I used Keynote for a couple of years before switching to beamer. It's not perfect, but it would take a lot to persuade me to switch back - and Keynote is supposed to be one of the better WYSIWYG tools. It does lack the PowerPoint misfeature of automatically shrinking your text to fit it into the box, which has caused a lot of PowerPoint presentations containing bullet points that are illegible to anyone in the audience who left their binoculars at home.
I like the Singapore theme with beamer: it's clean and minimal. here's an example I created recently. The overall structure is beamer with the Singapore theme, the diagrams are done with TikZ, the PDF annotations with pdfmarginpar and the code listings with the listings package. The really nice thing is that you can compose all of these things, so I have some code listings embedded in TikZ drawings: listings does the syntax highlighting and then TikZ places that box somewhere and draws a background behind it and a border around it. TikZ also works really nicely with beamer's build support. Once you've written the diagram, you can just insert \pause commands and you'll get one page with everything before that and one with everything before and after it (but before the next \pause). This makes it really easy to do diagrams where parts appear as you're talking - you do the final version and then insert the build steps at the end. You can also hide things, but that's usually not ideal because the final version that people download typically won't have the build effects, so people who download the slides will see a mess (see any recent Apple presentation for examples of this same problem in Keynote).
The Help menu on OS X contains a search field at the top. This will search help, but it will also search menu items. For example, if I type 'utf-8' into it in Safari, it will return a single item, and when I select it it will open the Text Encoding submenu of the View menu and highlight the Unicode (UTF-8) option. It makes finding things in submenus a lot less painful.
If you're referring to OOXML, then perhaps you should take a look at how Word does in the OOXML conformance test suite. Last time I checked, there were about 10,000 test failures.
There are a few reasons to dislike the ribbon. If you're on a small screen, it uses a lot more real estate than the menus. They don't have the shortcut keys next to all of the options, which means that you don't learn the shortcuts for commonly used things as easily as you do with the menu. Finally, unlike the old toolbars, the ribbon does not allow you to put commonly used but unrelated things on the screen at the same time.
There are several reasons to like the ribbon. It does better on Fitts' Law metrics than a traditional menu, due to significantly larger targets. This is especially true on large screens. The larger display for each menu also means that you don't need as many submenus or even pop-up panels.
The real problem with it is that it has a different set of advantages and disadvantages to the old menu plus toolbar. For any given workflow and screen size, it may be better or worse, but you can't toggle back to the old UI if it's worse.
Maybe it's different for physics, but I've only come across one journal in computer science that required submissions in Word format, and it had a very poor reputation (slightly better than an unreviewed technical report, but only slightly). Most others now provide a Word template and a LaTeX template. You can easily spot the papers that used the Word one: they are the ones with kerning that looks crap.
For a lot of office scenarios, you probably don't want to be using LaTeX directly, you want to be providing a web front end with a set of fixed fields that generates a LaTeX document. This is how a lot of businesses use Word: via a custom wizard that takes inputs and inserts them into a template at the correct points.
I guess I was wrong then. I always defended Florian against accusations of being a shill, thinking that he was just an idiot and that no company would knowingly pay someone as stupid as him. It seems Microsoft and Oracle have lower standards than I though...
If you can find the CD ROM boxed set of LSL games, it comes with Softporn Adventure. LSL was definitely inspired by it in terms of style and so on, but I don't recall much similarity in terms of story...
I suspect the grandparent is thinking of the problems related to money creation and fractional reserve banking. When you take out a mortgage to buy a house, you borrow $n from the bank, hand it to someone else, and they then deposit it in another bank, or in the same bank. It actually doesn't make a difference in the global sense which it is, so we'll assume it's the same bank. That bank is now loaning $n and also has $n in currency. It has effectively created the money (this explanation involves some oversimplifications). It can then lend the same money again, but more importantly it can use either the money or the house (which is the security on the loan) to borrow more money from the central bank. This means that the more money the bank loans, the more it can borrow. Borrowing from the central bank is one way in which more money is introduced into the system with a fiat currency.
With a fixed currency supply (as with the gold standard), the central bank would quickly run out of money for these new loans. The grandparent is right that there wouldn't have been a bubble without a fiat currency, there would have been a currency (liquidity) shortage, as loans would have become progressively harder to acquire and we'd have had a massive recession very soon after the bubble started to form.
