But you see, journals in fields where scientists are capable, and expected, to use LaTeX are just as expensive. The "typesetting is so expensive" excuse thing just doesn't hold. Ask any other type of publication what they would do if all their content for free - here is a hint: their eyes would fill with dollar signs.
To be honest, this makes you sound like some high school/college kid who has never published an article, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and ask you what field you work in.
No, you are the one who comes across as extremely ignorant. I can't speak for the original author, but, as has been stated several times in this thread, authors preparing camera ready articles in LaTeX is standard in the more mathematical sciences. This includes math, physics, computer science, statistics, etc.
Trust me, scientists cannot format a paper for publishing, don't want to, and shouldn't be required to. Preparing a paper for print requires professionals that have training and experience at their jobs. Someday you should take a look at a pile of grant applications, which tend to represent the best writing most scientists can do. You're lucky to avoid serious grammatical errors, and are unlikely to see even correct indenting, much less some beautiful multi-page layout with embedded figures, multicolumn text flow, pretty typesetting, etc. It already takes months to write a paper, and now you want people with no training or interest to learn how to become publishers? Ridiculous.
I am at the mathematical institution of a major university right now. There are over a hundred researchers in this building alone - and I promise you that to the last one they are all capable of preparing their own papers for publication in LaTeX. Even turning in a masters thesis done some other way is frowned upon greatly.
Also, since the papers are reformatted (both text and graphics) for publishing, the publishers don't even want the authors to try to format their papers, because it will look like crap, and it just makes more work for them. Normally you submit your article text in a fairly non-structured form, and submit your graphics and charts separately in a different format.
I don't understand how you can claim to work in academic publishing and you don't even seem to know what LaTeX is. In LaTeX, you define the structure of the document, and all the typesetting is done for automatically. I have the aesthetic sense of a warthog, and I can produce "correct indenting, beautiful multi-page layout with embedded figures, multicolumn text flow, pretty typesetting, etc" because it is just a simple matter of applying a document class to the my.tex file.
See my response to your first assertion. You are incorrect. Scientists are not publishers, and lack the training and interest. Also, how is the author supposed to know how his or her article fits into the journal? Do you just assume that every article starts with a full page, and waste a lot of space? There are so many problems with this idea it's not even worth contemplating.
Authors do not do the typesetting. They produce an article structure, set up by defining sections, subsections, figures, etc, and then a simple FREE program does it all for them. You seem to be in denial because your job depends entirely on the luditry of members of the non-technical sciences...
While the blurb and quote are false, the headline actually isn't. Linus' stance in against Tridge is essentially him defending proprietary formats against reverse engineering.
The problem is not that when you buy some DRMed media that you do not really own the song, the movie, or whatever. The problem is that when you take part in a DRM system, you do not really own you computer any longer. I will not buy into a system that has my computer acting against me on behalf of others - not at any price, nor for any benefit.
Computers are not like cable boxes or satellite receivers, or even DVD players. They are our most fundamental and important devices of communication. To surrender control over those devices to others is a mistake we should pay for dearly...
If I pick up a phone to call 911, I don't care if it's a landline, mobile, VoIP oder telepathy-based - it just has to work, period.
What if somebody happens to have an old antique or just elegant phone on display that isn't connected to a line at all? Should that be illegal since you cannot call 911 on it?
What about if I have one those Skype handsets connected to my computer, which looks like a phone but is actually only used for calling in Skype network. Must that provide 911? If it does, what about the skype software on a PC? What is the difference? What about IM software with voice? Game "teamtalk" software?
Don't you think if there so ought to be laws about these things, that they at least have to be clear? Is it any device that looks like the conventional idea of a phone that has to be able to call 911? (Can we have an exact defenition of what "looks" like a phone?) Or is it any device that carries voice communication? (In that case, time to burn personal radios!)
When does it become necessary for an electronic device to allow 911 dialing, and why right then? Until you have defined this, you can't just demand things "period".
4 172.31.254.253 (172.31.254.253) 4.062 ms 5.199 ms 6.160 ms 5 172.16.128.19 (172.16.128.19) 631.013 ms 583.867 ms 1562.693 ms 6 172.16.64.61 (172.16.64.61) 1658.335 ms 1537.707 ms 1099.666 ms
Does this imply that 172.16.128.19 is the IP of the sattelite? Am I the only one who finds that pretty damn cool?
