server farm library and librarians
“You write a function to map the data: “Count every use of every word in Google Books.” That request is then split among all the computers in your army, and each agent is assigned a hunk of data to work with. Computer A gets War and Peace, for example. That machine knows what words that book contains, but not what’s inside Anna Karenina.”
Wired
“The Reduce computers correlate the lists of words. Now you know how many times a particular word is used, and in which books.”
comatose
The FotB.org
blog has gone comatose again. Ever since Dan left they appear unable to gather their banners and move on.
Teleread has a much livelier site with multiple daily postings and more opened forum. “1. Write for us or at least share news tips. You donít have to agree with usóweíre after a broad range of well-informed perspectives on topics ranging from the Amazon Kindle to copyright. Just be factual, interesting and clear. As for news tips, weíll credit you by name and, if you want, point to your site.” (from
six ways to help Teleread)
books of the brave
We are off on our mission to Arequipa, Peru. You can follow the project at our
wordpress site. For anyone more interested here is a short reading list:
Books of the Brave by Irving A. Leonard and
Empires of the Atlantic World by J.H. Elliott. Or Arequipa PowerPoint at this
site.
exactly
“I canít wait to see more phone/e-reader combos. While thereíll be demand for dedicated, Kindle-style devices, multi-use gizmos will be the real stars in the world of e-booksówhether phones hybrids or general purpose tablets and mini-notebooks.”
Teleread
Just so; the multiplicity of the functions of the hand-held interface will inevitably diminish its particular purpose for book reading. Here again there are attributes in both modes of paper and screen. Paper books are at an advantage exactly because they are exclusively dedicated to book transmission and sustained book comprehension. When is the last time that you called someone from a paper book?