One thing that MS Office 2007 seriously improved is their equation editor. That does not really mean much, since the old equation editor was so incredibly crappy that pretty much anything would be an improvement, but I must say that the new Word actually has a semi decent equation editor. It does have several major annoyances, I did manage to break it several times by some simple use, and I there are several better options, but at least it is usable, reasonably fast, and most of the time it actually produces fairly good looking formulas.
Ooffice equation editor is pretty horrible: it's "user friendly" clicky interface is completely broken, to the point of being even worse than the original MS equation editor. Sure you can type in the formula editor code directly, that's what I always end up doing, and that is definitely better for someone used to TeX than the old MS equation editor, but most users will probably not even be willing to try it. And after all, why not just use TeX or MathML here, instead of introducing some completely new rather obscure code. Even the new MS equation editor lets you type in TeX commands for math symbols (although it does it using its completion mechanism, which is not without its problems).
For example, if the text is layed out in mutiple columns, selections cross columns instead of flowing down the column, which is not what is wanted.
I noticed that several times in pdfs that someone sent me. I believe one thing they had in common was that they were all created by some sort of wordprocessor. On the other hand, I have a fairly large collection of TUGBoat articles, TeX documentation, and other documents with multiple columns, and in all of them the selection works perfectly fine.
You also run into problems with ligatures. For example, fi can be combined into a single glyph and that is what gets copied and pasted instead of the two individual characters.
Hm, that does not seem to happen in any of the about 20 pdf files I tested. They all have ligatures in them, but the ligatures can be cut and pasted just fine.
It seems to me that both of the problems are caused by badly created documents, not by the pdf format itself.
...since PostScript can easily be modified as well. PDF is by far the best method for the above.
And what exactly makes pdf harder to modify than postscript?
I agree with you that pdf is better choice for sharing document than postscript, but the reason has nothing to do with how hard or easy are they to modify.
Those counties already have number of gravel roads, and as far as I can tell, they manage to keep them them in much better shape than their rural paved roads. I think they know what they are doing.
You are comparing gravel road and well paved road. I would much rather drive on a gravel road than a paved road full of huge potholes, or multiple layers of badly patched potholes.
So I think some of these areas may be jumping the gun on thinking this is a catch-all solution for their cash-strapped transportation departments, counties, and cities.
Most of Michigan (anything north of Flint, anyway) already has quite a good portion of gravel roads, and in my experience they are typically in much better shape than rural paved roads, especially in the spring. I would say the counties probably have plenty of experience and know what they are doing.
I remember the flame war about people's sig. Some dudes had this gigantic ASCII art sig files, and people were complaining about one-line posts with 20-line sigs, how the bandwidth were wasted, etc.
The main reason why MS did not implement the Wordperfect "Reveal Codes" feature was, if I remember correctly, the difference in the two file formats. While WP file did actually have the formatting codes embedded in the text, MS had most of the formatting information at the beginning of the file, with pointers into the actual text, which then followed the formatting information. You could actually get the plain text without formatting from a corrupted.doc file by using a text editor to strip the beginning and end of the file. It would be too much work to do any "reveal codes" mode at that time.
Now that they switched to xml, they could theoretically implement such mode easily. In fact, in theory at least, you should be able to open the xml file in any text editor. However, if you look at the xml structure of a typical word document, you realize that the stuff was never meant to be edited by hand, its just too much of a mess.
In which case TeX is again the preferred tool to use, since the publisher can simply provide a class file with some basic instruction on how to use it, and the authors/editors can come up with a well formatted camera ready document simply by following the (usually one page of) instructions.
The publishers probably just copy-paste into word when they get the tex submissions anyway.
Actually, most publishers of math journals require the submissions to be in LaTeX, as they use LaTeX to typeset the journal, and if they allow Word submissions, they run them through doc2tex, or have a secretary retype them in TeX if they are too messy for direct conversion. Generally, submissions in Word are considered to be a huge PITA, and if you ever tried to convert a poorly formatted Word document to TeX, you know why.
Lot of RIA are used internally inside companies. We are just migrating to a new webmail software, and we were told very clearly "if you use IE, install firefox, the application currently does not support IE".
