If you were a very smart fellow in the 1800's with nothing but the most rudimentary knowledge of electricity, how would you go about understanding something like a portable radio transistor?
Would you have advised the people in the 1700's to just stop thinking about electricity because they lacked fundamental understanding of it? How would that have brought us to where we are now?
Do you think it would be possible to understand the human brain without computers (the cognitive models but especially the computing power needed for modeling) and electronic microscopes? Do you think it would be possible to build computers and electronic microscopes without a deep understanding of electronics (among other things)? And do you think we could get a deep understanding of electronics without the first crude experimentation with naturally occurring and static electricity?
Sure, someone that would write a paper now on how a radio works by reversing engineering the circuit board without understanding the first notions of electronics is an idiot and would be duly ridiculed in the literature. An "inventor" from the 1700's who did experiments with rubbing amber or flying kites into the storm was a genius, someone doing it now would be an amateur at best.
"We" made a similar island for storing contaminated sludge in a part of the IJsselmeer. This reservoir island is 1km across (so slightly smaller but same order of magnitude) and 45m deep.
According to this page, this island cost around 250 million to build. At 1 km across and 45m deep, it can hold around 35E6 sq meters of water=3.5E10 kgs of water. No idea whether it works that way, but the potential energy might be m*g*h=3.5E10 * 9.81 * 22 (avg.) ~ 7E12 joules, or the output of a 3500MW power plant for 7E12/3.5E9 2000 seconds or about half an hour, assuming 100% efficiency and no fuckups in my orders of magnitude.
I'm assuming it is easier to build this in the ocean than to dig it in a shallow lake (the lake around the reservoir is about 2.5m deep), because otherwise why not just dig it in the shallow lake? Since the north sea is about 50m deep offshore from the low countries, a reservoir of 3km accross wil hold 9 times as much energy, or around 5 hours of output from one plant. Whether that is enough or not I have no idea. I would suppose that the cost could be around 9*250 million = 2.5 billion euro, which is cheaper than building a new plant but nothing to sneeze at.
I think that in some cases it is even a policy to let the small shops get away with it, or at least I don't feel guilty if I get a discount for paying cash with a small shop owner.
They have enough trouble as it is while they generally provide a common good (diversity in the offering, shop owners generally take care of their neighbourhood, etc). The big boys strike all kinds of deals with the tax office and have recourse to various tax loopholes. This just makes it a slightly more level playing field...
'open APIs' published by a single vendor can't be trusted by outside developers
No shit, sherlock!
You mean that companies that offer free (or non-free) stuff can and will stop doing so when their own interest points in another direction?
I think google et al are great for writing software that allows other people to interoperate in an easy way... but that does not put a burden on them to continue supporting it after it is no longer in their best interest. We could define "open API" to mean that the server side software is implementable by a third party (like IMAP and even SMB are), but probably their APIs are so useful because they plug into a core product that they're not willing to open source and is extremely difficult to replicate (cf. iOS maps).
If your business depends on google doing or not doing something, then you are either taking a big risk (and entrepreneurship is about taking risks, so that's not necessarily a bad idea) or you should have a contract with google that they will do as needed for your business to succeed. If you take a big risk as a company and fail, well that's what bankruptcy protection is for;-).
I think you are focussing too much on java-style compiler-forced error handling. To me, the essence of try/catch error handling is that you only catch errors if you can deal with them. If you can't (the majority of cases), let is escalate, all the way up to the user (or a log file) if needed. I think there are three sane ways of using a try/catch: (1) to actually deal with the error (this is by far the rarest), (2) mainly in loops of more-or-less independeny actions: to log the error, reset state, and continue working, and (3) at the top level, to log the error and display something less meaningful but less scary to the end user.
I think it is a bad design decision to impose static checking on declared 'throws' statements, because that forces routines to catch stuff that they can't handle, or declare a meaningless list of everything every called routine could ever throw. In essence, it couples the signalling and handling again that exceptions were supposed to decouple.
In Python, more than half of the bugs are either an improper use of a variable or the wrong amount of white space after refactoring some nested code.
I think the white space is mainly a red herring, but you are right that it is annoying to copy-paste code or refactor and have to remember how many spaces to shift a block to the right. In that regard curly braces and select-all + reindent does work easier.
