If the cost-of-entry was really greatly reduced by e-publishing, you'd expect to see a number of "alternative professional societies" competing on basis of greatly reduced cost.
Several mathematics journals, such as 'Annals of Mathematics' and 'Geometry & Topology' are now 'overlays' of the ArXiv preprints archive -- which means that all of their articles are freely available over the internet.
'Geometry & Topology' is a member of SPARC - the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. As their website says, "SPARC influences the marketplace positively by encouraging publishers to enter areas where the prices are highest and competition is needed most -- primarily in the science, technical, and medical (STM) fields"... in other words, it is an initiative to replace the old for-profit journals.
So there are the beginnings of a decently sized movement rebelling against conglomerates like Elsevier.
There is no area of mathematics so abtruse that it hasn't been used in theoretical physics...
It's not so much that mathematicians are making discoveries that physical science has not reached. Mathematicians tend to pick and and play with a system because it looks interested to them in some strange twisted way. Years later, physicists want to model something, and notice that the properties they want fit nicely into the previously developed theory.
You never know what advances you'll get from those strange people muttering maths in the corner... just look at all the people who spent their lives studying and developing number theory, the applied version of which is modern cryptography.
ArXiv is great, but the problem is the non-refereed aspect of it. We need properly refereed free (or cheap:) journals... and there is really no reason why not. People don't get paid to referee papers, or submit papers... there is just this man in the middle eating all this money for no net gain to the community.
A journal that had all its articles freely available electronically could easily charge for paper copies as long as it was reputable. All we need is for some big names to get their act together. An example where they *have* got their act together is from my University:
This is a peer reviewed journal on (guess what) geometry and topology. All the articles published in the journal are freely available electronically, or you can order the paper version at a low price.
I don't see any reason for any extra distribution fee.
I'm doing a PhD in Mathematics, and as such I'm hoping that I'll be writing papers that might be publishable at some point in the near(ish:) future. Because of this, I've been looking at the publishing terms of some of the Maths journals -- and they're absolutely terrible!
For example, 'Advances in Mathematics' take basically all of your rights to your paper away. You are basically not allowed to publish the article in any form, by any method -- including making it downloadable from the web. I could perhaps understand some of the restrictions if authors were paid for their work, but they're not (except in academic kudos).
All of these small journals are owned by one or two massive publishing conglomerates. The fees and restrictions imposed are *utterly* archaic and obscene. We need freely available, peer reviewed, reputable academic journals.
From mentioning 'kvt', I'm assuming you're using KDE 1, which is a pity. KDE 2's console is Konsole, which is much better than Kvt was.
The advantage environments have over collections of applications is unity of style and theme. For example, all the KDE applications are network transparent, which means that you can type in a ftp or http address in a file/open dialogue and the file will automatically be downloaded. That, together with the interprocess model (DCOP) and the use of the same widget set (QT), make for a much more integrated experience than just using random applications all over the place. See if you can get your workplace to upgrade to KDE 2 -- it's much more integrated and polished than KDE 1.
Of course, you are free to just use random applications if you feel like it.
Exactly -- that's how I have my KDE desktop set up. It feels much more natural to have the bars at the top of the screen than the bottom. Having said that, I'm wondering why I bother to have the bar there at all, because I almost always launch programs by hitting Alt-F2...
Yes, with the tabs they've taken a lovely interface that I first saw in Konsole... it's my favoured form of MDI. (PWM does a similar thing as a window manager, but there would be a seperate instance of the program in each tab). I'd love to see this interface implemented in many more applications -- Konqueror for a start.
Sadly, I didn't get to see the LINKS toolbar because it was only enabled for about half an hour, and I'm not downloading loads more 15 meg old nightly builds to see what it looks like. Does anyone have any screenshots?
Your desktop environment timeline is very similar to mine:)
although there is nothing like the KDE Liquid theme, with transparent menus, shadowed text, and strippled window backgrounds
I really wish Mosfet hadn't had that stupid little spat with the core KDE developers -- KDE needs people like him who are interested in both graphics and programming. He just seemed to have a habit of checking code in 2 days after the final code-freeze deadlines...
(for those of you new to the story -- Mosfet developed the KDE 2 style engines as well as Pixie. After being told that he couldn't add his Liquid style because it was after a feature freeze deadline, Mosfet decided to remove all his code from the KDE CVS and change the license on it to a form of the QPL. Most of the styles have been readded in the form they were before they were removed, and are now being developed independently. This is a picture of Liquid, which is nice I suppose if you like that sort of thing.)
