The question isn't 'why don't academic publish in open access journals', its really 'why aren't the open access journals as good'?
I publish in both. My papers get read *more* in the open access journals. But the quality of scholarship of those papers, and the ones published along with it is lower. The simple reason is that the open access journals need my money to stay afloat - the fees I pay them to 'publish' (really for the copyediting, layout and coordinating peer review) bias their decision making. Its like an investment bank paying a credit rating firm to rate their product. Guess what - that shit smells like roses! Traditional journals are more likely to be hard-nosed, rejecting more papers up front and picking tough peer reviewers. They make their money by keeping their subscribers who want a monthly issue full of rigorously reviewed worked.
So, like my peers, I trust papers published in the traditional journals more than the open access journals, because I know that there is less financial bias. And when I have a choice because I have a great piece of scholarship to publish, I want it in with the other work that I trust myself.
Probably because its a summary of a press release, rather than the actual paper. This was a computer simulation exercise - a model. No patients were actually treated. There was no prescribing. There were no superior outcomes. Its all hypothetical.
Could an AI outperform an MD? Sure, could happen and probably will eventually. But this model doesn't show that. It just shows that its easier to model health care in silicon than the real world. Remember we can cure cancer in mice - models aren't the same thing as reality.
This is the most mercenary discussion I've seen on Slashdot, ever.
If your employer isn't loyal to you (within reason) then you don't want to be there. Most of the organizations I have worked for - including some very big ones - actually do try to avoid laying people off in a downturn, at least skilled white-collar workers. In a knowledge industry if you burn your workers every knows and it gets tougher to hire in the future.
You already know whats right for you - the other job. That means you need to leave - but doesn't mean leaving the current company (& coworkers!) in the lurch. Ask the new employer if they will give you a couple of months before you start; if so, get an offer letter with those terms. Seriously - I just hired a programmer and a project manager on these terms (2 months and 3 months respectively). They needed the time to close out projects, train new hires etc. I was impressed that they were loyal to their old employer - and presume they will leave me one day with the same grace and style. Their old employers (who couldn't match my offer) were pleased that they were willing to stay that long, and will in the future give them glowing recommendations - and might hire them back. Co-workers don't feel shafted etc. Did I want them sooner? Of course - but they were the right people and I'm willing to wait.
Now, your current employer might tell you to stuff it, and to clear out your desk. Or that they will hire someone and they only want 2 weeks and then your out. Fine - you have been loyal and done your part, and the new employer presumably will take you sooner.
Loyalty means doing your best in a hard situation, not picking between 2 weeks notice and staying forever.
Spear phishing is phishing targeted at a single individual. Since its in Wikipedia and all over the Interwebs and all those black hatted types talk about I'm guessing the poster didn't make it up. Then again maybe he is one of those black hatty, Wikipedia writing trolls making s***t up in a conspiratorial way. You never know...
Jindal said: "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.â
He never said the problem was it didn't create jobs, nor that it was working fine and didn't need additional funds. Instead he mocked it ("something called 'volcano monitoring'") and said flat out that the Federal government shouldn't be doing it.
I'm sure there's pork in the bill. Jindal's failure wasn't trying to point out pork. Jindal's failure was in being ignorant and hypocritical. He is the governor of a state already receiving the largest stimulus package since Reconstruction and one that depends on federal funding for "something called hurricane monitoring." Only a fool would think the rest of American had forgotten Katrina so quickly.
Yes, early administration of IV beta blockers caused more heart failure. It also caused people have fewer additional heart attacks and to drop into nasty rhythms requiring painful shocks.
The take home of the big study wasn't not to give beta blockers - it clearly showed they worked for the reason we had always given them - but to be judicious. Don't push them IV at the first sign of a heart attack. Give them to people who seem to have enough cardiac output to spare. In essence, think - don't just give them because a) the study protocol says the get it, or b) the hospital guidelines says to give them.
