from a library student's POV...
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An IMDb for Books
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Hi. I'm employed by a library and am working on a masters in library science, but IANAL(ibrarian).
That said, I spend a lot of time around databases of books. And I'd like to respond to a couple criticisms that have been raised in previous threads as well as make some suggestions.
It is true that are reference resources for books -- Books in Print with reviews, for example. And to an extent, BIP has been replaced by Amazon -- Because BIP costs money, whereas Amazon is fast and free. Librarians in general arn't happy about an entity with a stake in selling books controlling the reviews. They'd like to see a good, free resource develop.
But then we're vexed with the question of data format. We're developing free resources which we want to be interoperable, right? There is an internationally-accepted standard (data format) for electronic storage of bibliographic records -- it's called MARC. (http://www.loc.gov/marc/) Any new system storing records of books really should use MARC -- or at least be able to export to MARC, like allmusic/allmovie.com do.
Again, on the standards front -- what about subject tracings? Yeah, in the current database there's a place for genere, but books often cross those lines -- especially when you're dealing with nonfiction books. Library of Congress puts out a massive list of approved subject headings called (approperately) the library of congreess subject headings (LCSH). Wouldn't using those be wise? Plus you could get the records from the LoC already classified, saving a lot of work and arguments as to how to classify "the diamond age."
But downloading all those records manually would suck. Luckily, there's also a standard protocol for moving bibliographic records from one place to another -- z39.50. The advantage of z39.50 here would be that the maintainer of the site could suck zillions of bibiographic records from libraries, the LOC, whoever -- as well as share their records with libraries, schools, etc. They (for the most part) wouldn't have reviews, but they would have accurate summaries and bibiographic (size, publisher, isbn, pages, etc) information. To me, that seems like it would be a good way to start getting records for the userbase to augment. Plus, there's a z39.50 perl module available for your fun and entertainment. (http://perl.z3950.org/)
I think a database like this is ABSOLUTELY needed, and hope the creators will take these standards into account as their resource develops.
Hey, I'm working on a master's in library science, and as such the issue of digital conservation is of great importance to me, particularly this semester as I'm working on digital archives.
You put the five year recommendation in quotes, so I'm assuming you're quoting either your own work or somebody elses'... Is that work publically available (in whatever langauge)? If so, where? (As I'd like to use it, heh.)
p.s. I'm in the US and studying, so don't listen to those whackos who tell you you're using the wrong word.
I was a beta-tester for intertainer in... early 98 I think. Their movies were actually mpegs *streamed* over broadband, so it's a little different. The films themselves looked pretty good. When I was testing it it worked fine, as no one else in the city had a cable modem (literally - intertainer had partnered with Cox and the intertainer folks got the cable modems a few months before actual cable internet service was available...) but when the cable floodgates opened, throughput went way down, as you might imagine.
Plus, the fact that intertainer wasn't a rights holder sort of doomed them to failure.
Actually, reading, writing, and speaking are all left brain activities. Most people would argue that written language is more so, as the syntax is much more formalized.
Granted, there's right brain parts as well: something like deciphering vocal paralanguage/intonation might be more right brained. Assimilating metaphors contained in poetry would probably be more right brain.
But in general, the left hemisphere handles all the linguistic tasks.
It's still weird to me to hear all these DARE horror stories -- stories that I've been hearing for years from all sorts of people in my age bracket. My experience with DARE was very different. I went through DARE not long after the program first started up, so perhaps the system changed. But it seems -- due to the very disparate stories that have been told here -- that individual officers still retain a lot of control over what is taught.
My experience with DARE was much more like the Harvard Study. The officer came in and told us less about the pharmacological effects of the drugs than about drug culture and -- most importantly -- pointing out that a lot of people don't do drugs, we don't need to get sucked in by peer pressure, and our friends probably won't hate us if we pass the bogart, as it means more for them.
Sure, later on the image of that seedy kid started to arise in the popular media saying "hey little girl, want to try some POT? Come on..." Which I'll agree is not the best way to protray use.
THESIS: A lot of readers today have attacked the need for DARE at all. But look at it this way: Our current legal and political system is an advisarial one. Say we have an armed robbery with mitigating circumstances. The prosecution argues for life imprisonment, the defense argues to let him go free, the two face off and the criminal winds up serving 5-10. Justice is served. It might not be the best system, but it IS the sysem for now.
On one hand, kids get a lot pressure from the media et al to do drugs. My little brother (14) just started smoking pot because enimem told him to. If that's the only message kids were getting, that's what they'd listen to. Thus, we have Officer Joe come in and take the hard line against drug use.
But if the message becomes an absurdity (pot kills), it's effectiveness is obviously hindered.
So there very well may be a place for DARE within our system, and they might want to take the "hard line" against drugs. Spreading untruths, however, is counterproductive.
Disclaimer: Obviously this argument does not counter the libritarian argument. I have no qualms with the libritarian utopia. But it would mean a complete change in legal and political convention in this country. Might be good, sure, but it would have to be COMPLETE to be effective. Pulling out this one issue out of context and applying the same arguments within the current system doesn't work. Kudos for having a coherent world view, though.
Yeah. Furthermore, it should be added that today was the first day of the SC's new session -- hundreds of cases were denied cert today. This is how it works. First throw out the frivolous stuff. I'm not going to count, but there's about thirty cases listed per page, and the list of cases they're not going to hear is about sixty pages long.
Well look at it this way: it shows us that/. is nothing if not consistant.
More ideas for MIDI palm usage.
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Pilot Synthesis
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· Score: 1
I'm getting a hand-me down palm III in a couple weeks, and its main usage will be MIDI. I planned on wiring up an interface and using one of the many sequencers available.