I have a simple test for whether a new TLD is sensible: the fucksgoats test. If you create a new.fucksgoats TLD, then lots of people who already own.com domains will buy the.fucksgoats variant to prevent other people using it. If the majority of the people who would buy a domain under a new proposed TLD would also buy the.fucksgoats domain (and for the same reason), then it should not be approved. We saw this with.xxx: most of the people registering.xxx domains already owned the.com or similar version and didn't want someone else either introducing brand confusion (if they were already hosting porn) or associating porn with their brand (if they weren't).
Ten years ago, people were deploying exactly the same technologies on the back end (VM instances that were live migrated, spawned and destroyed on demand, and - where needed - fault tolerant using redundant images kept in sync on separate instances). Back then, it was called grid computing, not cloud computing. Twenty years earlier, almost the same thing was called a mainframe, or a mainframe cluster if you wanted your cloud to encompass multiple sites.
The only real change with the cloud is that now we're doing the same things but with cheap commodity hardware and cheap commodity software. For example, fault tolerance is now part of the standard Xen distribution, but if you wanted to roll it out a decade ago you needed to pay a company like Marathon a lot of money for their hypervisor. If you wanted to roll it out two decades ago, you bought a very expensive VMS system from DEC / Digital (later HP). Now, you can have two (or more) instances of the same VM running on separate sub-$1000 computers, and if one computer dies then people using it don't notice. Total cost of deployment is a couple of thousand dollars of equipment and a couple of hours of time.
It's the same thing with a lot of other technologies: it's not that they're especially novel, it's that now you can do something everywhere you want to, where previously you could only afford to do it everywhere you absolutely needed to.
There were also occasionally some story puzzles split over a lot of pages. You'd solve a puzzle and then the solution would be the next page number. You'd enter that and go onto the next part of the story.
I was very slightly too young for it, but when the BBC Micro was introduced they used to broadcast source code on a few of the Ceefax pages overnight. The idea was that schools could retrieve them using the teletext decoder and use them in lessons the next day.
I do remember when I was young enjoying the jokes and puzzles on Ceefax. Remote controls had a 'reveal' button and you could hide some parts of a page until this button was pressed, so pages contained jokes with the punchlines hidden and puzzles with the solutions hidden. Some film and book review pages also used this to hide spoilers.
It was generally the easiest way to get a TV schedule, especially once the newer TVs came in that did caching for pages (each of the pages would have its content updated very few seconds to scroll through things that were longer than a single page of text - newer TVs would record these and let you page through them without waiting for the next page to be broadcast). My mother still uses it to check the weather forecast.
I won't miss Ceefax - I've not used it for about a decade - but it was a very impressive technology for its time.
It's very simple: those are the terms of being incorporated into the standard. When standards like GSM are proposed, all of the involved parties (typically meaning all of the people who do a nontrivial amount of research in the field) meet and say 'we have a very good way of doing that' and if other people agree that it is as good as they say, then they get to put it in the standard in exchange for FRAND conditions. They benefit, because now everyone who implements the standard must license their patent, and everyone else benefits because they have a good standard that they can implement at a reasonable price.
Crappy patents have no special rules, because no one needs to license them. You can make a phone without licensing Apple's patents, but you can't make one without licensing Samsung's or Nokia's. It's not that their patents are more technical, it's that they are part of a published standard. If the standard allowed people to charge whatever they wanted for patent licenses, then it would be useless. The EU, for example, standardised on GSM for all 2G deployments. It was the required as a condition for all spectrum licenses. If a single company had been able to say 'actually, we changed our minds, and now anyone who implements this has to pay us $100/month for every cell plus $10/month for every client, then there would have been serious problems.
But who uses computers that way any more? Only really small business. Restaurants, plumbers, small stores, small law firms, etc.
Not even then. I just ordered a pizza from a local shop. The have a tracking system for each stage of pizza delivery (order processing, preparation, cooking, delivery) and shows you online where your order is in that sequence, and sends an automated SMS when the pizza goes out for delivery. They almost certainly use a GPS route finding system for their delivery people to take the pizzas, and may use a slightly more complex version to decide whether to send out multiple pizzas on a single run.
