As you glance through, notice the status icons. Not all of the vendors on the list have made it through to approval. Google is approved but, as stated above, is only approved at the Moderate sensitivity level.
Science News
Gadgets
Technology
Alternative Medicine
Bioinformatics
Informatics
In Pulse, I go with Slashdot and also
Smithsonian Science
Cool Hunting
Slashgear
Discover Magazine
Wired: Science
and I have not used but intend to try the WebMD app.
I hope you aggregate and rank everyone's choices! I think some really good ones will come to the top that way.
This, too, conflates trust with faith. They are different. Trust is earned by repeatedly showing correctness. That is roughly what science does. Faith is essentially trust without verification, especially religious faith.
Many things in science are verifiable by anyone. Not *all* science is easily verifiable. That's where trust in professional scientists come in. People are correctly suspicious of some scientists while correctly maintaining trust in the entire process. The process keeps proving itself by delivering new medicines, new technologies, and repeatable results.
My grad school ran a cluster of VAX 6000s and I was lucky enough to get to work in the IT department. I wrote code for our gopher server. The cluster was so dependable that users never, in 6 years, realized that the parts of the cluster ever went down. Our system uptime was amazing - far better than any Windows cluster I've seen today despite the VMS/VAX cluster technology ending up in Windows NT.
I recently sat in on a meeting with about 20 CAM scientists from various universities. The issue of validating herbal medicine is a little more complicated than isolating the single active ingredient, which has been the standard approach.
It is becoming recognized that some herbal remedies may be more complex, as in:
ingredient X by itself: no effect
ingredient Y by itself: no effect
X + Y together: a noticeable medical effect
That is, some herbal remedies may work because they have the correct combinations of active ingredients. Ingredient X may be a necessary precursor to ingredient Y doing any good Other herbal remedies *by the same name* may not have the correct proportion (too little of X or Y) and may therefore fail any reasonable test.
I just wanted to point out that current medicine has picked off the low-lying fruit of many herbal remedies and that's the most active ingredients. But the next round of research on herbal remedies and how to improve on them may be more difficult.
He also instituted new limits on lobbyists in the White House and put a freeze on White House salaries. And we're just talking about the first couple of days, here.
When I was getting my computer science grad degree many years ago, my father showed me an article he'd saved (because he saves everything). It was about a new computer language that was going to make computer programmers obsolete. The language? Fortran. The year? 1959. (Yeah, Fortran was around in 1957 but the article acted like it was big news and a real threat to programmers.)
Fortran did allow general scientists to join the programming population but they didn't put the assembly/machine code programmers out of work -- far from it.
People willing to do good work will always be valuable. Always.
I think the point is that StorageTek was bought by Sun a couple years ago. Now Sun owns the STK patent portfolio. If this comes down to court, Sun may have a good case based on the STK patents.
Not that I like the idea of software patents. Copyright should be enough.
1. Bill Gates worried that he was too late when he formed his computer company.
2. Lots of folks thought Linux was "too little, too late" and a duplication of Unix efforts.
3. The majority of IT folks around me thought the Apple OS switch to BSD (that is, MacOS X) was too late.
4. Sun already has great support and some great applications; maybe the OpenSolaris effort (like OpenVMS) won't succeed but I don't think it'll have anything to do with coming too late.
OpenVMS had a good solution to the versioning problem back when I was working in that OS. Every file change got a version extension by default. This was opposite of the Unix philosophy at the time but I found it a useful feature anyway. For instance,
In the problem you cite with multiple authors synching from multiple laptops, a VMS-type of synchronization would never overwrite a version. Users would unknowningly create extra copies with version number extensions that were mostly hidden. Then, when someone said, "Hey, this latest draft was written by a 3 year old!" the whole team of authors could go back to the earlier version numbers and find out what happened.
It wasn't always convenient but it was more convenient than having files overwritten.
I've worked as a reporter. It involves making a recording (usually written) and publishing it. There's nothing magical about working for a small or large newspaper except for better equipment and editors.
Someone who works on his/her own car is, indeed, a mechanic -- probably an amateur mechanic, true, but some amateurs are better than the pro grease monkeys who get to call themselves mechanics. Likewise, in my current position I know many excellent professional and amateur scientists.
The world needs more amateurs -- people who contribute to a profession out of a love for it. Maybe it's a romanticized idea but I enjoy reading about the 18th and 19th century amateur scientists who were rich and could afford to contribute to basic science in a way that helped humanity. Amateur reporters will do the same. Nowadays, you don't have to be as rich.
