MrCynical - Slashdot User

Print-On-Demand Publisher VDM Infects Amazon 190

Posted by kdawson on Saturday April 03, 2010 @05:56PM from the scam-on-demand dept.

erich666 writes "In recent months a flood of so-called books have been appearing in Amazon's catalog. VDM Publishing's imprints Alphascript and Betascript Publishing have listed over 57,000 titles, adding at least 10,000 in the previous month alone. These books are simply collections of linked Wikipedia articles put into paperback form, at a cost of 40 cents a page or more. These books seem to be computer-generated, which explains the peculiar titles noted such as 'Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit.' Such titles do have the marketing effect of turning up in many different searches. There is debate on Wikipedia about whether their 'VDM Publishing' page should contain the words 'fraud' or 'scam.' VDM Publishing's practice of reselling Wikipedia articles appears to be legal, but is ethically questionable. Amazon customers have begun to post 1-star reviews and complain. Amazon's response to date has been, 'As a retailer, our goal is to provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover, and buy any item they might be seeking.' The words 'and pay us' were left out. Amazon carries, as a Googled guess, 2 million different book titles, so VDM Publishing is currently 1/35th of their catalog, and rapidly growing."

NHS Should Stop Funding Homeopathy, Says Parliamentary Committee 507

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday February 23, 2010 @02:57PM from the how-am-I-going-to-align-my-chakras-now dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Homeopathic remedies work no better than placebos, and so should no longer be paid for by the UK National Health Service, a committee of British members of parliament has concluded. In preparing its report, the committee, which scrutinizes the evidence behind government policies, took evidence from scientists and homeopaths, and reviewed numerous reports and scientific investigations into homeopathy. It found no evidence that such treatments work beyond providing a placebo effect." Updated 201025 19:40 GMT by timothy: This recommendation has some people up in arms.

Comment Re:Partially Correct (Score 1) 372

by MrCynical on Friday July 06, 2007 @08:53AM (#19766057) Attached to: The Mainframe Still Lives!

The numbers I am quoting are running with Type 2 JDBC drivers under WebSphere 5.1. Running on the same LPAR as the COBOL code. They are even worse running on a server doing remote access.

Now this particular J2EE application was written by a 3rd party vendor so I can't for certain determine the actual bottle neck, but DB/2 access seems to be the culprit based on the traces we have done. It is a very large application with a 22mb EAR file that we deploy and I don't think it is written for speed. Even the small SERVLET's I have written suck sand when it comes to database speed. The actual query speeds are similar but setup and processing the data takes longer. Maybe it is JAVA itself, I don't know, but I can only respond with what I have observed.

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