The advertising is, by far, not the biggest ethical problem, but that the articles remain copyright of the publisher and a traditional publisher typically will not give out copies of the article for free. So if you are not part of an institution that subscribes to the article, it can be quite costly for you to gain access to an article. Sure, you can find it on Google or Pubmed, but you cannot read it unless you pay.
This is not a good thing - if you don't have the money or are not part of an institution, you can't access information. And this just because the publisher wants to make a buck. Information should be free if the party who generated it wish so.
The problem that the open access journals face today is that of credibility. My boss doesn't want me to publish in an open access journal because that would not, in his opinion, be as good a credit for the group as would be publishing in a respected journal. It is not yet widely understood that easy access to an article correlates positively with publicity. When I do my reading, I do not care at all in which journal the article appeared. But the fact is that there are still people who do.
I have had a couple of dreams where I, simply, solve some problem that has been bugging me for some time.
When I was programming Commodore 16 in Basic, I had a problem: How to move a character on the screen. I had devised a system where cursor moving characters were concatenated into a string that was printed after a screen clear, and then the character to display. The problem was that the lenght of the string would increase indefinitely as the user moved the character. In a dream it occurred to me that I could use horizontal and vertical coordinates to store the position of the character. That was quite an advancement...
Years later, it came to me in a dream how texture mapping can be done on a triangle. Before that, I had been solid-filling the triangles, so it was pretty neat.
In future, we might be using light in fibre loops instead of sound waves in mercury delay lines, to act as computer memory. I googled for light loop memory --- look what turned up:
I bought the first volume of Apostol's Calculus recently, after learning probability theory from my bosses copy of the second volume. It is the kind of book that starts from set theory and builds everything on top of that. Lazy as I am, I have not gotten very far yet, but I have already started to believe that if you really want to understand mathematics, you must take the approach Apostol's Calculus is taking.
I'm very happy with the output quality of the onboard AC97 (Analog Devices 1881 Soundport codec) on my a-few-years-old Asus K7M motherboard.
However, the other input channel is noisy.
Perhaps recording quality is compromized in other motherboards, too? Most users never have a need to use this feature anyway.
Anyone knows if Bitboys Oy, a company dedicated to the development of graphics chips and with a history of products not reaching silicon, has something to do with the 3D engine of N-Gage? Quoting an article:
"
Near the time of ending US operations [first quarter of 2002], Bitboys had begun work with a major electronics corporation on a mobile solution for PDAs and cell phones."
Also, the article mentions Bitboys have a contract since some time last year, but doesn't give any details.
Need "quality" stuff? Here's a perverted ASCII comic, The #musicdsp Adventures, which I drew last year - stories from the music digital signal processing IRC channel. Each picture is only 3 lines long. A tiny sample:
\õ/ Oh Bram! OH BRAM!!!
| /\|\_o..ah DJ Maus, DJ MAUS!!!
Slashdot Mirror
What coffin...?
Do you want a bigger brain?
Has your brain ever dribbled out when you wish it had shot out?
The advertising is, by far, not the biggest ethical problem, but that the articles remain copyright of the publisher and a traditional publisher typically will not give out copies of the article for free. So if you are not part of an institution that subscribes to the article, it can be quite costly for you to gain access to an article. Sure, you can find it on Google or Pubmed, but you cannot read it unless you pay.
This is not a good thing - if you don't have the money or are not part of an institution, you can't access information. And this just because the publisher wants to make a buck. Information should be free if the party who generated it wish so.
The problem that the open access journals face today is that of credibility. My boss doesn't want me to publish in an open access journal because that would not, in his opinion, be as good a credit for the group as would be publishing in a respected journal. It is not yet widely understood that easy access to an article correlates positively with publicity. When I do my reading, I do not care at all in which journal the article appeared. But the fact is that there are still people who do.
When I was programming Commodore 16 in Basic, I had a problem: How to move a character on the screen. I had devised a system where cursor moving characters were concatenated into a string that was printed after a screen clear, and then the character to display. The problem was that the lenght of the string would increase indefinitely as the user moved the character. In a dream it occurred to me that I could use horizontal and vertical coordinates to store the position of the character. That was quite an advancement...
Years later, it came to me in a dream how texture mapping can be done on a triangle. Before that, I had been solid-filling the triangles, so it was pretty neat.
There's probably more, but I don't remember.
In future, we might be using light in fibre loops instead of sound waves in mercury delay lines, to act as computer memory. I googled for light loop memory --- look what turned up:
Fiber loop makes quantum memory
I bought the first volume of Apostol's Calculus recently, after learning probability theory from my bosses copy of the second volume. It is the kind of book that starts from set theory and builds everything on top of that. Lazy as I am, I have not gotten very far yet, but I have already started to believe that if you really want to understand mathematics, you must take the approach Apostol's Calculus is taking.
It's a lovely book!
I'm very happy with the output quality of the onboard AC97 (Analog Devices 1881 Soundport codec) on my a-few-years-old Asus K7M motherboard. However, the other input channel is noisy. Perhaps recording quality is compromized in other motherboards, too? Most users never have a need to use this feature anyway.
Anyone knows if Bitboys Oy, a company dedicated to the development of graphics chips and with a history of products not reaching silicon, has something to do with the 3D engine of N-Gage? Quoting an article:
Also, the article mentions Bitboys have a contract since some time last year, but doesn't give any details.OK. don't start any rumors.
Need "quality" stuff? Here's a perverted ASCII comic, The #musicdsp Adventures , which I drew last year - stories from the music digital signal processing IRC channel. Each picture is only 3 lines long. A tiny sample:
\õ/ Oh Bram! OH BRAM!!!
/\|\_o ..ah DJ Maus, DJ MAUS!!!
|