The audience that needs to be targeted is the average user, and no it is not 'joe six-pack', or at least not entirely. The primary audience for wide-adoption consists of your parents, your grand parents, your neighbors and friends who call you to fix their systems, children, etc. People who want to use their computer with a minimum of fuss, and who DO freak out when they get an unexpected pop-up, and DO run anything sent to them in an email, and DO use their first name as their password.
Ummm...what exactly do you think "Joe Six-Pack" means? It's a term used to refer to the typical American, the people who just want to use their computers.
I dunno...this might be exceptionally nice when it's working nicely, but it seems like the times when you have problems are *really* going to suck.
Part of a boss's duty are being an asshole when necessary. Sometimes you need to lay down the law ("No, you can't have Monday off -- we absolutely need someone and we're shorthanded."). That's going to be *rough* if you're talkign to a gf.
Second of all, there's some point in most relationships (especially a gf rather than a wife) where your gf is going to be pissed off at you. Most people cool off at work or away from the other person. You're going to be throwing yourselves together and forcing yourselves together every day, without providing a mechanism for either of you to escape.
Third of all, there are some times when most *employees* get pissed off at or frusterated with their boss. Dilbert is popular for a reason. Do you want your girlfriend to be pissed off at you at home because you let go a friend of hers at work?
Fourth of all, this creates a tough power role problem. In contemporary society, the gf/wife generally has a much closer degree of power to the guy than a boss/worker does. Can you really "change roles" at work and home?
Fifth of all, percieved favoritism from other employees can, I imagine, be bad for a workplace environment. ("Oh, she doesn't have to do *anything* at work because she fucks the boss.") Every tiny percieved favor could be built up.
Sixth of all, the reason your gf is your gf and not your wife is because you haven't yet absolutely decided that you are able to stand each other day in and day out. Why commit to doing so?
Seventh of all, people joke about having sex at work, but honestly the temptation is there, and it's liable to make people feel less comfortable.
Eighth of all, do you really want your girlfriend and you coworkers gossiping about you day in and day out? And what about with your brother thrown into the mix?
Ninth, can you really spend this much time with your gf? Yes, there are people that work at home (I was just reading Jeff Vogel's homepage) and constantly come in contact with a wife, say.
If it works, fine. My own father ran a small business in addition to his regular job in which our immediate family worked, but it was much more of a hobby, to help teach us the value of a dollar, than a primary income source. We had a blast...but we worked in more of a contractor-like manner -- if we did X, we got paid N dollars. I'm not sure that I'd want to work with family in a regular business. I also think that I wouldn't involve a gf if at all possible.
But, hey. Maybe it'll work out just fine, and you'll have a ball. There's an awful lot of companies that have anti-nepotism and anti-relationship rules, though. I suspect that it's founded on at least some grain of truth.
Dude, *how* can you possibly blame NASA for insufficient coverage?
They put out an entire *channel* of content and have an extensive website with tons of goodies. They have been fighting like mad to get more media coverage to ensure that they get continued funding.
If you want to blame someone, blame our current media sources or people's interests. NASA is the *least* guilty party involved in trying to expose people to information about space.
don't know if anyone else feels this way, but I'm kind of let down by the fact that our most interesting space story for awhile now is that we MAY have a 10th planet in our solar system.
Umm...what? The past few months have been *spectacularly* exciting from a space point of view. We have two probes that successfully landed on Mars and have found strong evidence that Mars had liquid brine at one point. We have a ton of pictures from the surface to look at, and are expecting tons of findings, papers, and theories based on probe data that's been returned.
And while, yes, the classification may not be interesting, the fact that we discovered a new, sizeable chunk of matter in our solar system is not small stuff either.
Honestly, I have no idea what TeX is, so, I don't know the comparison.
TeX and LaTeX are (roughly) the general typographical layout equivalents of Lilypond -- instead of producing musical scores, one produces text and math formulas. Each is a GUIless program that takes a set of plain text input, and produces a rendered, formatted set of output.
Because BSD and Linux lacked a decent free word processor for a long, long time, a lot of people learned LaTeX in the place of a word processor. LaTeX is really intended for extremely high-quality textual output -- the sort of thing that a typesetter would use to produce a book. As Knuth (the author of TeX) put it, he was shocked when people started requiring college students to use TeX for their papers -- he saw TeX as a system that required more work to use but was worth it when you wanted to go the extra distance and get really good output.
