Oracles purchased of MySQL never made sense: A popular but very lightweight database? I once used it on an enterprise project and it was too buggy and had terrible locking and reliability problems. If your database is down you're losing lots of money - we lost $50K an hour. InnoDB helped a bit, but in the end we found it MySQL unworkable and moved to PostgreSQL. Oracle is an enterprise company which makes kazillions selling enterprise software to, you know, enterprises. Maybe some ill-informed executive thought they could use MySQL to target the low-end of the market, but eventually realised MySQL just wasn't up to the task and *that* is why they abandoned it.
> Schmidt's clarification confirmed that consolidating the two products would be, well, stupid.
That consolidation was exactly what Microsoft did with Windows and Explorer, and later with Vista and DirectX. Now look at Windows declining marketshare with fewer Windows applications. Too stupid to learn from their mistakes Microsoft are repeating the Vista disaster by withholding DirectX 11 from Windows 7, thinking if they keep DirectX 11 from it then everyone will upgrade to Windows 8. They haven't. OpenGL is the graphics system used on Android and iPhones. It has replaced DirectX as the future of graphics. Microsoft arrogantly consolidated platforms and paid the price when consumers wouldn't take their baggage. Google is wise to let each platform live or die on its own merits.
> this person didn't really buy the books for himself which is what the first sale doctrine is for? he had relatives buy books for the purpose of reselling them in a country where people have a lot more money. i'm surprised SCOTUS didn't find for the publisher. this is a pretty big expansion of the first sale doctrine
That's because you are a consumer and are most familiar with goods being purchased for consumption. In fact most goods are purchased by merchants for reselling or adding value and reselling. Is a farmer selling a case of Apples to a wholesaler able to put their foot down when they learn they will resell them to a supermarket FOR A PROFIT? OMG! How unconscionable! Hardly: That's how they make a profit, and profit is what makes the world go around.
One of the few good things about our courts is that they are very pro-capitalist. For example if you spot and and buy something from a seller who doesn't understand it's truth worth (the proverbial Botticelli at a garage sale) the courts will not reverse the sale even if it can be proved you knew and took advantage of them because that's capitalism, baby. They can reverse it on other grounds (e.g. seller was a minor, inebriated, fraud) but not for this. If your wish was granted and first-sale doctrine was wound back or blown up by Mythbusters then anyone selling anything would have a control over the operation of downstream businesses and be able to interfere with their ability to make a profit.
> To prove the point, here are before-and-after photos from one San Francisco household (mine) where the herd of digital devices has been thinned from about three dozen, eight years ago, to just 15 today.
This isn't new: Recommend Professor Robert Hazen's book on the origins of life. He says no matter where you go on earth, deep into sea sediments or the rock of deep undergrounds mines, every cubic inch of the Earth is teaming with microbes. Worth noting the vast majority of them are indifferent to you. Even out of the ones that made their home on your body (for every cell on your body there are 10 bacteria along for the ride), the vast majority of those are indifferent or even beneficial. Only a tiny percentage are pathogenic, and often only when your immune defences are down. On the origins of life it isn't that it is hard to come up with an explanation, but instead there are so many plausible theories they don't know which one it might have been. It may be far easier for life to get started than we like to think. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Origins-of-Life.html
It's perfectly reasonable for charity workers to be paid reasonable salaries. It's unreasonable for them to be paid unreasonable ones. The American Red Cross got a lot of flack a few years ago because of the high salary it paid Marsha Evans. Other charities were unfairly accused of doing the same thing but it turned out those claims were exaggerated. http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/charities.asp http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_charities_salaries.htm
My 2c on old PCs: Yes, I have lots, but really they are practically worthless. Recipients would do better with a cheap modern netbook than they would a hulking power-guzzling iron monster. Like a story I read about how people donating their old books to libraries: "People can't bare to throw out their old books, so they donate them to us (libraries), and we throw them out for them."
