Walt at Random

CavLec doesn’t have a comment function.

CavLec does have a readily-available email address, with the note that email to that address can be posted or commented on at CavLec.

This post discusses the no-comment situation and why Dorothea Salo runs the blog that way. Along the way, Dorothea notes that some people think CavLec isn’t really a blog because it doesn’t support comments–and points to an, um, er, interesting comment stream at another blog. (Let’s just say that reading that stream was about as depressing as visiting /., if you know how I feel about /. )

CavLec continues to be a great blog. That’s because Dorothea Salo thinks well, writes well, and has the same internal-censor problem I have (that is, she says what she means and what’s important, without being sufficiently careful not to say anything that might come back to haunt her).

Saying CavLec isn’t really a blog because it doesn’t have comments is, in my not so humble opinion, nonsense. That’s like saying a wiki that isn’t open to anonymous editing/trolling/graffiti isn’t really a wiki.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one definition of “blog” that makes any sense:

A blog is an online publication with individual entries arranged in reverse chronological order.

That’s it. Period. Full stop, if you’re British. “Online” doesn’t even necessarily mean “on the open web”–you can have intranet blogs.

The 250+ spamment attempts last night remind me that comments are a nuisance in one way. One particular interchange on a really off-topic post reminded me that they’re a nuisance in another way. Some days I’m tempted to turn on full moderation or go look for another Capcha routine. Most days, though, I’m not.

For Walt at Random, comments make the difference between a blog with infrequent posts but some great conversations, and probably no blog at all; without the feedback, I’d probably have stuck to commenting at other posts. (Oh yes: And writing a quarter-million words a year in a different kind of online venue.)

For CavLec, not having comments apparently makes the difference between a robust, interesting, worthwhile blog that’s also becoming an essential resource for those interested in OA repositories, and probably not having that blog at all. Seems to me that’s a fair tradeoff.

Blogs would be a whole lot interesting if they were all alike. How comments (and trackbacks) are handled is part of that variety. To cite the apropos title of a group blog run by some colleagues and friends: It’s all good.

Thinking about this post (does LaCie actually manufacture disks? do they actually make a one-platter 1-TB disk, or is their external unit a two-disk combo?) brought back memories of the first hard disk I had direct access to.

Late 1970s. UC Berkeley, Doe Library. We had a local area network of sorts, with three or four semi-intelligent terminals running off one central unit, to support data entry–for serials checkin, I think. I wrote the 24-hour oversight system. Once a week, we gathered up all the data to transmit to the data processing center we were using (via tape, as I remember). The data was gathered on a removable disk cartridge.

The system worked reasonably well (and slight glitches in the weekly process were key to my personal life: That’s how I met my wife). Given the technology involved, it’s amazing that it worked at all. Consider:

• The central unit was a Datapoint “minicomputer,” with a Z80A CPU running at 2MHz, and with (I believe) 128K of RAM. If you know the history of micros, the Z80A was an 8-bit chip, somewhat comparable to the Intel 8088. The operating system and primary programming environment was Databus, a remarkably robust OS with a flexible database system built in. Not terribly fast, to be sure, but a whole lot better than you’d expect from such a primitive CPU.
• The removable hard disk held 10 megabytes. That’s mega, not giga. It was a 14″ device, and I’m pretty sure it had multiple platters within the case. I don’t remember the replacement cost, but it was high enough to encourage us to take extremely good care of it.
• If I recall correctly–and this was almost 30 years ago, so that’s unlikely–we actually ran it as a straight multiterminal time-sharing system, but we could have run a LAN. If we had, the LAN would have been ARCNet, not Ethernet. ARCNet was a token network and worked extremely well particularly given the limited processing power and bandwidth at the time (and was used in thousands of back offices in businesses, frequently without the business’s IT department even knowing about it).

Ten megabytes on a multiplatter 14″ drive. Right now, you can get 750 gigabytes–75,000 times as much storage–on a 3.75″ single-platter drive. Running several times as fast, and probably with 8 megabytes RAM as a buffer. For a few hundred bucks.

Do I look back longingly at the Datapoint days? Not a chance. You could do remarkable things–for the time and the power–with Databus, but it still had some of the characteristics of a chess-playing bear.

It’s that time again: Four TV movies (although one of them may have had theatrical release), all from the 70s.

Evel Knievel, 1971, color, Marvin J. Chomsky (dir.), George Hamilton, Sue Lyon, Bert Freed, Rod Cameron. 1:28.

Even the sleeve blurb (which spells Knievel’s first name “Evil”) has to take a slap at Hamilton, “The ever-tanned and charismatic,” who also produced. George Hamilton as Evel Knievel? Surprisingly, at least as I watched it works pretty well—and it’s a nicely done movie. The blurb says Vic Tayback was in the movie, but if he was, the part was so small it’s not credited in IMDB or listed in the movie’s credits. Some damage reduces what’s otherwise a pretty good flick. $1.25.