Embedding audio, video, SWF and 3D in PDFs is a truly retarded notion
Why? Just because your favorite pdf reader does not support it, you label it retarded? That's like when windows apologists say that virtual desktops and sloppy focus are retarded.
I hope that at some point of time free pdf readers will start supporting at least some of these features and I will be able to get rid of adobe reader.
Actually, there are many really cool mathematical visualizations done in VRML. The main problem with VRML was, imho, that the plugins were really clunky and never really worked that well. In fact, at the time VRML was introduced, the whole plugin architecture in most browsers was pretty simple, and even installing plugins was not easy. Finding, dowloading and installing a VRML plugin wasn't any easier than installing a standalone application for 3D, and the application probably had better functionality.
If this thing is well done, and easy to find and install, it can make quite a difference in areas such as mathematics or chemistry instruction.
So that I don't have to make my multivariable calculus students download and install new applications on their computers, so that I don't have to convince the IT folks at our school to install bunch of new applications that only a handful of students will use in the labs and classrooms, and I don't have to find an application that would run on all of my students' computers, whichever OS they use, the labs that mostly run windows, and my linux laptop.
You can use a good programming editor when posting, something with syntax highlighting and parensbcwsmilies matching to keep your smilies properly balanced.
I guess the way the infection works is you put so many smilies to make the message look like some sort of lisp code. The IM software gets confused, starts a lisp interpreter to make some sense of it, the unbalanced parenthesis cause a buffer overflow in the parser,...
I feel OOo is slow both on Linux as well as Windows. Most likely this is due to the bloat and mindless copying of MS Office features. I have a question: Is it possible to weed out the redundant or useless features in OOo and make it sleek and quick? Since this is completely open source, theoretically this should be possible.
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Unless you feed your cows mineral oil products or coal, greenhouse gas emissions from cows should not be much of a problem.
One thing that MS Office 2007 seriously improved is their equation editor. That does not really mean much, since the old equation editor was so incredibly crappy that pretty much anything would be an improvement, but I must say that the new Word actually has a semi decent equation editor. It does have several major annoyances, I did manage to break it several times by some simple use, and I there are several better options, but at least it is usable, reasonably fast, and most of the time it actually produces fairly good looking formulas.
Ooffice equation editor is pretty horrible: it's "user friendly" clicky interface is completely broken, to the point of being even worse than the original MS equation editor. Sure you can type in the formula editor code directly, that's what I always end up doing, and that is definitely better for someone used to TeX than the old MS equation editor, but most users will probably not even be willing to try it. And after all, why not just use TeX or MathML here, instead of introducing some completely new rather obscure code. Even the new MS equation editor lets you type in TeX commands for math symbols (although it does it using its completion mechanism, which is not without its problems).
For example, if the text is layed out in mutiple columns, selections cross columns instead of flowing down the column, which is not what is wanted.
I noticed that several times in pdfs that someone sent me. I believe one thing they had in common was that they were all created by some sort of wordprocessor. On the other hand, I have a fairly large collection of TUGBoat articles, TeX documentation, and other documents with multiple columns, and in all of them the selection works perfectly fine.
You also run into problems with ligatures. For example, fi can be combined into a single glyph and that is what gets copied and pasted instead of the two individual characters.
Hm, that does not seem to happen in any of the about 20 pdf files I tested. They all have ligatures in them, but the ligatures can be cut and pasted just fine.
It seems to me that both of the problems are caused by badly created documents, not by the pdf format itself.
...since PostScript can easily be modified as well. PDF is by far the best method for the above.
And what exactly makes pdf harder to modify than postscript?
I agree with you that pdf is better choice for sharing document than postscript, but the reason has nothing to do with how hard or easy are they to modify.
Those counties already have number of gravel roads, and as far as I can tell, they manage to keep them them in much better shape than their rural paved roads. I think they know what they are doing.
You are comparing gravel road and well paved road. I would much rather drive on a gravel road than a paved road full of huge potholes, or multiple layers of badly patched potholes.
So I think some of these areas may be jumping the gun on thinking this is a catch-all solution for their cash-strapped transportation departments, counties, and cities.
Most of Michigan (anything north of Flint, anyway) already has quite a good portion of gravel roads, and in my experience they are typically in much better shape than rural paved roads, especially in the spring. I would say the counties probably have plenty of experience and know what they are doing.
