Anyway "ping" already has some well established (and very specific) meaning in the computer world. I'm surprised Apple would choose that specific word for their newest gimmick. Especially since it is already loaded with such uncool, geeky history.
You can also put some pure hydrogen in a more solid container with not chance of a leak introducing oxygen, rig up a spark plug or something, and nomatter how hard you try, it won't go off unless there is a leak for air to get in.
Same thing goes for gasoline. Put some in a bowl and light it on fire and you get a nice slow flame. Get some gasoline vapors and mix them with stoicheometric amounts of oxygen and you will get an explosion.
There's more to combustion than just thermodynamics, kinetics matters too.
I agree with you about the hydrogen powered car having lots of issues though.
There may be better tools out there if you have a big budget, but I'd have to agree. I got sick of word and its quirks when writing my thesis (sort of a technical book if you want to think of it like that). Emacs and LaTeX were a life-saving combination. Bibtex took some getting used to for the indexing, but that was the hardest thing to learn.
Formatting is easy. Large projects are easy. It copes with all the major image formats. And if using a text editor is not your thing, there are pseudo-wysiwyg gui's available.
On a side note, there are also (problematic) tools to convert your document to html and many other formats once you have it in tex.
If my Dad can use Slackware, anybody can. The real fun is when my step-mom can't get XP to recognize her camera so my dad had to DL the pictures and copy them to a USB stick.
Folks who haven't tried Slackware since the mid '90s really have no busness commenting about the distro. It's come just as far as all the rest, but somehow managed to stay true to the idea of being stable and reliable that has been there from day one.
If you want to be a point-and-click drone and only need to do email, then Slack will work just fine. On the other hand, I rarely have any problems compiling stuff either (haven't had to google for strange libs since I left redhat in the dust).
I know it's not "official" (in that it is not overseen by Pat) but slamd64 runs quite nicely. I've been running it for almost a year now on a core2 system with almost the same ease as official slackware on older systems. Just in case anyone is looking for 64 bit slack.
Now if only I could get an install that works easily on my PS3.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood