This is a neat idea, but not yet remotely ready to try in people. There were quite significant local infammatory reactions (big lumps!) in some of the mice tested. There's probably ten years of work, and well north of $150 million dollars before the first human tests. Good luck!
Gentoo is good, but only if 1) you can follow instructions with religious fervour until you know what you are doing (i.e. go line by lein throught the install guide!) 2) First download and burn a rescue CD (gentoo itself will do) and make sure that it boots your hardware. 3) You don't mind spending about half an hour a week updating stuff - this is half an hour of your time, the PC will take several hours a week updating stuff.
Gentoo is much easier to use than it was five years ago, and you will learn a lot, but you have to want to. If you don't then try Debian or Ubuntu - which are also very fine distributions, but will not require you to learn a lot of stuff. Gentoo will.
It's not promsicuous and monogamous mice, it's about a relatively promsicuous species of mouse, and a diffferent, relatively monogamous, species of mouse. These different species have different immune systems. It shows less about mice, than about wishful thinking...
This was a cross-sectional survey of schoolchildren. It tells you nothing about the direction of causation. Maybe using Facebook and texting a lot does indeed cause early sex, drug use and drinking. Maybe kids who use drugs, drink and have sex, use Facebook more to tell others about it,and text a lot to arrange their busy social lives. Most likely, kids who have sex, drink and drugs, have significant major issues in their lives already, and may be using texting and Facebook as alternative (or additional) coping strategies.
Kids who text all the time and live (sort of) on Facebook or Bebo may well be kids who already have problems. This study is a survey of schoolkids at point in time, and does not provide any data on whether early sex and drugs cause Facebook, Facebook causes early sex and drugs, or, most likely, both reflect existing issues facing the kids. Indeed texting and Facebook are likely better coping strategies than sex and drugs, though perhpas les immediately enjoyable.
Pass along please, nothing to see here.
Not perfect, but a start
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From our perspective (I'm a health policy person based in Europe), US health care is staggeringly expensive, very variable, and very unfair. It's the single biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in the States.
Your health is poor, overall, especially you have poor child health, and relatively poor maternal and infant health.
A large part of your population have no access to good quality health care, and this imposes large costs on your society.
Your major companies find high health care costs for staff a major burden, and this sharply reduces the competitiveness of good US employers.
You have the highest administrative costs for heath care that I know of, now running over 30%, and at current rates of increase, in thirty years you will be spending 100% of your GDP on health services. At the top end, there is no better health care anywhere for acute illnesses, but very few people can access this.
The proposed changes are a start, and only a start. With no public option, there is a real risk that the insurance companies will continue to combine together to rip you off. However, the current proposals will save a lot of money over the next decade, which is why the insurance companies are spending millions buying ads, and influencing politicians to stop the change.
I manage all my home directories with Unison, including 80Gig of pictures across Linux and Windows. The only issue I've noticed is that for single files over 1G it gets slow, so I split up my thunderbird folders to get under this. Everything else just works.
I work with a Government agency in Ireland, (I work for a university to avoid confusion). We developed a really innovative information system with them, a web-based system which allows flexible mapping, GIS work, sophisticated calculations, open ended queries, loads of pre-specified reports and more. It is entirely open source.
It would have been economically unfeasible, and, I think, technically impossible, with closed source software.
The developers were paid, and are still being paid, quite a large amount of money to build this for us, maintain it, and keep it moving forwards. My view is that give great value for money. All the stuff they develop for us is GPLed.
This seems like quite a viable model to me. What's not viable is the 'write a better video-processor' model which you describe. You need to work with your clients, support them in improving productivity, ease of use, cool new features, whatever it is they need for their business.
We had some audio amplifiers in a student theatre where I worked. One of my dimmer colleagues spilt a pint of milk into the amplifiers while they were running. We turned it off! The next day we used industrial alcohol to clean it. This worked pretty well. Anthony
Standard journals are dying steadily. They are based on subscriptions, which can reach $30,000 for, a single journal, for a library, and as much as $5,000 for individuals. The research published in them is hard to access, and often invisible to search engines. Open Access journals [OAJ|http://www.doaj.org/] are funded by publication charges, usually not printed, although the [PLOS|http://www.plos.org/] journals are an exception.
