The one argument I've heard against it is that it can't do animations
One of my happiest moments in grad school (which shows just how depressing grad school is if something like this makes me happy) was learning how to add animations in LaTeX Beamer.
pdfanim lets you add animations in. The only downside is that xpdf doesn't currently support them (but it does fail gracefully). I've done several talks using this, both on my own laptop and on random machines at conferences and it always works flawlessly (wish I could say the same about my part of the presentation, but at least when you know the tech will work, you can concentrate on the more important parts).
As long as it is a well-behaved imap server, there is no reason that they need to support pine. It will work. Of course lots of things that should work don't, but still. And maybe they assume the remaining pine users don't need directions since they are probably the type to figure it out themselves.
I know once this shows up on my account, I'll try using pine with it (and I'll certainly put any funny issues that come up on my website).
But, just for the record, pine is sort of dead and the new version of it (alpine) seems to be in pretty good shape even though it isn't up to a 1.0 release yet.
Reading Stallman's rant, I'm surprised you could find 17 warm bodies that'd put up with his bullshit let alone 17 developers.
I've been working on his website, http://stallman.org/ for the past 4 years, and despite all the stories you hear, I've found Richard to be a very nice person to work with. He is very appreciative of help and doesn't micromanage at all. So I sometimes wonder if he was hard to work with in the past and people never quite forget old stories or what.
And before anyone says anything, yes, I know most of the site is ugly and non-conforming html. We do try to fix things, just very slowly.
Yes, it just seems to hang with seamonkey (64 bit) and FC6.
That's really weird. I've paid my comcast bill on a Mac with Firefox once or twice and using Firefox on Gentoo many times with no trouble. Maybe it is the 64 bit thing that is messing you up because Firefox (and non-windows systems) have never been a problem for me.
Why are there never winges about 'MS Office just doesn't render Open Office format docs properly' or 'MS is rubbish because the tab key behaves differently to OO'?
On the rare occasions when I have to touch MS OFFICE I tend to complain that it doesn't do things the way LaTeX and emacs do them. But that probably doesn't count.
If memory serves me right, that's only partly true. As I recall, a lot of CUPS is built around Postscript (Yech) handling software. Postscript is a proprietary protocol/format owned lock stock and barrel by Adobe. There was some sort of odd arrangement that allowed CUPS users to get around having to pay royalties on Postscript as used in Linux. Am I imaging all this?
As I understood it, postscript is fully documented and open standard (as is pdf for the most part). Ghostview is a very old free interpreter for it and they don't need anything funny to avoid royalties. Just like C or FORTRAN, you can go out and buy a postscript book and write postscript programs (or a postscript interpreter like ghostview). Not sure why you would want to, but you can.
Re:This phone is a 2 HAND device vs 1 HAND device
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Apple iPhone Dissected
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· Score: 1
A: You can't. They all have this same characteristic - whether it's a stylus (Treo) or a Crackberry, they all require two hands for effective operation.
Actually, the Motorola Q is pretty easy to use with one hand. And I imagine any other non-touchscreen windows mobile phone would be similar.
That being said, Windows Mobile 5 is a flaky piece of crap (and this is coming from someone who really likes their Q). But it is a flaky piece of crap that you can easily use with one hand.
Re:tivoisation
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GPLv3 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't see the benefit in forcing them to open up their hardware just because they want to use GPLv3 software on it.
No one is asking them to open up their hardware. As far as I'm concerned they can do anything they want with their hardware. The problem is that they want to lock MY hardware and won't give me the key. I purchased a series 2 TiVo. I understand that software has licenses so I don't own the software when I buy it in a way. But the TiVo box is a physical item that I gave a store money for. The only owner of that box sitting under my TV is me (and I guess my wife).
Both ID and evolution are theories, or they wouldn't have the words "The theory of" before them.
I think you have some trouble with your definition of the word 'theory' there. Scientists use a slightly different definition than the normal definition. ID people seem to "accidentally" get them mixed up all the time and want the public to make the same mistake. I have no idea which side of that you fall on, and am not trying to claim either for you.
but case-sensitivity is eminently useful, and only ancient operating systems ignore case, so we keep it
Useful for what?
As a FORTRAN programmer, a non-case sensitive file system is really annoying. It one one of the most annoying parts of moving programs to OS X. Typically in FORTRAN, filename.F is an un-preprocessed source file and filename.f is the same file after it has been preprocessed and is ready to go to the compiler. I'm sure you can imagine what a mess you get when you try to build something that expects things to work that way on a non-case sensitive file system.