There is more than one way to attract young people. Twitter and Facebook are unlikely since you're already telling people about something they already know but aren't particularly interested in. Youtube might work, but I doubt watching a video clip will attract most people. And then there's this: educating people while entertaining them. I learned more about appreciating classical music from this than I did my entire schooling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodame_Cantabilehttp://www.youtube.com/show/nodamecantabile
... no one can be bothered to click 2c or 3c every time they stumble on a useful page. It's extra mental processing that distracts from what they're really doing, and the fact a page is useful might not be apparent until much later, long after they have left it. What happens if you make a payment and the advice on the page later turns out to be crap? Then there is the question of who the micropayments are going too: Some struggling blogger or hobbyist (worth supporting), a tenured academic (who is already taken care of financially) or a big company who needs my 2c much less than I do. You will also have issues like hosted content: are the payments going to the author, or the webhost.
Some sort of payment scheme is a good idea, but not like this. Often you'll find someone throw themselves into a freeware project and get disillusioned and abandon it when issues like paying the rent take precedence. I think the old 'Donate $5 with Paypal' is a good idea, if you can get rid of the Paypal, Visa, Mastercard or any other intermediary who might block payments. http://www.pcworld.com/article/242470/wikileaks_suspends_publication_because_of_financial_boycott.html
> Judge William Alsup himself had some programming background and wasn't bedazzled by Oracle's thin arguments on the range-checking function.
At long last, an awesome judge. Many other decisions from the courts about IP reflect minds still set in the stone age. Check into him. We may have a hero.
> Microsoft, BSA, EMC, Netapp, et al. get behind Oracle to overturn Alsup's ruling citing 'destabilization' of the 'entire software industry.'
Well that is funny. Microsoft, a company becoming irrelevant, could end up locking itself out of future markets.
> The ruling came, programmers rejoiced and Oracle vowed Appeal.
On careful reflection I think it is better if Oracle goes and fucks itself.
I've done both. Don't knock online courses. Many American universities are putting their lectures and course materials online. If you're motivated, this is a treasure trove and makes available education to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to do it.
To do anything at home though, you have to be highly motivated and have a work environment where you won't be interrupted. If you live with other people - and let's face it - most of us do - it can be hard for them to understand that, but this is true of anything, even working at home, and it's why so many companies don't like telecommuting. It can be done though. Instead of dismissing online courses, they need to educate people how to do online courses - teach skills like focus, motivation, saying no. If we could we would all do physical courses, but online is better and we have to adapt. Oblig. link to online lectures: http://www.youtube.com/education
If you screwed up like this in company, you would be fired. Yet some dumbass government worker in the USPTO grants this and several million dollars later it gets sorted out by the courts. One of the reason patent litigation is out of control is because these dumbass don't do their jobs.
Getting a patent is easy. The USPTO give away patents without a fight. If they frown, you just dump more paperwork on them. If you have read patent filings, they are indecipherable. Pure bullshit and gobbledygock. Seriously. You can twist them to mean anything. So the USPTO shrugs and grants it anyway.
Thing is, and this is important, the courts are the second half of the process. There is a big difference between being granted a patent and having it stand up in court. Courts are incredibly expensive. Your patent is a vanity plate unless you have $2M to sue someone for COUGH COUGH violating it. If you are a big company this is chicken feed and a nice way around anti-trust laws APPLE APPLE APPLE. If you are small patent owner then there are troll lawyers out there. They will buy a patent, troll the shit out of victims and give you a cut if they draw blood. Sounds good? Well remember they are lawyers and it will serve you right if they fuck you over too.
BTW who was the asshole founding father who put patents in the constitution?
And 57% of respondents agree by 2053 we will be flying around the galaxy in faster-than-light spaceships. You know, like the Millennium Falcon. They saw it in a movie. And most of those believe Obama is a Secret Muslim Nigerian. What are we trying to prove here?
Consultants charge several hundred an hour to offer advice. Prospective employees will do it for free. Beware of the shonky cheapskate small business types.The point of the interview is supposed to be for them to get a feel for you and whether you can do the job. That's all. Once that is established, leave. Limit your interview to an hour - or as short as practical. If they want to talk for longer they are just picking your brain. If they reassure you they are not picking your brain, then they are. If you get a vibe you are dealing with a shonky or a cheapskate, best have nothing to do with them even if they do offer you a job. It'll only be trouble down the road. And if you are desperate and need the job that bad, you will still get trouble down the road. Find a decent employer to work for instead.
