Most slashbots are absolute morons when it comes to art, social sciences and humanities. It's as if they've had a collective lobotomy.

The things I've seen about 'design flaws' have usually been about it being counter to the unix tradition of small programs doing one thing and one thing well, which only ever was true for small cli programs used to manipulate strings of text. It's not so much a proper neckbeard criticism, just some regurgitated nonsense that people will repeat because they've seen it modded to +5, insightful, and repetition is after all the surest way to seem insightful.

Broken shit is to be expected from software. Hopefully most of it gets fixed sooner now that so many have to use it.

And that's why no criticism of systemd is to be taken seriously: it's always about how terrible it will become in the future, never about actual problems it might have today.

Bullshit. Any pre-64 bit Intel laptop from Apple had a lifespan of 5 years before it was forced into obsolescence by an arbitrary OS X cut-off. These days, support go all the way back to the first 64 bit laptops (2008), but it's still far too early to tell whether they last twice as long as alternatives.

His reason for lying is because he's one of them. Besides, if someone involved with 4chan is doxxed, then the first suspect would be someone else from there. #gamergate is 4chan.

Right. As if someone who even bothers following more than 30 people involved in #gamergate isn't involved himself. I.e. not exactly a trustworthy source. I'm not questioning you, btw, I'm saying you're making shit up.

The funny thing is that the #gamergate proponents feel that being rightly labeled as misogynists is harassment that justify death threats. They're a bunch of dilusional morons, the lot of them.

You use Google for research? Seriously?

But that's just not practical when you want a current overview of a huge field. With EndNote, you typically dump the entire list of search results from the database, and then start reading abstracts (included in the reference file), sorting relevant from irrelevant, and then download PDFs to read (which are then stored along with the references). It's a research tool and a retrieval tool. BibTeX isn't.

Exactly. The ability to view the database, sorted in any order imaginable, or ordered into groups, either manually or through live searches. It's a very useful tool when writing a review with hundreds or references, and is nice to have even if you've got just a few dozens.

Yeah, BibTeX is more reliable than EndNote, but it's cumbersome to use and extremely poor at, well, managing references. Perhaps there are frontends with dupe control, sorting by arbitrary fields, grouping, etc., but then you're into the old Unix problem of having the choice of a gazillion applications that do one thing each, usually poorly, and with different combinations everywhere. A monstrosity like EndNote does pretty much everything you can want from a reference manager (much of it in a confusing manner, granted), which means you can get help: it's the same everywhere.

BibTeX might have most styles you can think of -- in English. When I last used it, I had to hack my own, not something I would recommend to your average researcher. Keep in mind that most of them are quite poor with computers. Asking them to use LaTeX is like asking Unix programmers to think of the end user: it's neither relevant to them, nor helpful.

Typesetting isn't a process computers excel at. LaTeX is good, but not nearly as good as a good designer equipped with InDesign and loads and loads of time. It's faster and cheaper, yes, and certainly good enough for most academic journals (probably not Nature). Unfortunately, it also offers nothing (except decent typesetting) for fields that don't deal much with maths, whereas Microsoft Word offers a few nice tools, is somewhat easy to use, and has rubbish typesetting.

> it is indeed the case that nonlocal businesses are more likely to use Maersk for shipping, since there are so many more of them.

Thanks for the confirmation. You really are an idiot.

I'm sorry, I didn't realise I was talking to an idiot. If local businesses are more likely to use Maersk for shipping, then it would be better for Maersk to use local businesses, for its own sake. Clearer now?

Supporting local business tends to increase local business, increasing local business. This is good for business. Do Korean shipyards get their ship parts shipped by Maersk?