When journals where paper based, they had an obvious cost.
Academics would write up their research, lets say on a typewriter. They send it to a journal (owned by a publisher). The journal would need to copy this, send it out to be peer reviewed, collect corrections from the peer reviewers, send them to the academic, collection revised copy from academic, and then set the article (and diagrams/images) out to be sent to printers. It would then need to be sent to subscribers around the world by post.
You can see the costs, and the work which the publisher undertook.
Now? of course all online, and I'm sure all can imagine the web based systems that make nearly all of this automatic (apart from laying out the pages, though some expect academics to write straight in to their MS Word template). The valuable work is the researcher (who may have taken years), the peer reviewers (the stamp which shows this is good research) and the editor. All of whom do not get paid by the publisher.
Meanwhile publishers have been increasing their costs by 10% or so a year, ever year, what once cost $1,000 is now$ 10,000, while adding in clauses and strings attached (you can only subscribe to journal A if you subscribe to our new but useless journal B).
And perhaps part of the problem is that those who see the problem (such a librarians, who get the flack from academics when they have to cancel journals because the cost has gone up and their budget hasn't) aren't those who can really change it (academics - who give their research 'away' for free - and senior university administrators).
At the moment Publishers get a good deal. They charge huge amounts so that Universities (or anyone else) can have access to their journals. why do Universities (and others) pay these huge amounts? Because they need the journals. Why because of the CONTENT, i.e. the academic research papers. Who pays for researchers and academics to carry out the research to write up those papers? Universities, funding councils, tax payers. So how much do Universities get from publishers for this valuable content. NOTHING!
We (universities, the tax paying public) are paying huge amount to publishers to access content which we (universities, tax payers) have given them for free.
The big costs are 'doing the research' and writing it up in an article, this takes time, expertise and money, most of which is from a University's own budget or a funding agency such as NIH, NSF (or say the Research Councils here in the UK).
The key part of academic publishing is peer-review. This is done again with no cost to the publisher, by other academics (who are being paid by Universities). There will also be a Editor (and perhaps a board of Editors), they are unpaid (with a few exceptions).
What does the publisher do, well they help facilitate this (with web based software, all quite simple and there are open source solutions to do this), and they provide clerical services such as proof reading and putting the article in to a page template (actually a few make the academic do this as well). They then put it on their website.
They charge HUGE amounts for this, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars/UKpounds, many hundreds of thousands of dollars going to one publisher, per year, for one smallish university. That's only to have access to recent editions, want the older stuff... pay more. Want to cancel access to a journal, then pay a penalty (or pay more for the whole lot for the right to do so). Many academics do not even have access to their own articles. And because journal subscription inflation is about 7% a year (for about the last 10 years) the only option is to cancel more and more.
Publishers do very little and charge huge amounts, every increasing, for access to content the 'customers' basically wrote, reviewed and edited (collectively) themselves.
Now, there are open access journals. These are freely available on the web. They either keep their costs down (perhaps using resources of a given University). Or charge for people to submit articles. This may sound bad, but in reality researchers will have research grants and 'publishing fees' can be included in research bids. This pays for running of the Journal and the articles are free to all, including the Tax payers who probably paid for it, keen members of the public, and those from the third world who had no chance of paying the fees of the traditional publishers.
Their are also open access REPOSITORIES. These are either subject based (pubmed, arXiv.org, etc) or institution based, ie based at a university. An academic publishes in to a traditional (high cost) journal, for the peer review and kudos, and then puts their article in to their institutional (or pubmed/arXiv.org) so that it is freely available to everyone. Even though publishers put huge restrictions on this, such as embargos and which copy can be used (normally the academics original copy, not the publisher's version) they unsurprisingly don't like this. Think about it, though the academic/university paid for and created the research, the publisher still tells them when they can upload their own version of the article (i.e. not before a year after publication).
[this post is as good as any to post my tiny two pence worth...]
A friend recently bought the cheapest dell laptop available and asked me to set it up. It had vista on. The interface seemed an improvement (i liked the black glass style), it seemed 'responsive enough'. wireless was a dream. I liked the way it prompted if a program wanted extra privileges (similar to mac os x). I liked that it could be set up to defrag on a regular basis. It seemed ideal for what she wanted, it 'just worked' when it came to photos and scanning things in and browsing files (photos, documents). Finally, I liked the sidebar; hers - like many laptops - had a widescreen and it seemed like a nice way to display non-urgent messages rather than annoying alert boxes which take the focus and stop you from what you are doing.
So, I've read the many, many stories about Vista with interest, and do take on board everything people have said, but to me, on just this one laptop for one person, it seemed to work well. Sorry!
