Er … did Otto just say what I think he said? I was just watching one of my favorite seasons of the Simpsons, “The Mook, the Chef, the Wife and Her Homer”, and when Lisa accidentally dropped Otto’s walkman while tugging on his headphone (“Otto, help me. Bart won’t give me a seat.”), I think he said “Fuck”.
But … I thought you couldn’t say “Fuck” on TV. At least South Park bleeps it out when they do.
Congress is expected to vote this week on a bill requiring investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to publish research papers only in journals that are made freely available within one year of publication. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish.
This is a GOOD MOVE.
Yes, it is difficult to get a RESPECTED, peer-reviewed journal that is freely accessible going. ArXiv.org serves its purpose, and our group does post links to the ArXiv.org version of the paper (the same one published in a peer-review journal), but this does not make for an easy searching—as people searching for papers in ArXiv.org have no easy way of knowing whether the paper has been peer-reviewed.
While people work out a way to have more journals available openly, freely, and at no cost (some involving author-paid (which would then usually be covered by grants supporting the research activity) models have been suggested, but I haven’t seen it implemented), the more academic papers we can get out in the open (however lacking it may be at the moment), the better.
Sigh. I wish people would please stop writing “how-to”s that require NDISwrapper. NDISwrapper is at best a stop-gap solution, a bandage. Even NDISwrapper developers agree that it should only be used as a last resort. But, for a device like this one, these people shouldn’t be writing “how-to”s that depend on a proprietary driver. There is a free driver (albeit one that requires a binary-only firmware) out there, and people need to use it. It needs to be tested more widely, and developed more actively until it is stable enough for mission critical tasks and overtakes the proprietary driver in features.
But, as long as people keep using NDISwrapper, this won’t happen as quickly as it possibly can. Using NDISwrapper only prolongs everyone’s captivity and slavery to the proprietary software. PLEASE, use it only as a very last resort, and PLEASE, PLEASE do not write a how-to using NDISwrapper if there is a free alternative out there.
Qualified hard drive buyers can choose cash or backup software
November 01, 2007 (Computerworld) — Seagate Technology LLC has agreed to settle a lawsuit by offering customers who purchased a hard drive from the company during the last six years a cash refund or free backup and recovery software.
Yawn. Wake me when they finally fix their ways and advertize the disk space that would show up in a modern operating system. I mean, I don’t care either way. After all, it’s not like I ever buy a hard drive mistakenly thinking that the capacity was advertised at the correct binary convention. Only idiots do that. But, even knowing that, there’s nothing more disheartening than buying a 500 GB hard drive, only to see an output like:
bkpark@nestor:~$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda3 72G 15G 54G 22% / tmpfs 252M 0 252M 0% /lib/init/rw udev 10M 80K 10M 1% /dev tmpfs 252M 0 252M 0% /dev/shm /dev/sda1 459G 411G 44G 91% /media/CoolMax