Research published in Open Access journals is more cited than similar research published in the subscription only literature, and, as a result, the latter is dying out.
The main losers are the shareholders of academic publishers, which are extremely profitable ventures at the moment.
The works published are all long out of UK copyright, but Cambridge University asserts:-
" Permission is hereby granted, without agreement and without licence or royalty fees, to use and to download and print a single copy of the Materials for private study and research, provided that such usage and copying is for non-commercial purposes only and not for any commercial advantage and that any copyright notice within the Materials and these Terms of Use appear in any copy of the Materials.
Except as permitted above and use or copying under statutory allowances as permitted in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 as amended, the User undertakes not to copy, reproduce, publish, store in any medium (including extraction into any other website, database, compilation, or computer programme), generate collections, distribute, transmit, retransmit, modify, manipulate, alter, rent, lease or lend, or broadcast or show any part of the Website without the prior written permission of the University.
To use and copy the Materials otherwise requires specific written permission from the University and the original copyright holder(s) as identified and the User undertakes to contact the University and the copyright holder(s) to obtain permission to do so.
Any further use may infringe copyright and moral rights and may attract civil remedies and criminal penalties. The University regularly monitors access to the Website, other websites and publications in all media and utilizes digital watermarking to assist in the tracing of illegal use and will take action for infringement of copyright and breach of these Terms of Use.
The User warrants to the University that the User will not infringe the University's intellectual property rights herein nor will the User breach the intellectual property rights of any third party herein."
This is their legal right, but it means, for example, that if Project Gutenberg wanted to mount these works, they would need to scan them proofread them and do all the work again. This seems to miss the point.
It's not a pacifier for the masses, it is intended to contribute to the general aura of fear. Fear makes people easier to control, and makes them less likely to look critically at what their government is up to.
A common feature of most totalitarian and oppressive regimes, is that they start by inducing fear in their populations. In Nazi Germany the Jews were the target; in Stalin's Russia, successively the Jews, the engineers, the doctors, and the army; in Horthy's Hungary, the Jews and the non-Hungarians; in South Africa, the blacks; in Zimbabwe, the whites; in modern China, the poor and the non-Han; in many parts of South America the indigenous population.
In some cases these groups were objectively dangerous, if only to truly disgusting regimes, and some were not, but that didn't matter, they served their purpose.
Now if we look at Putin's Russia, the Chechens; in Turkey, the Kurds; in Israel, the Palestinians; in Gaza the Jews... See a pattern?
In our states, where governments are using the excuse of terror to distract our attention, inducing hatred and fear of Islam, the same pattern is emerging. Of particular value in this process is amorphous indefinite Al Qaeda, which is conveniently everywhere and nowhere.
Viewed objectively the late Ken Lay (Enron) and his criminal cohorts did far more harm to the USA than Bin Laden, and probably killed more people, albeit less directly. However, their close links to your government discourage close inspection of this thesis. (Put brutally most of your government is owned by men like Lay and Skilling.)
No system like this will ever work for a very simple reason - one well known to those of us who do medical screening.
Note the following.
Assume 1 in every thousand passengers is a terrorist - surely a wild exaggeration. So the probability that a random passenger is 'innocent' is 0.9999.
This sytem will 'catch' 85 terrorists and 7,992 innocent people from every 100,000 passengers.
So what we call the 'Negative Predictive Value', that is the probability that someone who passes the test isn't a terrorist is not too bad at 0.99984, down from 0.9999 before we did the test,
The 'Positive Predictive Value' is a truly uninspiring 0.01052. Just over 1% of those who test positive truly are actors pretending to have evil intent.
For a more realistic 1 in ten thousand passengers being a terrorist we get 8 terrorists and a total of 7999 'innocent's. This assumes that actors mimic terrorists well.
This would stop international flights dead, but buy shares in it anyway.