But what intrigued me more was midi processing of live streams. For instance, an arpeggiator. Or a MIDI delay unit. Or using the tablet to draw and send CC's in real time (fC on the X axis, Q on the Y, for example). Basic MIDI processing is pretty easy to do with an ancient uP, so I'd think the palm would have more than enough power to parse the data and spit it back out unless there was something weird in regards to the serial port's functionality. But I didn't see anything like that when rifling through Palm proggies. Anyone have applicable resources or code snippets?
On the OT side, does the ora Palm programming book cover the serial port?
The merger had come under increasing criticism because its value -- tied to Corel's stock price on Nasdaq -- has shrunk 73 percent since the deal was announced.
'nuff said.
Not really. Even now Corel's stock price is still slightly above what it was a year ago, which was higher than it was the year before.
Their boom followed the little linux-micro boom. Look at the graph for Red Hat, it looks exactly the same. Artficial boom, followed by correction. Viola.
Sure, there's problems, but the market does tend correct itself. Admittedly sometimes it takes a little waiting and when it comes, it comes violently. But still.
I have a US domain name. You know how much I paid to register it three years ago? $10. You know how much I've paid since then? Zilch. Nothing.
Were it not for those profiteering bastards at NSI, people would have used the.US domain, and we wouldn't have this whole damn domain name squatting controversy. Say I owned a store with a terribly cliched name -- let's make it the "New Leaf Bookstore." And we'll say I'm in Olympia, Washington. I'm www.newleaf.olympia.wa.us. Say there's a totally unrelated New Leaf bookstore in Tacoma. They're www.newleaf.tacoma.wa.us. How hard is that? You gotta remember a city instead of a com, org, or net. Then apply the related state and dot-us. That would SEVERELY cut down on the quibbling. Sure, there would still be a problem between me and the guy who owns the new leaf health store in Olympia, but that's a hell of a lot less of a problem than every New Leaf bookstore, health store, grain refinery and horticulture joint fighting over newleaf.com (out of curiosity, I looked it up -- turns out to be a "community market").
Remember fraud and misrepresentation laws still apply -- someone couldn't register newleaf.lubbock.tx.us and claim to be me. More over, squatting wouldn't be profitable because A) lubbock obviously isn't me and B) They'd have to buy thousands of domain names, not just three.
Moreover, the entire co-op way the US domain is put together should appeal to the hacker ethic -- there's no giant corporation holding all the strings, each region (i.e. olympia) is done by someone in the community who elected to do it. Like I said, I paid a one-time ten buck fee, but I'm in LA (california) -- lots of regions don't charge a dime. The workload is distributed.
But no, big money prevailed over reason, prices were inflated and service dissipated.
I urge you all to at least LOOK at the.us system and understand its beauty before you run off and buy a shiny new dot-com. Pisses me off when sites bounce my email address as "not a valid email address" 'cos the dumbass site admin has never heard of.us.
The folks keen on breaking MS up tell us one co. for apps, and one co. for the "operating system," i.e. Windows.
This baffles me. In the MSNBC article, MS stated that a breakup would essentially bring windows development to a standstill. This is -- (from a consumer's point of view... it's the number of toppings on the sunday, not the quality of the milk... sundries such as "integrated internet blah" get people to fork over the cash, as we've seen) -- entirely correct. I realize that's what some people *want*, but bear with my train of logic here for a moment.
The phrase "operating system" has become rather amorfous to say the least -- and this bleeds over into the GNU/Linux vs Linux debate. When we talk about the "windows operating system," we obviously mean more than just the kernel. We're talking about the entire desktop enviornment at the very least. And that's where things start to get a little fuzzy.
Desktop enviornments contain applications. What kind of hard and fast rules do we put on those applications? notepad (or vi) can be bundled, but word (or emacs) can't? What about wordpad (dunno, pico or something)?
Yes, low level functionality can be cleaned up, but OS (in the windows sense of the word) "improvements" consist almost exclusively of piling on the goodies -- which are applications. The linux distros compete almost exclusively on this basis. Even the kernel itself -- I mean, honestly I see more reason to integrate a browser into a desktop shell than to integrate a http server into the kernel.
So let's do some serious thinking as to what "operating system" entails (realistically, here people) prior to calling for a breakup. Also worthy of consideration is that this definition of "operating system" will be written into law.
Right. That's perfectly consistant with the law and this ruling. Fair use breaks down at step five, because someone else does the dirty work. MP3 -- as has been noted here many times -- is just a format. Say you own a VHS copy of Citizen Kane. You love it. It's your favorite movie. It's the only reason you still have a VCR, having moved mostly to DVD. If you had the DVDR and a video capture device, you could make your own (admittedly low quality) DVD, and dump that VCR. No problem.
But what if *I*, seeing an unbridled market niche to exploit, decide to start making DVDs of classic movies that havn't been released to DVD yet? No extra DVD features or anything, just a spiffy package and a VHS-quality recording on DVD. To make sure no one gets ripped off, I make you trade in your (original) VHS copy of said movie.
The problem isn't in your right to own a DVD of your VHS tape, it's in ME doing the job. The owners of the IP have the right to reissue their goods in new mediums to keep sucking cash out of consumers. That doesn't impede fair use. It's unfair use in my case, because I'm undercutting the market that they have been granted a monopoly on by copyright law.
Can you dig it?
What it MIGHT affect is the companies doing "put your old records on a CD" type audio restoration work -- that's what I'd be interested in seeing.
[ How long is it going to be before we get a real MP3 broadcasting radio statio playing MP3's of mainstream artists?... I see no possible justification to stop some website broadcasting MP3s if they can get a license. Why do I get the feeling that RIAA really don't want that sort of license to arrive? ]
As a previous poster pointed out, mainstream web casting is happening now. And the RIAA has no apprehension over such licenses -- they're the ones that issue them, obviously. Sold their first one over a year ago.
If you'd like to buy a license, contact the RIAA's Steve Marks at 202-775-0101 or smarks@riaa.com. They're currently still ironing out the details of a per-use license, but blanket licenses are available now.
