That's not on "Linux"—which you seem to describe in monolithic terms and as if this monolithic community could magically sprout an appendage that does everything you want. There's already emulation. Some emulation software isn't terribly difficult to use. Most Linux users are still expected to read the documentation before expecting things to simply work.
Until Microsoft or Apple drop out of the desktop market, there will be no substantial incentive to make it any easier to run software built for those operating systems in a foreign operating system.
FWIW, teaching people to write in a cursive script has several known neurological and psychological benefits, over teaching non-cursive scripts.
Careful with that (or cite your sources): as much as I love handwriting, from scrawl to cursive to calligraphy, much of the purported benefits of learning cursive instead of other modes of handwriting are rooted in mid-nineteenth century pseudoscientific marketing propaganda and is about as reasonable as the contemporaneous belief that alternating current is more dangerous than direct current because it kills elephants.
Given that it's something that is designed to be installed on any domain at all, it may not be required to be called Diaspora. I don't know many people who refer to their gchat account as jabber.
Not quite right. The square of the number of nodes takes into account all possible subgroups among those nodes. Reed's Law takes this number and removes singletons as well as the empty subgroup. You link to Metcalfe's Law, which does only deal with pairwise groupings and follows a pattern of triangular numbers (i.e., for five people there are ten possible pairings). Someone who is more adept with the mathematics than me should be in charge of actually saying which of these is more suitable for representing the value of social media websites, but it seems that Reed's Law is what you're looking for.
The learning curve for Lilypond is really no worse than for any other
text-based music typesetting software -- and far easier than, say, the TeX
music packages. ABC is a little more simple on the surface, but is so much
less flexible as to make it useless for complicated music. MusicXML seems
to be a good transport format, but as parent points out, it's clunky: like
any other XML format, everything is perfectly readable and will take a
year and a day to type.
Lilypond, which seems to me to be the best option for open-source
notation software, is probably not a worthwhile system for creating
on-the-fly snippets for web pages. Something JavaScript based would be
nice for that, and it seems likely that there could be wiki plugins that
could be used to create musical examples without hugedependencies
(much less specific versions of any given large software packages),
or a knowledge of how to use these large, complicated notation software
packages. There might still be the problem of being limited to simple
examples, but do we really need all of Lilypond and its dependencies to
create an example of a Phrygian scale?
Though it may not be quite as easy to read initially, a prefix or postfix notated expression would work well on a (probably wrapped) line, and could therefore be good for simple text editors (which is what I use for taking notes). People experienced with this (LISPers?) would be better suited than I am to say if this would work well.
Parent is absolutely correct. The freedom to do what we wish with the software includes the freedom to sell. In parent's link, there is another link with further elaboration on the subject: Selling Free Software
The second paragraph really says it all: "Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on." (Emphasis mine)
In short, the developer who thinks that selling GPLed software is against the spirit of the GPL is simply wrong.
It's been a few years since Ubuntu's default color scheme was the wash of dark brown you're describing as fecal. If your bodily wastes are anything like the orange colors that Ubuntu have used for most of their theme work for the past several releases (at least as of the last time I used it about a year ago), it might be a good idea for you to see a doctor.
I remember the controversies about the relative merits of the default brownness of the early editions of Ubuntu. The people who disliked it (apparently like parent poster) did so intensely and vocally; most people didn't really care, or were satisfied to change the color scheme if and when they felt like it without complaining about anything; and then another group of people actually liked seeing something other than blue for once. (Admittedly, I was among this last group.)
If I remember correctly, one of the reasons for using browns, reds, and yellows was that Ubuntu was conceived as an international distribution, designed to be pleasing to the eyes of people from cultures other than American, as not every culture has such strong preferences for blue (or other strong, vivid primary colors) as we do. I have no idea if they succeeded in this, but the rationale seemed compelling.
Adding to what Stewbacca posted, there are a couple things that seem to need pointing out. Just within the context of the Latin alphabet, the transition between having an all-caps system and the direct progression of advances that led to having a majescule/miniscule system like we have today took about five hundred years (the Uncials begat the Half-uncials begat the Carolingians). This span of five hundred years was one in which the nature of literacy changed, and though almost everyone who was literate was clergy, the clergy was really interested in getting the bible and other religious texts written as quickly and neatly as possible to aid in the dissemination of their ideas.
Additionally, the nature of writing changed: instead of needing an alphabet that could be flexible enough to work not only on stone, wax, or paper* (and here with brush or quill pen), almost everything was being done on paper with pens.
