Memorizing multiplication table was always outdated. On the other hand, understanding how numbers and arithmetic operations work and what can you do with them is a skill that cannot be replaced by a calculator or computer. Gaining this understanding can, IMHO, be aided by a use of calculator or computer, however that is not what seems to be happening at most of our schools.
Is the son going to be GPL'd? In other words, can I reuse half of his genetic information to produce my own version? Will you provide an access to the source?
Please don't! Make it send all sorts of hints to the window manager if you want, but don't let the application take over the window manager's job. Make it possible for the window manager to ignore those hints if user wants to configure it that way. Don't let GIMP become another OpenOffice.
I have seen the same. My previous job was at a community college, where I had two computers on my desk. One of them was brand new fairly high power machine running windows XP. This was the official machine I was not allowed to mess with, and I needed it to access the college intranet, which required internet explorer. Basically I used it twice each semester, once at the beginning to download rosters for my classes, once at the end of semester to turn in grades. Next to it was the machine I used to do the rest of my work: at least 6 years old machine that was officially discarded and which they gave to me so I could run Debian. I didn't complain, I was glad they let me plug it into the network. I wasn't the only one with similar setup, the chair of the chemistry department also had two machines, except that she used Windows 95 on her work machine. Needless to say, the college was very proud that all their faculty have brand new very capable machines on their desks.
There was at least one paper written that considers a possibility of such doomsday very real. It was titled "The Black Ball", published by someone named Gustav Meyerink.
The only explanation is that campus administrators are zombies.
Yes, but that's no news. I mean, doesn't everybody already know that? I didn't know NERF guns worked on them, though. I think I will get one for my office, and carry it with me to meetings.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
on
X Power Tools
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· Score: 1
X is as much a defacto standard as.doc,...
Er, no. Unlike.doc, the X11 is fully documented, and there exist multiple implementations, both free and commercial, both open and closed source. If you want to write another implementation, you don't have to reverse engineer anything, you just read the documentation. It does not have an official stamp of approval of some international standard body, but it is open and documented....this is Slashdot, we know the flaws are there...
That may be true, except that we don't seem to agree exactly on what the flaws are. If you read the posts here, the few posts that actually list specific flaws seem to each come up with a different list.
Let's start. Let's make a development program for a replacement for X that will correctly process the hooks for a few popular toolkits (QT,GTK+) and work from there...
Anybody knows what happened to the Berlin project? Their web page seems to be gone.
That's simple. The application windows will be created, but not managed. Which may be a problem if the application has several windows that have to be used at the same time, since one of the windows will probably cover at least parts of the other windows, and without a window manager it will be rather hard to access the other windows and bring them on top, or move windows out of the way. However, if you have an application that has only one window, or has a one main window and occasionally pops up a dialog window, that is used and closed quickly, you have no problem. I used to have a somewhat underpowered computer that I used to run starlogo. In order to minimize memory use, I would run starlogo directly on top of X. The computer would run just a very minimal system, X and starlogo. It worked perfectly well.
Second, this whole thing about universities being a bastion for free thought and speech is some sort of whack job revisionist expectation that has only existed in the western nations in the last 50 years or so.
Not true, if you look at some major European universities in the past, you can clearly find the same thought in early 1800's, and, in fact, some aspects of it go back all the way to 14th and 15th century. And no, at that time universities were not considered to be businesses.
I work on a University campus, so I know what's really going on. It's simple: too many people abused their "right" to free speech by making it impossible to hold classes, being rowdy and loud in the halls, preventing people from passing into buildings, etc. In essence, depriving the students of the very thing they paid for. End result? The university isn't about having "free speech all the time", it's where people pay for an education. So the Universities had to strike a balance, and they had to do something so that those who wanted to protest can do so, but WITHOUT DISRUPTING CLASSES.
That's interesting. I have been working on several University campuses for the past 15 years. Several years before I was at a campus as a student. The only time I have seen students making it impossible to hold classes, preventing people from passing into buildings and so on was in 1989, during a strike of Czechoslovak university students against the communist government. I was a part of the event, and I am proud of it. And I distinctly remember the government and its supporters saying things very similar to what you wrote in the paragraph quoted above.
