Yes, the journals have a great business model (for them) right now:
- Publish expensive journal that libraries have little choice about subscribing to. - Receive free content from scientists. - Force scientists to transfer copyright. - Get other scientists to to the hard work of reviewing the articles for free. - Add 'page charges' for the privilege of publication. - Add extra charges for colour figures (though most articles are downloaded, coloured electrons are more expensive). - Charge the authors again for reprints. - Whine about 'unfair competition' from Open Access. - Pay off our democratic representatives. - Profit!
Right now most bookmakers will give you very good odds on the current government actually being in power by the end of 2010. Since the other lot are supposedly going to get rid of the scheme, and there's been no large-scale rollout of the cards to the general population, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to buy all the readers just now. Not that 'sense' really comes into this, of course.
Kind of ironic for a printer to use coffee grounds when one major coffee company is now using the printer cartridge business model (machine only works with expensive proprietary pre-packaged capsules you have to buy online):
Virgin Media supposedly just tried to set up a legal filesharing system for subscribers. Everything was apparently going well until the last minute, when Sony & Universal decided they liked everything about the plan except the actual 'sharing files' aspect:
'The Hiroshima bomb was a very simple "gun" design. Plenty of published info on it. It used a navy gun barrel cut down to size, a U235 doughnut target, a polonium initiator, and a U235 projectile. Mighty simple.'
A major point of the article is that many of the key (and repeatedly published) 'facts' about the bomb are quite wrong. e.g., according to Coster-Mullen, the projectile was actually a hollow cylinder and the target was a rod rather than a doughnut - 'little boy was female'. Wikipedia is now using his version of the bomb design in the Little Boy article:
'You're missing the point. First, I believe this is meant to compete with VMWare Workstation, not VMWare server. And, therefore, it is giving vmware a run for their money if they just have equal features - beacause VirtualBox is free, VMWare isn't.'
I'm running 64-bit Linux under 32-bit XP using VMWare Player, with a VM created using EasyVMX:
This is a free (but not Free) solution that does everything I need and (once it's set up) is as slick as Workstation in normal usage. But it'll be interesting to give VirtualBox a try now that this feature is available. Incidentally, the VMware VM can't address any more memory than the host OS, but I still find this setup useful for binary compatibility with my native 64-bit Linux installation.
'And yes, when you read the whole mail it's quite obvious it's just a troll, no-one can be that retarded, and there's no chance in hell she's actually used it but believe that it would be illegal.'
And a rather well-executed troll, too. I suspect someone is having a little quiet fun at Ken's expense, and will be overjoyed that their prank has made it as far as Slashdot, complete with drug references ('I along with many others tried Linux during college'). It's almost too easy to get us to bite about this sort of thing - check out some of the readers' comments on some of the 'technical articles' here:
'That's not the point. The point is that these days the focus is on understanding the concepts of chemistry (for example) compared to 50 years ago when the focus was on doing the math.'
From the RSC report:
'81% correctly identified sodium as the metal in sodium benzoate, but only 61% correctly gave the number of elements present in this compound, with the formula C6H5CO2Na given'
Can anyone who can't count the number of elements in a simple formula be considered to have the remotest understanding of the concepts of chemistry? Is basic addition now 'too mathematical'?
Or again:
'just 56% of participants successfully determined the relative formula mass of MgCl2, given the relative atomic masses for Cl and Mg'
'These results have a potential use in forensic science, since it suggests that, given large databases of names and Y chromosome profiles, surname prediction from DNA alone may be feasible.'
There's already a 240Gb drive that would fit in the 160Gb Classic housing. Apple's justification/excuse for killing off the thicker model was that not many people were buying it (though if true, it's not clear if they didn't need the storage, didn't like the form factor, or didn't want to pay the rather steep asking price). It's likely that the capacity of the Classic will be dictated by the largest drive that will fit in the slimmer shell of the current 120Gb model, unless or until the hard drive iPods are killed off altogether. There is a market for very high capacity devices (I'm in it!), but it's obviously much smaller than the demand for more compact flash-based players that Apple and everyone else are concentrating on.