About static typing (I assume that you mean static vs dynamic and not strong vs weak typing?): I think I disagree. I've not looked at how perl did it, so my experience mainly comes from java. But in java you are spending so much time mucking around with interfaces, casting etc. that it becomes a big mess quite soon, and you need an IDE to make any sense of it; while I use python for a non-trivial program (>25kloc in >200 files in ~10 years and 3 rewrites) and a plain old text editor is fine.
The "duck typing" is often misunderstood. In essence, python says that any object which supports a method, say ".count_parts()" implicitly implements the 'count_parts' interface. You can test membership in that class with 'hasattr' and you don't need to do any casting to use it. In java, if you have two classes from different libraries that happen to have the same method (e.g. becuase they both implement the same standard), if they haven't done it right by implementing the right interface (which is often not the case if you deal with 3d party code) it is a huge mess to do polymorphism: you either need to have complex conditional casting and executing, or define some sort of unified wrapper object and wrap them all.
I would love a language that has "implicit" contracts and still a way to better check enforcement, but I wouldn't know how that would look like.
Where I do feel an easy gain could be had is a sort of optional "strict" mode, although seeing pylint as a "compiler" step does that most of the time. It is annoying that typo's can often go unnoticed, making it harder to debug than needed. Also, the cpython compiler/interpreter seems to be missing out on some optimization that could be added with "cython-like" optimizer hints, ie "this thing over here is an int"...
Don't get me wrong, I love Python. But weaknesses are weaknesses.
Weaknesses are weaknesses, but dynamic typing is a choice that has negative and positive consequences. I would love to see ways to reduce the negatives while keeping the positives, but moving over to static typing feels like throwing out the baby with the bath water...
I'm a big python fan. It encourages elegant and readable code and has a good library and community. The lack of static typing hurts a bit in now having good static checking ("compiler errors") and IDE autocomplete, but it also means that you can scrap tehe 90% of code that java forces you to write to declare and then work around interfaces and abstraction layers:-)
I haven't written PHP the last 10 years, so I can't really compare to state of the art, but I felt that PHP encourages sloppy programming and lack of separation of concerns by sticking a lot of business logic in the presentation layer. But that be more about the language being used by a lot of people without formal programming training than about the language itself.
Totally off topic, but actually I think the main problem with APT is not the linking, they do solve that wonderfully; and the few times that I need something that is not (yet) available from apt I can just compile myself.
What I do find problematic is the interface of apt with language-specific library repositories. Eg pip for python, cran for R. I generally want to use those repositories since they are the de facto standard in those communities, but (1) that gives clashes if some other apt package requires something that I installed using pip, leading to multiple copies and version problems, and (2) the library repos can't specify "out-of-language" requirements, e.g. the libxml for some python library that binds to that lib. That means that I have to try installing via pip/cran/..., see what is missing, apt-get install those libs, and then try installing again.
The linked article shows how Amnesia (which is an excellent game, btw, at least part 1 is) will be supported on different platforms, but I'm pretty sure Amnesia already runs on those platforms. So it seems to me that Valve is supporting ubuntu, but will list other OS'es that happen to be supported by the (original) publisher?
Of course this is all deduction from rumors and two screenshots, so take cum grano salis....
Thinking about this: I so much wish that there was an effort to write a new sane and consistent OS based on modern C++ (seeing the error handling code in Linux makes me cry). But I know that in my lifetime we will not see such a thing going mainstream.:(
It seems that Linus has said:
- the whole C++ exception handling thing is fundamentally broken. It's
_especially_ broken for kernels.
Can you care to elaborate on how you think that C++ error handling would be superior for a modern kernel?
xs4all (Netherlands) does provide ipv6 and I find it quite useful to have direct links between computer that would otherwise be difficult to reach (e.g. between my computer at home (ipv4 NAT by the ADSL router) and a virtual server at work for which I didn't get an ipv4 address and hence only has pulic ipv6.
Also, it is useful to be able to connect directly to my home box from outside, and there are multiple ssh enabled machines on my LAN. Of course, I could give them all different ports and forward them using the router, but that is just so much more hassle...
I'm not much of a solderer, but isn't the operating (or at least max) temperature of a cpu above the melting point of soldering tin? Wouldn't that cause issues, or at least force a different kind of solder to be used?
Just to increase the pedantry: Great Britain refers to the main island (England+Wales+Scotland), and is Great as compared to French Brittany (Bretagne). That is why the UK is called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So, Great Britain is a smaller territory than the UK, and Ireland has never been part of Great Britain.
