The "event" has lasted all Summer. Why not publish at least status of the projects?
Because Google didn't know the status of the projects, at least not for the 400 projects not mentored by Google.
That was the whole idea of having mentoring organizations: Google didn't have the resources to look after each of the
400+ students. However some students, and some mentoring organizations have made the status available to anybody (for
example by spliting everything into tiny tasks and tracking them using JIRA) but nobody was forced to do so. Two months
is very little time to finish a project, and most of the chosen projects were very ambitious. So my guess is that rather
then providing status on the progress for the rest of the world, the students and mentors focused on developing
software.
Why are you so sure the projects can be found, that Google will make the announcement?
I'm just guessing. It just makes sense that when you invest so much money into sponsoring projects you will want the
world to know that you did so, and that many of them were successful. Google could gain some more press coverage because
of this. But I think that this was not the goal of the whole thing, and they might even skip it. I'm very currious about what they could tell, so I really hope they won't.
Every one of the mentoring organizations has one or more pages dedicated to the event. You can surelly find the different projects there. As of this time Google made no official announcement regarding the results of the event, and I am sure that when they will, there will be enough information about each project they sponsored. You just have to be patient:)
The article is interesting, and I really have to agree with the ending phrase:
"Quite frankly, I don't know how Google will use the projects' results," Macieira said. "I hope they use it to promote free/open software and show that there is a healthy relation between the corporate world and the free software developers."
I know that there will be enough of you trying to find a hidden (evil) reason for Google's action, but it is simply not the case. Google has very many benefits from open source, and now that they have the power to help back, they are actually doing it. Thank you Google.
Come on. My rant had nothing to do with Google. They did a very good job already, and they will release the results, when they are ready to do so. The actual coding phase has finished two weeks ago, so this is old stuff. I think that the eveluation process (by the mentors) is also ready, or almost ready, so we can expect a Google anouncement sometime soon. Now, there is simply, very little to see.
When I saw the subject I was really expecting to see some analysis, some statistics, at least a list of projects. Well... where are all these things? The only reference in the article is to the official Summer of Code page, and that has been unchanged for weeks. So I have ask: where is the story?
Description (from the National Academies of Science site): BEIR VII develops the most up-to-date and comprehensive risk estimates for cancer and other health effects from exposure to low-level ionizing radiation. It is among the first reports of its kind to include detailed estimates for cancer incidence in addition to cancer mortality. In general, BEIR VII supports previously reported risk estimates for cancer and leukemia, but the availability of new and more extensive data have strengthened confidence in these estimates. A comprehensive review of available biological and biophysical data supports a "linear-no-threshold" (LNT) risk model that the risk of cancer proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and that the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans. The report is from the Board on Radiation Research Effects that is now part of the newly formed Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board.
The Chernobyl accident caused the deaths of 30 power plant employees and firemen within a
few days or weeks (including 28 deaths that were due to radiation exposure). In addition, about
240,000 recovery operation workers (also called "liquidators" or "clean-up workers") were
called upon in 1986 and 1987 to take part in major mitigation activities at the reactor and within
the 30-km zone surrounding the reactor. Residual mitigation activities continued on a relatively
large scale until 1990. All together, about 600,000 persons (civilian and military) have received
special certificates confirming their status as liquidators, according to laws promulgated in
Belarus, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine (UNSCEAR, 2000).
In addition, massive releases of radioactive materials into the atmosphere brought about the
evacuation of about 116,000 people from areas surrounding the reactor during 1986, and the
relocation, after 1986, of about 220,000 people from what are at this time three independent
republics of the former Soviet Union: Belarus, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine. Vast
territories of those three republics were contaminated to a substantial level. The population of
those contaminated areas, from which no relocation was required, was about 5 million people.
Very considerable uncertainty remains over the possible long-term health effects
of the accident. On the one hand, the nuclear industry acknowledges only very
limited and closely defined consequences. On the other, some politicians,
researchers and voluntary movement workers claim that the accident has had
profound and diverse impacts on the health of many millions of people. This
uncertainty is a cause of widespread distress and misallocation of resources and
needs to be addressed though rigorous and adequately funded international efforts.