Thompson (EndNote's publisher) sucks. Its a monopoly that control's the three dominant packages, and because of network effects (ie, "because of collaboration...") they can market crap and people have to buy it.
Eventually someone will come out with a cross-platform product that leapfrog's EndNote and will make a killing. Until then...
Few, and if they are present then its usually a single, short equation with a derivation etc. Word does just fine for these purposes. Any paper that required a more sophisticated equation editor than Word provides wouldn't be appropriate for your average medical journal readership. While you can argue that this is soft science, NIH's funding and the sheer volume of publications is mind-boggling.
But more to the point, all of the talk about formatting etc is a bit irrelevant. Most of journals in my field require final submissions to be in MS Word format as they perform the formatting. We can submit a draft for review as a PDF (double spaced, please), but the final version is expected to be in Word so they can make it fit their own standards.
Biochemistry and the bench science journals may be different, but at the general medical and public health level, it would be difficult to get a LatEx manuscript through the peer and final submission process without hiccups.
In 10 years of research in the biomedical field I have never actually seen anyone use LaTex. Perhaps it is the standard in engineering & CS or other fields where researchers use Unix on their workstations, but Word and EndNote remain the lingua franca elsewhere.
Real Title: Why One Journalist Hates Doctors
on
Why Doctors Hate Science
·
· Score: 1, Informative
The fact that the medical system has struggled to implement evidence (ie, science) based medicine over the past 20 years is not evidence that physicians hate science. Its evidence that the science is poor, the process is hard and there are tremendous incentives against it. Its just damn difficult.
Think physicians hate "science"? Try explaining to a patient why they should take the drug that is 10% less effective than the competitor but half the price. Or explain why the diagnostic procedure that saved their best friends life is unlikely to find anything in their case, wouldn't hurt them -- but is "worthless" from a cost efficacy perspective. We all struggle with cost efficacy - no one wants to get something less than the best, patients even less than physicians.
Besides which, "doctor" means teacher, not medical practitioner. So exactly why does this journalist think that teachers hate science? And how does citing a Senator help? Yes, Coburn is a physician (albeit an obstetrician which is one of the fields that has struggled the most to integrate hard science appropriately due to the overwhelming malpractice issues), but Coburn doesn't believe in science in the first place - famously calling global warming a "bunch of crap."
>> FISA was established when the nation was not at war.
What exactly would you consider a war? We were still in the throes of the "Cold War" against a billion plus Communists armed with nuclear weapons. We had just pulled out of Vietnam, and it was the warrantless surveillance of people opposed to that war that sparked the Chuch Investigations and then FISA. So whether you consider Mr. Bush's war to be an figurative, ideological struggle, or whether you consider is to be a literal, physical struggle, FISA was a reaction to exactly the same excesses.
Besides which, FISA doesn't cover information sharing between agencies. Thats an entirely different problem. FISA simply establishes a mechanism for authorizing domestic spying.
EMRs are a great idea, but the medical world is poorly adapted to build them and integrate them. Its dysfunctional system where billing is becoming increasingly critical, while what you get for is divorced from what you actually do. So we wind up with schizophrenic EMRs that can't decide whether they are generating billing tickets, documenting patient care or preventing a lawsuit.
1) They are expensive for a small practice - think that a primary care docs office is rolling in cash? Think again. Most of them are barely scraping by, which is why your doc needs to see 30+ patients a day. Otherwise the rent doesn't get paid and he/she can't make payroll. If a new tool doesn't make the office more efficient, it can't be justified. Sound odd? Next time you visit your doc, ask him who determines how much he/she gets paid. Its not you, its not the market and its not actually the insurance companies. Its the federal government when they set payment guidelines for Medicare/Medicaid which the insurers follow. Free market my ass.
2) They are slower than paper - few docs can type as fast as they can dictate or write. Most of us can take notes on a piece of paper while interviewing a patient - no one I know can talk to a patient and type into a form.
