"frivolous" inventions can lead to great ones with huge and widespread practical applications
Sure. But it doesn't follow from that all inventions have further applications - let alone
widespread ones! - and you can't infer that the
category "frivolous" is empty.
Indeed. Those who have money get all kinds of gadgets designed and built for them, even if they're of marginal utility, while nowhere near as much effort goes into designing or improving technology for the poor, even when it would have a hugely beneficial effect on their lives.
I don't care about tech support or ISV certification, but I do want a version for which bugfixes and security patches will be available for more than a year.
Advanced Server is too expensive - I work in a university. So I'm left with the choice between upgrading way more often than I'd like or switching to another distribution - too much work to contemplate at the moment, but Debian would be the choice if I did. (Of course if I stop using Red Hat, the Red Hat mirror I run for the university will go away... It would be kind of nice if Red Hat gave AS free to unis, or maybe to people who do evangelism for them:-)
Another not so well known work is
The Monsters and the Critics - that's an academic work, of course, not fiction, but it's still reasonably broadly accessible.
Your organisation could have used Linux on its server while keeping the Windows client machines. There are "plug-and-go" small office solutions, that do filesharing to windows clients, print spooling, Internet gatewaying, email etc.
And if I travel from Sydney to Canberra, am I going "down to Canberra" or "up to Canberra"? I think in these cases either preposition has pretty much the same meaning.
Speaking as a reviewer, I tend not to write many negative reviews because I usually don't bother reading bad books. Also, with so many books out there, helping people avoid bad ones is less useful than helping them find good ones.
Quite apart from the enforcement problems (international jurisdiction, for one thing), this would kill a lot of mailing lists completely. I run some small lists for distributing my book reviews, for example, sending out maybe 2000 messages a month, and even US$20/month would deter me from doing that.
And the big discussion lists I'm on would cost a fortune to run at 1c/message.
Ok, so maybe people signing up to a list would have to pay for the messages they receive... but now we're basically talking micropayments!
I've wondered about that too. But Google is counting "web desktops", not desktops more generally. Most of the momentum in Linux desktop growth is I think coming from corporates starting to move over (see the SuSE interview, where the guy said they were getting one 1000+ seat company enquiry a day), and (outside the IT industry) most employees don't do much web surfing at work.
Danny.
sites that sort of do this already
on
An IMDb for Books
·
· Score: 1
The Complete Review has pages for around 1000 books, on which they list all the useful links to information about them they can find, as well as summarising print reviews. BiblioReview is more automated, dumping whole review sites (e.g. New York Times, my own reviews, others) into their database - so they have more than 20 000 books listed, but their pages often have just a single link.
Neither of these sites cover as many books as Amazon, but because they are prepared to link to other web sites the Complete Review pages are often much more useful.
My review of the first edition might be of interest, though a lot has changed since then! The first edition was one of the first ever books on firewalls - also the first review copy I got from a publisher, so I have fond memories of it.
I've just asked for a review copy of the new edition.
Maybe Amazon's reviews are different. When someone is looking at reviews on Amazon, they have already selected a particular book and are (for popular titles) looking at a large number of reviews. Whereas if they're browsing my site, or another "one review of each book" site, they're more likely to be looking for something to read rather than making up their mind about a particular title. (Though if they're using Google to browse reviews across multiple sites maybe that's not true.)
Another difference is that most of the books I review are obscure. Most of Amazon's books are obscure too, but their reviews definitely cover popular titles better - how many thousand reviews of the Harry Potter books are there?
I write reviews for my own web site, not for Amazon, but most of mine are positive (though fewer than 10% make it onto my "best" list). The reason for that is that with several million books in print and hundreds of thousands of new ones printed each year, people need help finding the good ones, so negative reviews aren't as useful.
I make the occasional exception for very popular books which I think are overrated.
Do the critics of Gould's popular writing really include Mayr, Maynard
Smith, George Williams, Hamilton, Wilson, Trives, etc?
