This guy, peeled from the Wikipedia list of comments, seems to summarize the real problem here better than I'd guessed:
At least folks could build an alternative to OCLC. So that's what I and others have been doing -- Open Library provides a free collection of over 20 million book records that anyone can browse, download, contribute to, and reuse for absolutely free. Naturally, OCLC hasn't been a fan. They've been trying to kill it from the beginning -- threatening its funders with lawsuits, insulting it in the press, and putting pressure on member libraries not to cooperate. (Again, notice the reversal: an organization libraries create to help them has now become so powerful that it is forcing libraries to help it.)
But recently, it's gone one step way too far. Not satisfied with controlling the world's largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It's now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.
Basically, they're feeling threatened by the Internet, they've locked Google and Yahoo out of their web-based records, and they don't want the records (which member libraries actually paid them to contribute to) being given away to anybody else.
Pooh on them. If this keeps up, it looks like they're liable to be replaced by something smaller, faster, and free-er that uses the Internet. Like the RIAA, they're being dangerously slow to embrace the new technology so widely used by their own customers. Unlike the RIAA, they stand a good chance of being completely circumvented if small libraries decide they'd rather share their records with someone like Google.
...OCLC is a business (sorry, non-profit) that has orchestrated a ginormous database of bibliographic data and summaries, which it then sells to libraries both on- and off-line.
Libraries that use and display these records are expected to indicate that they were provided by OCLC and cannot be re-copied en masse.
So far, I can't blame 'em. That's a huge database to just let slip away for free. However, I imagine that this part of the policy would make a few libraries upset:
Reasonable Use. Use must not discourage the contribution of bibliographic and holdings data to WorldCat or substantially replicate the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat.
Which, to me, translates as "If you use our database, you're not allowed to compete with us, period."
The malfunction rate for iPhones after one year is 5.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent for the BlackBerry To me that suggests the iphone is 94.4% reliable and the blackberry is 88.8% reliable. That's just me, though.
That makes sense if you're a reseller or insurer, and you're interested in how many iPhones or Blackberrys will be sent back for replacement.
However, the consumer who only owns one such device at a time isn't interested in that probability. He's interested in the probability of this individual unit failing tomorrow. From that point of view, the iPhone is twice as likely to not-fail on any given day -- making it, to him, twice as reliable.
What if you buy DRM free MP3 music online ? Or free music available from indie bands ? You should be adding them manually to the iTunes library ? I don't think so.
Myself, I just double-click them. Since all my MP3 files are associated with iTunes by default, the app opens up, the file is imported, and it starts playing automagically.
Frankly, I don't want iTunes to automatically add MP3s whenever it sees them on my desktop, because that would mean it would try to import files that may not have finished downloading yet.
For any of you folks who have only seen some of MC's movies, don't judge his storytelling ability without reading the books first.
For those who have, read the books anyway.
There's one thing I've always admired about Crichton, and that's his willingness and ability to write on just about any subject. His thrillers cover the whole range of modern science and medicine, and while no one would call his work "hard science", it's still extremely well researched by NYT-bestseller standards.
the kind that people decades from now will remember and ask each other "Do you remember where you were when Obama was elected?"
I had been watching TV for over an hour, waiting to see if Obama would get those last electoral votes, not realizing that both parties had already assumed he'd take California.
So it's rather appropriate that when someone asks me, "What were you doing when Obama was elected?" I can answer that I, just like the entire Democratic party, got tired of listening to FOX News and went to take out the trash.
normal superconductors need liquid helium temperatures, which are very hard to maintain reliably,
Although in outer space, surely that's less of a problem?
Yes, I know about factors like engine heat, the need to keep critical mechanical components above a certain temperature a la the Mars landers, and so forth. But shouldn't it still be easier to maintain superconducting temperatures in deep space?
Does this mean we can now construct larger antennas with greater sensing power, using fewer materials, due to knowing a larger optimal configuration than previously?
Probably not, since (a) optimal rulers of order greater than four but less than twenty have been known for some time, and (b) the [0,1,4,6] ruler is proven to be the largest perfect optimal ruler (according to the Wikipedia article).
Once yo install Vista and anti virus software, the PC is easily outperformed by a Mac with the same specs....unless you want to play new games, or use any other off-the-shelf software instead of (sadly) having to buy Mac software online or at an urban Apple Store somewhere.
I'm a Mac fan myself, but the chronic inability to buy software at retail grates after a while. (Fortunately, I'm computer-literate enough to find almost everything I want in downloadable formats.)
We need real competition, and we need to bust the teacher's unions to get the bozos out of our school system.
It's not the unions' fault; it's the low pay scale. Most people who are good at math and numbers make a more practical career out of it because the pay is better as an engineer.