More seriously: How many of you have needed to log in to a machine remotely from some Windows PC, and just googled for "putty" and used the first link? Imagine how many machines you compromise by simply replacing putty's homepage in the rankings.
Before anyone starts panicing about Juptier collapsing into a companion star to the sun, and screwing over our whole solar system pretty royally - please note that while this star is only 16% larger than Jupiter in volume, it contains 95 times as much mass.
Re:It's a step up from a storage dump for photos
on
Apple Updates iPod
·
· Score: 1
Yes, Mr. Rocket Scientist, thank you for pointing out what everybody already knew. The point is that the iRiver H3xx does have a USB master port (at least the European and Asian versions - I have heard that the US version needs to be reflashed for it to work.)
It works with a lot of USB mass storage devices, but not (for whatever reason) this particular camera.
Re:It's a step up from a storage dump for photos
on
Apple Updates iPod
·
· Score: 1
I have a iRiver H320 which is a (less elegant) iPod clone with a color screen and a USB host port. It supports USB mass storage, so that one can connect most digital cameras directly the player and copy the files over to the 20 gig harddisk.
However, for whatever reason it did not work with my old Sony "Cybershot" camera, even though it works under linux without any special modules (AFAIK). You have been warned...
It isn't like there is anything particularly ugly about what Microsoft is doing. I mean, they really don't have an obligation to provide downloads of wine users, who are using a (somewhat) compatible competing system rather than theirs.
I use wine to run some things, and I have not paid a dime to microsoft, so I don't exactly expect them to provide me with any services.
International suppliers in these countries invariably offer dramatically better conditions then domestic industry. There is no reason to believe it would be there if we were to demand that working conditions meet those of a much wealthier society.
The fact is that all countries that have developed have done so by gradual improvements on wealth and conditions. Protectionism justified by trying to deny this is only hurting those it claims to benefit.
Of course they can leave, but the "fair trade" people always conveniently forget that in their quest to justify protectionism. The fact is that the people who work in these "sweatshops" (whether they are making sneakers or RPG characters) are there by choice because they decided the alternatives they had were worse. And if the "sweatshop" was to dissapear, what would happen? They would be left with exactly those alternatives.
Of course it sucks that their are people in world who are so poor that working under awful conditions is a step up for them. But denying them this step up does not help their poverty - instead it locks out their societies from the prospect of economic development.
You can point this out to the left as many times as you want, though, and they won't listen. The reason is that their motives for wanting protectionism have nothing to do with concern for foreign workers. Like all other protectionism, it has to with protecting ourselves from the possibility that others are able to do our jobs better and cheaper.
Stallman likes to point out that the term "Intellectual Property" is a fallacy in the sense that copyright, patents, and trademarks are very different things that need to be discussed seperately. But one can at least identify one problem that they are all suffering from: courts and lawmakers forgetting their actual purpose, and treating them like they exist to protect incumbant companies.
In the case of Trademark, it's purpose is not to protect companies that take out trademarks, but to protect _consumers_. The point with trademark is that if I want a Coca-Cola, or a Louis-Vuitonn bag, I can be sure that what I buy is actually such a product, and not a cheap knock-off. Without trademark laws, it would be next to impossible to know what you are buying. That this leads to brands with incredible value is entirely incidental, and possibly not entirely positive.
So, in this context, the ruling could not be more stupid. How does it, in any way, hurt the consumer that competitors can advertise under queries for Louis-Vuitonn? As long as the ads are clearly marked as being adds for somebody else (as they are on Google), this will only increase competition and give the consumer more choice.
One can understand why Louis-Vuitton might not like that, but the role of the courts ought not be to do their bidding!
Both Berners Lee and Torvalds did both though. They created the WWW and Linux/and/ gave them away. Sounds pretty close to the socialist ideal to me.
Neither has hesitated to profit from his invention, as well they shouldn't. Both will tell you that the reason they released it for free wasn't altruism, but that it was the only way it could have evolved into what it became.
I'm so very sick of posts like this. There is always some holier-than-thou slashdotter who'll tell us how we should be ashamed of ourselves for developing technology instead of giving our money to cancer victims/sick kids/homeless puppies etc.
Let me put this out there for you: Who do you think has made a greater contribution to cancer treatment, Jane Tomlinson, or Tim Berners Lee?