Small companies are often among the first to adopt new technology into their work flow, because hiring an extra employee is a massive expense for them, while tweaking an automated system is a lot cheaper.
And most of them are dismissed as suits without business savvy by Wall Street.
The reason CEOs are paid so much is that good ones are rare and they can make a massive difference to a company's performance. Unfortunately, no one seems to have yet worked out how to recognise the good ones (a good CEO for one company won't necessarily be able to run even a fairly similar one nearly as well).
Seems to me that the grant supporting the research came from the US so submission for publication in a US journal is pretty normal. I got some telescope time on a UK telescope and published in a UK journal as a result.
I don't think that normally holds. I published in US and EU journals while on a UK grant and will likely publish in both now I am on a US grant - the location of the journal rarely factors into where I publish, only the suitability of the subject matter and the reputation. Location only matters for conferences, and then it's a question of whether my interest in the conference plus my interest in visiting the location is greater than the effort involved in going there and justifying the expenses.
It is hard to say I was exporting science to the UK when they built the telescope and instrument I used
Would it be a question of exporting science to North Korea (for example) if they built the parts for the nuclear bomb you designed for them? I think most people (including courts) would say yes...
No, all distributed versioning systems use hashes for changesets. Fossil and Mercurial - distributed system systems designed by and for humans - use a monotonic counter for version numbers.
Without reading TFA (a GPL'd reference implementation of a new language? Good luck with that.) it's probably a git version. The designers of git come from a planet whose dominant species did not evolve a concept of linear orderings until quite late in their development and so identify sequences by unrelated names of each value.
The Witcher 2 being the most recent "big" game (meaning current gen/flashy graphics/$60 price point).
$42.49, DRM-free, on GOG, including an unlimited number of redownloads of the installer, for as long as GOG is in business, and an unlimited number of reinstalls from the installer as long as you still have hardware or emulators that can run it...
Most of them aren't, but they have had a few new titles available DRM-free on launch day. They seem to do well, if you can trust the 'most popular' ranking lists on GOG.
Slashdot Mirror
I used Keynote for a couple of years before switching to beamer. It's not perfect, but it would take a lot to persuade me to switch back - and Keynote is supposed to be one of the better WYSIWYG tools. It does lack the PowerPoint misfeature of automatically shrinking your text to fit it into the box, which has caused a lot of PowerPoint presentations containing bullet points that are illegible to anyone in the audience who left their binoculars at home.
I like the Singapore theme with beamer: it's clean and minimal. here's an example I created recently. The overall structure is beamer with the Singapore theme, the diagrams are done with TikZ, the PDF annotations with pdfmarginpar and the code listings with the listings package. The really nice thing is that you can compose all of these things, so I have some code listings embedded in TikZ drawings: listings does the syntax highlighting and then TikZ places that box somewhere and draws a background behind it and a border around it. TikZ also works really nicely with beamer's build support. Once you've written the diagram, you can just insert \pause commands and you'll get one page with everything before that and one with everything before and after it (but before the next \pause). This makes it really easy to do diagrams where parts appear as you're talking - you do the final version and then insert the build steps at the end. You can also hide things, but that's usually not ideal because the final version that people download typically won't have the build effects, so people who download the slides will see a mess (see any recent Apple presentation for examples of this same problem in Keynote).
The Help menu on OS X contains a search field at the top. This will search help, but it will also search menu items. For example, if I type 'utf-8' into it in Safari, it will return a single item, and when I select it it will open the Text Encoding submenu of the View menu and highlight the Unicode (UTF-8) option. It makes finding things in submenus a lot less painful.
Because the standard MS uses is now public.
If you're referring to OOXML, then perhaps you should take a look at how Word does in the OOXML conformance test suite. Last time I checked, there were about 10,000 test failures.
There are a few reasons to dislike the ribbon. If you're on a small screen, it uses a lot more real estate than the menus. They don't have the shortcut keys next to all of the options, which means that you don't learn the shortcuts for commonly used things as easily as you do with the menu. Finally, unlike the old toolbars, the ribbon does not allow you to put commonly used but unrelated things on the screen at the same time.
There are several reasons to like the ribbon. It does better on Fitts' Law metrics than a traditional menu, due to significantly larger targets. This is especially true on large screens. The larger display for each menu also means that you don't need as many submenus or even pop-up panels.
