I've looked at the website and suspect that there's a number of things the authors aren't taking into account; most prominently, the inherent laziness of most of the human race. I include myself in this. There's a lot of things I tell myself I'd do if I only had more time: fun things that nevertheless take a little bit of effort, like practising musical instruments more (and maybe learning new ones), setting up a website for my family, writing in my blog (on a subject I'm interested in, but which I nevertheless haven't updated in over a month), writing stories... Yet when I did have more time, during a period of unemployment a few years ago, I did none of these things, but just faffed around in the house all day. Most of us need some feeling of obligation before we are prepared to make any effort, even for things we enjoy.
In my experience the authors don't care, or want to have to bother to care, about getting their styles and language exactly right, and don't want to have to learn a new system in order to do it. See other people's posts on how outwith maths and physics areas most people don't use LaTeX as a matter of course: if you handed them a.sty or.cls they wouldn't know what to do with it. They'll use whatever they normally use, regardless of what they're asked to do, and that's usually Word, Excel and Powerpoint; therefore, we need to use Word, Excel and Powerpoint too. Distressingly.
The printing process is still based on four-colour CMYK: even if the files are sent digitally to the printer, the physical inks are still cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and the printer still needs to be told which goes where. Of course, it is trivial these days to convert from RGB to CMYK in production, so it's really not a major problem if they are supplied in the wrong format. A bigger deal is when we get colour pictures for a black-and-white journal; converting to greyscale is no problem in itself, but it's rare that the author thought about the need to distinguish by shade and contrast rather than by colour. Then they complain that things that were very different colours (say, dark blue and bright red) in the original now look almost identical.
My big gripe, though, is authors supplying their figures in Powerpoint format. OK, so maybe it's the only vector-based artwork package they can lay their hands on or know how to use (or maybe they're just recycling the slides from their last presentation), but Powerpoint's transparency handling is broken, and it uses transparency to produce hatching. So unless you're very careful and prepared to jigger about with the figures, all the cross-hatching on the bar graphs will disappear and you'll get a series of identical blank bars. Please everyone, use a proper vector drawing program and send your graphs as EPS files!
Is this equation editor based on a version of MathType? MathType is what the non-LaTeX-using production offices use to set equations. The previous version of Equation Editor was based on a (very) old version of MathType, and so equations embedded in pre-2007 Word can be imported and set correctly using the current MathType (much improved over the version that went into Word). If Word 2007's is based on something else, it's possible that this could break the equation imports, and this could be a reason for the rejection of Word 2007 format.
The reviewers want PDF. If your paper gets accepted and is to be published, then the production office will want an editable file. Sometimes all the authors send us is the PDF, and there's barely anything at all we can do with that - we just have to go back to the author and ask for something else.
I don't even want to think about the amount of time I've lost playing around with latex2rtf and tex4ht trying to convert my latex papers to an acceptable format. Well if you didn't do that we in production would have to. We don't get paid enough to spend hours faffing about on each paper, and the people in Singapore, whither production is increasingly being moved, certainly don't!
The journal publishers don't actually use Word to typeset the papers. They will use a typesetting program such as Quark or InDesign, or indeed a LaTeX setter in some cases (it depends on the field and on the publisher). The trouble is that you don't want your authors to submit the paper in the format of the typesetting program, because (a) it's a bugger to convert from one format to another, and (b) you're going to have to reset it anyway even if they use the right file format, because you need to run spell-checkers and whatnot on it before typesetting, and you're pretty much guaranteed that the author won't have used journal style[1] (or even set up their text style formats in a rigorous way such that they can be easily converted). It's far better to make the whole process consistent by asking for a format which pretty much everyone will be able to provide, which preserves the text formatting designated by the author, and which can be easily imported into any of the typesetting programs once the spelling and style has been sorted out.
There's another consideration which is worth bearing in mind. Production and editorial are handled completely separately. The journal editor will be a scientist working in the field, as will be the reviewers. They don't want a fully laid-out paper; they just want something they can open and read easily. For some fields, LaTeX will be fine; for others it will just be a nuisance. Some of the larger journals have fancy online submission controls which will automagically convert your submission to PDF for this purpose, but many still don't. And just because an editor knows about their scientific field does not at all mean they know anything about computers and how to read a novel format. Most people can figure out how to read Word, however.