At the moment Publishers get a good deal. The big costs are 'doing the research' and writing it up in an article, this takes time, expertise and money, most of which is from a University's own budget or a funding agency such as NIH, NSF (or say the Research Councils here in the UK). The key part of academic publishing is peer-review. This is done again with no cost to the publisher, by other academics (who are being paid by Universities). There will also be a Editor (and perhaps a board of Editors), most of the time they are unpaid.
What does the publisher do, well they help facilitate this (with web based software, all quite simple and there are open source solutions to do this), and they provide clerical services such as proof reading and putting the article in to a template (actually quite a few make the academic do this as well). They then put it on their website.
They charge HUGE amounts for this, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of UK pounds, many hundreds of thousands of dollars going to one publisher, per year, for one smallish university. That's only to have access to recent editions, want the older stuff... pay more. Want to cancel access to a journal, then pay a penalty (or pay more for the whole lot for the right to do so). Many academics do not even have access to their own articles. And because journal subscription inflation is about 7% a year (for about the last 10 years) the only option is to cancel more and more.
Publishers do very little and charge huge amounts, every increasing, for access to content the 'customers' basically wrote, reviewed and editied (collectively) themselves.
Now, there are open access journals. These are freely available on the web. They either keep their costs down (perhaps using resources of a given University). Or charge for people to submit articles. This may sound bad, but in reality researchers will have research grants and 'publishing fees' can be included in research bids. This pays for running of the Journal and the articles are free to all, including the Tax payers who probably paid for it, keen members of the public, and those from the third world who had no chance of paying the fees of the traditional publishers.
Is there some sort of web site where all the cool slashdoters (I know, an oxymoron) hang out and discuss what tags they are going to use or something?
I mean, I just can't believe that a load of people randomly typed "!darwinawardunlesshedies" so that it became one of the most popular tags for this article unless you are all discussing it somewhere without letting me in on it.
Look. I know it's bad form. But I submitted something yesterday that made this clear. And I don't normally, so as it is my first time ever... I'm sulking that my submission was rejected. Pah! it was much better than this shit. and my mum would agree with that (probably)
But i had to catch a train home (UK, currently 7pm here) wanted to air my anger at the silly situation and yours was the first post at the top that i hit reply to. Pure laziness on my part, pure and simple:) (sorry!)
(isn't replying to the top high scoring post in order that your own gets read and mod'ed a rule of slashdot?!)
Where to start, first try http://pisdcoalition.org/ as the 'alternative' site to prism (they forgot that wanting to share you knowledge is the work of communists).
Background: Researchers at Universities do research. They are paid by the University, and they (well the University) may have received a grant to carry out the research (from nsf in the US or the research councils in the UK for example).
Once they have done their research they write it up, normally in a paper (in the arts it can be a dance!).
They send the paper to our journal. The journal's editorial board receive it and will the have it peer reviewed by other researchers in the same field to ensure it meets a level of quality and is suitable for the journal. This is the crucial part of the process. But the peer reviews do not get paid for this, and the VAST majority of editors do not get paid either.
The publishers then sell the journal to the very Universities who supplied the articles for free and allowed their academics to peer review and edit for free (on university time normally).
The publisher will normally demand they own the copyright.
The price they sell journals to Universities have gone up far more than inflation year after year after year, which means unis cancel journal subs. Plus the contracts are complex with huge tie-ins and 'if you buy x you must by z' clauses.
All publishers to is take the work of the academic (for free), get the editors and peers to review (for free) and then demand they own it, all for basically doing little more than formatting the document, proof reading and putting on a website (and, rarer now-a-days, in print). These are basic clerical jobs, not something which means they should own the copyright.
As noted, Universities and academics often do not have access to their own work.
There are changes afoot.
The Open Access movement is taking off (either through freely available journals, or by making the articles available on University websites). The latter are referred to as Institutional Repositories (unsexy name!) and I happen to run one. The software they use is either http://www.dspace.org/ or http://www.eprints.org/ both are free and open source.
"I see, and do you happen to be an elected government that pays for running that Website by collecting tax dollars from the people (at gunpoint if need be)? I didn't think so."
It's the BBC, not the Government. They may have a Royal Charter, and they may receive funding from a TV licence fee (not a tax as such, it is my choice if i have a TV) the technicalities of which are set up via acts of parliment, but not government.
I am not aware of people being held at gunpoint to pay the licence fee (remember not even out Police carry guns except for a few special units).
In a nutshell. For many years researchers (academics) carry out some research, write up the findings and try and get the results published in the the most prestigious journal as possible (there are tens of thousands of journals now available), on submitting to a journal, a paper is peer reviewed. Peer-review is carried out by other academics (normally for free), they will either reject, make corrections or just (rarely) simply accept an article for publication in a journal.
