Slashdot Mirror

I may be wrong, but 99% of the time when people say...

From what I've seen, 99% of the time, when the media says anything about X, they say it with a particular conclusion already in mind. That's why I tend to look stats up for myself, when I care enough about the topic. Here's a document I found that seems to have a pretty straightforward tone to it, although it's 14 year old data. Seems the "per capita" numbers are the ones we really care about.

Actually, Evergreen, which the parent was recommending is backed by the free PostgreSQL database, rather than Oracle. My university library recently switched from Voyager to an Evergreen derived system for that very reason.

Why the colleges that teach these teachers are choosing to NOT require classes in technology is beyond me.

I went to teacher's college a couple of years ago at the University of Windsor and we were required to take a technology course. I assume it's the same at many teacher's colleges, but it might not be universal.

I don't have to do this myself but I have heard about this problem (and wrote a little about it). Your school pays publishers for access to journals and you can't necessarily get to them from home. There is a plugin for Firefox called LibX that makes it easier to search what your school's library has available. It has to be customized somehow to make it work with the school's system. The University of Windsor has customized LibX as Foxy Leddy (Leddy is the school library). Maybe your school has something similar.

Turnkey systems may have all kinds of problems and be expensive, but the problems can be solved with money.

Of course, the nice thing with an open source ILS is that there is one problem that cannot be solved with money: if your vendor happens to go out of business, or decides to stop supporting your product, or decides to hike your fees immensely and you don't have a good means of exporting all of your data (including serials and acquisitions) to another system, then you're basically screwed. And given all of the consolidation and private equity investments going on in the library system vendor world at the moment, I'm not particularly confident about the viability of any of the current vendors. Open source at least gives you the assurance that you are not locked in with a given product; you own your data, and you can extend or enhance the system if you have the skills in-house or are willing to fund the skills.

And what makes more sense: having one hundred libraries paying $10K - $25K or more per year in basic support fees to vendors, or investing those same funds (or equivalent resources) towards a common library system that can be shared freely? Acquisitions and serials are tricky, sure, but you can make a lot of headway with that kind of common resource available. Hey, look: one institution has already joined GPLS to help develop an acquisitions module for Evergreen. And yes, the open source solution requires support resources: but proprietary solutions require support personnel as well... who, at least in the case of our library system, are each required to take a $3K training course to be certified as a system administrator, and have to take another $3K training course if they want to touch the API that the vendor has made available for the system.

It's a lot more complex than just running rpm against a tarball. This application depends on Apache, PostgreSQL, a Jabber server, libmemcached, CVS versions of SpiderMonkey and the lib-dbi / lib-dbd packages, and a host of Perl modules. Georgia's installation runs on top of 25 servers. Getting a secure, stable system up and running was understandably the Evergreen team's first priority; making the source and as much documentation available as they already have was a courtesy that they didn't even have to extend. However, they've gone further than that: they have made a commitment to open source, and librarians-who-do-development / developers-for-libraries thank them for that!

The project is still in its infancy as far as growing outside of Georgia. That's why a few of us are starting by trying to build Open-ILS (aka Evergreen) on our own, following the existing installation instructions. We've already been able to tease out a few more details in the process of trying to create distribution-specific instructions... not that the developers are trying to keep installation hard, it's just that they've lived and breathed this for the last year and a half and so some details are second-nature to them.

I have been quite impressed with the Evergreen team's technical capabilities and commitment to open source. They have contributed patches to the upstream libdbi and libdbd packages as a matter of course, and they pull in a ton of Perl modules that are either not packaged in most distributions, or on which they have dependencies on newer versions than are available in current distros. The team is committed to a transparent open source model comparable to the Linux or PostgreSQL development models and have posted a first draft of that model for comment.

So, the first hurdle is to set up an Evergreen environment outside of Georgia. I've come very close with Ubuntu and Gentoo, but have one more hurdle to clear. All the way along, the developers have been extremely responsive to my questions.

Once we nail down the "gotchas", my personal goal is to create a VMWare image that can be easily redistributed for demonstration purposes. I agree that packaging is obviously going to be an important aspect of the project, but it naturally has to follow a well-documented manual install process.