No reliable evidence has emerged of an increase in leukemias, which had been
predicted to result from the accident. However, some two thousand cases of
thyroid cancer have so far been diagnosed among young people exposed to
radioactive iodine in April and May 1986. According to conservative estimates,
this figure is likely to rise to 8-10,000 over the coming years. While thyroid
cancer can be treated, all of these people will need continuing medical attention for the rest of their lives. A significant number have potentially serious
complications. It is likely that the coming decades will see an increase in other
solid cancers resulting from exposure to radiation. However, there is no
consensus over how many cases will occur.
...........
From the above discussion and recommendations, the following conclusions may be drawn
with regard to the impact of the Chernobyl accident on risk of solid cancers other than thyroid
cancer on the populations of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.
With regard to the dosimetry to be applied to liquidators, considerable caution should continue
to be employed in the use of the "official" doses contained in the various state registries. This
is due to inaccuracies in the doses, large uncertainties affecting many dose estimates and the
variability of that precision according to the source of doses. The time and motion method of
RADRUE described in Section II seems the best hope at present for constructing individual
doses received by liquidators for use in analytical epidemiological studies. However, until
more validation studies on the method are completed, caution must be used in applying the
RADRUE method, again, because of uncertainty as to its accuracy and precision.
For doses applying to the general population, registries of such doses have been developed in
Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. These can be adapted and applied to analytical
and ecological epidemiological studies, though,
You have to consider that the source of these studies is the International Atomic Energy Agency. Wouldn't be in their very best interest to try to hide the consequences of the disaster? Just reading this article about Thyroid Cancer Effects in Children made me lough. They are biased. Just because thyroid cancer is curable (BTW, only if discovered in an early stage of the disease, as with all types pf cancer) doesn't mean that a lot of people are still dying because it is diagnosed to late and it has spread to other organs as well. There is no data in the article, other that they have been treating "hundreds of children". While this is laudable, the institute only existed for the last five years. How many people died before, and how many people are still dying from thyroid cancer? Remember that Ukraine is not US, and the medical services there far from optimal.
Your ignorance is amazing. Radioactive contamination (poisoning) is not any better or any worse then chemical poisoning, it is just different. Even when the exposure level is very low, and there are no apparent symptoms for the iradiated person, the potential for cancer and mutation of genetic material increases. After the Cernobyl accident the thyroid cancer rate increased 10 times in Ukraine (over a period of 10 years) and it is still extremely high even after almost 20 years. And this is only one type of cancer. Also think about the children who are born every year with very serious birth defects because one of their parents was exposed to a rather small radiation dose.
Maybe today's reactors are safe enough so that the risk of radioactive contamination is very low (compared to the harm of burning fossil fuel poses to people and the environment). However you must understant that this risk will never be zero, and the effects of an accident are not just negligible. Will this stop nuclear power from getting more widespread? Probably no.
This is just the opinion of one of the children in the many countries adjacent to Ukraine who had to take one iodine pill every week in order to mitigate the thyroid cancer risk. BTW, they are still giving these pills in schools, and it's almost 20 years from the dissaster.
Chernobal is the only example of a catastrophic failure, and the death toll was comparible to a bad chemical spill (remember bhopal india?), and orders of magnitude less that the most destructive hydoelectric mishaps
This is because you only count immediate casualties of the Chernobyl disaster (only 30 people died immediately, at least according to the soviet autorities). What about all the people who died in the folowing months because of the very high radiation levels (nobody counted them)? What about the children who are born every year with very serious birth defects? What about the increased cancer rate for the population of Ukraine and the surrounding countries? For example in Ukraine the number of Thyroid Cancer cases increased 10 times after the incident (and it is still extremely high even after almost 20 years).
The constant refrain of (IE will default to it) doesn't change the fact that this strategy has already failed.
Well... MSN Search still exist and has enough users, even if it is crappy as hell. So this move was not exactly a failure. Think what would have happened if Microsoft had had a comparable search engine. Would Google still exist? Fortunately Microsoft never had a comparable search engine (comparable to Google or even Yahoo!).
Of course that Microsoft's products will default to MSN, with all the consequences you stated. However, Microsoft didn't need open APIs in order to do this anyway. The article was about Microsoft opening up their APIs to third-party developers. And these developers should be somehow motivated to use the Microsoft services, instead of the ones provided by Google or Yahoo! The problem (for Microsoft) is that their services SUCK (especially the search). So, I'm very curious on how will Microsoft lure developers into using it's APIs. Maybe by including them into VS.NET?
