Because Linux on the desktop is really unpleasant for most people, particularly novices? Even on Fedora with the default settings, you have to set your HTTP proxy in many different places. (Once in GConf, once in Mozilla, once for the RedHat Network, and god forbid you start Konqueror -- that's a separate setting too.)
And exactly how often do novices set their HTTP proxy? Your average novice probably has a computer connected to a cable or dsl modem, maybe with a Linksys or Netgear router in between. No funny network settings for them regardless of OS.
Don't forget this is Utah. They consider starbucks.com an abomination.
Have you had any starbucks coffee recently? Comes pretty close to my definition of abomination. (Although I am ashamed to say I really like any of their fancy or frozen stuff).
We would never dream of expecting an author to know what LaTeX was, let alone submit in it.
Wow, what kind of publisher do you work for? I hope not one that publishes science journals. LaTex has a little learning curve, but if your authors can't figure that out, I'm not sure I would put much faith in what they have to write. If someone needs to stick with a much worse system than LaTex because they are too lazy to learn or even look it up, that is just sad.
>I'm not sure if you noticed, but when you don't >reward people for their efforts, they stop trying >(see U.S.S.R.)
Exactly whose efforts are the current copyright laws rewarding? Surely not the artists as they are getting screwed most of the time too. The RIAA perhaps? Considering their efforts consist of suing people, screwing artists, and promoting bland, homoginized crap, it might not be a bad thing if we stop rewarding their efforts.
Wow, what kind of science do you do? I've seen people in astronomy plot with a lot of things (I'm a pgplot guy myself), but I've never seen anyone use Excel. If you need to do any real plotting (or god forbid actual number crunching, Excel would be terribly lacking. Not to mention that it isn't on the Suns or GNU/Linux machines where lots of actual science gets done (although it is on the OSX laptops a lot of people seem to be moving to).
And, if you do science with any math, MS Office is totally worthless. Latex all the way there.
Mostly it was Tetris Attack for the SNES for me. When I played a lot of that there were tiles in the bathroom that I kept rearanging in my head to make matches like in the game.
We won't talk about what too much Goldeneye made me think.
>Tell someone 'Einstein was wrong' and you would >probably get beaten badly even before you say a >word about evidence.
Sorry, but that just isn't true. Look at recent physics papers http://xxx.lanl.gov or go to a physics talk, and lots of physicists are willing to give serious consideration to things that go pretty far against Einstein's theories. And, once one of those actually does better with the data, it will supercede relativity. Not to mention that lots of gravitational wave stuff is stated a test of relativity. You don't test things that you would never be willing to accept could be false.
That is where science is different that intelligent design or creationism.
The installer for the demo of Halo gives a nice error message about only running on Windows (with some list of supported versions) when run under wine in Fedora Core 1. So that could be a case of a program actually checking (since it did open up a window of its own to give the error message). Of course that is the closest thing to sucess I've ever had with wine.
>Then there's copyediting, formatting and >typesetting, preparation of figures for >printing (most scientists still haven't >realized that their RGB figures look very >different when converted to CMYK). Then there >are printing costs, and costs for formatting >papers to html and pdf, and costs for web hosting.
Actually, in fields like physics, astronomy (which I'm a grad student in), math, and hopefully lots of others, most papers are in tex or latex anyway, so all the formatting and typesetting is handled by the authors.
>Why do we continue to classify the shape of the >Universe? Realistically, if we can not define the >shape by placing it within a totally viewable >package...
Actually, you don't need to view something from the outside to talk about its shape. Just like in the case of the surface of the earth, the shape is largely about the behavior of parallel lines. In the case of the earth's surface, parallel lines (such as lines of latitude) can meet at the poles. For the universe, the parallel lines are light rays. And since astronomy is mostly about light rays coming from very far away, this shape stuff does have serious implications for some of us.
>Think, for example, mail reading and web browsing. Perhaps photo viewing or editing, faxing, page layout, management of multiple login sessions visually, etc.