In the company I work for, which has handled production for a number of journals[2], we don't yet have Office 2007. This is because we use Apple Macs, as do many, perhaps most, production houses, and Office 2007 doesn't exist for Macs. We have, however, acquired a third-party importer, so we don't need to reject documents submitted in the latest format. Personally I find that there are many holes in Word, but that's what most people submit their papers in, whether they're asked to or not, so that's what we need to cater for.
[1] Most journals will impose a certain style on all papers for consistency: spelling (analyse or analyze?), numbers in the text (nine samples or 9 samples?), reference style (Vancouver or Harvard?), etc. Plus we have the different text styles for different levels of heading, figure legends, etc. Rare indeed is the author who can figure out exactly what the preferred options are and use them consistently, particularly as the paper may have been hawked round several journals before getting accepted by this one.
[2] Now in the process of being moved to Singapore because it's cheaper out there.
A literary work first must have intrinsic artistic value. Then, it must have intellectual value. Then, it must be creative. Entertainment value doesn't enter the picture here, as far as I'm concerned (from what I've seen). Have you read C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism? He argues (in his capacity as literary don rather than as Christian apologist) that there is such thing as a literary or unliterary book, but only literary or unliterary readers. The literary reader reads and re-reads for the joy of immersion in the world of the book, for the language of the descriptions and to meet again the characters, and mulls over the book afterwards. The unliterary reader reads simply to find out what happens next. Thus a good book is one which rewards the first sort of reading, which still has benefit on second and subsequent readings, while poor books, once their plot is discovered, hold nothing more out to the reader.
'Intrinsic artistic value', inasmuch as it means anything at all, means that it is capable of moving people, changing them; and that people like the experience. And entertainment is, must be, part of this.
Another poster (below) mentions the dark fibre of the dot-com era. It's out there, and it's being used. Telewest are not on a wholesale bundle deal with BT. They peer at Telehouse and their network has thousands of miles of dark fibre should they require more bandwidth. As a result they operate completely differently to the DSL ISPs and don't throttle their traffic. You buy a 10Mb connection, you get a 10Mb connection. The only contention is from other subscribers on your segment; ie Telewest customers in the same street. But Telewest have now been taken over by Virgin, who do throttle their traffic. As a Telewest (now Virgin) customer, I have experienced a drastic decrease in the quality of service since the takeover, with outages of a couple of hours at a time once or twice a week. Since the whole reason for moving to cable in the first place was to get away from a dodgy old BT line so that we could have a more reliable service, I'm very disappointed and am seriously considering moving back to the dodgy old BT line - it wouldn't be any worse and would probably be cheaper.
If GIMP ran faster and supported CMYK (out of the box; I know there's a plugin for it), it might be in with a chance. As it is, it's unsuited to print work. This is the problem with GIMP, not that it's not an 'industry standard'.
As someone who works in publishing, I know that the journal editors are not the same people as work in production. They are in the position they are because of their subject knowledge, not their ability to publish. Some of them are worryingly incompetent with computers in general. So they want word documents because they can click on them and they open, and then they can write all over them, and it's what they're used to using.
Even in production, we will usually ask for Word files, although we will attempt to process other formats if we receive them. This is because, whether we specify a format or not, most people will supply their text as Word files, so we have to use Word to ensure that we retain all the data. This being the case, we've set up a number of macros in Word to handle certain common processing tasks. If we did not specify Word, the proportion of alternative formats would increase, meaning more work either converting them to Word format while maintaining as much of the data as possible, or doing manually the work that the macros are supposed to do for us. Moreover, even though we request Word files, we still get some people sending things that are quite unuseable, such as PDF (as it's primarily a display format rather than an editing format, we can do very little with it). This proportion would only increase if we let people think they could send what they liked!
Not necessarily. If you have anything like a decent head of pressure in your mains, then a mixer shower coming off the mains will have a much stronger jet than an electric shower. I had an electric shower replaced with a mixer once, and the plumber installed a pump to increase the water pressure coming out of the shower head - and a pressure regulator to decrease the water pressure going in so the pump could handle it! Naturally, it didn't work (the flow kept cutting out completely) and I called him back, which was when I found out what he'd done. I made him take both components out and pay me back for them, and then it worked perfectly.