If the Palestines get their way, the gaza strip becomes a sovereign nation and it is perfectly legal to close the borders between nations. THAT is the HUGE elephant in the room in this conflict. The Palestines NEED Israel more then Israel needs them and the arabs don't want them at all.
If Gaza were a souvereign nation:
1. Israel would be totally free to close the land border. In fact, Israel has closed borders with Lebanon and Syria and that is fine in terms of international law
2. Israel would *not* be allowed to blockade Gaza from the sea and air, as it currently does. Blockading is an act of war and would justify an armed response from Gaza, making Israeli the aggressor if a war occurs. (in fact, blockading of the red sea leading to Eilat was was part of the casus belli for the 6 days war, so Israel certainly acknowledges that blockade is an act of war).
3. There would be no objection to Gaza importing arms from Egypt and Iran and training a real military.
At the moment, (1) is already a reality, and Israel really does not want (2) and (3). In fact, preventing (re)arming of Hamas was a stated objective of the 2009 Gaza War. Although economically Gaza would profit much more from integration with Israel, at the moment they're getting the worst of both worlds: they are blockaded from outside and closed off from Israel. So, Gaza (the region/potential country/people) absolutely has nothing to gain from the status quo.
(Of course, whether current Hamas leadership prefers the status quo to a more normalized situation where they can't abuse the conflict with Israel to stay in power is a totally different question...)
This is nonsense. DNA can be used to determine ethnic heritage, susceptibility for certain diseases (would you like your insurer to see that?), maybe in the future probability of deviant behaviour (would you like the police to see that?), etc. etc.
If there were some good way of 'checksumming' DNA this could be averted, but a DNA database is much more than a bunch of bar codes...
Creating a new game because you're too lazy to learn how to i-g and d-b-d another game? Sounds like the kind of inspiration needed to get a good game going:-)
Linux is absolutely lightweight and flexible, it's just that KDE and gnome seem to be making a mess of things lately in a stupid attempt to keep up with the Joneses.
I use xubuntu+xmonad and it is blazingly fast and flexible on 4+ year old hardware. I tried using Gnome and KDE but I feel they get in my way more than helping me do my stuff, but I am completely happy with my current setup.
I completely agree that the thing looks hideous and I hope they sail it away from the Netherlands as soon as possible.
However, (1) the shipyard does have a long and rich history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_De_Vries. You don't get the "royal" prefix by bribing the Queen, you get it by existing at least 100 years and having a distinguished record. For example, the "Royal" warehouse KBB (Bijenkorf) lost its prefix when it was acquired by a hedge fund.
(2) according to wikipedia they are actually the same guys behind the feadship you quoted
So, I am guessing that the ugliness is at the specific desire of the guy who ordered it...
Yeah... I have to admit even the 'deobfuscated' versions of the source code are gibberish to me, so it is quite obvious that the ascii-art is nothing more than icing on the cake.
Yeah, it is not quite clear whether the journal accepted the rebuttals of the authors, which would be quite hilarious:
1. The referee’s objection is well taken; indeed, the abstract has not the slightest thing to do with the content of the paper. 2. The paper certainly does contain a plethora of mathematical notation, but it is to be hoped that readers with the appropriate background can infer its meaning (or lack thereof) from context. 3. It is indeed customary for a mathematical paper to contain a proof of its main result. This omission admittedly represents a slight flaw in the manuscript. 4. The author believes the proofs given for the referenced propositions are entirely sufficient [they read, respectively, "This is obvious" and "This is clear"]. However, she respects the referee’s opinion and would consider adding a few additional details. 5. On this point the author must strenuously object. The LATEX formatting of the manuscript is perfectly standard and in accordance with generally accepted practice. The same cannot be said of APM’s required template, which uses Microsoft Word [!].
I wish I had the balls to write cover letters like that to journal editors..
strange. I usually upgrade at least one of my desktops immediately on a new release, and have never encountered any problems. The computer I'm typing on is 12.04, which is incrementally do-release-upgraded from 10.04 or around then. Never had any upgrade problems on laptop, desktop, or server.
Slashdot Mirror
If you were a very smart fellow in the 1800's with nothing but the most rudimentary knowledge of electricity, how would you go about understanding something like a portable radio transistor?
Would you have advised the people in the 1700's to just stop thinking about electricity because they lacked fundamental understanding of it? How would that have brought us to where we are now?
Do you think it would be possible to understand the human brain without computers (the cognitive models but especially the computing power needed for modeling) and electronic microscopes? Do you think it would be possible to build computers and electronic microscopes without a deep understanding of electronics (among other things)? And do you think we could get a deep understanding of electronics without the first crude experimentation with naturally occurring and static electricity?