I'm with you for the web browsing and photo stuff needing a GUI. But I'm a pretty big fan of pine for my email (and latex does some pretty good non-gui page layout). Basically, except for when you really need it (like the photos), command line and shell stuff is always faster once you pass a little learning curve.
That may not be bragging and unwillingness to try something new. That may just be someone who had an adverse reaction to Fortran and now dislikes whitespace sensitive language (a position I completely understand).
You did not seriously use the words 'solid' and 'DirectX' in the same sentence, did you? Because on the rare occasions when I have booted my girlfriend's laptop into WindowsXP to play diablo 2, directx has given me more trouble and been less stable than almost anything GNU/Linux has thrown at me.
That isn't totally fair. Some people (like me) read, but take really good care of my books. Most books that I have read (except for a few text books that got very heavy use) look perfectly new (no folded pages or bent spine). Multiple readings may cause more wear, but there is almost always something else that I haven't read that I can read instead of rereading a book.
I was trying to remember what the first thing I downloaded was, and think it was also some faith no more or mr. bungle b-side too. Music really was a lot more fun then.
It is definately still Latex in both physics and astronomy. I would hope that CS people get to use it too, but I don't have any experience there. And it is significantly superior to any word processor I've ever seen.
You aren't actually suggesting that Dell supports the computers that it sells with windows, are you? Back in the dark days when the old Dell I have still occasionally got booted into windows, my modem died. When I called Dell (it was still under warrenty then), they refused to replace it because they couldn't do "online trouble shooting" since I had WIn2K on it. How did they expect to do online trouble shooting on a computer with a broken modem regardless of the OS? With that kind of support, I don't think Dell would have any trouble providing the same level of support with for linux that they do for windows.
You do realize that your average athalon can easily double as a heater, don't you? I can't imagine that any Intel technology can keep up with the heat produced by the dual athalon machine in my office without melting the plastic in the case.
Last I checked, the man pages of nearly all software show the authors' names. And most of the time, it is a program's web page that people need to go to for help pr useful info, and those are always filled with names of people who worked on it. I don't see why we need much more than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, you got me there. But considering that I posted that before my first cup of coffee, I think I came pretty close.
Wow, what kind of publisher do you work for? I hope not one that publishes science journals. LaTex has a little learning curve, but if your authors can't figure that out, I'm not sure I would put much faith in what they have to write. If someone needs to stick with a much worse system than LaTex because they are too lazy to learn or even look it up, that is just sad.
I'll not only second (or third or fourth) gnuplot, but will give a link to a tutorial I gave on it a little while ago.
unix plotting tutorial
>I'm not sure if you noticed, but when you don't >reward people for their efforts, they stop trying >(see U.S.S.R.)
Exactly whose efforts are the current copyright laws rewarding? Surely not the artists as they are getting screwed most of the time too. The RIAA perhaps? Considering their efforts consist of suing people, screwing artists, and promoting bland, homoginized crap, it might not be a bad thing if we stop rewarding their efforts.
Wow, what kind of science do you do? I've seen people in astronomy plot with a lot of things (I'm a pgplot guy myself), but I've never seen anyone use Excel. If you need to do any real plotting (or god forbid actual number crunching, Excel would be terribly lacking. Not to mention that it isn't on the Suns or GNU/Linux machines where lots of actual science gets done (although it is on the OSX laptops a lot of people seem to be moving to).
And, if you do science with any math, MS Office is totally worthless. Latex all the way there.
Mostly it was Tetris Attack for the SNES for me. When I played a lot of that there were tiles in the bathroom that I kept rearanging in my head to make matches like in the game.
We won't talk about what too much Goldeneye made me think.
>Tell someone 'Einstein was wrong' and you would >probably get beaten badly even before you say a >word about evidence.
Sorry, but that just isn't true. Look at recent physics papers http://xxx.lanl.gov or go to a physics talk, and lots of physicists are willing to give serious consideration to things that go pretty far against Einstein's theories. And, once one of those actually does better with the data, it will supercede relativity. Not to mention that lots of gravitational wave stuff is stated a test of relativity. You don't test things that you would never be willing to accept could be false.