Most of our country's math teachers don't understand math well enough to make it interesting. They think it is just memorizing 'math facts' and memorizing cookbook ways to solve problems.
Hah. Take it from someone who loves numbers and can't for the life of him get a classroom of teenagers to see things his way: It's not the teachers who want to turn math texts into a cookbook of algorithms, it's the students.
Fact is, math isn't natural to the human brain, unlike language or tool usage. Humans, left untutored, will discover a natural ability to count to three, and that's it. The rest of mathematics had to be invented.
The brain is an intuitive and inductive reasoning machine; mathematics is rigorously logical and deductive. It's also highly abstract, and as long as it has to be taught in schools, it will remain that way. The reason most kids think math isn't easy is because, well, it isn't.
Whatever the greatness of Penrose's discovery, he threw it all away when he started advocating the quantum gravity theory of uncomputable physics as the basis for creativity.
Bah to that. Nobel prizes are for specific discoveries, not for a person's reputation since then. You might as well say Einstein should be discredited because he changed his mind about the cosmological constant.
It's all bullshit but very interesting to observe, and as an audience you are really overestimating the Chinese government's intervention which is close to none. This is just companies chasing profits with as much regard for ethics as our own companies.
...except for a little thing called government safety regulation. As the recent milk scandal in China has demonstrated, a capitalist profit motive is a fine and good thing, as long as the government (or at least the multinationals looking to sell this stuff in the West) is doing its part to oversee legal compliance, and the press is allowed to report when it's failing to occur.
"The only way to understand and really dig on Achewood is to read it from the beginning."
Then that's a bad comic strip in my opinion. If I have to read more then 2-3 strips back to figure out wtf is going on then the author really chose the wrong medium.
I would argue that that's the only way to read a normal comic strip; however, webcomics have the unique ability to keep a complete chronological archive of strips readily available to new and old readers alike.
I stopped reading Achewood a while ago, myself -- it just wasn't as funny and offbeat as it used to be, for me. But if continuity is an issue for a comic writer, then webcomics may be exactly the place he/she needs to be.
It's too bad that you need a $2300 mac pro to make use of it as the mini has a very weak video card and the imac screens are not good for photo work.
Why should it be "too bad" that you need a professional computer to make good use of professional software? I mean, that $2300 Mac Pro is still cheaper than the Adobe software suite to which you're referring.
Ask the folks in Lake Nyos. Natural CO2 escaped from a lake and killed something like 2,000 people.
Gonna be mighty hard to ask them about it, then.
That CO2 needs to be stored very securely and away from centers of population.
I believe that was exactly the idea behind burying it "3,000 meters underground into a depleted inland gas field in Altmark."
And the article doesn't mention it, but IIRC the reason for burying the waste CO2 is that it gets absorbed by the surrounding rocks and converted into harmless minerals, rather than letting it escape into the atmosphere again. Someone with more geological expertise than I have will have to explain that, though.
...I for one LIKED the ads, with its 'nothingness' agenda... Surely they would have known that this brand campaign would need TIME and COMMITMENT to have a payoff!
Maybe you missed the part where most advertisements are thirty seconds because their target audience has a very short attention span.
Or perhaps it was the fact that, when half your viewers think your ads are idiotic and irrelevant, you've done something fundamentally wrong.
Microsoft wanted an ad campaign, not a new "Seinfeld" sitcom. This whole campaign would have been better as a YouTube exclusive than anything else.
Also, there's probably some kind of collusion going on. We could make a 45mpg car that has decent numbers back in the 80's, but we can't make anything comparable now? Bullshit. There's something behind the scenes.
Could it be that the cars today have tighter emissions and safety regulations, which cost efficiency and weight, respectively?
In addition, IIRC the government's forced car companies to be more accurate/realistic about their MPG ratings in the past few years, which means they no longer advertise the MPG you'd get under ideal driving and gas-saving conditions.
if i want to delete an mp3 file, with my htc universal i start up my favourite file manager (total commander in my case), go to the file, open the context menu, chose "delete" and i am done. with the ipod touch i have to delete the file in the itunes on my pc, then synchronise. it sucks.
Yeah, I can see how that second approach is SO much more complicated and difficult than whatever the hell you're doing instead.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy, peeled from the Wikipedia list of comments, seems to summarize the real problem here better than I'd guessed:
At least folks could build an alternative to OCLC. So that's what I and others have been doing -- Open Library provides a free collection of over 20 million book records that anyone can browse, download, contribute to, and reuse for absolutely free. Naturally, OCLC hasn't been a fan. They've been trying to kill it from the beginning -- threatening its funders with lawsuits, insulting it in the press, and putting pressure on member libraries not to cooperate. (Again, notice the reversal: an organization libraries create to help them has now become so powerful that it is forcing libraries to help it.)