> The performance problems though were attributed to running the Android environment emulated rather than showing off the Wine implementation from a bare metal device.
The Androids Emulator is a pile of shit. It is really, really slow. So slow I would describe it as unusable. Google knows this and have promised to speed it up, but in typical Google fashion they haven't done anything for many, many years. They are full of shit. Really. Android is cool platform, but Google don't understand developers the way {it pains me to say this!} Microsoft does. Google are irresponsive just like their useless emulator. Compare this with Apple's
iOS emulator which kicks ass, but don't blame it all being a software emulation. The non-Google Bluestacks emulator runs faster than Google's piece of shit. It's so widely known that the Android Emulator is such a piece of shit I'm surprised WINE did a demo using it: It's like infecting yourself with pustular total-body herpes before a first date.
Steven Chu was a Nobel Prize Winner. Clearly Obama has gone power-mad and demanded that Chu build him an Army of Super Drones powered by the Arc Reactor in Iron Man. Chu refused, and when Obama threatened him Chu resigned in protest. Truth is Chu didn't do it on principal. He did it because the Arc Reactor is impossible and Iron Man is just a movie, but how could he explain that to a lawyer? Now as Steven Chu drives back takes the long and lonely drive back to St. Louis, if he looked in his rear vision mirror, he might see a star. A star closer than it should be, following him. The Drone Lord does not take "No" for an answer. TO BE CONTINUED...
There has already been real-life testing of biological attacks. The ones we know about took place in the 50s and 60s. The US Navy released bacteria in a cloud off the coast of San Francisco to see what would happen. The bacteria they released was "mostly harmless" but killed some people with compromised immune systems.
Some other government scientists spread bacteria around the NY subway system to see what would happen. Was hushed up for 20 years and sounds like trooferism but it really happened: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/weapon-secret-testing/
You are missing the point: trivial things are now illegal. If you have ever been less than entirely honest in an e-mail or letter then YOU TOO are a felon and any federal employee who doesn't like you - or decides to use you as career fodder - can jail you for wire fraud or mail fraud. Same if you have ever made a 'mistake' on your tax return. Wondered why the IRS audited the CIA waterboarded whistleblower back 7 years? Because it's an easy way to jail someone. Getting Al Capone for tax evasion seems clever, but giving prosecutors like Oritz a joker means you must trust them not to abuse it for career-building instead of justice. Pick the prisoner, and choose the crime.
The discoveries, algorithms and parameters generated by publicly-funded research is locked behind the paywalls of for-profit publishers. Those publishers won't publish an article unless the academic SURRENDERS THEM THE COPYRIGHT OF THEIR RESEARCH PAPER FOR FREE. The only reason these publishers have survived is because academics want their research published in the most prestigious (read 'expensive') journal they can find. Academics could benefit from 'open-sourcing' their research too.
Slashdot Mirror
It only costs $200 to get a story on Slashdot. Wow! Where do I sign up?
Oracles purchased of MySQL never made sense: A popular but very lightweight database? I once used it on an enterprise project and it was too buggy and had terrible locking and reliability problems. If your database is down you're losing lots of money - we lost $50K an hour. InnoDB helped a bit, but in the end we found it MySQL unworkable and moved to PostgreSQL. Oracle is an enterprise company which makes kazillions selling enterprise software to, you know, enterprises. Maybe some ill-informed executive thought they could use MySQL to target the low-end of the market, but eventually realised MySQL just wasn't up to the task and *that* is why they abandoned it.
Yep. 3D Printing won't put the ATF out of business anytime soon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-04-27/politics/35454066_1_operation-fast-and-furious-assault-weapons-gun-traffic
In Dr Irving Kirsch's book "The Emperor's New Drugs Exposed" he described how they are as effective as a class of anti-depressants, and of course they have fewer side effects! http://healthimpactnews.com/2012/fact-antidepressant-drugs-no-better-than-placebos/ Ben Goldacre in "Big Pharma" has written similar stories. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/irving-kirsch-phd/antidepressants-the-emper_b_442205.html
> Schmidt's clarification confirmed that consolidating the two products would be, well, stupid.
