AlephGarden

I get that, but I'm not even viewing the website because it nearly crashed my computer.

> How does one even respond to comments like that!

Something I struggle with on other internet forums, too. I try to tell myself that I'm not just writing to change the low-effort antagonist's mind, but for everyone else reading the thread, too.

Likewise. I've worked with some of my university's databases that have a field for SSN, but don't contain SSNs anymore. We now call them Structural Support Numbers, or something equally silly.

That keeps your data safe, but (and I'm guessing here) quite plausibly means filesystem writes may likely start failing, causing services on the affected server to start failing. If you need uptime during an earthquake, then that's not sufficient.

What's wrong with LaTeX (or extensions like XeTeX or LuaTeX)? Cursory searching pops up tools such as LaTeXML (http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML) for converting from LaTeX to XML; not that I've used it, but it seems to have about a 60% success rate at converting arXiv papers [1]. That's still about 20,000 papers that don't build successfully, but it's a tool that could be improved.

What would you suggest as an alternative to LaTeX or Word?

I'm just curious; I use LaTeX regularly and think it works just fine.

[1]http://arxmliv.kwarc.info/

| What programs do you get to have full control over for free?

How about we go through your own list of programs that your control panel gives access to?

* WordPress: Free and open source. * Drupal: Same. * Joomla: Same. * Bulletin Board software: Same. * PHP: Same. * Python: Yup. * Javascript: Same. * OpenPGP: Also FOSS.

At least half of your bloody toolkit is stuff that developers can easily have full control over for free. Stuff that you're charging a prospective employee to use.

As an aspiring mathematician, the thought of not using LaTeX for mathematics frightens me. The thought of using Word for mathematics terrifies me.