Well, Tomlinson may have collected money that can be used to fund a few more researchers in a field where hundreds of millions are already spent, and finding the solution is not a matter of man-hours. TBL on the other hand, created a brilliant new communication medium that has completely revolutionized the sharing of information between people.
As somebody who works with research (though not directly related to curing cancer - shame on me!) I can attest that the World Wide Web is an invalvuable tool that has completely changed for the better the way scientists are able to cooperate, publish, and access each others information. Tim Berners Lee wasn't just good at begging together money: he actually created something great, something that brought society forward, something that has improved the efficiency and wealth of all walks of life.
When efficient treatments for cancer are found, Tim Berners Lee will have deserved some of the credit for it, like he deserves some of the credit for every scientific achievement from now on. All due respect to Miss Tomlinson, but her achievement does not close to compare.
The same thing goes, btw, to the recent post about the Linux community matching Gates' donation to childrens vaccines. Gates may vaccinate ten million children, but the result will most likely be that those children will have another twenty million children, also living in poverty, and also needing vaccines. The Linux community, on the other hand, has given to developing world a fantastic tool with which wealth can be created, and development spurred.
Let us not fall for the socialist fallacy that the only good thing one can do in life is to give away ones money. People like Tim Berners Lee CREATE wealth, which is a greater virtue then passing it around!
Odds that Slashdot implements such a thing: very very low.
Considering that last time Malda saw my sig, he called me a troll and I was ip-banned for three months, I think that perhaps you should temper your optimism...
Slashdot Mirror
# [update] Google Pagerank extension
You really think informing Google about EVERY page you surf to is a good idea?
Between the search engine, gmail, and Orkut, don't they know enough about us already?
At first I was excited because I thought I was going to get to finally read an enlightening, in-depth article that critically examined the browser.
And I thought my life was dull. You need help my friend. Now!
But you see, journals in fields where scientists are capable, and expected, to use LaTeX are just as expensive. The "typesetting is so expensive" excuse thing just doesn't hold. Ask any other type of publication what they would do if all their content for free - here is a hint: their eyes would fill with dollar signs.
To be honest, this makes you sound like some high school/college kid who has never published an article, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and ask you what field you work in.
.tex file.
No, you are the one who comes across as extremely ignorant. I can't speak for the original author, but, as has been stated several times in this thread, authors preparing camera ready articles in LaTeX is standard in the more mathematical sciences. This includes math, physics, computer science, statistics, etc.
Trust me, scientists cannot format a paper for publishing, don't want to, and shouldn't be required to. Preparing a paper for print requires professionals that have training and experience at their jobs. Someday you should take a look at a pile of grant applications, which tend to represent the best writing most scientists can do. You're lucky to avoid serious grammatical errors, and are unlikely to see even correct indenting, much less some beautiful multi-page layout with embedded figures, multicolumn text flow, pretty typesetting, etc. It already takes months to write a paper, and now you want people with no training or interest to learn how to become publishers? Ridiculous.
I am at the mathematical institution of a major university right now. There are over a hundred researchers in this building alone - and I promise you that to the last one they are all capable of preparing their own papers for publication in LaTeX. Even turning in a masters thesis done some other way is frowned upon greatly.
Also, since the papers are reformatted (both text and graphics) for publishing, the publishers don't even want the authors to try to format their papers, because it will look like crap, and it just makes more work for them. Normally you submit your article text in a fairly non-structured form, and submit your graphics and charts separately in a different format.
I don't understand how you can claim to work in academic publishing and you don't even seem to know what LaTeX is. In LaTeX, you define the structure of the document, and all the typesetting is done for automatically. I have the aesthetic sense of a warthog, and I can produce "correct indenting, beautiful multi-page layout with embedded figures, multicolumn text flow, pretty typesetting, etc" because it is just a simple matter of applying a document class to the my
See my response to your first assertion. You are incorrect. Scientists are not publishers, and lack the training and interest. Also, how is the author supposed to know how his or her article fits into the journal? Do you just assume that every article starts with a full page, and waste a lot of space? There are so many problems with this idea it's not even worth contemplating.
Authors do not do the typesetting. They produce an article structure, set up by defining sections, subsections, figures, etc, and then a simple FREE program does it all for them. You seem to be in denial because your job depends entirely on the luditry of members of the non-technical sciences...
