The Action Adventure With Car Chases Model was key to the 1970 reworking when Jon Pertwee came in, with the Exile On Earth theme and UNIT. Car chases every week for several years, troops in jeeps, airstrikes, and all in wondrous new shiny colour. First there was Bessie the yellow edwardian roadster, then towards the end of Pertwee's tenure, the glorious Whomobile, with tailfins to make a 1950's T-bird weep with envy.
I think the major problem was that no matter how hard people tried to stop Phil Segal producing a festival of fanwank, a lot of it still got through. Enough continuity to utterly befuddle a new audience, but fast and loose enough to infuriate established fans (Eye Of Harmony within the TARDIS, hello?) plus the half-human doctor thing peed a lot of people off. At least they managed to get away from his original concept of the Doctor with his Gallifreyan mentor Borusa charging around the galaxy looking for his lost father.
My chickens have yet to hatch but I'm preparing estimates right now!
tomV
Re:But who will be the Doctor?
on
Doctor Who Comeback
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· Score: 2, Interesting
noooooooooooooooo!!!!
Gotta NOT under any circumstances treat continuity as a shibboleth. If this is going to survive its first season it HAS to be a new series for new viewers. Every time it harks back to something from The Dealy Assassin or Genesis Of The Daleks, expect another 10,000 viewers to switch off in confusion and disappointment.
And that also means no regeneration. IMHO one of the key problems with the TVM was the way it spent 15 minutes introducing the McCoy character to a brand new audience (after a bollocks spiel about taking the Master's remains back to Gallifrey from Skaro, puhleaze!) and then killing him to get a regeneration in. Catastrophic mistake.
Doctor Who is a show about a mysterious traveller, generally a good, kind and helpful one, who travels around time and space in a bizarre and mostly unexplained vehicle, righting wrongs and getting into scrapes.
Anyway, Russell Davies already said, with his Doctor Who 2000 proposal and i think on BBC teletext this morning again, that this would be starting well after any theoretical regeneration, with some bloke called 'the Doctor' having adventures. Hartnell didn't start with a regeneration after all. And Scream Of The Shalka will be taking exactly the same approach with the Richard E Grant doctor for the November 29th webcast. The Big Finish 'Unbound' series is showing very nicely that you just don't need regenerations, and you don't need single-threaded continuity. At present we've got TV continuity (which was always patchy and secondary to the dramatic requirements of the meoment. except in the death-throes of the last couple of seasons), Virgin NA continuity, BBC EDA continuity, Big Finish audio continuity, Telos Novellas continuity, DWM comicstrip continuity and so forth.
Doctor Who needs continuity no morethan does Superman.
But do all pubs owned by the same person or company get shut down?
Nearly. It's not a question of who *owns* the pub, but of who's *responsible* for it. And the licensee would certainly lose his/her license and be prohibited from operating a drinking establishment, for a while at least.
it's not difficult to become a moderator and I'm sure MS is not going to conduct backround checks on all of the moderators they'll need
Ah, now, they may not have a choice in that mattter in the UK, as the Protection Of Children Act 1999 states that
it is an offence for any organisation to offer employment that involves regular contact with young people under the age of 18 to anyone who has been convicted of certain specified offences, or included on lists of people considered unsuitable for such work held by the DfEE (List 99) and the Department of Health. (PoCA - Protection of Children Act list)
and to be honest, what would be the use of a moderator who hadn't had a background check? Chatroom moderator would just become another prime 'opportunity' just like scout leading, teaching, or whatever the demon of the week is this time round.
Stop putting 'internet chat rapes' into Google and the problem goes away.
Not in the UK, my friend. Here it would be more a case of 'stop reading newspapers, do not watch television, do not listen to radio and avoid having watercooler conversations with colleagues'.
Rightly or wrongly, at present in this country this is seen as a huge and pressing issue, or at least as an issue which is pretty much guaranteed to support newsmedia sales and probably a nice cheap votewinner for demagogues into the bargain.
This is, certainly, simplistic, but it's also real.
This seems right on the money. That would be the money that Moft will lose from ad views, the money that will flow to other chatroom providers from AOL outwards. Or the money that they might have lost if they'd ever been tarred with the brush marked "microsoft, the child-raper's best-kept secret".