R&D takes time, a lot of time. And there is no guarantee that the results would be worth the money they would spend. And even if they are, they might simply be to late. If Microsoft wanted innovative products now, they should have invested in research in this domain five years ago, but they probably have not, and this is going to cost them.
Well, I think that it is more likely that Google will out-Microsoft Microsoft than Microsoft Out-Googling Google. However this would mean that Google will turn evil, which is also very unlikely (at least at this time).
Maybe I should explain why your numbers seem wrong to me. First because you think that all software development is web-centric. Well, it is not. Second, even for web-centric applications there are always (many) programmers that do the server-side bussiness logic and data binding. They don't have to worry about Internet Explorer at all.
Finally, your frustrations are justified, only for those developing web interfaces. I know there are a lot of you guyz out there, and I really understand your problems. And you are right here, that you waste most of the time working around IE bugs. However, you are not the only type of developers out there.
Who every thought that Google would ban CNET because CNET used Google to do research on Google Execs?
They did't ban anyone, you can still search CNET on google and it will work. They will just not make press announcements to them. This is a very different thing.
Yes, Microsoft could afford to throw far more cash at the situation than Google. But will they actually do it? And how will this actually help?
In my opinion there is nothing that Microsoft can do in order to stop Google. Absolutely anything. (If we were living in the Starcraft World they could try to rush the Googleplex though)
As part of its new "Web platform" strategy, Microsoft will expose application programming interfaces, or APIs, for MSN Search using SOAP. Third party applications will be able to access up to 10,000 search results per day.
As long as Google offers the most relevant search results, for free, what would be the incentive to use MSN Search? Unless Microsoft pays developers to use their crappy search engine, there is no incentive.
For the past decade, Microsoft has largely ignored the Web as an emerging platform for application development with fears that it could render Windows obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
The "event" has lasted all Summer. Why not publish at least status of the projects?
Because Google didn't know the status of the projects, at least not for the 400 projects not mentored by Google. That was the whole idea of having mentoring organizations: Google didn't have the resources to look after each of the 400+ students. However some students, and some mentoring organizations have made the status available to anybody (for example by spliting everything into tiny tasks and tracking them using JIRA) but nobody was forced to do so. Two months is very little time to finish a project, and most of the chosen projects were very ambitious. So my guess is that rather then providing status on the progress for the rest of the world, the students and mentors focused on developing software.
Why are you so sure the projects can be found, that Google will make the announcement?
I'm just guessing. It just makes sense that when you invest so much money into sponsoring projects you will want the world to know that you did so, and that many of them were successful. Google could gain some more press coverage because of this. But I think that this was not the goal of the whole thing, and they might even skip it. I'm very currious about what they could tell, so I really hope they won't.
Every one of the mentoring organizations has one or more pages dedicated to the event. You can surelly find the different projects there. As of this time Google made no official announcement regarding the results of the event, and I am sure that when they will, there will be enough information about each project they sponsored. You just have to be patient :)
The article is interesting, and I really have to agree with the ending phrase:
"Quite frankly, I don't know how Google will use the projects' results," Macieira said. "I hope they use it to promote free/open software and show that there is a healthy relation between the corporate world and the free software developers."
I know that there will be enough of you trying to find a hidden (evil) reason for Google's action, but it is simply not the case. Google has very many benefits from open source, and now that they have the power to help back, they are actually doing it. Thank you Google.
Come on. My rant had nothing to do with Google. They did a very good job already, and they will release the results, when they are ready to do so. The actual coding phase has finished two weeks ago, so this is old stuff. I think that the eveluation process (by the mentors) is also ready, or almost ready, so we can expect a Google anouncement sometime soon. Now, there is simply, very little to see.
When I saw the subject I was really expecting to see some analysis, some statistics, at least a list of projects. Well ... where are all these things? The only reference in the article is to the official Summer of Code page, and that has been unchanged for weeks. So I have ask: where is the story?
Just look at this: Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII - Phase 2)
Just check this out: Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII - Phase 2) (Summary, PDF Brief).