Stunts, 1977, color, Mark J. Lester (dir.), Robert Forster, Fiona Lewis, Ray Sharkey, Joanna Cassidy, Bruce Glover. Richard Lynch. 1:29.

Death and peril in stunt work on an action flick where the director’s wife is sleeping with stuntmen. Gee, who could the real murderer be? Interesting stunt work, not much else. $1.00

Murder Once Removed, 1971, color, Charles S. Dubin (dir.), John Forsythe, Richard Kiley, Reta Shaw, Joseph Campanella, Wendell Burton, Barbara Bain. 1:14.

A slick triple-cross murder mystery, with Barbara Bain in a classic femme fatale role and John Forsythe as a doctor who has a bad habit of killing off patients for his own gain. There’s more to it than that; for plot and only slight overacting, I’d give it a higher rating but for damage. $1.25.

The Strangers in 7A, 1972, color, Paul Wendkos (dir.), Andy Griffith, Ida Lupino, Michael Brandon, James A. Watson Jr., Tim McIntire, Susanne Hildur. 1:14.

The blurb calls Griffith’s role “uncharacteristically sleazy”—but although he plays a discouraged, married apartment building super willing to be seduced by a hot chick in a very short skirt (and Griffiths groupies, if any, get to see him shirtless), he winds up being the hero nonetheless. (The blurb also says he’s a landlord, which is a hugely different thing than a super!). Reasonably well plotted, and Michael Brandon makes a pretty good villain, but it’s all a little tired. $1.00.

Just saw a blurb about Western Digital’s new MyBook Pro II, a one-terabyte external drive for a ridiculous $549. (Ridiculously low, that is!) Here’s the skinny.

This isn’t the one terabyte drive that we should see before the end of the year–because this critter has two drives. Which also means that for $549 you can have a fully-mirrored 500GB RAID box with USB2 and FireWire connectivity (and backup software). That may be a more sensible use for this kind of capacity at this modest a price. For now.

As far as I can tell on coffee-break searching, Seagate still has the largest single disk, their 750GB unit. WD appears to top out at a mere 500GB per single disk.

The year still has three months to go.

I don’t do political posts much. Not even ALA politics. But sometimes…

My local paper has this article today on the Foley scandal. I’m not going to recount what’s there.

What I can’t help but note, however, is the way Tony Perkins of the “Family” Research Council spins the story, all too typical of various “Family” groups (I use scare quotes because these groups use such a narrow definition of family):

Perkins said neither party “seems likely to address the real issue, which is the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse … ignoring this reality got the Catholic Church into trouble over abusive priests, and now it is doing the same to the House GOP leadership.”

Isn’t that sweet? Either Perkins is accusing Mark Foley of being gay (from FRC, it’s an accusation, not a label) or Perkins is just trying to shift the focus from a specific and real situation to FRC’s phantom devils.

I don’t use the word “evil” much. Sometimes it’s difficult to avoid the word.

Update: If Slate is to be believed (not always a given), Mark Foley may be a closet gay. That really doesn’t change the situation. The story is about pedophilia and power relationships; Foley’s sexual orientation is irrelevant. [Perhaps not to some fraction of Republican voters, which may have a lot to do with "closeted," but that's a different story. What he does on his own time with consenting adults is entirely his own business.]

I was sad to see this post at The Parachute, echoed by Peter Suber’s agreement. Specifically, I was sad to see this section:

Virtually all subscriptions, in all areas of research, are currently sustained via library budgets – money streams that are separate from research funds, but nonetheless available in ‘the system’.

The central idea of ‘author-side’ payment in order to secure open access for the formally published research literature (and as a side benefit, transparency of the proportionality between the amount of research done and the cost of the literature) is to use the same money now used for subscriptions (reader-side payment) in a different way. Not extra money; the same money. Once that insight has broken through, we can start overcoming the practical (bureaucratic?) difficulties.

It’s useful to note that in his new position Jan Velterop is pushing an expensive example of author-side-payment OA, presumably to assure that Springer continues to be as $profitable$ as under current subscription methods.

The problem here is that all other aspects of library budgets are being undermined by the rising costs of subscriptions–and those costs are such that even the wealthiest university libraries can no longer subscribe to everything they’d like to.

OA journals could relieve some of that pressure, maybe even free up some money for monographs, digital preservation, etc. But not if the university administration redirects all of the subscription money to keep overpriced publishers as profitable as they are now. In that scenario, commercial (and high-priced society) publishers win, libraries lose. At least if you think of university libraries as anything more than scholarly-article-transfer agencies.

I’m reminded once again of why I’m an independent in the OA field. My primary interest is in seeing vibrant, healthy libraries carrying out the range of short and long term missions that make them important, and the hope that OA could help in two ways: by making more scholarly resources available, and by reducing the extent to which library budgets are held ransom to the big commercial journal publishers and indirectly subsidizing other activities of professional societies.

But if OA advocates generally agree that it’s a great idea to snatch library subscription money to pay for author-side charges (and allow commercial publishers to set those charges based on their own models), well, so much for the second possibility.