The font system has a lot of benefits (it is defined algorithmically, so if a font is defined correctly, it is completely scalable
On paper this looked really good, but it turns out that font designers do not think algorithmically. Computer Modern (the font Knuth designed) is virtually the only font that is a real MetaFont, where you can vary any of the fonts aspects shape by altering parameters.
[disclaimer: I am the main author of LilyPond, a system that you could easiest describe as "LaTeX" for music notation]
The problem is not with TeX. Knuth is mostly as brilliant as people say he is. The problem is that
1. the extension infrastructure of TeX is very outdated (WTF, a macro expansion language?)
2. the development ecosystem around TeX is filled with souls that are of lesser stature than Knuth. They're mostly people that need to write mathematics (physicists. mathematicians), as opposed to people that know how write software.
LilyPond back in the day used TeX as a backend engine, and I vividly recall all of the brokenness I encountered in the support-tools that surround TeX (dvips, xdvi, etc. etc.). Things have gotten a lot better now that we have pdflatex - it cuts a whole truckload of crappy tools out of the document pipeline.
Font handling remains atrocious. In case you're wondering: someone was bright enough to base parts of the fontsystem on the DOS 8.3 restriction, so URWGothicL-Demi is and will be called uagd8a forever inside TeX -and worse- if you have to add a modern (OTF, TTF) font, you have run scripts to make LaTeX's font subsystem understand these files in terms of the ridiculous naming scheme.
People get hung up over TeX's beautiful formatting algorithms, but they are not actually that complicated, and by todays' standards TeX is a small program: tex.web is just 25k lines, and that includes its ample comments. LilyPond has page layouting and line breaking that is far more complex.
The real problem with typography, whether for music or documents, is that it's full of traditions that predate automatic processing, and are not specially suited to computerizing. For example, in some language words change their spelling/typography when they get hyphenated (eg. the German eszet letter which hyphenates to s-s).
IMO The challenge is designing the software such that these idiosyncrasies can be captured effectively without hardcoding them, so people can create their own idiosyncrasies.
As for the original poster's question, the system that looked the most convincing to me is Lout, but I have never tried it out.
I think the reason that there are lots of macs in Google is that many use the laptops, and the company just caters for the employee's preferences. It's a pity, because the thinkpads are better built and more easily serviced. Despite the relatively good support for linux laptops at Google, using them remains cumbersome:
- wireless crapping out at random times
- suspend/hibernate woes
- poor battery life
I probably would use Mac too if it weren't for the absence of the nipple-trackpoint and the user interface that drives me crazy.
The technology is within our grasp now. If tomorrow the entire human race decide to commit the entire gross planetary product to build a space ship capable of sustaining 10,000 people indefinitely, It would certainly be possible.
This argument doesn't make sense. If the entire race could commit to something, it would be easier, cheaper and more effective to fix the current environmental and sustainability problems. But we're not; we're exacerbating the problems at ever increasing rates.
And, to those who say "Remember that Google went to Court to prevent the Government from getting records", remember what Google said. They said they were doing this NOT to protect your privacy, but to protect their trade secrets.
Brazil has a reciprocity policy when it comes to customs & visa. This means that US citizens have a gratuitious extra 100 EUR (UK: 155) processing fee slapped onto their visa handling fee. See eg.
Actually, the state-supported media are more objective than any of the commercial channels.
Any club of people that can raise a significant number of members will get public funding and can participate in the public channel. There are broadcasting organisations with socialist, catholic, buddhist, islam, etc. backgrounds, and they all get their voice.
you're completely off the mark here. This product aims to increase effectiveness of an adwords campaign, ie. getting people to buy your stuff after they've gone to your website.
There still seems to be a popular belief that PV systems cannot
'pay back' their energy investment. The data from recent studies show however that although for present-day systems the EPBT can still be high, it is generally well below the expected life time of a PV system
If you measure it as ERoEI, it's generally acknowledged by everyone except die-hard solar power advocates that the ratio of Energy Returned over Energy Input for solar is less than 1, unless you use very very recent strained Silicon-based technology, which barely hit break-even earlier this year.
how does this jibe with the FAQ linked previously in a comment? SEIA probably is a die-hard solar advocate, but how can I evaluate either statement? (eg. are there references that document either position?)
The problem is that these machines are actually from the late 80s. It's not feasible to retrofit new chips onto these boards. For a fun look, go to www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl, where there are pictures of the board-internals. These show soldered resistors, the likes of which I've last seen in my Apple II.
The Gimp is one of the most noteworthy applications with a Scheme interface, and much of the lower-level functionality of GNU Lilypond is reached with Scheme.
Although, curiously, GIMP uses the SIOD interpreter rather than GUILE.