For years this was fine. Then the web happened. (well the web was originally designed for communicated research). Journals became online journals, requiring authentication to prove you are part of a paying institution. Academics could access them from anywhere, print their own copy, access them the same time as others etc. The advantages were huge. But something else happened, journal prices increased way out of proportion with inflation, sometimes 10% a year. End result, libraries had to cancel them.
So two points: One: Your article, the result of years of research, can only be read be a very small number of people who work at Universities (and other research organisations) which can afford to subscribed to the journal (and not even Harvard can subscribe to them all). Your work is hidden to the vast population of the world. Even when it was tax payers money paying for it
Two: The key to academic publishing is the peer review, it's the step that ensures quality. That is done by other academics for free (and overseen by an editor(s) also normally for free).
Hang on, your University, and Research Funding body (such as the nsf) have paid for months/years of research, which you have written up, peer reviewed by others for free, and now a journal - which charges huge amounts for access - takes the copyright, pays you nothing, pays the peer reviewers nothing, formats and proof-reads it, and then sells it to Universities (basically the very people who supplied the content) for huge amount of cash. Universities rely on journals and have to pay what ever the price. Meanwhile academics are not allowed to send their own research to their peers, colleagues and students because the publisher now owns the copyright. It is (cliché alert) a licence to print money.
Open access (making research free to all) comes in two forms: - open access journals, which are freely available on the web (either working at no cost, costs covered by a sponsor or by charging institutions to submit articles). - Author deposits their article on to their institution's website, namely in to an Institutional Repository (or a subject specific website such as ArcXiv), as well as submitting it to a journal. This means the article is always freely available online.
The advantages of making research (normally publicly funded) free to all, are numerous and hard to exaggerate. Hobby scientists, school children, the press, the third world, and smaller universities have access to research that they just could not afford to access in the past (and of course, unlike freely available research, subscription only research can not easily be googles).
The main two software systems for Institutional Repositories are Dspace (MIT/HP) and Eprints (Southampton, UK).
Nature, they are a pain, they are one of the biggest journals, and they of course know it. If we (my university) were to subscribe to Nature online, we would have to cancel hundreds of other important journals, probably more. We can just not afford it.
"What are you separating in your waste?? You can't just throw it in one can?"
In the UK this will depend on your local council, I have lived in several different places with different policies.
Some examples may be: - you put out you 'general waste bin' once a fortnight. and on the the weeks you don't, you put out a bin for garden waste, and boxes for glass and paper once. (one week for recycling and garden waste, one week for everything else).
- another place, bins collected each week, once every fornight (can't rememember) our green bins were collected which contained anything that could be recycled. all just chucked in, glass, plastic, tinfoil, paper. No idea how it was sorted.
many councils don't recycle plastic as it is hard to reuse, and sometimes ends up being shipped to the far east, which probably does more harm than good.
It costs more, and the Gov has set high recycling targets for councils to meet, but we live in a small island and we can not go on digging big holes and chucking huge amounts of crap in them.
DMX uses bad words and says rude things, so do some rock and metal (are they still called that?) bands. It's what they do.
Just because they do doesn't mean it is right for a radio host to call a bunch of girls those same sort of names. Radio hosts, just like the rest of us, are expected to show a level of respected to normal people, unless they deserve otherwise.
Just because a rapper uses such language (who - so happens to be black) does not mean its right to say that 'black people use this language about blacks so why shouldn't whites'.
Places where I might want to edit a photo: my flat, my place of work (my office), my place of work (someone else's desk), parents house, friends house, internet cafe, conference.
Places where I will just install software because I need it: my flat.
All those other places, if I want (or someone else asks me) to edit a photo, an online tool would be great.
>Whenever Slashdot asks a question in a story I perform a service as a reader: > >I tag the story "yes", "no", and "maybe".
And I tag them:.... I_dont_know, Can_you_repeat_the_question?
Re:Less of the kitchen sink would make KDE better
on
A Sneak Preview of KDE 4
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"Please, Gnome is a slim pick up and go desktop for new users, KDE is a customisable and flexible desktop for power, business or techie users."
Disagree.
I use Gnome because I have a million and one things to do and so long as the interface isn't annoying, looks ok and doesn't get in the way, then it's good for me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a power, business and techie user. When KDE 1 came out I spent loads of happy minutes changing every setting just to how i liked it on my home PC. Partly because I could and partly because I found the default kde setup annoying.
I now use Ubuntu (at work) and have never felt the urge to change a single option. Now, the techie in me wants to do cool things at a PC, not change how the taskbar looks.
TFA does not say that the laptop had infomation on "their entire customer base" (not saying the submitter is wrong, but the BBC article certainly doesn't say this). It seems that it included names and account numbers but not pins, balances or passwords.