That said, Apple seem to have gone out of their way to make both the software (as in the subject of this thread) and the hardware as inaccessible as possible, blocking both interoperability and upgrades/repairs (has anyone tried to replace the 160Gb drive with a 240Gb?). See for example the 25 difficult and potentially damaging steps required just to get at the hard disk in a Classic:
Changing the battery is just as hard. Is it too much to ask for a user-upgradable pocket media player with no software lockdown and a decent interface, which can be opened up with a screwdriver..?
'If it works there and the government buys into it, then look for it to spread to the other overly conservative nations. (I'm looking at you Russia)'
India is already pursuing a vigorous anti-piracy policy in cases of clear criminal intent, a move that has received international approval and calls for the wider adoption of such measures:
"The United Nations and international community must decide how to solve this grave problem (of piracy). They must be more forceful in their action," Mr Choong said.
He said that action should have been taken "years back or even last year when piracy was just starting - it's clearly getting worse and out of control".'
As Daniel steps back from the board we SEE he has nearly completed the translation of the top part of the Tablets.
DANIEL This should read, A MILLION YEARS INTO THE SKY IS RA, SUN GOD. SEALED AND BURIED FOR ALL TIME HIS...
Then Daniel circles the last word.
DANIEL (CONT'D) It's not DOOR to HEAVEN. The proper translation is...SUN PORTAL!
O'NEIL Um, Daniel..my script says 'STARGATE'.
There is an awkward silence. Then Daniel rounds furiously on O'Neil, the wild look in his eyes telling us that all sanity has clearly gone.
DANIEL Stargate! Stargate! It's always about the frikkin' Stargate! Ten years of my life I gave to that frikkin' show and I still can't escape from it! Ten miserable years trudging through the same muddy forest in British Columbia! I've got PhDs in archaelogy, anthropology and philology and the bastards all speak English anyway! I even ascended to a Higher Plane and I still couldn't get away from it! They killed me more times than Kenny! And now they're making a frikkin' movie! Please, for the love of...
With a resigned expression O'Neil raises his Zat gun and fires, stunning Daniel.
O'NEIL OK Guys, looks like Daniel could use a bit of Sarcophagus time. Let's take ten minutes and try it again when he's rested.
'...have someone like George Soros fund a new government that brings together the best and brightest minds in a manner where they're not tempted by bribery.'
This is an old idea, of course, most recently known as 'meritocracy', a term that many people are unaware was originally intended to be pejorative. Here's what Michael Young (who coined the term in the 50s) had to say about this type of system in business and politics back in 2001, well before the current economic mess:
'The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get. They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side. So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited.'
'I assume they mean some flavor of Perl 5, since the Perl didn't have objects prior to Perl 5. And Perl 5 released several years after Python.'
Indeed. According to Larry:
'After Tcl came Python, which in Guido's mind was inspired positively by ABC, but in the Python community's mind was inspired negatively by Perl. I'm not terribly qualified to talk about Python however. I don't really know much about Python. I only stole its object system for Perl 5. I have since repented.'
Slashdot Mirror
"Is there something I'm unaware of that they merely overcharge massively for"
'Reputation'
"or are they actually the complete and total parasites that they sound like?"
Pretty much.
Yes, the journals have a great business model (for them) right now:
- Publish expensive journal that libraries have little choice about subscribing to.
- Receive free content from scientists.
- Force scientists to transfer copyright.
- Get other scientists to to the hard work of reviewing the articles for free.
- Add 'page charges' for the privilege of publication.
- Add extra charges for colour figures (though most articles are downloaded, coloured electrons are more expensive).
- Charge the authors again for reprints.
- Whine about 'unfair competition' from Open Access.
- Pay off our democratic representatives.
- Profit!
Right now most bookmakers will give you very good odds on the current government actually being in power by the end of 2010. Since the other lot are supposedly going to get rid of the scheme, and there's been no large-scale rollout of the cards to the general population, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to buy all the readers just now. Not that 'sense' really comes into this, of course.
