The h Bar

5:00 PM

@EmilioPisanty But that's not precisely what historical locks were made for. They're meant for "stellar" questions which have exceptional redeeming value despite not being on topic. Not that "stellar" correlates directly to votes, but I'm thinking more like 25-score questions, not 5-score questions. Most physics-careers questions don't come anywhere close to that.

By the way, our allotted time for the chat session is over. See everyone in two weeks! We'll continue this discussion on tags for those who would like to stick around.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ so what do you reckon?

delete them all?

David Z

@EmilioPisanty All the questions? I'd say examine the top 5 or so for possible historical lock, and delete the rest. Though if we can have the tag blacklisted (I mean, forbidden for future use) without removing it, the deletion isn't so important.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ or maybe we can ask for a mass migration to academia?

that last bit does look to be possible

David Z

@EmilioPisanty Eh... that's questionable. No guarantee that all the questions would be on topic or desirable on Academia, and some of them may have duplicates there anyway. Plus as a rule we can't migrate questions older than 60 days; I'm sure SE could override that, but I doubt they would want to.

One thing we could do is, if we find (open) duplicates on Academia, edit in a "manual duplicate notice" that points to the question there.

Since you pointed out that it does seem to be possible to have a tag blacklisted but not burninated, maybe we can just have physics-careers blacklisted for now, and then we can discuss what to do with the old questions with that tag. cc @Qmechanic

Emilio Pisanty

BTW there's about 900 total rep on the tag.

not that removals will affect people much

but still

David Z

5:11 PM

I suppose that's a good point against deleting unnecessarily. Well, it looks like 200 of that rep is associated with deleted users anyway, and other than that, no more than 105 to any given user

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ yeah, on closer inspection, it's not that impactful

I guess this guy/girl won't be happy

grad student

49 1 2

but otherwise

David Z

Still, that is enough to push me over in favor of dealing with this without mass deletion if we can - and it looks like we can.

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ cool

I guess that's mostly it for now?

We haven't discussed the + tags

or tag review queues

but those sound like topics for another day

David Z

Yeah... well, I'm worn out for now, I agree to defer those to another day.

Qmechanic

@EmilioPisanty : OK.

Emilio Pisanty

5:16 PM

@DavidZ one last bit, what's your thoughts on changing tags on this one to careers and then it can be lumped in with the others?

1

Q: Publication Authorship Credits

Many physics papers now have dozens of authors per paper. Experimental physics may have multi-organizational and multi-country contributing staffs, but I'd guess that most of the names don't contribute a word or equation to a paper, yet they get individual authorship credit. My question is who de...

soft-question general-physics

it's essentially the same situation the way I see it

David Z

Yeah, if the tag is going to be blacklisted anyway, I don't mind

Emilio Pisanty

cool

Anonymous

What is a good software for Windows 7 that allows to create LaTeX documents and save/render them on desktop?

Anonymous

Any suggestions?

Emilio Pisanty

@Blue texmaker

David Z

5:18 PM

@Blue MikTeX is the common LaTeX compiler for Windows I think? You'll need a compiler as well as an editor (which TeXmaker is AFAIK)

Anonymous

@EmilioPisanty Thanks, checking

Yashas

I have less than 15 more hours at home before I go to college

Anonymous

@Yashas You said it starts next Monday?

Emilio Pisanty

@DavidZ I imagine @Blue was looking for a frontend rather than a backend

@Blue but you do need a back-end to actually compile the latex into pdf whatever editor you choose

Anonymous

I guess I need both. I want to type my lecture notes in LaTeX and then save them as pdf documents for future reference

David Z

5:20 PM

Yeah, you need both

Yashas

@Blue I need to be at the college on Saturday

I am leaving tmrow

Anonymous

@Yashas Oh, are your parents gonna accompany you?

Yashas

@Blue yes

they need to sign some stuff AFAIK

David Z

@Yashas Good luck

Yashas

@DavidZ Thank You :-)

Emilio Pisanty

5:21 PM

@Blue You need a backend but for windows the standard choice is MikTeX and there's little reason to deviate unless you have very specific requirements

@Yashas yup, good luck with that

Yashas

@EmilioPisanty ty :)

David Z

31

Q: Latex distributions. What are their main differences?

What are the main differences among: TeX Live teTeX fpTeX MiKTeX proTeXt MacTeX gwTeX OzTeX AmigaTeX PasTeX

distributions

Emilio Pisanty

oh, god, no, don't look at that

just install MikTeX and forget about it

it's enough of a pain to learn LaTeX as is

John Rennie

@Qmechanic I saw it mentioned on Peter Woit's blog. Not that I'm a big fan of Woit, but he does a good job of collating interesting links so I find his blog worth reading.

Anonymous

Texmaker isn't available for Windows 7? xm1math.net/texmaker/download.html

David Z

5:24 PM

Oh here's another good one:

83

A: What are the advantages of TeX Live over MiKTeX?

I've covered some of this before on my blog, so some of this is a rehash! In recent versions, the differences between MiKTeX and TeX Live have narrowed. Package coverage between the two is similar, as is the ability to do on-line updates. I guess here you want differences: Only MiKTeX can do 'o...

@Blue The older version (4.5) says it does run in Win 7

Emilio Pisanty

@Blue hmmmmm, seems so, it stops at 4.5 for win7 and it's at 5.0 for the rest

Qmechanic

@JohnRennie : Ah, Ok, thx.

David Z

and you could always just try the 5.0 installer on Windows 7, it might just work anyway

Emilio Pisanty

No, if you're just starting, there's no sense in jumping into monkey business like that

you want something that's well supported on your machine

David Z

@EmilioPisanty assuming you're talking about Texmaker 4.5 v 5.0, I disagree. My point is that both versions might be well supported even though only one claims to be.

And there should be nothing to lose by trying the other.

Emilio Pisanty

5:27 PM

I used texniccenter.org for a long time but switched to texmaker when I moved to ubuntu, mostly because of the better preview pane. it might have improved, though.

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