BTW, RMS doesn't want to use GUILE for Emacs, which makes me wonder if he's serious about GUILE as the Gnu extension language.
in case of bike/car collision, the car driver is automatically guilty
Hmm, I wonder what the risk-return ratio is, and whether I should go visit Europe and start maliciously running into cars on my bike and living off the proceeds of lawsuits?
they're not automatically guilty for US-style emotional damage lawsuits (which are not very common in Europe either), but rather for material damages, and the hospital bill. If you would try to sue a car driver for emotional damage or lost productivity after an accident, you would be told off by the judge.
It's like this because cyclist and pedestrians don't have a liability insurance for traffic accidents, so they are troublesome to have insurance disputes with.
Off on a tangent: I don't understand the argument that a minix style microkernel would be more reliable to code. I concede that a MK will have smaller, easier to understand, and more obviously correct separate modules.
However, who is interested in the reliability of each separate component? We want the whole thing to be reliable, not its components. I would say that all the possible interactions between different server processes will make it an order of magnitude harder to verify. For example, how could you run Coverity on a multi-process kernel?
It seems to me that one of the approaches that AT covers in his paper (Singularity), is just taking the method of combining Linux and static checking to its logical extreme.
Google made a filesystem for exactly that purpose: storing HUGE files highly reliably. OK, so it's not publically available, but it's still perfect for you
I doubt that. To run GFS (assuming you have the code), you need to have a big honking cluster, to replicate data across machines. Also, it assumes a different file semantics, so you need to hand-code your apps to use the different reading and writing semantics. It only works well for appending writes and streaming reads. Furthermore, GFS does not have file-locking, and concurrent writes will leave your files in an undefined states.
The interesting thing really is the graph, which is next to the article. We've been on a more or less steady temperature increase for the past century and a half.
In my case, I haven't been sick enough to need antibiotics in more than a year and a half.
That merely highlights how much american doctors over-prescribe anti-biotics.
A lot of disease is viral (meaning that antibiotics don't help), and your body can take care of most diseases by itself anyway
Yes, it would be great to have a USB device, not because of convenience, but because of security. With a USB device, they could make the system impervious to man-in-the-middle attacks. Why? Because the bank could send the transaction details to the USB gadget, along with a 50 digit challenge, which is also the checksum of the transaction to be verified. In that case, an attacker could be the man-in-the-middle, but it would no longer be of use, since he cannot divert transactions to his own bank accounts.
Of course, this assumes that users not only need to be verified with TFA but, that each transaction is also signed with TFA separately.
This is BTW already what ABN AMRO (in the Netherlands) is doing, but they still use an 8 digit challenge/6 digit response for signing the transactions. So, with windows viruses rampaging, you can't be sure that the transaction you're signing is the one you're executing.
Slashdot Mirror
The font system has a lot of benefits (it is defined algorithmically, so if a font is defined correctly, it is completely scalable
On paper this looked really good, but it turns out that font designers do not think algorithmically. Computer Modern (the font Knuth designed) is virtually the only font that is a real MetaFont, where you can vary any of the fonts aspects shape by altering parameters.
[disclaimer: I am the main author of LilyPond, a system that you could easiest describe as "LaTeX" for music notation]
The problem is not with TeX. Knuth is mostly as brilliant as people say he is. The problem is that
1. the extension infrastructure of TeX is very outdated (WTF, a macro expansion language?)
2. the development ecosystem around TeX is filled with souls that are of lesser stature than Knuth. They're mostly people that need to write mathematics (physicists. mathematicians), as opposed to people that know how write software.
LilyPond back in the day used TeX as a backend engine, and I vividly recall all of the brokenness I encountered in the support-tools that surround TeX (dvips, xdvi, etc. etc.). Things have gotten a lot better now that we have pdflatex - it cuts a whole truckload of crappy tools out of the document pipeline.
Font handling remains atrocious. In case you're wondering: someone was bright enough to base parts of the fontsystem on the DOS 8.3 restriction, so URWGothicL-Demi is and will be called uagd8a forever inside TeX -and worse- if you have to add a modern (OTF, TTF) font, you have run scripts to make LaTeX's font subsystem understand these files in terms of the ridiculous naming scheme.
People get hung up over TeX's beautiful formatting algorithms, but they are not actually that complicated, and by todays' standards TeX is a small program: tex.web is just 25k lines, and that includes its ample comments. LilyPond has page layouting and line breaking that is far more complex.
The real problem with typography, whether for music or documents, is that it's full of traditions that predate automatic processing, and are not specially suited to computerizing. For example, in some language words change their spelling/typography when they get hyphenated (eg. the German eszet letter which hyphenates to s-s).
IMO The challenge is designing the software such that these idiosyncrasies can be captured effectively without hardcoding them, so people can create their own idiosyncrasies.