I'd trust the guys writing this so-called "report" more if those so-called "peace and justice organizations" weren't fronts for communist groups (ANSWER, International Socialist Workers Party, etc), anarchist groups, blatant racial supremacist organizations (MEChA and La Raza, motto "For the race, everything, for other races, nothing"), or international terrorist/genocide groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Again, what you are saying sounds very familiar. The communist governments in the east used similar arguments quite often. They always said that organizers of anticommunist protests cannot be allowed free speech because they are evil western imperialists, supported by CIA and other nefarious organizations. I have no love to spare for commies, supremacists, and the likes of Hezbollah, but the thing about freedom of speech is you either grant it to everybody, or there is no freedom of speech.
Slightly off topic, but I always thought LyX would be a prime candidate for an online document processor. It already has a thin frontend and separate backend. Making the frontend an online application would free users from having to install TeX with all its packages and fonts, and all sorts of other LyX files. It would also let you manage all your templates centrally, for example an organization could have all their templates on a LyX server, and employees would just need to run a possibly browser based thin client.
That depends on a whole bunch of stuff. You have to think about what happens with the CO2 in the atmosphere, how can it get removed. Of course one way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is using plants. As the grandparent noted, this does not really work, though, because most plants die and are burned in some way (as fuel, food, they rot etc), which will cause most of their carbon to go right back into the air in the form of CO2. Pretty much the only way to prevent this is dump them in a swamp or in a deep ocean, somewhere where there is not much chance of oxygen getting to them.
Some CO2 dissolves in the ocean. But there is only so much CO2 that can be absorbed bu the ocean before it becomes saturated. What's worse, with rising levels of CO2 in the ocean water are changing the ocean chemistry, which seems to make things even worse:
One great way to get rid of carbon is to turn it in a rock. That has been done by number of ocean organisms (corals, shellfish,certain kind of plankton...). Although I don't have any numbers, I believe that there is much much more carbon in calcite and aragonite based rocks than in fossil fuels under the ground. We release some of it into the air when we produce cement. Some is also released naturally when the rocks are dissolved by slightly acidic rain water. That creates karst, things like caves, stalactites, stalagmites etc. When you visit one of those caves, the guides always tell you that this process is extremely slow, and that it took thousands of years for all the dripstone formation to develop, and that they only grow something like a small fraction of milimeter in a decade. Some of my spelunking friends tell me that in some areas that is no longer the case, and that they can see much increased speed of such "karstification". They explain it by the acid rain. With more CO2 in the air, the rain is only going to become more acidic, therefore speeding up this process, and leading to more CO2 being released into the air.
The main problem here is that as the ocean chemistry changes due to increased level of CO2, many of the organisms that create calcite and aragonite based rocks cannot function. In fact, as CO2 dissolves in the ocean, the water becomes more acidic, to the point that some already existing calcite and aragonite rocks will start dissolving, again releasing CO2.
In short, as with most things that have some natural equilibrium, it is possible to upset the system so much that it will never return back to the equilibrium. It may swing to another equilibrium point, or it may become chaotic. Let's hope we won't get to that point.
ou are correct about the hydrogen, but production of biofuel is not a conversion. You need to use some sort of energy, but unless you are doing something wrong, you should be getting much more energy from it than you use to produce it.
I agree with you that TeXmacs is pretty good. The reason it is called TeXmacs is that it implements a fairly complete subset of TeX typesetting algorithm "behind the scene". It also uses TeX fonts. So yes, you do get fairly close to the quality of typesetting we are used to with TeX. Integration of other software packages is a big plus, although I am not aware of an easy way to do complicated commutative diagrams in TeXmacs. It has one of the easiest, most powerful math input you can find, and the greatest thing is that the math input is really integrated into the program, compared to most of other systems where you have some sort of "equation editor" badly pasted on top of the user interface.
The reason I don't use it is that it is still significantly slower and less flexible than typing TeX with a good text editor (vim in my case). I can do things easily with TeX that are either impossible or hard, or at least slow, with TeXmacs. You are correct that TeX has much steeper learning curve. It took me years to get to my current level of proficiency in TeX. I think this is one of the cases where the learning curve is there for a reason: the power and flexibility of TeX is such that it takes a while to master it. Once again, though, I agree that TeXmacs is a great tool, and for those who do not want to spend the time to learn TeX well, it is definitely an excellent choice.