At the moment in the UK at least, there seems to be a growing line from the press that 'the internet' is primarily an evil tool used by very evil people to do very evil things and that 'it must be brought under control'.
So there are several very good reasons why Moft might do this, including:
to avoid perceived guilt-by-association amongst the paediatrician-haters,
to, perhaps somewhere down the line, avoid liability as an 'accessory' to some deeply revolting crimes, particularly with David (Knee)jerk Blunkett runnig the home office to the Sun's latest whims,
to make it easier for the people managing the MSN service to sleep at night given the undeniable fact that a vanishingly small fraction of their unmonitored users are the sort of people who, as a card-carrying woolly liberal, I could merrily see burned at the stake on live TV.
The big Risk that's been pointed out, OTOH, is that a lot of kids who see that they're about to be cut off from their online friends, may use the last two weeks of the service for a flurry of real-name, phone-number and snail-mail exchanging, exposing them to more danger than was ever posed previously by the service.
I was, frankly, revolted by the post by 'Frank Kalf, Holland' on the BBC talking point discussion, where he said Best move ever, that will get the kids off their Windows addiction, and make them familiar with other operating systems like OS/2 , Linux and BEOS which operate ICQ . Jesus wept, Frank, whatever your views on the relative merits of various OS platforms, get a sense of proportion, please.
I can certainly second that take on autocomplete. I spent a summer typing up ISO 9000 documentation, and great swathes of these documents were built around a tight set of phrases and constructions that could be condensed through autocomplete. "It is the responsibility of the Plant Manager to ensure that production staff comply with the appropriate blah blah and any relevant statutory regulations blah." Once that was down to just typing "resp planman to ensure that prostf compregs" and so forth for everyone from the Finance Director to the Night Cleaners, and the list of autocompletes had a few dozen entries, the typing work got finished weeks early and they had to find me some interesting stuff to do instead:-).
This is akin to blaming the existance of pencils and electric sharpeners for his incessant pencil sharpening. Its just a habit he has to avoid working, get rid of it and he'll find another.
A habit, aye, there's the rub.
I've heard and read the same story from so many writers, from Douglas Adams' famous 'whooshing deadlines' comment on. Authors, perhaps, fall into two broad categories - the possessed, compelled to write all the time without rest, and far more commonly, the procrastinator.
There seem to be a great number of writers, including some staggeringly good ones, who tell the same story of procrastination, displacement activity, long baths, walking the dog, repainting the kitchen, becoming a world authority on Bolivian lepidoptera, scaling mountains, booking an extensive program of root canal surgery, anything, anything at all to just delay having to actually try to condense their inner vision into squiggles on a plain background.
Perhaps that's the first editor, the reluctance to commit anything until forced to. Perhaps there are millions of people out there who could create fabulous works, but don't force themselves to actually write it. A few of the authors I've conversed with will readily state that the reason they're authors is that they're 'no good at anything else' - for me, there are easier ways to feed myself than writing, but there are those who believe there aren't, and eventually, desperately, reluctantly, they are finally forced to make some marks on that plain background.
I find for the first draft at least, it has to be ink or a typewriter. Anything with a backspace key just dumps me into a morass of microediting, with ink I have to choose more carefully and accept more willingly. Savage editing can come later when I know how the thing actually *goes*.
Your post suggests that it is a copyright suit, but it is a trademark suit.
Oh, certainly the OCLC - Library Hotel case described in the Article concerns a Trademark dispute, and certainly there would be a significantly smaller number of posts here on/. if the population could get its head around the distinction between TM (c) and Pat.
However, I was attempting (perhaps misguidedly, in view of the overwhelming confusion between these distinct forms of protection, but anyway...) to provide a response to the specific comment:
I think the point is that anything invented 130 years ago by someone who died 72 years ago damn well ought to be in the public domain by now
because there seemed to be a misapprehension that the DDC had been set in stone 130 years ago, which rather failed to give any credit for the ongoing work on the scheme.