Dunno if they'll respond though -- I've sent a number of emails to no avail.
I think you're missing out the original author's point here.
Say there's a situation in which the "volume" rises. As you said, you got volume. If you assert yourself, you're considered a rational, thinking individual. If she asserts herself, she's considered a bitch, "getting emotional" or "it must be that time of the month." Or worse still, "she's so cute when she's mad," or something to that effect.
Now I've seen this happen, and no doubt you've seen it happen as well. Women who speak up for themselves are -- in general -- treated with a cold shoulder if they're listened to at all.
In the business world you're told to play the game, walk the walk, talk the talk. You have to play a role. And thus, as a woman, your role is to play servile. A lot of women throughout history have found that it's easier, less dangerous, and often more productive to just play dumb, as it were. And it wasn't until the feminist movement really came along that women on a large scale said they weren't going to be treated as chattel any more and made a stand -- regardless of what the concequences may be.
But the ERA still died, didn't it?
_This_ is what the enviornment consists of. And thus -- in answer to your query -- yes, the problem _is_ the enviornment.
As a writer (and all around media super star!), you're well aware that _how_ a person utilizes language has a tremendous impact on how their message is recieved.
Words like "geek" and "geek pride" have been fantastically succesful and well recieved within this community, and I think they will continue to work well (though with enough hype and commodification, just about anything can lose its power.)
The point is, using a phrase like "geek" casually in this context would ultimately take attention AWAY from the issue at hand (the protection of the kids) and turn it elsewhere. Conciousness raising is fine and dandy, but what you're about to do is essentially a damage control -- it's a fine line to tread, but you've got to stick to the immediate problem.
This is best illustrated with examples:
Say gay students were getting beaten up at school (happens). Were I to meet with school officials to discuss the issue I wouldn't say "But ma'am, the fact of the matter is that these faggots have done nothing to instigate, etc., etc."
Faggot -- while perfectly acceptable within the gay community -- is not something you would use in a formal situation with outsiders to discuss what amounts to problem resolution. It has been -- and continues to be -- a perjorative term used by outsiders to label the group. Sure, it conjures up images of how we've treated gays, but it diverts attention from the immediate issue and further confuses things.
Replace gay with black and faggot with nigger, it's even worse (though the context and the legacy of the words is admittedly a bit different than the geek parallel -- which is why I think the faggot thing works best.)
You are entirely correct that the use of the term "geek" has gotten a lot of good press for the whole movement. But same for faggot, and moreso for queer. Neither of which would I employ in a situation like the above.
Plus -- god forbid -- someone might *not* know what you're talking about. While undoubtely a number of their reps have read the slashdot postings, chances are that you're going to (if not now, eventually) wind up talking to someone who's "out of the loop" and is old enough to have an image of "geek" that has little to do with the technophiles we know and love. You know, carny alcoholic who's brain has turned to mush and bites the head off a chicken?
First off, I'd like to thank Mr. Katz for yet another well written and thought provoking essay. Come on folks, Katz bashing is passe. And at least he got your synapses firing, right?
The article itself echos many of the sentiments I've seen cropping up lately in tech journals, fururist rags, art forums and marxist zines -- but they all share a common problem.
It's the cluetrain issue.
That is to say, "change or die! change or die!" might be a fun mantra to chant, but it really doesn't put us on any sort of PATH. Vague notions of interactivity are put forth (a la cluetrain), but that's it.
I.e. Okay, change. Change is good. What are we changing to? And no cop out answers like "more focus on the customer" or "strive to counteract cultural alienation." Solid examples here, people. What could a publisher do to "ride the internet wave" and become a better company? That's not rhetorical or sarcastic, I'm seriously interested in replies.
The problem with altering the nature of publishing houses (be they paper, film, record, whatever) is that they're hocking _two_ products: The actual good, and the name. Stephen King pushed a lot of bits online because he was Stephen King. Or the people who go see a Cohen Bros film, or Star Wars, or buy the new Pink Floyd CD. That is to say, the product does not stand entirely by the measure of it's own quality, it intermingles with a greater cultural legacy, even if that legacy is illusory marketing hype. It becomes a cultural phenomona. Nor is this necessarily bad, it gives us (the members of the culture) something to tie us together.
Though it may seem banal and hollow in retrospect.
Another reader pointed out the obvious: There's really no point in changing, seeing as we have zilpo idea where we're gonna be in oh say five years.
Katz chastized online papers for not providing something "more." But creating more product costs more money -- even if it's just hiring additional researchers to find and link to existant relevant information. The larger online newspapers are supported by their print ventures. How would the money roll in otherwise? I mean, Slashdot wasn't exactly a media empire prior to the influx of venture capital.
Katz hit the nail on the head: the King thing was a PR move. Marketing hype. But so are most websites, and virtually all TV shows. But we're told to think harder what the internet "means" to business. Okay.
Radio is grand. It lets air traffic controllers keep planes from coliding, lets kids play with toy cars, transmits tcp/ip packets, opens garage doors and keeps truck drivers from getting lonely on the long haul. But when most people think radio, they think of, you know, radio. Advertising through "entertainment."
And that's what I've seen happen to a lot of the internet (though I tend to associate the downfall with netscape's introduction of colored backgrounds) -- it's become corporatized. So what? The good stuff's still there, as are ham radio fiends. Don't like it? Learn to live with it.
I don't mean to come off as overly nihilistic here, but virtually everyone I know who uses the internet thinks of it as TV with a buy button, and a neat way to save on stamps. Some for the pirated music/software.
But they're ordinary folks, they're not looking for a paradigm shift. I'll concede, maybe they are and they don't know it -- but that's a dangerous, flawed and elietist (though I too suffer from that disease) line of reasoning.