But recently, it's gone one step way too far. Not satisfied with controlling the world's largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It's now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.
Basically, they're feeling threatened by the Internet, they've locked Google and Yahoo out of their web-based records, and they don't want the records (which member libraries actually paid them to contribute to) being given away to anybody else.
Pooh on them. If this keeps up, it looks like they're liable to be replaced by something smaller, faster, and free-er that uses the Internet. Like the RIAA, they're being dangerously slow to embrace the new technology so widely used by their own customers. Unlike the RIAA, they stand a good chance of being completely circumvented if small libraries decide they'd rather share their records with someone like Google.
...OCLC is a business (sorry, non-profit) that has orchestrated a ginormous database of bibliographic data and summaries, which it then sells to libraries both on- and off-line.
Libraries that use and display these records are expected to indicate that they were provided by OCLC and cannot be re-copied en masse.
So far, I can't blame 'em. That's a huge database to just let slip away for free. However, I imagine that this part of the policy would make a few libraries upset:
Reasonable Use. Use must not discourage the contribution of bibliographic and holdings data to WorldCat or substantially replicate the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat.
Which, to me, translates as "If you use our database, you're not allowed to compete with us, period."
The malfunction rate for iPhones after one year is 5.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent for the BlackBerry
To me that suggests the iphone is 94.4% reliable and the blackberry is 88.8% reliable. That's just me, though.
That makes sense if you're a reseller or insurer, and you're interested in how many iPhones or Blackberrys will be sent back for replacement.
However, the consumer who only owns one such device at a time isn't interested in that probability. He's interested in the probability of this individual unit failing tomorrow. From that point of view, the iPhone is twice as likely to not-fail on any given day -- making it, to him, twice as reliable.
What if you buy DRM free MP3 music online ? Or free music available from indie bands ? You should be adding them manually to the iTunes library ? I don't think so.
Myself, I just double-click them. Since all my MP3 files are associated with iTunes by default, the app opens up, the file is imported, and it starts playing automagically.
Frankly, I don't want iTunes to automatically add MP3s whenever it sees them on my desktop, because that would mean it would try to import files that may not have finished downloading yet.
For any of you folks who have only seen some of MC's movies, don't judge his storytelling ability without reading the books first.
For those who have, read the books anyway.
There's one thing I've always admired about Crichton, and that's his willingness and ability to write on just about any subject. His thrillers cover the whole range of modern science and medicine, and while no one would call his work "hard science", it's still extremely well researched by NYT-bestseller standards.
A Giant Has Passed
Now, there's no need to poke fun at his height.
the kind that people decades from now will remember and ask each other "Do you remember where you were when Obama was elected?"
I had been watching TV for over an hour, waiting to see if Obama would get those last electoral votes, not realizing that both parties had already assumed he'd take California.
So it's rather appropriate that when someone asks me, "What were you doing when Obama was elected?" I can answer that I, just like the entire Democratic party, got tired of listening to FOX News and went to take out the trash.
normal superconductors need liquid helium temperatures, which are very hard to maintain reliably,
Although in outer space, surely that's less of a problem?
Yes, I know about factors like engine heat, the need to keep critical mechanical components above a certain temperature a la the Mars landers, and so forth. But shouldn't it still be easier to maintain superconducting temperatures in deep space?
The AC/DC version of Rock Band costs $40 for 18 songs, and you can't buy individual songs - it's all or nothing. This shit has gotta stop.
They said that about CDs (with 8-14 songs for $16, all or nothing), and AC/DC doesn't care about that, either.
Does this mean we can now construct larger antennas with greater sensing power, using fewer materials, due to knowing a larger optimal configuration than previously?
Probably not, since (a) optimal rulers of order greater than four but less than twenty have been known for some time, and (b) the [0,1,4,6] ruler is proven to be the largest perfect optimal ruler (according to the Wikipedia article).
Once yo install Vista and anti virus software, the PC is easily outperformed by a Mac with the same specs. ...unless you want to play new games, or use any other off-the-shelf software instead of (sadly) having to buy Mac software online or at an urban Apple Store somewhere.
I'm a Mac fan myself, but the chronic inability to buy software at retail grates after a while. (Fortunately, I'm computer-literate enough to find almost everything I want in downloadable formats.)
This macbook will ALWAYS be expensive. ...until the next one comes out and this one goes on clearance. Is that what you meant by being "patient"?
We need real competition, and we need to bust the teacher's unions to get the bozos out of our school system.