This was my first computer - couldn't afford a ZX! A rather cute programmable calculator with about 250 steps, including elementary loops. It could also write programs to magnetic strips. I wrote my first game for it - a crude version of battleships.
My first proper PC was an Apricot - it ran DOS, had 2 floppy drives, 64k of memory, and a monochrome screen. It wasn't IBM PC compatible - but it was close enough. I learnt BASIC very quickly! I also wrote statistical programs for the spreadsheet which came with it.
I also used North Star machines running CP/M (Control Program for Microprocessors). I programed these in QBASIc adn DBASE. This was Gary Kildall's program, which IBM nearly used as the OS on their first PC. Instead Microsoft bought in an OS, and the rest is history...
My first exposure to minis was programming in PL/1 on TOPS-20 machines (pre-Vax DEC machines) in Trinity College Dublin with a punch card reader. There was a TTY interface, but we weren't allowed to use it.
To quote "the dammed fools - I told them". This is the logical conclusion of a corporatist state, like yours, where the rights of an individual count for nothing compared to the rights and privileges of corporations. You are now, officially, corporate slaves.
This has nothing to do with Republican vs. Democrat, the rather pathetic shadow boxing which your owners use to confuse you and distract you from what's reallly going on. And as for liberal vs. conservative - I give up, by the standards of real politics you're all hard right conservatives.
The deepest issue is in whose interests is the state run? It's not run in the interests of the people anymore, and hasn't been for at least fifty years. The last president who wasn't a corporate shill was Jimmy Carter, and before him probably Eisenhower.
So. What's to be done? You can, and probably will, lie down under this, so, before you roll over on your couch read, mark, learn and inwardly digest Martin Niemöller's lines about moral failure in the face of the Holocaust:-
'First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.'
You've already locked up your communists, destroyed your social democrats, and gutted your trade unions. So, I'd say that you're stuffed anyway.
This is a pity, you're a great country, with a lot of really amazing people. But only you can fix it now.
*Rant* I hate BibTeX. I'm a life scientist and BibTeX is the main reason I don't use LaTeX.
First BibTeX is an undocumented nightmare. I speak as someone who learned Forth as their second programming language.
2) Bibliographic tools used in my discipline don't play well with BibTeX. I still don't know of any BibTeX style to produce Vancouver formatted references, which completely dominate medical journals. (I could probably write one, but life is too short, see 1)
3) BibTeX documentation usually assumes that you already know everything about how it works. Lamport's book has a good short introduction, but it's not really enough. (There's a useful MSc. thesis from LS Abd Rahmin. This is worth looking at as it has a nice introduction to the whole area, and a careful examination of some of the existing tools.)
4)Integrating BibTex into a document processing workflow, for example for meta-analysis or annotation, seems to be basically impossible.
5) BibTex is great if you write statistical or mathematical papers, otherwise, forget it. It is far harder to use than other reference handling systems. It does work on Linux, which EndNote reallly doesn't, but thats about it. *End Rant*
In fairness to BibTeX it set out to solve a very specific problem, and solves it very well, however the problem space has moved on rather sharply since.
There is a dire need for an Open source competitor to EndNote/Reference Manager. A combination of RefDb and OpenOffice could do it, but BibTex won't.
The URL is wrong. The Wayback machine says that Mainfsoft press releases looked like this in 2000.
/www.mainsoft.com/press/pr-pcl.html (for example)
There's no March 2000 press release confirming MS access to Mainsoft source code, although Mainsoft did have access to MS source code, and MS may well have had perfectly legit access to Mainsoft code in return.
There is a disturbing historical precedent for this bizarre piece of nonsense. Francis Galton , the man who invented eugenics, wrote on 'Hereditary genius' by assigning what were effectively IQ scores to dead historical figures based on their biographies. He thought that he had found that these scores were heritable. He used this to argue for restrictions on human breeding.
Galton, by repute a kindly and pleasant man, was the unwitting intellectual godfather both of the Nazi exterminaiton programs, and of the disgraceful programs of forcible sterilisation in the United States and many other Western countries.