Description (from the National Academies of Science site):
BEIR VII develops the most up-to-date and comprehensive risk estimates for cancer and other health effects from exposure to low-level ionizing radiation. It is among the first reports of its kind to include detailed estimates for cancer incidence in addition to cancer mortality. In general, BEIR VII supports previously reported risk estimates for cancer and leukemia, but the availability of new and more extensive data have strengthened confidence in these estimates. A comprehensive review of available biological and biophysical data supports a "linear-no-threshold" (LNT) risk model that the risk of cancer proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and that the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans. The report is from the Board on Radiation Research Effects that is now part of the newly formed Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board.
Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes:
...........
The Chernobyl accident caused the deaths of 30 power plant employees and firemen within a few days or weeks (including 28 deaths that were due to radiation exposure). In addition, about 240,000 recovery operation workers (also called "liquidators" or "clean-up workers") were called upon in 1986 and 1987 to take part in major mitigation activities at the reactor and within the 30-km zone surrounding the reactor. Residual mitigation activities continued on a relatively large scale until 1990. All together, about 600,000 persons (civilian and military) have received special certificates confirming their status as liquidators, according to laws promulgated in Belarus, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine (UNSCEAR, 2000).
In addition, massive releases of radioactive materials into the atmosphere brought about the evacuation of about 116,000 people from areas surrounding the reactor during 1986, and the relocation, after 1986, of about 220,000 people from what are at this time three independent republics of the former Soviet Union: Belarus, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine. Vast territories of those three republics were contaminated to a substantial level. The population of those contaminated areas, from which no relocation was required, was about 5 million people.
Very considerable uncertainty remains over the possible long-term health effects of the accident. On the one hand, the nuclear industry acknowledges only very limited and closely defined consequences. On the other, some politicians, researchers and voluntary movement workers claim that the accident has had profound and diverse impacts on the health of many millions of people. This uncertainty is a cause of widespread distress and misallocation of resources and needs to be addressed though rigorous and adequately funded international efforts.
No reliable evidence has emerged of an increase in leukemias, which had been predicted to result from the accident. However, some two thousand cases of thyroid cancer have so far been diagnosed among young people exposed to radioactive iodine in April and May 1986. According to conservative estimates, this figure is likely to rise to 8-10,000 over the coming years. While thyroid cancer can be treated, all of these people will need continuing medical attention for the rest of their lives. A significant number have potentially serious complications. It is likely that the coming decades will see an increase in other solid cancers resulting from exposure to radiation. However, there is no consensus over how many cases will occur.
From the above discussion and recommendations, the following conclusions may be drawn with regard to the impact of the Chernobyl accident on risk of solid cancers other than thyroid cancer on the populations of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.
With regard to the dosimetry to be applied to liquidators, considerable caution should continue to be employed in the use of the "official" doses contained in the various state registries. This is due to inaccuracies in the doses, large uncertainties affecting many dose estimates and the variability of that precision according to the source of doses. The time and motion method of RADRUE described in Section II seems the best hope at present for constructing individual doses received by liquidators for use in analytical epidemiological studies. However, until more validation studies on the method are completed, caution must be used in applying the RADRUE method, again, because of uncertainty as to its accuracy and precision.
For doses applying to the general population, registries of such doses have been developed in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. These can be adapted and applied to analytical and ecological epidemiological studies, though,
You have to consider that the source of these studies is the International Atomic Energy Agency. Wouldn't be in their very best interest to try to hide the consequences of the disaster? Just reading this article about Thyroid Cancer Effects in Children made me lough. They are biased. Just because thyroid cancer is curable (BTW, only if discovered in an early stage of the disease, as with all types pf cancer) doesn't mean that a lot of people are still dying because it is diagnosed to late and it has spread to other organs as well. There is no data in the article, other that they have been treating "hundreds of children". While this is laudable, the institute only existed for the last five years. How many people died before, and how many people are still dying from thyroid cancer? Remember that Ukraine is not US, and the medical services there far from optimal.
Your ignorance is amazing. Radioactive contamination (poisoning) is not any better or any worse then chemical poisoning, it is just different. Even when the exposure level is very low, and there are no apparent symptoms for the iradiated person, the potential for cancer and mutation of genetic material increases. After the Cernobyl accident the thyroid cancer rate increased 10 times in Ukraine (over a period of 10 years) and it is still extremely high even after almost 20 years. And this is only one type of cancer. Also think about the children who are born every year with very serious birth defects because one of their parents was exposed to a rather small radiation dose.