In any event, it's not that text in uppercase was too difficult to read before the advent of lowercase. Rather, it's that once we saw the benefits of the more varied letterforms (ascenders! decenders! clear visual distinction between sentences!) we found that all of a sudden it was easier to read long texts than before.
* by 'paper', I mean everything from pulp paper to papyrus to animal skin vellum or parchment and any other variation on this theme. We use sticky notes; ancient Romans used wax tablets.
There was no minuscule alphabet using Latin or Greek letterforms until the 8th or 9th Century. The Greco-Roman buildings to which you refer were written before there was really such a concept as all caps being different than any other kind of writing.
You and parent poster are onto something there, though. Lowercase forms (at lease using Latin letters, but likely also Greek) were conceived to make handwriting faster, consistent, and more legible than the quasi-cursive quasi-lowercase letterforms that immediately preceded them. Before the minuscules, all letters essentially fit into their own little boxes -- a matter that in the 20th Century made them easier to punch into cards with a 7x5 template (or something similarly simple). Minuscules weren't really feasible until displays could handle significantly greater resolution; but, once that resolution became available, the benefits of legibility (and the opportunities of having two of every letter) gave us the flexibility of lowercase.
It needs some patches to compile on modern systems, since development stopped before gcc4 was being used. It's not hard to find patches, and checkinstall would turn it into a package. I suppose there's a possibility that there's a 3rd party package out there somewhere, but not being an Ubuntu user, I can't make any guarantees. There's also a possibility that gcc3 is still available in the Ubuntu repositories, in which case there would be no need for the patches.
Someone above advised e3 which is what I wanted to advise, but I forgot the name. Very small, very fast, and has the option to run with emacs-, vi-, nano-, nedit-, and wordstar-like keybindings. Again, though, my experience with e3 is very limited, so I can't really tell you if this is the right editor.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. But seriously: nah.
That's not on "Linux"—which you seem to describe in monolithic terms and as if this monolithic community could magically sprout an appendage that does everything you want. There's already emulation. Some emulation software isn't terribly difficult to use. Most Linux users are still expected to read the documentation before expecting things to simply work.
Until Microsoft or Apple drop out of the desktop market, there will be no substantial incentive to make it any easier to run software built for those operating systems in a foreign operating system.
FWIW, teaching people to write in a cursive script has several known neurological and psychological benefits, over teaching non-cursive scripts.
Careful with that (or cite your sources): as much as I love handwriting, from scrawl to cursive to calligraphy, much of the purported benefits of learning cursive instead of other modes of handwriting are rooted in mid-nineteenth century pseudoscientific marketing propaganda and is about as reasonable as the contemporaneous belief that alternating current is more dangerous than direct current because it kills elephants.
Now Italic handwriting, on the other hand... ;-)
I'd be okay with your proposal if, in addition, the lawyers were as invisible, silent, and afraid of water, as Nazgûl.
...but if they went the other way, it would be AFLAC, which would probably land them in court for trademark infringement.
No way would St. Ignucious show his support that way. You'd have to open source the original by way of sacrifice.
We do it in the road. I mean, really, no one will be watching us.
I do this every month. I don't call it a 'give-away'. I call it 'rent'.
Yeah, my ex-girlfriend told me that in *her* house, the ditch is one way... You must have known her too.
Given that it's something that is designed to be installed on any domain at all, it may not be required to be called Diaspora. I don't know many people who refer to their gchat account as jabber.
Not quite right. The square of the number of nodes takes into account all possible subgroups among those nodes. Reed's Law takes this number and removes singletons as well as the empty subgroup. You link to Metcalfe's Law, which does only deal with pairwise groupings and follows a pattern of triangular numbers (i.e., for five people there are ten possible pairings). Someone who is more adept with the mathematics than me should be in charge of actually saying which of these is more suitable for representing the value of social media websites, but it seems that Reed's Law is what you're looking for.
It already is.
Emacs?
The learning curve for Lilypond is really no worse than for any other text-based music typesetting software -- and far easier than, say, the TeX music packages. ABC is a little more simple on the surface, but is so much less flexible as to make it useless for complicated music. MusicXML seems to be a good transport format, but as parent points out, it's clunky: like any other XML format, everything is perfectly readable and will take a year and a day to type.
Lilypond, which seems to me to be the best option for open-source notation software, is probably not a worthwhile system for creating on-the-fly snippets for web pages. Something JavaScript based would be nice for that, and it seems likely that there could be wiki plugins that could be used to create musical examples without huge dependencies (much less specific versions of any given large software packages), or a knowledge of how to use these large, complicated notation software packages. There might still be the problem of being limited to simple examples, but do we really need all of Lilypond and its dependencies to create an example of a Phrygian scale?