There's been lots of criticism of Gould, sure. Some of it has been very uninteresting or demonstrably wrong, but a lot of it has been quite solid. Some of Gould's responses have been weak, but sometime's he's revised his ideas and come back stronger than before. And both "sides" have on occasion resorted to "playing the man" instead of the ideas.
But this is how debate works...
Frankly, I never understood the fuss. I can read Dawkins and Wilson - I'm just reading The Ants now, it's an incredible achievement -
and Gould and Lewontin, and find them all well worthwhile. And when what they say is incompatible... well, we can't expect everything to be handed to us on a platter!
And Wilson certainly has cred when it comes to ants, but frankly Sociobiology has aged less well than Ontogeny and Phylogeny and
while I haven't read Consilience, reports suggest it isn't entirely convincing.
And if you want to know how Gould is considered by palaeontologists, Carroll's highly regarded Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution is quite critical - but definitely not dismissive. If this is "Gouldism"... well, then Gouldism has totally permeated palaeontology.
For my information, is it really true that Gould really dropped all
references about brain size from the first and second edition of
"mismeasured"?
There's plenty of discussion of brain size in the 2nd editon of Mismeasured... And someone borrowed my 1st edition and never returned it, so I can't compare.
OK, Gould claims (in his popular writing) that evolutionary biologists
ignore alternatives to selection for changing gene frequency. Despite
genetic drift being accepted for decades.
It's possible for something to be neglected while still being known... and
neutral theory had to fight for a place. In any event, there's no doubt at all that the range of approaches to evolution - in terms of levels of selection, understanding of developmental constraints, etc. - is much broader now than it was fifty years ago.
Dawkins is not a myopic as some critics have suggested, but some of his attacks misrepresent people woefully too. I can't remember the Dawkins article in the Langton volume - and my copy of that isn't where it ought to be on my shelf, so I can't comment on that directly - but there's a difference between evolvability and levels of selection.
If I have learned anything yet in life, it is that idealists lie.
Idealists?? I think you must be using a different sense of that word to the rest of the philosophical community. And accusations that people are "lying" always remind me of creationists, who have to fall back on accusing biologists of lying because they have no other response to what they are saying...
I don't know what in particular your complaining about, but Gould has been subjected to an immense number of "straw man" attacks himself... So I'd suggest reading him yourself, or if you're relying on third-party evaluations, maybe using a broader range of them.
few (non-marxist) evolutionary biologists consider Gould's writing on alternatives in evolution to be interesting
That's just completely false. Shapes of Time is one counter-example, as is Patterns and Processes in Vertebrate Evolution, but there are thousands of other non-marxist biologists who have used Gould's ideas on evolution. Check the citation record for Ontogeny and Phylogeny sometime!
Danny.
Re:sigh .. there is no such thing as "macroevoluti
on
Shapes of Time
·
· Score: 2
If I stand in San Francisco and walk heel-to-toe in an easterly direction, I will eventually end up in New York.
No, you will eventually end up somewhere on the east coast of the United States. The channelling and constraints of the road system make it more likely that you will follow certain paths than others (going due east continuously is not an option!) and also make it likely that you will reach the east coast in an urban centre or road junction, rather than a random point.
Danny.
Re:Sigh, not more dialectical things, I hope?
on
Shapes of Time
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There's nothing the least bit "Marxist" about Shapes of Time, if that's worrying you. And there's nothing particularly marxist about Gould either - I never did understand why the tag was applied to him so frequently, but I guess "communist" makes such a good term of abuse in the United States it's hard for people to restrain themselves.
Just imagine what Google can do with data on 80% of the Net's searches! The Google Zeitgeist is just bait, I'm sure there are people paying Google huge sums for both specific data and overall statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. But it doesn't follow from that all inventions have further applications - let alone widespread ones! - and you can't infer that the category "frivolous" is empty.
Danny.
Danny.
Advanced Server is too expensive - I work in a university. So I'm left with the choice between upgrading way more often than I'd like or switching to another distribution - too much work to contemplate at the moment, but Debian would be the choice if I did. (Of course if I stop using Red Hat, the Red Hat mirror I run for the university will go away... It would be kind of nice if Red Hat gave AS free to unis, or maybe to people who do evangelism for them :-)
Danny.
