PSTricks is more for diagrams. GnuPlot runs circles around Excel for high-powered graphing. It has lots of neat tricks including advanced graphs with complex error bars, colour coding, shading, etc. I know Excel pretty well, and I don't think it is possible to do a number of the examples at the gnuplot demo page in Excel.

The challenges facing my thesis were more basic. Excel has a few key issues with log graphing and numbers in scientific notation. Excel (and PowerPoint) have issues with Greek numbers. Also, in GnuPlot it is possible to place two graphs on the same page, one above the other, such that the X-Axis line up accurately. With Excel and PowerPoint, the results are "less than professional quality" at best. It's definitely not replicatable if a large volume of graphs is being done.

I also found a bug in Excel where it would render the bar graphs with the texture pattern inside the bar also appearing outside the border line for the bar. That truly sucked.

Another, "Not in my big moment!" bug is that PowerPoint will not consistently render the same fonts in the same presentation if you move between computers and/or PowerPoint versions. It's a really nasty bug, and creeps up in the wierdest places.

The 3 envelopes joke clearly explains what is happening.

More seriously, the easiest person for Whitman to blame this fiasco on, is someone else, ideally from outside HP. Viola - the previous Autonomy CEO ...

Avoid Green. It is the only colour of light that is not absorbed by chlorophyl. I would suggest using red LEDs, as most of the suns energy is in that end of the spectrum. Blue LEDs and White LEDs will appear brighter for a given energy input, however that is because our eyes are much more sensitive to blue than to red.

Agreed. Latex and GnuPlot saved my thesis.

The Excel, PowerPoint, Word toolchain for advanced graphing particularly sucks. Gnuplot may be archaic, but it blows Excel away in graphing capabilities. WordPerfect for Windows is still better than Word for large document text editing. Latex is the only one that handles complex math in an easy to use fashion. Plus, Latex gives the ability to port the same document to multiple print styles, which WordPerfect only partially accomplishes.

Key problems:
- Excel reformats the document to handle different printers, and then doesn't reformat it back.
- Absence of advanced formating functions in graphing and in spreadsheets. No equivalent of the Latex $f_{\Chi^2}(\vec{x})$ exists in Excel, especially for graphs.
- The statistics professor had a list of known bugs in Excel math functions. I think some of the newer versions of Excel fix some of these.
- Excel doesn't support exponential notation, such as 1E-4096, properly or consistently.
- You can paste the Excel spreadsheet into PowerPoint, and then apply advanced formating in PowerPoint. However, this sucks, and PowerPoint moves the symbols around every once in a while.
- OpenOffice clones Microsoft Office. By and large, it has the same problems.
- Word has no proper support for advanced graphing.
- No reveal codes in Word. This causes graphs and equations to unexpectedly disappear.
- Word does not properly support big documents.
- Word has no equivalent for LaTex support for BibTex.
- Word has no equivalent for LaTex's ability to support multiple back end formats, for instance, print, PDF, and HTML.
- Word doesn't support properly large documents.
- Way easier to script LaTex and GnuPlot than Word.
- Has Word fixed that bug where it will randomly reformat and/or delete pictures yet?
- Has Word fixed that bug where if it crashes if the embedding becomes too complex?

Word does not work for complex documents. For years, the legal profession kept purchasing WordPerfect because it had a few key functions that were missing in Word. Every month or two, an article pops up in Groklaw about how a law firm was bit by Word. If you need Mathematics or advanced document generation, then Word still doesn't work either. PowerPoint and Excel are no substitutes for a image editing programs or graphing programs.

If in the 1980's you were predicting that the world would get noticably hotter in the 2000's, and if almost every year in the 2000's had record global temperature highs, then you might conclude that your 20 to 30 year long-term climate models aren't doing too badly.

Yes, the models in the 1980's weren't all that accurate, and the modellers new it. However, they have had 30 years to refine those models. Ignore the science at your peril ...

The McLibel trial was widely regarded as the biggest publicity disaster to every hit McDonalds.