This was a domestic burglary, there's a chance that the theif has no idea this laptop was special, and has already sold it cash in hand down the pub. It's probably being used right now by someone browsing for porn or doing 'ebay' unaware of what sits of that disk.
Not to say they should not presume the worse and react accordingly of course.
From TFA: "For programs that create or view documents, use the standard menu categories such as File, Edit, View, Tools, and Help." (part of rule 10).
From the shell blog (posted to/. a few days a go): "However, menus can be used inappropriately - particularly when developers slavish follow the File/Edit/View//help pattern. These standard menus are really designed for document-based applications, where there is a lot of saving, printing, cutting, pasting, and window management going on." http://shellrevealed.com/blogs/shellblog/archive/2 006/09/20/What-happened-to-the-menu-bars_3F00_.asp x
Bit of a contradiction there, but I can see the argument for both. 'File' has become the generic application menu, e.g. web browsers - which only deal with files in a limited way - have a file menu, so does basically any other app. It's just a badly named menu entry. As ever OS X gets this right (the first menu entry is named after the app).
To be fair to MS, one is the official useability guidelines, the other is an informal blog, it's probably better than MS not allowing their staff to blog incase such contradictions come out.
We use it, and i have to support it for a department at our University.
It sucks.
It has every feature you could every hope for, but has so many quirks that everyone (even those we could call 'advance IT users') found it annoying to use. Many aspects of the interface were just strange, which could make day to day slow, and support calls frequent. i'm glad to see it go.
Its good points: Good IMAP support. It supported server-side settings and addressbook. This is a godsend in somewhere like a University. A user can log in to any PC with Mulberry installed (pointing at our servers) and login, where they would get their settings, addressbook, etc. Compare that to Outlook Express, or - I hate to say it - thunderbird[1], where settings are saved in the profile[2] or local machine.
to pre-empt.. [1] yes, i'm sure there is a way to save settings on a (LDAP) server with thunderbird, but there seems to be little support for this, though the thunderbird wiki makes mentions of future plans [2] yes Windows roaming profiles allow settings to move with the user, unless they log on to a home PC, or a PC not in that Domain, or a MAC, or a laptop, etc.
I've worked for a couple of Universities for 5 years or so. The first thing is, like the private sector, no two are the same. Imagine asking the same thing about companies on the stock market, a person from Walmart would probably give very different advice from someone at Google.
The second thing is: year on year Universities are becoming more like big business (for good and bad). My first job was being the 'IT guy' in a department which required quite a lot of IT. I was basically left to myself, trusted to come and go as I please, set my own agenda, make the most high level of decissions involving hundreds of thounsands of pounds and in the same day replace mice. No one checked up on me, but then I loved it so much, no one needed to, I loved the job due to it's freedom.
Now (ok different uni), we have very high levels of accountabilty, I have to report on each 'unit' of my job to senior staff of the department so they can see what is happening. They want to see what I'm doing (which is hard when part of the job is sys admin to SOlaris and PCs, testing backups and patching doesn't produce anything, it just keeps the ship afloat.
Third, and this may differ in the US where many Uni's are private, the level of accountabilty is huge, we have to justify everything to the tax payer. This sounds good when you are a tax payer, but often means that cost of allocating costs is very high. "how much staff time was spent learning the new software?" the public think this should be an easy thing to answer, of course if the software is used across campus you will have little idea how much time different departments (and sub units of departments) have spent on staff training, but you are expected to know, so much time is spent keeping track of such things.
Which leads me to the next point, Universities *can* be very segmented, with departments not talking to each other, and you have to play the game. Just because the guys in the Computer Science academic department have the solution does not mean you in - say - the computing service can go and use it. It's stupid and a waste, but be careful before you fight it.
But I come back to my main point all departments in all Universities will be different. Some will be fair, some will be laid back and generous, some will try and rip you off, some will be professional and have clear guidelines as to whats expected, some will not know how to manage a project. If it is the latter, don't come on too strong with the professional way of laying out guidelines and spec, some (especially some academics) are cynicall of the private sector and will preume 'you don't get it', in the same way as the guy down the local store will lecture the guy who shops at walmart because he presumes he 'doesn't get why walmart is bad'. You need to be clear of what is expected of you, but be smart enough so that they think you are like them.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple Blocking Opera on the Iphone
http://www.osnews.com/comments/20455
(blocking legit apps on the iphone is one of the stupidest things Apple has done in a long time)
I think because of history.
When journals where paper based, they had an obvious cost.
Academics would write up their research, lets say on a typewriter. They send it to a journal (owned by a publisher). The journal would need to copy this, send it out to be peer reviewed, collect corrections from the peer reviewers, send them to the academic, collection revised copy from academic, and then set the article (and diagrams/images) out to be sent to printers. It would then need to be sent to subscribers around the world by post.