Galton's procedure was nonsense, based as it was on a completely circular defintion of "intelligence", a complete absence of data, and a deal of fuzzy thinking. Murray's appears to be equally nonsense, and probably for very similar reasons. What he has managed to show is that certain types of achievement are more likely to be recorded than others, which is at most mildly interesting, and that dominant social groups write about themselves, which is not very surprising, and entirely un-original.
Having read Murray's previous opus, I will not be parting with my hard-earned euros to read this one...
Computer benchmarking data are (usually) quite noisy. As such plain graphs, like those shown are not very useful. Simple statistical graphics like lowesss plots are much easier to interpret. Take a look at the for some ideas.
This stuff is easy to use, at least if you have a computer background, and would produce far better graphs.
This is eerily reminiscent of the situation in science. Most scientific research is funded by governments. The 'scientiifc literature' is written by working scientists, and submitted to scientific journals, mostly run by one of three or four large companies. Almost all journals require us to sign a restrictive transfer of copyrght, so I can't put the text of my own articles on my own web site. Journal subscription costs are rising very rapidly, and are far beyond the reach of many libraries in developed countries, never mind developing countries. Finally the (very expensive) online systems through which subscribers access journal articles are inconsistent, incompatible, and hard to use... Help!!
Well almost, my *first OS* was TOPS-10 using Pl/1. My first OS at work was VMS on Vaxen. We used it to run large health related databases. I was a user, and I still miss TPU. There is a Windows port, but it wasn't very good. On the other hand R-DBMS, while effective was a pain to deal with. But I did love the Dec-C compiler. I still have a lot of stuff that I wrote for this compiler, and it just runs everywhere else. Oh I miss ny Vaxes..
Slashdot Mirror
This is a neat idea, but not yet remotely ready to try in people. There were quite significant local infammatory reactions (big lumps!) in some of the mice tested.
There's probably ten years of work, and well north of $150 million dollars before the first human tests.
Good luck!
Gentoo is good, but only if
1) you can follow instructions with religious fervour until you know what you are doing (i.e. go line by lein throught the install guide!)
2) First download and burn a rescue CD (gentoo itself will do) and make sure that it boots your hardware.
3) You don't mind spending about half an hour a week updating stuff - this is half an hour of your time, the PC will take several hours a week updating stuff.
Gentoo is much easier to use than it was five years ago, and you will learn a lot, but you have to want to. If you don't then try Debian or Ubuntu - which are also very fine distributions, but will not require you to learn a lot of stuff. Gentoo will.
It's not promsicuous and monogamous mice, it's about a relatively promsicuous species of mouse, and a diffferent, relatively monogamous, species of mouse. These different species have different immune systems. It shows less about mice, than about wishful thinking...
This was a cross-sectional survey of schoolchildren. It tells you nothing about the direction of causation. Maybe using Facebook and texting a lot does indeed cause early sex, drug use and drinking. Maybe kids who use drugs, drink and have sex, use Facebook more to tell others about it,and text a lot to arrange their busy social lives. Most likely, kids who have sex, drink and drugs, have significant major issues in their lives already, and may be using texting and Facebook as alternative (or additional) coping strategies.
Nothing to see here, pass along please.
Kids who text all the time and live (sort of) on Facebook or Bebo may well be kids who already have problems. This study is a survey of schoolkids at point in time, and does not provide any data on whether early sex and drugs cause Facebook, Facebook causes early sex and drugs, or, most likely, both reflect existing issues facing the kids. Indeed texting and Facebook are likely better coping strategies than sex and drugs, though perhpas les immediately enjoyable.
Pass along please, nothing to see here.
From our perspective (I'm a health policy person based in Europe), US health care is staggeringly expensive, very variable, and very unfair. It's the single biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in the States.
Your health is poor, overall, especially you have poor child health, and relatively poor maternal and infant health.
A large part of your population have no access to good quality health care, and this imposes large costs on your society.
Your major companies find high health care costs for staff a major burden, and this sharply reduces the competitiveness of good US employers.