3) Many are designed to maximize billing, not care - we get paid based on how many indicators of complex care we hit. How many "systems" asked about, how many organs examined etc etc - not by our time or skill. So in order to bill we have to document all of these. Some EMRs are designed to force the MDs to check many boxes for billing and audit purposes. Unpleasant and slow.
4) Many are slow and perform poorly - my hospital switched recently from a physician designed an written EMR from the 80s that was text/terminal based and blindingly fast, to a web-based system. The new system is slow, and doesn't really do much that the old system did. The difference was that the first system was built by MDs who ate their own dog-food, the second by teams of very smart, very committed programmers who don't practice medicine.
5) They are the camel's nose under the tent - my hospital based practice was recently instructed to begin doing "medication reconciliation" on all outpatients. That means at the start of the visit I have to type in all of a patient's medications into the EMR. Sounds fine for you, right? Now imagine your grandmother. As a sub-specialty consultant I see most of my patients once to twice a year and they are on 20+ medications, over the counters, vitamins and herbal supplements. It can take 6-7 minutes out of an already short 30 minute visit. Sure its great for safety, but it means we are running an additional 45 minutes late at the end of the day. Not so great for you if you have a late afternoon appointment.
Windows XP - the full, bloated ugly version - runs fine in 1GB of memory. In fact, for most of its lifecycle, very few people every ran it at 2GB. All of the clinical workstations in my hospital still run it at 640MB (mostly just web-based apps), and many desktops in our organizations run it in 512MB. Admittedly, the latter machines are cripplingly slow, but it makes the point.
Microsoft has been porting XP to the OLPC for a while. The problem they are running into is that WinXP is nothing without its applications. In fact, MS isn't even worried about educational apps - its worried about Office. Check out the size of even a minimal install of Word - its not insignificant. However, without Office, XP just doesn't offer that much over a open source OS. *This* is their key stumbling block.
Frankly, this is a no win situation for MS. Unlike most PCs, in the OLPC "form follows function", ie the hardware is explicitly designed to support a certain set of priorities and functions. It can't be back-engineered so that Windows can run on it without either a) making it much more expensive, or b) turning it into just a stripped down Windows machine. If Negroponte holds firm then Windows will always be an inferior, second choice on the machine. Expect MS to hammer at the OLPC for being all sorts of terrible things and Negroponte for being an anti-capitalist obstructionist who belongs in Sweden eating French cheese with John Kerry.
Negronponte can't argue on the technical merits because his competitors are pulling the same fast one on consumers in 3rd world countries that they have perfected in the US. The OLPC isn't supposed to compete with traditional laptops - it does very different things. You can't compare its mesh network to WiFi. Its not designed just for battery life, but to be easy to recharge etc etc. Yes you can get something from Intel/MS that has a faster processor, or more memory or a shinier screen -- but its just a stripped down notebook.
Unless the OLPC folks can figure out how to combat the mhz myths and the "you need Windows" FUD then they are screwed, and so are the kids that will be using their WinTel notebooks as expensive seat cushions. Perhaps they should have involved Steve Jobs?
Well heeled my ass. At least in the life sciences, those journals are non-profit organizations with slim margins. Yes, some of the biggest ones turn a profit, but the vast majority barely hang on, being supported by their parent organization.
Oh, and many of them don't have offices. Its just a collection of people who do the work mostly by email and snail mail, and then send the proofs to a publishing company to print and mail. They have about as much in common with DoD contractors as Saddam did with WMD.
Perhaps this will cause some of our brain-addled technology media "journalists" to start noticing that HD-DVD and Blueray aren't about high definition video (my 2 year old Oppo DVD player does that just fine, apart from the fact no one will sell me a movie in DivX format), nor really about increased storage. Its really about moving to a format with a more functional DRM system.
There is no reason that standard 2 hour movies can't be distributed on a double-layer DVD using a modern compression format -- which are supported in just about every $99 DVD player I see at Circuit City. I don't have a problem with the big media companies moving in this direction - its their content, they can pick their format. I do have a problem with the fact that not a single journalist sees fit to note in their articles that the media companies public rationale for the switch is specious.