Sure, someone that would write a paper now on how a radio works by reversing engineering the circuit board without understanding the first notions of electronics is an idiot and would be duly ridiculed in the literature. An "inventor" from the 1700's who did experiments with rubbing amber or flying kites into the storm was a genius, someone doing it now would be an amateur at best.
tl;dr: context matters
"We" made a similar island for storing contaminated sludge in a part of the IJsselmeer. This reservoir island is 1km across (so slightly smaller but same order of magnitude) and 45m deep.
Some links: google maps, Dutch wiki, google translated Dutch wiki.
According to this page, this island cost around 250 million to build. At 1 km across and 45m deep, it can hold around 35E6 sq meters of water=3.5E10 kgs of water. No idea whether it works that way, but the potential energy might be m*g*h=3.5E10 * 9.81 * 22 (avg.) ~ 7E12 joules, or the output of a 3500MW power plant for 7E12/3.5E9 2000 seconds or about half an hour, assuming 100% efficiency and no fuckups in my orders of magnitude.
I'm assuming it is easier to build this in the ocean than to dig it in a shallow lake (the lake around the reservoir is about 2.5m deep), because otherwise why not just dig it in the shallow lake? Since the north sea is about 50m deep offshore from the low countries, a reservoir of 3km accross wil hold 9 times as much energy, or around 5 hours of output from one plant. Whether that is enough or not I have no idea. I would suppose that the cost could be around 9*250 million = 2.5 billion euro, which is cheaper than building a new plant but nothing to sneeze at.
I think that in some cases it is even a policy to let the small shops get away with it, or at least I don't feel guilty if I get a discount for paying cash with a small shop owner.
They have enough trouble as it is while they generally provide a common good (diversity in the offering, shop owners generally take care of their neighbourhood, etc). The big boys strike all kinds of deals with the tax office and have recourse to various tax loopholes. This just makes it a slightly more level playing field...
As opposed to the post-internet operating systems like... Android and iOS? Really?
'open APIs' published by a single vendor can't be trusted by outside developers
No shit, sherlock!
You mean that companies that offer free (or non-free) stuff can and will stop doing so when their own interest points in another direction?
I think google et al are great for writing software that allows other people to interoperate in an easy way ... but that does not put a burden on them to continue supporting it after it is no longer in their best interest. We could define "open API" to mean that the server side software is implementable by a third party (like IMAP and even SMB are), but probably their APIs are so useful because they plug into a core product that they're not willing to open source and is extremely difficult to replicate (cf. iOS maps).
If your business depends on google doing or not doing something, then you are either taking a big risk (and entrepreneurship is about taking risks, so that's not necessarily a bad idea) or you should have a contract with google that they will do as needed for your business to succeed. If you take a big risk as a company and fail, well that's what bankruptcy protection is for ;-).
I think you are focussing too much on java-style compiler-forced error handling. To me, the essence of try/catch error handling is that you only catch errors if you can deal with them. If you can't (the majority of cases), let is escalate, all the way up to the user (or a log file) if needed. I think there are three sane ways of using a try/catch: (1) to actually deal with the error (this is by far the rarest), (2) mainly in loops of more-or-less independeny actions: to log the error, reset state, and continue working, and (3) at the top level, to log the error and display something less meaningful but less scary to the end user.
I think it is a bad design decision to impose static checking on declared 'throws' statements, because that forces routines to catch stuff that they can't handle, or declare a meaningless list of everything every called routine could ever throw. In essence, it couples the signalling and handling again that exceptions were supposed to decouple.
Another nicety of exceptions compared to return values is that the semanitcs of "something went wrong" is clear. This makes it possible to e.g. have a wrapper function that begins a transaction and commits or rollbacks it depending on the outcome (e.g. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/transactions/?from=olddocs#django.db.transaction.commit_on_success)
In Python, more than half of the bugs are either an improper use of a variable or the wrong amount of white space after refactoring some nested code.
I think the white space is mainly a red herring, but you are right that it is annoying to copy-paste code or refactor and have to remember how many spaces to shift a block to the right. In that regard curly braces and select-all + reindent does work easier.
