morningbuzz

Ubuntu, Minneapolis, MOOCs, Public Domain, Quora, MORE: Thursday Morning One Swear Word Buzz, January 24, 2013

Is Ubuntu going to change the way it does release dates? ” If the change Canonical is considering is adopted, every future edition starting with 14.04 will be an LTS, so the next version after 14.04 would be 16.04 in April 2016.” This would be fine with me because the only time I upgrade is to an LTS version.

Nifty: Using the Kindle Fire for genealogy.

Minneapolis is going to digitize old adoption records. (Thanks Genealogy Blog!)

So apparently Quora has launched a blogging platform. This is irritating — do wanna get more involved with Quora (especially now that LinkedIn Answers has died), don’t wanna have to blog somewhere else! Really wish that Quora had also considered integration with more blogging platforms.

Yahoo has purchased Snip.It.

News from the LOC: Congress.gov has gotten some upgrades.

New from UVA, an online resource called “The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama”. “The new digital archive includes full-length interviews, newspaper articles, field reports, letters, court filings and other primary sources from the Civil Rights Movement – much of which is drawn from the Project on Lived Theology’s paper archive and Marsh’s decades of research – and organizes everything by actors, scenes, themes and keywords, to show how people lived out their theological beliefs in the world, said Kelly West Figueroa-Ray, manager of the new resource and a doctoral student in religious studies.”

Wow! Some introductory MOOCs will be offered for credit in the hopes that you’ll come back and pay additional money for the degree program. “In an unusual arrangement with a commercial company, dozens of public universities plan to offer an introductory online course free and for credit to anyone worldwide, in the hope that those who pass will pay tuition to complete a degree program.” Wouldn’t it be great to

Sometimes these attempts to create online databases don’t work. “In November, the seven-member board that regulates 6,200 active Certified Public Accountants in the state terminated contracts with two firms after concluding that a 17-month effort to create an online licensing system had failed. The board had fired the agency’s executive director over the summer. … [Pittioni] estimated that the agency had spent $250,000 on the botched system, ‘a significant problem’ for an agency with $1 million annual budget funded by licensing fees.” Whoopsie.

There’s a new version of the Checkbook NYC database that contains spending information on over 100 city agencies.

What enters the public domain in the US in 2013? Shit-all, if you’ll pardon my language. And according to this article, nothing will until 2019. Good morning, Internet…

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