Kind of ironic for a printer to use coffee grounds when one major coffee company is now using the printer cartridge business model (machine only works with expensive proprietary pre-packaged capsules you have to buy online):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nespresso
Thankfully HP and Epson haven't yet tried to push their refills via some sort of dreadful 'aspirational lifestyle' club:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/26/drink.comment
If it's 'limited to DoD personnel for security reasons' in what sense is it 'Open'?
I just assumed they were testing Phase One of Google Purge
Virgin Media supposedly just tried to set up a legal filesharing system for subscribers. Everything was apparently going well until the last minute, when Sony & Universal decided they liked everything about the plan except the actual 'sharing files' aspect:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/23/virgin_puts_legal_p2p_on_ice
It's probably because the scientists' bullshit detector infringed on Nemesysco's patents.
'"we can't have a system where we're talking about arresting teenagers in their bedrooms."
Why not? We do it here daily in the USA.'
I think there were some complaints about the previous (US-assisted) UK policy:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=CGXavXZwRcg
'The Hiroshima bomb was a very simple "gun" design. Plenty of published info on it. It used a navy gun barrel cut down to size, a U235 doughnut target, a polonium initiator, and a U235 projectile. Mighty simple.'
A major point of the article is that many of the key (and repeatedly published) 'facts' about the bomb are quite wrong. e.g., according to Coster-Mullen, the projectile was actually a hollow cylinder and the target was a rod rather than a doughnut - 'little boy was female'. Wikipedia is now using his version of the bomb design in the Little Boy article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
Eliza: Can you elaborate on that?
'You're missing the point. First, I believe this is meant to compete with VMWare Workstation, not VMWare server. And, therefore, it is giving vmware a run for their money if they just have equal features - beacause VirtualBox is free, VMWare isn't.'
I'm running 64-bit Linux under 32-bit XP using VMWare Player, with a VM created using EasyVMX:
http://www.easyvmx.com/
and VMWare tools extracted from Workstation:
http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Installing_VMware_Tools_with_VMware_Player.html
This is a free (but not Free) solution that does everything I need and (once it's set up) is as slick as Workstation in normal usage. But it'll be interesting to give VirtualBox a try now that this feature is available. Incidentally, the VMware VM can't address any more memory than the host OS, but I still find this setup useful for binary compatibility with my native 64-bit Linux installation.
...to relax after a hard day on the ski slopes:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4491210.stm
http://www.skidubai.com/
Well you wouldn't want a Hardon in your Tract, would you?:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/72656781214715n4/
('Preview (Small, Large, Larger, Largest)').
For more of the same ('This may strike you as the geek equivalent of looking up "arse" in the dictionary'), see:
http://www.badscience.net/?p=238
'And yes, when you read the whole mail it's quite obvious it's just a troll, no-one can be that retarded, and there's no chance in hell she's actually used it but believe that it would be illegal.'
And a rather well-executed troll, too. I suspect someone is having a little quiet fun at Ken's expense, and will be overjoyed that their prank has made it as far as Slashdot, complete with drug references ('I along with many others tried Linux during college'). It's almost too easy to get us to bite about this sort of thing - check out some of the readers' comments on some of the 'technical articles' here:
http://shelleytherepublican.com/category/education/technical/linux
CASH music has a nice setup. Creative Commons music (complete tracks, and some mix stems to play with), with open source site code:
http://cashmusic.org/
Mostly of interest to me for solo stuff by Kristin Hersh (of Throwing Muses), but there are now half a dozen other artists to check out.
'That's not the point. The point is that these days the focus is on understanding the concepts of chemistry (for example) compared to 50 years ago when the focus was on doing the math.'
From the RSC report:
'81% correctly identified sodium as the metal in sodium benzoate, but only 61% correctly gave the number of elements present in this compound, with the formula C6H5CO2Na given'
Can anyone who can't count the number of elements in a simple formula be considered to have the remotest understanding of the concepts of chemistry? Is basic addition now 'too mathematical'?
Or again:
'just 56% of participants successfully determined the relative formula mass of MgCl2, given the relative atomic masses for Cl and Mg'
?!
I wonder if any of these shows have used this:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-10/uol-dcr100608.php
as a plot device yet?
'These results have a potential use in forensic science, since it suggests that, given large databases of names and Y chromosome profiles, surname prediction from DNA alone may be feasible.'