About static typing (I assume that you mean static vs dynamic and not strong vs weak typing?): I think I disagree. I've not looked at how perl did it, so my experience mainly comes from java. But in java you are spending so much time mucking around with interfaces, casting etc. that it becomes a big mess quite soon, and you need an IDE to make any sense of it; while I use python for a non-trivial program (>25kloc in >200 files in ~10 years and 3 rewrites) and a plain old text editor is fine.
The "duck typing" is often misunderstood. In essence, python says that any object which supports a method, say ".count_parts()" implicitly implements the 'count_parts' interface. You can test membership in that class with 'hasattr' and you don't need to do any casting to use it. In java, if you have two classes from different libraries that happen to have the same method (e.g. becuase they both implement the same standard), if they haven't done it right by implementing the right interface (which is often not the case if you deal with 3d party code) it is a huge mess to do polymorphism: you either need to have complex conditional casting and executing, or define some sort of unified wrapper object and wrap them all.
I would love a language that has "implicit" contracts and still a way to better check enforcement, but I wouldn't know how that would look like.
Where I do feel an easy gain could be had is a sort of optional "strict" mode, although seeing pylint as a "compiler" step does that most of the time. It is annoying that typo's can often go unnoticed, making it harder to debug than needed. Also, the cpython compiler/interpreter seems to be missing out on some optimization that could be added with "cython-like" optimizer hints, ie "this thing over here is an int"...
Don't get me wrong, I love Python. But weaknesses are weaknesses.
Weaknesses are weaknesses, but dynamic typing is a choice that has negative and positive consequences. I would love to see ways to reduce the negatives while keeping the positives, but moving over to static typing feels like throwing out the baby with the bath water...
I'm a big python fan. It encourages elegant and readable code and has a good library and community. The lack of static typing hurts a bit in now having good static checking ("compiler errors") and IDE autocomplete, but it also means that you can scrap tehe 90% of code that java forces you to write to declare and then work around interfaces and abstraction layers :-)
I haven't written PHP the last 10 years, so I can't really compare to state of the art, but I felt that PHP encourages sloppy programming and lack of separation of concerns by sticking a lot of business logic in the presentation layer. But that be more about the language being used by a lot of people without formal programming training than about the language itself.
Totally off topic, but actually I think the main problem with APT is not the linking, they do solve that wonderfully; and the few times that I need something that is not (yet) available from apt I can just compile myself.
What I do find problematic is the interface of apt with language-specific library repositories. Eg pip for python, cran for R. I generally want to use those repositories since they are the de facto standard in those communities, but (1) that gives clashes if some other apt package requires something that I installed using pip, leading to multiple copies and version problems, and (2) the library repos can't specify "out-of-language" requirements, e.g. the libxml for some python library that binds to that lib. That means that I have to try installing via pip/cran/..., see what is missing, apt-get install those libs, and then try installing again.
Does anyone have a good solution for that?
The linked article shows how Amnesia (which is an excellent game, btw, at least part 1 is) will be supported on different platforms, but I'm pretty sure Amnesia already runs on those platforms. So it seems to me that Valve is supporting ubuntu, but will list other OS'es that happen to be supported by the (original) publisher?
Of course this is all deduction from rumors and two screenshots, so take cum grano salis....
Thinking about this: I so much wish that there was an effort to write a new sane and consistent OS based on modern C++ (seeing the error handling code in Linux makes me cry). But I know that in my lifetime we will not see such a thing going mainstream. :(
It seems that Linus has said:
- the whole C++ exception handling thing is fundamentally broken. It's
_especially_ broken for kernels.
Can you care to elaborate on how you think that C++ error handling would be superior for a modern kernel?
Is there an easy way to start a new X server in a separate control-alt-F*?
xs4all (Netherlands) does provide ipv6 and I find it quite useful to have direct links between computer that would otherwise be difficult to reach (e.g. between my computer at home (ipv4 NAT by the ADSL router) and a virtual server at work for which I didn't get an ipv4 address and hence only has pulic ipv6.
Also, it is useful to be able to connect directly to my home box from outside, and there are multiple ssh enabled machines on my LAN. Of course, I could give them all different ports and forward them using the router, but that is just so much more hassle...
I'm not much of a solderer, but isn't the operating (or at least max) temperature of a cpu above the melting point of soldering tin? Wouldn't that cause issues, or at least force a different kind of solder to be used?
Just to increase the pedantry: Great Britain refers to the main island (England+Wales+Scotland), and is Great as compared to French Brittany (Bretagne). That is why the UK is called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So, Great Britain is a smaller territory than the UK, and Ireland has never been part of Great Britain.