The Feist books that most impressed me were the Mistress of the Empire series he wrote with Janny Wurts.
Danny.
Danny.
The author of 9wm, David Hogan, died suddenly this April, at the all too young age of 34. I have created an online memorial.
Danny.
Danny.
e-smith (Mitel SME) is one such beast.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
But I have written some pretty negative reviews:
- Clear and Present Danger
- Beyond Contact
- Advanced Internet Technologies
- etc.
(Maybe I should add a "bad books" page to the site.)Danny.
Ok, so maybe people signing up to a list would have to pay for the messages they receive... but now we're basically talking micropayments!
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Neither of these sites cover as many books as Amazon, but because they are prepared to link to other web sites the Complete Review pages are often much more useful.
Danny.
I've just asked for a review copy of the new edition.
Danny.
Another difference is that most of the books I review are obscure. Most of Amazon's books are obscure too, but their reviews definitely cover popular titles better - how many thousand reviews of the Harry Potter books are there?
Danny.
I make the occasional exception for very popular books which I think are overrated.
Danny.
Do the critics of Gould's popular writing really include Mayr, Maynard Smith, George Williams, Hamilton, Wilson, Trives, etc?
There's been lots of criticism of Gould, sure. Some of it has been very uninteresting or demonstrably wrong, but a lot of it has been quite solid. Some of Gould's responses have been weak, but sometime's he's revised his ideas and come back stronger than before. And both "sides" have on occasion resorted to "playing the man" instead of the ideas. But this is how debate works...
Frankly, I never understood the fuss. I can read Dawkins and Wilson - I'm just reading The Ants now, it's an incredible achievement - and Gould and Lewontin, and find them all well worthwhile. And when what they say is incompatible... well, we can't expect everything to be handed to us on a platter!
And Wilson certainly has cred when it comes to ants, but frankly Sociobiology has aged less well than Ontogeny and Phylogeny and while I haven't read Consilience, reports suggest it isn't entirely convincing. And if you want to know how Gould is considered by palaeontologists, Carroll's highly regarded Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution is quite critical - but definitely not dismissive. If this is "Gouldism"... well, then Gouldism has totally permeated palaeontology.
For my information, is it really true that Gould really dropped all references about brain size from the first and second edition of "mismeasured"?
There's plenty of discussion of brain size in the 2nd editon of Mismeasured... And someone borrowed my 1st edition and never returned it, so I can't compare.
OK, Gould claims (in his popular writing) that evolutionary biologists ignore alternatives to selection for changing gene frequency. Despite genetic drift being accepted for decades.
It's possible for something to be neglected while still being known... and neutral theory had to fight for a place. In any event, there's no doubt at all that the range of approaches to evolution - in terms of levels of selection, understanding of developmental constraints, etc. - is much broader now than it was fifty years ago.
Dawkins is not a myopic as some critics have suggested, but some of his attacks misrepresent people woefully too. I can't remember the Dawkins article in the Langton volume - and my copy of that isn't where it ought to be on my shelf, so I can't comment on that directly - but there's a difference between evolvability and levels of selection.
If I have learned anything yet in life, it is that idealists lie.
Idealists?? I think you must be using a different sense of that word to the rest of the philosophical community. And accusations that people are "lying" always remind me of creationists, who have to fall back on accusing biologists of lying because they have no other response to what they are saying...
Danny.
Danny.
That's just completely false. Shapes of Time is one counter-example, as is Patterns and Processes in Vertebrate Evolution , but there are thousands of other non-marxist biologists who have used Gould's ideas on evolution. Check the citation record for Ontogeny and Phylogeny sometime!
Danny.
No, you will eventually end up somewhere on the east coast of the United States. The channelling and constraints of the road system make it more likely that you will follow certain paths than others (going due east continuously is not an option!) and also make it likely that you will reach the east coast in an urban centre or road junction, rather than a random point.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.