All the big categories in the hierarchy are a century old. So the poor old thing gets a bit muddled when you ask her to handle broad concepts that didn't even exist when she was born. She's the elderly granny of the Library world, but we still love the old dear.
So, for example, we shouldn't find some dead guy named Dewey, steal his work,[...]
Seeing as it's a hotel they're suing, rather than a library support organisation, I think OCLC are completely mad to do this at all, but in fairness they are the current owners of all the copyrights and trademarks associated with the ongoing Dewey Decimal System information product, now in its 22nd edition, so they didn't steal it, it was assigned to them by the previous copyright holder. And if you don't protect your Trademarks, they dilute.
I have to wonder how much water that can hold, using a person's (other than one's own) name in a trademark
Ford, McDonald's and Hoover seem reasonably confident...:-)
Oh, but DDC1, published 130 years ago by someone who died 72 years ago, is in the public domain now.
It's pretty useless if you want to classify 20th century history, or airplanes, or cars or computers. Relativity and Quantum, just where exactly in Physics should those go?
DDC22, on the other hand, is latest, fairly-up-to-date product of immense amounts of hard (and it must be said mind-blowingly boring) work by dedicated specialists who classified 110,000 new items last year, and will no doubt have to classify even more this year, and more the year after. Nobody's stopping you from using the 'invention' (a hierarchical classification scheme using numeric indicators), it's just the trademark and the copyrighted content of the Dewey implementation of this invention that's protected.
AFAIK, anything in a hundred year old Britannica is out of copyright, as are many early versions of Dewey. But the world moves on. And in the absence of de facto standards like DDC or LOC, every library would have to classify every new accession from first principles (as I say, both specialised, and mind-damagingly dull work), and there wouldn't be any consistency between libraries, which is a useful collateral bonus of the big schemes.
Free-text is a useful adjunct for testing relevance of your initial hits, but it's not a sound basis for a classification as such. The difficulty with Free Text is the lack / impossibility of a proper Thesaurus (in the librarian's sense of the word, a graph of authoritative terms, their synonyms *and* their relationships). Personally I'd like an underlying Faceted classification (fundamentally bottom-up rather than top-down / hierarchical), and then some controlled-vocabulary descriptors, plus othe indicators and maybe free-text as the icing on the cake. The trouble with getting Free Text to do all the work is that before you can do that, you just need to get the Universal Natural Language Parser sorted out to look after the semantics.
The trouble with schemes like DDC or LOC is that you have to create a category *before* you can assign an item to that category. The first faceted scheme, Ranganathan's Colon classification , marked every item with five, colon-delimited facets, in the form personality:matter:energy:space:time, but most modern faceted schemes are a little less philosophical about it. If you need a new description within a facet, you're free to create one.
The only time I ever had to build a specialist class scheme for a library I was restructuring, I went faceted - DDC or LOC would have been quick and easy but wouldn't have reflected the ways my particular customers were likely to want to approach the information I was providing.
Not really useful as a shelving guide in a general-purpose library, but as a class scheme per se, faceted is lovely.
TomV
Re:Performance doesn't come directly from 64 bits
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
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· Score: 1
It's Swiftly Approaching Industry Standard Acronym In Several Areas
And it has to be said, that punch was the single most honest response by any politician I have ever seen or ever expect to see in my life. SUCH a refreshing change.
Why the hell not? Good bridges are the ones that don't fall down
That's not the same as saying that good bridges have no faults. Bridges are built with a large safety factor. A large amount of the steel wire in the Brooklyn Bridge cables is hideously substandard, slipped in there by a currupt subcontractor. But because the safety factors were in place, even though the cables are probably about 5/6 as strong as they were designed to be, because they were designed to be 4 times as strong as strictly necessary, the Brooklyn Bridge is still there today. They paid for a lot more steel than strictly necessary, but they were proved right to have done so.
The bridge is Verifiably Strong Enough, but it certainly isn't Fault-Free. It was a product of defensive engineering, and software containing the inevitable bugs can be made much safer by taking a defensive approach to programming. It's better not to have an out-of-bounds situation at all, but that's no reason not to do bounds-checking wherever an OOB might pose a hazard. Yes it costs money to code all those extra checks, but that's what engineers do in most other disciplines.
