I guess that mathematicians prefer blackboards because they are the superior medium:

• You can write freely, naturally and easily (even with TeX, typing math can be a pain),
• You can add things freely - which is often necessary when there are questions and gives more flexibility,
• You have a high resolution at your disposal (when compared to video projectors or whiteboard markers), letting you easily draw fine structures or write small indices.
• Even in the smallest seminar rooms you'll have at least two blackboards at your disposal (going up to 6 huge ones in lecture halls all of which can be seen at once). This means the listener/viewer will always have a lot of context available which is crucial.
• You'll talk at a reasonable speed, because you have to write down everything at the time.

PS. I corrected the initials 'SP' to 'ssp' in todays entries.

These people died while serving their country, so this is a powerful (and perhaps unfair) metaphor of the current president. But what about the grief of the relatives and friends?

Update: RA commented: "It might be a bit rough to use those people's names, but it's hardly any different to someone on the other side of the political spectrum parading them as Defenders of American Freedom, and all that guff. They didn't die in the defence of their country: Iraq was not a threat to the US."

Ok, good to know. Buffalo and Linksys were the test winners in a recent review in the Finnish MikroPC magazine. But the review focused on performance and features, which are not so important for me. In any case the limiting factor is the speed of the broadband connection, which maxes out at 2 Mbit/s in Finland at this moment. I read some good comments about Buffalo, but apparently this system needs some effort to configure properly. So, Apple would be the easiest, but is the price difference (about 100 euros) worth the saving in time?

I have been using some PostScript-specific macro packages in the books I have written. Also, when I tried to use pdfLaTeX to typeset a book with several hundred pages, pdfLaTeX run out of space for the PDF bookmarks etc.

I later corrected this problem by modifying the local TeX installation. I configured the TeX system with more space for bookkeeping (I don't remember all the details any more). So, you may have to have a non-standard version of TeX to use pdfLaTeX in longer books.

I'm acting as an unofficial TeX support person at work, and I'm also maintaining the local TeX installation. So I tend to get to know if something does not work, and pdfLaTeX has caused few problems recently.

PdfLaTeX works especially well with slide presentations, which can be shown on virtually all platforms in the PDF format.

I think that teTeX was a giant step forwards. When teTeX came out was when I started maintaining our TeX installation. That was teTeX version 0.x, perhaps 0.3 (or even earlier). However, that version still had problems in getting commercial PS fonts to work properly, so I had to dig rather deep inside TeX. Today installing those fonts (Lucida Bright and MathTime) would be painless.

SP wrote: "While TeX has always been very good at its core tasks, it does look a bit dated. Things like the memory constraints, Unicode support, font support and variable output formats can use improvement. And that's what people seem to look into. In particular, it should be possible to improve those aspects without ruining the good typesetting engine."

I couldn't agree more. At one point I looked at a system called Lout, which was an elegant typesetting system designed from scratch - but without the numerous useful LaTeX packages. Apparently Lout still exists. So, you can learn a lot from the clumsy aspects of TeX when designing a new typesetting system. But TeX is TeX, and I have learned to like it.

SP commented when I recommended pdfLaTeX for slide presentations: "People tend to prefer blackboards around here, so that's not too much of a problem... but as always it's good to know that TeX will be able to handle it."

Good to know. I dislike intensely the routine slide shows which have many times replaced good lectures here in Finland. I miss blackboards, they don't really exist in Finland, as they were replaced with whiteboards or were removed completely.