IT News

by Cliopatria

Wired.com provides a couple of short IT stories today. Each I find somewhat disconcerting, though it’s quite possible my feelings are misplaced

From the bandwidth world, here’s a post describing internet connections at the South Pole. Not bad for a shaky satellite connection. The decline in isolation also changes something fundamental about wintering in Antarctica. The anecdote at the close of the article suggests something of the change. I find myself wondering if that is entirely a good thing, but the author, herself in residence, certainly seems to disagree with my concern. If I were there, I might disagree, too.

The second article is about robots shelving books. The library is at Chicago State University. Books after 1990 seem to be in open stacks. All the rest are in robot-serviced drawers. The books have RFID chips attached, and with them, the bots can retrieve 5 books in 2.5 minutes. They say that it took students two hours, but unless they have really dumb students—which I doubt—I suspect that the time reflected the students having to accomplish several tasks at once. If so, it’s not a very fair comparison, but the point being made, that having a dedicated technology can speed things up, is quite true.

Of course, here is yet another example of the prohibition of browsing and with that prohibition, of the curtailing of one of the most important ways that we learn about works of importance to our interest. I realize that libraries are often stuck between a rock and a hard place in this—they must find more and more space or downsize their collections. And this is certainly superior to the order-one-day-pick-up-the-next approach that off-premise storage entails. Still . . . .

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Andrew D. Todd - 12/29/2006

AT&T has offered some concessions in exchange for being allowed to complete its merger with BellSouth. The concessions are still in too vague a form to be precisely appraised, or to be enforceable.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061229/001833.shtml

The techies are growling suspiciously, but they were in a carnivorous mood anyway, due to having listened to too much technical disinformation from the telephone companies. The main point is that the fifth FCC commissioner, Robert McDowell, a Republican who was abstaining under conflict-of-interest laws, tested the political wind, and decided to stand on the letter of the law. With a Democratic Congress coming in, time is not on AT&T's side, and they have to achieve a settlement quickly. I don't know what line President Bush would take about vetoing legislation pertaining to consumer rights in respect of electronics, software, telecommunications, copyrights and patents. However, I suspect he would regard it as an acceptable trade-off for a whole series of issues which he does care about, or even as a chance to nudge his approval index a few percentage points northward.

There is no word as yet about what line the two Democratic commissioners are taking. However, having conceded the principle, AT&T will presumably throw in a package of things which would not be enforceable anyway against an astute heavy user intent on routing his traffic through the most economical available mode under the new dispensation. For example, once the telephone company stops trying to block VOIP internet phone service, it might as well mark long distance telephone rates down to a flat rate of five dollars a month for unlimited usage, or thereabouts. There is no great profit to be gained out of people who do not make a lot of long-distance calls.

Andrew D. Todd - 12/27/2006

I think you'd probably find that "before 1990" actually means "before 1990 and never checked out." The robot system ought to be programmable to run on the fly, with books being automatically promoted to the shelves if someone asks to look at them. This system is at least as good as any form of "dead storage." Some libraries have electrically powered traveling shelves, and while theoretically one can browse through these shelves, in practice, one has a strong desire to get the hell out of there before someone pushes a button and, um..., compresses one.

Of course the real issue is what one might call the "Eldred Amendment," problem, named after Lawrence Lessig's client in the law case three or four years ago. Specifically, should works be protected by copyright when they are not in print in the ordinary sense of the word? One can differ about precise proposals about how an Eldred system would be implemented, but in practice the details do not matter very much in the end. Most books do not have actual commercial value. The only people who want to read them are grad students, who are, by definition, stony broke. If you can sweep away the mass of "fictitious copyright," the little-read books can just go up on the internet. Under this kind of reasonable compromise formula, everything over ten years old would be either available on the internet, or in a high-school library, or sometimes both.

In the case of technical literature, something different is happening. Those technical organizations which put their material freely up on the internet get an advantage in recruiting the fourteen-year-old geniuses, and they tend to drive out technical organizations which insist on formalities.