That consolidation was exactly what Microsoft did with Windows and Explorer, and later with Vista and DirectX. Now look at Windows declining marketshare with fewer Windows applications. Too stupid to learn from their mistakes Microsoft are repeating the Vista disaster by withholding DirectX 11 from Windows 7, thinking if they keep DirectX 11 from it then everyone will upgrade to Windows 8. They haven't. OpenGL is the graphics system used on Android and iPhones. It has replaced DirectX as the future of graphics. Microsoft arrogantly consolidated platforms and paid the price when consumers wouldn't take their baggage. Google is wise to let each platform live or die on its own merits.
> this person didn't really buy the books for himself which is what the first sale doctrine is for? he had relatives buy books for the purpose of reselling them in a country where people have a lot more money. i'm surprised SCOTUS didn't find for the publisher. this is a pretty big expansion of the first sale doctrine
That's because you are a consumer and are most familiar with goods being purchased for consumption. In fact most goods are purchased by merchants for reselling or adding value and reselling. Is a farmer selling a case of Apples to a wholesaler able to put their foot down when they learn they will resell them to a supermarket FOR A PROFIT? OMG! How unconscionable! Hardly: That's how they make a profit, and profit is what makes the world go around.
One of the few good things about our courts is that they are very pro-capitalist. For example if you spot and and buy something from a seller who doesn't understand it's truth worth (the proverbial Botticelli at a garage sale) the courts will not reverse the sale even if it can be proved you knew and took advantage of them because that's capitalism, baby. They can reverse it on other grounds (e.g. seller was a minor, inebriated, fraud) but not for this. If your wish was granted and first-sale doctrine was wound back or blown up by Mythbusters then anyone selling anything would have a control over the operation of downstream businesses and be able to interfere with their ability to make a profit.
> To prove the point, here are before-and-after photos from one San Francisco household (mine) where the herd of digital devices has been thinned from about three dozen, eight years ago, to just 15 today.
Awesome. Once burglary was a real hit and miss. Now your victims case their places for you. Even lists his dog. Google tells me his dog it is an Australian Sheppard. Sound docile enough. I can always get it drunk lol.
http://www.wikifido.com/page/Rhody
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Shepherd#Temperament
Now when will Wade be out of town?
Xconomy robotics event 4/11 https://twitter.com/wroush
"Far too many people have too much information online as to their schedules and what they will be attending and where." http://protectitnow.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/your-home-security-never-before.html
I'll just have to arrive early to beat the crowd. I have dibs on the Canon Powershot S5 IS and the iPhone5.
This isn't new: Recommend Professor Robert Hazen's book on the origins of life. He says no matter where you go on earth, deep into sea sediments or the rock of deep undergrounds mines, every cubic inch of the Earth is teaming with microbes. Worth noting the vast majority of them are indifferent to you. Even out of the ones that made their home on your body (for every cell on your body there are 10 bacteria along for the ride), the vast majority of those are indifferent or even beneficial. Only a tiny percentage are pathogenic, and often only when your immune defences are down. On the origins of life it isn't that it is hard to come up with an explanation, but instead there are so many plausible theories they don't know which one it might have been. It may be far easier for life to get started than we like to think. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Origins-of-Life.html
It's perfectly reasonable for charity workers to be paid reasonable salaries. It's unreasonable for them to be paid unreasonable ones. The American Red Cross got a lot of flack a few years ago because of the high salary it paid Marsha Evans. Other charities were unfairly accused of doing the same thing but it turned out those claims were exaggerated.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/charities.asp
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_charities_salaries.htm
If you do donate to a charity, make sure it's an efficient one that serves the cause and not the office holders:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/23/charities-most-efficient-personal-finance-charity-09-efficiency_slide_2.html
My 2c on old PCs: Yes, I have lots, but really they are practically worthless. Recipients would do better with a cheap modern netbook than they would a hulking power-guzzling iron monster. Like a story I read about how people donating their old books to libraries: "People can't bare to throw out their old books, so they donate them to us (libraries), and we throw them out for them."