You have the highest administrative costs for heath care that I know of, now running over 30%, and at current rates of increase, in thirty years you will be spending 100% of your GDP on health services.
At the top end, there is no better health care anywhere for acute illnesses, but very few people can access this.
The proposed changes are a start, and only a start. With no public option, there is a real risk that the insurance companies will continue to combine together to rip you off. However, the current proposals will save a lot of money over the next decade, which is why the insurance companies are spending millions buying ads, and influencing politicians to stop the change.
I hope it passes!
I manage all my home directories with Unison, including 80Gig of pictures across Linux and Windows. The only issue I've noticed is that for single files over 1G it gets slow, so I split up my thunderbird folders to get under this. Everything else just works.
I work with a Government agency in Ireland, (I work for a university to avoid confusion). We developed a really innovative information system with them, a web-based system which allows flexible mapping, GIS work, sophisticated calculations, open ended queries, loads of pre-specified reports and more. It is entirely open source.
It would have been economically unfeasible, and, I think, technically impossible, with closed source software.
The developers were paid, and are still being paid, quite a large amount of money to build this for us, maintain it, and keep it moving forwards. My view is that give great value for money. All the stuff they develop for us is GPLed.
This seems like quite a viable model to me. What's not viable is the 'write a better video-processor' model which you describe. You need to work with your clients, support them in improving productivity, ease of use, cool new features, whatever it is they need for their business.
Good luck,
Anthony Staines
We had some audio amplifiers in a student theatre where I worked. One of my dimmer colleagues spilt a pint of milk into the amplifiers while they were running. We turned it off!
The next day we used industrial alcohol to clean it. This worked pretty well.
Anthony
Hi,
It still costs money to do Open Acess, at least as long as editors want to eat...
Standard journals are dying steadily. They are based on subscriptions, which can reach $30,000 for, a single journal, for a library, and as much as $5,000 for individuals.
The research published in them is hard to access, and often invisible to search engines. Open Access journals [OAJ|http://www.doaj.org/] are funded by publication charges, usually not printed, although the [PLOS|http://www.plos.org/] journals are an exception.
Research published in Open Access journals is more cited than similar research published in the subscription only literature, and, as a result, the latter is dying out.
The main losers are the shareholders of academic publishers, which are extremely profitable ventures at the moment.
The works published are all long out of UK copyright, but Cambridge University asserts :-
" Permission is hereby granted, without agreement and without licence or royalty fees, to use and to download and print a single copy of the Materials for private study and research, provided that such usage and copying is for non-commercial purposes only and not for any commercial advantage and that any copyright notice within the Materials and these Terms of Use appear in any copy of the Materials.
Except as permitted above and use or copying under statutory allowances as permitted in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 as amended, the User undertakes not to copy, reproduce, publish, store in any medium (including extraction into any other website, database, compilation, or computer programme), generate collections, distribute, transmit, retransmit, modify, manipulate, alter, rent, lease or lend, or broadcast or show any part of the Website without the prior written permission of the University.
To use and copy the Materials otherwise requires specific written permission from the University and the original copyright holder(s) as identified and the User undertakes to contact the University and the copyright holder(s) to obtain permission to do so.
Any further use may infringe copyright and moral rights and may attract civil remedies and criminal penalties. The University regularly monitors access to the Website, other websites and publications in all media and utilizes digital watermarking to assist in the tracing of illegal use and will take action for infringement of copyright and breach of these Terms of Use.
The User warrants to the University that the User will not infringe the University's intellectual property rights herein nor will the User breach the intellectual property rights of any third party herein."
This is their legal right, but it means, for example, that if Project Gutenberg wanted to mount these works, they would need to scan them proofread them and do all the work again. This seems to miss the point.
Anthony Staines
As of two minutes ago a search on http://search.microsoft.com/results.aspx?q=KB92095 8&l=2&mkt=en-US&FORM=QBME2 showed no reference to data corruption. Any tech journalists reading this?
It's not a pacifier for the masses, it is intended to contribute to the general aura of fear. Fear makes people easier to control, and makes them less likely to look critically at what their government is up to.