A better solution for petabytes of storage is a commercial product developed by some former Cray engineers, SAM-FS. This is really an HSM solution -- very scalable, which is the entire point.
The samfs filesystem allows you to browse to a file as if it's online in a disk even if samfs has cached it to some other media, such as DVDs or tapes. The nice thing about this HSM style solution is that it combines completeness (all files available, even if they are on tape and rarely used) with the need for data integrity. SAM-FS allows duplicate tapes or dupe writes to DVD or CD-ROM; it can even write the duplicates in another city. Why not? You've can have your 2 PB in NYC and your backup 2 PB in LA. I think that's a worthwhile feature.
The hitch for some folks here is that SAM-FS is written for Solaris only, so far as I know. It is darned fast for what it does, although retrievals of rarely-used files tend to be limited by the HSM media type(s) used in the particular storage system.
Hmm... disclaimer: I don't sell SAM-FS or Solaris. This is just a good, scalable solution that I've used at a large government facility and can be bought OTS from Sun or StorageTek for fairly serious bucks.
As someone who visited New Orleans two weeks ago and thought seriously about living there, I can say that New Orleans will come back. There's a lot of money to be made in that location. It's beautiful, yes, fun and charming, too, but there's a powerful shipping economy.
So much oil and so much natural gas and so many farm products go through New Orleans that it would get built from scratch starting today if it weren't already there. (Technically, the city is still there -- might be easier to rebuild from scratch, though.)
As the original post pointed out, there are plenty of cities built on fault lines (like Seattle) or near them (San Francisco, Oakland, pretty much all of Southern California). No coastal city is safe, really, as the recent Indian Ocean tidal wave made clear. So the question is not so much whether New Orleans or other Gulf Coast cities should rebuild but how they rebuild.
This disaster was predicted and lots of city planners knew the dikes might fail. The Dutch (yes, I work with some) would never have let their dikes get undersized or under-maintained for any reason. They are rightly paranoid for their country. They seem shocked that we Americans planned so poorly for a distaster that had to come. This wasn't even a worst-case F5 scenario; nevertheless, New Orleans will be recovering for 20 years.
The '20 years' estimate is real, too. I live in a Maryland town that was flooded by Hurricane Agnes 33 years ago and the downtown shops are still being rebuilt. The poorer sections of New Orleans will probably give some of the/. writers their wish -- they won't get rebuilt and/or re-inhabited for a long, long time. By then, I hope, they will be built higher and with backup deisel generators and water purifiers.
It's not so much a matter of people developing for Solaris because that won't happen except in an expensive commercial setting; it's about Solaris becomming more and more like another version of Linux. That's a good thing. As someone who has to administer a variety of Sun hardware, I'm happy. The Sun product line is among the best. What I want from Sun is more compliance with OpenSource projects and that's what the company is giving me. From the Linux developer end, Solaris may become just another platform, more like Red Hat or SuSE than AIX or HP-UX.
The problem is that the article says AT&T is evaluating operating systems, not setting up an office with Linux or MacOS desktops to test productivity. On the other hand, it sounds like that's what IBM is doing -- much more real-world stuff. It's disappointing that AT&T doesn't seem to be giving Linux desktops a real evaluation. They don't mention testing application productivity.
Yes, this is exactly the sort of support that makes an incredible difference. I work in a scientific research environment -- where we use tons of little apps shared by user bases sometimes in the single digits -- and a little support goes a long, long way.
The idea of Sun supporting university/student developers with token amounts of money is probably pie-in-the-sky but it would be wonderful if it ever happens. Even used hardware donations would provide a boost.
P.S. I hadn't seen the Jonathan Schwartz blog -- interesting comment about Red Hat making the cost of switching OSes high.
The win-win philosophy underlying the Sun statements is good; that is, it's true that Sun can make money by operating as 'editor in chief' of a suite of freeware applications.
However, I don't buy into the statement that open source doesn't mainly benefit from having many hands involved. Making the best people the 'committers' of projects is important but nowhere in the article does anyone mention how much good software is created and maintained by people not previously recognized as 'best' for the job. The process doesn't work the way the Sun statement implies.
Slashdot Mirror
As you glance through, notice the status icons. Not all of the vendors on the list have made it through to approval. Google is approved but, as stated above, is only approved at the Moderate sensitivity level.
The FedRAMP cloud providers list: https://marketplace.fedramp.go...
It may be useful to look at this from a different point of view economically.