The real problem with it is that it has a different set of advantages and disadvantages to the old menu plus toolbar. For any given workflow and screen size, it may be better or worse, but you can't toggle back to the old UI if it's worse.
Maybe it's different for physics, but I've only come across one journal in computer science that required submissions in Word format, and it had a very poor reputation (slightly better than an unreviewed technical report, but only slightly). Most others now provide a Word template and a LaTeX template. You can easily spot the papers that used the Word one: they are the ones with kerning that looks crap.
For a lot of office scenarios, you probably don't want to be using LaTeX directly, you want to be providing a web front end with a set of fixed fields that generates a LaTeX document. This is how a lot of businesses use Word: via a custom wizard that takes inputs and inserts them into a template at the correct points.
From the perspective of a vi user, an emacs user is a superior tool.
I guess I was wrong then. I always defended Florian against accusations of being a shill, thinking that he was just an idiot and that no company would knowingly pay someone as stupid as him. It seems Microsoft and Oracle have lower standards than I though...
If you can find the CD ROM boxed set of LSL games, it comes with Softporn Adventure. LSL was definitely inspired by it in terms of style and so on, but I don't recall much similarity in terms of story...
I suspect the grandparent is thinking of the problems related to money creation and fractional reserve banking. When you take out a mortgage to buy a house, you borrow $n from the bank, hand it to someone else, and they then deposit it in another bank, or in the same bank. It actually doesn't make a difference in the global sense which it is, so we'll assume it's the same bank. That bank is now loaning $n and also has $n in currency. It has effectively created the money (this explanation involves some oversimplifications). It can then lend the same money again, but more importantly it can use either the money or the house (which is the security on the loan) to borrow more money from the central bank. This means that the more money the bank loans, the more it can borrow. Borrowing from the central bank is one way in which more money is introduced into the system with a fiat currency.
With a fixed currency supply (as with the gold standard), the central bank would quickly run out of money for these new loans. The grandparent is right that there wouldn't have been a bubble without a fiat currency, there would have been a currency (liquidity) shortage, as loans would have become progressively harder to acquire and we'd have had a massive recession very soon after the bubble started to form.
I have a simple test for whether a new TLD is sensible: the fucksgoats test. If you create a new .fucksgoats TLD, then lots of people who already own .com domains will buy the .fucksgoats variant to prevent other people using it. If the majority of the people who would buy a domain under a new proposed TLD would also buy the .fucksgoats domain (and for the same reason), then it should not be approved. We saw this with .xxx: most of the people registering .xxx domains already owned the .com or similar version and didn't want someone else either introducing brand confusion (if they were already hosting porn) or associating porn with their brand (if they weren't).
Ten years ago, people were deploying exactly the same technologies on the back end (VM instances that were live migrated, spawned and destroyed on demand, and - where needed - fault tolerant using redundant images kept in sync on separate instances). Back then, it was called grid computing, not cloud computing. Twenty years earlier, almost the same thing was called a mainframe, or a mainframe cluster if you wanted your cloud to encompass multiple sites.
The only real change with the cloud is that now we're doing the same things but with cheap commodity hardware and cheap commodity software. For example, fault tolerance is now part of the standard Xen distribution, but if you wanted to roll it out a decade ago you needed to pay a company like Marathon a lot of money for their hypervisor. If you wanted to roll it out two decades ago, you bought a very expensive VMS system from DEC / Digital (later HP). Now, you can have two (or more) instances of the same VM running on separate sub-$1000 computers, and if one computer dies then people using it don't notice. Total cost of deployment is a couple of thousand dollars of equipment and a couple of hours of time.
It's the same thing with a lot of other technologies: it's not that they're especially novel, it's that now you can do something everywhere you want to, where previously you could only afford to do it everywhere you absolutely needed to.
There were also occasionally some story puzzles split over a lot of pages. You'd solve a puzzle and then the solution would be the next page number. You'd enter that and go onto the next part of the story.
I was very slightly too young for it, but when the BBC Micro was introduced they used to broadcast source code on a few of the Ceefax pages overnight. The idea was that schools could retrieve them using the teletext decoder and use them in lessons the next day.
