Sub Ubi

I continue to be appalled at the IEEE digital library’s terms and conditions. From http://www.ieee.org/products/ieeemdl/

Find the research you need, when you need it. Subscribers can read, print and save up to 25 full-text articles each month for just $35 a month. A six-month commitment is required, and your credit card will be billed monthly.

As a full member of the IEEE, I would pay $35 per month to download up to 25 articles per month. That’s $1.40 per PDF. Of course, I would pay the same regardless of whether it is a 20-page journal publication or a 5-page conference publication, but never mind that. Furthermore, all of these publications were written and reviewed by academics (the hard work), and then checked for spelling and grammar, and typeset, by the IEEE (assuming it is a journal publication, of course).

So what do I gain (as an academic) were I to submit a paper to this process? If it goes through, I gain a notch in the belt towards tenure. I certainly don’t see any revenue from the IEEE, and they certainly aren’t sharing the research and efforts of IEEE members freely within the organization (not at these prices). Instead, they’re charging unreasonable rates for access to work that was, in many instances, probably funded with public dollars anyway.

By comparison, the ACM digital library allows me unlimited downloads as part of my standard membership ($45, approximately, as a student). I can casually download 25 articles without trying. Guess which digital library I prefer using, and which work I tend to cite more as a result?

Let’s play pretend: what if I want unlimited download access from the IEEE digital library? What do I have to do to get it?

I can get unlimited access to the IEEE Computer Society for $59 on top of my membership (as a student) or $118 as a professional member. This is separate from the IEEE DL, however.

The IEEE Computer Society Digital Library delivers quality and quantity.

• Get online access to all issues of 22 society periodicals from 1988 to present.
• Over 1,200 conference proceedings are also part of this collection.
• Read and print with ease with HTML and PDF formats.
• Find what you need fast with full text search capabilities.
• Members subscribe today for access to over 100,000 articles and papers.

This is reasonable; I’d pay either of those rates for full, unrestricted access; it’s still $59 on top of the student membership, but I can handle that.

But what about the full IEEE library? I looked at their brochure:

On this document is a contact number, which (thanks to SkypeOut), I was able to call. I went ahead and phoned, and spoke with someone in member services. There is no such thing as individual, unlimited access to the IEEE digital library. If my institution pays for unlimited access, then it is possible for me to obtain unrestricted access… but only if.

So, how much does unrestricted access at the institutional level cost? For a library the size of Kent’s, it is roughly 50,000 pounds. Partial access (electronic only, and only going back to around 1988? 98?1998) is £21,000. Compare this with the ACM digital library, which provides full access for around £20,000 at the institutional level.

I suspect I’ll receive an email at some point from someone associated with the IEEE DL explaining to me why their prices are what they are, and why what I’ve said is uninformed and unreasonable. However, I maintain that if the ACM can afford to offer full access at less than half the price (at an institutional level), and can offer it to me freely as part of my membership, then the IEEE has some explaining to do…

Poking around with stylesheets, layouts. No cause for alarm.

If the write-up and subsequent defense go poorly, I can always take advantage of those many emails I receive…

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Woot!

Penguin Jumpers – Pattern

Handknitted 4 ply




4 ply wool 1 pair No. 10 needles (old measurement)




1 pair No. 12 needles (old measurement)




With No. 12 needles cast on 50 stitches.




K10 rows in K1, P1 rib

Change to No. 10 needles and K2, P2 rib whilst increasing at the end of every row 6 times (62 stitches) then continue to knit in 2 x 2 rib until garment measures 15cm.

Decrease one st at each end of every row until 36 stitches remain. In the next row decrease one st at each end and also one st in the middle of the row to leave 33 sts.

Change to K1, P1 rib with Size 12 needles.

Knit 11 rows and cast off firmly on Row 12.

This is one side of garment. Make another and sew up from upper decrease to start of rib open for flippers. Add elastic to the top and bottom to prevent the penguins getting out of them. Top: 15cm of elastic; bottom 17cm (knots allowed).

Hand knitted 8 ply




8 ply wool 1 pair No. 11 needles (old measurement)




1 pair of No. 9 needles (old measurement)




1 set of No. 11 needles (old measurement)

Cast on 36 stitches using No. 11 needles.

K1, P1 to end of row. Repeat this row 7 times.

Change to No. 9 needles and K2, P2 rib. Work 4 rows increasing at each end of every row. (44 sts)

Continue until work measures 15 cms.

Decrease 1 st at each end of every row until 28 sts remain.

Decrease 1 st. in middle of next row (27 sts.)

Leave on needle.

Make second side the same.

Transfer the 54 sts from both pieces to 3 of the set of 4 No. 11 needles.(18 sts on each.) and work a round neck in K1 P1 rib for 10 rows.

Cast off.

Stitch up sides to decreasing to 27sts (opening for flipper). Add elastic to the top and bottom to prevent the penguins getting out of them. Top: 15cm of elastic; bottom 17 cm (knots allowed).