Even in grad school, PhD students surf the web (looking at shoe stores, reading their email) on their laptops during class. Even in small seminar classes, not lectures, ostensibly built around discussion. I'm convinced that no matter what age or maturity level or intellect the students have, laptops are a productivity killer.
To be fair, that isn't limited to students. Usually if I'm at a conference and sit at the back of the room, about a third of the laptops have people taking notes or something related to the talk, about a third are checking email or surfing the web, and the final third are writing the talk or making the slides that they need to present later that day. And many of these people are professors, not students. (Of course that breakdown of numbers is pretty much made up since I've never actually counted, but those are the categories I've seen, and I doubt the real numbers are that far off. Maybe the number writing their talk is a slight exaturation.)
I like maxima quite a bit! For certain operations, it is MUCH faster than Mathematica & other commercial Computer Algebra Systems (CASs). (The most recent example that springs to mind was a relatively simple (symbolic) cardonic equation. Maxima spit it out instantaneously.)
Speed isn't the only great thing about maxima. The LaTeX output maxima provides for equations is an awesome feature that wasn't in anything else as of the last time I checked.
I have to admit, you sort of got me there. I downloaded the spec. I even started reading it. I could tell there was some potentially good stuff in there, but I didn't get through that much of it before moving on to skimming.
Although in my defense, the fact that when I read it, the closest thing there was to a compiler for it was an implementation of it that runs over the java virtual machine. And while that may be a good thing for language research, it isn't all that attractive from a numerical performance point of view.
I agree, cosmetics are not the only thing that matters in a language (after all, I use enough FORTRAN 77 that it would be sort of perverse for me to care only about a language being pretty).
All that parallel loop stuff is potentially very interesting. I work mainly with a parallel MHD code. If we could get rid of all or most of the MPI statements from the code it would dramatically simplify the code. I spent most of Monday hunting down a stupid little MPI bug.
So, from my perspective, Fortress is mainly interesting for its potential to simplify numerical code. Unicode math is a minor point against it since that would seem to complicate code. But if they really can deal with splitting loops and arrays across processors in a transparent way, that could make up for nearly any shortcomings. As long as the performance is as good as had done MPI using F77 of course. As for that, I think we have a bit of a wait to see how Fortress shapes up. And I will definitely keep a hopeful eye on it.
For example by using Unicode Fortress has finally a charatcter set matching the ones used by scientists.
I do a lot of my work in FORTRAN 77, but I'm interested in programming languages, and tend to switch my smaller tools around from one language to the next (currently I like Python a lot). So I probably fall right into the class of people who Fortress is interesting to. But the idea of Unicode using programming languages seems like a really bad idea for a language that is trying to replace a numerical workhorse. The last time I looked at Fortress, I seem to remember that if you don't use a unicode aware editor, there was some LaTeX-like way to input math also, but even that seems a little heavy weight for numerical programming.
I guess what it comes down to is that of all the failing of FORTRAN, the fact that its math is less pretty than LaTeX does not seem like an important one. I know Fortress has some other features, but the whole pretty math character thing seems to be the one that comes up most.
PDF doesn't always cut it as one often uses animations.
I use animations in pdfs (made from LaTeX) for all my presentations. pdfanim is pretty damned reliable. Sadly the results don't quite work with xpdf at the moment, but Acrobat or Acrobat Reader have been available for every talk I've given.
...they are legally required to sue Trent Reznor for copyright infringement or risk losing their copyright.
I think you've got trademarks and copyright mixed there. It is only trademarks which have a requirement to defend them. Copyright has no such requirement.
Do current Roombas pick up pet hair well? And do pets like them?
From what I've seen the Roomba does a decent job with cat hair (although I still need to use a real vacuum occasionally). The cat seems able to coexist with it although he seems a bit suspicious of it as these pictures show.
I'm impressed. Even imagemagick seems to have trouble with that image. identify just sits there using around 40% of my cpu (but basically no memory).
john@ganon ~ $ time identify dontloadthis.jpg
dontloadthis.jpg JPEG 20000x20000 20000x20000+0+0 DirectClass 8-bit 964b 39.920u 2:02
identify: Corrupt JPEG data: premature end of data segment `dontloadthis.jpg'.
identify: Corrupt JPEG data: bad Huffman code `dontloadthis.jpg'.
real 2m11.653s
user 0m23.433s
sys 0m17.189s
Two minutes is an extremely long time for something that doesn't even try to display the image. Usually identify is extremely fast, even for gigantic images.
Two years ago when I blew out my sound card on my laptop, Dell told me to take out my hard drive before I sent it into them.
If they didn't ask me to do that I would have wiped it anyways. I don't like the idea that someone could see my data.