It's not the unions' fault; it's the low pay scale. Most people who are good at math and numbers make a more practical career out of it because the pay is better as an engineer.
Most of our country's math teachers don't understand math well enough to make it interesting. They think it is just memorizing 'math facts' and memorizing cookbook ways to solve problems.
Hah. Take it from someone who loves numbers and can't for the life of him get a classroom of teenagers to see things his way: It's not the teachers who want to turn math texts into a cookbook of algorithms, it's the students.
Fact is, math isn't natural to the human brain, unlike language or tool usage. Humans, left untutored, will discover a natural ability to count to three, and that's it. The rest of mathematics had to be invented.
The brain is an intuitive and inductive reasoning machine; mathematics is rigorously logical and deductive. It's also highly abstract, and as long as it has to be taught in schools, it will remain that way. The reason most kids think math isn't easy is because, well, it isn't.
Whatever the greatness of Penrose's discovery, he threw it all away when he started advocating the quantum gravity theory of uncomputable physics as the basis for creativity.
Bah to that. Nobel prizes are for specific discoveries, not for a person's reputation since then. You might as well say Einstein should be discredited because he changed his mind about the cosmological constant.
It's all bullshit but very interesting to observe, and as an audience you are really overestimating the Chinese government's intervention which is close to none. This is just companies chasing profits with as much regard for ethics as our own companies.
...except for a little thing called government safety regulation. As the recent milk scandal in China has demonstrated, a capitalist profit motive is a fine and good thing, as long as the government (or at least the multinationals looking to sell this stuff in the West) is doing its part to oversee legal compliance, and the press is allowed to report when it's failing to occur.
"The only way to understand and really dig on Achewood is to read it from the beginning."
Then that's a bad comic strip in my opinion. If I have to read more then 2-3 strips back to figure out wtf is going on then the author really chose the wrong medium.
I would argue that that's the only way to read a normal comic strip; however, webcomics have the unique ability to keep a complete chronological archive of strips readily available to new and old readers alike.
I stopped reading Achewood a while ago, myself -- it just wasn't as funny and offbeat as it used to be, for me. But if continuity is an issue for a comic writer, then webcomics may be exactly the place he/she needs to be.
It's too bad that you need a $2300 mac pro to make use of it as the mini has a very weak video card and the imac screens are not good for photo work.
Why should it be "too bad" that you need a professional computer to make good use of professional software? I mean, that $2300 Mac Pro is still cheaper than the Adobe software suite to which you're referring.
I seem to recall that Stavro Muller intentionally added the Beta label to one of his own restaurants, with catastrophic results.
Ask the folks in Lake Nyos. Natural CO2 escaped from a lake and killed something like 2,000 people.
Gonna be mighty hard to ask them about it, then.
That CO2 needs to be stored very securely and away from centers of population.
I believe that was exactly the idea behind burying it "3,000 meters underground into a depleted inland gas field in Altmark."
And the article doesn't mention it, but IIRC the reason for burying the waste CO2 is that it gets absorbed by the surrounding rocks and converted into harmless minerals, rather than letting it escape into the atmosphere again. Someone with more geological expertise than I have will have to explain that, though.
...I for one LIKED the ads, with its 'nothingness' agenda... Surely they would have known that this brand campaign would need TIME and COMMITMENT to have a payoff!
Maybe you missed the part where most advertisements are thirty seconds because their target audience has a very short attention span.
Or perhaps it was the fact that, when half your viewers think your ads are idiotic and irrelevant, you've done something fundamentally wrong.
Microsoft wanted an ad campaign, not a new "Seinfeld" sitcom. This whole campaign would have been better as a YouTube exclusive than anything else.
I know where my money is riding.
"Has ridden," past tense.
Your money is already in China. That's why they can afford to do this before the USA will.
Also, there's probably some kind of collusion going on. We could make a 45mpg car that has decent numbers back in the 80's, but we can't make anything comparable now? Bullshit. There's something behind the scenes.
Could it be that the cars today have tighter emissions and safety regulations, which cost efficiency and weight, respectively?
In addition, IIRC the government's forced car companies to be more accurate/realistic about their MPG ratings in the past few years, which means they no longer advertise the MPG you'd get under ideal driving and gas-saving conditions.
And google is really happy with that. They don't need to target the linux market because Mozilla is already working for them here.
The target is obviously internet explorer.
Because Mozilla doesn't work well over there?
if i want to delete an mp3 file, with my htc universal i start up my favourite file manager (total commander in my case), go to the file, open the context menu, chose "delete" and i am done. with the ipod touch i have to delete the file in the itunes on my pc, then synchronise. it sucks.
Yeah, I can see how that second approach is SO much more complicated and difficult than whatever the hell you're doing instead.