Both of my DVD players (including the one built into the 32" LCD I just bought) play MPEG4/DivX. In other words, they can already handle a full HD movie -- its just that none are available legally on standard DVDs. The only thing the new formats offer for the purpose of watching video is DRM -- hardly a good reason to upgrade for consumers.
I'll be amused if we start seeing DivX encoded pirated DVDs start to appear in the states that offer HD on a standard DVD. The studios response should prove interesting...
Click creates the connection between your telephone and that of the advertiser. After "clicking" -- and entering your telephone number -- your telephone rings and so does that of the advertiser. Maybe there will be VOIP eventually, but not now.
If his story is true, he is much sicker than 90% of patients in US hospitals. The tests he needs are not done on an outpatient basis, and someone his age who has developed valvular dysfunction (a failing heart for God's sake) is always worked up agressively. If he is embellishing, or not telling the whole story its a different matter.
Going to the Mayo Clinic is _not_ the same thing as being admitted to their hospital. You could be seen at their walk-in clinic, in their ER, at an associated satellit clinic, by a physician's assistant, by a nurse practioner, by a first year resident. Its not even in the same ballpark. Its like saying you talked to a programmer at Microsoft - it doesn't mean squat. You need to have worked your way up the latter until you saw one of their top people to get any of the benefit.
He clearly saw a number of ER docs and at least one "Doc in A Box", what he didn't clearly say was that he chose a primary care physician and went back to see them. Thats very, very different. Its an approach that doesn't work in software, and one that doesn't work in medicine.
Because I did "RTFA" I can say his story isn't credible.
If he is as sick as he says, _any_ physician would insist on having him hospitalized and having multiple consultants see him (notably, infectious disease and oncology.) He symptoms suggest a progressive disease that requires agressive intervention - and that doesn't mean trials of expensive antibiotics.
He has either failed to see a primary care physician, or he has refused appropriate treatment and admission to a hospital. In either case, as an educated, intelligent man he has made his own decision. Slashdot should not be contributing to his decline by enabling his poor decisions. He needs to be told flat out by his friends that they are not going to work with him until he agrees to admission and workup at a major teaching hospital (which, by the way, will have access to every antibiotic in the world.)
True, it is iterative, but its not confined to being iterative like most everything else. In most people's experience, building metadata dbs is either done by the daemon that runs once a day (like the Windows Indexer), or a startup time crawler (like iTunes.) Eitherway, it requires an additional process that doesn't monitor in real time, meaning its not possible to do the sorts of really cool queries BeOS did.
This really is a big deal, much bigger than Microsoft's feeble attempts at full text search, or Google's desktop search. In many way's this much, much more useful than full-text search, especially for developers.
At home I have about 6,000 MP3s, a 1000 photos, 500 scientific articles in PDF format and hundreds of words files that I need to juggle. Each one has its own metadata database, and none of them are updated in real time.
Databases:
MP3 - WinAmp & AudioTron
Photos - Photoshop
PDFs - Acrobat Indexer
Word files - MS Indexer
That doesn't include any of the other data that is stored completely databases and would have been easier to store in the file system - like email, guitar tab files and god knows what else.
A properly implemented global meta-data store (that works at the filesystem level, not as an iterative service) profoundly changes how one uses the system, making sorting and finding data actually almost pleasurable.
There is actually a real need for this sort of product. Many hotels and conference locations rent internet access at outlandish rates - thousands of dollars a day for a single connected computer at a trade show is not uncommon. The last (small) conference I attended had a single ethernet jack enabled in each symposium room. The hotel had wireless, but wanted thousands of dollars a day to enable it for the conference particiapnts.
There are _lots_ of places in the real world where there is a single ethernet jack but multiple people who need access. Most conference rooms at any non tech oriented company, if they have a connection, it will be a single jack. Universities have only recently gotton to the point that wired access is universal - a half dozen students trying to study in a library study room might have a single jack -- etc etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The question isn't 'why don't academic publish in open access journals', its really 'why aren't the open access journals as good'?