Openoffice, Scribus and pdftex can all create pdf forms. In pdftex it is incredibly easy, creating a pdf form with some 200 or 300 fields in it is a snap.
Scribus and psftex will also let you insert javascript in the pdf file, I am not sure about openoffice, I try to avoid that piece of software as much as I can.
Digital signing and encryption is a problem. Pdftex used to implement encryption, but they took it out. What makes me mad is that adobe reader is a crippleware, it can do annotations and simple editing in a pdf document, but artificially restrict this capability to documents that are digitally signed in a special way, and there is no free tool that would do that.
You cannot really edit an existing PDF file very well, no matter which tool do you use. Try loading a pdf document created by something like pdftex or a good dtp package into any pdf editor and changing few things, it is going to end up looking like a crap. There are editors that handle any graphics inside a pdf file very well, but the text part you mostly want to leave alone.
Lot of pstricks functionality has been implemented by pgf/tikz package. Other options are using inline metapost, asymptote or ePiX. As for replacing placeholders in figures with equations, there is a package just for that, which should work with pdftex, I just can't recall the name right now. I believe it was described in PracTeX journal about a year ago.
Re:PDF Tainted by Shitty Adobe Reader
on
PDF Is Now ISO 32000
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· Score: 3, Informative
They do not offer the same features, its just that most people don't particularly care about the features that are in Adobe Reader and not in Foxit Reader.
How exactly is this different to what the US does to foreign visitors?
It's not, but just because one country does something bad and stupid does not mean every country should be doing the same.
(although they are not just focussing on US citizens)
Exactly! Which means that they re not "following through with their threat". I would understand if they fingerprinted only us, or painted our faces blue upon arrival or something, to retaliate for the US fingerprinting, but what they are doing is equally stupid to what our government is doing. In fact, I think they claim they are going to share the data with our government. How in the world is that a retaliation for US fingerprinting of visitors?
Slashdot Mirror
Memorizing multiplication table was always outdated. On the other hand, understanding how numbers and arithmetic operations work and what can you do with them is a skill that cannot be replaced by a calculator or computer. Gaining this understanding can, IMHO, be aided by a use of calculator or computer, however that is not what seems to be happening at most of our schools.
Dear Dad,
Make sure you won't end up like SCO.
Son.
Is the son going to be GPL'd? In other words, can I reuse half of his genetic information to produce my own version? Will you provide an access to the source?
This has been done before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velorex
We went for centuries without knowing there is America, too.
Trig is very intuitive, and so is calculus. What is not intuitive is the way we do calculus, i.e. limits and stuff. That was definitely invented.
Please don't! Make it send all sorts of hints to the window manager if you want, but don't let the application take over the window manager's job. Make it possible for the window manager to ignore those hints if user wants to configure it that way. Don't let GIMP become another OpenOffice.
I have seen the same. My previous job was at a community college, where I had two computers on my desk. One of them was brand new fairly high power machine running windows XP. This was the official machine I was not allowed to mess with, and I needed it to access the college intranet, which required internet explorer. Basically I used it twice each semester, once at the beginning to download rosters for my classes, once at the end of semester to turn in grades. Next to it was the machine I used to do the rest of my work: at least 6 years old machine that was officially discarded and which they gave to me so I could run Debian. I didn't complain, I was glad they let me plug it into the network. I wasn't the only one with similar setup, the chair of the chemistry department also had two machines, except that she used Windows 95 on her work machine. Needless to say, the college was very proud that all their faculty have brand new very capable machines on their desks.
There was at least one paper written that considers a possibility of such doomsday very real. It was titled "The Black Ball", published by someone named Gustav Meyerink.
The only explanation is that campus administrators are zombies.
Yes, but that's no news. I mean, doesn't everybody already know that? I didn't know NERF guns worked on them, though. I think I will get one for my office, and carry it with me to meetings.
X is as much a defacto standard as .doc,...
.doc, the X11 is fully documented, and there exist multiple implementations, both free and commercial, both open and closed source. If you want to write another implementation, you don't have to reverse engineer anything, you just read the documentation. It does not have an official stamp of approval of some international standard body, but it is open and documented. ...this is Slashdot, we know the flaws are there...