While the blurb and quote are false, the headline actually isn't. Linus' stance in against Tridge is essentially him defending proprietary formats against reverse engineering.
I don't mind software that comes with a EULA. I just don't respect them. Likewise I don't mind media that has DRM, as long as I can circumvent it.
The problem is not that when you buy some DRMed media that you do not really own the song, the movie, or whatever. The problem is that when you take part in a DRM system, you do not really own you computer any longer. I will not buy into a system that has my computer acting against me on behalf of others - not at any price, nor for any benefit.
Computers are not like cable boxes or satellite receivers, or even DVD players. They are our most fundamental and important devices of communication. To surrender control over those devices to others is a mistake we should pay for dearly...
If I pick up a phone to call 911, I don't care if it's a landline, mobile, VoIP oder telepathy-based - it just has to work, period.
What if somebody happens to have an old antique or just elegant phone on display that isn't connected to a line at all? Should that be illegal since you cannot call 911 on it?
What about if I have one those Skype handsets connected to my computer, which looks like a phone but is actually only used for calling in Skype network. Must that provide 911? If it does, what about the skype software on a PC? What is the difference? What about IM software with voice? Game "teamtalk" software?
Don't you think if there so ought to be laws about these things, that they at least have to be clear? Is it any device that looks like the conventional idea of a phone that has to be able to call 911? (Can we have an exact defenition of what "looks" like a phone?) Or is it any device that carries voice communication? (In that case, time to burn personal radios!)
When does it become necessary for an electronic device to allow 911 dialing, and why right then? Until you have defined this, you can't just demand things "period".
What stops somebody from creating a fake credit card? Or from simply whiteouting the signature part and resigning.
Showing an ID is a better way of verifying identity then a signature read by a non-expert.
4 172.31.254.253 (172.31.254.253) 4.062 ms 5.199 ms 6.160 ms
5 172.16.128.19 (172.16.128.19) 631.013 ms 583.867 ms 1562.693 ms
6 172.16.64.61 (172.16.64.61) 1658.335 ms 1537.707 ms 1099.666 ms
Does this imply that 172.16.128.19 is the IP of the sattelite? Am I the only one who finds that pretty damn cool?
Umm, could you explain to me how you would implement a DRM scheme that doesn't trust the client? Think about this real hard now...
More seriously: How many of you have needed to log in to a machine remotely from some Windows PC, and just googled for "putty" and used the first link? Imagine how many machines you compromise by simply replacing putty's homepage in the rankings.
Before anyone starts panicing about Juptier collapsing into a companion star to the sun, and screwing over our whole solar system pretty royally - please note that while this star is only 16% larger than Jupiter in volume, it contains 95 times as much mass.
Yes, Mr. Rocket Scientist, thank you for pointing out what everybody already knew. The point is that the iRiver H3xx does have a USB master port (at least the European and Asian versions - I have heard that the US version needs to be reflashed for it to work.)
It works with a lot of USB mass storage devices, but not (for whatever reason) this particular camera.
I have a iRiver H320 which is a (less elegant) iPod clone with a color screen and a USB host port. It supports USB mass storage, so that one can connect most digital cameras directly the player and copy the files over to the 20 gig harddisk.
However, for whatever reason it did not work with my old Sony "Cybershot" camera, even though it works under linux without any special modules (AFAIK). You have been warned...
It isn't like there is anything particularly ugly about what Microsoft is doing. I mean, they really don't have an obligation to provide downloads of wine users, who are using a (somewhat) compatible competing system rather than theirs.
I use wine to run some things, and I have not paid a dime to microsoft, so I don't exactly expect them to provide me with any services.
I ware glasses, [...] i did damn well in school, even when i had only 50%~ attendance, and they were jelious.
The classes you skipped didn't include grammar and spelling by any chance?
International suppliers in these countries invariably offer dramatically better conditions then domestic industry. There is no reason to believe it would be there if we were to demand that working conditions meet those of a much wealthier society.
The fact is that all countries that have developed have done so by gradual improvements on wealth and conditions. Protectionism justified by trying to deny this is only hurting those it claims to benefit.
If you're outright against all labor laws, I'm sorry, but you are a horribly misguided individual who needs to study history[...]
If you want to have an argument, I would suggest that you need to study the art of actually making arguments rather than ad hominem attacks.