I publish in both. My papers get read *more* in the open access journals. But the quality of scholarship of those papers, and the ones published along with it is lower. The simple reason is that the open access journals need my money to stay afloat - the fees I pay them to 'publish' (really for the copyediting, layout and coordinating peer review) bias their decision making. Its like an investment bank paying a credit rating firm to rate their product. Guess what - that shit smells like roses! Traditional journals are more likely to be hard-nosed, rejecting more papers up front and picking tough peer reviewers. They make their money by keeping their subscribers who want a monthly issue full of rigorously reviewed worked.
So, like my peers, I trust papers published in the traditional journals more than the open access journals, because I know that there is less financial bias. And when I have a choice because I have a great piece of scholarship to publish, I want it in with the other work that I trust myself.
Probably because its a summary of a press release, rather than the actual paper. This was a computer simulation exercise - a model. No patients were actually treated. There was no prescribing. There were no superior outcomes. Its all hypothetical.
Could an AI outperform an MD? Sure, could happen and probably will eventually. But this model doesn't show that. It just shows that its easier to model health care in silicon than the real world. Remember we can cure cancer in mice - models aren't the same thing as reality.
This is the most mercenary discussion I've seen on Slashdot, ever.
If your employer isn't loyal to you (within reason) then you don't want to be there. Most of the organizations I have worked for - including some very big ones - actually do try to avoid laying people off in a downturn, at least skilled white-collar workers. In a knowledge industry if you burn your workers every knows and it gets tougher to hire in the future.
You already know whats right for you - the other job. That means you need to leave - but doesn't mean leaving the current company (& coworkers!) in the lurch. Ask the new employer if they will give you a couple of months before you start; if so, get an offer letter with those terms. Seriously - I just hired a programmer and a project manager on these terms (2 months and 3 months respectively). They needed the time to close out projects, train new hires etc. I was impressed that they were loyal to their old employer - and presume they will leave me one day with the same grace and style. Their old employers (who couldn't match my offer) were pleased that they were willing to stay that long, and will in the future give them glowing recommendations - and might hire them back. Co-workers don't feel shafted etc. Did I want them sooner? Of course - but they were the right people and I'm willing to wait.
Now, your current employer might tell you to stuff it, and to clear out your desk. Or that they will hire someone and they only want 2 weeks and then your out. Fine - you have been loyal and done your part, and the new employer presumably will take you sooner.
Loyalty means doing your best in a hard situation, not picking between 2 weeks notice and staying forever.
Spear phishing is phishing targeted at a single individual. Since its in Wikipedia and all over the Interwebs and all those black hatted types talk about I'm guessing the poster didn't make it up. Then again maybe he is one of those black hatty, Wikipedia writing trolls making s***t up in a conspiratorial way. You never know ...
Jindal said: "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.â
He never said the problem was it didn't create jobs, nor that it was working fine and didn't need additional funds. Instead he mocked it ("something called 'volcano monitoring'") and said flat out that the Federal government shouldn't be doing it.
I'm sure there's pork in the bill. Jindal's failure wasn't trying to point out pork. Jindal's failure was in being ignorant and hypocritical. He is the governor of a state already receiving the largest stimulus package since Reconstruction and one that depends on federal funding for "something called hurricane monitoring." Only a fool would think the rest of American had forgotten Katrina so quickly.
Yes, early administration of IV beta blockers caused more heart failure. It also caused people have fewer additional heart attacks and to drop into nasty rhythms requiring painful shocks.
The take home of the big study wasn't not to give beta blockers - it clearly showed they worked for the reason we had always given them - but to be judicious. Don't push them IV at the first sign of a heart attack. Give them to people who seem to have enough cardiac output to spare. In essence, think - don't just give them because a) the study protocol says the get it, or b) the hospital guidelines says to give them.