...wait, they'll give handj-- I mean, I can go to Starbucks on these asteroids? Sign me up!
Is it bad that I've remapped the Caps Lock key to send rm -rf?
...that's one way to get a Canon to work with Linux. Perhaps the only way, for most of Canon's printer models.
Though it may not be quite as easy to read initially, a prefix or postfix notated expression would work well on a (probably wrapped) line, and could therefore be good for simple text editors (which is what I use for taking notes). People experienced with this (LISPers?) would be better suited than I am to say if this would work well.
Parent is absolutely correct. The freedom to do what we wish with the software includes the freedom to sell. In parent's link, there is another link with further elaboration on the subject: Selling Free Software
The second paragraph really says it all: "Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on." (Emphasis mine)
In short, the developer who thinks that selling GPLed software is against the spirit of the GPL is simply wrong.
It's been a few years since Ubuntu's default color scheme was the wash of dark brown you're describing as fecal. If your bodily wastes are anything like the orange colors that Ubuntu have used for most of their theme work for the past several releases (at least as of the last time I used it about a year ago), it might be a good idea for you to see a doctor.
I remember the controversies about the relative merits of the default brownness of the early editions of Ubuntu. The people who disliked it (apparently like parent poster) did so intensely and vocally; most people didn't really care, or were satisfied to change the color scheme if and when they felt like it without complaining about anything; and then another group of people actually liked seeing something other than blue for once. (Admittedly, I was among this last group.)
If I remember correctly, one of the reasons for using browns, reds, and yellows was that Ubuntu was conceived as an international distribution, designed to be pleasing to the eyes of people from cultures other than American, as not every culture has such strong preferences for blue (or other strong, vivid primary colors) as we do. I have no idea if they succeeded in this, but the rationale seemed compelling.
Adding to what Stewbacca posted, there are a couple things that seem to need pointing out. Just within the context of the Latin alphabet, the transition between having an all-caps system and the direct progression of advances that led to having a majescule/miniscule system like we have today took about five hundred years (the Uncials begat the Half-uncials begat the Carolingians). This span of five hundred years was one in which the nature of literacy changed, and though almost everyone who was literate was clergy, the clergy was really interested in getting the bible and other religious texts written as quickly and neatly as possible to aid in the dissemination of their ideas.
Additionally, the nature of writing changed: instead of needing an alphabet that could be flexible enough to work not only on stone, wax, or paper* (and here with brush or quill pen), almost everything was being done on paper with pens.
In any event, it's not that text in uppercase was too difficult to read before the advent of lowercase. Rather, it's that once we saw the benefits of the more varied letterforms (ascenders! decenders! clear visual distinction between sentences!) we found that all of a sudden it was easier to read long texts than before.
* by 'paper', I mean everything from pulp paper to papyrus to animal skin vellum or parchment and any other variation on this theme. We use sticky notes; ancient Romans used wax tablets.
There was no minuscule alphabet using Latin or Greek letterforms until the 8th or 9th Century. The Greco-Roman buildings to which you refer were written before there was really such a concept as all caps being different than any other kind of writing.
You and parent poster are onto something there, though. Lowercase forms (at lease using Latin letters, but likely also Greek) were conceived to make handwriting faster, consistent, and more legible than the quasi-cursive quasi-lowercase letterforms that immediately preceded them. Before the minuscules, all letters essentially fit into their own little boxes -- a matter that in the 20th Century made them easier to punch into cards with a 7x5 template (or something similarly simple). Minuscules weren't really feasible until displays could handle significantly greater resolution; but, once that resolution became available, the benefits of legibility (and the opportunities of having two of every letter) gave us the flexibility of lowercase.
...a conversation about Vim and you're concerned about learning obscure keystroke combinations?
It needs some patches to compile on modern systems, since development stopped before gcc4 was being used. It's not hard to find patches, and checkinstall would turn it into a package. I suppose there's a possibility that there's a 3rd party package out there somewhere, but not being an Ubuntu user, I can't make any guarantees. There's also a possibility that gcc3 is still available in the Ubuntu repositories, in which case there would be no need for the patches.
I find quieting wife and kids with messy gels not only effective, but quite satisfying.
Someone above advised e3 which is what I wanted to advise, but I forgot the name. Very small, very fast, and has the option to run with emacs-, vi-, nano-, nedit-, and wordstar-like keybindings. Again, though, my experience with e3 is very limited, so I can't really tell you if this is the right editor.