You can see the costs, and the work which the publisher undertook.
Now? of course all online, and I'm sure all can imagine the web based systems that make nearly all of this automatic (apart from laying out the pages, though some expect academics to write straight in to their MS Word template). The valuable work is the researcher (who may have taken years), the peer reviewers (the stamp which shows this is good research) and the editor. All of whom do not get paid by the publisher.
Meanwhile publishers have been increasing their costs by 10% or so a year, ever year, what once cost $1,000 is now$ 10,000, while adding in clauses and strings attached (you can only subscribe to journal A if you subscribe to our new but useless journal B).
And perhaps part of the problem is that those who see the problem (such a librarians, who get the flack from academics when they have to cancel journals because the cost has gone up and their budget hasn't) aren't those who can really change it (academics - who give their research 'away' for free - and senior university administrators).
Chris
At the moment Publishers get a good deal. They charge huge amounts so that Universities (or anyone else) can have access to their journals. why do Universities (and others) pay these huge amounts? Because they need the journals. Why because of the CONTENT, i.e. the academic research papers. Who pays for researchers and academics to carry out the research to write up those papers? Universities, funding councils, tax payers. So how much do Universities get from publishers for this valuable content. NOTHING!
We (universities, the tax paying public) are paying huge amount to publishers to access content which we (universities, tax payers) have given them for free.
The big costs are 'doing the research' and writing it up in an article, this takes time, expertise and money, most of which is from a University's own budget or a funding agency such as NIH, NSF (or say the Research Councils here in the UK).
The key part of academic publishing is peer-review. This is done again with no cost to the publisher, by other academics (who are being paid by Universities). There will also be a Editor (and perhaps a board of Editors), they are unpaid (with a few exceptions).
What does the publisher do, well they help facilitate this (with web based software, all quite simple and there are open source solutions to do this), and they provide clerical services such as proof reading and putting the article in to a page template (actually a few make the academic do this as well). They then put it on their website.
They charge HUGE amounts for this, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars/UKpounds, many hundreds of thousands of dollars going to one publisher, per year, for one smallish university. That's only to have access to recent editions, want the older stuff... pay more. Want to cancel access to a journal, then pay a penalty (or pay more for the whole lot for the right to do so). Many academics do not even have access to their own articles. And because journal subscription inflation is about 7% a year (for about the last 10 years) the only option is to cancel more and more.
Publishers do very little and charge huge amounts, every increasing, for access to content the 'customers' basically wrote, reviewed and edited (collectively) themselves.
Now, there are open access journals. These are freely available on the web. They either keep their costs down (perhaps using resources of a given University). Or charge for people to submit articles. This may sound bad, but in reality researchers will have research grants and 'publishing fees' can be included in research bids. This pays for running of the Journal and the articles are free to all, including the Tax payers who probably paid for it, keen members of the public, and those from the third world who had no chance of paying the fees of the traditional publishers.
Their are also open access REPOSITORIES. These are either subject based (pubmed, arXiv.org, etc) or institution based, ie based at a university. An academic publishes in to a traditional (high cost) journal, for the peer review and kudos, and then puts their article in to their institutional (or pubmed/arXiv.org) so that it is freely available to everyone. Even though publishers put huge restrictions on this, such as embargos and which copy can be used (normally the academics original copy, not the publisher's version) they unsurprisingly don't like this. Think about it, though the academic/university paid for and created the research, the publisher still tells them when they can upload their own version of the article (i.e. not before a year after publication).
For this story see:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/911/1
For more information, google for "open access"
Chris
[this post is as good as any to post my tiny two pence worth...]
A friend recently bought the cheapest dell laptop available and asked me to set it up. It had vista on. The interface seemed an improvement (i liked the black glass style), it seemed 'responsive enough'. wireless was a dream. I liked the way it prompted if a program wanted extra privileges (similar to mac os x). I liked that it could be set up to defrag on a regular basis. It seemed ideal for what she wanted, it 'just worked' when it came to photos and scanning things in and browsing files (photos, documents). Finally, I liked the sidebar; hers - like many laptops - had a widescreen and it seemed like a nice way to display non-urgent messages rather than annoying alert boxes which take the focus and stop you from what you are doing.
So, I've read the many, many stories about Vista with interest, and do take on board everything people have said, but to me, on just this one laptop for one person, it seemed to work well. Sorry!
CJK
May I put some ideas in here.
At the moment Publishers get a good deal. The big costs are 'doing the research' and writing it up in an article, this takes time, expertise and money, most of which is from a University's own budget or a funding agency such as NIH, NSF (or say the Research Councils here in the UK). The key part of academic publishing is peer-review. This is done again with no cost to the publisher, by other academics (who are being paid by Universities). There will also be a Editor (and perhaps a board of Editors), most of the time they are unpaid.