Anyone writing commercial code has exactly the same problem.
I work at a fulfilment house. Our internal software's very much commercial closed source - it encapsulates all the business logic that lets us operate and compete.
And we use 3166 countries and 4127 currencies everywhere to make sure that our systems can interoperate internally and with external stuff like clients' order-creation systems and courier companies' addressing requirements.
I'm not able to comment on the Diggers or the Autonomen.
But to call the Levellers anarchists is to call the framers of the US constitution anarchists.
Consider the start of Lilburne's Manifesto of 1649:
After the long and tedious prosecution of a most unnaturall cruell, homebred war, occasioned by divisions and distempers amongst our selves, and those distempers arising from the uncertaintie of our Government, and the exercise of un-limited or Arbitrary power, by such as have been trusted with supreme and subordinate Authority, whereby multitudes of grevances and intolerable oppressions have been brought upon us. And finding after eight yeares experience and expectation all indeavours hitherto used, or remedies hitherto applyed, to have encreased rather than diminished our distractions, and that if not speedily prevented our falling againe into factions and divisions; will not only deprive us of the benefit of all those wonderful Victories God hath vouchsafed against such as fought our bondage, but expose us first to poverty and misery, and then to be destroyed by forraigne enemies.
And being earnestly desirous to make a right use of that opportunity God hath given us to make this Nation Free and Happy, to reconcile our differences, and beget a perfect amitie and friendship once more amongst us, that we may stand clear in our consciences before Almighty God, as unbyassed by any corrupt Interest or particular advantages, and manifest to all the world that our indeavours have not proceeded from malice to the persons of any, or enmity against opinions; but in reference to the peace and prosperity of the Common-wealth, and for prevention of like distractions, and removall of all grievances; We the free People of England, to whom God hath given hearts, means and opportunity to effect the same, do with submission to his wisdom, in his name, and desiring the equity thereof may be to his praise and glory; Agree to ascertain our Government, to abolish all arbitrary Power, and to set bounds and limits both to our Supreme, and all Subordinate Authority, and remove all known Grievances.
Not too far from
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
And what kind of anarchist sets out a requirement in his manifesto that:
I.---That the Supreme Authority of England and the Territories therewith incorporate, shall be and reside henceforward in a Representative of the People consisting of four hundred persons, but no more; in the choice of whom (according to naturall right) all men of the age of one and twenty yeers and upwards (not being servants, or receiving alms, or having served in the late King in Arms or voluntary Contributions) shall have their voices; and be capable of being elected to that Supreme Trust those who served the King being disabled for ten years onely. All things concerning the distribution of the said four hundred Members proportionable to the respective parts of the Nation, the severall places for Election, the manner of giving and taking Voyces, with all Circumstances of like nature, tending to the compleating and equall proceedings at Elections, as also their Salary, is referred to be setled by this present Parliament, in such sort as the next Representative may be in a certain capacity to meet with safety at the time herein expressed: and such
The idea is to create standards that everybody will use so that we can communicate with each other.
And this particular standard has uses far, far beyond just the Internet.
I work at a fulfilment compnay. So obviously we've done a lot of work integrating our internal systems with our clients' preferrred couriers - DHL, UPS and so forth. And when we exchange address and customs-value information, we use ISO 3166 3-character countries (e.g. USA, GBR, DEU, FRA) and ISO 4127 Currencies (USD, GBP, EUR).
Now clearly both we and the couriers and the clients who supply us with order information benefit from the availability of these agreed codes, that's the point of standards.
But the amount of re-infrastructuring work we'd have to do to move away from using the ISO codes would be prohibitive (i.e. it could be a company-killing non-profit expense), which hardly seems fair recompense for the amount of work thatgoes into being compliant in the first place.
I also note that the Unicode Technical Committee also has concerns about these satndards remaining royalty free and notes that a lot of third-party pre-existing work was used in creating them in the first place.
I can't begin to express just how useful, every day, I find the discipline I learned from my first boss in a proper computing job.
Bill was an old-school, where's-my-schema, lets-see-the-docs-first, mainframe guy. And every time anyone would suggest any change to the systems we were building, Bill would ask:
"What's the business case for that?"