I completely agree. I would not be happy sending my data to someone. But in my case I had onsite service so I didn't have to send them anything (and it was a desktop which was sort of big and heavy to mail anyway). They were supposed to send me a new Ethernet card at which time I would give them a broken one back.
Dell pulled the same thing with me a long time ago. I had a Pentium 2 running Red Hat 7 or so and Windows 2000. The Ethernet card died while under warranty. Dell support refused to replace it because I didn't have the factory installed OS (Windows 98). So it may be more of an running any unapproved OS, not just GNU/Linux.
I went through several levels of tech support before they finally told me that if I had a problem with the warranty, I could talk to their legal department. I decided that the best solution was to not do business with Dell anymore.
This was while ago, so it is possible that they have changed their policies for personal support (not business where I hear they are better), but I doubt it.
People on Slashdot, such as yourself, seem to forget that it's possible for someone "on the same side" to have divergent positions on tangential topics.
I have no problem with dissenting opinions. Hell, I think a big part of what's wrong with the party politics in America these days is that dissent is discouraged. But what I do have a problem with is when someone gives their opinion and then says "Oh, but I'm not a *" where * is pretty closely related to the opinion they just gave (sort of like when Colbert says that he isn't a Republican on his show).
He downloaded material without bothering to make sure that what he was downloading was what he needed in order to play the music.
But you're ignoring the fact that the limitation he ran into was not a technological limitation or a lack of drivers or anything innocent like that. His problem was that he didn't think that he was buying a product that was intentionally crippled. Normally, we tend to think that things we buy are not intentionally broken by the manufacturer or seller, but with music that is no longer the case.
Note: I am not a record-industry shill, I'm just sick of people justifying their actions in order to clear their consciences.
Just because you say you aren't something doesn't make it true. You want someone else to take responsibility for their actions, then you should take responsibility for your words (and what they can get you labeled as).
Slashdot Mirror
pdfanim lets you add animations in. The only downside is that xpdf doesn't currently support them (but it does fail gracefully). I've done several talks using this, both on my own laptop and on random machines at conferences and it always works flawlessly (wish I could say the same about my part of the presentation, but at least when you know the tech will work, you can concentrate on the more important parts).
As long as it is a well-behaved imap server, there is no reason that they need to support pine. It will work. Of course lots of things that should work don't, but still. And maybe they assume the remaining pine users don't need directions since they are probably the type to figure it out themselves.
I know once this shows up on my account, I'll try using pine with it (and I'll certainly put any funny issues that come up on my website).
But, just for the record, pine is sort of dead and the new version of it (alpine) seems to be in pretty good shape even though it isn't up to a 1.0 release yet.
And before anyone says anything, yes, I know most of the site is ugly and non-conforming html. We do try to fix things, just very slowly.
That being said, Windows Mobile 5 is a flaky piece of crap (and this is coming from someone who really likes their Q). But it is a flaky piece of crap that you can easily use with one hand.
Although in my defense, the fact that when I read it, the closest thing there was to a compiler for it was an implementation of it that runs over the java virtual machine. And while that may be a good thing for language research, it isn't all that attractive from a numerical performance point of view.
All that parallel loop stuff is potentially very interesting. I work mainly with a parallel MHD code. If we could get rid of all or most of the MPI statements from the code it would dramatically simplify the code. I spent most of Monday hunting down a stupid little MPI bug.
So, from my perspective, Fortress is mainly interesting for its potential to simplify numerical code. Unicode math is a minor point against it since that would seem to complicate code. But if they really can deal with splitting loops and arrays across processors in a transparent way, that could make up for nearly any shortcomings. As long as the performance is as good as had done MPI using F77 of course. As for that, I think we have a bit of a wait to see how Fortress shapes up. And I will definitely keep a hopeful eye on it.
I guess what it comes down to is that of all the failing of FORTRAN, the fact that its math is less pretty than LaTeX does not seem like an important one. I know Fortress has some other features, but the whole pretty math character thing seems to be the one that comes up most.
Dell pulled the same thing with me a long time ago. I had a Pentium 2 running Red Hat 7 or so and Windows 2000. The Ethernet card died while under warranty. Dell support refused to replace it because I didn't have the factory installed OS (Windows 98). So it may be more of an running any unapproved OS, not just GNU/Linux.
I went through several levels of tech support before they finally told me that if I had a problem with the warranty, I could talk to their legal department. I decided that the best solution was to not do business with Dell anymore.
This was while ago, so it is possible that they have changed their policies for personal support (not business where I hear they are better), but I doubt it.