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Poster:
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Dupenhagen Moonbat |
Date:
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Jun 22, 2015 8:51pm |
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Forum:
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texts
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Subject:
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The Beta Express Train Wreck |
I haven't blown off your reply, garthus1, but I have been known to be glacial in my correspondence.
I've been working lately with a nifty program called
HTTrack in an effort to download at least a few of the essential elements and parts of the workings of the Internet Archive we've come to love. For example, the program which had provided the flip-book view of your album covers in the Texts section, I had originally thought went bye-bye with Beta. The program had actually been hobbled or otherwise limited to function therein only via fullscreen -- probably by the disabling or restriction of iframes, among other ways. More recently, the fullscreen button is missing, and only the stark stupid black-backgrounded player remains, sans any remnant of the flip-book viewer. The Archive has gone, then, from a classic page which
just works, to a Beta page which is a wreck --
and no, Archive wheels, simply telling folks to change "details" to "stream" in the URL (yet another lame Classic/Beta equivalency dodge) doesn't cut it.
It occurs to me that hobbling is merely the tip of the iceberg in what's coming, as far as
nonfunctionality goes.
Bottom line: we should download the working flip-book viewer (
and the Archive's other essential parts), using tools like HTTrack or whatever's at hand
while we can.
The Archive wheels take the community of archivists and their following -- yes, their following -- for granted. They (the wheels) have an odd notion that people and their efforts are so many widgets, disposable at whim. They are sadly mistaken. They, like their kinsmen in worldview, the purveyors of the Affordable Care Act, for instance, expect a brain trust, whether it's doctors or technologists (hate to break it to you, Archive wheels, but you don't have a corner on that market), to remain in place and take a pummeling. No, thinking people remove themselves to saner circumstances by removing their intellectual capital, whether that means going into business rather than medicine, or leaving, taking their capital offshore -- or offsite, as the case may be.
There's something smelly about the Beta which wheels in charge at the Archive aren't telling us.
I suspect it has to do with that arsehole Eric Schmidt's decision to punish those who don't make their sites more mobile-aesthetic, using his anti-trust law violating Valhalla known as Google and its monopoly power as a club.
I applaud your efforts to counter the sinister turn they're taking by moving in a positive direction and creating a front-end that actually works, rather than pads Eric Frickin' Schmidt's wallet at our expense.
This post was modified by Dupenhagen Moonbat on 2015-06-23 03:51:28
