patrickg

Cheap is not "dead cheap".

Which (western) countries would make such a link statement effective? I am pretty sure that here in Germany no sensible court would rule in favor of such a "don't link" rule.

Nobody mentions wikipedia? I think this is one best sites for understanding historical things (amongst others of course).

This is my favorite: http://lallafa.de/blog/c64-projects/d64qlplugin/

There has been a lot of noise about the working conditions at groupon (Germany). I am not sure if this is good news or not.

dead cheap is getting more and more to "starting to get expensive". Prices are rising so much the last years, especially in Kreuzberg and other cool places. Offices are also getting more expensive and harder to get. Currently looking for a nice and affordable office in Schöneberg... :(

I think it's time for killing the "Berlin is dead cheap" myth

That would have been much quicker with Time Machine (been there, done that).

Easy to say and hard to do.

TeX distributions are getting more complex and much bigger, while at the same time providing a _much_ better user experience than a few years ago. TeX live for example has the "full" distribution scheme as default and the users always never have to install things found somewhere on the net by themselves. It just works for most people around us.

As soon as you start splitting things up, it's hard for the users to follow.

"We" keep getting questions from Linux users that "package X is not available and how can I install it? I've tried [many horrible things]?" The answer is usually "install package texlive-something" of your distro. For these users the user experience is worse than installing the full texlive.

One really nice thing is with current texlive (> 2011) is that you can get updates between release cycles. This also makes (IMO) the user experience much better but is in contradiction to what most distros need.

See the discussion here: http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/20036/243

Glad to see that the top three browsers use different rendering engines. Long live diversity.

Edit: in the hope of good css/html5 conformance / no browser specific programming like in the old days

If there are only two options that add up to 100% it must be perfectly symmetric.

OK, so I guess I need to plan significant amount of time documenting. Not just "the last day".

I try. I guess this is the hardest part.

I use github extensively - very good suggestion! Thanks

Awesome. Not much more to say. Thanks

Not really what you're after, I guess, but a link anyway: http://code.google.com/p/pagedown/wiki/PageDown "PageDown is the JavaScript Markdown previewer used on Stack Overflow and the rest of the Stack Exchange network. It includes a Markdown-to-HTML converter and an in-page Markdown editor with live preview."

I do have a degree in computer science so I know about state machines. Yet I don't use them at all in my code. Am I missing a great opportunity? I know it is close to impossible to answer that question without knowing the problem space, but perhaps there is a nice article about solving (common) problems with state machines?

As it seems that here is a/the dash developer: how much will it be in the future? It's free now, but (AFAIUI) it will be a paid software once it leaves beta!? Can someone explain?

I am a tex.stackexchange.com regular and I really like the community. It is a small community but/therefore quite some people meet on a regular basis, the (local) TUG conferences. I agree very much with the "thank you sx" note.

There is this really great (German language) podcast about node.js from a well known podcaster here Tim Pritlove: http://cre.fm/cre167 - I listened to it and I know I had to try out node.js (which I did).

That reminds me of a story of a relative, who was working in a local German bank (Sparkasse). They were screening the text on money transfers (Überweisung) for words like "anthrax". I couldn't believe that they had such an order.

See http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/graphics.html

"The road to wisdom? Well its plain and simple to express - err and err and err again. But less and less and less" (Piet Hein)

No, there isn't. I am working on a book, but it will take a while when this is translated to english.

The stability comes from the core, but the problems arise from the extensions. I have pushed LuaTeX to some limits and seen lots of segfaults and other errors.

I am working on it. Thanks for pointing it out once more!

Only someone not related to typesetting can say that LaTeX is dead. Exactly the opposite is true. Even though there are good alternatives these days such as InDesign and (I hate to say that:) MS Word (which now has a much better formula editor and OpenType Math fonts), great developments are taking place, for example LuaTeX. Not directly LaTeX but TeX: I have built a high quality database publishing system based on LuaTeX: http://speedata.github.com/publisher/

Nobody uses (Knuth's) TeX anymore. They use PDFTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX. None of these are as stable as TeX, but in practice a whole lot better than most other software I use.

Metafont is hardly used these days. All TeX distributions use either a Type1 font of Computer Modern or Latin Modern. And the equation typesetting has nothing(!) to do with Metafont. Everything is set into the TeX binary (and its formats). You just need a good math font (and that is not trivial, but not related to Metafont)

I am running a TeX distribution with only one binary. And with bibliography and index: these could be done with the Lua part of LuaTeX. True about the others.

* First of all, the OP mixes up LaTeX and TeX. TeX is written in a very portable language and has been ported to more platforms than most other software, including PDP-10 and others.

* LaTeX is working on the iPad, see for example: http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2010/talks/2010-09-14-arthu...

* LuaTeX (http://luatex.org) is written in C, not WEB.

* You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont fonts, but who wants them these days anyway?