The ACM digital library is, in my opinion, a fair deal. I join the ACM for roughly $50/year as a student, and I gain full access to everything in the Digital Library (DL). Nothing is off-limits.

The IEEE DL, on the other hand—I have no idea what I can and cannot access with my membership. For example, I’m trying to help a student locate the article Simulation And Implementation Of Clock Synchronisation In Transputer Networks.

Now, if I join the IEEE as a student member, will I gain access to this article? According to their access policies, I can’t really tell. I gain access to periodicals and conference proceedings; I assume, since the article in question says it is in the “proceedings” of a workshop, that it will be available. I’d hate to subscribe, and find out that I’m wrong.

And it really isn’t clear why my institution can’t access this article in the first place. We have some kind of partial subscription… which is, frankly, useless.

The ACM DL is, as far as I can tell, both cheaper and better. The IEEE, it would seem, is looking to make a buck off their DL, which is sad—because all they’re doing is reaming their members three-times over: once to write and review the material, once to go to the conference (and pay for the proceedings), and again to subscribe to the DL. Kinda shit if you ask me.

But I created a South Park Avatar of my housemate!

Right. Perhaps dinner will help…

Just for Matt Lavine:

fifty-thousand-bang.txt

(It turns out that MovableType can’t handle a post with the number in it. So, I had to put the number in a separate file.)

The program that generated this was actually quite short; it was written in Scheme, and if you download DrScheme, you can use it to generate your own very large numbers. 50,000! is, for the curious, 213,237 digits long.

(define (fact n)
  (if (zero? n)
    1
    (* n (fact (sub1 n)))))

(fact 50000)

Interestingly, the program that formatted the number into 10×10 blocks was a good bit more complex.

Update 20051121: Matt pointed out that I actually dropped digits when formatting the 10×10 blocks. I’ll have to post an updated version of 50,000! shortly.

I wrote a little Scheme script to recursively traverse directories and find out how “big” they are.

[Lyra] mcj4 > dir-size analysis/
1240389 files, 8252 directories
30GB 472MB 596KB

[Lyra] mcj4 > dir-size Music/
1918 files, 635 directories
10GB 243MB 469KB 

[Lyra] mcj4 > dir-size docs/
56065 files, 2683 directories
7GB 505MB 570KB 

[Lyra] mcj4 > dir-size Pictures
4211 files, 269 directories
3GB 262MB 312KB

My analysis directory contains the data from my dissertation, the code that manipulates that data, and the output from that code. 30 gigabytes of data. Over 1.2 million files!. The documents directory contains my writing, programming, and other projects; there is not much in the way of “media” there; it’s almost entirely text, PDFs, and the like. Well, clearly, there must be a lot of something in there.

It’s interesting to get a sense for where the 80GB of space on my Powerbook has gone… clearly, my dissertation is to blame.

I’m watching the demo movie over at Kinkless.com regarding “Getting Things Done,” and I am amazed at this little suite of Applescripts for OmniOutliner Pro. Given that I have OOP, this looks like a really nice way to organize projects.

I’ll write more if/when I play with it in depth.

“Unforgivable?”

Wordpress.com “major drive failure”:

This is unforgivable. No matter how small a hosting organisation you are (and Wordpress.com couldn’t be considered small), your users data is sacrosanct. Users will tolerate occasional downtime but not loss of data.

If you use computers, and you think your data is safe anywhere, you’re confused.

If you think paying a few dollars a month buys you data security on par with God, you’re confused.

If you think weblog content on a $3/month plan is sacrosanct, you’re confused. In fact, I can’t even figure out how much it costs to have a weblog hosted at Wordpress.com.

The reason Tom has this backwards is because it is very expensive, in time and equipment, to provide the kind of bulletproof data recovery he is talking about (more details follow later in his post). To be specific, he talks about having separate drive containers/arrays for content, one for the system itself, and one for transaction logs. Well, to be really secure, we also need:

• A redundant set of backups on a second (geographically disparate) site, also with separate storage spaces for OS and backups.
• Integrity checks of all backups at all times; not just CRC, but making sure that all the content that should be backed up, is.
• Someone to administer all of this.

Any monkey can set up a Linux box and put it on the ‘net. Setting up a Linux box, making it easy to maintain (more-so than a bog-standard Debian install is), secure, and robust in the face of failure is another thing entirely. Now that I’m co-daddy of a new, 1U server (as opposed to a small virtual machine), I’m coming to see that making the machine robust in the face of every possible failure is simply not likely, given the time available.

For what Tom wants, I’d expect someone to be paying at least $80-100 US/month to be guaranteed nothing will go south. Less than that, and data loss should be a possibility that is just part of life. Of course, Tom is mostly writing about customer perceptions and reputation, but the expectations of users often far outweigh what they are paying for the service. Essentially, in a world where Gmail is free, how can you compete?