In the computer industry, vaporware (or vapourware) is a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled.  Vaporware is often announced months or years before its purported release, with development details lacking.  Usage of the word has broadened to products such as automobiles.  At times, vendors are criticized for intentionally producing vaporware in order to keep customers from switching to competitive products that offer more features.  Publications widely accuse developers of announcing products early intentionally to gain advantage over others.  Network World magazine called vaporware an "epidemic" in 1989, and blamed the press for not investigating whether developers' claims were true.  Seven major companies issued a report in 1990 saying they felt vaporware had hurt the industry's credibility.  The United States accused several companies of announcing vaporware early in violation of antitrust laws, but few have been found guilty.  InfoWorld magazine wrote that the word is overused, and places an unfair stigma on developers.  "Vaporware" was coined by a Microsoft engineer in 1982 to describe the company's Xenix operating system, and first appeared in print in a newsletter by entrepreneur Esther Dyson in 1983.  It became popular among writers in the industry as a way to describe products they felt took too long to be released.  InfoWorld magazine editor Stewart Alsop helped popularize it by lampooning Bill Gates with a Golden Vaporware award for the late release of his company's first version of Windows in 1985.  Vaporware first implied intentional fraud when it was applied to the Ovation office suite in 1983; the suite's demonstration was well received by the press, but was later revealed to have never existed.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware  

See The Top 15 Vaporware Products of All Time by Emru Townsend at http://www.pcworld.com/article/145351/article.html

Grandes Maestros is an exhibit featuring more than 1200 works made by folk artists in Latin America, Spain and Portugal  Natural History Museum (NHM) in Los Angeles  November 9, 2014 through September 13, 2015  http://www.nhm.org/site/explore-exhibits/special-exhibits/grandes-maestros  

See pictures at http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-7-pieces-natural-history-museum-folk-art-show20141105-htmlstory.html

November is National Novel Writing Month.  NaNoWriMo is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (formerly known as the Office of Letters and Light) that believes your story matters.  Our mission statement:  National Novel Writing Month organizes events where children and adults find the inspiration, encouragement, and structure they need to achieve their creative potential.  Our programs are web-enabled challenges with vibrant real-world components, designed to foster self-expression while building community on local and global levels.  The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.  The Young Writers Program promotes writing fluency, creative education, and the sheer joy of novel-writing in K-12 classrooms.  We provide free classroom kits, writing workbooks, Common Core-aligned curricula, and virtual class management tools to more than 2,000 educators from Dubai to Boston.  The Come Write In program provides free resources to libraries, community centers, and local bookstores to build writing havens in your neighborhood.  Camp NaNoWriMo is a virtual writing retreat, designed to provide the community, resources, and tools needed to complete any writing project, novel or not.

NaNoWriMo 2013 statistics:  310,095 participants; 651 volunteer Municipal Liaisons in 595 regions on six continents; 89,500 students and educators told their stories with the Young Writers Program; 650 libraries opened their doors to novelists through the Come Write In program.  http://nanowrimo.org/about

The Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies 2-1 on May 24, 1935 in Major League Baseball’s first-ever night game, played courtesy of recently installed lights at Crosley Field in Cincinnati.  The first-ever night game in professional baseball took place May 2, 1930, when a Des Moines, Iowa, team hosted Wichita for a Western League game.  The game drew 12,000 people at a time when Des Moines was averaging just 600 fans per game.  Evening games soon became popular in the minors.  As minor league ball clubs were routinely folding in the midst of the Great Depression, adaptable owners found the innovation a key to staying in business.  The major leagues, though, took five years to catch up to their small-town counterparts.  The first big league night game in 1935 drew 25,000 fans, who stood by as President Roosevelt symbolically switched on the lights from Washington, D.C.  To capitalize on their new evening fan base, the Reds played a night game that year against every National League team--eight games in total--and despite their record of 68-85, paid attendance rose 117 percent.  Though baseball owners had a well-deserved reputation for being old-fashioned, most teams soon followed suit, as they knew night games would benefit their bottom line.  Teams upgraded their facilities to include lights throughout the 1930s and 40s, and before long, most of the league had night games on the schedule.  Wrigley Field, on Chicago’s North Side--the second oldest major league park after Boston’s Fenway--was the last of the parks to begin hosting night games.  Wrigley’s tradition of hosting only day games held for 74 seasons until August 8, 1988, when the Cubs hosted the Philadelphia Phillies.  

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/mlb-holds-first-night-game

The Cincinnati Gas & Electric Company was given the requirement by General Electric to design the lighting layout in Crosley Field.  Three electrical engineers, Earl D. Payne, Al Reuterer and Charles Young, designed the layout.  See 33 photos taken by Earl D. Payne that night at http://www.crosley-field.com/FNG/  See also the book  Let There Be Light:  A History of Night Baseball 1880 to 2008 by Robert B. Payne.  

Why Libraries [Still] Matter  by Jonathan Zittrain   In the late Nineteenth Century the Spanish Marquis de Olivart — a writer, ambassador, professor, and sometime foreign minister — had amassed an enviable collection of some fourteen thousand international law books.  He then gave the collection to the Spanish government, moved, he said, “by a patriotism that was as ardent as it was sterile.”  The government didn’t stick to the terms of the gift in maintaining the collection, and the disillusioned Marquis managed to claw it back.  Word got around that it might be for sale.  The Harvard Law School Librarian lobbied to put in a bid — one that would cost the school nearly every spare cent it had.  After contentious discussion, the faculty approved.  Gold bullion was deposited into the Marquis’s bank, and the books were smuggled out under cover of night, apparently to avoid inciting the Spanish government to ban their export, or perhaps to avoid the eye of the Marquis’s lenders.  Thus did a law school library score a coup of materials, and whet its appetite for more.  The next year, acquisitions vaulted Harvard’s collections to over eighty percent of all the world’s English law books published before 1601.  Tales like these, shared in the law school’s own official reminiscences published in the 1950's and 60's, reinforce the notion of a library as a storehouse of rare and precious things.  And with good reason.  Libraries originated at a time when books were expensive, difficult to copy, and thus perhaps irreplaceable.  The Web is a distributed marvel:  click on any link on a page and you’ll instantly be able to see to what it refers, whether it’s offered by the author of the page you’re already reading, or somewhere on the other side of the world, by a different person writing at a different time for a different purpose.  That the act of citation and linkage could be made so easy to forge and to follow, and accessible to anyone with a Web browser rather than special patron privileges, is revolutionary.  But the very characteristics that make the distributed Net so powerful overall also make it dicey in any given use.  Links rot; sources evaporate.  The anarchic Web loses some luster every time that something an author meant to share turns out to be a 404-not-found error.  I co-authored a study investigating link rot in legal scholarship and judicial opinions, and was shocked to find that, circa late 2013, nearly three out of four links found within all Harvard Law Review articles were dead.  Half of the links in U.S. Supreme Court opinions were dead.  That’s why the HLS Library is proud to be a founding member of perma.cc, a consortium complementing the extraordinary Internet Archive, seeking to preserve copies of the sources that scholars and judges link to on the open Web.  The preserved materials can be readily accessible for the ages, placed on the record within a formal, disinterested, distributed repository of the world’s great libraries.  This is especially important as information might not only vanish, but be adulterated.  Read more and see pictures at https://medium.com/biblio/why-libraries-still-matter-3df27e7522cb

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1216  November 12, 2014  On this date in 1833, Alexander Borodin, Russian composer and chemist, was born.  On this date in 1840, Auguste Rodin, French sculptor, was born.