As for the original poster's question, the system that looked the most convincing to me is Lout, but I have never tried it out.
I think the reason that there are lots of macs in Google is that many use the laptops, and the company just caters for the employee's preferences. It's a pity, because the thinkpads are better built and more easily serviced. Despite the relatively good support for linux laptops at Google, using them remains cumbersome:
- wireless crapping out at random times
- suspend/hibernate woes
- poor battery life
I probably would use Mac too if it weren't for the absence of the nipple-trackpoint and the user interface that drives me crazy.
actually, since said product is licensed as opensource, you could simply add them yourself.
This argument doesn't make sense. If the entire race could commit to something, it would be easier, cheaper and more effective to fix the current environmental and sustainability problems. But we're not; we're exacerbating the problems at ever increasing rates.
Care to back this up with a reference?
Thanks for the response. That sounds very reasonable, indeed. Where do I sign up?
Try jobs@google.com
Brazil has a reciprocity policy when it comes to customs & visa. This means that US
t m
citizens have a gratuitious extra 100 EUR (UK: 155) processing fee slapped
onto their visa handling fee. See eg.
http://www.brazilianembassy.nl/english/cons_513.h
Warmer water can contain less oxygen. This may affect availability of food in the sea.
Actually, the state-supported media are more objective than any of the commercial channels.
Any club of people that can raise a significant number of members will get
public funding and can participate in the public channel. There are broadcasting organisations
with socialist, catholic, buddhist, islam, etc. backgrounds, and they all get their voice.
I would be surprised if Diebold really designs ATMs. The insides of ATMs usually have specialized tamper-proof crypto chips, such as IBM 4758.
and, do you still work there ?
you're completely off the mark here. This product aims to increase effectiveness of an adwords campaign, ie. getting people to buy your stuff after they've gone to your website.
There still seems to be a popular belief that PV systems cannot 'pay back' their energy investment. The data from recent studies show however that although for present-day systems the EPBT can still be high, it is generally well below the expected life time of a PV system
how does this jibe with the FAQ linked previously in a comment? SEIA probably is a die-hard solar advocate, but how can I evaluate either statement? (eg. are there references that document either position?)
The problem is that these machines are actually from the late 80s. It's not feasible to retrofit new chips onto these boards. For a fun look, go to www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl, where there are pictures of the board-internals. These show soldered resistors, the likes of which I've last seen in my Apple II.
The iMic really sucks. It actually has more noise output than the audio jack on my Mac Mini.
Although, curiously, GIMP uses the SIOD interpreter rather than GUILE.
BTW, RMS doesn't want to use GUILE for Emacs, which makes me wonder if he's serious about GUILE as the Gnu extension language.
Hmm, I wonder what the risk-return ratio is, and whether I should go visit Europe and start maliciously running into cars on my bike and living off the proceeds of lawsuits?
they're not automatically guilty for US-style emotional damage lawsuits (which are not very common in Europe either), but rather for material damages, and the hospital bill. If you would try to sue a car driver for emotional damage or lost productivity after an accident, you would be told off by the judge.
It's like this because cyclist and pedestrians don't have a liability insurance for traffic accidents, so they are troublesome to have insurance disputes with.
Off on a tangent: I don't understand the argument that a minix style microkernel would be more reliable to code. I concede that a MK will have smaller, easier to understand, and more obviously correct separate modules.
However, who is interested in the reliability of each separate component? We want the whole thing to be reliable, not its components. I would say that all the possible interactions between different server processes will make it an order of magnitude harder to verify. For example, how could you run Coverity on a multi-process kernel?
It seems to me that one of the approaches that AT covers in his paper (Singularity), is just taking the method of combining Linux and static checking to its logical extreme.
I doubt that. To run GFS (assuming you have the code), you need to have a big honking cluster, to replicate data across machines. Also, it assumes a different file semantics, so you need to hand-code your apps to use the different reading and writing semantics. It only works well for appending writes and streaming reads. Furthermore, GFS does not have file-locking, and concurrent writes will leave your files in an undefined states.
The interesting thing really is the graph, which is next to the article. We've been on a more or less steady temperature increase for the past century and a half.
That merely highlights how much american doctors over-prescribe anti-biotics. A lot of disease is viral (meaning that antibiotics don't help), and your body can take care of most diseases by itself anyway
That's not completely accurate. There was an avian influenza outbreak in 2003, but it was of the H7N7 variant.
Of course, this assumes that users not only need to be verified with TFA but, that each transaction is also signed with TFA separately.
This is BTW already what ABN AMRO (in the Netherlands) is doing, but they still use an 8 digit challenge/6 digit response for signing the transactions. So, with windows viruses rampaging, you can't be sure that the transaction you're signing is the one you're executing.