LaTeX (a sort of child of/extension of TeX) is commonly required as a format to submit papers in, since it produces high-quality output and can be used to allow certain formatting tasks that are very difficult with a word processor. Another benefit of LaTeX is that it uses a text format to represent math formulas, and so LaTeX is often used on USENET and other text-based forums to represent complex mathematical formulas. It's relatively quick to enter forumlas into LaTeX, so it's become dominant in the computer science and mathematical fields.
If you've ever run into CSS, you may understand some of the benefit of using a LaTeX-style system over a more conventional GUI. It lets you assign meaning to elements of your document that can let you perform very powerful operations later. For example, have you ever used stylesheet functionality, present in most word processors? This is a very limited form of this. You can "create a new style", assign text to be of that style, and later tweak the format of an entire book easily by changing properties of the style sheet.
That being said, having RTFA'ed, I think that I can guess at the difference.
It sounds like Finale and friends can put out usable sheet music. If that's fine for you, go for it -- I don't bother with LaTeX if I'm just jotting a quick note to a friend. However, apparently you *really* have to know these programs and put serious time in to coax really, really high-quality output from them. If you're going to put out, say, a collection of sheet music, perhaps Lillypond is what you want -- for engravers, rather than merely musicians.
I doubt that so many people have spent time on this issue without a pretty decent justification.
I hate to say it, but websites do go down. It's regrettable, but the reasons people here dislike Microsoft are not because they have a website that happened to go down. Blame Microsoft for their real flaws.
Heck, if the FOSS world was held accountable for, say, Sourceforge or Slashdot reliability, we'd all be in a world of hurt.
'm sure that didn't stop you for voting for Clinton. And until you can prove that GWB knew the intelligence was faulty, shut up.
"Sin" aside, I find it far more objectionable for a President of the United States of America to lie about the existence of a threat to further his political and personal goals and start a war (ultimately killing thousands of peple) than I do for a President to lie about his sex life, with no impact other than on himself and his family.
I find it amazing that Bush was not impeached for the first, though Clinton was for the second.
Currently, CNN.com's poll is Should law enforcement agencies be able to wiretap Internet traffic? CNN.com does a much better job of getting a "Joe Sixpack" opinion than does Slashdot -- and I was surprised and pleased to see that with over 40,000 votes in, almost 60% of voters opposed law enforcement monitoring of the Internet, even in this post-9/11 era.
People are not thrilled with Ashcroft. I am impressed and pleased.
Huh? The notion of high birth rates as a national goal went out of fashion after WWII. Even if it hadn't, our society does not pracice polygyny, so additional women would be unmarried and have a low birth rate (not zero, obviously, but significantly lower than the married women).
Ah, you're forgetting about the Mormons. Imagine the United States repopulated with lots of little Darl McBrides.
Umm...there's a very, very strong correlation between "astronaut" and "military pilot". I doubt that being an astronaut is sucha great idea.
7) Al-Quada oppertive
Now *that* would be fun to present to the draft board. "Uh, sir, I don't think I can fight. No, I'm not a conscientious objector -- I'm an al-Queda operative."
If you're going to start custom-compiling software before shipping binaries, I suspect that there will be at least *four* variants:
* One old-style, no special instructions.
* One P4.
* One Athlon.
* One Opteron
This sucks, for a couple of reasons:
1) It makes patching hell, since you have a whole bunch of different possible update. If Microsoft had come up with a *good* (i.e. can be effectively automated as a silent daemon, didn't require reboots, could be used by third parties, wasn't flaky) auto-update service, this wouldn't be a problem.
2) It makes life more interesting for corporate departments that use Ghost images to set up machines and may have some Intel and some AMD machines.
There may be other issues -- those are the ones that jump out at me.
First, someone ought to catch the IP of that board spamer.
Slashdot has a cap on the number of posts from a given IP per twenty-four hour period (IIRC, it's in the neighborhood of 50 posts or so. I've hit it occasionally, though not recently.).
As a result, it's really unlikely that this is one IP. It could be a couple of people posting. It could be someone on a dynamic IP releasing and renewing his lease after dumping out 50 posts. It could be someone with a script and access to a large cluster, or it could be someone controlling a number of compromised hosts.