Dear lord I've become incoherent. So pray tell: what exactly _should_ industry be doing? At least the cluetrain folks had the balls to say "beats us." If we're just going to rehash other people's theories, we should at least _contribute_ something to their development, y'know?
Well it's like this: The about section of the program (and indeed plastered onto the window itself) is copyright Nullsoft, Inc... Not Justin Frankel. So It'd be kind of hard to argue otherwise.
Okay, before everyone hops on this really popular anti-patent train, let's make sure we note that the sequences can't be patented. Yes, independent companies are gonna beat out the human genome project and have been filing patents. But the patents arn't on the sequences themselves, they're on applications. Whether these applications have to do with more efficient methods of genome-unraveling or whether they have to do with specific uses of the patterns they've found, it's NOT the actual sequences.
In a number of countries it's already quite specifically illegal to attempt to put intellectual property restraints on anything involving human genes. US is considering some laws as well, but let's just get all the facts straight before panicing, okay?
When digging through published UN reports on technology transfer, "how to modernize your nation in 12 easy steps," etc., I was quite suprised to find repeated references to and endorsements for the FSF and the GNU project, as well as some BSD stuff.
This was all in the pre-linux age, mind you.
It is the position of the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank that software development *for local consumption* is a darn good way to kick start a high-tech econcomy. Some old machines, a GNU development suite, create a market and the direct foreign investment will come with their reams of fibere optic they can't wait to lay.
I mean, this is what South Africa's doing right now. Their economy's still in the shitter, but at least they're getting some cool infrastructure from the outside.
Okay, since so far no one has actually talked about what this software actually DOES, I'd like to take the time to clear up a few misconceptions that are floating about by way of analogy.
First, keep in mind that Sibelius (the software, not the really keen composer guy) is for scoring. It is not a synthesis program. It does not create the sounds. It will send (via midi) the approperate notation to a device of your chosing -- if you send it to your sound blaster, it will sound like your sound blaster. It came highly reccomended to me from an Acorn user across the pond, I used the first windows version (it might be a bit different now, don't know) at school a few times. It is excellent at what it does.
Getting music done used to be a lot like getting a book published. First you write the story out on a big yellow pad. Then you send it to the typesetter, then to the printer. The process was a lot the same for music -- you hired a composer, who'd give you a hand written sheet back. Then you'd take it to someone who'd do the equivilent of typesetting for music, to make it nice and readable, looking like your average piece of sheet music instead of a scribbled on broadside of notation. Then you take it to the orchestra and they play it.
Sibelius is for the second step. You click the notes on the staff, add the approperate dynamics markings, and wind up with a really spiffy looking slab of sheet music. It also allows you to play this spiffy looking slab of sheet music via a midi device to make sure you didn't fsck it up.
This is where the magic comes in, which some people here have read too much into. While midi has 127 steps of velocity, sheet music does not. you've got your fortes, you've got your pianissimos, but this doesn't translate very well when sending to a midi device. Obviously there needs to be some interpolation. Same with trills, crecendos, etc. A real player doesn't play the music in it's quantized form, so some timing variations are introduced.
This is really handy for someone who's laying out a score, they can quickly discern whether or not they need to change the notation to something different.
The program is essentially desktop publishing for scores -- and a darn good one. There's a lot of great stuff out there in the synthesis world (sms!), but let's not mistake Sibelius for what it is not.
Okay, since a few people have disagreed with the original author's statements, I'm gonna have to back him or her up here.
Sure, you can map velocity, aftertouch or whatever other cc's you so desire to adsr, filter cutoff, res, etc. But this has very little to do with timberal changes in real instruments. We're not talking about the groovy havoc it can wreck on a sawtooth wave here.
The attack time on your k2k will manipulate an amplitude envelope. You could make it take longer to get to the loudest point, but the harmonic structure of the sound wouldn't be altercated.
On a violin, a slow attack will be varied by four factors that affect not only the amplitude, but the timbre. Where you put the bow, at what angle you hold the bow, how hard you press the bow against the strings, and how fast you move the bow. All these will change dramatically during an attack, and the sound will change accordingly. The k2k will just make the same sound get louder at a different rate, as opposed to changing the timbre -- which is what the original poster was trying to say.
This isn't to say that you can't get a damn good violin sound out of a k2k -- you can, as with any sampler. It's just kind of dull and lifeless, which is why it's used for soundtrack work and not symphonies.
I realize that if you went out of your way you could set up another adsr from gate to filter, and this would give a different sound, but not the right sound. You could have different samples linked to velocity, and this would solve part of the problem, but you'd run out of memory before you could do up a real good one, and then you'd only have taken care of one of our aformentioned problems.
Finally, with stringed instruments, you have a question of where to play the note. Viola part. Open G, or just a fifth up on the C string? Which one you play will produce a very different resonation within the body of the instrument. You pick which one to use depending on what notes are around it, and there's no way to control that via synths at this point in time.
Looking forward, all this stuff can eventually be taken care of via computers. But let's not underestimate the monumental task at hand, even for one instrument.
the Mumia and Kevin cases have VERY little in common with each other than some surface level stuff and the "free kevin" campaign... coopted from the "free mumia" campaign.
First, there's less evidence against Mumia than against Kevin. It was right out in the open, yes. And everyone who saw it had dramatically different stories, from what people were wearing to how many people were on the scene to where they were standing. The people who testified that it _was_ mumia didn't originally have him as the shooter in their dispositions, then had him shooting from the wrong direction, all sorts of oddities. But not all that odd considering the witnesses were being threatened with drug and prostitution charges. This obviously doesn't mean Mumia _didn't_ do it. But just about everyone who looks into the whole story will concede that there's a reasonable doubt.
The point of the Mumia supporters, however, is that he didn't get a real trial. On the miscarage of justice scale, Kevin's trial pales in comparison to Mumia's. He chose to represent himself, and was then thrown in detention and not allowed to appear. I mean, really, look into the trial, even if only for entertainment's sake. It's honestly worth your time.