Thompson (EndNote's publisher) sucks. Its a monopoly that control's the three dominant packages, and because of network effects (ie, "because of collaboration ...") they can market crap and people have to buy it.
Eventually someone will come out with a cross-platform product that leapfrog's EndNote and will make a killing. Until then ...
Few, and if they are present then its usually a single, short equation with a derivation etc. Word does just fine for these purposes. Any paper that required a more sophisticated equation editor than Word provides wouldn't be appropriate for your average medical journal readership. While you can argue that this is soft science, NIH's funding and the sheer volume of publications is mind-boggling.
But more to the point, all of the talk about formatting etc is a bit irrelevant. Most of journals in my field require final submissions to be in MS Word format as they perform the formatting. We can submit a draft for review as a PDF (double spaced, please), but the final version is expected to be in Word so they can make it fit their own standards.
Biochemistry and the bench science journals may be different, but at the general medical and public health level, it would be difficult to get a LatEx manuscript through the peer and final submission process without hiccups.
In 10 years of research in the biomedical field I have never actually seen anyone use LaTex. Perhaps it is the standard in engineering & CS or other fields where researchers use Unix on their workstations, but Word and EndNote remain the lingua franca elsewhere.
The fact that the medical system has struggled to implement evidence (ie, science) based medicine over the past 20 years is not evidence that physicians hate science. Its evidence that the science is poor, the process is hard and there are tremendous incentives against it. Its just damn difficult.
Think physicians hate "science"? Try explaining to a patient why they should take the drug that is 10% less effective than the competitor but half the price. Or explain why the diagnostic procedure that saved their best friends life is unlikely to find anything in their case, wouldn't hurt them -- but is "worthless" from a cost efficacy perspective. We all struggle with cost efficacy - no one wants to get something less than the best, patients even less than physicians.
Besides which, "doctor" means teacher, not medical practitioner. So exactly why does this journalist think that teachers hate science? And how does citing a Senator help? Yes, Coburn is a physician (albeit an obstetrician which is one of the fields that has struggled the most to integrate hard science appropriately due to the overwhelming malpractice issues), but Coburn doesn't believe in science in the first place - famously calling global warming a "bunch of crap."
Garbage.
>> FISA was established when the nation was not at war.
What exactly would you consider a war? We were still in the throes of the "Cold War" against a billion plus Communists armed with nuclear weapons. We had just pulled out of Vietnam, and it was the warrantless surveillance of people opposed to that war that sparked the Chuch Investigations and then FISA. So whether you consider Mr. Bush's war to be an figurative, ideological struggle, or whether you consider is to be a literal, physical struggle, FISA was a reaction to exactly the same excesses.
Besides which, FISA doesn't cover information sharing between agencies. Thats an entirely different problem. FISA simply establishes a mechanism for authorizing domestic spying.
EMRs are a great idea, but the medical world is poorly adapted to build them and integrate them. Its dysfunctional system where billing is becoming increasingly critical, while what you get for is divorced from what you actually do. So we wind up with schizophrenic EMRs that can't decide whether they are generating billing tickets, documenting patient care or preventing a lawsuit.
1) They are expensive for a small practice - think that a primary care docs office is rolling in cash? Think again. Most of them are barely scraping by, which is why your doc needs to see 30+ patients a day. Otherwise the rent doesn't get paid and he/she can't make payroll. If a new tool doesn't make the office more efficient, it can't be justified. Sound odd? Next time you visit your doc, ask him who determines how much he/she gets paid. Its not you, its not the market and its not actually the insurance companies. Its the federal government when they set payment guidelines for Medicare/Medicaid which the insurers follow. Free market my ass.
2) They are slower than paper - few docs can type as fast as they can dictate or write. Most of us can take notes on a piece of paper while interviewing a patient - no one I know can talk to a patient and type into a form.
3) Many are designed to maximize billing, not care - we get paid based on how many indicators of complex care we hit. How many "systems" asked about, how many organs examined etc etc - not by our time or skill. So in order to bill we have to document all of these. Some EMRs are designed to force the MDs to check many boxes for billing and audit purposes. Unpleasant and slow.
