Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:When is something well-known enough to not cite (Score 1) 81

Hm, maybe I live is a web search world, but I never found myself wishing for that kind of thing. It tended to be I'd read a paper finding it through web searches, on the website of a researcher I knew to be be important in the field, or cited elsewhere.

But that's just not practical when you want a current overview of a huge field. With EndNote, you typically dump the entire list of search results from the database, and then start reading abstracts (included in the reference file), sorting relevant from irrelevant, and then download PDFs to read (which are then stored along with the references). It's a research tool and a retrieval tool. BibTeX isn't.

Comment Re:When is something well-known enough to not cite (Score 1) 81

How do you mean? Is this for some sort of display purpose other than in the bibliography of the paper? BibTeX is mostly just the database and tools for turning that plus a document into a bibliography. Beyond that it doesn't do any "management".

Exactly. The ability to view the database, sorted in any order imaginable, or ordered into groups, either manually or through live searches. It's a very useful tool when writing a review with hundreds or references, and is nice to have even if you've got just a few dozens.

Comment Re:When is something well-known enough to not cite (Score 1) 81

Yeah, BibTeX is more reliable than EndNote, but it's cumbersome to use and extremely poor at, well, managing references. Perhaps there are frontends with dupe control, sorting by arbitrary fields, grouping, etc., but then you're into the old Unix problem of having the choice of a gazillion applications that do one thing each, usually poorly, and with different combinations everywhere. A monstrosity like EndNote does pretty much everything you can want from a reference manager (much of it in a confusing manner, granted), which means you can get help: it's the same everywhere.

BibTeX might have most styles you can think of -- in English. When I last used it, I had to hack my own, not something I would recommend to your average researcher. Keep in mind that most of them are quite poor with computers. Asking them to use LaTeX is like asking Unix programmers to think of the end user: it's neither relevant to them, nor helpful.

Comment Re:When is something well-known enough to not cite (Score 2) 81

Typesetting isn't a process computers excel at. LaTeX is good, but not nearly as good as a good designer equipped with InDesign and loads and loads of time. It's faster and cheaper, yes, and certainly good enough for most academic journals (probably not Nature). Unfortunately, it also offers nothing (except decent typesetting) for fields that don't deal much with maths, whereas Microsoft Word offers a few nice tools, is somewhat easy to use, and has rubbish typesetting.

Input Devices

Apple's Next Hit Could Be a Microsoft Surface Pro Clone 252

theodp writes "Good artists copy, great artists steal," Steve Jobs used to say. Having launched a perfectly-timed attack against Samsung and phablets with its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Leonid Bershidsky suggests that the next big thing from Apple will be a tablet-laptop a la Microsoft's Surface Pro 3. "Before yesterday's Apple [iPad] event," writes Bershidsky, "rumors were strong of an upcoming giant iPad, to be called iPad Pro or iPad Plus. There were even leaked pictures of a device with a 12.9-inch screen, bigger than the Surface Pro's 12-inch one. It didn't come this time, but it will. I've been expecting a touch-screen Apple laptop for a few years now, and keep being wrong.
The Internet

Eric Schmidt: Anxiety Over US Spying Will "Break the Internet" 179

jfruh writes Oregon Senator Ron Wyden gathered a group of tech luminaries to discuss the implications of U.S. surveillance programs, and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt didn't mince words. He said that worries over U.S. surveillance would result in servers with different sets of data for users from different countries multiplying across the world. "The simplest outcome is that we're going to end up breaking the Internet."

Comment Re:Corporate Malfeasance (Score 1) 293

such malfeasance should be punished by confiscation of all of Infosys assets located in the United States, and by banning Infosys or any subsidiary of Infosys from operating on American soil.

As this is a discrimination suit, they would ostensibly be punished in accordance with any other suit of the same nature; damages awarded directly to the victim(s), and possibly additional measures such as requiring "diversity training," and such, assuming the plaintiffs win.

Do you consider Affirmative Action discriminatory as well? It's one thing to have a preference for a particular group of people when all other considerations (such as qualifications, experience, etc.) are equal, it's very different to purposely hire a less qualified, poorer fit for a position simply because of their nationality.

By your logic, a person choosing a contractor to work in their home who picks one over the other simply because they are the same [ race / ethnicity / nationality ] should have their house confiscated by the government and banned from the city.

Comment Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO (Score 0) 993

The hatred is mostly due to internet communities creating circle-jerks where some really retarded opinions get reinforced due to their mere popularity. People who have no idea what you're talking about think your comment is "insightful" just because it's marked as such, and adopt them as their own.

Slashdot Top Deals

Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.

Working...