This case is so peripherally connected with file sharing, that it could sour the public on the recording industry. Specifically, if England, if they go to trial, the can subpoena the record company executives to testify at trial. There is no end of embarassing documents that might come up.

In accounting, the term is: market size.

If the iPhones are selling at 1,000,000 phones per day (or close to it) and my app can sell to 0.1% of that market, then $1,000/day in revenue. Figure out how to grow the market further, and your rich.

If the Microsoft surface tablets are selling 600,000 units/quarter, and my app sells to 0.1% of Surface owners, then I have $600/quarter in revenue. To avoid starvation, you need to either have 100% market penetration, or as the parent post put it: start "selling sandwiches at 7/11".

The problem is that a few players in the Windows App Store will have very large market penetrations. If those top players are selling $25,000/month, then the total market size avalable to a new entrant is small. Really small.

It doesn't matter if you are selling Singles on iTunes, Apps on Windows Store, or Sandwiches at 7/11. Multiply the selling price by the number of available customers and you get the market size. It is one of the first questions a CFO or venture capitalist will ask when you walk into the corner office to explain how you want money to fund your new idea.

Cassidy Pope singing Stupid Boy (The Voice Performance) sold $29,912 in the last 24 hours in the U.S.A. on iTunes. She likely sold even more the day before.

To be "a blip in Microsoft's accounting system", sales need to be at least 10 million. Reaching $25,000 in sales a month after launch, hobbyist platforms like the Rasberry Pi do better ...

I suspect some independent software vendors are weeping quietly ...

The documentation will be wrong, don't even bother.

I've programmed in more languages and on more platforms that most of the people here. The documentation is always a poor description of what the code does, and the researchers focused on formal methods would argue that any english language description of code must be a bad description.

If you are on a project where every exception must be handled properly, then you must cross-check against the upstream source. However, even this approach is dubious.

I've worked on a great many real-time embedded projects. When rare fault cases are analyzed, the software engineers preconceptions and real-life differ so radically, that faults and exceptions cannot be handled properly in advance in software. Software engineering has its limits, and you need to let the application testing people do their jobs.

Usually, I'm using DD-WRT in a small application. For instance, on a remote computer node that needs to connect to the office wirelessly. A small business or home network (less than 5 computers.) The home network of a business person that needs to connect to the office. etc.

Is there a DD-WRT replacement for my WRT-54GL?

Every once in a while I go looking. I know I can type some arcane commands into Linux, and make the router route IPv6. However, for any of my customers, I need either a GUI or a webpage based tool. The ease of configuration, the ability to set up a wireless bridge, and the configuration options on DNSMasq, keeps me coming back to DD-WRT.

Is there a more modern device with a Linux based kernel, at a reasonable price, that does IPv6 and is set up with a GUI and webpages?

At this point, businesses are wary of Microsoft's trendy application framework of the day. They are still recovering from IE6.

I remember that. I coded an entire front end for web browsers, and the next release deleted all of it. The revised software has been in production for the better part of a decade, and never needed further recoding. I don't get extra money for rewriting software every time Microsoft updates its operating systems. My programs run on big industrial machines, and my customers want write once - run for 20 years.

Microsoft charged money for their software, and Nokia is history.

If you have a third party selling your free software for a price, it might explain a great many of those phone calls ...

Way back, the US Military, probably under the guise of DARPA, wanted a new database written. The concept was that it could track, for example, the salaries of all civil servants. If someone queried for the salary for one particular civil servant, the database would refuse to return that data unless the requester had the specific security clearance required (the need to know).

A clever requester might know that one civil servant working in one particular division might be the one and only manager. As such, they could request the total salary for the divsion, and then request the total salary all the non-managers (secretaries) in that division. Then the manager's salary could be deduced by taking the difference between the two queries. This would be an obvious security violation, and as such the specification said that any sequence of operations that might give away classified data should also be prohibited (unless the requester had clearance.)

This database project generated lots of press, because it was such a good idea. Last I heard, no one quoted on the project, because no one had the faintest idea how to build the database.

Anyone have any updates? What was the standard called?