Linked List: April 27, 2008

Sunday, 27 April 2008

Dell to Offer Windows XP Beyond June 30 Cutoff ★

PC World:

Dell will take advantage of a licensing option in Vista Business and Vista Ultimate that lets PC makers provide XP under the Vista license, which Microsoft calls a “downgrade” license. (Enterprises with site licenses have these same rights with any version of Vista.) In essence, the user is buying a Vista license that it can apply to XP, and Microsoft can still claim a Vista sale.

So, after June 30, when you buy XP Microsoft will score it as a Vista sale.

Interview With Donald Knuth ★

Andrew Binstock interviews the ever-thoughtful Donald Knuth. Knuth, on how he writes:

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine, using the conventions of TeX. […] I have some homemade tools, like my own spell-checker for TeX and CWEB within Emacs. I designed my own bitmap font for use with Emacs, because I hate the way the ASCII apostrophe and the left open quote have morphed into independent symbols that no longer match each other visually. I have special Emacs modes to help me classify all the tens of thousands of papers and notes in my files, and special Emacs keyboard shortcuts that make bookwriting a little bit like playing an organ.

(Thanks to David Magda.)