1) It's hard to get these plane parts
2) Hey, this jet pilot just landed $200 million worth of parts
They may never trust this plane to fly correctly again but that doesn't mean it's completely useless.
And shoot, I forgot
http://www.nature.com/
As websites, I browse for science:
http://www.newscientist.com/
http://www.boingboing.net/
http://science.slashdot.org/
http://www.nature.com/
http://www.sciam.com/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/
http://discovermagazine.com/
and I include those in my newsfeeds along with the NIH RSS. Also in my feeds are
Flipboard Tech
Flipboard Wired Magazine
Flipboard Make Magazine
Hacker News
ProPublica
Gamification
Science Magazine
In Zite, I use
Science News
Gadgets
Technology
Alternative Medicine
Bioinformatics
Informatics
In Pulse, I go with Slashdot and also
Smithsonian Science
Cool Hunting
Slashgear
Discover Magazine
Wired: Science
and I have not used but intend to try the WebMD app.
I hope you aggregate and rank everyone's choices! I think some really good ones will come to the top that way.
This, too, conflates trust with faith. They are different. Trust is earned by repeatedly showing correctness. That is roughly what science does. Faith is essentially trust without verification, especially religious faith.
Many things in science are verifiable by anyone. Not *all* science is easily verifiable. That's where trust in professional scientists come in. People are correctly suspicious of some scientists while correctly maintaining trust in the entire process. The process keeps proving itself by delivering new medicines, new technologies, and repeatable results.
My grad school ran a cluster of VAX 6000s and I was lucky enough to get to work in the IT department. I wrote code for our gopher server. The cluster was so dependable that users never, in 6 years, realized that the parts of the cluster ever went down. Our system uptime was amazing - far better than any Windows cluster I've seen today despite the VMS/VAX cluster technology ending up in Windows NT.
I recently sat in on a meeting with about 20 CAM scientists from various universities. The issue of validating herbal medicine is a little more complicated than isolating the single active ingredient, which has been the standard approach.
It is becoming recognized that some herbal remedies may be more complex, as in:
ingredient X by itself: no effect
ingredient Y by itself: no effect
X + Y together: a noticeable medical effect
That is, some herbal remedies may work because they have the correct combinations of active ingredients. Ingredient X may be a necessary precursor to ingredient Y doing any good Other herbal remedies *by the same name* may not have the correct proportion (too little of X or Y) and may therefore fail any reasonable test.
I just wanted to point out that current medicine has picked off the low-lying fruit of many herbal remedies and that's the most active ingredients. But the next round of research on herbal remedies and how to improve on them may be more difficult.
He also instituted new limits on lobbyists in the White House and put a freeze on White House salaries. And we're just talking about the first couple of days, here.
WTF? In his first days, he ordered the shutdown of the CIA's secret prisons and the closing of Guantanimo Bay. Did you not believe in that?
When I was getting my computer science grad degree many years ago, my father showed me an article he'd saved (because he saves everything). It was about a new computer language that was going to make computer programmers obsolete. The language? Fortran. The year? 1959. (Yeah, Fortran was around in 1957 but the article acted like it was big news and a real threat to programmers.)
Fortran did allow general scientists to join the programming population but they didn't put the assembly/machine code programmers out of work -- far from it.
People willing to do good work will always be valuable. Always.
Can we get this Slashdot headline correct? Is there some way to bypass the current editing system?
Not that I like the idea of software patents. Copyright should be enough.
2. Lots of folks thought Linux was "too little, too late" and a duplication of Unix efforts.
3. The majority of IT folks around me thought the Apple OS switch to BSD (that is, MacOS X) was too late.
4. Sun already has great support and some great applications; maybe the OpenSolaris effort (like OpenVMS) won't succeed but I don't think it'll have anything to do with coming too late.
OpenVMS had a good solution to the versioning problem back when I was working in that OS. Every file change got a version extension by default. This was opposite of the Unix philosophy at the time but I found it a useful feature anyway. For instance,
...
group_paper;1
group_paper;2
group_paper;3
group_paper;X
In the problem you cite with multiple authors synching from multiple laptops, a VMS-type of synchronization would never overwrite a version. Users would unknowningly create extra copies with version number extensions that were mostly hidden. Then, when someone said, "Hey, this latest draft was written by a 3 year old!" the whole team of authors could go back to the earlier version numbers and find out what happened.
It wasn't always convenient but it was more convenient than having files overwritten.
I think death is final for one character: Bucky.
Someone who works on his/her own car is, indeed, a mechanic -- probably an amateur mechanic, true, but some amateurs are better than the pro grease monkeys who get to call themselves mechanics. Likewise, in my current position I know many excellent professional and amateur scientists.