At the moment, until the Slashdot staff does something (for once I'd like to see jamie get involved) it looks like the only workaround is to bump your threshhold up to 1 and just lose all the input from AC posters.
I would suggest not wasting mod points on this. They're pretty likely to get removed by Slashdot staff, and your points could be better used on worthwhile posts.
It's still possible to make a profit, just indirectly. The GPL doesn't mandate releasing associated data files with programs.
I've never figured out why emulator groups were always so rabid about keeping their emulators closed-source -- they are tinkerers, systems people, reverse engineerers, and seem like *exactly* the kind of people that fit into the open source world. Yet emulators stayed closed source for the longest time, with much duplication of effort and people screaming that people stole code from them...ack. How many people have really made a decent sum of money from writing a console emulator? Given the number of closed-source projects out there, probably not many...
It is nice to see this open-sourced, though. Since VisualBoyAdvance is also GPLed, perhaps the two projects could share effort to some degree.
They got what they paid for -- a Gameboy Advance emulator.
The fact that some other people get it for free doesn't change the fact that they evaluated what something was worth to them and made the choice to buy it.
Biblical parables are not all that popular on Slashdot, but the workers in the vinyard really does illustrate this point nicely. Humans have this weird psychological quirk where they measure what they have very directly by what their peer is getting.
Slashdot Mirror
The audience that needs to be targeted is the average user, and no it is not 'joe six-pack', or at least not entirely. The primary audience for wide-adoption consists of your parents, your grand parents, your neighbors and friends who call you to fix their systems, children, etc. People who want to use their computer with a minimum of fuss, and who DO freak out when they get an unexpected pop-up, and DO run anything sent to them in an email, and DO use their first name as their password.
Ummm...what exactly do you think "Joe Six-Pack" means? It's a term used to refer to the typical American, the people who just want to use their computers.
The people who buy these machines are going to just wipe them clean and install an illegal copy of windows and spend their $40 on ice cream.
That's still a good thing for Linux folk. Less funds for Microsoft mean less funds used to attack Linux.
I dunno...this might be exceptionally nice when it's working nicely, but it seems like the times when you have problems are *really* going to suck.
Part of a boss's duty are being an asshole when necessary. Sometimes you need to lay down the law ("No, you can't have Monday off -- we absolutely need someone and we're shorthanded."). That's going to be *rough* if you're talkign to a gf.
Second of all, there's some point in most relationships (especially a gf rather than a wife) where your gf is going to be pissed off at you. Most people cool off at work or away from the other person. You're going to be throwing yourselves together and forcing yourselves together every day, without providing a mechanism for either of you to escape.
Third of all, there are some times when most *employees* get pissed off at or frusterated with their boss. Dilbert is popular for a reason. Do you want your girlfriend to be pissed off at you at home because you let go a friend of hers at work?
Fourth of all, this creates a tough power role problem. In contemporary society, the gf/wife generally has a much closer degree of power to the guy than a boss/worker does. Can you really "change roles" at work and home?
Fifth of all, percieved favoritism from other employees can, I imagine, be bad for a workplace environment. ("Oh, she doesn't have to do *anything* at work because she fucks the boss.") Every tiny percieved favor could be built up.
Sixth of all, the reason your gf is your gf and not your wife is because you haven't yet absolutely decided that you are able to stand each other day in and day out. Why commit to doing so?
Seventh of all, people joke about having sex at work, but honestly the temptation is there, and it's liable to make people feel less comfortable.
Eighth of all, do you really want your girlfriend and you coworkers gossiping about you day in and day out? And what about with your brother thrown into the mix?
Ninth, can you really spend this much time with your gf? Yes, there are people that work at home (I was just reading Jeff Vogel's homepage) and constantly come in contact with a wife, say.
If it works, fine. My own father ran a small business in addition to his regular job in which our immediate family worked, but it was much more of a hobby, to help teach us the value of a dollar, than a primary income source. We had a blast...but we worked in more of a contractor-like manner -- if we did X, we got paid N dollars. I'm not sure that I'd want to work with family in a regular business. I also think that I wouldn't involve a gf if at all possible.
But, hey. Maybe it'll work out just fine, and you'll have a ball. There's an awful lot of companies that have anti-nepotism and anti-relationship rules, though. I suspect that it's founded on at least some grain of truth.