ObTopic: Electric showers, particularly the 'power' showers with pumps, are electricity hogs, and a mixer shower in conjunction with a gas boiler is much more efficient. That's why I was getting it changed in the first place - the old shower, even though it didn't have a pump, was burning big holes in the electricity budget.
Do you mean USENET? Because that still exists, and is still used by quite a lot of people. I sometimes look at a couple of newsgroups on the more obscure end of the spectrum, and there doesn't appear to be a major spam problem there.
How come everyone's saying in response to the viral marketing post that viral marketing (or indeed any marketing) is Bad and Something Ought To Be Done About It, yet when Something is proposed to be Done About It, everyone is yelling about 'free speech'?
(Of course, free speech actually has nothing do to with this situation; the 'rights' (an artificial concept in any event) are to allow people to express opinions without retribution, not to assist them to deliberately deceive.)
I have one public email address that has been so for many years. It appears in various places including many USENET posts. It receives lots of spam, but with a good spam filter and the fact that it is not my main mailing address, this is copeable with. However, in the last couple of months some spammer or other has taken to faking my domain name as their From: address in their spam. This means I am getting piles and piles of bounces, auto-replies and whatnot for emails I never sent. Is there any way I can stop my domain name from being used in this way?
Except that then the author will go to another publisher for their next book[1], which is likely to be a big seller no matter how good or bad it is, because the author is already famous. An already successful author is a valuable asset to any publisher, because they already have a fanbase and you don't need to spend so much money on marketing them. So it would be very short-sighted to fool an author into giving away all their rights.
[1] Unless you tied them in to a multi-book contract, which is a risk in itself because if the author turns out not to do very well you've just tied yourself in to publishing several more dud books that you'll make a loss on.
Production costs do exist, but many of them (such as copy-editing) will exist whether the book is on paper or in electronic form.
So you are downloading your updates when your connection drops. You reconnect, but the server is still registering your old connection. Suddenly you've connected twice with a single key and are now banned. Not good.
This sounds more like a description of what the tabloids believe the UK population to be. Its the tabloid newspapers that engineer public beliefs and then use populist rhetoric to maintain public support. See they're racist campaign against asylum seekers as an example.
Sadly, we can`t pile all the blame onto the tabloids. They wouldn`t print things if people didn`t buy them. And people tend to read only what reflects the views they`ve made already. So the tabloids are only reflecting the thought processes of their readers.
I go to namespace.ORG, and right in the center of the page is an advertisement, from "Name.Space" for domain registration for $69.95.
Just because they charge money doesn`t mean they`re necessarily for-profit. For all you know, they`re charging the minimum necessary to cover their costs. And since they`re fighting a legal battle at the moment against Network Solutions, they probably need all the money they can get.
Here`s another point. At the moment, most people looking for a business either know the URL from advertisements or use search engines. Why should this change when we have new TLDs? So why should more choices be a problem?
If you get rid of the country codes, how are you going to distinguish between the governments of all the countries, since they`ll all come under.gov? At the moment I can go to.gov.uk and get the UK government; I assume that under your proposals I`d go to.uk.gov. What`s the difference? (And why, for that matter, don`t I go to.gov.us to get the US government? Surely.gov, being international, should belong to something like the United Nations?)
I`ve had some difficulty recently with easyspace.co.uk: registering is nice and cheap, but it`s only after you`ve forked out that you discover that if you`re not hosting your site on their servers, they don`t want to know. I`ve had no reply to several emails asking them about changing the DNS to point to my computer, and a friend was forced to pay for a mailbox service he didn`t want.
However, I can`t seem to find any other registrars in the UK that are at all decent. Either they`re incredibly pricey, or they`re entirely geared around website hosting and don`t even mention the possibility that a domain name can point to your own computer (or even have anything other than www. on the front of it). As it happens, I want the domain name for more than just a website, so even if I could afford it, a web hosting package is no good to me.
Still, I registered the domain name with easyspace, and now I can`t figure out how to get my hands on it at all. Which is more than slightly annoying.
That's because the only reason you read it in high school was because the author was Canadian, just like you.
Actually, John Wyndham was British. Just because the story is set in Canada doesn`t mean he was Canadian. You don`t have to live in Canada to remember that it exists.