4) Many are slow and perform poorly - my hospital switched recently from a physician designed an written EMR from the 80s that was text/terminal based and blindingly fast, to a web-based system. The new system is slow, and doesn't really do much that the old system did. The difference was that the first system was built by MDs who ate their own dog-food, the second by teams of very smart, very committed programmers who don't practice medicine.
5) They are the camel's nose under the tent - my hospital based practice was recently instructed to begin doing "medication reconciliation" on all outpatients. That means at the start of the visit I have to type in all of a patient's medications into the EMR. Sounds fine for you, right? Now imagine your grandmother. As a sub-specialty consultant I see most of my patients once to twice a year and they are on 20+ medications, over the counters, vitamins and herbal supplements. It can take 6-7 minutes out of an already short 30 minute visit. Sure its great for safety, but it means we are running an additional 45 minutes late at the end of the day. Not so great for you if you have a late afternoon appointment.
Windows XP - the full, bloated ugly version - runs fine in 1GB of memory. In fact, for most of its lifecycle, very few people every ran it at 2GB. All of the clinical workstations in my hospital still run it at 640MB (mostly just web-based apps), and many desktops in our organizations run it in 512MB. Admittedly, the latter machines are cripplingly slow, but it makes the point.
Microsoft has been porting XP to the OLPC for a while. The problem they are running into is that WinXP is nothing without its applications. In fact, MS isn't even worried about educational apps - its worried about Office. Check out the size of even a minimal install of Word - its not insignificant. However, without Office, XP just doesn't offer that much over a open source OS. *This* is their key stumbling block.
Frankly, this is a no win situation for MS. Unlike most PCs, in the OLPC "form follows function", ie the hardware is explicitly designed to support a certain set of priorities and functions. It can't be back-engineered so that Windows can run on it without either a) making it much more expensive, or b) turning it into just a stripped down Windows machine. If Negroponte holds firm then Windows will always be an inferior, second choice on the machine. Expect MS to hammer at the OLPC for being all sorts of terrible things and Negroponte for being an anti-capitalist obstructionist who belongs in Sweden eating French cheese with John Kerry.
Negronponte can't argue on the technical merits because his competitors are pulling the same fast one on consumers in 3rd world countries that they have perfected in the US. The OLPC isn't supposed to compete with traditional laptops - it does very different things. You can't compare its mesh network to WiFi. Its not designed just for battery life, but to be easy to recharge etc etc. Yes you can get something from Intel/MS that has a faster processor, or more memory or a shinier screen -- but its just a stripped down notebook.
Unless the OLPC folks can figure out how to combat the mhz myths and the "you need Windows" FUD then they are screwed, and so are the kids that will be using their WinTel notebooks as expensive seat cushions. Perhaps they should have involved Steve Jobs?
Well heeled my ass. At least in the life sciences, those journals are non-profit organizations with slim margins. Yes, some of the biggest ones turn a profit, but the vast majority barely hang on, being supported by their parent organization.
Oh, and many of them don't have offices. Its just a collection of people who do the work mostly by email and snail mail, and then send the proofs to a publishing company to print and mail. They have about as much in common with DoD contractors as Saddam did with WMD.
Perhaps this will cause some of our brain-addled technology media "journalists" to start noticing that HD-DVD and Blueray aren't about high definition video (my 2 year old Oppo DVD player does that just fine, apart from the fact no one will sell me a movie in DivX format), nor really about increased storage. Its really about moving to a format with a more functional DRM system.
There is no reason that standard 2 hour movies can't be distributed on a double-layer DVD using a modern compression format -- which are supported in just about every $99 DVD player I see at Circuit City. I don't have a problem with the big media companies moving in this direction - its their content, they can pick their format. I do have a problem with the fact that not a single journalist sees fit to note in their articles that the media companies public rationale for the switch is specious.