Superb. Must have heard that several times a day every day until I internalised it. We all get great ideas for our systems, perfectly technically valid inspirations. But where's the business case?
If fast and easy is all that's needed, what's the business case for using J2EE? If complex transactionalised distributed business logic is what's needed, what's the business case for using PHP?
Some of us like a good deal more still. Office is an Application as well as being a suite.
Any of the Office apps can use the functionality of the others where they're best, through automation in VBA ('macros'). It's not so much that Word is a Word Processor, more that it's the bit of Office where the good document presentation and text processing stuff is. The best calculating goodies are in Excel.
If the thing wasn't such an unholy security nightmare, Outlook is where the calendaring and messaging functionality lives. And then there's the ability to use all those other IDispatch-flavoured COM servers for PAFing addresses and BACS-checking bank account numbers and so forth. Sometimes people are just more comfortable using Word as their interface to SQL server, and if I was as good at drumming up business and keeping the clients happy as them, maybe I'd be in a position to criticise that. But I build software to help them stay employed, and they liaise with clients to help me stay employed. Everybody happy.
It's not a tale of architectural beauty, certainly, but it works, it's quick and easy to glue together and it's flexible when another client makes another U-turn. And for several years before my time, this firm (internet commerce, and still very much alive and growing) survived on Office development alone, not a copy of any other language / development tool in sight other than SQL server and they had no idea at all what the Enterprise Manager and the Query Analyser were for.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's only partly true.
The Action Adventure With Car Chases Model was key to the 1970 reworking when Jon Pertwee came in, with the Exile On Earth theme and UNIT. Car chases every week for several years, troops in jeeps, airstrikes, and all in wondrous new shiny colour. First there was Bessie the yellow edwardian roadster, then towards the end of Pertwee's tenure, the glorious Whomobile, with tailfins to make a 1950's T-bird weep with envy.
I think the major problem was that no matter how hard people tried to stop Phil Segal producing a festival of fanwank, a lot of it still got through. Enough continuity to utterly befuddle a new audience, but fast and loose enough to infuriate established fans (Eye Of Harmony within the TARDIS, hello?) plus the half-human doctor thing peed a lot of people off. At least they managed to get away from his original concept of the Doctor with his Gallifreyan mentor Borusa charging around the galaxy looking for his lost father.
tomV
BBC News
BBC Cult
My chickens have yet to hatch but I'm preparing estimates right now!
tomV
noooooooooooooooo!!!!
Gotta NOT under any circumstances treat continuity as a shibboleth. If this is going to survive its first season it HAS to be a new series for new viewers. Every time it harks back to something from The Dealy Assassin or Genesis Of The Daleks, expect another 10,000 viewers to switch off in confusion and disappointment.
And that also means no regeneration. IMHO one of the key problems with the TVM was the way it spent 15 minutes introducing the McCoy character to a brand new audience (after a bollocks spiel about taking the Master's remains back to Gallifrey from Skaro, puhleaze!) and then killing him to get a regeneration in. Catastrophic mistake.
Doctor Who is a show about a mysterious traveller, generally a good, kind and helpful one, who travels around time and space in a bizarre and mostly unexplained vehicle, righting wrongs and getting into scrapes.
Anyway, Russell Davies already said, with his Doctor Who 2000 proposal and i think on BBC teletext this morning again, that this would be starting well after any theoretical regeneration, with some bloke called 'the Doctor' having adventures. Hartnell didn't start with a regeneration after all. And Scream Of The Shalka will be taking exactly the same approach with the Richard E Grant doctor for the November 29th webcast. The Big Finish 'Unbound' series is showing very nicely that you just don't need regenerations, and you don't need single-threaded continuity. At present we've got TV continuity (which was always patchy and secondary to the dramatic requirements of the meoment. except in the death-throes of the last couple of seasons), Virgin NA continuity, BBC EDA continuity, Big Finish audio continuity, Telos Novellas continuity, DWM comicstrip continuity and so forth.
Doctor Who needs continuity no morethan does Superman.
tomV
About 7.3% as gay as Turlough.
;-)
But not since 1970 was there a regular companion running around in a skirt.
