turned me into a realist.
It's not just the corporate world, either. I spent nearly a month working on a research proposal in/LaTeX/ and gave the resulting source files to my advisor. He took one look at them and said "What am I going to do with these?". Where I work (biochemistry academia), M$ Office is the standard, for good or for bad. OpenOffice is good, but it just isn't there yet.
[OpenOffice] is far better than any version of MS office
I like OO.org too, and I run it on both sides of my Win98/Linux dual-boot, but I must admit it's still has its flaws:
* There's little to no documentation anywhere!
* The bibliography-generating system is virtually unusable. If it is useable I sure
don't know how to find out how!
* There are no advanced statistical functions in OO.org Calc
* Ever try to drag the contents of a single cell in Calc? Try it!
... and so on. I know that there are people working on all of these things, and I think they're doing a wonderful job-- please keep it up!
But it's not quite there yet for many folks out there have serious work to do.
I'm writing a doctoral proposal right now and need many of the functions listed above. It's due Real Soon Now, and guess what I'm going to use to write it? The OpenOffice project is a great thing, but it's not yet a drop-in for M$.
Looks like Science News is going the way of Scientific American. Yet another magazine I used to admire is getting watered down for the masses.
Science, Nature, and Physical Review Letters are in your local academic library. IMHO, it's better that a popular science journal "water down" the science a little and keep it accessible rather than have John and Jane Q. Public think that scientific research is not understandable and irrelevant to their lives.
i must say that parrot is neat -- i've checked out latest current version, 0.0.2 iirc
Actually, it's 0.0.8.1! (http://www.parrotcode.org is a little out of date.) The latest releases are in JGOFF's directory on CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/) or you can look it up on http://search.cpan.org/.
Or, even better, find your (or somebody else's!) local NPR station and see if they stream too so that we don't/. NPR's website... Use the "mirrors" people...
The need to WORK in order to satisfy that need, if not the need itself, is most certainly CULTURAL (and probably a product of Puritan-thinking America), not a basic characteristic of human instinct.
What's your definition of work? Are you saying that if you had all the money you need you'd
spend the rest of your days in your underwear eating Cheetos? Maybe "work" isn't the right word-- but I would think that most intelligent, creative people, IRREGARDLESS of culture, would want to exercise whatever talents or skills they have.
If you really can't wait to get at the CVS version, the most recent release (parrot-0_0_7) also has the perl6 compiler (in languages/perl6). I don't know what nifty new things they've recently added in CVS, but the release version seems to work for (simple) programs. It's in Jeff Goff's directory (JGOFF) on CPAN.
Making sure credit is where credit is due...
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I don't agree. One simple fact: Microsoft Office has features that the open source alternatives don't have (yet). Period.
I used to be a zealot as well. A few years of working every day has turned me into a realist.
It's not just the corporate world, either. I spent nearly a month working on a research proposal in /LaTeX/ and gave the resulting source files to my advisor. He took one look at them and said "What am I going to do with these?". Where I work (biochemistry academia), M$ Office is the standard, for good or for bad. OpenOffice is good, but it just isn't there yet.
[OpenOffice] is far better than any version of MS office
I like OO.org too, and I run it on both sides of my Win98/Linux dual-boot, but I must admit it's still has its flaws:
* There's little to no documentation anywhere!
* The bibliography-generating system is virtually unusable. If it is useable I sure don't know how to find out how!
* There are no advanced statistical functions in OO.org Calc
* Ever try to drag the contents of a single cell in Calc? Try it!
... and so on. I know that there are people working on all of these things, and I think they're doing a wonderful job-- please keep it up! But it's not quite there yet for many folks out there have serious work to do.
I'm writing a doctoral proposal right now and need many of the functions listed above. It's due Real Soon Now, and guess what I'm going to use to write it? The OpenOffice project is a great thing, but it's not yet a drop-in for M$.
Looks like Science News is going the way of Scientific American. Yet another magazine I used to admire is getting watered down for the masses.
Science, Nature, and Physical Review Letters are in your local academic library. IMHO, it's better that a popular science journal "water down" the science a little and keep it accessible rather than have John and Jane Q. Public think that scientific research is not understandable and irrelevant to their lives.
i must say that parrot is neat -- i've checked out latest current version, 0.0.2 iirc
Actually, it's 0.0.8.1! (http://www.parrotcode.org is a little out of date.) The latest releases are in JGOFF's directory on CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/) or you can look it up on http://search.cpan.org/.
Uh...
$ pod2html perl6_qref.pod >perl6_qref.html
$ pod2text perl6_qref.pod >perl6_qref.txt
(Though I'd suspect that if you really want to be using Perl 6 right now, you'd already know what to do with POD documents. IMHO.)
Or, even better, find your (or somebody else's!) local NPR station and see if they stream too so that we don't /. NPR's website... Use the "mirrors" people...
If I'm on your reading list I think you need to revise it. :)
Anybody else have about umpteen thousand books on their to-be-read list?
First thing - read until my eyes hurt!
(And then go to the optometrist.)
The need to WORK in order to satisfy that need, if not the need itself, is most certainly CULTURAL (and probably a product of Puritan-thinking America), not a basic characteristic of human instinct.
What's your definition of work? Are you saying that if you had all the money you need you'd spend the rest of your days in your underwear eating Cheetos? Maybe "work" isn't the right word-- but I would think that most intelligent, creative people, IRREGARDLESS of culture, would want to exercise whatever talents or skills they have.
If you really can't wait to get at the CVS version, the most recent release (parrot-0_0_7) also has the perl6 compiler (in languages/perl6). I don't know what nifty new things they've recently added in CVS, but the release version seems to work for (simple) programs. It's in Jeff Goff's directory (JGOFF) on CPAN.
s/Spielberg/Kubrick and Spielberg/