OK, I`ll bite. The Big Bang theory is the widely-accepted theory amongst scientists of how the universe came into being. There`s basic information at this NASA site.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is the widely-accepted theory amonst scientists of how life developed and is still developing. Here`s a good introduction taken from the extensive talk.origins FAQ.
The two theories are complementary, not conflicting.
I see a misunderstanding in several of the comments here. The bill has not yet passed, and is not yet made law. It is, as yet, still legal to store encrypted data on our computers. But the bill has been drawn up, and it will be debated in parliament, and in the current social climate, is likely to be passed without a murmur. So it is of the utmost urgency that we write, calmly and sensibly, to our MPs to stress the unfairness, unfeasibility, and sheer stupidity of the bill as it presently stands.
Slashdot Mirror
I've looked at the website and suspect that there's a number of things the authors aren't taking into account; most prominently, the inherent laziness of most of the human race. I include myself in this. There's a lot of things I tell myself I'd do if I only had more time: fun things that nevertheless take a little bit of effort, like practising musical instruments more (and maybe learning new ones), setting up a website for my family, writing in my blog (on a subject I'm interested in, but which I nevertheless haven't updated in over a month), writing stories... Yet when I did have more time, during a period of unemployment a few years ago, I did none of these things, but just faffed around in the house all day. Most of us need some feeling of obligation before we are prepared to make any effort, even for things we enjoy.
The parent is uninformatively brief, but not off-topic. Max Weber's thesis of the Protestant Work Ethic (thrift, hard work, usefulness) and its relationship to the development of capitalism and industrialised society is directly related to the topic at hand.
In my experience the authors don't care, or want to have to bother to care, about getting their styles and language exactly right, and don't want to have to learn a new system in order to do it. See other people's posts on how outwith maths and physics areas most people don't use LaTeX as a matter of course: if you handed them a .sty or .cls they wouldn't know what to do with it. They'll use whatever they normally use, regardless of what they're asked to do, and that's usually Word, Excel and Powerpoint; therefore, we need to use Word, Excel and Powerpoint too. Distressingly.
The printing process is still based on four-colour CMYK: even if the files are sent digitally to the printer, the physical inks are still cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and the printer still needs to be told which goes where. Of course, it is trivial these days to convert from RGB to CMYK in production, so it's really not a major problem if they are supplied in the wrong format. A bigger deal is when we get colour pictures for a black-and-white journal; converting to greyscale is no problem in itself, but it's rare that the author thought about the need to distinguish by shade and contrast rather than by colour. Then they complain that things that were very different colours (say, dark blue and bright red) in the original now look almost identical.
My big gripe, though, is authors supplying their figures in Powerpoint format. OK, so maybe it's the only vector-based artwork package they can lay their hands on or know how to use (or maybe they're just recycling the slides from their last presentation), but Powerpoint's transparency handling is broken, and it uses transparency to produce hatching. So unless you're very careful and prepared to jigger about with the figures, all the cross-hatching on the bar graphs will disappear and you'll get a series of identical blank bars. Please everyone, use a proper vector drawing program and send your graphs as EPS files!
Is this equation editor based on a version of MathType? MathType is what the non-LaTeX-using production offices use to set equations. The previous version of Equation Editor was based on a (very) old version of MathType, and so equations embedded in pre-2007 Word can be imported and set correctly using the current MathType (much improved over the version that went into Word). If Word 2007's is based on something else, it's possible that this could break the equation imports, and this could be a reason for the rejection of Word 2007 format.
The reviewers want PDF. If your paper gets accepted and is to be published, then the production office will want an editable file. Sometimes all the authors send us is the PDF, and there's barely anything at all we can do with that - we just have to go back to the author and ask for something else.
The journal publishers don't actually use Word to typeset the papers. They will use a typesetting program such as Quark or InDesign, or indeed a LaTeX setter in some cases (it depends on the field and on the publisher). The trouble is that you don't want your authors to submit the paper in the format of the typesetting program, because (a) it's a bugger to convert from one format to another, and (b) you're going to have to reset it anyway even if they use the right file format, because you need to run spell-checkers and whatnot on it before typesetting, and you're pretty much guaranteed that the author won't have used journal style[1] (or even set up their text style formats in a rigorous way such that they can be easily converted). It's far better to make the whole process consistent by asking for a format which pretty much everyone will be able to provide, which preserves the text formatting designated by the author, and which can be easily imported into any of the typesetting programs once the spelling and style has been sorted out.