Oh, alright, kilt, if you insist
But do all pubs owned by the same person or company get shut down?
Nearly. It's not a question of who *owns* the pub, but of who's *responsible* for it. And the licensee would certainly lose his/her license and be prohibited from operating a drinking establishment, for a while at least.
Ah, now, they may not have a choice in that mattter in the UK, as the Protection Of Children Act 1999 states thatand to be honest, what would be the use of a moderator who hadn't had a background check? Chatroom moderator would just become another prime 'opportunity' just like scout leading, teaching, or whatever the demon of the week is this time round.
tomV
Stop putting 'internet chat rapes' into Google and the problem goes away.
Not in the UK, my friend. Here it would be more a case of 'stop reading newspapers, do not watch television, do not listen to radio and avoid having watercooler conversations with colleagues'.
Rightly or wrongly, at present in this country this is seen as a huge and pressing issue, or at least as an issue which is pretty much guaranteed to support newsmedia sales and probably a nice cheap votewinner for demagogues into the bargain.
This is, certainly, simplistic, but it's also real.
tomV
At the moment in the UK at least, there seems to be a growing line from the press that 'the internet' is primarily an evil tool used by very evil people to do very evil things and that 'it must be brought under control'.
So there are several very good reasons why Moft might do this, including:
- to avoid perceived guilt-by-association amongst the paediatrician-haters,
- to, perhaps somewhere down the line, avoid liability as an 'accessory' to some deeply revolting crimes, particularly with David (Knee)jerk Blunkett runnig the home office to the Sun's latest whims,
- to make it easier for the people managing the MSN service to sleep at night given the undeniable fact that a vanishingly small fraction of their unmonitored users are the sort of people who, as a card-carrying woolly liberal, I could merrily see burned at the stake on live TV.
The big Risk that's been pointed out, OTOH, is that a lot of kids who see that they're about to be cut off from their online friends, may use the last two weeks of the service for a flurry of real-name, phone-number and snail-mail exchanging, exposing them to more danger than was ever posed previously by the service.I was, frankly, revolted by the post by 'Frank Kalf, Holland' on the BBC talking point discussion, where he said Best move ever, that will get the kids off their Windows addiction, and make them familiar with other operating systems like OS/2 , Linux and BEOS which operate ICQ . Jesus wept, Frank, whatever your views on the relative merits of various OS platforms, get a sense of proportion, please.
TomV
I can certainly second that take on autocomplete. I spent a summer typing up ISO 9000 documentation, and great swathes of these documents were built around a tight set of phrases and constructions that could be condensed through autocomplete. "It is the responsibility of the Plant Manager to ensure that production staff comply with the appropriate blah blah and any relevant statutory regulations blah." Once that was down to just typing "resp planman to ensure that prostf compregs" and so forth for everyone from the Finance Director to the Night Cleaners, and the list of autocompletes had a few dozen entries, the typing work got finished weeks early and they had to find me some interesting stuff to do instead :-).
tomV
This is akin to blaming the existance of pencils and electric sharpeners for his incessant pencil sharpening. Its just a habit he has to avoid working, get rid of it and he'll find another.
A habit, aye, there's the rub.
I've heard and read the same story from so many writers, from Douglas Adams' famous 'whooshing deadlines' comment on. Authors, perhaps, fall into two broad categories - the possessed, compelled to write all the time without rest, and far more commonly, the procrastinator.
There seem to be a great number of writers, including some staggeringly good ones, who tell the same story of procrastination, displacement activity, long baths, walking the dog, repainting the kitchen, becoming a world authority on Bolivian lepidoptera, scaling mountains, booking an extensive program of root canal surgery, anything, anything at all to just delay having to actually try to condense their inner vision into squiggles on a plain background.
Perhaps that's the first editor, the reluctance to commit anything until forced to. Perhaps there are millions of people out there who could create fabulous works, but don't force themselves to actually write it. A few of the authors I've conversed with will readily state that the reason they're authors is that they're 'no good at anything else' - for me, there are easier ways to feed myself than writing, but there are those who believe there aren't, and eventually, desperately, reluctantly, they are finally forced to make some marks on that plain background.