BTW, yes I am against government labor laws (union demands are of course fine). Nobody owes you a job: if you don't like the conditions don't take it.
However, if they can't leave it IS slavery.
Of course they can leave, but the "fair trade" people always conveniently forget that in their quest to justify protectionism. The fact is that the people who work in these "sweatshops" (whether they are making sneakers or RPG characters) are there by choice because they decided the alternatives they had were worse. And if the "sweatshop" was to dissapear, what would happen? They would be left with exactly those alternatives.
Of course it sucks that their are people in world who are so poor that working under awful conditions is a step up for them. But denying them this step up does not help their poverty - instead it locks out their societies from the prospect of economic development.
You can point this out to the left as many times as you want, though, and they won't listen. The reason is that their motives for wanting protectionism have nothing to do with concern for foreign workers. Like all other protectionism, it has to with protecting ourselves from the possibility that others are able to do our jobs better and cheaper.
Have you used Google lately? It isn't the yellow-pages, it is a search engine, and searching for Louis-Vuitton turns up guess who as the first hit.
The advertisements pruchased by competitors where clearly marked as such and on the sides.
Stallman likes to point out that the term "Intellectual Property" is a fallacy in the sense that copyright, patents, and trademarks are very different things that need to be discussed seperately. But one can at least identify one problem that they are all suffering from: courts and lawmakers forgetting their actual purpose, and treating them like they exist to protect incumbant companies.
In the case of Trademark, it's purpose is not to protect companies that take out trademarks, but to protect _consumers_. The point with trademark is that if I want a Coca-Cola, or a Louis-Vuitonn bag, I can be sure that what I buy is actually such a product, and not a cheap knock-off. Without trademark laws, it would be next to impossible to know what you are buying. That this leads to brands with incredible value is entirely incidental, and possibly not entirely positive.
So, in this context, the ruling could not be more stupid. How does it, in any way, hurt the consumer that competitors can advertise under queries for Louis-Vuitonn? As long as the ads are clearly marked as being adds for somebody else (as they are on Google), this will only increase competition and give the consumer more choice.
One can understand why Louis-Vuitton might not like that, but the role of the courts ought not be to do their bidding!
Both Berners Lee and Torvalds did both though. They created the WWW and Linux /and/ gave them away. Sounds pretty close to the socialist ideal to me.
Neither has hesitated to profit from his invention, as well they shouldn't. Both will tell you that the reason they released it for free wasn't altruism, but that it was the only way it could have evolved into what it became.
I'm so very sick of posts like this. There is always some holier-than-thou slashdotter who'll tell us how we should be ashamed of ourselves for developing technology instead of giving our money to cancer victims/sick kids/homeless puppies etc.
Let me put this out there for you: Who do you think has made a greater contribution to cancer treatment, Jane Tomlinson, or Tim Berners Lee?
Well, Tomlinson may have collected money that can be used to fund a few more researchers in a field where hundreds of millions are already spent, and finding the solution is not a matter of man-hours. TBL on the other hand, created a brilliant new communication medium that has completely revolutionized the sharing of information between people.
As somebody who works with research (though not directly related to curing cancer - shame on me!) I can attest that the World Wide Web is an invalvuable tool that has completely changed for the better the way scientists are able to cooperate, publish, and access each others information. Tim Berners Lee wasn't just good at begging together money: he actually created something great, something that brought society forward, something that has improved the efficiency and wealth of all walks of life.
When efficient treatments for cancer are found, Tim Berners Lee will have deserved some of the credit for it, like he deserves some of the credit for every scientific achievement from now on. All due respect to Miss Tomlinson, but her achievement does not close to compare.
The same thing goes, btw, to the recent post about the Linux community matching Gates' donation to childrens vaccines. Gates may vaccinate ten million children, but the result will most likely be that those children will have another twenty million children, also living in poverty, and also needing vaccines. The Linux community, on the other hand, has given to developing world a fantastic tool with which wealth can be created, and development spurred.
Let us not fall for the socialist fallacy that the only good thing one can do in life is to give away ones money. People like Tim Berners Lee CREATE wealth, which is a greater virtue then passing it around!
Odds that Slashdot implements such a thing: very very low.
Considering that last time Malda saw my sig, he called me a troll and I was ip-banned for three months, I think that perhaps you should temper your optimism...