There is more than one way to attract young people. Twitter and Facebook are unlikely since you're already telling people about something they already know but aren't particularly interested in. Youtube might work, but I doubt watching a video clip will attract most people. And then there's this: educating people while entertaining them. I learned more about appreciating classical music from this than I did my entire schooling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodame_Cantabile http://www.youtube.com/show/nodamecantabile
... no one can be bothered to click 2c or 3c every time they stumble on a useful page. It's extra mental processing that distracts from what they're really doing, and the fact a page is useful might not be apparent until much later, long after they have left it. What happens if you make a payment and the advice on the page later turns out to be crap? Then there is the question of who the micropayments are going too: Some struggling blogger or hobbyist (worth supporting), a tenured academic (who is already taken care of financially) or a big company who needs my 2c much less than I do. You will also have issues like hosted content: are the payments going to the author, or the webhost.
Some sort of payment scheme is a good idea, but not like this. Often you'll find someone throw themselves into a freeware project and get disillusioned and abandon it when issues like paying the rent take precedence. I think the old 'Donate $5 with Paypal' is a good idea, if you can get rid of the Paypal, Visa, Mastercard or any other intermediary who might block payments. http://www.pcworld.com/article/242470/wikileaks_suspends_publication_because_of_financial_boycott.html
> Judge William Alsup himself had some programming background and wasn't bedazzled by Oracle's thin arguments on the range-checking function.
At long last, an awesome judge. Many other decisions from the courts about IP reflect minds still set in the stone age. Check into him. We may have a hero.
> Microsoft, BSA, EMC, Netapp, et al. get behind Oracle to overturn Alsup's ruling citing 'destabilization' of the 'entire software industry.'
Well that is funny. Microsoft, a company becoming irrelevant, could end up locking itself out of future markets.
> The ruling came, programmers rejoiced and Oracle vowed Appeal.
On careful reflection I think it is better if Oracle goes and fucks itself.
I've done both. Don't knock online courses. Many American universities are putting their lectures and course materials online. If you're motivated, this is a treasure trove and makes available education to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to do it.
To do anything at home though, you have to be highly motivated and have a work environment where you won't be interrupted. If you live with other people - and let's face it - most of us do - it can be hard for them to understand that, but this is true of anything, even working at home, and it's why so many companies don't like telecommuting. It can be done though. Instead of dismissing online courses, they need to educate people how to do online courses - teach skills like focus, motivation, saying no. If we could we would all do physical courses, but online is better and we have to adapt. Oblig. link to online lectures: http://www.youtube.com/education
If you screwed up like this in company, you would be fired. Yet some dumbass government worker in the USPTO grants this and several million dollars later it gets sorted out by the courts. One of the reason patent litigation is out of control is because these dumbass don't do their jobs.
Worse, the USPTO is about to switch from first to invent to first to file. You don't need to invent any more. Just find out what your competitors are doing, patent it, and sue them out of business: http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/top-ten-reasons-to-file-your-patent-appl-98912/
Getting a patent is easy. The USPTO give away patents without a fight. If they frown, you just dump more paperwork on them. If you have read patent filings, they are indecipherable. Pure bullshit and gobbledygock. Seriously. You can twist them to mean anything. So the USPTO shrugs and grants it anyway.
Thing is, and this is important, the courts are the second half of the process. There is a big difference between being granted a patent and having it stand up in court. Courts are incredibly expensive. Your patent is a vanity plate unless you have $2M to sue someone for COUGH COUGH violating it. If you are a big company this is chicken feed and a nice way around anti-trust laws APPLE APPLE APPLE. If you are small patent owner then there are troll lawyers out there. They will buy a patent, troll the shit out of victims and give you a cut if they draw blood. Sounds good? Well remember they are lawyers and it will serve you right if they fuck you over too.
BTW who was the asshole founding father who put patents in the constitution?
In this thread: Mojang stalked by angry CGI tiger.
And 57% of respondents agree by 2053 we will be flying around the galaxy in faster-than-light spaceships. You know, like the Millennium Falcon. They saw it in a movie. And most of those believe Obama is a Secret Muslim Nigerian. What are we trying to prove here?
Consultants charge several hundred an hour to offer advice. Prospective employees will do it for free. Beware of the shonky cheapskate small business types.The point of the interview is supposed to be for them to get a feel for you and whether you can do the job. That's all. Once that is established, leave. Limit your interview to an hour - or as short as practical. If they want to talk for longer they are just picking your brain. If they reassure you they are not picking your brain, then they are. If you get a vibe you are dealing with a shonky or a cheapskate, best have nothing to do with them even if they do offer you a job. It'll only be trouble down the road. And if you are desperate and need the job that bad, you will still get trouble down the road. Find a decent employer to work for instead.
