It depends on what you mean by "support." My university doesn't "support" GNU/Linux in the sense that they wouldn't fix your daughter's laptop if the screen fell off, but they might give her the relevant data she needs for networking. And then everything is done through the web, so she won't be missing anything essential for class. This is the very reason the web was built in the first place.

I use a GNU/Linux workstation and have had no problems. I don't know any undergrads who use GNU/Linux laptops, but my fellow grad students who do have not had any problems that they've told me about.

Network connectivity is the big one.

The other important one would be special applications, like Mathematica that she might be required to use for a class. IN that case I just run it off the nearest GNU/Linux cluster in an X server using ssh. Teach her how to do that and she'll be set.

Unfortunately people do shove proprietary software down the throats of every undergrad here; it's really disappointing. They're convinced that they have two choices when it comes to computing.

I agree with your main point: Apple didn't invent this idea. However, have you not noticed the useful programs? I guess Emacs, The Gimp, Firefox and all that other stuff isn't that usable. !!!Sarcasm!!! Get real, dude. What is this usable people are always talking about? How is it that my three year old can use this supposedly "unusable" operating system?

I quickly made my presence as a LaTeX user known when I started grad school. My lab-mate and a postdoc in the lab also use LaTeX, but our advisor has been a Word user for decades. After the subject came up once, the Postdoc (who has a Ph.D. in math) says to me "Just so you know, the new equation editor in Word can use the LaTeX formula markup," as if that was supposed to make up for the fact that after using Word for 15 years, I still didn't know why it never behaved the way it said it did, nor why the documentation was stupid and useless, or that the output looked like crap.

It's not that I can quickly make pretty formulas in LaTeX, it's that since LaTeX is (mostly) not a commercial product, and its used almost entirely by intellectuals, the help files are actually useful, and I can actually find out how to do something in LaTeX. On top of that, I can edit the files in plain text using any editor.

I think the biggest problem is that a lot of people don't understand what plain text is. People think if it looks like letters on the screen, it's text. Then they wonder why they can't open the same file on a Mac as they could on a machine with Windows. I switched from using Stata's do-file editor to Emacs, and my supervisor was shocked: he thought you had to use the IDE-esque do-file editor.

And the best part is that the output actually looks like something I would want to read. I was never satisfied with the output from Word: it both looks like what is on the screen, and departs from it in radical ways. I could never tell where the pagebreaks would actually be when I used word processors. After using LaTeX it hit me that what goes on the screen and what comes out of the printer really ought to be two different things, instead of being in denial and thinking they should be the same on screen as on paper. I would spend hours formatting Word documents, and the help files had no explanation for why it everything would change in other sections when I changed the formatting of one section. Formatting is not my problem! The typesetting program should take care of that.

And as to these changes, Word will always look like crap as long as it's the fare of the masses.

Nobody's penetrating my wife's netbook without my permission, or at least letting me watch. I'm the system administrator.

Just what is the desktop that these debaters keep referring to? Is it desktop machines? Is it desktop use, as in a certain set of applications?

I disagree with the RedHat CEO: I've used all of the above-mentioned distros, some worked better than others, but all make a good desktop at home and at work. I use Slackware at work, for my Unix-like environment, and I use Kubuntu at home. Multimedia, networking and web-browsing as well as office applications work just fine: so what is this desktop he's referring to?

RedHat has made it particularly clear over the years that they do not care about the "desktop market" whatever that refers to. They care about Big Iron. That's where they make their money. And they shouldn't care about anything else. I do want the opportunity to set up a networked office when I have my own lab, and I don't know who i'll turn to when the time comes, but probably not RedHat. Probably someone who does Slackware, like myself.

And to Mr. "It's all about the apps": which apps are you referring to? I don't think you're talking about the ones I use, because Emacs, LaTeX, R, and gcc work best on GNU/Linux.

Tinbergen, Lorenz, Mayr, ..., Kimura, Gould,...

My point is that the humans involved are very important to understanding a field, and having respect for the pioneers in the field just comes with the territory.

Joel

You're absolutely right, we don't go around saying "I'm a Darwinist."

However, we (evolutionary biologists) do honor Darwin in certain ways: we're having a birthday party for him tomorrow. However, physicists do the same with Planck and Einstein, and Mathematicians with Gauss and Poincare. It's no different in biology.

We also honor Mendel, Fisher, Wright, Haldane, Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin and many others.

Joel

"It's as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and
testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge."

That's baloney. Every competent biologist knows that Darwin's ideas were strongly challenged and not fully accepted until the late 1930s. I haven't read Safina's article, but if he's saying stuff like this, his audience is obviously not evolutionary biologists like me.

Joel

Don't bother. This is a money-laundering scheme --- I don't mean that the people doing it think of it that way, or that they have malevolent motives. However, stem cell research is basically at the level of "alchemy" and the ads I've seen are all targeted at parents' biggest insecurities. Don't give in to them.

I once had a job interview for one of these blood-banking companies: the job would have been to call doctor's offices and make sure they were placing flyers in prominent places where pregnant women could see them. They rejected me for the job because they didn't like the look on my face --- no joke. I knew there was something morally questionable about it, and this was before I was a parent. Now that I am, I think you'll have plenty of stuff to worry about without another bill for a useless service that is predicated on fear.

Of any fears you should be tackling, you should be dealing with your fears related to birthing.

Joel