There's another consideration which is worth bearing in mind. Production and editorial are handled completely separately. The journal editor will be a scientist working in the field, as will be the reviewers. They don't want a fully laid-out paper; they just want something they can open and read easily. For some fields, LaTeX will be fine; for others it will just be a nuisance. Some of the larger journals have fancy online submission controls which will automagically convert your submission to PDF for this purpose, but many still don't. And just because an editor knows about their scientific field does not at all mean they know anything about computers and how to read a novel format. Most people can figure out how to read Word, however.
In the company I work for, which has handled production for a number of journals[2], we don't yet have Office 2007. This is because we use Apple Macs, as do many, perhaps most, production houses, and Office 2007 doesn't exist for Macs. We have, however, acquired a third-party importer, so we don't need to reject documents submitted in the latest format. Personally I find that there are many holes in Word, but that's what most people submit their papers in, whether they're asked to or not, so that's what we need to cater for.
[1] Most journals will impose a certain style on all papers for consistency: spelling (analyse or analyze?), numbers in the text (nine samples or 9 samples?), reference style (Vancouver or Harvard?), etc. Plus we have the different text styles for different levels of heading, figure legends, etc. Rare indeed is the author who can figure out exactly what the preferred options are and use them consistently, particularly as the paper may have been hawked round several journals before getting accepted by this one.
[2] Now in the process of being moved to Singapore because it's cheaper out there.
'Intrinsic artistic value', inasmuch as it means anything at all, means that it is capable of moving people, changing them; and that people like the experience. And entertainment is, must be, part of this.
If GIMP ran faster and supported CMYK (out of the box; I know there's a plugin for it), it might be in with a chance. As it is, it's unsuited to print work. This is the problem with GIMP, not that it's not an 'industry standard'.
As someone who works in publishing, I know that the journal editors are not the same people as work in production. They are in the position they are because of their subject knowledge, not their ability to publish. Some of them are worryingly incompetent with computers in general. So they want word documents because they can click on them and they open, and then they can write all over them, and it's what they're used to using.
Even in production, we will usually ask for Word files, although we will attempt to process other formats if we receive them. This is because, whether we specify a format or not, most people will supply their text as Word files, so we have to use Word to ensure that we retain all the data. This being the case, we've set up a number of macros in Word to handle certain common processing tasks. If we did not specify Word, the proportion of alternative formats would increase, meaning more work either converting them to Word format while maintaining as much of the data as possible, or doing manually the work that the macros are supposed to do for us. Moreover, even though we request Word files, we still get some people sending things that are quite unuseable, such as PDF (as it's primarily a display format rather than an editing format, we can do very little with it). This proportion would only increase if we let people think they could send what they liked!
Not necessarily. If you have anything like a decent head of pressure in your mains, then a mixer shower coming off the mains will have a much stronger jet than an electric shower. I had an electric shower replaced with a mixer once, and the plumber installed a pump to increase the water pressure coming out of the shower head - and a pressure regulator to decrease the water pressure going in so the pump could handle it! Naturally, it didn't work (the flow kept cutting out completely) and I called him back, which was when I found out what he'd done. I made him take both components out and pay me back for them, and then it worked perfectly.
ObTopic: Electric showers, particularly the 'power' showers with pumps, are electricity hogs, and a mixer shower in conjunction with a gas boiler is much more efficient. That's why I was getting it changed in the first place - the old shower, even though it didn't have a pump, was burning big holes in the electricity budget.
Do you mean USENET? Because that still exists, and is still used by quite a lot of people. I sometimes look at a couple of newsgroups on the more obscure end of the spectrum, and there doesn't appear to be a major spam problem there.
How come everyone's saying in response to the viral marketing post that viral marketing (or indeed any marketing) is Bad and Something Ought To Be Done About It, yet when Something is proposed to be Done About It, everyone is yelling about 'free speech'?