My own opinion on the matter is that if there ever is a major exchange between the nuclear elite it will be Russia and China:
You have *got* to be kidding. India and Pakistan? Israel and the first Islamic country that manages to acquire nukes?
Really, what's the chance of Britain or Australia telling the US to shove off when it wants something?
Diana,
:-)
Diana is associated with the Moon already.
I think it'd be great to have a planet called Bacchus, though.
I believe "Proserpine" should be "Prosperpina".
Dude, *how* can you possibly blame NASA for insufficient coverage?
They put out an entire *channel* of content and have an extensive website with tons of goodies. They have been fighting like mad to get more media coverage to ensure that they get continued funding.
If you want to blame someone, blame our current media sources or people's interests. NASA is the *least* guilty party involved in trying to expose people to information about space.
don't know if anyone else feels this way, but I'm kind of let down by the fact that our most interesting space story for awhile now is that we MAY have a 10th planet in our solar system.
Umm...what? The past few months have been *spectacularly* exciting from a space point of view. We have two probes that successfully landed on Mars and have found strong evidence that Mars had liquid brine at one point. We have a ton of pictures from the surface to look at, and are expecting tons of findings, papers, and theories based on probe data that's been returned.
And while, yes, the classification may not be interesting, the fact that we discovered a new, sizeable chunk of matter in our solar system is not small stuff either.
a running time of nearly 3 and 1/2 hours.
Only 3 1/2 hours?
They're going to cut Tom Bombadil again!
I should have said that TeX/LaTeX take "text input", not "plain text input". They have markup embedded in the text.
Honestly, I have no idea what TeX is, so, I don't know the comparison.
TeX and LaTeX are (roughly) the general typographical layout equivalents of Lilypond -- instead of producing musical scores, one produces text and math formulas. Each is a GUIless program that takes a set of plain text input, and produces a rendered, formatted set of output.
Because BSD and Linux lacked a decent free word processor for a long, long time, a lot of people learned LaTeX in the place of a word processor. LaTeX is really intended for extremely high-quality textual output -- the sort of thing that a typesetter would use to produce a book. As Knuth (the author of TeX) put it, he was shocked when people started requiring college students to use TeX for their papers -- he saw TeX as a system that required more work to use but was worth it when you wanted to go the extra distance and get really good output.
LaTeX (a sort of child of/extension of TeX) is commonly required as a format to submit papers in, since it produces high-quality output and can be used to allow certain formatting tasks that are very difficult with a word processor. Another benefit of LaTeX is that it uses a text format to represent math formulas, and so LaTeX is often used on USENET and other text-based forums to represent complex mathematical formulas. It's relatively quick to enter forumlas into LaTeX, so it's become dominant in the computer science and mathematical fields.
If you've ever run into CSS, you may understand some of the benefit of using a LaTeX-style system over a more conventional GUI. It lets you assign meaning to elements of your document that can let you perform very powerful operations later. For example, have you ever used stylesheet functionality, present in most word processors? This is a very limited form of this. You can "create a new style", assign text to be of that style, and later tweak the format of an entire book easily by changing properties of the style sheet.
IANAM.
That being said, having RTFA'ed, I think that I can guess at the difference.
It sounds like Finale and friends can put out usable sheet music. If that's fine for you, go for it -- I don't bother with LaTeX if I'm just jotting a quick note to a friend. However, apparently you *really* have to know these programs and put serious time in to coax really, really high-quality output from them. If you're going to put out, say, a collection of sheet music, perhaps Lillypond is what you want -- for engravers, rather than merely musicians.
I doubt that so many people have spent time on this issue without a pretty decent justification.
I don't understand why Lilypond aims to go back to having a proprietary textual format for typesetting music.
Lillypond's format is open, not proprietary.
Linux and Musicians!
What do you propose musicians use instead? Mac OS? Windows? What makes the concept of *Linux* and musicians unacceptable?
By the way...does anyone know how Lillypond and MusiXTeX compare?
I hate to say it, but websites do go down. It's regrettable, but the reasons people here dislike Microsoft are not because they have a website that happened to go down. Blame Microsoft for their real flaws.
Heck, if the FOSS world was held accountable for, say, Sourceforge or Slashdot reliability, we'd all be in a world of hurt.