A common feature of most totalitarian and oppressive regimes, is that they start by inducing fear in their populations. In Nazi Germany the Jews were the target; in Stalin's Russia, successively the Jews, the engineers, the doctors, and the army; in Horthy's Hungary, the Jews and the non-Hungarians; in South Africa, the blacks; in Zimbabwe, the whites; in modern China, the poor and the non-Han; in many parts of South America the indigenous population.
In some cases these groups were objectively dangerous, if only to truly disgusting regimes, and some were not, but that didn't matter, they served their purpose.
Now if we look at Putin's Russia, the Chechens; in Turkey, the Kurds; in Israel, the Palestinians; in Gaza the Jews... See a pattern?
In our states, where governments are using the excuse of terror to distract our attention, inducing hatred and fear of Islam, the same pattern is emerging. Of particular value in this process is amorphous indefinite Al Qaeda, which is conveniently everywhere and nowhere.
Viewed objectively the late Ken Lay (Enron) and his criminal cohorts did far more harm to the USA than Bin Laden, and probably killed more people, albeit less directly. However, their close links to your government discourage close inspection of this thesis. (Put brutally most of your government is owned by men like Lay and Skilling.)
The libertarian nuts have a point really...
(Only one point though.)
No system like this will ever work for a very simple reason - one well known to those of us who do medical screening.
Note the following.
Assume 1 in every thousand passengers is a terrorist - surely a wild exaggeration. So the probability that a random passenger is 'innocent' is 0.9999.
This sytem will 'catch' 85 terrorists and 7,992 innocent people from every 100,000 passengers.
So what we call the 'Negative Predictive Value', that is the probability that someone who passes the test isn't a terrorist is not too bad at 0.99984, down from 0.9999 before we did the test,
The 'Positive Predictive Value' is a truly uninspiring 0.01052. Just over 1% of those who test positive truly are actors pretending to have evil intent.
For a more realistic 1 in ten thousand passengers being a terrorist we get 8 terrorists and a total of 7999 'innocent's. This assumes that actors mimic terrorists well.
This would stop international flights dead, but buy shares in it anyway.
This was my first computer - couldn't afford a ZX!
A rather cute programmable calculator with about 250 steps, including elementary loops. It could also write programs to magnetic strips. I wrote my first game for it - a crude version of battleships.
My first proper PC was an Apricot - it ran DOS, had 2 floppy drives, 64k of memory, and a monochrome screen. It wasn't IBM PC compatible - but it was close enough. I learnt BASIC very quickly! I also wrote statistical programs for the spreadsheet which came with it.
I also used North Star machines running CP/M (Control Program for Microprocessors). I programed these in QBASIc adn DBASE. This was Gary Kildall's program, which IBM nearly used as the OS on their first PC. Instead Microsoft bought in an OS, and the rest is history...
My first exposure to minis was programming in PL/1 on TOPS-20 machines (pre-Vax DEC machines) in Trinity College Dublin with a punch card reader. There was a TTY interface, but we weren't allowed to use it.
Vast amounts of modern biology use trig too.
To quote "the dammed fools - I told them". This is the logical conclusion of a corporatist state, like yours, where the rights of an individual count for nothing compared to the rights and privileges of corporations. You are now, officially, corporate slaves.
This has nothing to do with Republican vs. Democrat, the rather pathetic shadow boxing which your owners use to confuse you and distract you from what's reallly going on. And as for liberal vs. conservative - I give up, by the standards of real politics you're all hard right conservatives.
The deepest issue is in whose interests is the state run? It's not run in the interests of the people anymore, and hasn't been for at least fifty years. The last president who wasn't a corporate shill was Jimmy Carter, and before him probably Eisenhower.
So. What's to be done? You can, and probably will, lie down under this, so, before you roll over on your couch read, mark, learn and inwardly digest Martin Niemöller's lines about moral failure in the face of the Holocaust:-
'First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.'
You've already locked up your communists, destroyed your social democrats, and gutted your trade unions. So, I'd say that you're stuffed anyway.