Er, no. Unlike
That may be true, except that we don't seem to agree exactly on what the flaws are. If you read the posts here, the few posts that actually list specific flaws seem to each come up with a different list.
Let's start. Let's make a development program for a replacement for X that will correctly process the hooks for a few popular toolkits (QT,GTK+) and work from there...
Anybody knows what happened to the Berlin project? Their web page seems to be gone.
That's simple. The application windows will be created, but not managed. Which may be a problem if the application has several windows that have to be used at the same time, since one of the windows will probably cover at least parts of the other windows, and without a window manager it will be rather hard to access the other windows and bring them on top, or move windows out of the way. However, if you have an application that has only one window, or has a one main window and occasionally pops up a dialog window, that is used and closed quickly, you have no problem. I used to have a somewhat underpowered computer that I used to run starlogo. In order to minimize memory use, I would run starlogo directly on top of X. The computer would run just a very minimal system, X and starlogo. It worked perfectly well.
Second, this whole thing about universities being a bastion for free thought and speech is some sort of whack job revisionist expectation that has only existed in the western nations in the last 50 years or so.
Not true, if you look at some major European universities in the past, you can clearly find the same thought in early 1800's, and, in fact, some aspects of it go back all the way to 14th and 15th century. And no, at that time universities were not considered to be businesses.
I work on a University campus, so I know what's really going on. It's simple: too many people abused their "right" to free speech by making it impossible to hold classes, being rowdy and loud in the halls, preventing people from passing into buildings, etc. In essence, depriving the students of the very thing they paid for. End result? The university isn't about having "free speech all the time", it's where people pay for an education. So the Universities had to strike a balance, and they had to do something so that those who wanted to protest can do so, but WITHOUT DISRUPTING CLASSES.
That's interesting. I have been working on several University campuses for the past 15 years. Several years before I was at a campus as a student. The only time I have seen students making it impossible to hold classes, preventing people from passing into buildings and so on was in 1989, during a strike of Czechoslovak university students against the communist government. I was a part of the event, and I am proud of it. And I distinctly remember the government and its supporters saying things very similar to what you wrote in the paragraph quoted above.
I'd trust the guys writing this so-called "report" more if those so-called "peace and justice organizations" weren't fronts for communist groups (ANSWER, International Socialist Workers Party, etc), anarchist groups, blatant racial supremacist organizations (MEChA and La Raza, motto "For the race, everything, for other races, nothing"), or international terrorist/genocide groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Again, what you are saying sounds very familiar. The communist governments in the east used similar arguments quite often. They always said that organizers of anticommunist protests cannot be allowed free speech because they are evil western imperialists, supported by CIA and other nefarious organizations. I have no love to spare for commies, supremacists, and the likes of Hezbollah, but the thing about freedom of speech is you either grant it to everybody, or there is no freedom of speech.
Slightly off topic, but I always thought LyX would be a prime candidate for an online document processor. It already has a thin frontend and separate backend. Making the frontend an online application would free users from having to install TeX with all its packages and fonts, and all sorts of other LyX files. It would also let you manage all your templates centrally, for example an organization could have all their templates on a LyX server, and employees would just need to run a possibly browser based thin client.
I thought the message was "Green door".
That depends on a whole bunch of stuff. You have to think about what happens with the CO2 in the atmosphere, how can it get removed. Of course one way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is using plants. As the grandparent noted, this does not really work, though, because most plants die and are burned in some way (as fuel, food, they rot etc), which will cause most of their carbon to go right back into the air in the form of CO2. Pretty much the only way to prevent this is dump them in a swamp or in a deep ocean, somewhere where there is not much chance of oxygen getting to them.
Some CO2 dissolves in the ocean. But there is only so much CO2 that can be absorbed bu the ocean before it becomes saturated. What's worse, with rising levels of CO2 in the ocean water are changing the ocean chemistry, which seems to make things even worse:
One great way to get rid of carbon is to turn it in a rock. That has been done by number of ocean organisms (corals, shellfish,certain kind of plankton...). Although I don't have any numbers, I believe that there is much much more carbon in calcite and aragonite based rocks than in fossil fuels under the ground. We release some of it into the air when we produce cement. Some is also released naturally when the rocks are dissolved by slightly acidic rain water. That creates karst, things like caves, stalactites, stalagmites etc. When you visit one of those caves, the guides always tell you that this process is extremely slow, and that it took thousands of years for all the dripstone formation to develop, and that they only grow something like a small fraction of milimeter in a decade. Some of my spelunking friends tell me that in some areas that is no longer the case, and that they can see much increased speed of such "karstification". They explain it by the acid rain. With more CO2 in the air, the rain is only going to become more acidic, therefore speeding up this process, and leading to more CO2 being released into the air.