Evergreen is going to spread outside of Georgia, and it's going to spread fast. The University of Windsor has already announced their intention to work with Evergreen to build an acquisitions system.

There are some pictures of the animal in question here.

1. The Softwood lumber dispute (I found a link to an american organization but one that is against the tarrifs because is raises lumber prices), which is doing severe damage to our lumber industry.

2. Kyoto I just threw out as something that came to mind, not all Canadian provinces like it either and a lit of US states have actually implemented their own rules that are even more stringent but it was an another international agreement that the US backed out of.

3. The landmine treaty pretty much everyone but the US signed, a notable exception, I remember hearing some speculation about them going to use some in Afghanistan but couldn't find anything in a quick google. Still it's important to note that this was in Clintons era so isn't exactly Bush's fault.

4. Here's a though piece on US violations with regards to treatment of war prisoners in Afghanistan.

5. Hostility doesn't always have to be military, the US has arguably been very hostile to the entire international community with the huge distain it showed for the UN and any country that opposed it's plans to go into Iraq or even countries that didn't offer military support (with us or against us anyone?). Yes there has been some hostility shown to the US but that's inevitable with a superpower and a crutial difference is that when the US is hostile towards another nation is any capacity it causes economic hardship and can be a threat to the nations very existance(what if GW decides to go to Iran or North Korea). As to the moron comment that was just an overheard remark (an accurate one I might add;), the bastard comment likewise was just a mistake from frustration, frankly I couldn't believe the amount of fuss that was made in the US over either comment. For example look back to the campaign when Bush didn't even appear to know who our PM's name was!! The only real reaction here was some jokes.

6. As to divisions bringing them into the open can the way the US does is more akin to aggrivating them. I'm too lazy at this point to google for info on what was going on between the Korea's at the time but I recall hearing on the media several months before about how the countries were starting to get closer together then Bush decided to through North Korea in on the axis of evil and all that went to waste.

In Canada, we collect a levy on CDR media, this allows us the RIGHT as a citizen to make copies of any music CD for our own personal use.

See more about this here: http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml#copy_for_friend s

I have been toying with the idea of organizing / promoting a "Come and Copy CDs Day" at University of Windsor or maybe at on of the local Windsor Librarylocations, which does in fact contain a whole PILE of CDs we can now legally copy...

I believe it is important now to 'get the word out' and snuff out their massive revenue stream...

Also I believe we should simply order the CDRs online anf FUCK their 'corporate-whore-tax', it would make this otherwise legal event a little more gray, but hey, fuck them.

This could be seriously fun...

Microsofts vision is a world with no choice but Microsoft. Why people cannot see the inherent evil in this, I just don't understand.

Indeed. I've often talked to people who've attempted to justify this by saying "but Word/Excel/whatever is a standard!" And in their case, that may well be true-- but nevertheless, standards are possible without a monopoly, and supporting a monopoly is a large black mark against any standard. The advent of Mono should mean that if .NET becomes standard it'll be because it's technically a good standard, rather than because Microsoft produce it.

Didn't the lad from Nazareth mention something about "the road less traveled"?

Nope (or at least, if he did, nobody wrote it down.) Robert Frost said something a little like it, though :)

One stumbling block to finding out more information about Chornobyl is that the spelling is often different. The proper Ukrainian spelling is "Chornobyl". However, the English press has glossed over the name "change" since Ukraine became independent.

Either way, there are now plenty of books on the topic. Official Soviet statistics have always been suspect and more reliable estimates are, quite frankly, chilling. The thousands of military personnel who were sent in to cleanup this mess were equipped with little more than gas masks and were not well-informed of the extreme dangers they faced. Several respected television news programs have done documentaries on the aftermath (I recall seeing an excellent episode of the CBC's Fifth Estate a few years back).

I have quite a few friends in the Ukrainian community who are more actively involved in helping the victims - particulary children who have been saddled with radiation-related birth defects or sicknesses such as leukemia. The number of these children and their suffering is beyond tragic. Have a look at what you can do to help: www.childrenofchornobyl.org.

If you're seriously interested in learning more about this tragedy, feel free to email me. I'll consult with some fine folks I know who can better recommend insightful reading.

--