today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 26, 2022

• EU mandates USB-C as standard for charging ports. Good.

  In other words, I think charging isn’t exactly a fast-moving aspect of technology that warrants being immune from standardisation attempts. If it were for the Silicon Valley types, people would have to change their power plugs and outlets every 5 years or so because ‘innovation’.

• Open Access And The Incentives For Embezzlement

  So let’s look at the current publication practice of researchers. Due to the traditional reward structure, researchers aim to publish in the most prestigious journals, in order to benefit from that prestige in tenure, hiring and promotion decisions. In subscription times, in which we still partially live, this practice does not come with immediate changes in the cost/pricing structure. However, this picture changes dramatically when Open Access publications are considered, where the journals demand payment of an article processing charge (APC). It has been documented exhaustively over several studies that these APCs scale with journal prestige. This situations provides incentives for authors to choose the most expensive publication option and there are two studies that have found such effects already: [...]

• R, its license and my take on it

  Yes, you can write proprietary code using R. Microsoft has done so, for example their {RevoUtilsMath} package is, as far as I know, proprietary, and I’m sure that it includes some R code. I’m pretty sure it would also be possible to even build a proprietary program that would require the R interpreter to be bundled to run. As long as the developers of this tool would: [...]

• Studies on country-of-origin for free software / open source

  As governments put more effort into working with free software / open source development communities, some might be interested to know how much involvement each country has. Two interesting studies have recently been published on this. The larger of the two treats Europe as a single geographic location and shows a global context. The second study focusses on Europe and breaks everything down to the level of member states and even regions within member states.

  Both studies use a "best guess" approach for assigning a geographic location based on email addresses, names, timezone data, etc. The researches acknowledge the limitations of these pieces of information, noting that Europe and Africa share timezones and that today the name "Eric, derived from Old Norse, is more popular in Ghana than it is in France or in the UK". Previous studies have used questionnaires, which give greater accuracy but greatly limit the number of responses and also introduces its own set of response biases.

• Sponsorships, Releases, New Books, and Kickstarters

  OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems is at the copyeditor, and due back 15 December. I should have print in stores immediately before Christmas. Barely.

• In Other BSDs for 2022/10/22

• Discuss with the Dragon

  SO, after the previous "Confront the Dragon", I continue my research.

  This time, I wanted to study a more cinematographic shot, with depth of field and again, multiple light sources (obviously a contrast of a cold and warm one).

  I think I improve a bit in the way I'm letting more and more expressive brush stroke visible but in place where they are not an issue for reading the picture. Firm edges and sharpening are ok, but I need to find a better solution because I used here the "clipping mask" workaround in Krita, and it was really unbearable how many layers where necessary and buttons to press to just shade a shape and then merge back. I start to really wish if Krita had real clipping mask.

  [...]

  my desk and setup: Intuos Pro Large, Fedora KDE Linux 36, Philipps 245E monitor