Back when it was KDE 1 vs Gnome 1.2, I used Gnome... or bits of it. For ages I used Sawfish on its own, back when it was called Sawmill and wasn't the Gnome default window manager. I always hated GMC, and didn't use the panel much... so my use of Gnome was mostly restricted to the applications, and most of those (Gimp, XChat,...) were GTK+ rather than Gnome.
Once KDE 2 came out, I found myself using Konqueror more and more, plus Konsole, mostly because of the tabbed MDI interface it has (which is wonderful). From there it was a small step to actually running the whole KDE desktop -- I even got used to the KDE window manager, although it still feels a bit clunky in comparison to Sawfish (I see that KDE 3 will have active desktop borders back again though, which is wonderful).
Of course, I can still run all the same GTK+ applications I used to use, and they work just as well. Kate, Konsole and Konqueror are the killer apps for KDE, plus the way it all feels much more integrated together than Gnome does (although it has the better individual applications).
I've always thought this Gnome vs. KDE thing was about as dumb as vi vs. emacs.
And it'll keep on going just as long as vi vs. emacs...
I think you're running the risk of turning from one sort of fanatic to another.
When KDE was in transition from 1.1 to 2.0, a lot of people assumes that there was very little work going on, when in fact (as we now know) they were almost completely rewriting the core libraries. A similar thing is happening with Gnome -- and it's very hard to show people what you are doing until the main libraries are 90% complete. So lets give the Gnome guys a chance and see what they produce.
(the only thing I'm waiting for to make me happy is for Lyx 1.2 to come out so I can finally get rid of that xforms library...)
No, Qt have never artifically inflated their version number. The first number changes with major binary incompatible changes to the library, the second with additional features that keep binary compatibility, and the third with bug-fixes. KDE uses this numbering scheme as well.
Just because you might be used to other projects (such as the Linux kernel) completely changing interfaces within minor version revisions, doesn't mean that is how a properly managed piece of software is versioned.
I always liked AIX when I used it (well, I was working for IBM at the time). What is supposed to be so bad about it? All that I cared about is that it had decent support for message queues and inter process communication. (I worked in the group that did MQSeries -- I still can't work out what the point of that is).
Believe it or not, many companies *like* paying royalties for the widget set. Partly its because the beancounters can't get the idea of something worthwhile actually being free:), but mainly because it gives them a contact point for when they have problems, together with confidence that the widget set will continue to be developed.
Don't go getting the idea that Sun and HP hate the idea of non-free (or too-free) widget sets -- they kept CDE and Motif going far past the time when it should have been quietly taken out back and put down.
But that said, I hope all the money pouring into Gnome has a positive affect on the project. They are currently at the same stage that KDE were when they were changing to QT 2 -- 18 months between stable releases of the whole codebase. Gnome 2 will hopefully be as big a step in usability over 1 as KDE 2 was over KDE 1.
The UNIX software community needs healthy competition:)
No, a large amount of people have *stopped* buying music since Napster fell apart, and music sharing splintered into 15 million rival protocols.
The time when I bought most albums was when I had a nice broadband connection and Napster was in its heyday -- in conjunction with cdnow.com it let me listen to lots of artists which I'd not heard about before. Now I buy much less music, and from a narrower base of artists.
The year that the music industry was declaring that file sharing would destroy music buying, revenues from CD sales went *up*.
So, where can I find a simple KDE based distribution that doesn't try to mess with menus, or have all of the setup tools based on GTK? It has to play nice with Windows dual booting (games, and my partner's *spit* Visual Basic *spit* programming).
I've found that Mandrake 8 is less usable than Mandrake 7 -- simple stupid things like the way the boot-time hardware detection doesn't work you use the default graphical bootup, or the way that it doesn't list exactly which kernel patches it requires, so that I can't get a damn compiled kernel to even *boot*.
Does anyone use Slackware these days -- and how much of a nightmare is it to install?
Slashdot Mirror
If the cost-of-entry was really greatly reduced by e-publishing, you'd expect to see a number of "alternative professional societies" competing on basis of greatly reduced cost.
Several mathematics journals, such as 'Annals of Mathematics' and 'Geometry & Topology' are now 'overlays' of the ArXiv preprints archive -- which means that all of their articles are freely available over the internet.
'Geometry & Topology' is a member of SPARC - the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. As their website says, "SPARC influences the marketplace positively by encouraging publishers to enter areas where the prices are highest and competition is needed most -- primarily in the science, technical, and medical (STM) fields"... in other words, it is an initiative to replace the old for-profit journals.
So there are the beginnings of a decently sized movement rebelling against conglomerates like Elsevier.
There is no area of mathematics so abtruse that it hasn't been used in theoretical physics...
