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Submission + - Elsevier going after authors sharing their own papers (svpow.com) 2

David Gerard writes: Elsevier, in final desperation mode, is going after authors sharing their own papers online. Academia.edu reported to several researchers that Elsevier "is currently upping the ante in its opposition to academics sharing their own papers online." This is the sound of a boycott biting. Repeat after me: "Elsevier delenda est."

Comment Millions made redundant as Facebook automated (Score 1) 163

MONDAY MORNING, In A Human Face Forever, Monday (NNGadget) — Millions of British workers are to be made redundant as companies install robotic Facebook readers, with F5-clicking robot arms, in the workplace to save human time interacting with social networks.

"Computers are in the workplace to improve our economic efficiency," said killjoy researcher Chris MacKenzie. "We thought companies would really go for something that would give an actual reason to lay off complete wastes of space without all that tedious waiting for them to post their tits or publicly slag off their boss."

Additional functionality includes posting to Twitter through that page someone made that looks like a spreadsheet and looking up the anatomy photos on Wikipedia so IT won't flag it trying to go to porn sites at work.

"The next model is showing great promise — it talks about football and last night's telly in the breakroom with the other computers, automatically drinks tea and never tells Facilties about the tea bags running out, and nips off to the bogs for a sly tug over porn on its iPhone when things are quiet. And do you think you'll get a drop of work out of it on Friday afternoon after it's been down the pub drowning its peripherals with the other ’bots? I don't bloody think so."

The only barrier to adoption may be the threat of redundancy for large swathes of senior management should the software be adapted to 19" Sony Vaio laptops. However, many workers who actually work at work were clamouring for a version that would automatically translate scientific papers from English to Faeces-Flinging Monkey and back and find funny videos on YouTube, thus enabling it to both write and read Metro and London Lite and saving everyone else the trouble.

Comment Re:155 Forrester Clients (Score 1) 337

Yes, it's barely-supported analyst wank, not any sort of proper industry survey. But it's from Forrester, and this sort of thing is their bread and butter.

"Analysts sell out - that's their business model. But they are very concerned that they never look like they are selling out, so that makes them very prickly to work with."

Comment Re:The whole Open/Libre Office thing hurt (Score 4, Informative) 337

Not quite. The Oracle-paid devs stayed working at Oracle (until they fired them all six months later), but most of the non-Oracle and non-IBM contributors got up and left - that is, the people who'd spent ten years giving OpenOffice a public reputation at all. Then Oracle threw it to IBM to do Apache OpenOffice, which is ridiculously behind in development (and is now wondering on its mailing list how on earth it can actually get any outside developers interested). (AOO partisans will deny both points, but those links are to the Wikipedia articles, which have ridiculous quantities of citations to this effect.)

Comment Re:Oh, you guys... (Score 3, Insightful) 262

CUPERTINO, Transylvania, Friday — After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil as a corporate policy.

"Fuck it," said Zombie Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it's pretty and it's cool and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows phone. Ha! Ha!"

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole.”

"Of course, we're still not evil," said Sergey Brin of Google. "You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my ‘spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."

 

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