Maybe today's reactors are safe enough so that the risk of radioactive contamination is very low (compared to the harm of burning fossil fuel poses to people and the environment). However you must understant that this risk will never be zero, and the effects of an accident are not just negligible. Will this stop nuclear power from getting more widespread? Probably no.
This is just the opinion of one of the children in the many countries adjacent to Ukraine who had to take one iodine pill every week in order to mitigate the thyroid cancer risk. BTW, they are still giving these pills in schools, and it's almost 20 years from the dissaster.
Chernobal is the only example of a catastrophic failure, and the death toll was comparible to a bad chemical spill (remember bhopal india?), and orders of magnitude less that the most destructive hydoelectric mishaps
This is because you only count immediate casualties of the Chernobyl disaster (only 30 people died immediately, at least according to the soviet autorities). What about all the people who died in the folowing months because of the very high radiation levels (nobody counted them)? What about the children who are born every year with very serious birth defects? What about the increased cancer rate for the population of Ukraine and the surrounding countries? For example in Ukraine the number of Thyroid Cancer cases increased 10 times after the incident (and it is still extremely high even after almost 20 years).
The constant refrain of (IE will default to it) doesn't change the fact that this strategy has already failed.
... MSN Search still exist and has enough users, even if it is crappy as hell. So this move was not exactly a failure. Think what would have happened if Microsoft had had a comparable search engine. Would Google still exist? Fortunately Microsoft never had a comparable search engine (comparable to Google or even Yahoo!).
Well
They can certainly copy the visible parts of Google, the products that are out (heh, mostly in beta) now.
You mean, like this?
I was wondering what "to Out-google" means. Thank you.
The biggest reason that Microsoft can't compete with Google is that it has become a big, bloated bureaucracy.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has become very risk adverse, so it's not willing to stake its future on new ideas.
You sound like there was a time when Microsoft was really innovating. Was it?
Of course that Microsoft's products will default to MSN, with all the consequences you stated. However, Microsoft didn't need open APIs in order to do this anyway. The article was about Microsoft opening up their APIs to third-party developers. And these developers should be somehow motivated to use the Microsoft services, instead of the ones provided by Google or Yahoo! The problem (for Microsoft) is that their services SUCK (especially the search). So, I'm very curious on how will Microsoft lure developers into using it's APIs. Maybe by including them into VS.NET?
R&D takes time, a lot of time. And there is no guarantee that the results would be worth the money they would spend. And even if they are, they might simply be to late. If Microsoft wanted innovative products now, they should have invested in research in this domain five years ago, but they probably have not, and this is going to cost them.
hotmail >>> gmail, msn messenger >>> google's chat, my spaces >>> blogger.com
... don't just STFU, this is /.
Do you have any tangible data to back this up? If not
Well, I think that it is more likely that Google will out-Microsoft Microsoft than Microsoft Out-Googling Google. However this would mean that Google will turn evil, which is also very unlikely (at least at this time).
Maybe I should explain why your numbers seem wrong to me. First because you think that all software development is web-centric. Well, it is not. Second, even for web-centric applications there are always (many) programmers that do the server-side bussiness logic and data binding. They don't have to worry about Internet Explorer at all.
Finally, your frustrations are justified, only for those developing web interfaces. I know there are a lot of you guyz out there, and I really understand your problems. And you are right here, that you waste most of the time working around IE bugs. However, you are not the only type of developers out there.
This is just PURE speculation, and seems quite far from the truth to me. But ... well, this it's /.
Who every thought that Google would ban CNET because CNET used Google to do research on Google Execs?
They did't ban anyone, you can still search CNET on google and it will work. They will just not make press announcements to them. This is a very different thing.
Yes, Microsoft could afford to throw far more cash at the situation than Google. But will they actually do it? And how will this actually help?
In my opinion there is nothing that Microsoft can do in order to stop Google. Absolutely anything. (If we were living in the Starcraft World they could try to rush the Googleplex though)
As part of its new "Web platform" strategy, Microsoft will expose application programming interfaces, or APIs, for MSN Search using SOAP. Third party applications will be able to access up to 10,000 search results per day.
As long as Google offers the most relevant search results, for free, what would be the incentive to use MSN Search? Unless Microsoft pays developers to use their crappy search engine, there is no incentive.
For the past decade, Microsoft has largely ignored the Web as an emerging platform for application development with fears that it could render Windows obsolete.
What about ASP.NET or IIS?