'm sure that didn't stop you for voting for Clinton. And until you can prove that GWB knew the intelligence was faulty, shut up.
"Sin" aside, I find it far more objectionable for a President of the United States of America to lie about the existence of a threat to further his political and personal goals and start a war (ultimately killing thousands of peple) than I do for a President to lie about his sex life, with no impact other than on himself and his family.
I find it amazing that Bush was not impeached for the first, though Clinton was for the second.
Currently, CNN.com's poll is Should law enforcement agencies be able to wiretap Internet traffic? CNN.com does a much better job of getting a "Joe Sixpack" opinion than does Slashdot -- and I was surprised and pleased to see that with over 40,000 votes in, almost 60% of voters opposed law enforcement monitoring of the Internet, even in this post-9/11 era.
People are not thrilled with Ashcroft. I am impressed and pleased.
Huh? The notion of high birth rates as a national goal went out of fashion after WWII. Even if it hadn't, our society does not pracice polygyny, so additional women would be unmarried and have a low birth rate (not zero, obviously, but significantly lower than the married women).
Ah, you're forgetting about the Mormons. Imagine the United States repopulated with lots of little Darl McBrides.
10) Astronaut
Umm...there's a very, very strong correlation between "astronaut" and "military pilot". I doubt that being an astronaut is sucha great idea.
7) Al-Quada oppertive
Now *that* would be fun to present to the draft board. "Uh, sir, I don't think I can fight. No, I'm not a conscientious objector -- I'm an al-Queda operative."
If GWB wins, we're most probably going to have a conflict with Syria or Iran and he's going to need more troops for that.
Ah, but it's okay if he drafts some troops -- GWB is, after all, a "war president".
What exactly is a "suicide girl"? Does that mean she's already dead? I'm not into that kind of stuff, you know...
Err..."already" dead? What, you have to do the honors?
Among other things:
If you're going to start custom-compiling software before shipping binaries, I suspect that there will be at least *four* variants:
* One old-style, no special instructions.
* One P4.
* One Athlon.
* One Opteron
This sucks, for a couple of reasons:
1) It makes patching hell, since you have a whole bunch of different possible update. If Microsoft had come up with a *good* (i.e. can be effectively automated as a silent daemon, didn't require reboots, could be used by third parties, wasn't flaky) auto-update service, this wouldn't be a problem.
2) It makes life more interesting for corporate departments that use Ghost images to set up machines and may have some Intel and some AMD machines.
There may be other issues -- those are the ones that jump out at me.
First, someone ought to catch the IP of that board spamer.
Slashdot has a cap on the number of posts from a given IP per twenty-four hour period (IIRC, it's in the neighborhood of 50 posts or so. I've hit it occasionally, though not recently.).
As a result, it's really unlikely that this is one IP. It could be a couple of people posting. It could be someone on a dynamic IP releasing and renewing his lease after dumping out 50 posts. It could be someone with a script and access to a large cluster, or it could be someone controlling a number of compromised hosts.
At the moment, until the Slashdot staff does something (for once I'd like to see jamie get involved) it looks like the only workaround is to bump your threshhold up to 1 and just lose all the input from AC posters.
I would suggest not wasting mod points on this. They're pretty likely to get removed by Slashdot staff, and your points could be better used on worthwhile posts.
It's still possible to make a profit, just indirectly. The GPL doesn't mandate releasing associated data files with programs.
I've never figured out why emulator groups were always so rabid about keeping their emulators closed-source -- they are tinkerers, systems people, reverse engineerers, and seem like *exactly* the kind of people that fit into the open source world. Yet emulators stayed closed source for the longest time, with much duplication of effort and people screaming that people stole code from them...ack. How many people have really made a decent sum of money from writing a console emulator? Given the number of closed-source projects out there, probably not many...
It is nice to see this open-sourced, though. Since VisualBoyAdvance is also GPLed, perhaps the two projects could share effort to some degree.
They got what they paid for -- a Gameboy Advance emulator.
The fact that some other people get it for free doesn't change the fact that they evaluated what something was worth to them and made the choice to buy it.
Biblical parables are not all that popular on Slashdot, but the workers in the vinyard really does illustrate this point nicely. Humans have this weird psychological quirk where they measure what they have very directly by what their peer is getting.