> The performance problems though were attributed to running the Android environment emulated rather than showing off the Wine implementation from a bare metal device.
The Androids Emulator is a pile of shit. It is really, really slow. So slow I would describe it as unusable. Google knows this and have promised to speed it up, but in typical Google fashion they haven't done anything for many, many years. They are full of shit. Really. Android is cool platform, but Google don't understand developers the way {it pains me to say this!} Microsoft does. Google are irresponsive just like their useless emulator. Compare this with Apple's iOS emulator which kicks ass, but don't blame it all being a software emulation. The non-Google Bluestacks emulator runs faster than Google's piece of shit. It's so widely known that the Android Emulator is such a piece of shit I'm surprised WINE did a demo using it: It's like infecting yourself with pustular total-body herpes before a first date.
Typical posts:
"The Android SDK emulator is notoriously slow, and almost everybody hates it."
https://www.google.com/search?q=android+emulator+slow
Steven Chu was a Nobel Prize Winner. Clearly Obama has gone power-mad and demanded that Chu build him an Army of Super Drones powered by the Arc Reactor in Iron Man. Chu refused, and when Obama threatened him Chu resigned in protest. Truth is Chu didn't do it on principal. He did it because the Arc Reactor is impossible and Iron Man is just a movie, but how could he explain that to a lawyer? Now as Steven Chu drives back takes the long and lonely drive back to St. Louis, if he looked in his rear vision mirror, he might see a star. A star closer than it should be, following him. The Drone Lord does not take "No" for an answer. TO BE CONTINUED...
PS. This is a joke.
So is this: "Obama Begins Inauguration Festivities With Ceremonial Drone Flyover" http://www.theonion.com/articles/obama-begins-inauguration-festivities-with-ceremon,30974/
So are these: "Obama’s CIA pick calls drone attacks ‘ethical and just’" http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/02/01/czar-of-the-drones/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/07/john-brennan-cia-drones-obama
'Governor Jiabao. I should have expected to find you holding General Mingfu's leash. Do you realize the more your hackers attack our free (well mostly free) press, the more we will think you're are carrying on like a pack of spoiled brats unfit to replace America as the world's superpower?' http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-general-ominously-warns-australia-not-to-side-with-the-us-tiger-2013-1
> Microsoft Wants Computer Science Taught In UK Primary Schools
Good idea. We need to introduce our kids to the new generation of Android devices
There has already been real-life testing of biological attacks. The ones we know about took place in the 50s and 60s. The US Navy released bacteria in a cloud off the coast of San Francisco to see what would happen. The bacteria they released was "mostly harmless" but killed some people with compromised immune systems. Some other government scientists spread bacteria around the NY subway system to see what would happen. Was hushed up for 20 years and sounds like trooferism but it really happened: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/weapon-secret-testing/
You are missing the point: trivial things are now illegal. If you have ever been less than entirely honest in an e-mail or letter then YOU TOO are a felon and any federal employee who doesn't like you - or decides to use you as career fodder - can jail you for wire fraud or mail fraud. Same if you have ever made a 'mistake' on your tax return. Wondered why the IRS audited the CIA waterboarded whistleblower back 7 years? Because it's an easy way to jail someone. Getting Al Capone for tax evasion seems clever, but giving prosecutors like Oritz a joker means you must trust them not to abuse it for career-building instead of justice. Pick the prisoner, and choose the crime.
The discoveries, algorithms and parameters generated by publicly-funded research is locked behind the paywalls of for-profit publishers. Those publishers won't publish an article unless the academic SURRENDERS THEM THE COPYRIGHT OF THEIR RESEARCH PAPER FOR FREE. The only reason these publishers have survived is because academics want their research published in the most prestigious (read 'expensive') journal they can find. Academics could benefit from 'open-sourcing' their research too.
"Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for by us."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist
"Academic papers are hidden from the public."
http://www.badscience.net/2011/09/academic-papers-are-hidden-from-the-public-heres-some-direct-action/