Why it Died: cost > income

normal human beings

Academics aren't normal human beings. ;)

Office will take over from TeX when (at the least)

* It works on Linux (which lots of academics use.
* It works well with version control, making it easy to merge edits made by different people
* It is easy to generate tables from scripts and glue them into the document
* It is easy to take a pre-written document and put it in a new style.

Now, it's possible Office already does a few of those, and it's also very possible TeX does an awful lot more than that.

The cost isn't really that much of an issue for academics, as every university tends to have a site-licence for Office and other apps. Despite this, I still never use it.

I don't believe we were designed for any particular reason. However, I wish to investigate how the universe works, both for my own interest, and because experience shows that learning more about how the universe works lets us make more cool things.

I have no reason to believe the laws of physics will stay the same. However, they seem to be staying the same, so I'll assume they will until I have a reason to think otherwise.

I'm nice to people and help them, because experience tells me that tends to lead to people being nice to me, and helping me, which is useful.

I don't see what part of my atheism I'm not consistent with?

No offense, but that only seems to show that bad shoes are really, really bad for you. How do you know barefoot might not be better than even good, new shoes?

Or maybe, they have got a license for playing MP3s and other audio types, and can't release the source for it? That's a standard part of lots of patent licensing.

How many people do you think would pay extra money to get an extra queen in chess? How many people would pay to get some more "e"s in Scrabble, even when just playing with friends, if they wouldn't get caught? People like to be the best, and lots of people want to do it without skill or work.

I'm concerned that after reading the article, and apt-p2p's FAQ page, that I can't find any guide to how much upload bandwidth this thing will use. While I'm all for sharing, I find it important to cap my upload speed so my connection performs well on other stuff I'm doing, and also stop uploading once I'm at 1:1 sharing or so. Some of us pay if we use too much bandwidth!

The first rule of pirated movies isn't don't discuss them, it's don't go out and download them, watch them, then admit you did it. You can easily write an article about a crime, without actually going out and committing it yourself.

While this sounds like a cool idea, I think the problem is being exaggerated slightly. The suggestion is that doing 1200 tests per commit doesn't scale is simply not true. In general necessary to run the tests for every commit, if commit N passes, and commit N+5 passes, it really doesn't seem necessary to check the ones inbetween. We run a lot more than 1200 tests on 3 operating systems and one dual-core computer with VMs is more than enough to keep up.

Does anyone know which controller / drive is in macbooks, and how these results match up to those on macs with SSDs?

That sounds more like the BSD licence.

In a no-copyright world, I could take your stuff, change it, put it in my binary-only product, and not give you back the changes I made. The GPL doesn't allow that.

According to the C++ standard, as soon as you dereference NULL, you are off into the nasty old land of undefined behaviour, and all kinds of horrible things can occur to you.

I'm NOT saying Homosexuality isn't fine, but saying animals do it just isn't a good justification. There are animals that kill and eat their own mothers, but I don't think that's a good justification for doing it yourself.

Haha! Negative equity isn't a problem for me, I don't have to pay back my mortgage, because I got my goldfish to sign for it!