The Sun BabelFish Blog
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Berkley and Standford lectures via iTunes
Both Berkeley and Stanford have put various lectures online through an iTunes interface. There are a lot of excellent talks available there, as one would expect.
As usual Apple does an excellent job of making things easy to use. And as usual Apple pushes that perfection just a little south of transparency. What should be open, and probably is open, is hidden a little more than it should be. In this case it is very difficult to work out where the URLs for either the podcasts or the individual sound files is to be found. Those URLs that are accessible seem to force one to use iTunes. This makes me uneasy. I would like to be able to write about the lectures I hear there and refer to them in a way that I am confident will be unchanging. (After all writing takes time, and I don't want to be hunting down broken urls down on the whim of the people I am speaking of). Furthermore iTunes only runs on Windows and OSX. I am an avid OSX user, but I don't want my audience to be limited to people using those two platforms. Had they writing iTunes in Java, things would be a lot different.
So though I find those two site very interesting I'd rather recommend archive.org or mit's open courseware or mit world's video index.
Anyway lot of great things to listen to there. There is no excuse anymore left to watch or listen to trash.
Posted at 02:11PM Apr 26, 2006 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in General | Comments[2]
Note on comments:
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Posted by Obadiah Greenberg on April 27, 2006 at 03:34 AM CEST #
Posted by Henry Story on April 27, 2006 at 09:49 AM CEST #