Both of my DVD players (including the one built into the 32" LCD I just bought) play MPEG4/DivX. In other words, they can already handle a full HD movie -- its just that none are available legally on standard DVDs. The only thing the new formats offer for the purpose of watching video is DRM -- hardly a good reason to upgrade for consumers.
...
I'll be amused if we start seeing DivX encoded pirated DVDs start to appear in the states that offer HD on a standard DVD. The studios response should prove interesting
Click creates the connection between your telephone and that of the advertiser. After "clicking" -- and entering your telephone number -- your telephone rings and so does that of the advertiser. Maybe there will be VOIP eventually, but not now.
If his story is true, he is much sicker than 90% of patients in US hospitals. The tests he needs are not done on an outpatient basis, and someone his age who has developed valvular dysfunction (a failing heart for God's sake) is always worked up agressively. If he is embellishing, or not telling the whole story its a different matter.
Going to the Mayo Clinic is _not_ the same thing as being admitted to their hospital. You could be seen at their walk-in clinic, in their ER, at an associated satellit clinic, by a physician's assistant, by a nurse practioner, by a first year resident. Its not even in the same ballpark. Its like saying you talked to a programmer at Microsoft - it doesn't mean squat. You need to have worked your way up the latter until you saw one of their top people to get any of the benefit.
He clearly saw a number of ER docs and at least one "Doc in A Box", what he didn't clearly say was that he chose a primary care physician and went back to see them. Thats very, very different. Its an approach that doesn't work in software, and one that doesn't work in medicine.
Because I did "RTFA" I can say his story isn't credible.
This fucking ridiculous.
If he is as sick as he says, _any_ physician would insist on having him hospitalized and having multiple consultants see him (notably, infectious disease and oncology.) He symptoms suggest a progressive disease that requires agressive intervention - and that doesn't mean trials of expensive antibiotics.
He has either failed to see a primary care physician, or he has refused appropriate treatment and admission to a hospital. In either case, as an educated, intelligent man he has made his own decision. Slashdot should not be contributing to his decline by enabling his poor decisions. He needs to be told flat out by his friends that they are not going to work with him until he agrees to admission and workup at a major teaching hospital (which, by the way, will have access to every antibiotic in the world.)
This is really inappropriate commercial shilling.
True, it is iterative, but its not confined to being iterative like most everything else. In most people's experience, building metadata dbs is either done by the daemon that runs once a day (like the Windows Indexer), or a startup time crawler (like iTunes.) Eitherway, it requires an additional process that doesn't monitor in real time, meaning its not possible to do the sorts of really cool queries BeOS did.
Unless you used BeOS in the past!
This really is a big deal, much bigger than Microsoft's feeble attempts at full text search, or Google's desktop search. In many way's this much, much more useful than full-text search, especially for developers.
At home I have about 6,000 MP3s, a 1000 photos, 500 scientific articles in PDF format and hundreds of words files that I need to juggle. Each one has its own metadata database, and none of them are updated in real time.
Databases:
MP3 - WinAmp & AudioTron
Photos - Photoshop
PDFs - Acrobat Indexer
Word files - MS Indexer
That doesn't include any of the other data that is stored completely databases and would have been easier to store in the file system - like email, guitar tab files and god knows what else.
A properly implemented global meta-data store (that works at the filesystem level, not as an iterative service) profoundly changes how one uses the system, making sorting and finding data actually almost pleasurable.
There is actually a real need for this sort of product. Many hotels and conference locations rent internet access at outlandish rates - thousands of dollars a day for a single connected computer at a trade show is not uncommon. The last (small) conference I attended had a single ethernet jack enabled in each symposium room. The hotel had wireless, but wanted thousands of dollars a day to enable it for the conference particiapnts.
There are _lots_ of places in the real world where there is a single ethernet jack but multiple people who need access. Most conference rooms at any non tech oriented company, if they have a connection, it will be a single jack. Universities have only recently gotton to the point that wired access is universal - a half dozen students trying to study in a library study room might have a single jack -- etc etc.