This is a pity, you're a great country, with a lot of really amazing people. But only you can fix it now.
*Rant*
I hate BibTeX. I'm a life scientist and BibTeX is the main reason I don't use LaTeX.
First BibTeX is an undocumented nightmare. I speak as someone who learned Forth as their second programming language.
2) Bibliographic tools used in my discipline don't play well with BibTeX. I still don't know of any BibTeX style to produce Vancouver formatted references, which completely dominate medical journals. (I could probably write one, but life is too short, see 1)
3) BibTeX documentation usually assumes that you already know everything about how it works. Lamport's book has a good short introduction, but it's not really enough. (There's a useful MSc. thesis from LS Abd Rahmin. This is worth looking at as it has a nice introduction to the whole area, and a careful examination of some of the existing tools.)
4)Integrating BibTex into a document processing workflow, for example for meta-analysis or annotation, seems to be basically impossible.
5) BibTex is great if you write statistical or mathematical papers, otherwise, forget it. It is far harder to use than other reference handling systems. It does work on Linux, which EndNote reallly doesn't, but thats about it.
*End Rant*
In fairness to BibTeX it set out to solve a very specific problem, and solves it very well, however the problem space has moved on rather sharply since.
There is a dire need for an Open source competitor to EndNote/Reference Manager. A combination of RefDb and OpenOffice could do it, but BibTex won't.
Anthony Staines
The URL is wrong. The Wayback machine says that Mainfsoft press releases looked like this in 2000.
/www.mainsoft.com/press/pr-pcl.html (for example)
There's no March 2000 press release confirming MS access to Mainsoft source code, although Mainsoft did have access to MS source code, and MS may well have had perfectly legit access to Mainsoft code in return.
There is a disturbing historical precedent for this bizarre piece of nonsense. Francis Galton , the man who invented eugenics, wrote on 'Hereditary genius' by assigning what were effectively IQ scores to dead historical figures based on their biographies. He thought that he had found that these scores were heritable. He used this to argue for restrictions on human breeding.
Galton, by repute a kindly and pleasant man, was the unwitting intellectual godfather both of the Nazi exterminaiton programs, and of the disgraceful programs of forcible sterilisation in the United States and many other Western countries.
Galton's procedure was nonsense, based as it was on a completely circular defintion of "intelligence", a complete absence of data, and a deal of fuzzy thinking. Murray's appears to be equally nonsense, and probably for very similar reasons. What he has managed to show is that certain types of achievement are more likely to be recorded than others, which is at most mildly interesting, and that dominant social groups write about themselves, which is not very surprising, and entirely un-original.
Having read Murray's previous opus, I will not be parting with my hard-earned euros to read this one...
Computer benchmarking data are (usually) quite noisy. As such plain graphs, like those shown are not very useful. Simple statistical graphics like lowesss plots are much easier to interpret. Take a look at the for some ideas.
This stuff is easy to use, at least if you have a computer background, and would produce far better graphs.
Beer died last August. There's a nice appreciation of his life here. He was a very major figure in both Operations Research and Cybernectics.
--
Anthony Staines
This is eerily reminiscent of the situation in science. Most scientific research is funded by governments. The 'scientiifc literature' is written by working scientists, and submitted to scientific journals, mostly run by one of three or four large companies.
Almost all journals require us to sign a restrictive transfer of copyrght, so I can't put the text of my own articles on my own web site.
Journal subscription costs are rising very rapidly, and are far beyond the reach of many libraries in developed countries, never mind developing countries.
Finally the (very expensive) online systems through which subscribers access journal articles are inconsistent, incompatible, and hard to use...
Help!!
Well almost, my *first OS* was TOPS-10 using Pl/1.
My first OS at work was VMS on Vaxen. We used it to run large health related databases. I was a user, and I still miss TPU. There is a Windows port, but it wasn't very good.
On the other hand R-DBMS, while effective was a pain to deal with. But I did love the Dec-C compiler. I still have a lot of stuff that I wrote for this compiler, and it just runs everywhere else.
Oh I miss ny Vaxes..
Anthony Staines