If the Palestines get their way, the gaza strip becomes a sovereign nation and it is perfectly legal to close the borders between nations. THAT is the HUGE elephant in the room in this conflict. The Palestines NEED Israel more then Israel needs them and the arabs don't want them at all.
If Gaza were a souvereign nation:
1. Israel would be totally free to close the land border. In fact, Israel has closed borders with Lebanon and Syria and that is fine in terms of international law
2. Israel would *not* be allowed to blockade Gaza from the sea and air, as it currently does. Blockading is an act of war and would justify an armed response from Gaza, making Israeli the aggressor if a war occurs. (in fact, blockading of the red sea leading to Eilat was was part of the casus belli for the 6 days war, so Israel certainly acknowledges that blockade is an act of war).
3. There would be no objection to Gaza importing arms from Egypt and Iran and training a real military.
At the moment, (1) is already a reality, and Israel really does not want (2) and (3). In fact, preventing (re)arming of Hamas was a stated objective of the 2009 Gaza War. Although economically Gaza would profit much more from integration with Israel, at the moment they're getting the worst of both worlds: they are blockaded from outside and closed off from Israel. So, Gaza (the region/potential country/people) absolutely has nothing to gain from the status quo.
(Of course, whether current Hamas leadership prefers the status quo to a more normalized situation where they can't abuse the conflict with Israel to stay in power is a totally different question...)
This is nonsense. DNA can be used to determine ethnic heritage, susceptibility for certain diseases (would you like your insurer to see that?), maybe in the future probability of deviant behaviour (would you like the police to see that?), etc. etc.
If there were some good way of 'checksumming' DNA this could be averted, but a DNA database is much more than a bunch of bar codes...
Creating a new game because you're too lazy to learn how to i-g and d-b-d another game? Sounds like the kind of inspiration needed to get a good game going :-)
Just pledged!
This is my first ever kickstarter pledge, so don't disappoint me :-)
Am currently playing a lot of DF so I like the idea of a scifi themed DF-inspired game (with actual graphics).
Good luck creating the game!
Linux is absolutely lightweight and flexible, it's just that KDE and gnome seem to be making a mess of things lately in a stupid attempt to keep up with the Joneses.
I use xubuntu+xmonad and it is blazingly fast and flexible on 4+ year old hardware. I tried using Gnome and KDE but I feel they get in my way more than helping me do my stuff, but I am completely happy with my current setup.
I completely agree that the thing looks hideous and I hope they sail it away from the Netherlands as soon as possible.
However, (1) the shipyard does have a long and rich history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_De_Vries. You don't get the "royal" prefix by bribing the Queen, you get it by existing at least 100 years and having a distinguished record. For example, the "Royal" warehouse KBB (Bijenkorf) lost its prefix when it was acquired by a hedge fund.
(2) according to wikipedia they are actually the same guys behind the feadship you quoted
So, I am guessing that the ugliness is at the specific desire of the guy who ordered it...
Yeah... I have to admit even the 'deobfuscated' versions of the source code are gibberish to me, so it is quite obvious that the ascii-art is nothing more than icing on the cake.
Yeah, it is not quite clear whether the journal accepted the rebuttals of the authors, which would be quite hilarious:
1. The referee’s objection is well taken; indeed, the abstract has not the slightest thing to do with the content of the paper.
2. The paper certainly does contain a plethora of mathematical notation, but it is to be hoped that readers with the appropriate background can infer its meaning (or lack thereof) from context.
3. It is indeed customary for a mathematical paper to contain a proof of its main result. This omission admittedly represents a slight flaw in the manuscript.
4. The author believes the proofs given for the referenced propositions are entirely sufficient [they read, respectively, "This is obvious" and "This is clear"]. However, she respects the referee’s opinion and would consider adding a few additional details.
5. On this point the author must strenuously object. The LATEX formatting of the manuscript is perfectly standard and in accordance with generally accepted practice. The same cannot be said of APM’s required template, which uses Microsoft Word [!].
I wish I had the balls to write cover letters like that to journal editors..
Randomly generated math article accepted by open access journal in september
FTFY, slashdot... olds for nerds, stuff that mattered a while ago?
Posted on September 14, 2012
strange. I usually upgrade at least one of my desktops immediately on a new release, and have never encountered any problems. The computer I'm typing on is 12.04, which is incrementally do-release-upgraded from 10.04 or around then. Never had any upgrade problems on laptop, desktop, or server.