There's already a 240Gb drive that would fit in the 160Gb Classic housing. Apple's justification/excuse for killing off the thicker model was that not many people were buying it (though if true, it's not clear if they didn't need the storage, didn't like the form factor, or didn't want to pay the rather steep asking price). It's likely that the capacity of the Classic will be dictated by the largest drive that will fit in the slimmer shell of the current 120Gb model, unless or until the hard drive iPods are killed off altogether. There is a market for very high capacity devices (I'm in it!), but it's obviously much smaller than the demand for more compact flash-based players that Apple and everyone else are concentrating on.
That said, Apple seem to have gone out of their way to make both the software (as in the subject of this thread) and the hardware as inaccessible as possible, blocking both interoperability and upgrades/repairs (has anyone tried to replace the 160Gb drive with a 240Gb?). See for example the 25 difficult and potentially damaging steps required just to get at the hard disk in a Classic:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPod/iPod-Classic/Hard-Drive/130/4/Page-1
Changing the battery is just as hard. Is it too much to ask for a user-upgradable pocket media player with no software lockdown and a decent interface, which can be opened up with a screwdriver..?
'Problem is, no other manufacturer offered me a 160GB drive with good battery life (40hrs+). Apple used to.'
Fixed that for you.
'If it works there and the government buys into it, then look for it to spread to the other overly conservative nations. (I'm looking at you Russia)'
India is already pursuing a vigorous anti-piracy policy in cases of clear criminal intent, a move that has received international approval and calls for the wider adoption of such measures:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7739171.stm
"The United Nations and international community must decide how to solve this grave problem (of piracy). They must be more forceful in their action," Mr Choong said.
He said that action should have been taken "years back or even last year when piracy was just starting - it's clearly getting worse and out of control".'
As Daniel steps back from the board we SEE he has nearly completed the translation of the top part of the Tablets.
DANIEL
This should read, A MILLION YEARS INTO THE SKY IS RA, SUN GOD. SEALED AND BURIED FOR ALL TIME HIS...
Then Daniel circles the last word.
DANIEL (CONT'D)
It's not DOOR to HEAVEN. The proper translation is...SUN PORTAL!
O'NEIL
Um, Daniel..my script says 'STARGATE'.
There is an awkward silence. Then Daniel rounds furiously on O'Neil, the wild look in his eyes telling us that all sanity has clearly gone.
DANIEL
Stargate! Stargate! It's always about the frikkin' Stargate! Ten years of my life I gave to that frikkin' show and I still can't escape from it! Ten miserable years trudging through the same muddy forest in British Columbia! I've got PhDs in archaelogy, anthropology and philology and the bastards all speak English anyway! I even ascended to a Higher Plane and I still couldn't get away from it! They killed me more times than Kenny! And now they're making a frikkin' movie! Please, for the love of...
With a resigned expression O'Neil raises his Zat gun and fires, stunning Daniel.
O'NEIL
OK Guys, looks like Daniel could use a bit of Sarcophagus time. Let's take ten minutes and try it again when he's rested.
If you have the genome sequence and know the markers that are likely to be tested, e.g. the FBI's CODIS Core STR Loci:
http://www.cstl.nist.gov/strbase/fbicore.htm
then you could potentially engineer a fake sample (covering just the forensically targeted regions) using only existing technology...
'...have someone like George Soros fund a new government that brings together the best and brightest minds in a manner where they're not tempted by bribery.'
This is an old idea, of course, most recently known as 'meritocracy', a term that many people are unaware was originally intended to be pejorative. Here's what Michael Young (who coined the term in the 50s) had to say about this type of system in business and politics back in 2001, well before the current economic mess:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
'The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get. They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side. So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited.'
'I assume they mean some flavor of Perl 5, since the Perl didn't have objects prior to Perl 5. And Perl 5 released several years after Python.'
Indeed. According to Larry:
'After Tcl came Python, which in Guido's mind was inspired positively by ABC, but in the Python community's mind was inspired negatively by Perl. I'm not terribly qualified to talk about Python however. I don't really know much about Python. I only stole its object system for Perl 5. I have since repented.'