What does the publisher do, well they help facilitate this (with web based software, all quite simple and there are open source solutions to do this), and they provide clerical services such as proof reading and putting the article in to a template (actually quite a few make the academic do this as well). They then put it on their website.
They charge HUGE amounts for this, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of UK pounds, many hundreds of thousands of dollars going to one publisher, per year, for one smallish university. That's only to have access to recent editions, want the older stuff... pay more. Want to cancel access to a journal, then pay a penalty (or pay more for the whole lot for the right to do so). Many academics do not even have access to their own articles. And because journal subscription inflation is about 7% a year (for about the last 10 years) the only option is to cancel more and more.
Publishers do very little and charge huge amounts, every increasing, for access to content the 'customers' basically wrote, reviewed and editied (collectively) themselves.
Now, there are open access journals. These are freely available on the web. They either keep their costs down (perhaps using resources of a given University). Or charge for people to submit articles. This may sound bad, but in reality researchers will have research grants and 'publishing fees' can be included in research bids. This pays for running of the Journal and the articles are free to all, including the Tax payers who probably paid for it, keen members of the public, and those from the third world who had no chance of paying the fees of the traditional publishers.
For more information, google for "open access"
Chris
There's some interesting follow with more details in more recent BBC Blog postings
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/
Doesn't answer your question but this is quite interesting
http://support.bbc.co.uk/support/
- "What ever happened to the United People's front?"
- "He's over there"
Is there some sort of web site where all the cool slashdoters (I know, an oxymoron) hang out and discuss what tags they are going to use or something?
I mean, I just can't believe that a load of people randomly typed "!darwinawardunlesshedies" so that it became one of the most popular tags for this article unless you are all discussing it somewhere without letting me in on it.
I want to be invited to the party god damn it!
Look. I know it's bad form. But I submitted something yesterday that made this clear. And I don't normally, so as it is my first time ever... I'm sulking that my submission was rejected. Pah! it was much better than this shit. and my mum would agree with that (probably)
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=332447
Chris
(never posting again. Ever. Stupid slashdot, I'm going to read http://www.kuro5hin.org/ - for at least a day. and then come back. again.)
none, it was a good post.
:) (sorry!)
But i had to catch a train home (UK, currently 7pm here) wanted to air my anger at the silly situation and yours was the first post at the top that i hit reply to. Pure laziness on my part, pure and simple
(isn't replying to the top high scoring post in order that your own gets read and mod'ed a rule of slashdot?!)
Chris
Where to start, first try http://pisdcoalition.org/
as the 'alternative' site to prism (they forgot that wanting to share you knowledge is the work of communists).
Background:
Researchers at Universities do research.
They are paid by the University, and they (well the University) may have received a grant to carry out the research (from nsf in the US or the research councils in the UK for example).
Once they have done their research they write it up, normally in a paper (in the arts it can be a dance!).
They send the paper to our journal. The journal's editorial board receive it and will the have it peer reviewed by other researchers in the same field to ensure it meets a level of quality and is suitable for the journal. This is the crucial part of the process. But the peer reviews do not get paid for this, and the VAST majority of editors do not get paid either.
The publishers then sell the journal to the very Universities who supplied the articles for free and allowed their academics to peer review and edit for free (on university time normally).
The publisher will normally demand they own the copyright.
The price they sell journals to Universities have gone up far more than inflation year after year after year, which means unis cancel journal subs. Plus the contracts are complex with huge tie-ins and 'if you buy x you must by z' clauses.
All publishers to is take the work of the academic (for free), get the editors and peers to review (for free) and then demand they own it, all for basically doing little more than formatting the document, proof reading and putting on a website (and, rarer now-a-days, in print). These are basic clerical jobs, not something which means they should own the copyright.
As noted, Universities and academics often do not have access to their own work.
There are changes afoot.
The Open Access movement is taking off (either through freely available journals, or by making the articles available on University websites). The latter are referred to as Institutional Repositories (unsexy name!) and I happen to run one. The software they use is either http://www.dspace.org/ or http://www.eprints.org/ both are free and open source.
Chris
"I see, and do you happen to be an elected government that pays for running that Website by collecting tax dollars from the people (at gunpoint if need be)? I didn't think so."
It's the BBC, not the Government. They may have a Royal Charter, and they may receive funding from a TV licence fee (not a tax as such, it is my choice if i have a TV) the technicalities of which are set up via acts of parliment, but not government.
I am not aware of people being held at gunpoint to pay the licence fee (remember not even out Police carry guns except for a few special units).
Chris
In a nutshell.
