Odd Lots
- Well. Amazon (finally) pulled my name off Garth Williams’ book Baby Farm Animals. Years of polite complaints didn’t do it. Making fun of them in the comments did. Thanks to my friends Eric, Steve, and Dave for working the magic. Poor Garth can rest in peace now without having to learn x86 assembly language.
- Erik Klemetti has a good overview of the 1783-84 Laki eruption in Iceland, which caused a sulfuric haze that Benjamin Franklin said reduced the intensity of the sunlight so much that a magnifying glass could not concentrate it sufficiently to ignite paper.
- Here’s a good if technical discussion about what’s wrong with X and why Wayland almost can’t help but be better.
- Yet another force pushing print magazines into the torn-off-cover return racks of history: People are checking Facebook on their smartphones while waiting their turn in supermarket checkout lines. Good-bye to starting a story in People and then tossing the mag in the cart to finish at home.
- I don’t always agree with Stallman. But this time I sure as hell do. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Bruce Eckel pokes holes in a couple of recent SF films. I hate to think of what he might have said about Independence Day. (Thanks to Jason Bucata for the link.)
- I’m not sure that Beowulfing boxfuls of Raspberry Pi boards makes sense, but it can be done.
- As can using a Raspberry Pi to take video through a telescope.
- There will be another perigee moon on June 23. It’s not especially close as such things go; for a really close perigee moon, consider January 14, 1930, when our lesser light was only 356,397 km away. It won’t be that close again until 2257. Nice page on the topic here.
- And the sunspot count of our greater light was down to 27 this morning. This sure doesn’t look like a sunspot maximum to me.
- Tor has been publishing DRM-free ebooks for a year now, and reports that piracy has not increased as a result. They’re mostly mum on how they measure piracy rates, but it’s encouraging that a major print player would even do the experiment.
- Nice reminder that nobody died at Fukushima, and according to the UN it’s unlikely that many will even get sick. Nuclear is not the demon that Certain Parties insist it is.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · books · piracy · publishing · rpi · science
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On the Cloud, I just wrote a comment on a G+ community about the evils of subscriptions. We see them everywhere, and they sap our lifeblood. Having always resented the legal fiction that we never own the software we pay for, I very deeply resent the possibility that the lawyers and marketeers are edging us closer to an implementation of their notion that we should pay forever. My response is: what have you done for me lately?
Still, with Stallman as the reference point, I must point out that I am as I have been, a die-hard capitalist.
Nice to see that TOR has done the experiment, and even nicer that they report the results. I have always found the claims of the BSA about software piracy embarrassing. First, obviously, because they are self-serving. Second, because they display such stunning ignorance of the principles of economics: Pirated copies are not lost sales, as only a small percentage would ever use the products if they had no choice but to pay license fees. And, as should be obvious, the principle is more rigidly true, the further up the price curve the product lies.
And, with Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs), even the hazards we did see at Fukushima can be eliminated. It’s not new technology, it was developed and tested at Oak Ridge Laboratories in the 1960’s, including testing the safety features. Energy From Thorium has a lot more information.
(Plus, the process heat of LFTRs lends itself well to the production of synthetic hydrocarbons, using any convenient carbon source. The technology to do that, the Fischer-Tropsch process, is even older; the Germans were using it in World War II!)
Obviously you haven’t had the displeasure (agony) of trying to support small business IT, for which cloud services have been a wonderful innovation. Even if all you say is true about cloud services, for the average small business, cloud services work better, are more reliable, and have enabled FAR more productivity than the DIY. Just trying to maintain your own email server is a total snakepit – constantly being hacked on. For all the many evils of Gmail, it works better for email than any other system.
I haven’t ever maintained my own mail server. Mail bounces around out in the Cloud, so I’m happy to leave the server on the Cloud. However, I’ve been very happy with Thunderbird. GMail isn’t even in the ballpark. Thunderbird is here on my desktop. I control it, and it doesn’t need a great deal of controlling.
The nuttier issue about the Cloud is whether to exile your freaking word processing there. Or your spreadsheets. Or your book layout program. This makes no sense at all. Servers belong on the Cloud. Clients belong on the desktop. Productivity belongs on the desktop. If some loon driving a backhoe cuts the cable that links you to the Cloud, you’re dead in the water. I’d like something a little more robust than a spool of #24 wire between my company and bankruptcy.
… a spool of #24 wire…
That is so last millenium!
BTW – a story from when I was contracting at Motorola Cellular about 1998. The Phoenix office lost all network connection. The networking staff spent several hours rebooting routers and so on. Then someone looked out the window and noticed the guy with the backhoe.
Regarding your battle with Amazon’s bibliologists, here is a little Wikipedia piece about a Jesuit:
“a circumstance to which he is ruefully resigned.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Francis_A._Sullivan&oldid=557997025