The world needs more amateurs -- people who contribute to a profession out of a love for it. Maybe it's a romanticized idea but I enjoy reading about the 18th and 19th century amateur scientists who were rich and could afford to contribute to basic science in a way that helped humanity. Amateur reporters will do the same. Nowadays, you don't have to be as rich.
A better solution for petabytes of storage is a commercial product developed by some former Cray engineers, SAM-FS. This is really an HSM solution -- very scalable, which is the entire point.
... disclaimer: I don't sell SAM-FS or Solaris. This is just a good, scalable solution that I've used at a large government facility and can be bought OTS from Sun or StorageTek for fairly serious bucks.
The samfs filesystem allows you to browse to a file as if it's online in a disk even if samfs has cached it to some other media, such as DVDs or tapes. The nice thing about this HSM style solution is that it combines completeness (all files available, even if they are on tape and rarely used) with the need for data integrity. SAM-FS allows duplicate tapes or dupe writes to DVD or CD-ROM; it can even write the duplicates in another city. Why not? You've can have your 2 PB in NYC and your backup 2 PB in LA. I think that's a worthwhile feature.
The hitch for some folks here is that SAM-FS is written for Solaris only, so far as I know. It is darned fast for what it does, although retrievals of rarely-used files tend to be limited by the HSM media type(s) used in the particular storage system.
Hmm
As someone who visited New Orleans two weeks ago and thought seriously about living there, I can say that New Orleans will come back. There's a lot of money to be made in that location. It's beautiful, yes, fun and charming, too, but there's a powerful shipping economy. So much oil and so much natural gas and so many farm products go through New Orleans that it would get built from scratch starting today if it weren't already there. (Technically, the city is still there -- might be easier to rebuild from scratch, though.) As the original post pointed out, there are plenty of cities built on fault lines (like Seattle) or near them (San Francisco, Oakland, pretty much all of Southern California). No coastal city is safe, really, as the recent Indian Ocean tidal wave made clear. So the question is not so much whether New Orleans or other Gulf Coast cities should rebuild but how they rebuild. This disaster was predicted and lots of city planners knew the dikes might fail. The Dutch (yes, I work with some) would never have let their dikes get undersized or under-maintained for any reason. They are rightly paranoid for their country. They seem shocked that we Americans planned so poorly for a distaster that had to come. This wasn't even a worst-case F5 scenario; nevertheless, New Orleans will be recovering for 20 years. The '20 years' estimate is real, too. I live in a Maryland town that was flooded by Hurricane Agnes 33 years ago and the downtown shops are still being rebuilt. The poorer sections of New Orleans will probably give some of the /. writers their wish -- they won't get rebuilt and/or re-inhabited for a long, long time. By then, I hope, they will be built higher and with backup deisel generators and water purifiers.
It's not so much a matter of people developing for Solaris because that won't happen except in an expensive commercial setting; it's about Solaris becomming more and more like another version of Linux. That's a good thing. As someone who has to administer a variety of Sun hardware, I'm happy. The Sun product line is among the best. What I want from Sun is more compliance with OpenSource projects and that's what the company is giving me. From the Linux developer end, Solaris may become just another platform, more like Red Hat or SuSE than AIX or HP-UX.
The problem is that the article says AT&T is evaluating operating systems, not setting up an office with Linux or MacOS desktops to test productivity. On the other hand, it sounds like that's what IBM is doing -- much more real-world stuff. It's disappointing that AT&T doesn't seem to be giving Linux desktops a real evaluation. They don't mention testing application productivity.
Yes, this is exactly the sort of support that makes an incredible difference. I work in a scientific research environment -- where we use tons of little apps shared by user bases sometimes in the single digits -- and a little support goes a long, long way. The idea of Sun supporting university/student developers with token amounts of money is probably pie-in-the-sky but it would be wonderful if it ever happens. Even used hardware donations would provide a boost. P.S. I hadn't seen the Jonathan Schwartz blog -- interesting comment about Red Hat making the cost of switching OSes high.
The win-win philosophy underlying the Sun statements is good; that is, it's true that Sun can make money by operating as 'editor in chief' of a suite of freeware applications. However, I don't buy into the statement that open source doesn't mainly benefit from having many hands involved. Making the best people the 'committers' of projects is important but nowhere in the article does anyone mention how much good software is created and maintained by people not previously recognized as 'best' for the job. The process doesn't work the way the Sun statement implies.