For many years researchers (academics) carry out some research, write up the findings and try and get the results published in the the most prestigious journal as possible (there are tens of thousands of journals now available), on submitting to a journal, a paper is peer reviewed. Peer-review is carried out by other academics (normally for free), they will either reject, make corrections or just (rarely) simply accept an article for publication in a journal.
For years this was fine. Then the web happened. (well the web was originally designed for communicated research). Journals became online journals, requiring authentication to prove you are part of a paying institution. Academics could access them from anywhere, print their own copy, access them the same time as others etc. The advantages were huge. But something else happened, journal prices increased way out of proportion with inflation, sometimes 10% a year. End result, libraries had to cancel them.
So two points:
One: Your article, the result of years of research, can only be read be a very small number of people who work at Universities (and other research organisations) which can afford to subscribed to the journal (and not even Harvard can subscribe to them all). Your work is hidden to the vast population of the world. Even when it was tax payers money paying for it
Two: The key to academic publishing is the peer review, it's the step that ensures quality. That is done by other academics for free (and overseen by an editor(s) also normally for free).
Hang on, your University, and Research Funding body (such as the nsf) have paid for months/years of research, which you have written up, peer reviewed by others for free, and now a journal - which charges huge amounts for access - takes the copyright, pays you nothing, pays the peer reviewers nothing, formats and proof-reads it, and then sells it to Universities (basically the very people who supplied the content) for huge amount of cash. Universities rely on journals and have to pay what ever the price. Meanwhile academics are not allowed to send their own research to their peers, colleagues and students because the publisher now owns the copyright. It is (cliché alert) a licence to print money.
Open access (making research free to all) comes in two forms:
- open access journals, which are freely available on the web (either working at no cost, costs covered by a sponsor or by charging institutions to submit articles).
- Author deposits their article on to their institution's website, namely in to an Institutional Repository (or a subject specific website such as ArcXiv), as well as submitting it to a journal. This means the article is always freely available online.
The advantages of making research (normally publicly funded) free to all, are numerous and hard to exaggerate. Hobby scientists, school children, the press, the third world, and smaller universities have access to research that they just could not afford to access in the past (and of course, unlike freely available research, subscription only research can not easily be googles).
The main two software systems for Institutional Repositories are Dspace (MIT/HP) and Eprints (Southampton, UK).
Nature, they are a pain, they are one of the biggest journals, and they of course know it. If we (my university) were to subscribe to Nature online, we would have to cancel hundreds of other important journals, probably more. We can just not afford it.
"What are you separating in your waste?? You can't just throw it in one can?"
In the UK this will depend on your local council, I have lived in several different places with different policies.
Some examples may be:
- you put out you 'general waste bin' once a fortnight. and on the the weeks you don't, you put out a bin for garden waste, and boxes for glass and paper once. (one week for recycling and garden waste, one week for everything else).
- another place, bins collected each week, once every fornight (can't rememember) our green bins were collected which contained anything that could be recycled. all just chucked in, glass, plastic, tinfoil, paper. No idea how it was sorted.
many councils don't recycle plastic as it is hard to reuse, and sometimes ends up being shipped to the far east, which probably does more harm than good.
It costs more, and the Gov has set high recycling targets for councils to meet, but we live in a small island and we can not go on digging big holes and chucking huge amounts of crap in them.
DMX uses bad words and says rude things, so do some rock and metal (are they still called that?) bands. It's what they do.
Just because they do doesn't mean it is right for a radio host to call a bunch of girls those same sort of names. Radio hosts, just like the rest of us, are expected to show a level of respected to normal people, unless they deserve otherwise.
Just because a rapper uses such language (who - so happens to be black) does not mean its right to say that 'black people use this language about blacks so why shouldn't whites'.
Places where I might want to edit a photo: my flat, my place of work (my office), my place of work (someone else's desk), parents house, friends house, internet cafe, conference.
Places where I will just install software because I need it: my flat.
All those other places, if I want (or someone else asks me) to edit a photo, an online tool would be great.
First they went after Internet Explorer....
Now they are going after Emacs!
does it interpret perl yet?
--
CJK
Pah, this is so typical, why do people always copy the god-like Atari GEM desktop
j pg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Atari_1040STf.
(PS Amigas suck)
>Whenever Slashdot asks a question in a story I perform a service as a reader:
.... I_dont_know, Can_you_repeat_the_question?
>
>I tag the story "yes", "no", and "maybe".
And I tag them:
"Please, Gnome is a slim pick up and go desktop for new users, KDE is a customisable and flexible desktop for power, business or techie users."
Disagree.
I use Gnome because I have a million and one things to do and so long as the interface isn't annoying, looks ok and doesn't get in the way, then it's good for me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a power, business and techie user. When KDE 1 came out I spent loads of happy minutes changing every setting just to how i liked it on my home PC. Partly because I could and partly because I found the default kde setup annoying.