It's not so much that mathematicians are making discoveries that physical science has not reached. Mathematicians tend to pick and and play with a system because it looks interested to them in some strange twisted way. Years later, physicists want to model something, and notice that the properties they want fit nicely into the previously developed theory.
You never know what advances you'll get from those strange people muttering maths in the corner... just look at all the people who spent their lives studying and developing number theory, the applied version of which is modern cryptography.
Yes, it gets really boring when you hit the Karma cap... the incentive to post quality reduces, and that to post crap increases.
(QED)
Nope. I forget the exact story, but it's something like: his wife had an affair with a mathematician.
The 'Fields Medals' are the maths equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
ArXiv is great, but the problem is the non-refereed aspect of it. We need properly refereed free (or cheap :) journals... and there is really no reason why not. People don't get paid to referee papers, or submit papers... there is just this man in the middle eating all this money for no net gain to the community.
A journal that had all its articles freely available electronically could easily charge for paper copies as long as it was reputable. All we need is for some big names to get their act together. An example where they *have* got their act together is from my University:
Geometry & Topology
This is a peer reviewed journal on (guess what) geometry and topology. All the articles published in the journal are freely available electronically, or you can order the paper version at a low price.
I don't see any reason for any extra distribution fee.
Agreed -- tell me the names of the places that these people who published 50 papers before their PhD published in... please :).
don't know what the fuck happened there... I wrote the link correctly in the source... let's try it again and see what happens:
CiteSeer
I'm doing a PhD in Mathematics, and as such I'm hoping that I'll be writing papers that might be publishable at some point in the near(ish :) future. Because of this, I've been looking at the publishing terms of some of the Maths journals -- and they're absolutely terrible!
For example, 'Advances in Mathematics' take basically all of your rights to your paper away. You are basically not allowed to publish the article in any form, by any method -- including making it downloadable from the web. I could perhaps understand some of the restrictions if authors were paid for their work, but they're not (except in academic kudos).
I first noticed the problem when researching using (which is basically google for CS & applied maths papers -- give it a try!) -- all the papers you can find are preprints, and many of the ones you want just aren't freely available. Even when your employer (or the university) does sign up for the site licenses to get electronic copies of the articles, they're difficult to get hold of, and almost invariably in the annoying PDF format... (hard to manipulate, impossible to extract data from).
All of these small journals are owned by one or two massive publishing conglomerates. The fees and restrictions imposed are *utterly* archaic and obscene. We need freely available, peer reviewed, reputable academic journals.
From mentioning 'kvt', I'm assuming you're using KDE 1, which is a pity. KDE 2's console is Konsole, which is much better than Kvt was.
The advantage environments have over collections of applications is unity of style and theme. For example, all the KDE applications are network transparent, which means that you can type in a ftp or http address in a file/open dialogue and the file will automatically be downloaded. That, together with the interprocess model (DCOP) and the use of the same widget set (QT), make for a much more integrated experience than just using random applications all over the place. See if you can get your workplace to upgrade to KDE 2 -- it's much more integrated and polished than KDE 1.
Of course, you are free to just use random applications if you feel like it.
American values for beginners:
Compare the amount raised by Americans *for 6000 Americans* *in one month* to the amount raised for *the rest of the world* *in one year*.
Exactly -- that's how I have my KDE desktop set up. It feels much more natural to have the bars at the top of the screen than the bottom. Having said that, I'm wondering why I bother to have the bar there at all, because I almost always launch programs by hitting Alt-F2...
Agreed, XChat is the best Unix IRC client.
I'd say that Bersirc is the best IRC client in Windows, though.
Yes, with the tabs they've taken a lovely interface that I first saw in Konsole... it's my favoured form of MDI. (PWM does a similar thing as a window manager, but there would be a seperate instance of the program in each tab). I'd love to see this interface implemented in many more applications -- Konqueror for a start.
Sadly, I didn't get to see the LINKS toolbar because it was only enabled for about half an hour, and I'm not downloading loads more 15 meg old nightly builds to see what it looks like. Does anyone have any screenshots?
although there is nothing like the KDE Liquid theme, with transparent menus, shadowed text, and strippled window backgrounds
I really wish Mosfet hadn't had that stupid little spat with the core KDE developers -- KDE needs people like him who are interested in both graphics and programming. He just seemed to have a habit of checking code in 2 days after the final code-freeze deadlines...
(for those of you new to the story -- Mosfet developed the KDE 2 style engines as well as Pixie. After being told that he couldn't add his Liquid style because it was after a feature freeze deadline, Mosfet decided to remove all his code from the KDE CVS and change the license on it to a form of the QPL. Most of the styles have been readded in the form they were before they were removed, and are now being developed independently. This is a picture of Liquid, which is nice I suppose if you like that sort of thing.)