I do remember when I was young enjoying the jokes and puzzles on Ceefax. Remote controls had a 'reveal' button and you could hide some parts of a page until this button was pressed, so pages contained jokes with the punchlines hidden and puzzles with the solutions hidden. Some film and book review pages also used this to hide spoilers.
It was generally the easiest way to get a TV schedule, especially once the newer TVs came in that did caching for pages (each of the pages would have its content updated very few seconds to scroll through things that were longer than a single page of text - newer TVs would record these and let you page through them without waiting for the next page to be broadcast). My mother still uses it to check the weather forecast.
I won't miss Ceefax - I've not used it for about a decade - but it was a very impressive technology for its time.
It's very simple: those are the terms of being incorporated into the standard. When standards like GSM are proposed, all of the involved parties (typically meaning all of the people who do a nontrivial amount of research in the field) meet and say 'we have a very good way of doing that' and if other people agree that it is as good as they say, then they get to put it in the standard in exchange for FRAND conditions. They benefit, because now everyone who implements the standard must license their patent, and everyone else benefits because they have a good standard that they can implement at a reasonable price.
Crappy patents have no special rules, because no one needs to license them. You can make a phone without licensing Apple's patents, but you can't make one without licensing Samsung's or Nokia's. It's not that their patents are more technical, it's that they are part of a published standard. If the standard allowed people to charge whatever they wanted for patent licenses, then it would be useless. The EU, for example, standardised on GSM for all 2G deployments. It was the required as a condition for all spectrum licenses. If a single company had been able to say 'actually, we changed our minds, and now anyone who implements this has to pay us $100/month for every cell plus $10/month for every client, then there would have been serious problems.
But who uses computers that way any more? Only really small business. Restaurants, plumbers, small stores, small law firms, etc.
Not even then. I just ordered a pizza from a local shop. The have a tracking system for each stage of pizza delivery (order processing, preparation, cooking, delivery) and shows you online where your order is in that sequence, and sends an automated SMS when the pizza goes out for delivery. They almost certainly use a GPS route finding system for their delivery people to take the pizzas, and may use a slightly more complex version to decide whether to send out multiple pizzas on a single run.
Small companies are often among the first to adopt new technology into their work flow, because hiring an extra employee is a massive expense for them, while tweaking an automated system is a lot cheaper.
And most of them are dismissed as suits without business savvy by Wall Street.
The reason CEOs are paid so much is that good ones are rare and they can make a massive difference to a company's performance. Unfortunately, no one seems to have yet worked out how to recognise the good ones (a good CEO for one company won't necessarily be able to run even a fairly similar one nearly as well).
Seems to me that the grant supporting the research came from the US so submission for publication in a US journal is pretty normal. I got some telescope time on a UK telescope and published in a UK journal as a result.
I don't think that normally holds. I published in US and EU journals while on a UK grant and will likely publish in both now I am on a US grant - the location of the journal rarely factors into where I publish, only the suitability of the subject matter and the reputation. Location only matters for conferences, and then it's a question of whether my interest in the conference plus my interest in visiting the location is greater than the effort involved in going there and justifying the expenses.
It is hard to say I was exporting science to the UK when they built the telescope and instrument I used
Would it be a question of exporting science to North Korea (for example) if they built the parts for the nuclear bomb you designed for them? I think most people (including courts) would say yes...
I know they are, I voted against them in the last election!
No, all distributed versioning systems use hashes for changesets. Fossil and Mercurial - distributed system systems designed by and for humans - use a monotonic counter for version numbers.
Without reading TFA (a GPL'd reference implementation of a new language? Good luck with that.) it's probably a git version. The designers of git come from a planet whose dominant species did not evolve a concept of linear orderings until quite late in their development and so identify sequences by unrelated names of each value.
Option 1 will just leave a load of rich sociopaths looking for something else to exploit.
The Witcher 2 being the most recent "big" game (meaning current gen/flashy graphics/$60 price point).
$42.49, DRM-free, on GOG, including an unlimited number of redownloads of the installer, for as long as GOG is in business, and an unlimited number of reinstalls from the installer as long as you still have hardware or emulators that can run it...
I wouldn't call the gog games "cutting edge,"
Most of them aren't, but they have had a few new titles available DRM-free on launch day. They seem to do well, if you can trust the 'most popular' ranking lists on GOG.