I find for the first draft at least, it has to be ink or a typewriter. Anything with a backspace key just dumps me into a morass of microediting, with ink I have to choose more carefully and accept more willingly. Savage editing can come later when I know how the thing actually *goes*.
tomV
Oh, certainly the OCLC - Library Hotel case described in the Article concerns a Trademark dispute, and certainly there would be a significantly smaller number of posts here on
However, I was attempting (perhaps misguidedly, in view of the overwhelming confusion between these distinct forms of protection, but anyway...) to provide a response to the specific comment: because there seemed to be a misapprehension that the DDC had been set in stone 130 years ago, which rather failed to give any credit for the ongoing work on the scheme.
tomV
All the big categories in the hierarchy are a century old. So the poor old thing gets a bit muddled when you ask her to handle broad concepts that didn't even exist when she was born. She's the elderly granny of the Library world, but we still love the old dear.
tomV
So, for example, we shouldn't find some dead guy named Dewey, steal his work,[...]
... :-)
Seeing as it's a hotel they're suing, rather than a library support organisation, I think OCLC are completely mad to do this at all, but in fairness they are the current owners of all the copyrights and trademarks associated with the ongoing Dewey Decimal System information product, now in its 22nd edition, so they didn't steal it, it was assigned to them by the previous copyright holder. And if you don't protect your Trademarks, they dilute.
I have to wonder how much water that can hold, using a person's (other than one's own) name in a trademark
Ford, McDonald's and Hoover seem reasonably confident
tomV
Oh, but DDC1, published 130 years ago by someone who died 72 years ago, is in the public domain now.
It's pretty useless if you want to classify 20th century history, or airplanes, or cars or computers. Relativity and Quantum, just where exactly in Physics should those go?
DDC22, on the other hand, is latest, fairly-up-to-date product of immense amounts of hard (and it must be said mind-blowingly boring) work by dedicated specialists who classified 110,000 new items last year, and will no doubt have to classify even more this year, and more the year after. Nobody's stopping you from using the 'invention' (a hierarchical classification scheme using numeric indicators), it's just the trademark and the copyrighted content of the Dewey implementation of this invention that's protected.
AFAIK, anything in a hundred year old Britannica is out of copyright, as are many early versions of Dewey. But the world moves on. And in the absence of de facto standards like DDC or LOC, every library would have to classify every new accession from first principles (as I say, both specialised, and mind-damagingly dull work), and there wouldn't be any consistency between libraries, which is a useful collateral bonus of the big schemes.
tomV
You are a fellow librarian and I claim my 5 quid :-)
Normal people just don't talk about faceted classifications, and some of them haven't heard of Ranganathan at all. Kids today, I ask you...
tomV
Free-text is a useful adjunct for testing relevance of your initial hits, but it's not a sound basis for a classification as such. The difficulty with Free Text is the lack / impossibility of a proper Thesaurus (in the librarian's sense of the word, a graph of authoritative terms, their synonyms *and* their relationships). Personally I'd like an underlying Faceted classification (fundamentally bottom-up rather than top-down / hierarchical), and then some controlled-vocabulary descriptors, plus othe indicators and maybe free-text as the icing on the cake. The trouble with getting Free Text to do all the work is that before you can do that, you just need to get the Universal Natural Language Parser sorted out to look after the semantics.
The trouble with schemes like DDC or LOC is that you have to create a category *before* you can assign an item to that category. The first faceted scheme, Ranganathan's Colon classification , marked every item with five, colon-delimited facets, in the form personality:matter:energy:space:time, but most modern faceted schemes are a little less philosophical about it. If you need a new description within a facet, you're free to create one.
The only time I ever had to build a specialist class scheme for a library I was restructuring, I went faceted - DDC or LOC would have been quick and easy but wouldn't have reflected the ways my particular customers were likely to want to approach the information I was providing.
Not really useful as a shelving guide in a general-purpose library, but as a class scheme per se, faceted is lovely.
TomV
It's Swiftly Approaching
Industry Standard Acronym
In Several Areas
And it has to be said, that punch was the single most honest response by any politician I have ever seen or ever expect to see in my life. SUCH a refreshing change.