Back when it was KDE 1 vs Gnome 1.2, I used Gnome... or bits of it. For ages I used Sawfish on its own, back when it was called Sawmill and wasn't the Gnome default window manager. I always hated GMC, and didn't use the panel much... so my use of Gnome was mostly restricted to the applications, and most of those (Gimp, XChat, ...) were GTK+ rather than Gnome.
Once KDE 2 came out, I found myself using Konqueror more and more, plus Konsole, mostly because of the tabbed MDI interface it has (which is wonderful). From there it was a small step to actually running the whole KDE desktop -- I even got used to the KDE window manager, although it still feels a bit clunky in comparison to Sawfish (I see that KDE 3 will have active desktop borders back again though, which is wonderful).
Of course, I can still run all the same GTK+ applications I used to use, and they work just as well. Kate, Konsole and Konqueror are the killer apps for KDE, plus the way it all feels much more integrated together than Gnome does (although it has the better individual applications).
I've always thought this Gnome vs. KDE thing was about as dumb as vi vs. emacs.
And it'll keep on going just as long as vi vs. emacs...
I think you're running the risk of turning from one sort of fanatic to another.
When KDE was in transition from 1.1 to 2.0, a lot of people assumes that there was very little work going on, when in fact (as we now know) they were almost completely rewriting the core libraries. A similar thing is happening with Gnome -- and it's very hard to show people what you are doing until the main libraries are 90% complete. So lets give the Gnome guys a chance and see what they produce.
(the only thing I'm waiting for to make me happy is for Lyx 1.2 to come out so I can finally get rid of that xforms library...)
No, Qt have never artifically inflated their version number. The first number changes with major binary incompatible changes to the library, the second with additional features that keep binary compatibility, and the third with bug-fixes. KDE uses this numbering scheme as well.
Just because you might be used to other projects (such as the Linux kernel) completely changing interfaces within minor version revisions, doesn't mean that is how a properly managed piece of software is versioned.
Only if you're a dickhead.
I always liked AIX when I used it (well, I was working for IBM at the time). What is supposed to be so bad about it? All that I cared about is that it had decent support for message queues and inter process communication. (I worked in the group that did MQSeries -- I still can't work out what the point of that is).
Believe it or not, many companies *like* paying royalties for the widget set. Partly its because the beancounters can't get the idea of something worthwhile actually being free :), but mainly because it gives them a contact point for when they have problems, together with confidence that the widget set will continue to be developed.
:)
Don't go getting the idea that Sun and HP hate the idea of non-free (or too-free) widget sets -- they kept CDE and Motif going far past the time when it should have been quietly taken out back and put down.
But that said, I hope all the money pouring into Gnome has a positive affect on the project. They are currently at the same stage that KDE were when they were changing to QT 2 -- 18 months between stable releases of the whole codebase. Gnome 2 will hopefully be as big a step in usability over 1 as KDE 2 was over KDE 1.
The UNIX software community needs healthy competition
Entries to the IOCCC have to be legal C, and your program isn't: 'void main' isn't legal C.
my favorite bit of C is the fact that a[b] and b[a] are equivalent. I remember the first time I saw a piece of code use '2[x]'...
Ogg will compare very well to WMA all the way down to 64 Kbps.
Generally, tests done with WMA have shown that, although it's better than MP3 at low bitrates, it's still not particularly good.
And Vorbis decoding isn't much more stressful than MP3 decoding, so his computer will decode Vorbis encoded files fine.
No, a large amount of people have *stopped* buying music since Napster fell apart, and music sharing splintered into 15 million rival protocols.
The time when I bought most albums was when I had a nice broadband connection and Napster was in its heyday -- in conjunction with cdnow.com it let me listen to lots of artists which I'd not heard about before. Now I buy much less music, and from a narrower base of artists.
The year that the music industry was declaring that file sharing would destroy music buying, revenues from CD sales went *up*.
So, where can I find a simple KDE based distribution that doesn't try to mess with menus, or have all of the setup tools based on GTK? It has to play nice with Windows dual booting (games, and my partner's *spit* Visual Basic *spit* programming).
I've found that Mandrake 8 is less usable than Mandrake 7 -- simple stupid things like the way the boot-time hardware detection doesn't work you use the default graphical bootup, or the way that it doesn't list exactly which kernel patches it requires, so that I can't get a damn compiled kernel to even *boot*.
Does anyone use Slackware these days -- and how much of a nightmare is it to install?