But most notably, Mumia hasn't played the "poor me" card. He's said very little about his own case, instead chosing to comment on systematic and institutional issues. I (and most people, I think) expect someone who's innocent to go around constantly wailing their head off about how they're innocent, etc. If they didn't engage in such actions, they're probably guilty and just trying to divert attention from the issue at hand. Thus I was pretty anti-Mumia at the start. He's constantly said "look, I gave my testimony, and nothing has changed... onto the balkan conflict, etc."
Which brings us to perhaps the most poignant difference between Kevin and Mumia. Mumia is a really bright guy -- well read and a great speaker. He's made a lot of people stop and think about prisons and the justice system -- Kevin didn't do this, and Goldstein was only able to do so on a superficial level by holding up a neon characture of Kevin. And that particular message was poorly constructed and delivered to a small community.
But enough babble. Please, read _Live from Death Row_ or something. Available at your local public library. Like I said, worth the effort.
"We have word that the PacketStorm site has not been deleted and that Harvard University will be supplying Ken Williams with a back up copy of the site. "
Slashdot Mirror
Hi. I'm employed by a library and am working on a masters in library science, but IANAL(ibrarian).
That said, I spend a lot of time around databases of books. And I'd like to respond to a couple criticisms that have been raised in previous threads as well as make some suggestions.
It is true that are reference resources for books -- Books in Print with reviews, for example. And to an extent, BIP has been replaced by Amazon -- Because BIP costs money, whereas Amazon is fast and free. Librarians in general arn't happy about an entity with a stake in selling books controlling the reviews. They'd like to see a good, free resource develop.
But then we're vexed with the question of data format. We're developing free resources which we want to be interoperable, right? There is an internationally-accepted standard (data format) for electronic storage of bibliographic records -- it's called MARC. (http://www.loc.gov/marc/) Any new system storing records of books really should use MARC -- or at least be able to export to MARC, like allmusic/allmovie.com do.
Again, on the standards front -- what about subject tracings? Yeah, in the current database there's a place for genere, but books often cross those lines -- especially when you're dealing with nonfiction books. Library of Congress puts out a massive list of approved subject headings called (approperately) the library of congreess subject headings (LCSH). Wouldn't using those be wise? Plus you could get the records from the LoC already classified, saving a lot of work and arguments as to how to classify "the diamond age."
But downloading all those records manually would suck. Luckily, there's also a standard protocol for moving bibliographic records from one place to another -- z39.50. The advantage of z39.50 here would be that the maintainer of the site could suck zillions of bibiographic records from libraries, the LOC, whoever -- as well as share their records with libraries, schools, etc. They (for the most part) wouldn't have reviews, but they would have accurate summaries and bibiographic (size, publisher, isbn, pages, etc) information. To me, that seems like it would be a good way to start getting records for the userbase to augment. Plus, there's a z39.50 perl module available for your fun and entertainment. (http://perl.z3950.org/)
I think a database like this is ABSOLUTELY needed, and hope the creators will take these standards into account as their resource develops.
> Download it and copy at will, it's FREE.
Actually, even the free version of Solaris is licensed per-CPU. So you can download at will, but certainly not copy.
Beauty. Thanks!
Hey, I'm working on a master's in library science, and as such the issue of digital conservation is of great importance to me, particularly this semester as I'm working on digital archives.
You put the five year recommendation in quotes, so I'm assuming you're quoting either your own work or somebody elses'... Is that work publically available (in whatever langauge)? If so, where? (As I'd like to use it, heh.)
p.s. I'm in the US and studying, so don't listen to those whackos who tell you you're using the wrong word.
I was a beta-tester for intertainer in... early 98 I think. Their movies were actually mpegs *streamed* over broadband, so it's a little different. The films themselves looked pretty good. When I was testing it it worked fine, as no one else in the city had a cable modem (literally - intertainer had partnered with Cox and the intertainer folks got the cable modems a few months before actual cable internet service was available...) but when the cable floodgates opened, throughput went way down, as you might imagine.
Plus, the fact that intertainer wasn't a rights holder sort of doomed them to failure.
Actually, reading, writing, and speaking are all left brain activities. Most people would argue that written language is more so, as the syntax is much more formalized.
Granted, there's right brain parts as well: something like deciphering vocal paralanguage/intonation might be more right brained. Assimilating metaphors contained in poetry would probably be more right brain.
But in general, the left hemisphere handles all the linguistic tasks.
My experience with DARE was much more like the Harvard Study. The officer came in and told us less about the pharmacological effects of the drugs than about drug culture and -- most importantly -- pointing out that a lot of people don't do drugs, we don't need to get sucked in by peer pressure, and our friends probably won't hate us if we pass the bogart, as it means more for them.
Sure, later on the image of that seedy kid started to arise in the popular media saying "hey little girl, want to try some POT? Come on..." Which I'll agree is not the best way to protray use.
THESIS: A lot of readers today have attacked the need for DARE at all. But look at it this way: Our current legal and political system is an advisarial one. Say we have an armed robbery with mitigating circumstances. The prosecution argues for life imprisonment, the defense argues to let him go free, the two face off and the criminal winds up serving 5-10. Justice is served. It might not be the best system, but it IS the sysem for now.
On one hand, kids get a lot pressure from the media et al to do drugs. My little brother (14) just started smoking pot because enimem told him to. If that's the only message kids were getting, that's what they'd listen to. Thus, we have Officer Joe come in and take the hard line against drug use.
But if the message becomes an absurdity (pot kills), it's effectiveness is obviously hindered.
So there very well may be a place for DARE within our system, and they might want to take the "hard line" against drugs. Spreading untruths, however, is counterproductive.
