For what it’s worth, I think that WordPress is the best blogging platform. It just turns out that a blogging platform isn’t what I’m really looking for.

Rejecta Mathematica is a new, open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences. We are currently seeking submissions for our inaugural issue.

I’m not sure what ticks me off more about Leoptard (I can’t take credit for that nickname—some Brit coined it): the fact that so many of the semi-important changes don’t work, the fact that Apple turned a stable OS into a crash-happy glitz fest, or that the annoying, scruffy Live Free or Die Hard actor infecting my TV (and our Web site, by the way) is pretending that Leopard is better than Vista. It’s not better than Vista. Leopard is Vista. And Tiger is better than both of them!

My last post notwithstanding, I’m trying to put Ubuntu on my messed up iBook right now. I don’t think it’ll work, I suspect that the logic board is what killed it. But it couldn’t hurt.

• I’m savvy enough to care about open source software, but not fanatical enough to use it exclusively, especially when commercial software is better
• I’m savvy enough to have a favorite text editor, but not fanatical enough for that editor to be Emacs
• I’m savvy enough to have bought a Mac, but not fanatical enough to have bought another one when the first one broke
• I’m savvy enough to use Linux, but not fanatical enough to abandon the convenience of commercial operating systems
• I’m savvy enough to write code, but not fanatical enough to decry WYSIWYG editors

In other words, computing, like life, should be based in part on philosophy and in part on pragmatic considerations.

MTV Networks plans to make every clip from every episode of hit animated comedy “South Park” available for free online next year as part of a strategy to reach consumers everywhere.
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The decision from the biggest division of media conglomerate Viacom Inc follows on the heels of the “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” whose popularity online has helped boost television viewership.

I never intended for this blog to have an audience but I don’t mind.

The internetarati are up in arms already, especially the anti-DRM crowd, with whom I sympathize. Mark Pilgrim compares it to devices in 1984, John Gruber defends the iPod as a an acceptable form of lock-in but decries the Kindle as too risky. They’re both right, but they’re probably over reacting.

True, you can’t share books. True, you can’t back your books up. True, you can’t import books from other sources. And True, if Amazon cancels the Kindle, you’re screwed.

I don’t know if this means that it won’t become the “iPod for books,” but I also don’t know if their is even a demand for such a device. And nobody’s making the argument that I want to hear: reading on an electronic devices sucks. It’s hard on the eyes, you can’t fold your Kindle or laptop or what have you in half, you can’t dog ear the pages, etc.

Although, as Pilgrim points out, at the very least, its nice to be able to search through books. Actually, I think he’s dead on here. In fact, I have physical and PDF versions of most of my favorite textbooks (and yes, the PDF files are ill-gotten), and it’s a system that I really like. A hard-copy book that I can use for serious studying, and a PDF file that I can search through when I need to find something quickly, print a few pages from when I don’t want to lug around the whole book, etc. In fact, the usefulness of this hybrid approach is a good argument for Gruber’s idea: let us buy the book and give us the Kindle copy. It would also be nice if the books were in a protected version of some other format — e.g. password protected PDF.

But that’s just wishful thinking. People will probably buy this thing and use it. It may grow popular, but who knows. I wouldn’t want to own any important books in the Kindle format. But, then again, companies are starting to realize that, at the very least, there is a small but very vociferous market segment that will pay for files that are unencumbered by DRM. And that’s an opportunity for competition.

I agree. It’s the same reason why I (and other scholars) don’t like locking my information into proprietary file formats — academia has a tradition of free exchange of information, at least in the sense that academics almost always disclose all of their methods and results.

At the same time, scholarly communication has traditionally taken place through, among other channels, publications in expensive academic journals. If you’ve ever tried to get an article on Science Direct without being hooked up to your campus network, you know that this information is not “freely” exchanged. Often, an individual article goes for about $30.

Increasingly, though, academics are using the internet to facilitate free exchange. Working papers are published on the web. Entire textbooks are posted online for free. And academia is probably one of the richest sources of open-source software.

But as the article also points out, good software is costly to make, and it can be difficult to make money on open-source software. So if commercial programs are easier to use or more powerful (as they often, though not always, are), it seems natural that many serious researchers will want to use them.

So what are we to do? I suppose that, as long as results can be checked in free software, there isn’t really a problem. Everyone is entitled to the information, but it seems reasonable that people with funding should be allowed to access that information with a slicker interface. After all, I think everything you can do in MATLAB you can also do in SciLab, and everything you can do in Stata you can also do in R, though you might need to invest a substantial amount of time and knowhow. Still, there is something unappealing about the widespread use of materials that, to some, are prohibitively expensive, but that’s really nothing new. After all, the armchair particle physicist doesn’t have access to a supercollider.