- Greenpeace giving grades to corporations for some reason or other. I’m suspicious.
- One laptop per child sued over multiple shift key for the universal keyboard. Ooops.
- Plasma killer delayed. Of course!
- CMU releases 1.5 million book library. It’s an incredible mess and an embarrassment. I rant about it.
Click to listen:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Yuck! For a place loaded with Phds they’re quite stupid.
It makes me think they are non-western, actually. The advanced search shows books from “China, India, Egypt”. What’s interesting is their vision/mission says they want to make everything full-text-OCR-searchable… but they haven’t even attempted it. Not even putting it in PDF or HTML format, that’s just weird.
I would say maybe some first-year students got at a project that a professor threw at them to shut them up, but even first-years could do better with a HP scanner and picking up a few freeware searching algorithms.
I checked their DNS records just to be sure, and yes, they are behind cmu.edu’s domain.
Mildly scary. I wonder how much they spent to have people scan these documents in one page at a time…
You’ve gone a made up a new number…. !.5
I guess that’s when you multiply a decimal by every other decimal until you reach 1, kind of like a bazaro factorial with no end.
[Fixed. – ed.]
I believe the correct pronuciation is car-NAY-gee mellon, not car-NEE-gie. That’s the way the Carnegie Mellon voice-over guy says it in their ads on NPR anyway.
Why just images? Worthless. No search, no cut and paste, no text to speech. Garbage.
Wowie. Ulib dot org has got to be the lamest web site I have ever had the misfortune to visit. A couple of minutes there makes banging my head against the wall in the Atheism Wars seem like a worthwhile endeavor.
I typed in “A Tale of Two Cities”, and after scrolling through books with titles like “A Tale of Ten Cities” and “A Tale of Three Cities” (wtf?), I clicked on a couple of what appeared to be valid entries with the correct title.
Every blessed one of them gave me the error message “Contents – Structural Metadata not found”, followed about 30 seconds later by a TIFF viewer opening with a single blank page.
I don’t know if these guys just don’t like Charles Dickens, or if they’re total nincompoops, but whatever they’re doing, they should try something else.
I had no problem viewing the books. The plugin required is the same required by the Patent Office for viewing patents. Stop taking lessons from Limbaugh
>>The plugin is the same required by the
>>Patent Office for viewing patents.
Plugin? What plugin? I can view patents from the USPTO with no plugin just fine
http://tinyurl.com/2jt9ll
And clicking on the links at ulib dot org doesn’t give me any message about a required plugin. The pages just open automatically, one fucking page at a time (for those books that, unlike A Tale of Two Cities, actually have something in them), in Windoze Photo Gallery. I imagine (or at least I hope) that there’s some other program I could link to TIFF files that would not require me to open every fucking page individually, but why should I have to bother? No other online book archive requires me to do this, an they don’t post the books in TIFF FORMAT, of all things.
WOW. That is wrenched. I like how the popup for the alphabet popup just flickers at a seizure inducing rate when hovering over the link.
>>The plugin required
Oh, I see the reference to the plugin now. It’s on the first page only, so if you just type in the book title an go (as I did), you miss the warning. Pffft. And then you have to view the book by loading one fucking page at a time.
And ANOTHER plugin for Firefox, just to view the kind of content I can see on other sites without any plugin? No thanks. Firefox is already grinding to a dead halt with Vista (IE isn’t much better), nfw am I going to download more crap.
You gotta do better than that, Carnegie Mellonballs.
I think Project Gutenberg has about the best model — provide the text in ASCII and let fans and others port it to whatever format they want.
HA! Frustrating when you go to a supposed tech site and find a mess isn’t. I wonder why they brought out the reader / library before it was ready? I wonder why you did the same thing last week LOL!
#13 – Breaking news. You’re an idiot. Film at 11.
Sorry, couldn’t help but beat on Pedro a little more.
Correct, I own you. I just felt you needed to be beat on a little more today.
You’ve learned your lesson.