... and the 1-bit power switch on the front makes 64! :-)
TomV
Why the hell not? Good bridges are the ones that don't fall down
That's not the same as saying that good bridges have no faults. Bridges are built with a large safety factor. A large amount of the steel wire in the Brooklyn Bridge cables is hideously substandard, slipped in there by a currupt subcontractor. But because the safety factors were in place, even though the cables are probably about 5/6 as strong as they were designed to be, because they were designed to be 4 times as strong as strictly necessary, the Brooklyn Bridge is still there today. They paid for a lot more steel than strictly necessary, but they were proved right to have done so.
The bridge is Verifiably Strong Enough, but it certainly isn't Fault-Free. It was a product of defensive engineering, and software containing the inevitable bugs can be made much safer by taking a defensive approach to programming. It's better not to have an out-of-bounds situation at all, but that's no reason not to do bounds-checking wherever an OOB might pose a hazard. Yes it costs money to code all those extra checks, but that's what engineers do in most other disciplines.
TomV
Anyone writing commercial code has exactly the same problem.
I work at a fulfilment house. Our internal software's very much commercial closed source - it encapsulates all the business logic that lets us operate and compete.
And we use 3166 countries and 4127 currencies everywhere to make sure that our systems can interoperate internally and with external stuff like clients' order-creation systems and courier companies' addressing requirements.
TomV
But to call the Levellers anarchists is to call the framers of the US constitution anarchists.
Consider the start of Lilburne's Manifesto of 1649:
Not too far from
And what kind of anarchist sets out a requirement in his manifesto that:
The idea is to create standards that everybody will use so that we can communicate with each other.
And this particular standard has uses far, far beyond just the Internet.
I work at a fulfilment compnay. So obviously we've done a lot of work integrating our internal systems with our clients' preferrred couriers - DHL, UPS and so forth. And when we exchange address and customs-value information, we use ISO 3166 3-character countries (e.g. USA, GBR, DEU, FRA) and ISO 4127 Currencies (USD, GBP, EUR).
Now clearly both we and the couriers and the clients who supply us with order information benefit from the availability of these agreed codes, that's the point of standards.
But the amount of re-infrastructuring work we'd have to do to move away from using the ISO codes would be prohibitive (i.e. it could be a company-killing non-profit expense), which hardly seems fair recompense for the amount of work thatgoes into being compliant in the first place.
I also note that the Unicode Technical Committee also has concerns about these satndards remaining royalty free and notes that a lot of third-party pre-existing work was used in creating them in the first place.
TomV
Bill was an old-school, where's-my-schema, lets-see-the-docs-first, mainframe guy. And every time anyone would suggest any change to the systems we were building, Bill would ask:Superb. Must have heard that several times a day every day until I internalised it. We all get great ideas for our systems, perfectly technically valid inspirations. But where's the business case?
If fast and easy is all that's needed, what's the business case for using J2EE? If complex transactionalised distributed business logic is what's needed, what's the business case for using PHP?
TomV
some of us like formatting and presentation
Some of us like a good deal more still. Office is an Application as well as being a suite.
Any of the Office apps can use the functionality of the others where they're best, through automation in VBA ('macros'). It's not so much that Word is a Word Processor, more that it's the bit of Office where the good document presentation and text processing stuff is. The best calculating goodies are in Excel.
If the thing wasn't such an unholy security nightmare, Outlook is where the calendaring and messaging functionality lives. And then there's the ability to use all those other IDispatch-flavoured COM servers for PAFing addresses and BACS-checking bank account numbers and so forth. Sometimes people are just more comfortable using Word as their interface to SQL server, and if I was as good at drumming up business and keeping the clients happy as them, maybe I'd be in a position to criticise that. But I build software to help them stay employed, and they liaise with clients to help me stay employed. Everybody happy.
It's not a tale of architectural beauty, certainly, but it works, it's quick and easy to glue together and it's flexible when another client makes another U-turn. And for several years before my time, this firm (internet commerce, and still very much alive and growing) survived on Office development alone, not a copy of any other language / development tool in sight other than SQL server and they had no idea at all what the Enterprise Manager and the Query Analyser were for.