Disclaimer: Obviously this argument does not counter the libritarian argument. I have no qualms with the libritarian utopia. But it would mean a complete change in legal and political convention in this country. Might be good, sure, but it would have to be COMPLETE to be effective. Pulling out this one issue out of context and applying the same arguments within the current system doesn't work. Kudos for having a coherent world view, though.
Yeah. Furthermore, it should be added that today was the first day of the SC's new session -- hundreds of cases were denied cert today. This is how it works. First throw out the frivolous stuff. I'm not going to count, but there's about thirty cases listed per page, and the list of cases they're not going to hear is about sixty pages long.
Do the math.
Well look at it this way: it shows us that /. is nothing if not consistant.
But what intrigued me more was midi processing of live streams. For instance, an arpeggiator. Or a MIDI delay unit. Or using the tablet to draw and send CC's in real time (fC on the X axis, Q on the Y, for example). Basic MIDI processing is pretty easy to do with an ancient uP, so I'd think the palm would have more than enough power to parse the data and spit it back out unless there was something weird in regards to the serial port's functionality. But I didn't see anything like that when rifling through Palm proggies. Anyone have applicable resources or code snippets?
On the OT side, does the ora Palm programming book cover the serial port?
Thus I'm burning Karma in hope of a response.
'nuff said.
Not really. Even now Corel's stock price is still slightly above what it was a year ago, which was higher than it was the year before.
Their boom followed the little linux-micro boom. Look at the graph for Red Hat, it looks exactly the same. Artficial boom, followed by correction. Viola.
Sure, there's problems, but the market does tend correct itself. Admittedly sometimes it takes a little waiting and when it comes, it comes violently. But still.
Tea, anyone?
Were it not for those profiteering bastards at NSI, people would have used the .US domain, and we wouldn't have this whole damn domain name squatting controversy. Say I owned a store with a terribly cliched name -- let's make it the "New Leaf Bookstore." And we'll say I'm in Olympia, Washington. I'm www.newleaf.olympia.wa.us. Say there's a totally unrelated New Leaf bookstore in Tacoma. They're www.newleaf.tacoma.wa.us. How hard is that? You gotta remember a city instead of a com, org, or net. Then apply the related state and dot-us. That would SEVERELY cut down on the quibbling. Sure, there would still be a problem between me and the guy who owns the new leaf health store in Olympia, but that's a hell of a lot less of a problem than every New Leaf bookstore, health store, grain refinery and horticulture joint fighting over newleaf.com (out of curiosity, I looked it up -- turns out to be a "community market").
Remember fraud and misrepresentation laws still apply -- someone couldn't register newleaf.lubbock.tx.us and claim to be me. More over, squatting wouldn't be profitable because A) lubbock obviously isn't me and B) They'd have to buy thousands of domain names, not just three.
Moreover, the entire co-op way the US domain is put together should appeal to the hacker ethic -- there's no giant corporation holding all the strings, each region (i.e. olympia) is done by someone in the community who elected to do it. Like I said, I paid a one-time ten buck fee, but I'm in LA (california) -- lots of regions don't charge a dime. The workload is distributed.
But no, big money prevailed over reason, prices were inflated and service dissipated.
I urge you all to at least LOOK at the .us system and understand its beauty before you run off and buy a shiny new dot-com. Pisses me off when sites bounce my email address as "not a valid email address" 'cos the dumbass site admin has never heard of .us.
Whew! Bitterness vented. I thank you.
This baffles me. In the MSNBC article, MS stated that a breakup would essentially bring windows development to a standstill. This is -- (from a consumer's point of view... it's the number of toppings on the sunday, not the quality of the milk... sundries such as "integrated internet blah" get people to fork over the cash, as we've seen) -- entirely correct. I realize that's what some people *want*, but bear with my train of logic here for a moment.
The phrase "operating system" has become rather amorfous to say the least -- and this bleeds over into the GNU/Linux vs Linux debate. When we talk about the "windows operating system," we obviously mean more than just the kernel. We're talking about the entire desktop enviornment at the very least. And that's where things start to get a little fuzzy.
Desktop enviornments contain applications. What kind of hard and fast rules do we put on those applications? notepad (or vi) can be bundled, but word (or emacs) can't? What about wordpad (dunno, pico or something)?
Yes, low level functionality can be cleaned up, but OS (in the windows sense of the word) "improvements" consist almost exclusively of piling on the goodies -- which are applications. The linux distros compete almost exclusively on this basis. Even the kernel itself -- I mean, honestly I see more reason to integrate a browser into a desktop shell than to integrate a http server into the kernel.
So let's do some serious thinking as to what "operating system" entails (realistically, here people) prior to calling for a breakup. Also worthy of consideration is that this definition of "operating system" will be written into law.
And now my friends, to bed.
But what if *I*, seeing an unbridled market niche to exploit, decide to start making DVDs of classic movies that havn't been released to DVD yet? No extra DVD features or anything, just a spiffy package and a VHS-quality recording on DVD. To make sure no one gets ripped off, I make you trade in your (original) VHS copy of said movie.
The problem isn't in your right to own a DVD of your VHS tape, it's in ME doing the job. The owners of the IP have the right to reissue their goods in new mediums to keep sucking cash out of consumers. That doesn't impede fair use. It's unfair use in my case, because I'm undercutting the market that they have been granted a monopoly on by copyright law.
Can you dig it?
What it MIGHT affect is the companies doing "put your old records on a CD" type audio restoration work -- that's what I'd be interested in seeing.
As a previous poster pointed out, mainstream web casting is happening now. And the RIAA has no apprehension over such licenses -- they're the ones that issue them, obviously. Sold their first one over a year ago.
If you'd like to buy a license, contact the RIAA's Steve Marks at 202-775-0101 or smarks@riaa.com. They're currently still ironing out the details of a per-use license, but blanket licenses are available now.