(Of course, free speech actually has nothing do to with this situation; the 'rights' (an artificial concept in any event) are to allow people to express opinions without retribution, not to assist them to deliberately deceive.)
I have one public email address that has been so for many years. It appears in various places including many USENET posts. It receives lots of spam, but with a good spam filter and the fact that it is not my main mailing address, this is copeable with. However, in the last couple of months some spammer or other has taken to faking my domain name as their From: address in their spam. This means I am getting piles and piles of bounces, auto-replies and whatnot for emails I never sent. Is there any way I can stop my domain name from being used in this way?
Except that then the author will go to another publisher for their next book[1], which is likely to be a big seller no matter how good or bad it is, because the author is already famous. An already successful author is a valuable asset to any publisher, because they already have a fanbase and you don't need to spend so much money on marketing them. So it would be very short-sighted to fool an author into giving away all their rights.
[1] Unless you tied them in to a multi-book contract, which is a risk in itself because if the author turns out not to do very well you've just tied yourself in to publishing several more dud books that you'll make a loss on.
Production costs do exist, but many of them (such as copy-editing) will exist whether the book is on paper or in electronic form.
So you are downloading your updates when your connection drops. You reconnect, but the server is still registering your old connection. Suddenly you've connected twice with a single key and are now banned. Not good.
This sounds more like a description of what the tabloids believe the UK population to be. Its the tabloid newspapers that engineer public beliefs and then use populist rhetoric to maintain public support. See they're racist campaign against asylum seekers as an example.
Sadly, we can`t pile all the blame onto the tabloids. They wouldn`t print things if people didn`t buy them. And people tend to read only what reflects the views they`ve made already. So the tabloids are only reflecting the thought processes of their readers.
Unfortunately.
I go to namespace.ORG, and right in the center of the page is an advertisement, from "Name.Space" for domain registration for $69.95.
Just because they charge money doesn`t mean they`re necessarily for-profit. For all you know, they`re charging the minimum necessary to cover their costs. And since they`re fighting a legal battle at the moment against Network Solutions, they probably need all the money they can get.
Here`s another point. At the moment, most people looking for a business either know the URL from advertisements or use search engines. Why should this change when we have new TLDs? So why should more choices be a problem?
If you get rid of the country codes, how are you going to distinguish between the governments of all the countries, since they`ll all come under .gov? At the moment I can go to .gov.uk and get the UK government; I assume that under your proposals I`d go to .uk.gov. What`s the difference? (And why, for that matter, don`t I go to .gov.us to get the US government? Surely .gov, being international, should belong to something like the United Nations?)
I`ve had some difficulty recently with easyspace.co.uk: registering is nice and cheap, but it`s only after you`ve forked out that you discover that if you`re not hosting your site on their servers, they don`t want to know. I`ve had no reply to several emails asking them about changing the DNS to point to my computer, and a friend was forced to pay for a mailbox service he didn`t want.
However, I can`t seem to find any other registrars in the UK that are at all decent. Either they`re incredibly pricey, or they`re entirely geared around website hosting and don`t even mention the possibility that a domain name can point to your own computer (or even have anything other than www. on the front of it). As it happens, I want the domain name for more than just a website, so even if I could afford it, a web hosting package is no good to me.
Still, I registered the domain name with easyspace, and now I can`t figure out how to get my hands on it at all. Which is more than slightly annoying.
That's because the only reason you read it in high school was because the author was Canadian, just like you.
Actually, John Wyndham was British. Just because the story is set in Canada doesn`t mean he was Canadian. You don`t have to live in Canada to remember that it exists.
OK, I`ll bite. The Big Bang theory is the widely-accepted theory amongst scientists of how the universe came into being. There`s basic information at this NASA site.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is the widely-accepted theory amonst scientists of how life developed and is still developing. Here`s a good introduction taken from the extensive talk.origins FAQ.
The two theories are complementary, not conflicting.
I see a misunderstanding in several of the comments here. The bill has not yet passed, and is not yet made law. It is, as yet, still legal to store encrypted data on our computers. But the bill has been drawn up, and it will be debated in parliament, and in the current social climate, is likely to be passed without a murmur. So it is of the utmost urgency that we write, calmly and sensibly, to our MPs to stress the unfairness, unfeasibility, and sheer stupidity of the bill as it presently stands.