I did not know that. Do you have a source for this claim? Is that why the product rule is also called the Leibnitz rule?
I remember the flame war about people's sig. Some dudes had this gigantic ASCII art sig files, and people were complaining about one-line posts with 20-line sigs, how the bandwidth were wasted, etc.
Yeah, the old days of warlording...
Fool! Kibo IS Google!
The main reason why MS did not implement the Wordperfect "Reveal Codes" feature was, if I remember correctly, the difference in the two file formats. While WP file did actually have the formatting codes embedded in the text, MS had most of the formatting information at the beginning of the file, with pointers into the actual text, which then followed the formatting information. You could actually get the plain text without formatting from a corrupted .doc file by using a text editor to strip the beginning and end of the file. It would be too much work to do any "reveal codes" mode at that time.
Now that they switched to xml, they could theoretically implement such mode easily. In fact, in theory at least, you should be able to open the xml file in any text editor. However, if you look at the xml structure of a typical word document, you realize that the stuff was never meant to be edited by hand, its just too much of a mess.
I think it means exactly what he think it means. I think that what you mean is it is much harder to learn.
Me too. :)
In which case TeX is again the preferred tool to use, since the publisher can simply provide a class file with some basic instruction on how to use it, and the authors/editors can come up with a well formatted camera ready document simply by following the (usually one page of) instructions.
The publishers probably just copy-paste into word when they get the tex submissions anyway.
Actually, most publishers of math journals require the submissions to be in LaTeX, as they use LaTeX to typeset the journal, and if they allow Word submissions, they run them through doc2tex, or have a secretary retype them in TeX if they are too messy for direct conversion. Generally, submissions in Word are considered to be a huge PITA, and if you ever tried to convert a poorly formatted Word document to TeX, you know why.
Lot of RIA are used internally inside companies. We are just migrating to a new webmail software, and we were told very clearly "if you use IE, install firefox, the application currently does not support IE".
Embedding audio, video, SWF and 3D in PDFs is a truly retarded notion
Why? Just because your favorite pdf reader does not support it, you label it retarded? That's like when windows apologists say that virtual desktops and sloppy focus are retarded.
I hope that at some point of time free pdf readers will start supporting at least some of these features and I will be able to get rid of adobe reader.
True or not, i don't know, but i do prefer Koff over anything else i've tasted.
Hm, I was king of interested in Koff after reading this, deciding I have to try it some times, but then you wrote:
Foster's is damn good as well.
If Koff is anything like Foster's, I can happily live without it.
And we'll all have our own X-Ray laser pointer.
Awesome! You won't be able to see what you are pointing at, but it can still burn out your eyes.
Actually, there are many really cool mathematical visualizations done in VRML. The main problem with VRML was, imho, that the plugins were really clunky and never really worked that well. In fact, at the time VRML was introduced, the whole plugin architecture in most browsers was pretty simple, and even installing plugins was not easy. Finding, dowloading and installing a VRML plugin wasn't any easier than installing a standalone application for 3D, and the application probably had better functionality.
If this thing is well done, and easy to find and install, it can make quite a difference in areas such as mathematics or chemistry instruction.
So that I don't have to make my multivariable calculus students download and install new applications on their computers, so that I don't have to convince the IT folks at our school to install bunch of new applications that only a handful of students will use in the labs and classrooms, and I don't have to find an application that would run on all of my students' computers, whichever OS they use, the labs that mostly run windows, and my linux laptop.
Hey, I'll sell you my crap. Cheap!
You can use a good programming editor when posting, something with syntax highlighting and parensbcwsmilies matching to keep your smilies properly balanced.
I guess the way the infection works is you put so many smilies to make the message look like some sort of lisp code. The IM software gets confused, starts a lisp interpreter to make some sense of it, the unbalanced parenthesis cause a buffer overflow in the parser, ...
I feel OOo is slow both on Linux as well as Windows. Most likely this is due to the bloat and mindless copying of MS Office features. I have a question: Is it possible to weed out the redundant or useless features in OOo and make it sleek and quick? Since this is completely open source, theoretically this should be possible.
It has been done long time ago. It's called pico.
Because it's there?