I now use Ubuntu (at work) and have never felt the urge to change a single option. Now, the techie in me wants to do cool things at a PC, not change how the taskbar looks.
TFA does not say that the laptop had infomation on "their entire customer base" (not saying the submitter is wrong, but the BBC article certainly doesn't say this). It seems that it included names and account numbers but not pins, balances or passwords.
r ts/
More infomation
http://www.nationwide.co.uk/security/news_and_ale
This was a domestic burglary, there's a chance that the theif has no idea this laptop was special, and has already sold it cash in hand down the pub. It's probably being used right now by someone browsing for porn or doing 'ebay' unaware of what sits of that disk.
Not to say they should not presume the worse and react accordingly of course.
"For programs that create or view documents, use the standard menu categories such as File, Edit, View, Tools, and Help." (part of rule 10).
From the shell blog (posted to
"However, menus can be used inappropriately - particularly when developers slavish follow the File/Edit/View//help pattern. These standard menus are really designed for document-based applications, where there is a lot of saving, printing, cutting, pasting, and window management going on."
http://shellrevealed.com/blogs/shellblog/archive/
Bit of a contradiction there, but I can see the argument for both. 'File' has become the generic application menu, e.g. web browsers - which only deal with files in a limited way - have a file menu, so does basically any other app. It's just a badly named menu entry. As ever OS X gets this right (the first menu entry is named after the app).
To be fair to MS, one is the official useability guidelines, the other is an informal blog, it's probably better than MS not allowing their staff to blog incase such contradictions come out.
We use it, and i have to support it for a department at our University.
It sucks.
It has every feature you could every hope for, but has so many quirks that everyone (even those we could call 'advance IT users') found it annoying to use. Many aspects of the interface were just strange, which could make day to day slow, and support calls frequent. i'm glad to see it go.
Its good points: Good IMAP support. It supported server-side settings and addressbook. This is a godsend in somewhere like a University. A user can log in to any PC with Mulberry installed (pointing at our servers) and login, where they would get their settings, addressbook, etc. Compare that to Outlook Express, or - I hate to say it - thunderbird[1], where settings are saved in the profile[2] or local machine.
to pre-empt..
[1] yes, i'm sure there is a way to save settings on a (LDAP) server with thunderbird, but there seems to be little support for this, though the thunderbird wiki makes mentions of future plans
[2] yes Windows roaming profiles allow settings to move with the user, unless they log on to a home PC, or a PC not in that Domain, or a MAC, or a laptop, etc.
I've worked for a couple of Universities for 5 years or so. The first thing is, like the private sector, no two are the same. Imagine asking the same thing about companies on the stock market, a person from Walmart would probably give very different advice from someone at Google.
The second thing is: year on year Universities are becoming more like big business (for good and bad). My first job was being the 'IT guy' in a department which required quite a lot of IT. I was basically left to myself, trusted to come and go as I please, set my own agenda, make the most high level of decissions involving hundreds of thounsands of pounds and in the same day replace mice. No one checked up on me, but then I loved it so much, no one needed to, I loved the job due to it's freedom.
Now (ok different uni), we have very high levels of accountabilty, I have to report on each 'unit' of my job to senior staff of the department so they can see what is happening. They want to see what I'm doing (which is hard when part of the job is sys admin to SOlaris and PCs, testing backups and patching doesn't produce anything, it just keeps the ship afloat.
Third, and this may differ in the US where many Uni's are private, the level of accountabilty is huge, we have to justify everything to the tax payer. This sounds good when you are a tax payer, but often means that cost of allocating costs is very high. "how much staff time was spent learning the new software?" the public think this should be an easy thing to answer, of course if the software is used across campus you will have little idea how much time different departments (and sub units of departments) have spent on staff training, but you are expected to know, so much time is spent keeping track of such things.
Which leads me to the next point, Universities *can* be very segmented, with departments not talking to each other, and you have to play the game. Just because the guys in the Computer Science academic department have the solution does not mean you in - say - the computing service can go and use it. It's stupid and a waste, but be careful before you fight it.
But I come back to my main point all departments in all Universities will be different. Some will be fair, some will be laid back and generous, some will try and rip you off, some will be professional and have clear guidelines as to whats expected, some will not know how to manage a project. If it is the latter, don't come on too strong with the professional way of laying out guidelines and spec, some (especially some academics) are cynicall of the private sector and will preume 'you don't get it', in the same way as the guy down the local store will lecture the guy who shops at walmart because he presumes he 'doesn't get why walmart is bad'. You need to be clear of what is expected of you, but be smart enough so that they think you are like them.
Chris