Dunno if they'll respond though -- I've sent a number of emails to no avail.
I think you're missing out the original author's point here.
Say there's a situation in which the "volume" rises. As you said, you got volume. If you assert yourself, you're considered a rational, thinking individual. If she asserts herself, she's considered a bitch, "getting emotional" or "it must be that time of the month." Or worse still, "she's so cute when she's mad," or something to that effect.
Now I've seen this happen, and no doubt you've seen it happen as well. Women who speak up for themselves are -- in general -- treated with a cold shoulder if they're listened to at all.
In the business world you're told to play the game, walk the walk, talk the talk. You have to play a role. And thus, as a woman, your role is to play servile. A lot of women throughout history have found that it's easier, less dangerous, and often more productive to just play dumb, as it were. And it wasn't until the feminist movement really came along that women on a large scale said they weren't going to be treated as chattel any more and made a stand -- regardless of what the concequences may be.
But the ERA still died, didn't it?
_This_ is what the enviornment consists of. And thus -- in answer to your query -- yes, the problem _is_ the enviornment.
And it's not just something one can leave.
Words like "geek" and "geek pride" have been fantastically succesful and well recieved within this community, and I think they will continue to work well (though with enough hype and commodification, just about anything can lose its power.)
The point is, using a phrase like "geek" casually in this context would ultimately take attention AWAY from the issue at hand (the protection of the kids) and turn it elsewhere. Conciousness raising is fine and dandy, but what you're about to do is essentially a damage control -- it's a fine line to tread, but you've got to stick to the immediate problem.
This is best illustrated with examples:
Say gay students were getting beaten up at school (happens). Were I to meet with school officials to discuss the issue I wouldn't say "But ma'am, the fact of the matter is that these faggots have done nothing to instigate, etc., etc."
Faggot -- while perfectly acceptable within the gay community -- is not something you would use in a formal situation with outsiders to discuss what amounts to problem resolution. It has been -- and continues to be -- a perjorative term used by outsiders to label the group. Sure, it conjures up images of how we've treated gays, but it diverts attention from the immediate issue and further confuses things.
Replace gay with black and faggot with nigger, it's even worse (though the context and the legacy of the words is admittedly a bit different than the geek parallel -- which is why I think the faggot thing works best.)
You are entirely correct that the use of the term "geek" has gotten a lot of good press for the whole movement. But same for faggot, and moreso for queer. Neither of which would I employ in a situation like the above.
Plus -- god forbid -- someone might *not* know what you're talking about. While undoubtely a number of their reps have read the slashdot postings, chances are that you're going to (if not now, eventually) wind up talking to someone who's "out of the loop" and is old enough to have an image of "geek" that has little to do with the technophiles we know and love. You know, carny alcoholic who's brain has turned to mush and bites the head off a chicken?
I fear a situation like _that_!
The article itself echos many of the sentiments I've seen cropping up lately in tech journals, fururist rags, art forums and marxist zines -- but they all share a common problem.
It's the cluetrain issue.
That is to say, "change or die! change or die!" might be a fun mantra to chant, but it really doesn't put us on any sort of PATH. Vague notions of interactivity are put forth (a la cluetrain), but that's it.
I.e. Okay, change. Change is good. What are we changing to? And no cop out answers like "more focus on the customer" or "strive to counteract cultural alienation." Solid examples here, people. What could a publisher do to "ride the internet wave" and become a better company? That's not rhetorical or sarcastic, I'm seriously interested in replies.
The problem with altering the nature of publishing houses (be they paper, film, record, whatever) is that they're hocking _two_ products: The actual good, and the name. Stephen King pushed a lot of bits online because he was Stephen King. Or the people who go see a Cohen Bros film, or Star Wars, or buy the new Pink Floyd CD. That is to say, the product does not stand entirely by the measure of it's own quality, it intermingles with a greater cultural legacy, even if that legacy is illusory marketing hype. It becomes a cultural phenomona. Nor is this necessarily bad, it gives us (the members of the culture) something to tie us together.
Though it may seem banal and hollow in retrospect.
Another reader pointed out the obvious: There's really no point in changing, seeing as we have zilpo idea where we're gonna be in oh say five years.
Katz chastized online papers for not providing something "more." But creating more product costs more money -- even if it's just hiring additional researchers to find and link to existant relevant information. The larger online newspapers are supported by their print ventures. How would the money roll in otherwise? I mean, Slashdot wasn't exactly a media empire prior to the influx of venture capital.
Katz hit the nail on the head: the King thing was a PR move. Marketing hype. But so are most websites, and virtually all TV shows. But we're told to think harder what the internet "means" to business. Okay.
Radio is grand. It lets air traffic controllers keep planes from coliding, lets kids play with toy cars, transmits tcp/ip packets, opens garage doors and keeps truck drivers from getting lonely on the long haul. But when most people think radio, they think of, you know, radio. Advertising through "entertainment."
And that's what I've seen happen to a lot of the internet (though I tend to associate the downfall with netscape's introduction of colored backgrounds) -- it's become corporatized. So what? The good stuff's still there, as are ham radio fiends. Don't like it? Learn to live with it.
I don't mean to come off as overly nihilistic here, but virtually everyone I know who uses the internet thinks of it as TV with a buy button, and a neat way to save on stamps. Some for the pirated music/software.
But they're ordinary folks, they're not looking for a paradigm shift. I'll concede, maybe they are and they don't know it -- but that's a dangerous, flawed and elietist (though I too suffer from that disease) line of reasoning.
Dear lord I've become incoherent. So pray tell: what exactly _should_ industry be doing? At least the cluetrain folks had the balls to say "beats us." If we're just going to rehash other people's theories, we should at least _contribute_ something to their development, y'know?
Well it's like this: The about section of the program (and indeed plastered onto the window itself) is copyright Nullsoft, Inc... Not Justin Frankel. So It'd be kind of hard to argue otherwise.