That is where science is different that intelligent design or creationism.
The installer for the demo of Halo gives a nice error message about only running on Windows (with some list of supported versions) when run under wine in Fedora Core 1. So that could be a case of a program actually checking (since it did open up a window of its own to give the error message). Of course that is the closest thing to sucess I've ever had with wine.
>Then there's copyediting, formatting and
>typesetting, preparation of figures for
>printing (most scientists still haven't
>realized that their RGB figures look very
>different when converted to CMYK). Then there
>are printing costs, and costs for formatting
>papers to html and pdf, and costs for web hosting.
Actually, in fields like physics, astronomy (which I'm a grad student in), math, and hopefully lots of others, most papers are in tex or latex anyway, so all the formatting and typesetting is handled by the authors.
>Why do we continue to classify the shape of the >Universe? Realistically, if we can not define the >shape by placing it within a totally viewable >package...
Actually, you don't need to view something from the outside to talk about its shape. Just like in the case of the surface of the earth, the shape is largely about the behavior of parallel lines. In the case of the earth's surface, parallel lines (such as lines of latitude) can meet at the poles. For the universe, the parallel lines are light rays. And since astronomy is mostly about light rays coming from very far away, this shape stuff does have serious implications for some of us.
>Think, for example, mail reading and web browsing. Perhaps photo viewing or editing, faxing, page layout, management of multiple login sessions visually, etc.
I'm with you for the web browsing and photo stuff needing a GUI. But I'm a pretty big fan of pine for my email (and latex does some pretty good non-gui page layout). Basically, except for when you really need it (like the photos), command line and shell stuff is always faster once you pass a little learning curve.
That may not be bragging and unwillingness to try something new. That may just be someone who had an adverse reaction to Fortran and now dislikes whitespace sensitive language (a position I completely understand).
You did not seriously use the words 'solid' and 'DirectX' in the same sentence, did you? Because on the rare occasions when I have booted my girlfriend's laptop into WindowsXP to play diablo 2, directx has given me more trouble and been less stable than almost anything GNU/Linux has thrown at me.
That isn't totally fair. Some people (like me) read, but take really good care of my books. Most books that I have read (except for a few text books that got very heavy use) look perfectly new (no folded pages or bent spine). Multiple readings may cause more wear, but there is almost always something else that I haven't read that I can read instead of rereading a book.
I was trying to remember what the first thing I downloaded was, and think it was also some faith no more or mr. bungle b-side too. Music really was a lot more fun then.
>but what happens when you want to view a quicktime video? Or an AVI? Or watch a DVD? Or read an Excel document?
Mplayer does the first three of those things. And OpenOffice takes care of the Excel stuff pretty well.
I bought the TurboGrafx-16. And even the stupid CD thing for it. Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest.
It is definately still Latex in both physics and astronomy. I would hope that CS people get to use it too, but I don't have any experience there. And it is significantly superior to any word processor I've ever seen.
You aren't actually suggesting that Dell supports the computers that it sells with windows, are you? Back in the dark days when the old Dell I have still occasionally got booted into windows, my modem died. When I called Dell (it was still under warrenty then), they refused to replace it because they couldn't do "online trouble shooting" since I had WIn2K on it. How did they expect to do online trouble shooting on a computer with a broken modem regardless of the OS? With that kind of support, I don't think Dell would have any trouble providing the same level of support with for linux that they do for windows.
>when someone mentions Stallman or Raymond, do
>youimmediately think of code they've written, or an
>image of them jumping up and down on a soapbox?
Maybe it's me, but emacs comes to mind with Stallman.
You do realize that your average athalon can easily double as a heater, don't you? I can't imagine that any Intel technology can keep up with the heat produced by the dual athalon machine in my office without melting the plastic in the case.
Or, if you are especially masochistic, you could try the emacs AIM mode (emacs-tnt).
Last I checked, the man pages of nearly all software show the authors' names. And most of the time, it is a program's web page that people need to go to for help pr useful info, and those are always filled with names of people who worked on it. I don't see why we need much more than that.