The main problem here is that as the ocean chemistry changes due to increased level of CO2, many of the organisms that create calcite and aragonite based rocks cannot function. In fact, as CO2 dissolves in the ocean, the water becomes more acidic, to the point that some already existing calcite and aragonite rocks will start dissolving, again releasing CO2.
In short, as with most things that have some natural equilibrium, it is possible to upset the system so much that it will never return back to the equilibrium. It may swing to another equilibrium point, or it may become chaotic. Let's hope we won't get to that point.
ou are correct about the hydrogen, but production of biofuel is not a conversion. You need to use some sort of energy, but unless you are doing something wrong, you should be getting much more energy from it than you use to produce it.
I agree with you that TeXmacs is pretty good. The reason it is called TeXmacs is that it implements a fairly complete subset of TeX typesetting algorithm "behind the scene". It also uses TeX fonts. So yes, you do get fairly close to the quality of typesetting we are used to with TeX. Integration of other software packages is a big plus, although I am not aware of an easy way to do complicated commutative diagrams in TeXmacs. It has one of the easiest, most powerful math input you can find, and the greatest thing is that the math input is really integrated into the program, compared to most of other systems where you have some sort of "equation editor" badly pasted on top of the user interface.
The reason I don't use it is that it is still significantly slower and less flexible than typing TeX with a good text editor (vim in my case). I can do things easily with TeX that are either impossible or hard, or at least slow, with TeXmacs. You are correct that TeX has much steeper learning curve. It took me years to get to my current level of proficiency in TeX. I think this is one of the cases where the learning curve is there for a reason: the power and flexibility of TeX is such that it takes a while to master it. Once again, though, I agree that TeXmacs is a great tool, and for those who do not want to spend the time to learn TeX well, it is definitely an excellent choice.
I would expect your reactions to differ over time, but I would not expect them to change dramatically in a short period of time
Hmm, when I tried it half an hour ago, they all looked like pizzas. Now all I see there are pillows.
Openoffice, Scribus and pdftex can all create pdf forms. In pdftex it is incredibly easy, creating a pdf form with some 200 or 300 fields in it is a snap.
Scribus and psftex will also let you insert javascript in the pdf file, I am not sure about openoffice, I try to avoid that piece of software as much as I can.
Digital signing and encryption is a problem. Pdftex used to implement encryption, but they took it out. What makes me mad is that adobe reader is a crippleware, it can do annotations and simple editing in a pdf document, but artificially restrict this capability to documents that are digitally signed in a special way, and there is no free tool that would do that.
You cannot really edit an existing PDF file very well, no matter which tool do you use. Try loading a pdf document created by something like pdftex or a good dtp package into any pdf editor and changing few things, it is going to end up looking like a crap. There are editors that handle any graphics inside a pdf file very well, but the text part you mostly want to leave alone.
Lot of pstricks functionality has been implemented by pgf/tikz package. Other options are using inline metapost, asymptote or ePiX. As for replacing placeholders in figures with equations, there is a package just for that, which should work with pdftex, I just can't recall the name right now. I believe it was described in PracTeX journal about a year ago.
They do not offer the same features, its just that most people don't particularly care about the features that are in Adobe Reader and not in Foxit Reader.
How exactly is this different to what the US does to foreign visitors?
It's not, but just because one country does something bad and stupid does not mean every country should be doing the same.
(although they are not just focussing on US citizens)
Exactly! Which means that they re not "following through with their threat". I would understand if they fingerprinted only us, or painted our faces blue upon arrival or something, to retaliate for the US fingerprinting, but what they are doing is equally stupid to what our government is doing. In fact, I think they claim they are going to share the data with our government. How in the world is that a retaliation for US fingerprinting of visitors?