In a number of countries it's already quite specifically illegal to attempt to put intellectual property restraints on anything involving human genes. US is considering some laws as well, but let's just get all the facts straight before panicing, okay?
This was all in the pre-linux age, mind you.
It is the position of the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank that software development *for local consumption* is a darn good way to kick start a high-tech econcomy. Some old machines, a GNU development suite, create a market and the direct foreign investment will come with their reams of fibere optic they can't wait to lay.
I mean, this is what South Africa's doing right now. Their economy's still in the shitter, but at least they're getting some cool infrastructure from the outside.
First, keep in mind that Sibelius (the software, not the really keen composer guy) is for scoring. It is not a synthesis program. It does not create the sounds. It will send (via midi) the approperate notation to a device of your chosing -- if you send it to your sound blaster, it will sound like your sound blaster. It came highly reccomended to me from an Acorn user across the pond, I used the first windows version (it might be a bit different now, don't know) at school a few times. It is excellent at what it does.
Getting music done used to be a lot like getting a book published. First you write the story out on a big yellow pad. Then you send it to the typesetter, then to the printer. The process was a lot the same for music -- you hired a composer, who'd give you a hand written sheet back. Then you'd take it to someone who'd do the equivilent of typesetting for music, to make it nice and readable, looking like your average piece of sheet music instead of a scribbled on broadside of notation. Then you take it to the orchestra and they play it.
Sibelius is for the second step. You click the notes on the staff, add the approperate dynamics markings, and wind up with a really spiffy looking slab of sheet music. It also allows you to play this spiffy looking slab of sheet music via a midi device to make sure you didn't fsck it up.
This is where the magic comes in, which some people here have read too much into. While midi has 127 steps of velocity, sheet music does not. you've got your fortes, you've got your pianissimos, but this doesn't translate very well when sending to a midi device. Obviously there needs to be some interpolation. Same with trills, crecendos, etc. A real player doesn't play the music in it's quantized form, so some timing variations are introduced.
This is really handy for someone who's laying out a score, they can quickly discern whether or not they need to change the notation to something different.
The program is essentially desktop publishing for scores -- and a darn good one. There's a lot of great stuff out there in the synthesis world (sms!), but let's not mistake Sibelius for what it is not.
Sure, you can map velocity, aftertouch or whatever other cc's you so desire to adsr, filter cutoff, res, etc. But this has very little to do with timberal changes in real instruments. We're not talking about the groovy havoc it can wreck on a sawtooth wave here.
The attack time on your k2k will manipulate an amplitude envelope. You could make it take longer to get to the loudest point, but the harmonic structure of the sound wouldn't be altercated.
On a violin, a slow attack will be varied by four factors that affect not only the amplitude, but the timbre. Where you put the bow, at what angle you hold the bow, how hard you press the bow against the strings, and how fast you move the bow. All these will change dramatically during an attack, and the sound will change accordingly. The k2k will just make the same sound get louder at a different rate, as opposed to changing the timbre -- which is what the original poster was trying to say.
This isn't to say that you can't get a damn good violin sound out of a k2k -- you can, as with any sampler. It's just kind of dull and lifeless, which is why it's used for soundtrack work and not symphonies.
I realize that if you went out of your way you could set up another adsr from gate to filter, and this would give a different sound, but not the right sound. You could have different samples linked to velocity, and this would solve part of the problem, but you'd run out of memory before you could do up a real good one, and then you'd only have taken care of one of our aformentioned problems.
Finally, with stringed instruments, you have a question of where to play the note. Viola part. Open G, or just a fifth up on the C string? Which one you play will produce a very different resonation within the body of the instrument. You pick which one to use depending on what notes are around it, and there's no way to control that via synths at this point in time.
Looking forward, all this stuff can eventually be taken care of via computers. But let's not underestimate the monumental task at hand, even for one instrument.
(anyone insterested in starting a project?)
First, there's less evidence against Mumia than against Kevin. It was right out in the open, yes. And everyone who saw it had dramatically different stories, from what people were wearing to how many people were on the scene to where they were standing. The people who testified that it _was_ mumia didn't originally have him as the shooter in their dispositions, then had him shooting from the wrong direction, all sorts of oddities. But not all that odd considering the witnesses were being threatened with drug and prostitution charges. This obviously doesn't mean Mumia _didn't_ do it. But just about everyone who looks into the whole story will concede that there's a reasonable doubt.
The point of the Mumia supporters, however, is that he didn't get a real trial. On the miscarage of justice scale, Kevin's trial pales in comparison to Mumia's. He chose to represent himself, and was then thrown in detention and not allowed to appear. I mean, really, look into the trial, even if only for entertainment's sake. It's honestly worth your time.
But most notably, Mumia hasn't played the "poor me" card. He's said very little about his own case, instead chosing to comment on systematic and institutional issues. I (and most people, I think) expect someone who's innocent to go around constantly wailing their head off about how they're innocent, etc. If they didn't engage in such actions, they're probably guilty and just trying to divert attention from the issue at hand. Thus I was pretty anti-Mumia at the start. He's constantly said "look, I gave my testimony, and nothing has changed... onto the balkan conflict, etc."
Which brings us to perhaps the most poignant difference between Kevin and Mumia. Mumia is a really bright guy -- well read and a great speaker. He's made a lot of people stop and think about prisons and the justice system -- Kevin didn't do this, and Goldstein was only able to do so on a superficial level by holding up a neon characture of Kevin. And that particular message was poorly constructed and delivered to a small community.
But enough babble. Please, read _Live from Death Row_ or something. Available at your local public library. Like I said, worth the effort.
"We have word that the PacketStorm site has not been deleted and that Harvard University will be supplying Ken Williams with a back up copy of the site. "
-- as yet unconfirmed, from www.hackernews.com